Are Girls Better Off?

~ Laura

I have a swirl of blog posts in my head, and I'm trying to sort out the contradictions this morning.

Caitlin Flanagan writes about the woman at Duke who turned her sexual exploits into a vicious PowerPoint presentation and finds her pitiable. Hanna Rosin says that the the PowerPoint slides were funny and empowering. Some Princeton grads exchange vile e-mails about their sexual exploits and are regarded as scum.

Is competitive, cruel, and documented promiscuity gross when men do it, but cool and empowering when women do it? Confused.

This week, it was hard to turn away from the gross details of Hugh Hefner's sex life. A room full of blond 20-year olds had ritualized group sex with an 80 year old. Some of the participants explained that they were grossed out by these evenings, but Hugh handed them $2,000 out of his safe at the end of evening and provided free plastic surgery to the girls. They endured Vigra-fueled evenings for the opportunity to meet Charlie Sheen and to make their B's into double D's.

Last week, I stumbled across a show on E! called, Bridalplasty. It's a reality show where girls compete to win plastic surgery, so they can look their boob-alicious best on their wedding day.

How does all this gel with the statistics that show that girls are outperforming boys in school? Hanna Rosin's TED talk on the "End of Men" makes a compelling case for a future run by women. It's hard to imagine those busty girls in wedding dresses running a multinational company. Will Hef's sexmates ever argue a case before the Supreme Court? Probably not. Duke's PowerPoint girl will probably be able to shake off her notoriety and end up as one of Hanna's success stories, but snickers will follow her into the boardroom.

I suppose there have always been girls like Hef's sex-for-surgery gals, who have no other options in life beyond becoming sex toys for rich, old men. Despite gains in education and career success for women as a whole, there are still these pathetic creatures. It's tempting after one watches Rosin's TED Talk, to say "OK, feminism has won. We're done. Time to pack up and look for another fight." Clearly, we're not done yet.

Published by Laura

11 thoughts on “Are Girls Better Off?”

  1. I separate the Duke women et all from Hef’s playmates and the reality tv show women. I don’t know what to think about the former but do agree that it does indicate that feminism is not yet “done”.
    The Hef girls? I believe that they are more related to class issues where there are few opportunities. They are using what they have to offer which unfortunately is just their bodies.
    My daughter lives in a large city and at 5 already lives such a different life than her similar-aged cousins who live in on a small farm 2 hours out of a small city. The combination of parents with barely a high school education, little travel, and spotty internet access narrows not so much the opportunities but the vision to SEE those opportunities.
    I can see how a reality show or playmate chance could seem like a dream come true.
    Crystal has made a better “deal” than Holly – Hef probably won’t last another 7 years and she might even get a reasonable cash settlement. Gross, yes, but not much different than a few rumoured sham Hollywood marriages where the ingenue trades her youth and a child for career opportunities from being married to the big.action.star.
    As an aside, my hairdresser back in the day was best friends with Kimberley Conrad, Hef’s ex-wife. It’s a lot of work to maintain that “look”. Took her four hours just to get ready to go out, between hair pieces, spray on tan, make up, etc.
    I’ll stick with the occasional swipe of lip gloss.

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  2. Is competitive, cruel, and documented promiscuity gross when men do it, but cool and empowering when women do it? Confused. It’s gross when anyone does it. It’s a sign of a reluctance or inability to form lasting bonds to other people, in my opinion.
    I would argue that women are under pressure at all ages and in all levels of our culture to be beautiful. Beautiful in appearance, not necessarily in action. Beautiful no matter the cost. Different groups may have different standards for beauty, but it’s always there.
    Some women are also vicious to beautiful women. I’ve seen it happen to my daughter. I’ve never had that problem. I notice the checkout girls get …colder… when she accompanies me to the store. This began when she was 13 or so. Older women are noticeably friendlier to her.
    I used to laugh at the ad tag, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” I don’t laugh at it now.

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  3. I don’t know what to say about your swirl. I do think that girls doing better in the artificial environment of school doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t translate into real-life opportunities later on. And, I think that motherhood, and the costs it imposes on women plays a significant role in women’s opportunities in real life (as opposed to school, when they can avoid having children).
    I haven’t read the Duke powerpoint, but I guess I’d judge it on whether it’s funny. Not liking that kind of humor in general (I’m pretty straight-laced), I’m not going to be able to tell. But, I recognize that sometimes people can find such humor funny.
    I also systematically disagree with the notion of “reverse” sexism/racism. I think such things can exist when there’s a power structure behind them (a group of women nurses, for example, might be able to produce a harassing environment for the one male nurse in their midst). But in a (roughly) equal, or alternatively male dominated playing field like Duke, well, I don’t believe in reverse discrimination, or that we should judge the actions of the woman by what we would say about a man who did the same things. The environment does matter.
    Mind you, if a woman strangled and killed her long time boyfriend who she had been stalking for years, I would judge this equivalently to what happen there.

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  4. The “girls are worse off” items tend to be more along the lines of anecdotes (this girl at Duke, this woman on a TV show . . .). The “girls are better off” items tend to be more along the lines of comprehensive statistics.
    When it’s statistics versus anecdotes, I know which way I am resolving my contradictions.

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  5. I agree with Ragtime about the superiority of statistics, scientific analysis, etc. over anecdote. (Conventional, Western, logocentric–maybe even phallocentric–thinker, that’s me.) But superficially analyzed statistics can be deceiving. For example, when I was at Yale, it was noted often that women had better grades than men, but noted less often that the men were a lot more likely to be majoring in thinks like math and science, which lead to high-paying jobs, and the women were a lot more likely to be majoring in things like art history, which doesn’t.

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  7. I suppose there have always been girls like Hef’s sex-for-surgery gals, who have no other options in life beyond becoming sex toys for rich, old men.
    If you’ve read much 19th C. literature, you’ve read cases like this- the Victorian era (and others, too, I’m sure) was full of semi and not-so-semi prostitution. (Think of Swann’s affair with Odette de Crécy in _Swann’s Way_, for example. The difference between that and Heffner is one of degree, not kind, I think.)

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  8. “Sorry for the moment of pedantry. ”
    I’m a fan of pedantry. The spelling actually looked weird to me when I wrote it, but I didn’t make the effort to double check.

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  9. I have to agree with Cranberry.
    It might be my line of work that puts me in contact with this particular group, but there is a lot of pressure on 40 and 50 year old women to get whatever anti-aging treatments are necessary so as not to look old – especially in fields like sales, marketing and public relations, law in some cases, and definitely boardrooms in a lot of instances.
    Botox is pretty much a career tool at this point. If your face looks old, it’s an issue.
    Men don’t seem to suffer the same issue.
    I liked the Hannah Rosin speech but I don’t think it reflects the current reality. Issues of the mommy-track aside, even the women who chose not to have kids or managed to have them in such as a way as to not damage their careers are now hitting different ceilings.

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  11. I always assumed that the way to explain the contradiction between the bridalplasty babes and the Fortune 500 women was that women are essentially evolving into two separate species. I remember once working abroad for an American corporation and meeting with my boss to go over the details of the business trip which involved my driving across the country, being met by strangers and giving a day full of sales presentations in a foreign language. Halfway through our meeting, he had to take a frantic phone call from his wife (who was probably in her fifties and had never worked). Apparently a plumber had shown up to fix their sink and she was “terrified” to be in the house alone with a strange man who didn’t speak English — so off he went to hold her little hand. I, meanwhile, was expected to do things she would never dream of. I remember thinking that it was as if we were two different species. I think in this future, this disconnect will get larger.

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