Perhaps this is why many people are left with a vague feeling that each time they have casual sex they give away a little of themselves, that something sacred is profaned, and they are diminished as a result. Casual sex truly becomes meaningless sex.
In an era when premarital sex attracts no stigma and, indeed, self-restraint must be defended, this seems to be at the heart of the decision by some young women, and even some young men, to go against the trend of sexual licence and ‘save themselves’ for their partner in a long-term committed relationship.
The return of self-restraint
For teenage girls in the 1950s the price of breaching the chastity rule could be high, especially if they became pregnant. By the 1970s, virginity had become a sign of oppression, a denial of the right to free sexual expression. But 30 years on, sexual self-restraint is making a comeback. Recently, one young woman, now twenty, said that when her school friends became sexually active at about fifteen, depression, confusion and rejection often went with it (Overington, 2008). In a sex-saturated culture her peers felt they had no choice. ‘They were blind in a way,’ she said, ‘doing what they thought they had to do with their boyfriends. They should have been told they didn’t have to behave that way.’ But the only message from the adult world was ‘Use a condom.’
This young woman made a bold decision—to abstain from sex until she feels the time and the person are right. Her friends saw it as a bit weird but also fascinating. So perhaps the wheel is turning. Where once teenage sexual activity was a sign of rebellion, now girls and boys who say ‘no’ have become the dissenters. This refusal signals independence of mind. I am not, of course, talking about campaigns or ceremonies that pressure young people to make commitments to abstain; I am talking about young women, and men, who make a considered choice and decide on the basis of their own free will.
Once only the timid and compliant held back from sex; now it is the confident and courageous who refrain. Which leads us to wonder: who is more free—the young woman for whom sex is too valuable to be given over to the culture of the one-night stand, or her friends who became sexually active at fifteen because it is expected of them?
Who’s in control?
The objective of the social revolutions of the 1960s was to replace a society of oppressive rules and conventions with a society of autonomous individuals committed to the welfare of all and discriminating against none. For the first time we would be free to control our own destinies. Yet today we have never experienced more pressure to define ourselves in ways determined by others, including the marketing industry.
For decades, psychologists have collected data on a personality trait called the ‘locus of control,’ a measure of the extent to which we believe we control our own lives rather than being subject to outside forces. The research, by psychologist Jean Twenge (2004) shows that since the 1960s, young people in the west have become more inclined to believe external forces control their lives. Remarkably, declining scores on locus of control tests are greater among young women, despite the opportunities for women delivered by the feminist movement. Perhaps we should expect no more of an era in which for many the socially acceptable life is the one lived out of control—binge drinking, indiscriminate sex and capitulation to every desire. ‘Equality’ has come to mean freeing girls to behave as badly as boys and creating a new gender, ‘girls with balls,’ where once we imagined perhaps something closer to boys with ovaries. Contrary to the arguments of some ‘pro-sex’ feminists, when young women mimic the boorish behaviour of young men, it is still men who set the standard. Raunch culture debases the dream of liberation.
The demand for individual rights in the 1960s released a self-centredness that has grown into full-blown narcissism. In the pursuit of tolerant pluralism a society of rampant individualism was created, a phenomenon dubbed ‘boomeritis’ by author Ken Wilber (2006). Appeals to the principles of equality and freedom often allowed egocentric demands to flourish. Slogans such as ‘Let it all hang out’ and ‘Do your own thing’ were soon interpreted as ‘No one can tell me what to do.’ Self-worth became self-worship.
The marketing language used today mirrors this development precisely. Narcissistic interpretations of liberation are the bread and butter of modern advertising. Consider these tag lines from magazine ads: ‘Go on, you deserve it.’ ‘Just for you.’ ‘If it makes you happy, it’s a bargain.’ ‘I don’t care what it is, I want it.’ It is now apparent that the demands of the liberation movements dovetailed perfectly with the logic of hyper-consumerism. The self-creating individual was the agent ideally suited to the needs of the market. Among the first to understand the opportunities this presented were the tobacco companies, which turned ‘women’s lib’ into dollars by associating smoking with women’s emancipation and empowerment. As early as 1968, Phillip Morris launched Virginia Slims, a cigarette brand targeted specifically at women, famously deploying the slogan ‘You’ve come a long way, baby.’
The strategy worked: more teenage girls took up smoking. A magazine ad in 1978 juxtaposed a photo of an elegant woman in an evening gown with one of a housewife hanging out the washing. The text read, ‘Back then, every man gave his wife at least one day a week out of the house. You’ve come a long way, baby. Virginia Slims—Slimmer than the fat cigarettes men smoke.’ Sadly, the tumours women developed were no slimmer.
We cannot be free if we become slaves to our passions. But is not the absence of inner freedom the dominant characteristic of modern consumer society, where the cultivation of momentary impulse, temporary emotions and moral and intellectual weakness has become the essence of the system? Is not the purpose of the marketing society to make us slaves of our passions? In the era of hyper-consumerism the urge to satisfy any desire has reached sublime levels. It is now possible to buy capsules filled with 24-carat gold leaf which, when swallowed, make your excrement sparkle. Created by New York designer Tobias Wong, the gold pills are promoted as a signifier of excess and a means of ‘increasing your self-worth’—although presumably for only as long as the digestion process takes. At $425 each, they are the ultimate confirmation of the ancient association, often noted by anthropologists, between gold and excrement.
