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Tag Archive for 'young women'
Last week, I posted a quote from Wendy Shalit’s Girls Gone Mild. In many ways, the book speaks to me, especially about the pressure to be sexy from peers and media. Shalit encourages young women, telling them that they don’t have to bow to the pressure, that they don’t have to engage in sexual activity if they don’t feel ready or comfortable. Women can choose, and sometimes that choice is not the one expected from their peers.
But I have since finished the book, and I am now left with very ambivalent feelings about its contents and its author. While I do agree that women of all ages should have the right to dress how they would like, have sex in ways and with whom they would like, I don’t agree with some of the reasoning behind the new “good girl” script.
Shalit says that premature exposure to sex ruins the mystique and passion that sexual and romantic relationships have later in life. I would say that premature exposure to sex is a form of abuse. (Personal anecdote: I have found each relationship—sexual, romantic, or both—in my adult life to be new and interesting; I learned from every one.) More irritating is her belief that there is only one healthy relationship model: monogamy. (Many know how much I disagree.) But what really ruffles my feathers is that Shalit equates modesty with self-respect and high standards, and promiscuity with confusion and low expectations.
The hell?
What happened to the idea that empowered emotionally-healthy women are the ones who make their own choices? To have self-respect, I have to dress modestly and abstain from sex?
So far, whenever I mentioned the book by its title, I have left out its subtitle, It’s Not Bad to Be Good. We haven’t gotten past the cover, and already we are thrown into two distinct mores of “bad” and “good”. The “bad girl” is hip, popular, and has lots of sex without emotional attachment. The “good girl” is ridiculed, forced into behaviours she dislikes, all because she wants to wait for an emotional commitment to have sex. The bad girl is well-loved but lacks self-love. The good girl is not loved because she loves herself.
I repeat: The hell?
Sure, promiscuity is a symptom of depression, but lots of sex doesn’t cause mood disorders or low self-esteem. (Correlation is not causation!) But just as important as misinterpreted statistics (or maybe even more) is the idea that “good girls” and “bad girls” act only in certain ways.
And, of course, it’s all tied to sex.
The NY Times recently printed an article on purity balls. For those not in the know, purity balls are formal ceremonies where fathers and daughters share dinner and dance to bond with one another. At these ceremonies, daughters vow to remain chaste and “pure” until marriage—so they aren’t “sullied” for their future husbands—and fathers vow to protect their daughters’ honor and virginity.
The horror behind purity balls is the objectification of young women. Their worth is only measured by their virginity—their “purity”. But not only are young women only defined and valued by sex, they need protection from the corrupting, confusion influence of the outside world. Randy Wilson, organiser of a purity ball, tells the attending men:
Fathers, our daughters are waiting for us [...] They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.
The fucking hell?
Yes, everyone needs their fathers, but no one needs to be “rescued”. Young women can’t make their own decisions? We can’t understand what is best for us? Aren’t we also intelligent, independent human beings who have the ability to define ourselves?
Young women—or rather, our virgin “purities”—do not need protection. What we need are people who don’t limit “good” and “bad” to only two definitions. We need people who tell us that “good” and “bad” is not about sex. We need people who tell us that self-worth is not tied to “sexual purity”. We need people who tell us it’s about being informed, making your own decisions. It’s about having the strength to define yourself.
I’m sure that Wendy Shalit and Randy Wilson have the best intentions for young women. But their messages aren’t entirely honest. Their new scripts are supposed to be refreshing and rebellious in a period of sexualisation, but these new “female-positive” messages are merely rehashes of the same old script: Women can only be valued by sex, or lack thereof.
The plain fact is that girls today have to be “bad” to fit in, just as the baby boomers needed to be good. And we are finding that this new script may be more oppressive than the old one ever was. The psychologist Nina Shandler offers a shrewd insight: “The conformist mentality has been resurrected from the fifties—only today the badges of belonging have a higher price tag.” Consider how girls today need to be thin, available, and always sexy. At the same time they are supposed to have no hopes, no messy feelings, no vulnerability. They must be aggressive, yet somehow inviting. It’s complicated, and to rebel against the new bad-girl script takes enormous confidence. But, as I learned, it can be done.
– Wendy Shalit, Girls Gone Mild
Get the Books
- Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good by Wendy Shalit
- My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands by Chelsea Handler
- Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
- Reagan-era defense expert to House: Allow gays to serve openly in the military. Dr. Lawrence J. Korb, who served as Secretary of Defense under Reagan, advises the House to dispose of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because the policy contributes to PTSD and suicide among the troops.
- How can chromosome numbers change? Different species have different amounts of chromosome pairs. Ever wonder how it happened? Click to find out.
- What you hear when there is no sound. You start hearing things. Literally.
- Why do we vote on Tuesdays? At least we don’t vote on Mondays. Think of the turnout for that.
- Chinese and Western dyslexics have different affected brain regions. Chinese and English uses different areas of the brain, so dyslexia would affect a Chinese-speaker and an English-speaker differently.
- Alia Sabur became a college professor at the age of eighteen. She is active, smart, and socially conscious. What a role model.
- In Iran, women’s rights activists get suspended lashing sentences. Arrested and lashed for peacefully campaigning for civil rights. See, there’s a reason why they were campaigning for civil rights in the first place.
Girls as young as 10 and 11 are going to spas for facials, nail services, and bikini waxes. Yes, young prepubescent girls are getting bikini waxes before they even get hair. Who’s advocating this? Not CosmoGIRL. It’s Mom. Affluent mothers take their young girls to high-end spas for special bonding time. Mom gets a bikini wax, and request that their young daughters gets the same (even though their pubic hair hasn’t grown in yet).
“I’ve actually been joking that I’m going to write a book called Where Has All the Pubic Hair Gone?” Janice Hillman, a doctor in the Penn Health System at Radnor who specializes in adolescent medicine, tells me. “It’s such a rarity to find it these days in 10- and 12-year-old girls, and older girls. I need to check for it at that age — it’s an indicator of puberty and development, how much there is, where it’s growing. And now, I need to ask girls, if it’s not there, ‘Do you wax? Do you shave?’ Because so many of them do.” (link)
This weirds me out. This weirds out doctors who are obligated to check for signs of puberty. This weirds out many employees at the spas. But mothers still push for these treatments, and their daughters learn to ask for them, too.
Because it’s not just good enough to get nail polish at CVS. It’s not just good enough to get your hair done at the local salon. It’s a sign of affluence, of being hip when you go to spas, when your children come with you. Getting these spa treatments are not just to look good. They are to keep up with the Joneses. Except today the Joneses are the glamour women of Hollywood. And today, it’s not just Mom trying to keep up. She teaches her daughters to do the same.
The crime is not telling young women that they are free to dress up and look nice, but telling these girls that the standard is Vogue, and taking them to get spa treatments even when the experts say that it’s not good for them. The current beauty craze affects young women through their mothers. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Mother can treat their daughters in other ways—maybe with a massage—and beauty doesn’t need to be central to a woman’s life. There are happy appropriate mediums, but spa treatments and bikini waxes aren’t part of them
