Also, Feminism Is Not Responsible For Girls Gone Wild

Who builds a wall a mile high, topped with razor-wire and extravagantly electrified?

Someone who would rather build a wall than build anything else.

Brava.

it’s hard to have that sense of pride in one’s romantic “get” when you know she’s been passed around the fraternity like a blunt

has the author of this passage ever seen a naked woman?

Fucking beautiful post.

Excellent post, a worthwhile contribution to the sexuality/sex roles/social policy discussion.

I would add that discussions based on generalities (Women are/are not… men are/are not…) are little more than fun. They can be userful in informing conversations about sexuality/sex roles and attendant social policy, but they cease to be useful at all when applied to an actual individual.

So the assertion that members of the opposite gender, as a group, have lesser or greater sex drives than my own–even if it were true–is irrelevant when discussing any given Joe or Jane. Unless one ‘hooks up’ with a statistically significant number of partners, one’s milage as to their sex drive vs. one’s own will vary. It cannot be assumed or predicted. So you simply can’t proscribe Joe or Jane’s behavior based on perceived group tendencies without a violation of their essential liberty.

and the reason they can’t have what they actually want is that they’re fucking guys so quickly guys hardly have a chance to catch their names.

This is one of my favourite quotes, evar. Those poor, poor, passive men who somehow find themselves getting f*cked and having no idea how it happened, or by whom.

I think there’s a big problem with your post, Belle. The problem is, the underlying criticism of ‘hooking up’ is at least partly, potentially right. Parsing out the places where sex-as-empowering and afraid-of-women’s-sexuality are distinguished is the hard part, though. That is, I think that part of what you are saying is spot on – the people you are addressing your argument to are wrong.

So let me say up front, I don’t think the problem is an assertion of women’s sexuality, or men’s assumed sexual rapaciousness – neither of those things are natural, historically consistent, or dichotomous across men and women. I think that’s what Douthat and Ace of Spades think is the problem, but I don’t really care much about them.

What I do care about is that there is something troubling about the assertion of women’s sexuality in absence of a politics of feminism or equality. Not that women and men shouldn’t have sex until after the revolution, that’s not what I mean. But frankly, this is not a new argument, and it’s been made by real progressive men and women – sex-as-liberation and sex-as-dangrerous is a pendulum that you know has swung back and forth from late 60s/early 70s (sex as liberation!), through 80s (sex as danger!), and back now.

The problem is, my students, who see themselves as (and are) strong, feminist women, now see feminism as asserting the right to put photos of your ass on Facebook. This is ‘claiming sexual power’ in 2007. Kudos, and I think this is indeed empowering, but it is assumed to be a substitute, not an instigator or complement to, arguments and actions aimed at reducing the big fucking structural inequalities between (many) men and (many) women. That this book or article hasn’t been written, and that the debate seems to be happening between progressive women who are pro-sex and right-wing jerkoffs who are afraid of women’s vaginas, doesn’t mean that there isn’t something important and worth grappling with out there.

Absolute cracker of a post. Thanks, Belle.

This is because all men want lots of commitment-free, anonymous sex with lots of different women, while all women want to be taken to the State Fair and have their special man win them a giant, plush, pink teddy bear which will fill the car with the etiolated scent of frying fat while she gives the guy a hand job.

Magnificent. Color me bedazzled.

If there were any justice in this world, Belle would be the one with the seven-figure book deal popping up on CNN and MSNBC 3 times a week, and Ann Coulter would be living under a bridge, eating roadkill and screaming “FAGGOT!” at passing cars.

“What would a world look like in which women who had sex whenever and with whomever they want were never called sluts? Never judged by strangers and friends? What would it be like if girls were never told that they had to be gatekeepers for their bodies, defenders of castle walls that are always under assault by men wanting sex? Not to put too fine a point on it, what would the world be like if there wasn’t the pervasive threat of sexual violence?”

For this thought experiment to work, don’t you have to talk about more than just the distorting affects of sexual violence and judgmentalism, and also talk about the fact that women have a uterus? Much of what you say is true, but the fact that nowhere in your post do you mention how the reality that women can get pregnant and men can’t must also at least sometimes contribute to keeping women’s sexual preferences “hemmed in and rechanelled in a thousand ways” seems noteworthy, somehow. It may be that those who are repelled by the hook-up culture are less antifeminist than simply accepting of biological determinism.

Excellent post – really, really good!

I’m reading the late Roy Porter’s Flesh in the Age of Reason at the mo. There’s an interesting section in there about an late 17th century English writer who came up with a surprisingly modern theory about the social evolution of sexual roles and mores.

The complaint Douthat was making is one that is heard a lot in anti-feminist circles, and often in a doubly irritating concern-troll fashion. It boils down to this: sexual liberation has paradoxically furthered mens’ interests at the expense of the hapless women it purported to be liberating.

This all too widespread meme, irritatingly, was about all there was to the “argument” in Russell Arben Fox’s recent post on abortion that Harry so unaccountably found “thoughtful”.

I have two problems with this sort of thing:

(1) Like it or not, feminism is responsible for Girls Gone Wild. The sexual revolution did happen and feminism was a big part of it. Also, Britney would not currently be going around flashing herself had feminism not not been in with the sexual revolution. I don’t understand why modern feminists are so committed to denying that lots of current sexual mores they don’t particularly like are a result of feminism active influence on the culture. The impression I get is that plenty of feminists seriously think ‘modesty’ culture was Patriachal and that Girls Gone Wild is Patriarchal, and that the transition between the two was totally spontaneous act of oppression and nothing to do with feminism. It wasn’t, there’s a direct historical causal link.

