Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good

It was a refreshing break from people who hold boundaries and self respect in disdain. It's also strategic about counter-measures rather than just highlighting the problem.

In Wendy Shalit's Girls Gone Mild, Chapter one "Hi, Slut!" captures the stories of teens and college aged students who have been oppressed by the expectation and pressure that they will engage in casual sex. The story that Shalit tells deeply echoes my own experience with sex and dating. I was twenty years old for the first time that I kissed a boy. I thought that something was wrong with me, and felt prude and repressed. When I went to college I felt an even greater pressure to hook up as all my friends would randomly do so with boys after getting wasted on the weekends. I wanted to go on dates, like the stories my parents would tell. But dating as we know it has disappeared, "Much to the disappointment of many students, male and female, there's no real dating scene at Duke--true at a lot of colleges"(3). It would be weeks after my first kiss that I would lose my virginity to a very attractive stranger, a visitor to our school, following the encouragements of my friends who couldn't believe that I was still a virgin. I thought to myself, "What is wrong with me? Why haven't I had sex yet?" So I did it. And just as Shalit maintains, the pressure to have casual sex is prevalent, and is proven to be very unfulfilling. After I did it my friends all congratulated me and I felt a sense of relief. But I also felt like I had done something terribly wrong, purging myself of feeling. I'm not alone. Shalit claims that college students are having sex when they really don't want to, as looking wild and acting wild are supposed to be empowering. But they often lead to "misery, especially for young women who quickly learn to put their emotions in deep freeze in order to do what is expected." When I went on Spring Break in Acapulco I went wild. I thought it was the cool thing to do. I had sex with three people, including the club owner. He actually gave me a Girls Gone Wild Hat after we did it. I still have it. I thought I was doing the right thing for a woman my age. But after that trip I felt disgusted with myself. I was ashamed and empty. I thought I had become really good at keeping my emotions in check. I could hook up with a guy and not fall for him. But it still felt wrong. I regret it. "Everyone swims toward the norm and imagines others are having a great time, when in fact many are drowning"(12). "Is sex more than just intercourse?"(4). This modern drive for sex has taken precedence over these courtship practices, along with love and intimacy and even marriage. I have never been on a date. Except with my boyfriend, but that doesn't count. Other than that I have never been on a date with a guy. I always wanted to go on dates, but none of my friends ever did it, none of them. I think this has proven to be disadvantageous to society as whole, detaching our emotions and very own self-value. I feel as though there are conflicting social messages. My inherent values and core beliefs adhere to those of commitment and love. My pr

After her mother and I checked the book out and it passed scrutiny, I gave my granddaughter her hard-bound copy. She was delighted with it and read it non-stop over a three day period. I think it was a timely item of high quality and a valuable aid for those of us who have young, budding, female friends and relatives. A 'good book'!

Does anybody out there remember when Erica Jong, famous feminist and author, came out with the idea of "ziperless sex"? A sex so easy, so natural, that clothes just fly off? With the new, improved, version of females there would be none of that nonsense about inhibition and modesty. Just plenty of raw, raunchy sex. All that was long ago. Today, Erica Jong's daughter, as Shalit reports in "Girls Gone Mild", says "When you're twelve, there's nothing funny about your mother's fourth wedding" (p 104). No kidding. And there's nothing funny about the results in our culture, with Bratz dolls dressed in fishnet stockings and micromini skirts sold to three-year-olds (p 1). Nothing all that funny about not being able to trust other women not to try and sleep with your husband. Or teenage boys urging girls to make out with each other while the boys watch, even though "none of the high school or college women actually enjoyed making out with other women" (p 175). How can a love develop in today's culture? How can most women find love and marriage in this sex saturated culture? And without a loving marriage how can our children develop safely into good adults? All that's left is bars, drinking too much, hooking up, and herpes. This makes the Victorian era, warts and all, look like paradise.

