Girls Gone Mild: Are Feminists and Prudes Rebelling Against Slut Chic?

Wendy Shalit isn't quite shocked anymore by how eroticized popular culture is. She delved into that when researching her first book, A Return to Modesty, which defended premarital virginity and was published in 2000 when she was 23. Back then, Shalit was skewered by sundry venues from Playboy to The Nation. Hustler magazine dubbed her its Asshole of the Month. She jokes about trudging "under the heavy burden of the Scarlet M, baffled but fascinated." What startles her now -- now that she's married, with a baby of her own -- is how young the eroticization starts. She shudders at a line of bibs and onesies on display at cafepress.com that proclaim: I'm too Sexy for my diaper!

Meanwhile, a quick Google-surf yields, at speakupdesigns.com, child-size tees that read PROPERTY OF PIMP UNIVERSITY. "PIMP" is twice the size of the other words, in case passersby almost miss the point.

Hello Kitty preteen thongs and Hasbro Pussycat Dolls dolls shock Shalit, as do crimson-lipsticked Bratz Babyz and department-store padded pushup training bras.

"Being a child is no longer a valid excuse not to be sexualized" -- but the literal sexy-baby thing is just a symptom, Shalit contends, of a much crueler crisis in which young women are barraged by pop-culture pressures from My Scene Bling Bling Barbie to The Vagina Monologues, so they transform into vacuous Stepford sluts, the hybrid nightmare of both feminists and prudes. Sensual. Casual. Available. And so very eager to please.

"Not since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 has there been such bipartisan agreement that we have a problem," Shalit avows in her new book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good (Random House, 2007), in which she posits a brewing revolution among girls who just wanna say no. Comparing Bratz Babyz to the Cuban Missile Crisis is a bit bombastic, but what prompted her to climb out on that bouncy limb was a 2006 Rolling Stone story in which Duke University students, pole-dancing in a go-go cage, said they wished they could just date. When born-to-be-wild Rolling Stone "starts to read like the National Review, then clearly something has gone very wrong," Shalit proclaims.

"On the one hand, girls are more educated and women more successful in business than ever before." On the other hand, she avows, the hookup scene is making them miserable. If we are to believe the myriad surveys she cites and Shalit's thousand-plus personal interchanges with females aged twelve to 28, many resent the randomness, the anonymity, the forced unnaturalness of what she calls "bottling up those emotions" and separating sex from love, in being warned to remain "cling-free" and in having sex only because "you can't get out of it." Today's mothers, teachers, doctors and therapists are veterans of the sexual revolution. Deluged by the advice of these adults, young girls told Shalit that they feel pressured to strut boldly through the gates their elders crashed circa 1972. They told Shalit, or so she writes, that their moms call them freaks for wearing loose-fitting, figure-hiding clothes or hesitating to lose their virginities.

So merchandisers pounce: with tees for six-year-olds proclaiming LUST, with pimp-and-ho Halloween costumes. With the $24.95 Striptease Kit, including "red sequined pasties with adhesive, sheer black scarf, body glitter, 10 fold-out cards" detailing "step-by-step routines." Politics pounces too: Shalit recounts Women's Pride Week at her alma mater, Williams College, where the campus feminist group "distributed SHAMELESS HUSSY stickers that we were all expected to wear, to prove that we were proud to be sexually active. They also distributed stickers reading F - - K THE PATRIARCHY that seemed to be in conflict with the first set of stickers (unless they meant F - - K THE PATRIARCHY literally)."