(2) There’s something dubious about playing this as feminisms on one side and anti-feminist concern-trolls on the other. The fact is many feminists think “sexual liberation has paradoxically furthered mens’ interests at the expense of the hapless women it purported to be liberating”. Sheila Jeffreys is the most obvious example. But don’t mention this: it’s stop you from putting feminism on the side of liberation and anti-feminism on the side of repression.

This post is just a reflection of whatever culture-war US feminists are currently using to define themselves. But there’s plenty of stuff that has to be brushed under the carpet to do this(feminist make the same argument, feminism did actually cause lots of stuff modern feminists object to).

What the fuck are you guys talking about here? I don’t get any of them. Whooo!

Basically, feminists are those girls who adore or have been gone crazy. Got it?! ha ha ha…

Actually, since we are crediting feminism with such a massive effect on sexual mores, lets credit feminism for the massive drop in rapes over the past thirty years in the U.S. – pretty much an unprecedented occurence, especially in respect to other crimes. I’m not sure why this story isn’t more reported – and it isn’t as if feminists discourage the reporting of rape – in fact, rape was probably much more severely underreported pre-feminism than post-feminism. In years like 2005, for instance, when all other violent crimes were up, rape continued to fall.
Here’s a recent l.a. times piece about it:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/
commentary/la-op-males18feb18,0,7287489.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Feminism – healthy for your sex life, and stops crime too!

Oh, lovely! Now if only you’d manage to work my favourite Cate MacKinnon quote in (“man fucks woman – subject verb object”), you might have gotten a standing ovation in the O’Hare Chili’s. ;)

More seriously, I think that a lot of people who are anti-hook up “culture” are still thinking along the lines of the fluid, leaky body as bearing pollutants. So a woman is dirtied by sex, by harbouring the fluid of a man. A man can wash her fluids off, but there is this belief of the woman as sponge, just soaking up sperm happily – and that the more and varied the sperm is, the dirtier she is. Permanently dirty. Woman: biological weapon.

Liz Grosz runs with this, and points out how leaky and impermeable and fluid our bodies are, but I don’t see that particular essay getting a lot of play outside certain scitech pomo classrooms. (I’d love to see it more consistently paired with Joan Scott or Judith Butler.)

Okay, plane wants my attention. Or my leaky, polluting body, anyhow.

Just because there are side-effects to a cultural or political movement does not mean the movement should be criticized for them or associated with them. Sure, if the women’s rights movement hadn’t happened, maybe Britney Spears wouldn’t have flashed the camera- so what? The feminist movement has made a lot of progress on women’s issue and the benefits far outweigh any temporary negative side effects. Britney Spears is not the be all or end all of feminism. She is at best a distraction along the way. So to anyone who looks at stuff like that and responds: “dear god, feminists, what have you wrought?” a big fuck off is in order.

I’m not sure what Britney and Paris get up to are side-effects of feminism or shouldn’t be associated with feminism (though I think Anna Nicole may well have happened feminism or not).

Feminism, along with gay pride and free love, was a big part of the sexual revolution and actively promoted sexual liberation. I’m not saying this is terrible, or votes for women are not worth having if means Britney’s going to go around exposing herself. I am just saying the commonly expressed view that feminism isn’t responsible for Girls Gone Wild or ‘hook ups’ or Britney flashing isn’t as true as those who go around saying it wish it was.

Feminism historically made a big push for sexual freedom which dramatically changed our culture. As a consequence we’ve got a lot of sexual freedom, it’s not a side-effect or an epiphenomenon of feminism, it’s something feminists wanted and actively made happen. I’m not making any moral judgements – except that is seems a bit disingenuous for feminists to so easily write it off as nothing to do with them.

The belief that men want sex more than women do is far from historically constant, even within Western “civilization.” Through much of the middle ages (IIRC) the presumption was exactly the other way – that women were insatiably “lusty” and that only men, who had Reason [TM], were capable of any kind of restraint. (cf. The Wife of Bath in Canterbury Tales?) Because men are (of course!) superior. Just in a different way. Patriarchy is nothing if not adaptable.

This has, of course, just about zero evidentiary value with regard to what human sexuality is actually like. But it is, perhaps, a useful corrective to our assumption that our assumptions are universal.

# 27, I agree. And further I would add that that article pretty clearly stated that putting limits on the availability of abortion could be used to control women`s (and therefore men`s) access to easy sex. Charming logic which shows how these concern-trolls view women`s vulnerability.

Belle, I don`t know what the world you describe would look like but I live in a country which manages to come pretty close to this part:

What if a woman could confidently go anywhere, dressed however she pleased, and not be afraid of rape?

I see continuous examples of this in Japan. It is a constant mystery to me why Japan particularly has this property (I have never seen it anywhere else in my limited experience of travel), but whatever it is I would love to be able to explain it to the rest of the world.

Feminism, along with gay pride and free love, was a big part of the sexual revolution and actively promoted sexual liberation. I’m not saying this is terrible, or votes for women are not worth having if means Britney’s going to go around exposing herself. I am just saying the commonly expressed view that feminism isn’t responsible for Girls Gone Wild or ‘hook ups’ or Britney flashing isn’t as true as those who go around saying it wish it was.

