What a Girl Wants. - Review - book review

National Review, July 9, 2001 by Maggie Gallagher

Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution, by Paula Kamen (New York University, 280 pp., $25.95)

Paula Kamen is no academic. She is a "Chicago-based journalist, lecturer, playwright, and the author of what is widely regarded as the first postboomer feminist book, Feminist Fatale." None of which has kept her from occupying a position since 1994 as a "visiting research scholar" with Northwestern University's gender-studies program.

Kamen interviewed 72 young women in an unscientific but eclectic sample, and hopes to emerge with Her Way as the voice of her generation, loosely defined as those too young to remember a time when sexual coupling was even tangentially assumed to relate to social coupling, in or out of wedlock. Kamen bravely celebrates this state of affairs as a new frontier in women's liberation, a.k.a. the expansion of sexual choice and the destruction of double standards. Her thesis? "Young women's sexual power has grown slowly and widely" in what she calls a new "sexual evolution."

This "evolution," according to Kamen, was centered on women "getting what they need, such as Susie Bright's Herotica series, women-centered porn films by Annie Sprinkle and Candida Royalle, Our Bodies, Ourselves (which was first widely published in the 1970s), the former sitcom Ellen, Madonna, the Lilith Fair, the Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator with the 'G spot' attachment, sex-information websites, Judy Blume's Forever, Joycelyn Elders, rape hotlines, and Take Back the Night demonstrations." I kid you not.

This is a book that would be easy to ridicule, with its touching, adolescent faith that sexual power lies where vibrators can touch, in mastering the sexual uses of sushi, seeking tips from prostitutes, or browsing women's magazines that report on oral sex "from every conceivable angle." Kamen even tries to transform Monica Lewinsky, "whose sexuality was powerful and puzzling enough to cause a constitutional crisis," into a new archetype of female independence and power. Monica was "brazen, relentless, and self-centered in her quest for sex and power; in other words, she acted like a man."

Huh? Monica, as readers may recall, was a young woman who snapped her thong at a powerful, married, older man for reasons she did not fully understand and ended up falling in love, waiting by the phone, fantasizing about the wedding, obsessing about his neckties, and generally acting about as un-masculine in the conduct of her sexual affairs as humanly possible. The persistent tendency of feminist "thinkers" to pretend otherwise can be explained only by their increasingly desperate powers of sexual denial.

The pretense that men's sexuality and women's sexuality are identical produces, as its inevitable corollary, enormous female rage when men fail to act like women or when women find acting like men less satisfying than they expect. How to make this pent-up anger sexually attractive to men occupies a surprisingly large part of the Gen-X feminist project. Thus Kamen's idea of a feminist icon is Courtney Love "yelling in rage while wearing an overly frilly, docile, feminine baby- doll dress."

But Kamen is also a good journalist who asks key questions and lets her subjects speak for themselves. She talked to conservatives as well as feminists, evangelicals as well as goddess-worshipers, about their sexual, moral, and spiritual lives. In their commingled voices one can hear the emerging consensus about morality: It is (a) very important and (b) essentially private. Taunya, a 22-year-old Catholic student at the College of St. Catherine, distills the new morality in its purest form: "I think morality is individual. And I think that morality is you search and delve into yourself and know what you want and what you need and what is good for you. If you do something and you don't have a problem with it, and that's what you want to do and you know that's right for you, then how can that be immoral?" Away with the Ten Commandments! "To thine own self be true" becomes the only moral law. Yet Taunya also confesses that upon losing her virginity, "I cried for two weeks."

Here is the new feminist conundrum: Women are now free to act like men. But what if women prefer to act like women? What if they want sex to mean love? A few of Kamen's "liberated" friends called her "because they didn't understand why they weren't satisfied with their casual, uncommitted sexual relationships." As one said: "But guys do this. Why should I want more?" Thanks to feminism, female desire for sexual commitment has been redefined as sissy stuff. Women who want emotional connections "feel as though they must be weak."

Feminism has succeeded as a celebration of individual choice, the triumph of taste over norms, which have been redefined as assaults on personal freedom. But here the core weakness of Gen-X feminism surfaces. Norms exist in order to regulate human relationships, especially those that result in the production and rearing of the next generation. Tastes change. Norms are what make other people, including men, reliable in the face of continuously changing tastes.