This is the freedom of the market. Rosa Luxemburg once wrote: ‘Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently’ (1920, p. 109). She was right; thinking for ourselves is the ultimate form of liberty. Yet who truly thinks differently today when our universities have become locked in to the demands of the market, corporations infiltrate the academy and governments drain funds from the critical disciplines? Who thinks differently when the mass media saturate the culture with triviality and when children’s brains develop in a vat of commercial messages?
Where is the space for different thinking when ‘the end of politics’ has been announced, where a particular form of liberal capitalism has achieved such hegemony that there is no substantive difference between the main political parties because they have converged on a belief in unfettered markets, consumer choice and the primacy of economic growth?
Bad girls
The narcissistic and self-destructive elements of boomeritis converge in the figure of Paris Hilton. In September 2008, Republican presidential contender John McCain ran a television ad subliminally associating Barack Obama with the emptiness of Hilton’s celebrity; like Hilton, suggested the ad, Obama is the creation of pop culture. The Republican’s strategy failed because, in conspicuous contrast to the previous Democrat president and unlike Paris Hilton, Obama represents the antithesis of pop attitudes to sex.
Barack and Michelle Obama’s public kisses and embraces have turned them into the ‘hot couple’ who are making sex in marriage look not only desirable but better than the alternative (Wypijewski, 2008). In the old mind-frame of the 1960s, sizzling matrimonial love seems an oxymoron, but the Obamas are making it ‘cool’ to be monogamous. For young people who have chosen sexual autonomy, perhaps even abstinence, the Obamas seem to provide a model of how
intimacy and commitment can be combined with a great sex life.
Post-modern academics see the ‘bad girl’ as the heroine who sticks two fingers up at the puritanical repression of healthy sexuality (Lumby, 1997). But against Michelle Obama, the bad girl looks more and more like the puppet of a hypersexualised society whose demands to conform are every bit as insistent as those of the 1950s conservatives. She is a victim of the teen culture satirised in films like Mean Girls and in Chris Lilley’s character Ja’mie in Summer Heights High. All Ja’mie wants is to be ‘hot.’
‘Bad’ no longer signifies rebellion but compliance. Withholding the body instead of flaunting it—acknowledging one’s sexuality but not necessarily sharing it with strangers—is the new ‘transgression.’ Good is the new bad.
The reappearance of sexual self-restraint does not, however, represent a return to the conservative morality of the 1950s, with all its oppressive baggage. The argument for sexual self-determination is an argument for more freedom, not less—freedom from the tyranny of expectations imposed on baby boomers’ children by the commercial co-option of the aspirations of the sexual revolution. The task for today’s teenagers is to win back their freedom from the adults who run the advertising agencies and girls magazines and the ‘sex-positive’ media academics who insist that ‘bad girls’ are powerful girls.
The idea of empowerment through sexual licence has reached its pinnacle in the case of Natalie Dylan, a 22-year-old Californian who is auctioning her virginity to the highest bidder. ‘I understand some people may condemn me,’ she said. ‘But I think this is empowering. I am using what I have to better myself’ (Anon, 2008). In a perfect convergence of the narcissistic interpretation of 1960s sexual liberation and pure market thinking, she declared: ‘I don’t have a moral dilemma with it. We live in a capitalist society. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to capitalise on my virginity?’ Why not indeed? If he requests it, the purchaser of Natalie’s virginity will be able to authenticate the quality of the product by way of a gynaecological examination and then consummate the transaction in a brothel. Nice. As if to underscore the perversion of the ideals of feminism, it turns out that Natalie holds a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies.
Post-modern sex radicals who urge teenage girls to seize power by being sexually provocative are the new oppressors, because they insist that teenagers behave according to their own 1960s script. The same people defend the liberating possibilities of pornography, which is supposedly liberating for women because it breaks through the regulation of women’s bodies to show, in the words of one, ‘the disordered side of the female body—its orifices and fluids—which are both threatening and exciting’ (quoted in Lumby, 1997, p. 76). So efforts to regulate porn are always ‘the puritanical repression of healthy sexuality’ (quoted in Lumby, 1997, p. 77).
On this view, criticism of any form of sexual behaviour is suspect because all sexuality is deemed natural and because the suppression of one form of sexual expression can only be the thin end of the wedge. This gives rise to some grotesque arguments. Thus one defender of ‘bad girls’ could in all seriousness declare on national television in Australia (and in print) that those who want to regulate advertising to control the premature sexualisation of girls are equivalent to the Taliban who want to cover girls in burkas and make them the property of men (Fine, 2007).
The debate over the sexualisation of girls has outed these postmodern libertarians. They have always argued that children are sexual creatures and should be allowed to explore and express their sexuality without the guilt imposed on them by neurotic adults and conservative clerics. Children are much smarter than neurotic adults, they believe, and can slip easily into a savvy, ironic, critical mode whenever there is any danger of falling under the sway of advertisers or media.