This seems far from obvious to me. Women have always had roles defined by sex — it’s not for nothing that prostituion is called the oldest profession. Feminism hasn’t produced Britney Spears or Paris Hilton — you can find the exact same promiscuous stage performers and heiresses in the 18th century or whenever you like. It’s the chance to have a public role that’s NOT about sex that feminism is responsible for.

It always goes back to two points: a strong belief that men are slavering idiots ruled by the tyrannical and capricious whims of their cocks, and a deep conviction women don’t like having sex.

When boys are given the green light to be slavering idiots who don’t care whether the girl or woman they are slavering over is willing, of course those girls and woman aren’t likely to enjoy the sex pushed on them. That’s why it’s called rape.

To say that feminism is responsible for Girls Gone Wild is surely to overstate the case. But I do agree with leederick that it’s a bit disingenuous to deny any sort of connection. At the very least, I’d say the GGG phenomenon is an unintended consequence (which is not quite the same thing as a “side effect”) of a sexual emancipation project in which feminism has played a quite significant role.

Secondly, and I think this point is often underrated, just consider the vast, soul-crushing apparatus that has been constructed over the years for the purposes of restraining or subjugating female sexuality. Like, all of human society, right?

Looking back over the years (and we needn’t go back to the veldt, we need only turn to the fairly recent past that predates the invention of modern contraception), what I see is not only female but also male sexuality being restrained, hemmed in, and subjugated to aims and purposes which, when viewed from the perspective of modern self-actualizing individuality, now look utterly strange and perplexing, but which once upon a time did have a compelling cultural (not to mention social and economic) logic. Back in the day when Hannah Goodwife was being lectured and scolded into modesty and chastity, well, it’s not as though Jeremiah Younghusband was being urged to go out there and play the field. Not hardly. Nobody was telling Jeremiah to “party on, dude!” To the contrary, Jeremiah was being exhorted to keep his trousers buttoned up, or face the inevitable (pre-contraceptive) consequences. Indeed, the sexual mores of today’s GGG- video-viewing male college student would be utterly bizarre and incomprehensible to young Younghusband, and it’s not at all clear to me that Jeremiah would see the GGG thing as some sort of laudatory liberation of eros, any more than would Hannah Goodwife (which is just to say that I think male sexuality is every bit as socially constrained/constructed as female sexuality).

But despite all the social constructionist stuff (which I pretty much believe: I mean, I don’t think there’s any sort of latent, baseline sexuality that just is, or that just would be, if only we could free it up and liberate ourselves from the contraints of social life in order to achieve peace on earth or the warm, happy afterglow of a global simultaneous orgasm or something), in the absence of reliable contraception, there really was this inescapable biological fact that having sex meant having babies. Lots and lots of babies, which tender offshoots then had to fed and clothed and sheltered and provided for. Provided for with an “aliment,” as the language once went, and from whence “alimony,” because once upon a time, even to feed was to perform no mean feat. So there was the issue of paternity, obviously. If you were going to be socially and legally bound to devote much of your time and energy to the care and feeding of ten or twelve children or so, I guess you’d want to know that the little tykes were really your own offshoots? Call me crazy, but I know I would, no matter how primitive and atavistic that makes me sound. And in the days before DNA testing, the only way to ensure paternity was to place all sorts of restrictions in the way of those practices that pretty much inevitably led to the production of those mouths to feed.

Those restrictions weighed more heavily on Hannah than on Jeremiah, and there’s no question there was a double standard (an infraction on the part of Hannah Goodwife was seen as more serious than an infraction on the part of Jeremiah Younghusband), but again, it’s not as though Jeremiah was being encouraged to watch GGG videos. And to turn the question around just a little bit, as someone has already mentioned above, it’s not as though women didn’t also participate in the construction of such norms/restrictions. To say otherwise pretty much amounts to a massive denial of female agency in history, and anyway, it’s not all that difficult to see what kind of stake women had in enforcing the norms that now look so female-unfriendly. If you’re the mother of ten or twelve children or so, well, let’s face it, you don’t have a lot of time on your hands. It makes sense that you’d want some help, yeah? It even makes sense that you’d want to ensure exclusive access to the fruits of someone else’s labour: namely, to the fruits of the labour of a legally wedded husband, let’s call him Jeremiah Younghusband, who would be legally bound to provide for your offshoots, in exchange for which, you’d agree to the restrictions that would ensure Jeremiah that the offspring he was providing for really were his own.

I am vastly oversimplifying, obviously, but I just want to get at the logic of the exchange.

And so we now have birth control, and Hannah and Jeremiah now look like slack-jawed yokels and/or the hapless victims of a sexually repressive regime that never allowed them to global simultaneous orgasm…And yet, at the same time, we now have Girls Gone Wild. Which, at the very least, should make us uncomfortable enough to ask some uncomfortable questions, I think.

“Various not-totally-implausible sciency things support this, such as the effect of testosterone on male and female sex drives.”

Ah Belle, you disappoint, you disappoint. When will feminists approach the problem in a serious way?

Who turns away, with a nervous giggle and coy, quavering quip? She who fears that the “sciency things” on the horizon do not carry the flag she’s raised.

someone should point out to the (seemingly mostly male) critics, that feminism is about more than the right to get laid. if ‘masculinism’ were ever a movement, it might need only address the lack of available sex, but feminism has a wide-ranging task list.

sorry if someone’s already made that point.

“sexual liberation has paradoxically furthered mens’ interests at the expense of the hapless women it purported to be liberating.”

