Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Young women have long had to navigate mixed messages about being sexy but not too sexual. Now more than ever, the pressure for girls to be sexy is everywhere. This pressure no longer exclusively comes from mainstream media; today, girls are expected to present themselves as brands on social media. Girls know that if they want to receive more attention and more likes, they must be sexually desirable. They must be, as a 2011 report out of Princeton University determined, “smart, driven, involved in many different activities (as are men), and, in addition, they are supposed to be pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly” (13). In other words, girls must do everything boys do, and they have to do it all while also engaging every stereotype of femininity.

Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, clarifies that being “hot” means being “fuckable and salable” (14)—a commercialized, unimaginative version of sexiness based on men’s desires. Where earlier feminists saw objectification as something to challenge, today’s girls see self-objectification as an act of agency and self-expression. The problem with this, though, is that self-objectification sets strict limits for who girls can be.