The Good Girl Revolution: Young Rebels with Self-Esteem and High Standards

I live in a college town and end up recommending Wendy Shalit's books to the young college girls I know. They are nice girls, who choose to hold out for marriage and do not date much because they have high standards. I usually tell them that these books are well researched and controversial. (grin)I was very touched by the chapter relating about the author's friend Chaya. Honestly, I cried. What a beautiful blessing to have had such a friend! I've had friends like that and they are a rare gift indeed. As I see it, Girl's Gone Mild is really about relationships and what they mean in our lives.In my life I have had many good friends who were my mother's age and older, and a couple good friends 10 years or more younger, but very few my own age who have not been my friends since childhood, and I have wondered why. I'm not the only one, other women I've talked to about it say they experience the same sort of thing! It is like we fear women in our own age group--but are unthreatened by much older women.There isn't any sense of community anymore, or it is very rare. Women my age have families and careers and absolutely no time--and when they do have time, there is a tension that seems to prevent efforts at making friends from working out.I SEE the growing loneliness all around me.I belong to many groups, secular and religious: dog clubs, dance clubs, bible studies, student organizations, etc. Yet I am lonely and most of the people I know are lonely! One of the biggest problems is membership--lots of people join but few participate in any meaningful way.Most of the groups to which I belong are unable to create community because nobody comes often enough to build relationships within the group. When there is no required attendance, a group with 50 people on the roster might only have 5 or 10 who come most of the time, and everyone else comes every few months. Hence the majority of people might belong to several groups but still be lonely because they do not attend regularly enough to build the intimacy needed for friendships that can be meaningful.There is also this competitiveness and hostility that Wendy Shalit writes about. In one group to which I belong, a certain women verbally attacks me every chance she gets. Every one says it is because she fears I will take her boyfriend. Now, I don't poach, but even if I did, I wouldn't want him--what is more, I cannot imagine him wanting me! But in many of the clubs to which I belong, this tense undercurrent is present constantly. We cannot be friends because....? I don't get it, but when I read about it in this book I could certainly relate.

This book is about the young women who are attempting to turn the tide of feminism back to the original goal of equality in the workplace by standing against pornography and smut in fashion. They are protesting T-shirts that say things like "WHO NEEDS BRAINS WHEN YOU HAVE THESE?"; they are promoting modesty in fashion by holding their own fashion shows; they are standing up at school board meetings to protest required reading in schools of books that make them feel uncomfortable (such as The Buffalo Tree, by Adam Rapp); they are formulating their own "consciousness-raising" programs. These are young women who are sick of the F-word! The author makes an interesting observation: "If the feminist leaders were misguided in excluding "good girls" from their ideology, certain conservatives have been perhaps too hasty in declaring feminism dead. Feminism is clearly very much alive for young women, but it is a feminism that makes the leadership uneasy. For it is not as reflexively "bad-girl" as it once was, and its focus on personal dignity and on sex being sacred will mean the biggest shakeup of feminism since Seneca Falls in 1848. Older feminists are now concerned that the sexual revolution and the concessions they made to pornography have not turned out as expected. They're discovering that promiscuity and public sexuality may not be the ticket to happiness, after all, even for men. So it makes sense that they would want to honor young women like the Girlcotters. The problem is that they are so committed to the idea of casual sex as liberation that they can't appreciate or even quite understand these younger feminists. They still don't understand that pursuing crudeness is the problem, not the solution. Or maybe they do understand this, but they don't want to admit they are wrong."

I gave this book to a friend with a 15-year-old daughter simply because I give it to every mother of an adolescent girl I come across. What I didn't know was that this 15-year-old was hanging with the wrong crowd -- girls who dress provocatively, act out violently, and are otherwise jeopardizing their futures. Tonight her mother told me this, and said that after reading the book, her daughter started dressing more modestly, found new friends, and is bringing her grades up.Our culture is so saturated with sexily dressed young women that often we don't even notice, let alone consider its effect on girls trying to find their way in this world. Wendy Shalit is spot-on in her assessment of the pressure on girls today and their desperation to be themselves, not the sex toys our culture tries to make them.I was a feminist, and I am a feminist. I wish feminist leaders would realize the plight they've created for women-to-be and reverse course. Until they do, The Good Girl Revolution is an indispensable antidote.

A highly recommended book for parents, teenagers, and adults. All that is presented in this book goes against the distorted, perverted, mindset of much of culture that is in actuality degrading; especially to women but to society as a whole. If we were all to follow the standards contained in this book, this world would be a much healthier, and happier place to live.

This second book of Wendy Shalit's is just as tremendous and ground breaking as the first. Instead of the same points of views rehashed, this book takes some of the many letters Shalit received after her first book and makes some sense of the startling data. To wit, that much of the pressure on young girls today comes from an unlikely source: parents.Shalit empowers today's girls to take back themselves and let no one tell them what normal is. As the mother of daughters, I am thrilled that there is a voice crying out in the wilderness.