That statement doesn’t seem all that unreasonable to me after reading “Ehen in Roten Sturm”. When there was a free sex culture in the communist party, despite this meaning that women had to have several surgical abortions per year, I suspect that in this case, liberation of women was something men defined and (communisty party) women just accepted. Note that I’m not blaming feminists, I’m blaming Lenin.

tangentially, Ross Douthat’s nickname should surely be “Ross ‘Iwoulddoanythingforlovebutiwont’ Douthat”.

hmm, I think they are anagolous in a way since the wish to park in an ill-advised place is a wish to exercise ones rights free from crime. Of course the crime of rape is quite a bit more heinous than the crime of stealing the porche.

That said: why will the teddy bear fill the car with the scent of burning fat?

Surely Britneys being turned into an object for male fantasies and girls gone wild are symtoms of the low esteem women are held in rather than a result of feminism?
I just cannot see the logic behind making that connection.

You know, way up in #26, Steve Lebonne brought up my post on abortion, the one which included some ambivalent thoughts on abortion from Harry, as an another example of the Ross Douthat position which Belle is arguing against, and since then I’ve thought a couple of times about throwing in my two cents to this thread. Not because Steve’s claim is, I think, correct–given that 99% of my post was about my problem with the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” labels, and particularly the flawed conceptual territory which I believe is implicitly staked out by the latter, it’s doubtful that an argument about feminism and sexuality was really “all there was” to my post–but simply because…well, in for an inch, in a for a mile, right? So sure, I said to myself: why not expose yourself to some more (probably justified) abuse by pointing out that, as correct as Belle’s general observations are, it remains true that at least one small aspect of the ideology of sexual liberation really has rebounded in such a way as to undermine what used to be a legitimate source of security in the lives of women–and thus also men, and the family–in society?

But then, I noticed that Mary Catharine Moran said all that needed to be said on that subject, and probably with a lot more wisdom and care than I could muster, in comment #48. So I’ll just leave it at that. Thanks for the terrific, thoughtful, challenging comment, Mary!

harald k @54. You can blame the Communist Party all you like, but you can hardly blame Lenin, who was a notorious prude and AFAIK only ever fucked two women in his life. I think you’ll find the chief advocate of free love in the Russian revolution was Alexandra Kollontai, who had two X chromosomes.

Yes, mary catherine moran is very helpful. But I’m a bit surprised by the confidence so many people have in judging the sexual experiences and mores of pre-1960s men and women. I wasn’t around then, and frankly don’t feel able to make very confident judgements about the people around me now. But at least some reading about, for example, the Puritans, suggests that marital relationships at least may have been more egalitarian and less sexually repressed than some on this thread assume.
Not an argument against feminism, at all, in fact not an argument, just a call for caution about assessment of the facts.

And I’d like to see more discussion of what ryan miller said in #43

“Also, Feminism Is Not Responsible For Girls Gone Wild”

But, so what if it is? I am not at all convinced there is a problem. First, I doubt the charicature of “GGW” is very widespread in actual fact as opposed to exhibitionistic TV shows and material for handwringing editorialising. (I haven’t met any myself, sadly). Second, I don’t believe any proxy GGW girls are particularly miserable in their lives — as compared with Girls Gone Prudish, or with earlier generations of women.

The whole premise has such an overwhelming penetrating smack of moralising scaremongering with a painfully transparent reactionary agenda that one is led to conclude that that is in fact what it is.

… and to add, the mechanisms that provide the preventing detailed in #48 were only largely effective against misbehaving by the poor. We’d hardly have any literature at all, otherwise. In fact, I think that rather than #48 being a comment restricted specifically to gender issues, it’s more accurately seen as the sort of marmalade that Belle’s other half brilliantly vivisected here.

Where did those Donner Party people go, exactly? They went to Girls Gone Wild!

Sexual liberation is pretty much like economic liberation – people compete (by the crudest means) into being very rich and very poor. Web nerds are typically poor in the sexual economy (to coin a euphemism), and semiconciously want to go back to the kind of cartelized one-for-you-one-for-me of religious morality and economically disempowered women, where they would be in the sexual lower middle class again. Any talk about liberation being bad for women is smoke – it’s just a very raw competition (and not for old time security, but for sexual adventure) and like all competitions is bad for misfits and losers.

Women who have sex with lots of guys, in my experience, don’t tend to be highly empowered people taking a mature pleasure in their sexuality.

If you’re talking about young women, it’s not too surprising that they lack maturity, is it? On the other hand, being a divorced middle-aged geezer myself, I have certainly met some women in their 50s who have had a substantial number of partners in their maturer years and who very definitely are strong, empowered people. One must be careful with generalizing from limited samples.

Speaking as a f***ed-out old rent boy, I resent the implication that spreading your legs for every ass-starved horndog who propositions you is not a deeply rewarding lifestyle.

“One must be careful with generalizing from limited samples.”

Fair enough. I was addressing women of college age, who seem, in my experience, to have multiple partners not out of any sort of liberation, but rather out of an inability to resist pressure and a desire to be liked.

I can’t talk about any “hook up culture” though because I think that’s a made up phrase and that no such culture exists. Its just kids at college.

Feminism, along with gay pride and free love, was a big part of the sexual revolution and actively promoted sexual liberation. — leederick

As I understand it, feminism was more like a REACTION to the sexual revolution. Like, as I dumb it down for mnemonic purposes, the sexual revolution happened in the ’60s, feminism (as we know it) happened in the ’70s. And a lot of what led to that second-wave feminism in the ’70s was anger at the self-serving male chauvinist excesses of ’60s “sexually liberated” men.

