Hard to Get. Leslie Bell
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after a breakup—young women often struggle to admit that they need anyone, but it’s particularly difficult to say that they need a man. At the same time, they are enjoined to remember that partnership and marriage are just around the corner, when they turn thirty, so the dating and experimentation of their twenties must result in a relationship, and must come to an end. At that point, books such as Marry Him advise that they find someone who is “good enough” and hold on to him for dear life.7
This is a confusing set of messages with high stakes. If the goal is still marriage, what should young women do with all of their training in not needing anyone? What kind of a marriage should they hope for? It’s difficult to square their experiences in their twenties with marriage, which inevitably involves need, compromise, dependence, and vulnerability.
When it comes to sex, women hear that they ought to spend their twenties being sexually experimental, but only to a point. There is a fine line between being experimental and being a slut. Their peers, television shows such as Sex and the City, and movies seem to encourage sexual experimentation. And they may find advice about sexual positions to try in Glamour or Cosmopolitan magazines. But at the same time, books, such as Unhooked and A Return to Modesty, advise them to return to courtship practices from the early 1900s.8 And real women, not those in magazines, books, and movies, often contend with messages from their families, religions, and partners that they ought not to be sexually assertive, or sexually active at all.
These contradictory directives leave young women in a bind, and without much help in figuring out what they actually want. Every piece of “modern” advice about maintaining independence and using their twenties to explore and experiment sexually is layered over a piece of “old-fashioned” advice about getting married before it’s “too late,” not being too assertive or passionate in sex, and not being too sexually experienced.
These confusing messages are in contrast to the clear and helpful direction young women in the twenty-first century receive about how to succeed academically and professionally. Parents, educational institutions, workplaces, companies, and countless nonprofit organizations have focused on empowering girls and women to get ahead in fields and endeavors where they had lagged behind for generations. This training has often focused on developing a sense of control and mastery, and these efforts have largely succeeded. Today more women attend college than do men, and women make up close to half of all law and medical school graduates, although their entry into the highest echelons of these professions is still limited.9 But the skills twenty-something women have developed in getting ahead educationally and professionally have not translated well into getting what they want and need in sex and relationships.
When I began this project, I was a feminist sociologist starting my training as a psychotherapist. In my practice, I found that I was seeing a number of high-achieving twenty-something women who had trouble letting down their guard, who had difficulty being vulnerable and expressing needs, and who, despite their professed desire for satisfying sex and relationships, put a great deal of energy into protecting themselves from getting hurt. I wanted to understand what was going on with my patients and, more importantly, how I could use that understanding to help them get more of what they wanted. For reasons of confidentiality, I do not discuss patients in this book, but their experiences certainly inform my thinking about twenty-something women. The women described in detail in this book are those whom I interviewed. As a sociologist, feminist, and psychotherapist, I bring multiple perspectives to my analysis.
FREEDOM IN CONTEXT
It is not coincidental that women born after 1972, a turning point in U.S. history for women in gaining formal equality with men, are the subject of this book. Title IX, which protects people from discrimination based on sex in educational programs that receive federal funding, passed in 1972 and has had a tremendous impact on girls’ access to academics and athletics. By 1971, President Johnson’s Executive Order 11375, which prohibits federal contractors from discrimination in employment on the basis of sex and mandates “affirmative” measures to eliminate job segregation by gender, had been fully implemented by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And in 1973, Roe v. Wade made restrictions on abortion illegal throughout the country. The early 1970s also saw a dramatic decline in the proportion of families that lived with a father who earned a “family wage,” one able to support his entire family without income generated by another parent; the proportion had held steady for the previous two decades. Women born after 1972 were among the first in the late twentieth century to have been born into a country without formal discrimination in the workforce and educational institutions and with affirmative action and the legal right to abortion. With these formal rights came great changes in their family experiences in childhood, and in their opportunities in the workforce in adulthood.
These women’s experiences anticipate the social changes and trends that will characterize the lives of young women to come. Their entire lives have been marked by unprecedented sexual, educational, and professional freedoms. At the same time, some of these freedoms have had contradictory and paradoxical consequences. Not everything turned out exactly as hoped and planned by the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As a feminist who advocates for greater social, educational, economic, and sexual freedom for women, I feel a sense of urgency to understand which versions of freedom are truly liberating for women and which versions come with their own, new limitations.
For readers versed in the progress of the feminist movement and its central and guiding ideals, the next few pages include material that may be well known. But for readers unfamiliar with this history, they provide a historical context for understanding twenty-something women today. In earlier days of the feminist movement, freedom was a clear and important goal, one whose accomplishment seemed unambiguously positive. With the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan helped to spark a movement that challenged women’s confinement to roles as passive wives, mothers who derived their sense of meaning and self solely from domestic work, or sex objects.10 Feminists at the time critiqued these domestic ideals and fought for women’s equality in educational institutions and the workplace, and for the control of their reproductive and personal lives. Important achievements included legal protection from employment discrimination, inclusion in affirmative action, and increased representation in the media.11 Other feminist activists fought for and won reforms of the law’s traditionally punitive stance toward victims of rape and domestic violence.12 Feminist scholars in the social sciences targeted the traditional nuclear family and its division of labor between the public sector of work and the private sector of home as the cause of much of women’s oppression; since the 1960s, what constitutes a family and how it operates have changed dramatically.13
As a consequence of these achievements, many women born after 1972 had childhoods characterized by fathers (and sometimes mothers) coaching their soccer teams and encouraging them in sports and school. They grew up prior to the rise of the princess culture for young girls, which began in 2000 when Disney created and marketed a wildly successful line of princess products that promotes regressive versions of femininity.14 Girls in the 1970s and 1980s could do anything boys could do in the classroom and on the field, and, many argued at the time, they could even do it better than boys. “Girl power,” with its emphasis on self-reliance, ambition, and assertiveness, had its ascendance in the 1990s, when these women were in high school. With girlhood characterized by an “anything you can do, I can do better” attitude, and adolescence replete with a girl-power stance, women born after 1972 would seem to be poised for agency and independence in adulthood.
Yet at the same time that schools proclaimed that girls could do and be anything, they still encouraged particular versions of femininity for girls and masculinity for boys, and dissuaded girls from being as competitive or aggressive as boys. Sociologists of education have documented the ways that schools in the 1970s and 1980s subtly, and not so subtly, reinforced differences between boys and girls.15 Even after the passage of Title IX, researchers in the field of education found that girls were instructed with less focus and precision than boys—regardless of their behavior, boys got more time and attention from teachers.16 At the same time that birth control became