Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Young women have long had to navigate mixed messages about being sexy but not too sexual. Now more than ever, the pressure for girls to be sexy is everywhere. This pressure no longer exclusively comes from mainstream media; today, girls are expected to present themselves as brands on social media. Girls know that if they want to receive more attention and more likes, they must be sexually desirable. They must be, as a 2011 report out of Princeton University determined, “smart, driven, involved in many different activities (as are men), and, in addition, they are supposed to be pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly” (13). In other words, girls must do everything boys do, and they have to do it all while also engaging every stereotype of femininity.

Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, clarifies that being “hot” means being “fuckable and salable” (14)—a commercialized, unimaginative version of sexiness based on men’s desires. Where earlier feminists saw objectification as something to challenge, today’s girls see self-objectification as an act of agency and self-expression. The problem with this, though, is that self-objectification sets strict limits for who girls can be. Orenstein notes, “Girls shifted between subject and object day by day, moment by moment, sometimes without intending to, sometimes unsure themselves of which they were” (15). For example, one of the girls she interviews talks about the powerful feeling of dressing sexily, only to go out into the world and experience physical and verbal harassment because of how she’s dressed.

Being the right amount of sexy at the right times is complicated enough, but girls also must be careful not to come across as “slutty.” Orenstein writes that girls today navigate a new version of the classic double standard; sexually active girls are “sluts” while boys are “players,” but girls who remain virgins are denigrated as “prudes.” Girls must dress in ways to attract the right kind of attention, but they mustn’t act on that sexiness, or at least not too much. In hookup culture, young women intend to have sexual experiences that may or may not lead to relationships. This is different from the past, but the stigma of the “slut” didn’t change with the onset of hookup culture. Regarding this sexual tightrope, one girl says, “Finding that balance is every college girl’s dream” (125).

Moreover, there’s “a disconnect between [the] representation of ‘hotness’ and sex itself,” as Levy says (31). Being sexy and being a sexual person are very different things with very different expectations, with much more emphasis culturally placed on being sexy—prioritizing boys’ satisfaction—than on girls being in tune with their own desire. Orenstein’s interviews show again and again that most of the sexual experiences young women are having are physically unsatisfying for them. For girls, being sexual means caring about their partner’s pleasure over her own, and that isn’t the case for boys. Much of the girls’ sexual behavior follows the sexual scripts learned from media, which get the real female sexual experience wrong. As a result, being sexual for a girl often means performing rather than receiving pleasure.