Now you can all beat on my head with your actual knowledge of what you’re talking about.

Excellent post! I do think, however, that this conversation would benefit from someone’s pointing out the fact that there are more types of sex than “casual” and “non-casual.” One thing that is giving ammo to the antihookupites may be the fact that a lot of the women who are strong/assertive enough to go out and get sex may still not be strong/assertive during said sex, i.e. even with strong, modern women, the sex itself is often about pleasing the man.

It’s not enough to tell girls it’s okay to have sex–we also need to tell them it’s okay to control sex. If “Girls Gone Wild” still featured drunk college chicks getting naked, BUT once naked, those girls threw the nearest man to his knees and screamed “please me or I’ll rip your nuts off, worm!”, I don’t think that would be something that the left would need to feel conflicted about.

Read my take on it at http://www.the1585.com

Secondly, and I think this point is often underrated, just consider the vast, soul-crushing apparatus that has been constructed over the years for the purposes of restraining or subjugating female sexuality. Like, all of human society, right?

Is women’s (or by Moran’s extension men’s) sexuality really being restrained or subjugated in modern, liberal societies? I just don’t see it. Maybe it’s because I spent my adult life in european metropolises among liberal arts and media types, but I have a suspicion that a good part of the problem could be solved if people stopped caring so much about what others say.

Laura wrote: “I think we all agree that access of birth control and increased employment opportunities for women have decreased the staggering costs of having a child out of wedlock.”

Laura, I’d agree if you’d rephrase this way: Access to contraceptives has decreased the RISKS of promiscuous sexual behavior for women. The COSTS of unsupported pregnancy and child-rearing remain staggering for all women (although, of course, some women are able partially to offset those costs with material and personal resources).

What we see, though, is that while the risks of promiscuous sex for women (unintended and unsupported pregnancy, principally; I’m not persuaded by arguments about “self esteem”) have probably decreased overall, they have also been redistributed unevenly over class (and ethnic) categories. While privileged women enjoy a lower risk of unsupported pregnancy, underprivileged segments are now at a higher risk.

Frankly, I don’t shed too many tears for the GGW girls or even the next Pussycat Doll. They look to me mostly like middle-class college girls who have the resources, material and cultural, to minimize the risks of promiscuous behavior. I’m not so sure about the youngest and most vulnerable girls who are consuming the glamorized images of, say, the Pussycat Dolls on mainstream television.

This is where feminism has had the greatest effect, I think, however unintended. Because it’s clear that feminism has supplied the vocabulary of empowerment that has purchased mainstream legitimacy for these highly sexualized images of women. Without the master tropes of empowerment and freedom that structure feminism, the neo-burlesque would have remained in the marginalized cultural position that—it has rightly been observed—it has long occupied. Now it’s on network TV.

Am I missing something, or isn’t #48 simply an argument that birth control contributed to producing GGW, not that feminism helped to produce it? I don’t see any argument that feminism specifically caused GGW; #48’s argument is based — as far as I can tell — solely on the premise that fear of pregnancy restained sexual behavior in the past.

Because it’s clear that feminism has supplied the vocabulary of empowerment that has purchased mainstream legitimacy for these highly sexualized images of women. Without the master tropes of empowerment and freedom that structure feminism, the neo-burlesque would have remained in the marginalized cultural position that—-it has rightly been observed—-it has long occupied.

Going back even before Playboy, which as Hogan observed in #31 antedates second wave feminism, weren’t pin-up girls mainstream? It seems very dubious that feminism is responsible for mainstreaming highly sexualized images of women; leaving aside the questions of whether such images are responsible for higher risks of unsupported pregnancy among underprivileged women, or whether there really is a higher risk right now.

In addition to Katherine and M. Weiner’s questions about the alleged profundity of MCM at 48, we need to, others have added, question here historiography. It’s as if prostitution didn’t exist in Hannah and Jeremiah’s world, which seems problematic.

have Girls Gone Wild. Which, at the very least, should make us uncomfortable enough to ask some uncomfortable questions, I think.

I agree with Matt here. What freaking “uncomfortable questions”? This kind of political-ethical prick-teasing is much more objectionable than the normal kind.

btw, here’s my discussion of post #43

I don’t have the data to say whether that is slightly more injurious to girls or somesuch as the NYT author claims, but I think it’s clearly deeply injurious to both men and women.

well, if you don’t have the data, you’re flapping your gums. Sex is not “clearly injurious to both men and women”, or it wouldn’t be so popular. If we were talking about any other field of human activity, devices like “it’s clearly”, wouldn’t be tolerated and I don’t see why they should here either.

Hi Matt—

Your best question is whether there is a correlation between girls’ consumption of represenations of promiscuity and promiscuous behavior itself. I don’t know whether there is. (Note that I did not argue that feminism is the primary cause the proliferation of these images; only that the vocabulary of feminism has been appropriated to legitimize them. This is a much weaker kind of causality.)

Your final question—whether underprivileged women are at a higher risk for out-of-wedlock childrearing—is an empirical one, and the data are there. Your first question—whether the burlesque has become more mainstream—is historical; I’m persuaded that it has, but I’d be interested in evidence that it has not.

