Prude: New Book Rolls Sexuality Back Centuries

By Rachel Kramer Bussel, AlterNet. Posted December 14, 2007.

Carol Platt Liebau is proud to be a prude. In fact, "Proudly, A Prude," is the concluding chapter in her teen-sex-shockfest Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (and America, Too!) (Center Street). What sets Liebau, an attorney, political analyst and commentator, and self-professed "voice from the right," apart from the spate of other recent books decrying the ills of teen sexual exploration, is her unabashed conservatism and real desire to roll back the clock -- sometimes as far as previous centuries.

Nostalgia is omnipresent in Prude, which reluctantly reckons that the sexual revolution did, in some ways, overhaul bedroom mores in this country: "With so many sexual taboos having been effectively dismantled, perhaps it's no surprise that sexual experimentation doesn't carry the stigma it used to, especially for young girls. Previously unacceptable sexual behavior, like same-sex relationships, is increasingly common, and at younger ages." (Emphasis mine.)

This is a typical Liebau sentiment, one that does nothing to distance itself from its clearly homophobic message. For Liebau is not simply bemoaning the fact that it's easier, and more socially acceptable, for young girls to be sexually active, but also that adult women dare to act this way as well.

In her chapter "Between the Covers," which laments that "sex between teenagers is treated as a given," she blithely glosses over a major issue affecting students' access to information and simply states, "Given its sexual content, it's not surprising that Seventeen was one of the magazines banned from a middle school in 1998." As far as I'm concerned, her follow-up to that (that the magazine's content "was at odds with school policy teaching that abstinence constitutes the best way of preventing the spread of STDs") only serves to infantilize young people. Denying them information will only lead them to seek it out from other, possibly less reputable, sources. But this is of no concern to Liebau.

Liebau is just the latest in a series of writers essentially pitting the good girls against the bad girls -- the good girls being the ones we need to protect, the slutty, bad girls being the ones who are ruining things for the good girls. Her examples are unoriginal and largely unconvincing. While Wendy Shalit cited Bratz dolls and Abercrombie and Fitch in her more nuanced Girls Gone Mild, Liebau's original research leaves much to be desired. (She concludes that R.A. Nelson's YA novel Teach Me "encourages young girls to fantasize about their teachers as sexual objects, thereby ripening them for exploitation by real-life classroom Lotharios." In fact, the student, Nine, almost winds up getting herself and her best friend killed due to her obsessed stalking. It would be quite difficult to read the book and want to emulate her.)

Both books come after a wave of tomes telling us how far we haven't come, baby, from Ariel Levy's feminist take in Female Chauvinist Pigs to Laura Sessions Stepp's supposedly objective journalistic take in Unhooked, and from Jillian Strauss's you-waited-too-long scold The Unhooked Generation, to Hayley DiMarco, who has made a cottage industry of selling girls insecurity around sex (tag line on the back cover of Sexy Girls: How Hot Is too Hot?: "If it ain't on the menu, keep it covered up!")

To be fair, the issue of girls being marketed sex-related products at increasingly young ages should be of concern to everyone -- feminists and conservatives alike. Naomi Wolf zeroed in on a Liebau target, Gossip Girl, in the pages of the New York Times. The shifting sexual landscape, threats of STDs, and reports of younger and younger children becoming sexually active are important issues, but as even Liebau herself points out, simply harping on the twin horrors of pregnancy and STDs is not the best approach.

But Liebau's arguments throughout the book show that she doesn't want to shield only girls from sex, but adults, too. Liebau is horrified that burlesque performer Dita Von Teese was featured in the Los Angeles Times's calendar section as "fashion's 'it' girl" when she's known for "stripping down to her pasties." She is not just talking about girls when she writes, " ... the idea that everyone has his or her own, individual sexual morality -- which no one else is entitled to challenge -- has contributed immeasurably to the sexualization of American culture. It's also contributed to the death of the concept of sexual shame, which is nothing more than an inner recognition that one has violated established standards of propriety, good taste, and morals." Whose standards? Whose morals? Liebau's? George W. Bush's? Mine? To pretend that Americans can all agree about anything, let alone sex, is preposterous.

See more stories tagged with: sex, relationships, sexuality, teen sexuality, prude

Rachel Kramer Bussel is a New York-based author, editor and blogger. She is the editor of Best Sex Writing 2008, Hide and Seek, Crossdressing, He’s on Top, and She’s on Top, and host and curator of In The Flesh Reading Series.

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