From Pia Catton’s review of Wendy Shalit’s new book “Girls Gone Wild:”
“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.”
A group of girls in Pittsburgh stood up for modesty by protesting vulgar Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts. I was amused because I remember them from the NOW 40th anniversary bash that Allison and I attended. I wish I’d talked to them. Here is what the review says: “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.'”
“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.'”