Sex and Scandal at a Prep School
But what about the charge that the book is closer to soft porn than sociology?
Marissa: We presented what''s real. The students are not in a vacuum, without going to class, without the pressures for college, issues with their parents. We put all those in there. But frankly, not to understand and to devote a lot of the book to the real concerns and everyday thoughts that these students were having, wouldn''t be fair. It wouldn''t be real. Abigail: Someone who''s saying that
Restless Virgins is soft porn, they''re the person who needs to read the book. They''re our audience. That''s the evidence that there needs to be more conversation about this. Marissa: Our book isn''t soft porn, but the acts are more than soft porn. They''re very pornographic in nature. Abigail: Right. The goal here was to portray what was real. This book is nonfiction. We didn''t make anything up. Couldn''t!
How did the two of you come to write this book together? Abigail: When this came out, we read the articles and we were shocked. We looked at each other, and we thought, Do you remember this going on in high
school? And we didn''t. The sex acts themselves seemed more extreme than we remembered. We asked ourselves, How much has changed since we were in high school? At that time, we weren''t even a decade out from Milton. So we asked ourselves, What is it like to be in high school today?
Is this just an aberration, or does it speak to a national trend? Marissa: It''s certainly not an aberration. We found that many girls and
boys in our research were engaging in sex of a very casual nature. Certainly, nationwide, the statistics and studies show that this is not an aberration either, with over half of teenagers in the U.S. between 15 to 19 engaging in oral sex,
to a CDC study. Did the boys in this case received a fair punishment? Abigail: That was the law in Massachusetts, so there''s really nothing we can say about that. I think we are really interested here in opening up conversations about teenage sexual experiences and social pressures. What are the motivations behind why these boys engaged in the acts? A lot of what we found was that, among some of the guys we interviewed, there''s this desire to get a story, to get a hook-up story, from a girl or from multiple girls. So there''s that motivation. At the same time, we talked with other guys who, when commenting on the sex scandal and those five hockey players, said, ?Maybe they felt pressure to be involved from other guys.? What about the fact that the boys were punished, but the girl wasn''t? Marissa: That was really a complicated within the Milton community. The student body was split: The boys should have been expelled; they shouldn''t have been. The girl was at fault; the girl was a victim.