Wendy Shalit, author of Return to Modesty, has a new book out: Girls Gone Mild. I loved Return to Modesty, which examined the cultural history of sexual modesty for women, and which critiqued the so-called sexual revolution and its negative impacts, especially for young women. Girls Gone Mild describes the movement of young women who reject the hypersexualization of popular culture and embrace modesty. They're the new rebels! They don't want to dress like skanks or hook-up with "friends with benefits." Newsweek's recent article about the book is here, and there's an excellent interview with Shalit from a Toronto newspaper here. An excerpt from the interview:
"Traditional feminism has been utterly incapable of dealing with problems that girls are facing. They are so committed to the idea that that we have to be like men and that any differences between the sexes are socially constructed the result has been extremely unhealthy for girls. Let's be clear: A lot of men are wonderful, but it's the adolescent male that the third-wave feminists are now imitating."
"I'm saying that the '60s didn't really work – that when you take emotions out of sexuality, it's not as fun. The '60s promised this flowering of pleasure and liberation but what we got for young people is a lot of misery. We need our emotions, and we need restraint. – even for the sake of the physical experience itself. With all these hookups, people get totally jaded...."
In addition to Modesty Zone blog (which I contribute to), Shalit has started a Girls Gone Wild website aimed at teenagers.
I've just started to read Shalit's new book. It is on target and should provide balance to the decades of 'just do it' non-sense.
Mike Iwanowicz
Posted by: michael Iwanowicz | July 19, 2007 at 10:56 PM