Girls Gone Wild, Boys Gone Mild

In the wake of Madonna, Paris Hilton, and countless other “role models” encouraging young women to “express their sexuality” and drink deeply from the pool of promiscuity there comes a rare and refreshing voice of reason.  

At twenty-three, Wendy Shalit challenged conventional wisdom with her 1999 book A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, prompting James P. Pinkerton to write in Newsday that her book was “strong evidence that the backlash against Monica Lewinsky will come, not from her elders, but from her youngers.” His prediction, it seems, may be coming true.

Despite the fact that porn is mainstream, and despite the fact that those who to choose to delay sex are labeled “prudes,” Wendy Shalit argues that “a youth-led rebellion is challenging the status quo.”

In her latest book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good, we hear from the voices at the frontlines of this emerging new movement, from someone who has been talking to these “rebellious good girls” for almost ten years. Some of them, Shalit reports, are “pressured by their own mothers to lose their virginity, and come to resent it; others just don’t think they need to be ‘bad’ to be liberated in the first place.”

One reviewer writes: “Drawing on numerous studies and interviews around the nation, Shalit’s findings are at once shocking and encouraging. Nowadays, as even the youngest teenage girls feel the pressure to become cold sex sirens, put their bodies on public display, and suppress their feelings in order to feel accepted and (temporarily) loved, many young women are realizing that ‘friends with benefits’ are often anything but. And as these girls speak for themselves, we see that what is expected of them turns out to be very different from what is in their own hearts.” Shalit reveals how the media, one’s peers, and even parents can undermine girls’ quests for their authentic selves, details the problems of sex without intimacy, and explains what it means to break from the herd mentality and choose integrity over popularity.

Shalit writes, “This book is about my search for an alternative to our Girls Gone Wild culture. It’s about finding a way to acknowledge sexuality without having to share it with strangers. It’s about rediscovering our capacity for innocence, for wonder, and for being touched profoundly by others. My goal is not to attack those who want to be ‘wild,’ but rather to expand the range of options for young people, who I believe are suffering because of the limited choices available to them.”

I don’t know if this “backlash” against the sexualized culture will succeed but Ms. Shalit is addressing the most important segment of society able to determine our direction: women. As history shows, it is the sexual opportunity afforded to women that determines a society’s sexual ethic. Joseph Daniel Unwin, the noted British anthropologist was the first to confirm this point in his monumental work, Sex and Culture in 1934. Unwin studied over 80 civilizations spanning more than 5000 years of human history proving conclusively that a strong sexual ethic, which restrained sex to the exclusive relationship of legal marriage, was directly related to the health and prosperity of a given civilization. Regarding the relationship of women to determining this ethic Unwin wrote:

In all cases the opportunity afforded to the female seems a more important factor than that of the male, whose opportunity, of course, is in many ways a reflection of hers.