The triumph of bad-girl culture (National Post, June 6, 2004)

Dating and relationship-building are in steep decline amongst today's young people. According to a teen interviewee in a recent New York Times Magazine article on teenage sexual habits, relationships are "for losers." Supposed winners as young as 12 "hook up" -- that is, they have intercourse or oral sex -- with virtual strangers they meet online. Or they maintain "friends with benefits," friends who provide sex without emotional involvement.

Once there were "good" girls and "bad" girls. Both were subject to timeless hormonal drives. But cultural expectations, social values and strict parental surveillance supported good girls in their idealistic belief that sex should be hallowed by mature, committed love.

Bad girls were sexually available to boys who correctly interpreted as invitations their provocative appearance and shameless affect. Boys made advances to good girls too but, when rejected on moral grounds, backed off more or less gracefully. It was understood: Girls ruled in the sexual power game. And boys respected girls who respected the norm of sexual modesty.

Yet now, according to feminist guru Naomi Wolf, "There are no good girls; we are all bad girls." She means morality-linked sexual codes for women are defunct. She means girls have been liberated from the old-fashioned "essentialist" perception that men and women are inherently different. She means girls can and should fulfill their sexual longings early and often, exactly as boys do. Wolf's thesis is borne out in the NYT Magazine article. Bad-girl culture has indeed triumphed. What you see -- girls in hookerwear -- points to what boys are getting on demand.

Hooking up's defining characteristic is the banishment of emotion from girl-boy relations. Transience and interchangeability of partners are the hallmarks, features that play to boys' desires. A girl interviewee parrots the party line: "It's equal. Everyone is using each other. That's fair."

Who is brainwashing girls into such self-destructive behaviours? For even the most liberal parents are disgusted by these serial sexual robotics. The origins of the subversive "It's equal" message can be traced back to academic elites. Postmodern theorists feel threatened by sexual modesty because it is inextricably associated with the sanctity of marriage, an institution leftist academics deplore as oppressive to women. Their insistent equation of promiscuity with psychological health trickles down to children via politicized educators and girl-targeting media.

Here, for example, is popular sexual-mores bellwether Cosmopolitan magazine : "Let's face it ... in this age of instant gratification, there's something a little perverse (my emphasis) about people who refuse to satisfy their deepest needs." Thus Cosmo's girl readers "learn" that sexual modesty is not just old-fashioned, it is actually a sign of deviancy.

Many girls don't read Cosmo, but all girls go to school, where children are catechized in the belief that boys and girls share the same sexual instincts. In her 1999 book. A Return to Modesty, 20-something U.S. author Wendy Shalit recalls teachers from elementary school to university pushing girls toward broad sexual experience, but away from emotional involvement.

The equality credo has no basis in reality. Girls yearn for long-term, committed relationships. In a 1998 Glamour magazine poll, 49% of women said they wish they'd slept with fewer men, 7% wish they'd slept with more. The happiest were those women who had only ever had one partner.

Sexual modesty is an inborn, self-protective reflex in girls, especially at the threshold of puberty. "Good girls" were not suppressed; they were shielded from emotional injury at a critically vulnerable time of life. Shalit's research provides abundant corroborative evidence that girls are unhappy in their so-called "liberation." She cites mounting statistics of anorexia, self-mutilation and depression, persuasively linking them to the unnatural suppression of girls' intuitive modesty.

Furthermore, Shalit blames premature co-ed sex education for the lack of respect, hostility and downright aggression girls often experience from boys today. Before, modesty and the mystery of difference legitimated sexual rejection in boys' eyes, and put control over the sexual timetable in girls' hands. Without that impersonal psychological buffer zone, boys now experience No as personal rejection. Girls tend to avoid confrontation, so unwelcome advances often end in the girl's faked compliancy and secret shame.

Our girls' innocence and sense of self-worth have been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. Feminist Sally Cline concedes ideological defeat in what she calls the Genital Appropriation Era: "what [women copying male behaviour in the name of equality] actually achieved was not a great deal of liberation for women but a great deal of legitimacy for male promiscuity; what it actually passed on to women was the male fragmentation of emotion from body, and the ... schism between genital sex and responsible loving."

"It's high time sexual modesty came out of the closet," Shalit declares, claiming she wrote A Return to Modesty "to restore the lost moral vocabulary of sex."

Sadly, Shalit's determined contrarianism is virtually unique today. Few girls can be modest in a cultural vacuum. Without the support and protection of parents and educators for the option to say no to premature sexual experience, girls will go with the polluted social flow.

In 1711, Sir Richard Steele wrote: "When Modesty ceases to be the chief Ornament of one Sex and Integrity of the Other, Society is upon a wrong Basis." Hear, hear.