Girls Gone Skank

Girls Gone Skank: The Sexualization of Girls in American Culture

by Patrice Opplinger (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008)

“Instead of advancing women’s social and professional empowerment, popular culture appears to be backsliding into the blatant sexual exploitation of women and girls at younger and younger ages.” That’s the conclusion of Patrice Opplinger, assistant professor of mass communications at Boston University. In “Girls Gone Skank,” Opplinger investigates the effects of mass marketed sexual images and cultural trends on the attitudes of young girls and describes the ways in which girls are increasingly taught to go to outrageous lengths in seeking male attention. She researches cultural trends in fashion, sexuality, pornography, strippers, plastic surgery, beauty pageants, sexual behavior, and in the mass entertainment industry of music, print, radio, television, film and internet.

Opplinger’s research is extensive. It’s jaw-dropping to read her book and see the extent to which girls are being sexualized. I had to put the book down several times while reading because the information was so disturbing. And the nagging questions I kept murmuring under my breath were: “OK, lady… (1) Why do you think this happened? and (2) What do you suggest we do about it?” Though Opplinger’s research was stellar, I felt that her answers to these two important questions were woefully inadequate.

Opplinger approaches the sexualization of girls from a feminist perspective. She implies (but with not much conviction) that the current trends of female behavior are expressions of self-exploitation, and not self-empowerment, as other feminists have suggested. I found her analysis to be bizarre, to say the least, for it was so at odds with itself. On the one hand, she blames men for oppressing women. On the other hand, she concedes that women are to blame. They are volitionally self-exploitive.  On the one hand, Opplinger upholds the feminist mantra that women have the right to make whatever choice they want with regards to their behavior – “Women should be allowed to set their own boundaries.” (If they want to be prostitutes, let them be prostitutes!)- but then on the other hand, she suggests that the choices that women are making with regards to their sexuality are somehow wrong.

So how would Opplinger answer my two nagging questions? I had to wait to the seventeenth and concluding chapter to find out. For the “Why did this happen” one, she suggests that the problem is that “young women and girls appear to have a distorted sense of equality, that to be equal they must emulate males’ worst attributes.”  She also suggested that they are simply naive:  “”Young women are simply unaware of the extent to which women are exploited, either by themselves or by others.”

For the “What do we do” she suggests that further feminist education is the answer: “I believe education and an honest assessment of the culture is the answer… If we are afraid to teach girls about their sexuality, they will learn it from very unhealthy sources, which are abundant in popular culture.”

So, there you have it. According to Opplinger, the past 50 years of feminist education haven’t been enough. The feminist perspective on equality that society has adopted needs to be re-visited and re-vamped. Young girls need a new feminist perspective on equality and sexuality. The problem will only be solved with MORE feminist education.

Umm… call me naive Ms. Opplinger, but I fail to see how more feminism will solve the problem. Yes, the 1960’s feminist movement did identify some very valid problems. But the solutions it proposed have exacerbated rather than relieved them. The problems with the sexualization and exploitation of girls and women are far worse now then they were then. Throwing feminism at the problem was like throwing gasoline on the fire. It’s exploded in our faces and burned us badly. Feminism has failed women miserably.

“Girls Gone Skank” is great at documenting and identifying the enormity of the current crisis. I just hope that people realize that in order to improve the dignity and well-being of women, the philosophy of feminism just doesn’t cut it… We need to look to an entirely different sort of answer.

Copyright 2009, Mary Kassian