Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Feminists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries fought double standards for women regarding sexuality. Women’s sexual autonomy and men’s sexual violence were and continue to be at the forefront of feminist thought and activism, and today’s feminists continue to fight for sexual equality. Adolescent girls’ sexual equality, however, has only been a visible topic of feminist discussion since the 1990s, and the discussion has gained more traction in recent years due to greater access to information through the internet. Girls & Sex entered the conversation amid nationwide controversies about date rape, abstinence, and sex education.

Discomfort around the topics of teenage girls and sex is nothing new. Western culture has sexualized teenage girls for decades, and concern over this sexualization dominates the dialogue about girls’ sexual equality. Young women have attempted to reverse their objectification and disenfranchisement by reclaiming the word “slut” and participating in self-objectification—placing outsized importance on their appearance and reducing their own sense of self-worth to their desirability. But as Ariel Levy discussed in her 2005 book Female-Chauvinist Pigs, this provides a false sense of liberation because the template for empowerment is still rooted in men’s objectification of women. Self-objectification doesn’t come from an equal, autonomous experience of desire and therefore isn’t a genuine stride forward for women.