The politics of this are bizarre, for there has emerged an unholy alliance, or concordance of interests, between certain post-modern academics and the most aggressive agents of consumerism, the marketing industry (including the porn industry). Both argue that advertising has no untoward influence on consumers, including child consumers, but is merely informational and entertaining. Thus the post-moderns, who matured in an era of challenging the powerful and denouncing oppressive structures, have ended up as their most loyal apologists.
Rebuilding
The sexual revolution failed to deliver on its promise of a world of uninhibited sexual pleasure for all, in which we could find and express our true desires. Sexual freedom was never equal and became burdened with expectations it could never meet. Pursuing sexual freedom as an antidote to boredom or as a means of finding personal fulfilment was always a doomed adventure, particularly as it continued to reflect a male-centred idea of sex. For many—first men but increasingly women and now girls—it became a means of avoiding emotional intimacy and shunning the metaphysical meaning of sexual union. The ideology of sexual freedom did not recognise that, for all of its wonders, sex also has a powerful dark side, one that often gives rise to feelings of betrayal, regret and emptiness.
I have argued that engaging in early and uninhibited sex was once a sign of rebellion against an oppressive orthodoxy; now in a sex-soaked society, in which the imagery and practices of pornography are seeping into the mainstream, a new orthodoxy has taken hold, imposing a set of expectations almost as oppressive as those it replaced. In this new environment, power is now to be exercised by resisting those pressures so that deciding to abstain from sex can be an expression of self-control, of inner freedom. Today the challenge is no longer to attack and tear down, but to rebuild a moral code that truly liberates and leads to fulfilled lives for both women and men.
References
Anon (2008) ‘Shock jock to auction off girl’s virginity: Howard Stern announces his most controversial stunt yet’ Daily Mail, September 9.
Belliotti, Raymond (1993) Good Sex: Perspectives on Sexual Ethics. University of Kansas Press, Lawrence.
Fine, Duncan (2007) ‘Paris is good for kids: Sexed up, dumbed down, Hilton evokes an escape from the Western Taliban’ The Australian, May 18.
Hamilton, Clive (2008) The Freedom Paradox. Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Hunter, John (1980) Thinking About Sex and Love. Macmillan, New York.
Lumby, Catharine (1997) Bad Girls. Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Luxemburg, Rosa (1920/1983) Die russische Revolution. Eine kritische Würdigung, Gesammelte Werke Band 4. Dietz Verlag, Berlin (Ost) 1983.
Overington, Caroline (2008) ‘Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder for real love, not sex’ The Australian, July 14.
Twenge, Jean, Liqing Zhang, and Charles Im, (2004) ‘It’s beyond my control: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of increasing externality in locus of control, 1960–2002’ Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8 (3), pp. 308–319.
Wilber, Ken (2006) Integral Spirituality. Integral Books, Boston.
Wypijewski, JoAnn (2008) ‘Obama as sex symbol’ The Nation, August 4, 2008.
The Faking It Project: What Research Tells Us about Magazines in Young Women’s Lives
Selena Ewing
What’s your body for? What’s it supposed to look like? Is it for other people to look at and use? Who’s telling you what it should look like, and what it should be doing?
For millions of young women all over the world, these questions are answered by glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines. They have been around for decades. These days, such magazines are mostly written and produced by women, for women.
We recognised the significance of this media form in women’s lives. The burning question for Women’s Forum Australia1 was this: are these magazines beneficial and empowering for women and girls? To answer this question, we took the academic, evidence-based approach that informs all our work. We scoured peer-reviewed journals for research about magazines, pop culture, body image, and women’s health.
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1 Women’s Forum Australia is an independent women’s think tank involved in research, education and advocacy o
n issues affecting the wellbeing and freedom of women.
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What we found was far too important to remain locked away in journals or academic reviews where few young women would ever read them. A crucial requirement of the project was to make our report something people wanted to read. And so Faking It, an evidence-based parody of glossy women’s magazines, was born.
We produced Faking It because we believe young women should know what they’re really getting when they pick up a women’s or girls’ magazine. They should be able to read about, if they want to, what researchers and psychologists have found out about how media images portray women and how they affect women. They should also know that how thin, beautiful and sexy they are is not a measure of their value. And that they don’t exist solely to be looked at and judged, or to be sexual objects for men.
As soon as we began to promote our project, we realised that there are large numbers of people in and outside Australia who are deeply concerned about magazines, about media messages, and about the avalanche of images of ‘perfect’ sexualised women that we face in everyday life. Until recently, they have been a silent majority. Why silent? Partly because the objectification of women has become normalised through a hypersexualised pop culture. That is to say, we live in a world saturated in images of artificial, perfect, semi-naked, ‘sexy’ women in all manner of unreal positions and environments. It’s not easy to go against the grain. It’s not easy to challenge something that is presented to us as empowering, modern and mainstream.
Many people have told us that they feel unable to explain their concerns. They feel embarrassed, prudish or old-fashioned to speak up.
Getting Real Page 10
