Democratic Wings: Conservative Wendy Shalit's latest attack on feminism

November 16, 2007

Conservative Wendy Shalit's latest attack on feminism

Looks like Wendy Shalit still has not yet learned how to do research, since her sloppy he said/she said opinion piece, A Return to Modesty.

A review of Girls Gone Mild by Jennifer Howard in the Washington Post:

A few years ago, Wendy Shalit graced us with A Return to Modesty, an invitation to indulge in what she called the "lost virtue." Conservatives hailed it as a much-needed antidote to the poisonous legacy of the sexual revolution. Liberals, not as kind, wrote it off as a neo-Victorian call for a return to the bad old days when ladies were supposed to behave themselves. It earned its author the contempt of such feminist stalwarts as Katha Pollitt, who sniffed in the pages of the New York Times that Shalit "cites her experience in fourth-grade sex ed to argue that feminism and liberal sexual mores have encouraged men to degrade women. The solution: women should stay virgins, and arm themselves, as Shalit implies she has done, with blushes and long skirts to inspire chivalry in men."

Eight years have passed since then. Shalit now has a husband, a family and a Web site called Modesty Zone, and continues to champion the cause of virgins everywhere.

There's no shame in that. "Whether you're a virgin waiting until marriage, or just against casual sex more generally, you can find a safe harbor here to share your ideals, interests, and goals for the future," Modesty Zone promises. "Join forces with other young women who are tired of power struggles between the sexes. Believe in the possibility of real intimacy."

There, tied up in a pretty pink ribbon, is the argument of Shalit's new book, Girls Gone Mild. Shalit believes that too many girls and women have been denied a happy ending because, post-sexual revolution, we now believe it's good to be bad. "The plain fact," she writes, "is that girls today have to be 'bad' to fit in, just as the baby boomers needed to be good. And we are finding that this new script may be more oppressive than the old one ever was." You can't meet Mr. Right when you're busy shagging a series of Mr. Wrongs.

To make her point, Shalit roves through the bordello of popular culture, sweeping up unpleasant bits of evidence. She begins with Bratz dolls, a scantily clad line of playthings aimed at young girls, and goes as far as the "Girls Gone Wild" phenomenon, in which young women who ought to know better get drunk and take off their clothes and make lots of money for ungentlemanly types who sell videotapes of them.

If you're the parent of a young daughter (I am), Girls Gone Mild does one heck of a job of playing off your worst fears. Shalit wants me to believe that my innocent darling will, by the age of 6, be so saturated in hyper-sexualized contemporary culture that it will take an act of God to keep her from baring her midriff and painting herself to look like the pop tartlet of the moment. She will, by the time she's 13, be greeting her friends with such empowering phrases as "Hey, slut!" And by the time she's in college, if she wants male company, she'll be forced to find it by "hooking up" with lads who want nothing more than to be "friends with benefits." Her social life, in short, will be about cheap sex, bought with cheap clothes and cheaper liquor, at the price of self-respect and the prospect of any serious romance.

And I thought that Disney princesses were all I had to worry about.

Shalit tells me to take heart, though, because there's a new sexual revolution a-brewing -- one in which sex is supposed to be a meaningful act between two people who actually care about each other. It's tempting to mock her, but what's so silly about the idea of self-respect and finding one's soul mate? Nothing, even if you're more the "Sex and the City" type than the virgin-till-marriage type.

She asks, "Why, in the year 2007, should women's focus be completely on pleasing young men?" (Is it?) And she wants us to take heart (and I do, I do) from the growing number of young women whom she describes as "rebellious good girls." These new avatars of girl power give abstinence talks to high-schoolers; they stage "Pure Fashion" shows in which fashion doesn't just mean flesh; they become "girlcotters" who lobby retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch to pull tee-shirts emblazoned with sexist slogans. They don't sleep with the first, or second, or third boy who comes along. They don't become "people-pleasing bad girls" who will do anything, anything, to get a boy's attention.

More power to them. Behind Shalit's celebration of such girls, however, is some very dubious sociology.

I admit she had me scared for a while. I've encountered more than enough young women who have made questionable sartorial and sexual judgments. I'm not blind to the icky cultural messages that my children are subjected to every day. I worry about them, God knows, and the pressures they'll face as they grow into adults. But I worry about global warming, too, and terrorist attacks and paying the mortgage and whether my daughter will get paid as much as her male colleagues do for the same work.

