Bratz at the Beach

Meghan Daum has been to spring break, and came back troubled by what she saw:

But after a week of talking to people in various states of undress and intoxication, I can tell you this much: What's happening on spring break beaches isn't just boys being boys and girls going wild. It's young people, women especially, deciding that the way to measure their readiness for the adult world is not in terms of education or emotional maturity but sexual desirability.

The raunchy contests and general debauchery were something that these women had prepared for, almost as though for a final exam. They'd logged hours at the gym, in tanning booths and at body wax salons. They'd save up money for breast implants and then timed the surgery so they'd be healed by spring break. Some seemed to have practiced drinking, experimenting with different alcohol combinations to see what afforded the fastest buzz with the least amount of calories and dollars spent.

One word I heard again and again, oddly, was "confidence." As they psyched themselves up for wet T-shirt contests or debated whether a given guy was worth flirting with, a lot of women told me that they saw spring break as the proving ground for their attractiveness. "If I can be considered hot here, I'll be hot anywhere," a rather morose woman sitting on a bar stool in a bikini and high heels told me. "I'm here to get confident."

That's sad, but it's not exactly irrational given the context (no one was there, after all, to participate in a chess tournament). But the more women I talked to, the more it became clear that hotness was, for them, the largest factor in the equation of their self-worth. When they talked about what they wanted to do with their lives, they spoke not of jobs or grad school but of looking good, of having the right equipment and experience to ensure a place in the raunch-obsessed pop culture they'd come to see as the real world.

So this is what it's come to: female empowerment means using your sexual power to enslave yourself to the passions and to raw male sexual desire. Feminism was supposed to raise the consciousness of men, but it has made so many women just as raunchy and sex-obsessed as many males. Hey, I'm not blaming feminism, exactly; I am quite sure most feminists would look at the stuff Meghan Daum sees and despair.

But we should ask ourselves how it came to this. What went wrong? I'm not asking rhetorically, and while I believe most of the blame lies on the cultural left (including feminists), by no means do I believe it all does. Aside from the role of the free market and libertarianism in bringing about this state of affairs, there is a lot the cultural right has left undone that contributes to it. I don't wish to engage in blame-laying, except as an exercise in understanding how it got to this ... and how we can get out of it.

Fight the power, I say. Drop out of this popular culture. Today we cancelled cable TV entirely. We only used it to watch PBS and the Discovery Channel, but we officially decided that we didn't want TV as an option in our house, except for videos and movies we've chosen. A small thing, an extremely tiny thing. But something. A start -- but only a start. You can take away vectors of the disease, but you've got to fill the kids with good things to make them strong and healthy.

For your edification, if that's the word, here's Caitlin Flanagan's troubling 2006 Atlantic Monthly essay exploring how teenage girls got so comfortable with oral sex. It's a very long piece of cultural history and analysis, and I don't agree with everything she says (she's very hard on that PBS Frontline show I blog about from time to time, "The Lost Children of Rockdale County," calling it yellow journalism), but it really is a must-read. Here are the most important excerpts:

[T]he dominant culture in this country—one forged by the apparently opposed forces of male sexual desire and female empowerment—has abandoned girls in every possible respect. ...

One of the most astonishing things to happen during the 1990s was that rap music that included some of the most violent, sexually explicit, and misogynistic lyrics ever recorded slipped seamlessly and virtually unnoticed into the households of so many apparently responsible American families. Boomer parents, remembering their own struggles with their square parents over rock-and-roll, were lenient about their kids' music. Tipper Gore's heroic campaign to get explicit music rated and labeled was born after she decided to do something few parents had even attempted: actually listen to the albums her kids had bought. She was ridiculed by many factions, including those forces on the American left who cry censorship whenever anyone attempts to protect the public, including children, from smut (and in the case of rap, smut emanating from a source the left valorizes: black urban America). In the summer of 2004 Bill Cosby brought down a hail of criticism when he lambasted the hip-hop culture as a shameful squandering of the civil-rights gains that his generation had fought for and won.

But the protests of white senators' wives and African-American senior citizens have not had much effect on music sales, and have not prevented a large number of poor and middle-class kids alike from becoming saturated by the world of spoken-word, hard-core pornography that is rap music. Add to this the countless other products of our increasingly sexualized teen culture, in which male sexual fantasy of the type once reserved for prison-yard posturing has been adopted and championed by very young girls who stand only to be brutalized by it—emotionally, if not physically.

Ironically, many of the objectives stated in rap lyrics are the same as those of contemporary American feminism: to encourage girls not to be shackled by the double standard and to abandon modesty as a goal, to erode patriarchal notions of how men ought to treat women, and to champion aggressiveness in girls. It was very possible for a girl in the nineties to have her well-intentioned parents buy her a CD in which she was urged to suck [expletive] and get [expletive], and to have a well-intentioned teacher (I was one such) tell her to be as intellectually and verbally aggressive as she could—that aggression for its own sake was a good thing, because it leveled the playing field in a male-dominated world.

At the same time, actual pornography—once the province of the most marginalized and criminally suspect performers and businessmen; once a slice of illicit commerce entirely beyond the purview of decent society—was entering the mainstream. It became possible to find porn star Jenna Jameson discussing her trade with the likes of Anderson Cooper on CNN. It was possible, furthermore, to discover that she was being interviewed not as a fallen woman but as a successful businessperson. Simultaneously, feminists were turning themselves into pretzels trying to get together a coherent policy on pornography. Obviously it was exploitative—unless it wasn't. Because if it was explicit sexual material made for the arousal of women, then it was somehow … empowering? And how to deal with the Jenna Jamesons of the world, who were proving themselves to be feminist powerhouses, keeping the government out of private decisions about their own bodies (thank you, abortion rhetoric!) and profiting handsomely from the results?

More:

As a parent, I am horrified by the changes that have taken place in the common culture over the past thirty years. I believe that we are raising children in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households—individual mothers and fathers—are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment. The "it takes a village" philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it.

...I think that girls are vulnerable to great damage through the kind of sex in which they are, as individuals, as valueless and unrecognizable as chattel. Society has let its girls down in every possible way. It has refused to assert—or even to acknowledge—that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It's in the nature of who we are. ...

We've made a world for our girls in which the pornography industry has become increasingly mainstream, in which Planned Parenthood's response to the oral-sex craze has been to set up a help line, in which the forces of feminism have worked relentlessly to erode the patriarchy—which, despite its manifold evils, held that providing for the sexual safety of young girls was among its primary reasons for existence. And here are America's girls: experienced beyond their years, lacking any clear message from the adult community about the importance of protecting their modesty, adrift in one of the most explicitly sexualized cultures in the history of the world. Here are America's girls: on their knees.