More than that, taking on the right to bare arms (and legs, and cleavage, and midriffs) as a feminist rallying cry seems suspiciously Orwellian. Fashions catering to girls emphasize body consciousness at the youngest ages—Gap offers “skinny jeans” for toddlers, Target hawks bikinis for infants. Good luck finding anything but those itty-bitty shorts for your twelve-year-old. So even as I object to the policing of girls’ sexuality, I’m concerned about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure young women face to view their bodies as the objects of others’ desires.
In its landmark 2007 report on the sexualization of girlhood, the American Psychological Association linked self-objectification to poor self-esteem, depression, body dissatisfaction, and compromised cognitive function. Meanwhile, a study published last year in the journal Psychological Science titled “Objects Don’t Object,” found that when college women were asked to merely think about a time when they’d been objectified, they became subsequently less supportive of equal rights.
Yet, for today’s girls, sexy appearance has been firmly conflated with strong womanhood, and at ever younger (not to mention ever older) ages. Hence the rise of mani-pedi “spa” birthday parties for preschoolers; the heated-up cheers and dance routines of elementary school-age girls; the weeklong “slumber party camp” that promises to teach nine-year-olds “all the tricks of beauty.”
In a cruel bait-and-switch, embracing sexualization doesn’t even lead to a healthier attitude about sex; quite the opposite. By stressing self-presentation over self-knowledge, girls learn that being desirable is more important than understanding their own desires, needs, and capacities for intimacy and pleasure.
So where does that leave schools? With a mandate to educate—not stigmatize—students. Telling girls to “cover up” just as puberty hits teaches them that their bodies are inappropriate, dangerous, violable, and subject to constant scrutiny and judgment, including by the adults they trust. Nor does it help them understand the culture’s role in their wardrobe choices.
After a flurry of parental feedback, my daughter’s school is making two changes for next fall. First, the staff is developing lesson plans for students, faculty members, and parents about the impact of sexualization on boys as well as girls. They are also revising the definition of “distracting” apparel. Clothing must allow students a full range of motion—sitting, bending, reaching, running—without requiring perpetual readjustment. It cannot, in other words, pose a “distraction”: to the wearer. Beyond that?
It’s the families’ call, as it should be.
Middle school starts the day after Labor Day, just as Northern California moves into Indian summer, its hottest season. My daughter can hardly wait.
Our Barbie Vaginas, Ourselves
Young women today are sold the idea that “sexiness” is the same as sexuality, that being desirable is more important than understanding their own desires. Nothing symbolizes that more clearly than the trend toward pubic hair removal, which girls would tell me they did “for myself”—the same girls who told me that they had never masturbated or had an orgasm with a partner. This piece was published in May 2016.
One night not long ago while coming home late from a dinner with friends, I passed frat row near the University of California, Berkeley campus. Groups of girls were clacking along the street in their party uniforms: short skirts, bare midriffs, five-inch heels. One of them stopped and lifted her skirt above her waist, revealing a tiny thong, a flat belly, and some righteously toned glutes. She looked happy and strong, laughing, surrounded by friends, having fun. Then she turned toward a building where two bros, appraising the relative “hotness” of those trying to gain entrée to their party, were posted by the door.
Honestly? I didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled.
I have spent three years interviewing dozens of young women about their attitudes toward and experiences with physical intimacy. On the one hand, girls would enthuse about pop icons like Beyoncé, Gaga, Miley, and Nicki who were actively “taking control” of their sexuality. Whereas earlier generations of feminist-identified women were offended by Kim Kardashian West’s “happy #internationalwomensday” tweet and accompanying nude selfie (Instagram caption: “When you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL”), many of today’s generation talked about it as an expression of her sexuality rather than an exploitation of it—brand promotion done on Kim’s own terms.
Young women may not have a million-dollar empire to promote, but they can relate. As one college sophomore told me, she never feels more “liberated” than “when I wear a crop top and my boobs are showing and my legs are showing and I’m wearing super high heels.” She added, “I’m proud of my body, and I like to show it off.”
But a moment later it became clear that unless, through an accident of genetics or incessant work, you were able to “show off” the right body, the threat of ridicule lurked. The same young woman told me that she wouldn’t have worn that outfit a year earlier, when she was twenty-five pounds heavier. It’s not that she couldn’t wear skimpy clothes, but some “asshole-y boys” at the party might call her “a fat girl” and “that would have a very negative impact on my mental state.”
Young women talked about feeling simultaneously free to choose a sexualized image—which was nobody’s damned business but their own—and having no other choice. “You want to stand out,” one college freshman explains. “It’s not just about being hot, but who can be the hottest.”
But as journalist Ariel Levy pointed out in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs, “hot” is not the same as “beautiful” or “attractive”: it is a narrow, commercialized vision of sexiness that when applied to women, can be reduced to two words: “fuckable” and “sellable.” No coincidence, Levy added, that this is “the literal job criteria for stars of the sex industry.”