How real is the sexed-out, I Am Charlotte Simmons world Shalit describes? There's plenty of sleaze everywhere you look, but Shalit's reporting leaves me unconvinced. She leans too hard on secondhand evidence, most of it grabbed from the Internet and readers' e-mails. She's promiscuous in her reliance on studies but does not give much detail about their methods; as long as they support her conclusions, they must be sound.

Even more detached from reality is Shalit's takedown of older feminists. These are the good ladies, second- and third-wavers, who run organizations such as NOW and who have fought for years to give women the same chances as men -- not, as Shalit would have it, just the chance to sleep around like men. She attacks them for "the concessions they made to pornography" and for being "so committed to the idea of casual sex as liberation" that they're baffled by younger, more restrained women.

"As the third-wavers continue to advocate a public, crude sexuality and younger girls feel oppressed by how public sexuality is, the two sets of women are on course for an inevitable collision," Shalit writes. This is bone-headed conservatism at its most offensive. Last time I checked my Feminist Manual, letting it all hang out in public didn't appear on the must-do list. Nor did making concessions to pornographers, but maybe I missed that section. Shalit would have us believe that feminism is not a dirty word in her vocabulary. Yet she seems surprised when a Wesleyan undergraduate "rejects sexual exhibitionism even though she identifies as a feminist."

Imagine that! A feminist who doesn't take her clothes off. What is this world coming to? ·

"Probably, hanging onto the past brings more destruction than any other single cause. ...It's the Muslim fundamentalists who worship the past and ignore the reformist spirit with which Muhammad viewed women. It's the backward-looking Christian literalists who interpret religious teachings in a way that consolidates their power..." ~ Gloria Steinem

"'Inherent differences' between men and women, we have come to appreciate, remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual's opportunity." ~ Ruth Bader Ginsberg

"As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the world." ~ Virginia Woolf

"...remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation." ~ Abigail Adams

"Bloody treason, murderous act
Not by women were designed.
Bells o'erthrown nor churches sacked
Speak not ill of womenkind."
~ Gearoid Iarla Fitzgerald

"Too often the great decisions are originated and given form in bodies made up wholly of men, or so completely dominated by them that whatever of special value women have to offer is shunted aside without expression." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place." ~ Margaret Mead

"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?" ~ Zora Neale Hurston

"Eventually, all things merge into one; and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs..." ~ Norman Maclean

"There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example - where had they gone?... It was a spring without voices." ~ Rachel Carson

"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." ~ St. Francis of Assisi

"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men." ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools." ~ John Muir

"How quickly nature falls into revolt when gold becomes her object!" ~ William Shakespeare

"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders." ~ Edward Abbey

"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it... Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love." ~ George Eliot (Marian Evans)

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." ~ John Muir

"The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood of ideas in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." ~ John F. Kennedy

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." ~ James Madison

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." ~ C. P. Snow

"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth." ~ Albert Einstein

"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William Pitt

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~ Benjamin Franklin

"Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

"If somebody tells you you ought to quit, it's because they're afraid you won't." ~ Bill Clinton

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." ~ Robert F. Kennedy

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? But the good Samaritan reversed the question: If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

"No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise." ~ Marian Anderson

"We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis

"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life." ~ Jane Addams

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

"O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength; But it is tyrannous to use it like a giant." ~ William Shakespeare

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it." ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

"When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think." ~ Patricia Schroeder

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"What difference does it make to the dead whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" ~ Mohandas Gandhi

"One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one." ~ Agatha Christie

"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today." ~ John F. Kennedy

"Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God." ~ Jesus

"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?" ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"And thus I clothe my naked villany with odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil." ~ William Shakespeare

"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing... in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men... But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret..." ~ Jesus

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, ... legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state." ~ Thomas Jefferson

"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion, but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law." ~ Thomas Paine

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!" ~ Albert Einstein

"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else." ~ Clarence Darrow

"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." ~ George Washington

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." ~ George Orwell

"To (say) that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it's morally treasonable to the American public." ~ Theodore Roosevelt

"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take." ~ Adlai Stevenson

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." ~ John Stuart Mill

"I don't give 'em hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it's hell." ~ Harry Truman

"I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!" ~ Will Rogers

"I never was surer of my position that no self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her political rights." ~ Susan B. Anthony

HOME

November 16, 2007