Girls Who Go Too Far

September 03, 2024

Like a lot of 15-year-old girls, Crystal Wilson was boy crazy. But to Crystal's mother, and to the boys who were the objects of her affection, the Kansas City teenager's behavior gave a whole new meaning to that term. This wasn't just a case of a liberated young woman willing to make that first, terrifying phone call. Instead her need for attention bordered on obsession. Late at night, Crystal would start calling boys. Sometimes she would accuse them of things she knew they hadn't done just to have an excuse to talk to them. Rejection didn't stop her. "The more you get pushed away," she says, "the closer you want to be."

Teachers, school counselors and therapists who treat adolescents say they are seeing more and more girls like Crystal - desperate teenagers who will do just about anything to get a boy. Some, like Crystal, are daughters of divorce, eager for any kind of relationship with a male. Others are responding to peer pressure to be sexually active, and to the barrage of explicit images on television and in advertising. Girls will latch onto provocative entertainers like Madonna as role models, says Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, a professor of medical psychology at UCLA, and end up "playing a stereotypical role of a highly sexualized woman. And below that is a confused and lonely youngster seeking approval."

The bizarre behavior ranges from worrisome fads to cases of "Fatal Attraction," teenage style. At Robert Fulton Junior High School in Van Nuys, Calif., students purchase candygrams for one another on holidays. "Some of the things the girls write are very aggressive, very descriptive," says teacher Sandy Mermelstein. "Things such as, 'I want to feel you inside me'." At the other extreme are young girls who attempt suicide or threaten boys who have spurned them. Neil Bernstein, a Washington, D.C., psychologist, says he had a patient who sent her ex-boyfriend a live snake. He has also seen girls who slashed the tires of ex-beaus' cars, or even spread rumors that their former boyfriends had AIDS. The inability to tolerate rejection is a clear sign of emotional disturbance, Bernstein says. "Some girls just can't take no for an answer."

Firm numbers are still hard to come by, but any reader of Ann Landers knows the problem is very real. Recently, the advice columnist published a series of letters from distressed mothers of teenage boys. The mothers complained about girls doing everything from leaving obscene messages on the family answering machine to sending their sons unsolicited gold "engagement" rings. Landers says she received 20,000 letters in response, so many that she ran a second column on the subject. "If I'm hearing about it from so many places, then I worry about what's going on out there," says Landers. "What this says to me is that a good many young girls really are out of control. Their hormones are raging and they have not had adequate supervision."

Listen to two sexually active girls from Fulton Junior High, who agreed to talk if their names weren't used. One, 14, regularly goes to local record stores, where she collects phone numbers from teenage boys. She says: "It's important to have a guy so I can feel loved. It doesn't matter if he's ugly or disgusting, as long as he pays attention to me. I've gone after some ugly guys because they give me things, they take me out. One gave me a gold chain." The other girl pursues boys she doesn't even like, often to her regret. "Sometimes you feel like throwing up. But you do it because you need love from a guy, or someone, when you're feeling lonely."

Girls with divorced parents are particularly vulnerable to that kind of loneliness. Throughout the 1980s, more than a million children a year watched their parents split up. While many of these children adjust and function normally, a significant number of others feel deep pain for years. Judith Wallerstein, author of the best-selling book "Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade After Divorce," says she sees many girls terrified of being abandoned or betrayed. "One response we're seeing in a number of young women is to throw themselves into a lot of relationships," Wallerstein says.

Changing sexual habits have only fed the explosive combination of raging hormones, absentee parents and peer pressure. "Girls have always been concerned about relationships with boys and being liked, but it was very different when the opportunity for sex was not there," says UCLA professor of psychiatry Dr. Nancy Hornstein. "Back then you wrote in your diary and giggled with your girlfriends. Now, if one measure of success becomes whether you have a boyfriend, and you're sexually active at 13 or 14, you're much more prone to develop obsessional kinds of relationships. They don't think about the boy as a person so much as a status symbol. Now sexual fantasies are being actively explored with real boy children, and it can be very bad for some girls." Professionals are also concerned that some provocative behavior may be a sign of previous sexual abuse.

Boys are bewildered and even frightened by the way some girls come on to them. Michael Gibson, 17, a junior on the football team at Chicago's Gordon S. Hubbard High, had an unwelcome admirer last fall. A female classmate approached him after football practice. "She said that she would make love to me all night, and buy me clothes and jewelry if I would go out with her," Gibson says. "I don't understand it because I never even had to talk to the girl." He brushed her off, which only inflamed her interest. Her phone calling became so persistent that his family had their phone number changed. Gibson finally confronted the girl. Eventually, her obsession seemed to wane, although for the rest of the school year she occasionally showed up after football practice and made sexual advances.

Some therapists think that some of the fuss smacks of double standards. Says Deborah L. Tolman, a member of the Harvard Project on the Psychology of Women and the Development of Girls: "Girls aren't supposed to express their sexuality in this culture. Girls aren't supposed to want boys in a way boys are supposed to want girls." Deandra Lacey, 15, a student at Carter High School in Dallas, has seen the stereotypes at work. "If a guy sleeps around, the girls say he's 'just it'," she says. "But when a girl does that, she's a slut." A Richardson, Texas, high-school student, Sabrina Qutb, 16, is disturbed by a joke that has circulated around the school: what's the difference between a sophomore girl and a toilet? Answer: a toilet doesn't follow you around after you use it. "There's just no equivalent joke about boys," Sabrina says.

Parents of troubled girls are doing everything from grounding their kids to getting them into therapy and trying to provide new role models. In Edina, Minn., the parents of a group of middle-school boys confronted the parents of girls who had been calling their sons incessantly and told them to control their daughters. Some of the parents also snooped on the phone conversations. "The language was unbelievable," says Karen Vickman, whose son started receiving calls when he was 12. In Los Angeles, members of Planned Parenthood lecture at schools about what is appropriate behavior.

Wallerstein is concerned about what happens when troubled girls grow up. "I worry about their [ability] to become independent and mature," she says. "It's all part of a larger picture - the context is changing relations within the family and changing relations between the sexes." Cindy Wilson is concerned about the future, too, and she is trying to put her daughter Crystal on firmer footing. Not only has she forbidden Crystal to use the phone in the evening, she has gotten the whole family into counseling. Crystal says she's making an effort to change her habits, to stop pursuing boys who aren't interested in her. She hasn't given up on the opposite sex entirely. But, she says, she's discovered "I'd rather have them chase after me."

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