Thank Heaven for little girls

Insight on the News, Feb 2, 1998 by Suzanne Fields

As more men behave ever more beastly, are women becoming girlish again, in a hip update of Little Red Riding Hood for the nineties? Surely it was no coincidence that at the end of the year the New York Times featured back-to-back dispatches about men slouching toward Gomorrah and women behaving like "girls."

Cataloging the big bad boys is easy. They include Marv Albert for biting his lady love's back, Tasos Michael for jilting his fiancee at the altar and flying off to Tahiti by himself (since he had the airline ticket in hand anyway) and the stereotypical corporate cads in the movie In the Company of Men. These cads captured the masculine zeitgeist, seducing a deaf girl and then abandoning her.

Women, who have given up their broad-shouldered suits and stiletto heels, are fighting back with the regressive femininity of girlhood. Makeup giant Revlon caught the mood by naming a watermelon-pink nail polish "Girly." The Spice Girls sing about "girl power," which feminists of yesteryear might have called an oxymoron. The new spring catalog for Barney's, with its eye for expensive soft-sell chic, portrays models in girlish celebration of fantasy tiaras, reflecting the pleasure of being prom queens and princesses, virgins rather than vixens.

Is this merely a tongue-in-cheeky communication or a boudoir backlash? Are women making fun of macho polymorphous perversity or are they trying to regain the power of passionate passivity?

Surely a one-size explanation will not fit all, but cascades of books about adolescent girls detail how their happiness ended with puberty. There's more than a little suggestion that women want to rediscover their innocence by turning back the clock, metaphorically if not actually. That's why growing numbers of young women like to describe themselves as recycled virgins -- in behavior if not in fact.

The sexual revolution simply didn't live up to its promise. Naomi Wolf, who argues in her new book Promiscuities that there are "no good girls; we are all bad girls in the best sense of the word," nevertheless betrays a poignancy at having lost her virginity at the age of 15 without a hint of the delicious romance that is the due of every girl on giving that up. "No experience could have been flatter," she says of her visit with her boyfriend weeks ahead to arrange for contraception. "It was like going to the vet."

She expresses anger at "the absence of the event's significance" that she felt after the deed was done. Girlhood is gone in an instant, but not on the wild gossamer wings of a romantic seduction. This is not simply a replay of "the Earth didn't move," it's a lament that doing "it" not only lacked magic, but a sense of the sacred.

If we are to believe the books written about sexually active adolescents today, these kids are more anxious, drink and take drugs and suffer a greater loss of self-esteem than their virginal grandmothers of the fifties. In Reviving Ophelia, the best-seller about the pain of adolescent girls growing up now, Mary Pipher writes that "girls today are much more oppressed" than young women who came of age before the dawn of the women's movement. We expect them to be more confident and assertive and they are actually more insecure and obsessed with their feminity.

"They are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture," Pipher writes. "As they navigate a more dangerous world, girls are less protected." Thus, best-selling memoirs of adolescence feature young girls as victims of anorexia and bulimia as the girls try to take on the bodies of the prepubescent female.

The most glaring error of modern feminism was encouraging the ascendancy of the nutty idea that the sexes are more alike than different. We are made dramatically aware of that difference in adolescence. When girls should be competing aggressively with boys in academics they are told to exploit their sexuality in the same way the boys try to. In stressing "safe sex," we overlook what's psychologically unsafe for the adolescent girl. We refuse to give the girls the distinctions they need to forge their female identities as different from the boys.

No wonder the popular culture has rediscovered the nostalgia for being a girl. In more ways than one, those were the good ol' days.