In the wake of a controversial radio appearance, the blogosphere has not looked kindly on Caitlin Flanagan's new book, Girl Land, which aims to shield adolescent girls from a sexualized mass culture. Irin Carmon, who debated Flanagan in the segment, recaps her experience:
Specifically, she tried to use me as an example of the perils of having the Internet in your room as an adolescent, because I didn’t happen to meet a great guy to date in high school. The remedy? More princess movies.
Meghan O'Rourke thinks Flanagan is naive:
One waits in vain for Flanagan to get to the most interesting fact about the sex lives of teenage girls: that sexual vulnerability goes hand in hand with their own burgeoning desire—and the means to act on it. Instead, she informs us that "obviously" most adolescent girls would never type the word "porn" into a search engine (has she actually ever met a teenage girl?) and suggests that one reason girls can be so voluble is that they’re afraid of male attention. But is there any reason to think that girls don’t feel the same electric sexual charges—the same careless, intoxicated desire—boys do?
What’s most disheartening about all this alarmist rhetoric about girls is also what’s most predictable: It continues to define them as the objects of their erotic experience rather than as the agents of it.
Heather Havrilesky offers a qualified defense of the lightning rod:
… Flanagan’s central premise is not only worthwhile, it’s exactly the sort of argument that so few in media dare to make, butting up against both liberal notions about freedom of speech and pornography and the free-to-be-you-and-me universe that most middle-class feminists of a certain age grew up in. And that makes it all the more disappointing—and bizarre—when Flanagan lets herself off the hook, yet again.
If I were to learn that my children had engaged in oral sex—outside a romantic relationship, and as young adolescents—I would be sad. But I wouldn’t think that they had been damaged by the experience; I wouldn’t think I had failed catastrophically as a mother, or that they would need therapy. Because I don’t have daughters, I have sons.
That’s right, folks: Mothers fretting over the sexual precocity of their sons can just sit back and relax.
Maria Bustillos and David Roth stoke the debate further.
(Image: "Alice Just A Trap" by Thomas Czarnecki, part of his series on fallen Disney princesses)
The Dish 