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BOOK
REVIEW
The Real Girl Power?
FAST GIRLS: TEENAGE TRIBES AND THE
MYTH OF THE SLUT
By Emily White Scribner, $33.50, 219 pp.
THE SECRET LIVES OF WHAT GOOD GIRLS REALLY DO
By Sharon Lamb Free Press, $36.50, 247 pp.
Remember the high school slut? She would have been the girl --
usually just the one girl -- rumoured to be giving blow jobs to every guy on the
football team. The girl who "did it with five guys at once," who would
strip for anyone. The girl who possessed such sexual charisma that she was
shunned by other girls, and derided yet desired by the guys. Was the high school
slut actually more promiscuous than anyone else? Probably not. Certainly not
these days, when adolescent girls are having sex earlier. But she was -- and
remains -- a totemic figure, a lightning rod for adolescent anxieties about sex
and power.
This is the theory proposed by the Seattle
journalist Emily White, who embarked upon the unusual project of tracking down
and interviewing "high school sluts," upon wondering what ever
happened to the girl in her own high school, whom she and her friends dubbed
Anna Wanna.
After placing her request for interviews in a
nationally syndicated column, she heard from 150 girls and women who were still
outraged, haunted and perplexed by their experience of ostracism.
"Like a tribe in an ancient forest
telling stories about the moon, kids tell slut stories because they need an
allegory for the mystery of sex itself," White writes, "... the slut
becomes a way for the adolescent mind to draw a map. She's the place on the map
marked by a danger sign, where legions of boys have been lost at sea. She's the
place where a girl should never wander, for fear of becoming an outcast."
White quickly began to see a common pattern
in the "sluts' " recollections of what happened. All of them had
attended white, suburban high schools. Many of them had been sexually abused at
home. All of them had been extroverts, perhaps defiantly so, unafraid to dye
their hair pink, for example, or to swear. Often the slut rumours began to swirl
around the new girl, who had transferred into the high school, as Anna Wanna
had, posing a threat to the established hierarchy.
What interests White, finally, is how
"key" the character of the slut is to girls' sexual coming of age. The
dynamic is played out between girls, with boys as peripheral characters in the
drama. "Girls," White argues, "manifest a verbal and physical
hostility toward the slut that is remarkable in its focused intensity. They
ambush the slut in parking lots, whisper threats over telephone wires and wait
for her in the bathroom with fists clenched."
Having researched the phenomenon, White
confesses her disenchantment with the more utopian feminist ideals: "The
vision of a tribe of peaceful women who will soothe and straighten out and
redeem the world denies the vengeful violence of teenage girls and neutralizes
their notorious rage ... it is a vision of an angel that counteracts the
monstrous female we do not want to be ... who has the capacity to track down
another girl in a parking lot and overwhelm her with all the gusto of a true
predator."
Indeed. Until recently, there has been a very
awkward gap between the rhetoric of violence -- all male, all the time -- and
the reality of women's experiences. That gap is being bridged, now, by a new
generation of female journalists and academics who are unapologetically
interested in female aggression.
In her excellent book, The Secret Lives of
Girls, the psychologist Sharon Lamb echoes White's point about our blindness:
"We all would so much rather look like the lovely lost souls found by Mary
Pipher (in Reviving Ophelia) than the bad girls we suspect we really are."
Having said that, she goes on to make the
extremely cogent argument that girls are as volatile as they are in adolescence
because their sexual desire is bottled up and repressed. If they weren't taught
to feel ashamed of sexual desire, to fail, even, to recognize it in themselves,
the "slut" wouldn't be quite so threatening.
Lamb offers an example that made me laugh in
recognition. The prevailing yackety-yack about Barbie dolls is that they promote
impossible beauty ideals and make girls feel insecure. But if you watch girls
play with Barbie, what they mostly do is a) try to make Barbie and Ken have sex,
and b) make Barbie run gauntlets of peril. Barbie is, in fact, a perky-boobed
G.I. Joe for girls, both sexual and adventurous.
Similarly, girls engage quite naturally in
sex play with one another between the ages of six and 11, but their culture
insists that they are sexually passive and victimizable, that boys are the
sexual instigators. So their play makes them feel guilty. It is secret, hidden,
granted no acceptance.
"We want girls to know their
bodies," Lamb writes, "to understand pleasure, to gradually grow in
their development so that puberty does not attack them with a vengeance, and to
love themselves as sexual beings." Lamb goes on to discuss what is
appropriate and what is not, in a manner that is both sensible and reassuring to
the parents of girls.
This idea of basic self-awareness, of
enabling girls to own their sexual desire rather than fear it, applies to
aggression as well, in Lamb's view. "Smart psychotherapists know that the
girl who can acknowledge her anger and feelings of aggression toward others is
on the right track to health. Girls who own their aggression -- even feel
entitled to it -- have a source of energy and creativity that will do them well
in the lives ahead of them ... While we would certainly hope that girls do not
'almost kill' their friends, we do not have to enforce that by taking away their
longing for power, their wish to be the boss. How do we give them the experience
of power and dominance without allowing them to hurt others?"
That is the question. Lamb has a few
suggestions, including the promotion of organized contact sports for girls. But
there is a lot of contemplation left to be done. In the meantime, readers should
find this book both helpful and insightful as they watch their girls grow.
Patricia Pearson is a National
Post columnist and the author of When She Was Bad: How and Why Women Get
Away with Murder
Editor's Note: We
include this article because as responsible Asian parents, we have got to be
concerned about our daughters.
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