I doubt there’s much point in saying this, but, putting aside all questions about whose to blame for what, isn’t it possible that the public endorsement of or indifference to certain practices have effects of leading some people to behave in ways that are quite damaging to them. EG, gambling, heroin use, alcohol use etc. I see no reason to presume that, for example, promiscuous sex is not one such practice. While at the same time I can also see that strong norms disapproving of non-emotionally-intimate sex might also have quite damaging effects on some (usually other) people, as matt suggests. Sure, daniel, there’s not going to be much data here, but that’s because we don’t have much of a sense of how to operationalise the questions we’re asking. I wanted discussion of #43 because it seems to me that there might be real issues worth thinking about. I’d like help thinking through the possible costs and benefits (and their distribution) of different norms regarding sex. I agree that people on the whole do what they want, but I reject the claim that that is always what’s good for them, and also the claim that what they want has a lot of authority with respect to the evaluation of social norms in a world in which their preferences are highly sensitive to social norms.

I think it’s very brave of the men of the internet to defend the practice of breast-baring by college-age women.

Ogged:

To paraphrase:

This isn’t something I’m proud of. That’s because I can’t be proud of letting women make their own decisions anymore than I can be proud of not shitting on myself whenever I laugh. Letting women make their own decisions is the default fucking setting.

To say that we just let people do as they please is untrue, in addition to lazy—it avoids those uncomfortable questions that MCM rightly says we should be asking.

Such as?

All of the people worried about young women’s ability to form emotionally intimate relationships might bear in mind that there is more to intimacy than sex.

There are intimate relationships that do not revolve around sex (siblings, parents, roommates, friends). There are sexual relationships that do not involve intimacy. There are relationships with complex intertwinings of the two.

That is has become possible to disentangle what is merely sexual from what is nurturing, intimate, and profoundly personal strikes me as a good thing—because it helps a couple entwine them in positive and loving and CHOSEN ways.

The Second Wave of feminism was a reaction to the Sexual Revolution of the ’60s, i.e. the Men’s Movement. Men decided that they weren’t going to keep their end of the deal: lifetime financial support in exchange for sex, but still wanted sex, housekeeping and other support services. Since women couldn’t get men to support them they, reasonably, campaigned for a fair shake in the labor market–and the battle continues.

There’s no point in women not hooking up these days because you can’t play coy to get men to marry you and guarantee lifelong financial support.

Personally, I once tried to get pregnant in order to trap a guy into marriage–though I didn’t manage it. Nowadays neither this nor the business of teasing and playing the guy on the hook until you can trap him works. There is simply no way to get a secure career housewife job–if there were, I’d have done it. My job’s ok, but I’d much rather be a housewife.

#90 wrote: Sex is not “clearly injurious to both men and women”, or it wouldn’t be so popular.” But replace “sex” with “fast food” or “cigarettes”. This is a bad argument.

fast food is not particularly bad for people. And cigarettes, fair enough but it is your only data point. And, correctly, before people started doing a big deal about cigarettes being bad for you, they collected a lot of evidence that cigarettes actually caused lung cancer. I could turn this round; if you compare the strength of the evidence that cigarettes cause lung cancer with the strength of the evidence that feminism causes misery through lack-of-romance, then your, and post #43’s case looks really quite pathetic indeed.

After all, when two women are surrounded by a gang of men screaming “Show us your tits!”, and they ultimately both hike up their shirts and show us their tits — aren’t they, as mature adults, entitled to the presumption that they just really wanted to show us their tits? Who are these puritan busybodies insisting there’s something exploitative about that situation?

And who are you to make me feel ashamed of my rampant double-posting?

“And, “double standard” or not, it has always been the case, and will continue being the case into the year 3000, that it’s rather difficult to work up the enthusiasm to court a girl when she’s been nailing everyone you know without such courtship (why should I be the one who has to put in the effort?), and it’s hard to have that sense of pride in one’s romantic “get” when you know she’s been passed around the fraternity like a blunt.”

This is actually quite true. It is how men feel about women, and it will always be this way. The post does not substantively address this wholly correct obvservation in any way.

What freaking “uncomfortable questions”? This kind of political-ethical prick-teasing is much more objectionable than the normal kind.

Well, I wasn’t winking at you, Dsquared, I really had my eye on the guy just next to you. But actually, I didn’t see myself as addressing an exclusively, or even a primarily (and certainly not a primarily more important), male readership in the first place. I, a woman, was responding first and foremost to some interesting comments put forth by Belle, also a woman; and though I did want to query or challenge some of what this highly intelligent and articulate and makes-me-think-about-the-issues woman had to say, I really wasn’t trying to “tease” her in the manner you have so revealingly (and, if I wanted to go all feminist theory on you, I might even say, so phallocentrically) suggested.

Do you really not see the uncomfortable question that is running through this entire thread? It is pretty much built into the very title of this post: feminism is not responsible for GGG, which is already to respond to an assertion, about which there is, apparently, some sort of question, which question makes at least some of us, well, at least a little bit uncomfortable. The assertion that feminism is responsible for GGG is most frequently, or at least most loudly and crudely, put forth by male wingnuts in support of various and sundry other agendas … and yet, believe it or not, there are people (many of them women, and some of them even self-identified feminists) who exist outside the realm of right-wing nuttery, who yet dare, on occasion, to raise questions between sexual emancipation and GGG. There are women who at least silently, in their own minds, do raise such questions. But, given the current gendered balance of power and etc. and etc. (not to get all feminist theory on your arse, and seriously, darling, I really am not trying to “tease” you), it’s often a bit difficult for a woman to raise such questions in a public forum. The woman who has the temerity to raise such questions is apt to be accused of prudishness, puritanism, bluenosery…and maybe even to be compared to David Frum, and who the hell but a card-carrying member of Wingnuttery Inc. wants to be associated with the likes of David Frum? But I guess brooksfoe has said all of this much better than I can.

