Last Thursday morning, as I browsed the newspaper over breakfast, a particular headline in The Athens News caught my eye: Wet T-shirt contests represent the worst kind of misogyny. Campus reporter Kate Meier described how, earlier this month, a few men at College Gate passed out fliers advertising a wet T-shirt contest. She correctly identified wet T-shirt contests as a form of gross misogyny -and also pointed out that young women are lining up to participate.
For the rest of the day, I thought about Meier's column and its implications for our generation. She had raised a serious question: In this post-feminist age, 30 years after the apex of the women's movement, why are many girls so eager to participate in their own oppression? After all, this generation of girls hasn't experienced the level of institutionalized sexism imposed on our mothers and grandmothers -the type that barred women from law school and viewed marital rape as a conjugal right. Today, we have very few legal restraints on our freedoms. We can own property, join the military and pursue any college degree we choose.
But with our hard-won liberty, another phenomenon has exploded: women, with little coercion from men, sexually exploiting themselves. After reading Meier's column, I just happened to turn on MTV -one of the most popular networks with the college crowd. The screen was instantly filled with bikini-clad women gyrating beside a pool. Anyone who has seen a movie or opened a magazine lately knows what I'm talking about. But why is this happening now?
There's no doubt that the cultural pollution known as wet T-shirt contests, exhibitionist music videos and Girls Gone Wild is unique to the post-feminist generation. My mother, who graduated from high school before Gloria Steinem was a household name, says that when she was young no man had the audacity to advertise a wet T-shirt contest -and no reputable woman would dare participate. It was not until after the women's movement that such behavior became socially acceptable. This irony was mind-boggling to me.
A few months ago, after my first women's studies course, I began to entertain a theory. By denouncing sexual morality as a form of oppression, the feminists of the 1960s encouraged women to take part in the reckless sexuality and self-degradation that is so prevalent today.
Writer Nancy Linn-Desmond once said that Easy is an adjective used to describe a woman who has the sexual morals of a man. This belief was common among feminists. They had great disdain for chastity because they saw it as a tool to keep women from demonstrating their sexuality. Several feminists suggested that women should abandon restraint and have sex like men. With this new world view, a promiscuous woman was liberated
not bound to any moral code concerning sex. A woman who posed topless was celebrating her body.
Then the movement for libertine sexuality degenerated into the mess it is today.
The current chaos is likely an unintended consequence of feminism. We have a lot to thank the women's movement for, and I'm sure it was never the feminists' intention to harm women. But the sooner we acknowledge reality, the sooner we can work toward a new feminism -one that teaches women to value their sexuality enough to share it only with a precious few, not with a jeering audience or a TV camera. Men must be held to an equally high moral standard.
It won't be easy. I understand that there is still enormous pressure for girls to be validated by sexual attention, because I have experienced it. As a younger girl I made plenty of bad decisions in order to gain acceptance from men -decisions I regret now. Most of my friends have similar stories, and it's embarrassing to admit that we gave in to the pressure. But at least we can try to change things for the next generation of girls.
The first thing women have to do -something I didn't do until recently -is wake up. All women should feel the anger I felt after I read an upbeat article about a Playboy bunny in CosmoGirl, a magazine geared toward the under-18 crowd. The Playboy bunny sang the praises of posing nude in a men's magazine, claiming it empowered her because she chose to do it.
This is the Big Lie that my generation has heard all their lives: As long as it's your choice, exploitation can be empowering. The lie is beneficial to men looking for a cheap sexual experience. Unfortunately, it hasn't done much for the girls who are made to believe it.
-Ashley Herzog is a freshman journalism major. Send her an e-mail at ah103304@ohiou.edu. 17
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