We have seen already that the popular group was widely talked about, and that the girls especially were judged in terms of their sexualities. Talk about sexuality, or to be more specific, sexual activity, was by no means restricted to that group. No matter what friendship group a person belonged to, sexuality and relationships were seen as ripe for public consumption. Indeed, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the importance of the actual events sometimes seemed secondary to their interest as conversation fodder.
NH: Do people talk about people who do [have sex]? Zelda: I think so.
Link: If people find out, they're like, “oh, everyone ”, because it's – interesting.
There was a consensus that everybody was interested and curious about sexual activity, and that if it was discovered, it would quickly become news. This gossip was often focussed around parties, which I will look at in more detail below, but sexual activity in relationships was also a hot topic. Sexual activity and ‘pulling’, for the most part, fell into one of these two categories: either happening at a party, or in a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. Although I heard a few stories about casual sex in other settings (and one story about a girl who had a “fuck buddy”), these were very much seen as the exception. Natalie said:
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This subheading comes from the US television series “Gossip Girl”, based on the series of novels of the same name by Cecily von Ziegesar, which focus on the lives of upper-class teenagers in New York City.
118 Natalie: I think a lot of people speculate [about sexual activity] especially during relationships or like, I think for people in relationships the first couple of months is like where everything starts to happen, and I think also that’s where a lot of rumours speculate [NH: Right] and things kind of get exaggerated.
Zelda and Link complained about people’s assumptions about sexual activity in relationships, and their propensity to ask about it. They were clearly very close friends, but they talked about Link’s tendency to keep relationships private.
Zelda (to Link): You never tell me about your relationship!
Link: I don't like sort of telling people, cos then everyone just assumes, like, you're doing stuff.
Zelda: Yeah, I was impressed with that [Link’s mum having never found out about her relationship], but you hid it from me for like eight months.
Link: Yeah, I was quite proud of myself, I hid it from everyone.
NH: Oh really, how come? Oh, I suppose yo u said at the beginning, you – Link: I don't like the attention you get from going out with someone. Zelda: And loads of pressure you get to do stuff when people know, people are like, have you done that yet, oh, have you done this yet.
Christina similarly resented the ways in which friends wanted to know about what was going on in relationships. She had been going out with her boyfriend, Matt, for eight months, and they spent a lot of time together. But she took great care to keep some aspects of their relationship secret:
Christina: No-one at this school knows [that they have had sex] cos we didn’t want, like, rumours going around or anything.
Christina: Oh, there was a rumour going round a while ago that I’d given Matt a blowjob [NH: right] which was sort of true! But I just, like, was denying it, I was just like, no that’s not true. [NH: yeah] cos I didn’t want anyone to know.16
Many young people, then, felt the need to strictly compartmentalise their relationships from the rest of their social lives, in order to keep them private. Christina did, however, tell her friends at another school about her and Matt's sex
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Her tactic was certainly effective for at least two of her friends, who spoke in their interview of how strange it was that Christina and Matt were close emotionally but not physically.
119 life; as they were not entangled in the social networks she and Matt moved in within school, their knowledge did not pose a threat and provided a space for her to be more open. Zelda and Link described the danger of telling anyone about sex within
relationships:
Zelda: Yeah, cos sometimes one of the people tells one person and then it gets round everyone in the year in like a day.
Link: And the next day everyone in the school knows.
And Katie spoke of her feelings of betrayal after a friend failed to keep a secret:
Katie: Another friend who's very popular, is called Rose, and she, I confided in her about something, and Rachel mentioned it the othe r day [NH: OK] and I was like oh God I can't believe you said that! And I was like – I can't
believe I confided in her and then, but, I guess, you learn not to trust anyone.
This quote indicates again the slippages between “popularity” and “bitchiness”, as well as the fraught and tense nature of girls' friendships and the intensity of emotion. Katie's reaction – “you learn not to trust anyone” – is resigned and severe; she prefers to cut off emotional connection with her female friends rather than risk further compromise. She spoke of her friends' failings in this area in contrast to the intimacy of her relationship with her boyfriend, which I discuss further in the next chapter. These anxieties about friends spreading secrets were widespread in
interviews with both boys and girls, and they were often spoken about in contrast to the emotional closeness and privacy that could be found within heterosexual
relationships, as I discuss further in the next chapter. These relationships could form a unit, a shelter from the treacherous waters of teenage social cultures – a finding that will be important when we come to discuss violence within heterosexual relationships in chapter six.