The discomfort, to again vastly oversimplify in an attempt to get at the underlying logic, comes down to something like this: The wingnuts tell us that there is no middle ground between Victorian angels in the house and drunken, possibly underage, bikini-clad babes flashing it for the camera, and dear god, but what if there’s a kernel of truth to what these wingnuts so boldly and baldly proclaim? I mean, I want and I need to believe that what the wingnuts say couldn’t possibly be true: there must needs be, I need to believe, some sort of middle ground between these equally unpalatable options. But, eh, I think Joe Francis of GGG is, at the very least, a statutory rapist (now, go ahead and call me a bluenose and a puritan…it’s okay, I’ve already been compared to the likes of Frum, so I think I can take it).

“Sex” (as if there’s just “sex,” abstracted from any and all other considerations) cannot possibly be injurious because it is so “popular”? Yeah, and I’m told that working at substandard wages for no benefits at all is also quite “popular” (well, I mean, people from all around the globe do engage in this practice, and there’s populism for you), and just so long as it’s their free choice to make their own decisions, and blah blah blah and etc. etc. well, who could could possibly object? and let’s not talk about complex, and yes, even uncomfortable assymetries of power or anything.

Ogged:

The fact that a twenty-year-old woman makes a decision doesn’t make it, ipso facto, the right one.

No kidding! Also, the fact that I might have an opinion as to what I would do in her place or what choice might be most likely to lead to her long-term happiness doesn’t, ipso facto, mean that her decisions are any of my goddamn business.

We make judgments all the time about whether the behavior of other people is good for them, good for us, good for society, a good example for others, etc.

Yes, we do. We also make judgments as to what to make judgments about.

When society takes an attitude toward women’s sexuality I am, as a man, not the one who has to live with the consequences. It therefore ill behooves me to dictate what that attitude should be.

Furthermore, as a thirty-four-year-old man who’s grown up in the society Belle describes, I judge that where the sexual behavior of some hypothetical twenty-year-old woman I have never met is concerned, I am, (1), very likely to be burdened by any number of biases, conscious and unconscious, complementary and contradictory; and, (2), extremely unlikely to be in possession of all the facts.

I therefore suspect that my judgment on this subject is likely to be rather poor.

To say that we just let people do as they please is untrue…

Which isn’t to say that we couldn’t work harder at it.

…in addition to lazy—it avoids those uncomfortable questions that MCM rightly says we should be asking.

About what? About women’s agency in the Victorian era? Those questions aren’t uncomfortable, they’re fascinating — especially when you start comparing the Victorian era with earlier eras, and also start unpacking how much of our idea of what the Victorian era was and how it worked was shaped by the post-Victorian backlash of folks like Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. Doesn’t have a lot to do with prescribing social norms for the college students of today, though.

Could someone please explain to me (and this isn`t a trick question) what is wrong with Girls Gone Wild, and how it can be criticised effectively without subscribing to some extent to the kind of dirt/shame models which feminism has been trying to undo?

Mary, is it at all possible to express the uncomfortable questions concerned in a simple sentence ending in a question mark? I have a feeling that placed baldly, and stripped of all these innuendoes, they might not look so uncomfortable after all, and might indeed be susceptible to a short, one-word answer.

When society takes an attitude toward women’s sexuality I am, as a man, not the one who has to live with the consequences.

Uh…men aren’t affected by how society constructs its expectations of female sexuality? Wow, that’s a novel one. Burqas in Afghanistan, public group sex in Florida — whatever; I am, as a man, entirely unaffected.

Brooksfoe, your complaint seems to be about decency, not feminism. If the shame is just that people are exposing their private lives too much, I don’t see that it is feminism’s responsibility. There has to be something about this phenomenon which is harmful to women particularly, and in some way related specifically to women’s increased freedom. And a feminist critique should describe this problem without resorting to double standards about women’s role or sexuality.

And a feminist critique should describe this problem without resorting to double standards about women’s role or sexuality.

Well, you’ve conjured up the ancient issue there, right? — difference feminism versus…sameness feminism, or whatever it is; equality versus equity. I tend to be persuaded by the argument that women are different from men, and that an equitable treatment of both in society requires some “double standards”. In sort of the same way that guaranteeing civil rights may require different treatment for minorities than for majorities.

The expansion of the pornopticon into everyone’s bedrooms and onto our beaches falls inequitably on men and women. There are major asymmetries — no gangs of women on the beaches of Florida are pressuring heterosexual guys to tongue-kiss each other or perform oral sex on each other. To wish such asymmetries away, or (as Belle does) to speculate as to what our sexual regimes might look like if the entirety of human social history were to be somehow erased, seems pretty silly to me. If feminism isn’t about examining how differential treatment of women in social (including sexual) behavior affects women’s civic and social (dis)empowerment…then what exactly is feminism about?

matt — I take it that you are very gently telling me that I’m off-topic, which I can believe, and helps me to understand better some of what has been said. I guess I’m not interested in the topic of the thread, just in many of the things that have been said off-topic. I’ll shut up now.