For American society and culture to be good it must be built on truth. Now there is such a thing as objective truth, for if not, then it was only a difference of opinion that American society had with the National Socialists over whether or not Jews were human beings: "Hitler had his truth, and we had ours," so to speak. The untenability of cultural relativism should be self-evident, to borrow from Thomas Jefferson. Thus it was with a sense of joy and relief that I came across Wendy Shalit's Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good. Refreshingly, Shalit advocates returning to a single high standard for women and for men; Girls Gone Mild issues a well-documented challenge to contemporary America to take a hard look at the negative effects of a culturally relativist approach to male and female sexuality. She has penned a masterpiece which will no doubt go far in beginning a restoration of a genuine understanding of the truth about sex and the nature of women and men. Girls Gone Mild is on the mark and required reading in an increasingly hedonistic, commercial culture which encourages the exploitation of sexuality (specifically, for females, the disassociating of sex from emotion) to the point of corrupting young girls into allowing their bodies to be used for profit. Shalit also documents how this permissiveness in turn aggravates tendencies toward aggressive male behavior, which does not help in the quest for societal valuing of a girl's feminine dignity! For women, the truth which emerges from her book is the moral (i.e., human) absolute to value in thought, word and deed the inherent dignity of all women, as stated by one of the girls "gone mild" Shalit spoke with: [For Robin] "....pushing sexualized clothing on younger and younger girls is part of a society that does not value women" to the extent it values the efficiency and productivity of men; "So for Robin, refusing to wear sexy clothing means refusing to be defined in external terms" (p. 150). We can learn much from the young ladies interviewed in the book, such as the following: "With the trashy stuff, you're wanting to show everybody how good your body is, instead of how you are on the inside. I think it's much better to dress modest so you don't distract other people." Distraction here refers to distraction "from their personalities" (pp. 153, 158). One gent from Britain, quoted in the epigraph to chapter 6, was not so distracted: "[As I] walk[ed] around a crowded city shopping area on a hot day last week, it often felt as though glancing anywhere below head-level in any direction was fraught--yet not doing so could clearly result in a twisted ankle. However, amid the plunging necklines and beltlines, piercings and tattoos, one woman stood out. She was wearing a long white summer dress with a red pattern on it, and she stood out because it made her look . . . pretty! Remember pretty? Ah, yes--I'd almost forgotten it, lost among all the hot, h

Wendy Shalit has written another great book that all young women and parents should read. I think that very few adults (including myself) truly understand how very sex-saturated our children's environment has become. Girls are under constant pressure to turn themselves into objects for male viewing pleasure and servants to boys' sexual desires; which is terrible for both sexes, but particularly destructive to the girls. How did our supposedly feminist society get to be so bad for girls? When did it become so bad to be good, and when did 'badness' become an absolute requirement? Why did we stop protecting even our youngest kids from the worst our society can produce? When did sex become the main way for women to claim power--albeit a fleeting and false power--instead of the truer, more permanent achievements of mind and skill? (Gee, did nothing change?) Shalit describes all the pressure modern girls face to objectify themselves, to put themselves on display, to smother their deeper instincts in order to fit in. It's a terrible picture, and I feel lucky to have escaped so much of it myself, and very worried about how my own young daughters will fare. But Shalit also offers us hope, by introducing us to amazing young girls who are speaking up for themselves, their dignity, and their own desires to achieve. I admire these young women so much, and I hope that more of them will appear and start changing the world. This "fourth-wave feminism," as Shalit terms the rising generation of outspoken girls, seems to me to be a much better, truer, and healthier feminism than what we have seen in the past few years. I have always laid claim to the title "feminist," because I have sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, but now I've discovered that I can define myself more clearly as a fourth-waver. Detractors apparently accuse Shalit and her young colleagues of 'wanting to turn back the clock,' 'bring back corsets and petticoats,' or even of being the Taliban in disguise. None of this is true. These young women want progress. They are true rebels, and the older generation doesn't seem to like it very much. But the older generation didn't have to grow up in a morass of pornography; perhaps they wouldn't have cared for it either.