Dannah Gresh is a best-selling author of several faith-based books on the subject such as What Are You Waiting For, Get Lost, and And The Bride Wore White. She has long been at the forefront of a movement to encourage healthy sexual choices and is often called upon to use social science and medical research to defend a conservative position on relationships and gender in news media like USA Today, CNN.com, FoxNews.com, Chicago Tribune and Women’s Wear Daily. As a resident of the hometown of Penn State, Gresh coaches college students seeking to define their sexual and relationship theology. She was honored to deliver a TED Talk entitled “The Walk of Fame vs The Walk of Shame.” Learn more about her at dannahgresh.com.
By Wendy Shalit
It is by now almost impossible for anyone to deny some acquaintance with the phrase “girls gone wild.” It is the unavoidable title of a video series in which — one must rely here, in part, on the candor of male friends — college girls drink too much, bare their breasts and go all kinds of wild for the cameras, usually during an artless attempt at vacation fun.
What possesses young women to act this way? It’s a good question. Here we are, decades after the feminist revolution, and yet crude self-display — of a kind that makes the daring of the 1960s seem quaint — is considered something that a “normal” college girl might eagerly choose to do for a stranger with a camera and a release form. What is going on? “We continually malign the good girl as ‘repressed,'” notes Wendy Shalit, “while the bad girl is (wrongly) perceived as intrinsically expressing her individuality and somehow proving her sexuality.”
And indeed the bad-girl image — revealing clothes, a willingness to engage in casual sex, a glorification of the inner “bitch” — is strangely popular these days. It is the kind of daring post-feminist pose — presented as liberated and free of gender stereotyping — that shows up in music videos, racy advertisements, gossip columns and celebrity profiles. (Think of Lindsay Lohan on even a good day.) It is not hard to find versions of the bad-girl image in the hallways of the average American high school.
Luckily, Ms. Shalit argues, a rebellion is under way. In “Girls Gone Mild,” she claims that more and more young women today, put off by our hypersexualized culture, are reverting to an earlier idea of femininity. They wear modest clothing and even act with unbrazen kindness. They don’t mind abstinence programs at school, and they prefer a version of feminism based on self-respect rather than sex-performance parity. They also take matters into their own hands when craven adults neglect to object to the objectionable.
Tenth-grader Jordan Aube modeled ‘age appropriate’ clothing at the 2007 Pure Fashion Show in Atlanta in April. The event drew 1,500 people.
Tenth-grader Jordan Aube modeled ‘age appropriate’ clothing at the 2007 Pure Fashion Show in Atlanta in April. The event drew 1,500 people.
Take 11-year-old Ella Gunderson. In 2004, she wrote a letter to Nordstrom, the department-store chain, complaining that its denim jeans were too revealing. “As it happened . . . the Gundersons were helping to put on a local ‘Pure Fashion’ show featuring modest clothing,” Ms. Shalit writes. Ella’s letter — along with Nordstrom’s apologetic reply — was included in the show’s press kit. National media attention soon followed; Nordstrom, apparently shamed, eventually started marketing “Modern and Modest” clothes for girls. And Pure Fashion, a loose confederation of like-minded young women, has since grown from a church-basement phenomenon to force that stores study to see what girls consider hip-yet-modest.
In a similar spirit, a group of Pittsburgh girls, in 2005, boycotted their local Abercrombie & Fitch as a way of protesting the T-shirts on sale there, like the one with this charming message emblazoned on the chest: “Who Needs Brains When You Have These?” The group called a press conference, announced their purpose, began getting attention and eventually induced Abercrombie to pull its coarsest designs.
Tellingly, the National Organization for Women invited the Pittsburgh girls to one of their conferences, to honor them for “taking action,” but the girls themselves were put off by what they saw there. As one of them put it: “I support equality and would never like to be controlled by a man, but the NOW conference was more like a brainwashing feminist summit than anything else. They had this artistic performance that was so much about sex and how much all men suck; it made me feel sick.”
Ms. Shalit has little patience for the thinking of the older generation of mainstream feminists. They are, she says, “so committed to the idea of casual sex as liberation that they can’t appreciate or even quite understand these younger feminists.” To them, modesty is a step back, even a betrayal of the liberationist spirit. “They don’t understand,” Ms. Shalit says, “that pursuing crudeness is the problem, not the solution.”
Ms. Shalit is in a good position to speak on such matters. As an undergraduate at Williams College, she caused an uproar by objecting to the school’s coed bathrooms. In 1999, she wrote “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.” Based on the response to that book, she later launched the online community Modestly Yours and began hearing from girls everywhere.
In “Girls Gone Mild,” Ms. Shalit samples from her online exchanges. There is a certain poignancy to what she hears. “I am twenty-nine,” one girl writes, “and I still resent that stupid teen ‘narrative’ that claims it’s natural (and typical) to have sex and mess with drugs and alcohol, among other things, when you’re a teen. WHATEVER! Why is it so bad to be good? When did doing the right thing become wrong? And when did getting drunk and doing drugs become a benchmark of the supposed awesomeness of our teen years? I just do not think that one has to do a little dirt in order to have a meaningful and authentic teenage experience. I’m not saying I never messed up, but, according to friends, I was still a Goody Two-shoes.”
Inevitably, Ms. Shalit offers glimpses of the eroticized culture that she deplores — from a celebration of “empowering” nakedness in Marie Claire magazine to “The Hookup Handbook,” from sex-packed teen novels to the Web site of the American Library Association, which links to the site “Sex, Etc.,” where high-schoolers can learn about anal sex. (“Some people find it very pleasurable,” the site advises. “Some people don’t.”) It is such casual permissiveness that pushes so many of the people Ms. Shalit interviews to find another way of conducting their lives. One group of students at St. Louis University is so sick of seeing “The Vagina Monologues” that they mount a protesting counter-event, one that tries to present, in their own words, “the true mystery and beauty of the whole female person.”
What does this all add up to? One would like to believe that such protests — together with growing doubts about the sexualized culture and growing networks of support for more traditional ways — are a groundswell of good. But it is hard to say. By Ms. Shalit’s own account, we are surrounded by excess that is justified by an ethos of “empowerment.” And many of the figures in her book are admirable precisely because they have the pluck to counter a nearly overwhelming majority force.
“Girls Gone Mild” loses some of its own force when it moves from reportorial survey to advice and advocacy. At the end of every chapter are “how to” boxes, obviously aimed at young readers, on such subjects as taking back your college dorm room when your roommate, planning a tryst, wants to send you into exile. Another — “Confronting Your Baby Boomer Parent” — tells you how to explain yourself to parents who think that you’re “weird for being a virgin.” A box called “A Recipe for Pleasing With Integrity” asks: “Is there a way for a young woman to impress others, without having to be mean or compromise her value system?” Why, yes: Bake an apple pie!
One would certainly like to see a return to time-honored ideas of goodness — and homemade desserts. But something is needed beyond such self-help advice and spirited cheerleading. If the young are indeed crying out for a change, “Girls Gone Mild” documents their first wave of counter-rebellion, and good for Ms. Shalit for pulling together so many examples. But that’s a big “if.”
Ms. Catton is cultural editor of the New York Sun.