(Hmm… blockquote and paragraphs apparently don’t play well together, although they worked fine in the preview.)

“it’s rather difficult to work up the enthusiasm to court a girl when she’s been nailing everyone you know without such courtship (why should I be the one who has to put in the effort?),”

To reflect what is often the ugly reality behind this statement, I would change the above to:

“it’s rather difficult to work up the enthusiasm to court a girl when she’s been raped or exploited by everyone you know without such courtship (why should I be the one who has to get her consent?),”

To talk about how fully-consensual sex damages young women while avoiding talking about how non-consensual sex damages young women shows incompetence at best.

Sexual exploiters turn, “women have the right to say yes” into “women who can say yes don’t have the right to say no.” Then they turn around and say, “Feminism made me do it.”

Uh-huh.

I thought that the “uncomfortable questions” category might be a subset of “rhetorical questions whose obvious answer is ‘no'”.

Some of the comments about the Industrial Revolution strike me as apposite, not so much for the bits about unions, but because it’s probably only with the rise of the lower middle class that the notion of woman as sexually-shy retiring flower really became pervasive. Chaucer would have laughed the idea out of stableyard, and Boccacio would have gleefully stuck a knife in its back. Shakespeare would have cudgeled it to death.

The idea that women only engage in sex to aquire other goods is obviously an important meme for people who use women and their children as mechanisms for distributing property, but that’s only been a vanishing fraction of the population until sometime in the last few centuries. Can we trace the point where the notion of women as earthy types who would have (at least) as much sex as men when they could get away with it went completely out of fashion? Did it happen at the same time as pink for boys?

Rosalynde:

Hi! We’re back live.

The thing is, this is America. Empowerment and liberation are our bread and butter, or vice versa, and choice is the cream in our Coffee of Autonomy. The feminist movement didn’t invent such discourses; it just reframed and redeployed them for its political purposes, like many other political movements. And holding the feminist movement in any way responsible for advertisers’ and marketers’ exploitation of such discourses seems to me like holding St. Augustine responsible for Valmont’s use of soul-saving language in his seduction of Mme. de Tourvel in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It not only ignores the unscrupulousness of seducers in choosing their tools, it comes close to blaming the victim for the behavior of the seducer. (If we’re looking for an -ism to blame for GGW, I think capitalism is a much more likely candidate. And yes, some feminists are not as anti-capitalist as I would like them to be, but at the level of abstraction we’re speaking at here, so what?)

I’m all for complex historiographies of cultural phenomena, but I still have a near-antiquarian respect for timelines: the sexual revolution began roughly a generation before the launching of anything we would now recognize as “the feminist movement.” Maybe there’s some other definition of “sexual revolution” that doesn’t incorporate, e.g., Kinsey, Hefner, and the pill; we could talk about that. But until I see such a definition, I’m going to keep insisting that “feminism was an important cause of the sexual revolution” is bad social history, and not because of implicit prudery, but because it fails a basic test of historical explanation: sequence.

As for Belle’s peroration, I think you’re confusing a question with an answer. Belle is (oh God, here I go) trying to problematize traditional notions of the nature of male and female desire by pointing out that all the desire with which we have experience and on which we base our ideas of tradition and nature comes to existence under a regime of male privilege and heteronormativity (whew). Unless you want to argue that those two conditions are “natural” in some way that is synonymous with “immutable,” then Belle’s question is perfectly appropriate: in the absence of those constraints, what would female desire, or even female social behavior, look like? The point is, we don’t know. And the answer “it would look like young women flashing their boobs at Joe Francis’s camera” is sillier and more unimaginative than most.

with young girls giving it away like it’s rotting in the warehouse

Where are these young girls located and how can I get there?

#88’s response to my post(#83) brings us to an interesting point about whether “empowerment oneupspersonship” actually gets us anywhere.

By way of responding to the fact that straight men enjoy watching submissive women engage in sexual activity, I suggested that women still engage in sex, but be assertive/domme-ish rather than submissive. #83 countered by saying that straight men would STILL enjoy watching it just as much. Touche.

I guess I should have clarified that I was talking about ALL sex, not just sex-on-film, be it GGW or otherwise… but anyway, here we are: regardless of whether a woman is submissive or assertive (whether the sex is man-centric, woman-centric, totally symbiotic, etc.), the sexual act is always something that straight men would enjoy watching (assuming that the woman is decently attractive); hence it is always “potential porn,” even when it is not actually being filmed.

Okay, fine. The logical next question would be, is it also something that straight women would enjoy watching, provided that the man is decently attractive–i.e. the same old “would women like porn as much as men, if the men in porn were ever good-looking?” question. The only answer I’ve ever found that satisfies anyone is “some would and some wouldn’t.”

To reestablish the relevance here: #88 seemed to be saying that sex is always a “performance” for the woman, regardless of how she acts, ergo the submissive/assertive distinction is an illusion.

I disagree, because I wasn’t talking about “Art for Art’s Sake,” here; I was talking about actions designed to lead to results–i.e. the woman getting off vs. not getting off.

In a back-and-forth about the same subject on my site, a woman reader objected to my defense of hookupism on the grounds that most men are bad at pleasing women. But this is not a problem about sex, it is a problem with men. So, my point is, if the problem with casual sex is that men are bad at it, then isn’t the obvious solution “women should make men be good at it,” rather than “women shouldn’t have sex?”

My site, for those who are interested: http://www.the1585.com