And it may be no coincidence that young people are growing up with far more access to porn than ever before. Which means their early ideas about sex are drawn from fiction that has largely been produced for male masturbation.
Perhaps nowhere is that influence more clear than in the emergence of full-frontal waxing. Once the province of fetishists and, yes, porn stars, the Brazilian moved mainstream in 2000, thanks to Sex and the City. (“I feel like one of those freaking hairless dogs!” Carrie complained after visiting an overzealous aesthetician.) In 2003, trendsetter Victoria Beckham declared that Brazilians should be “compulsory” starting at age fifteen. She may get her wish: a study of two universities, published in 2014, found that nearly half of female college students were entirely hairless and just 4 percent went fully au naturel.
Most young women I met had been removing their pubic hair—all of it—since they were about fourteen. They cast it as a “personal choice,” saying it made them feel “cleaner.” Yet, when I pressed further, another darker motivation emerged: avoiding humiliation. “I remember all these boys were telling stories about this girl in high school, how she kind of ‘got around,’” one young woman told me. “And people would go down there to finger her, or whatever, and there would be hair, and they were appalled . . . Guys act like they would be disgusted by it.”
“There’s this real sense of shame if you don’t have your genitals prepared,” agreed Debby Herbenick, an associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Public Health. Herbenick studies something called “genital self-image”—how people feel about their private parts. Women’s feelings about their genitals have been directly linked to their enjoyment of sex, she told me. In interviews with young women, she found that those who were uncomfortable with their genitalia were not only less sexually satisfied, but also more likely to engage in unprotected sex. Herbenick is concerned that young women’s genital self-image is under siege, with more pressure than ever to see their vulvae as unacceptable in their natural state. She recalled a student who started shaving after a boy announced—during one of her class discussions—that he’d never seen pubic hair on a woman in real life
, and that if he came across it he’d walk out the door.
There’s no question that a bald vulva is baby smooth—some would say disturbingly so. Perhaps in the 1920s, when women first started shaving their legs and armpits, that act seemed creepily infantilizing, too, but now depilating those areas is a standard rite of passage. The early wave of hair removal was driven by flapper fashions that displayed a woman’s limbs; arms and legs were, for the first time, no longer part of the private realm. Today’s pubic hair removal could be seen the same way: we have opened our most intimate parts to unprecedented scrutiny, evaluation, commodification.
Consider: Largely as a result of the Brazilian trend, cosmetic labiaplasty, the clipping of the folds of skin that make up the vulva, has skyrocketed as well. While it’s still a small slice of overall cosmetic surgeries, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, there was a 16 percent rise in the procedure between 2014 and 2015—following a 49 percent jump the previous year. Labiaplasty is rarely undertaken for sexual function or pleasure; it can actually impede both. Never mind: in 2014, Dr. Michael Edwards, the society’s president-elect, hailed the uptick as part of “an ever-evolving concept of beauty and self-confidence.” One sought-after look, incidentally, is called—wait for it—the Barbie: a clamshell-type effect, meaning the outer labia appears fused, with no visible labia minora. I trust I don’t need to remind the reader that Barbie (a) is made of plastic and (b) has no vagina.
It might be tempting to pass off my concerns as the hand-wringing of an older generation. And if all that sexiness were making for better sex, I might embrace it. Yet while young women talked about dress and depilation as things they did for themselves, when they talked about actual sex, that phrase disappeared. Virtually none of the women I met had been told what (or where) a clitoris was. Sex education tends to stick with a woman’s internal parts—uteruses, tubes, ovaries. Those classic diagrams of a woman’s reproductive system, the ones shaped like the head of a steer, blur into a gray Y between the legs, as if the vulva and the labia, let alone the clitoris, don’t exist. Whereas discussion of male puberty includes the emergence of a near-unstoppable sex drive, female puberty is defined by . . . periods and the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. When do we talk to girls about desire and pleasure?
Few of the young women I met had ever had an orgasm with a partner, either, though according to one longitudinal study, the percentage of college women who fake it is on the rise, from less than half in the early 1990s to 69 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, a researcher at the University of Michigan found that when asked to talk about good sex, college men are more likely than women to talk about pleasure while the women are more likely to use their partners’ satisfaction to measure their own.
It’s not surprising that young women feel powerful when they feel “hot”: it’s presented to them over and over as a precondition for success. But the truth is that “hot” tells girls that appearing sexually confident is more important than actually being confident. And because of that, as often as not the confidence that “hot” confers, comes off with their clothes.
When Did Porn Become Sex Ed?
The phrase “intimate justice” has become my rallying cry, and I’m so grateful to Dr. Sara McClelland for coining the phrase. Meanwhile, the “glass of water” metaphor actually started out as a latte from Starbucks, but girls would respond, “Well, you have to pay for a latte” so I changed it. Parents tell me both concepts have been of great use in talking with their own daughters about sexual rights, values, and ethics. This piece ran in March 2016, to coincide with the publication of Girls & Sex.
