Here’s an inconvenient truth – the human appetite for sexual experience often develops a long time before emotional maturity; it takes a while for the mentality to catch up with the biology. This dichotomy is one of the central themes of Anita Shreve’s latest novel Testimony. Set at a swish Vermont private school, Testimony explores the consequences of a drunken dorm room orgy involving three boys and an underage girl when video footage of the event makes it onto the web.

Teenage sexuality is a contentious topic, Shreve acknowledges, and Testimony has already annoyed and upset many people. Firstly, because the teenagers involved all come from solid middle-class homes, and most importantly because Shreve has avoided a clear-cut morality tale.
School sex scandals are a staple of the American tabloid press. Perhaps the most famous occurred a few years back at the prestigious Milton Academy when it was discovered that a fifteen-year old girl had given oral sex to five older boys. Furthermore, social commentators such as Laura Session Steps have reported that teenagers are engaging in extreme sexual behaviours from an ever-younger age. Shreve, a former teacher herself, believes that both underage sexual behaviour and underage drinking have reached crisis point.
“It’s happening, you can’t deny it, it’s a fact and it’s something that we ought to pay attention to,” she says. “Underage drinking is a huge crisis, especially among 11, 12, 13, 14 year-olds, and from what I’ve seen, everything seems to be happening younger and younger. The behaviours at sixteen are riskier than they were ten years ago. Every time I would mention this book to someone, they’d say, ‘Well, in my daughter’s school…’ or, ‘In my best friend’s son’s school…’”
Under Vermont law, the incident is statutory rape. However, the video evidence shows that the fourteen-year old girl, Sienna, is sexually-experienced, willing, and appears to be the instigator. Fearing her parents’ reaction to the scandal, the girl claims coercion. Did Shreve wish to challenge the orthodoxy that in such a case the girl must always be the victim?
“Yes! Thank you! I wanted to make her a more complex character. Here’s a girl of fourteen and this thing has happened but her reaction is shallow. Initially it was a triumph. She wasn’t prepared to call it a rape until it looked like she was going to get in trouble. It’s all about ‘me’, not what has happened to the other people. Also I think in art, in literature and in movies, we’re a little bit tired of hearing about women as victims.”
Sienna is a morally ambiguous character – young and foolish, but also selfish and dishonest. But this allows Shreve to open up some complex questions about responsibility.
“She doesn’t take responsibility for her actions, but it doesn’t change the law. In the state of Vermont, the fact that there were three boys and one girl is an act of coercion, and the fact the three boys are older and the girl fourteen is a case of sexual assault. I think it’s a really interesting moral and legal argument that whether she was willing or not they were obliged to say no, and obliged to protect her, and the fact that they did neither makes them guilty in the eyes of the law.”
One criticism levelled at Testimony is that Shreve appears to be more sympathetic to the boys, J.Dot, Silas and Rob.
“I have very little respect for J.Dot; Silas I see as someone who is morally wracked by what he has done because he’s someone who places value on love; Rob is the voice of reason. When he describes what happened that night, he does it in a way that in addition to the ugliness of it, you also see the beauty of it.”
After the fact, Sienna is conflicted – deciding that perhaps she was a victim but in some ways proud of her notoriety, which she was wishing to leverage into a career.
“She’s a victim of what she sees in the media, on the internet and on television, it’s mostly television really that makes very young girls want to be celebrities. In that way she’s a victim of the culture, but she’s also very canny and manipulative.”
Sienna has grown up in a culture where teenagers are taught that abstinence is the only way to protect themselves, but where a sex scandal can launch a career; a country where fundamental Christian values frame public debate, but that is home to the world’s largest and most successful porn industry.
Shreve finds this duality intriguing, but she says porn is changing American attitudes towards sex, although not in a positive way.
“There always has been a weirdness about sex in American society. We are the original Calvinists, the original Puritans. There is a lot of guilt about sex. But internet porn has changed the whole ballgame. It makes sexual encounters seem of very little importance. What’s lost now, is the belief in a relationship, the belief in love.”