The other day, I got an email from a twenty-one-year-old college senior about sex—or perhaps more correctly, about how ill equipped she was to talk about sex. The abstinence-only curriculum in her middle and high schools had taught her little more than “don’t,” and she’d told me that although her otherwise liberal parents would have been willing to answer any questions, it was pretty clear the topic made them even more uncomfortable than it made her.
So she had turned to pornography. “There’s a lot of problems with porn,” she wrote. “But it is kind of nice to be able to use it to gain some knowledge of sex.”
I wish I could say her sentiments were unusual, but I heard them repeatedly during the three years I spent interviewing young women in high school and college for a book on girls and sex. In fact, according to a survey of college students in Britain, 60 percent consult pornography, at least in part, as though it were an instruction manual, even as nearly three-quarters say that they know it is as realistic as pro wrestling. (Its depictions of women, meanwhile, are about as accurate as those of the Real Housewives franchise.)
The statistics on sexual assault may have forced a national dialogue on consent, but honest conversations between adults and teenagers about what happens after yes—discussions about ethics, respect, decision making, sensuality, reciprocity, relationship building, the ability to assert desires and set limits—remain rare. And while we are more often telling children that both parties must agree unequivocally to a sexual encounter, we still tend to avoid the biggest taboo of all: women’s capacity for and entitlement to sexual pleasure.
It starts, whether intentionally or not, with parents. When my daughter was a baby, I remember reading somewhere that while labeling infants’ body parts (“here’s your nose,” “here are your toes”), parents often include a boy’s genitals but not a girl’s. Leaving something unnamed, of course, makes it quite literally unspeakable.
Nor does that silence change much as girls get older. President Obama is trying—finally—in his 2017 budget to remove all federal funding for abstinence education (research has shown repeatedly that the nearly $2 billion spent on it over the past quarter-century may as well have been set on fire). Yet according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer than half of high schools and only a fifth of middle schools teach all sixteen components the agency recommends as essential to sex education. Only twenty-three states mandate sex ed at all; just thirteen require it to be medically accurate.
Even the most comprehensive classes generally stick with a woman’s internal parts: uteruses, fallopian tubes, ovaries. When do we explain the miraculous nuances of their anatomy? When do we address exploration, self-knowledge?
No wonder that according to the largest survey on American sexual behavior conducted in decades, published in 2010 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, researchers at Indiana University found only about a third of girls between fourteen and seventeen reported masturbating regularly and fewer than half had even tried it once. When I asked about the subject, girls would tell me, “I have a boyfriend to do that,” though, in addition to placing their pleasure in someone else’s hands, few had ever climaxed with a partner.
Boys, meanwhile, used masturbating on their own as a reason girls should perform oral sex, which was typically not reciprocated. As one of a group of college sophomores informed me, “Guys will say, ‘A hand job is a man job, a blow job is yo’ job.’” The other women nodded their heads in agreement.
Frustrated by such stories, I asked a high school senior how she would feel if guys expected girls to, say, fetch a glass of water from the kitchen whenever they were together yet never (or only grudgingly) offered to do so in return? She burst out laughing. “Well, I guess when you put it that way,” she said.
The rise of oral sex, as well as its demotion to an act less intimate than intercourse, was among the most significant transformations in American sexual behavior during the twentieth century. In the twenty-first, the biggest change appears to be an increase in anal sex. In 1992, 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today, according to the Indiana University study, 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent.
A 2014 study of sixteen- to eighteen-year-old heterosexuals—and can we just pause a moment to consider just how young that is?—publi
shed in a British medical journal found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. They expected girls to endure the act, which young women in the study consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed the girls themselves for the discomfort, calling them “naive” or “flawed,” unable to “relax.”
According to Debby Herbenick, director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University and one of the researchers on its sexual behavior survey, when anal sex is included, 70 percent of women report pain in their sexual encounters. Even when it’s not, about a third of young women experience pain, as opposed to about 5 percent of men. What’s more, according to Sara McClelland, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, college women are more likely than men to use their partner’s physical pleasure as the yardstick for their satisfaction, saying things like “If he’s sexually satisfied, then I’m sexually satisfied.” Men are more likely to measure satisfaction by their own orgasm.
Professor McClelland writes about sexuality as a matter of “intimate justice.” It touches on fundamental issues of gender inequality, economic disparity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health, self-efficacy, and power dynamics in our most personal relationships, whether they last two hours or twenty years. She asks us to consider: Who has the right to engage in sexual behavior? Who has the right to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary of the experience? Who feels deserving? How does each partner define “good enough”? Those are thorny questions when looking at female sexuality at any age, but particularly when considering girls’ formative experiences.
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