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Abstract
The new millennium saw the emergence of two competing discourses in US pop culture on young women's sexuality: ‘girls gone wild’ and ‘new virgins.’ Feminists have seen these oppositional discourses – all women are either pressured to be either porn stars or chaste virgins – as being regressive and harmful, or have questioned how ‘empowering’ they really are. Levy's [Levy, A., 2006. Female chauvinist pigs. New York: Free Press] research identified the ‘girls gone wild’ discourse from auditions at the offices of Playboy, while Valenti's [Valenti, J., 2009. The purity myth. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press] research identified the ‘new virgins’ discourse at conservative religious youth group meetings. Despite their identification, we do not yet know if/how widespread these discourses are. Previous studies (Carpenter, L.M., 1998. From girls into women: scripts for sexuality and romance in seventeen magazine, 1974–1994. The journal of sex research, 35, 158–168; Durham, M.G., 1998. Dilemmas of desire: representations of adolescent sexuality in two teen magazines. Youth and society, 29, 369–390; Garner, A., Stark, H.M., Adams, S., 1998. Narrative analysis of sexual etiquette in teenage magazines. Journal of communication, 48, 59–78) have found examples similar to the ‘girls gone wild’ discourse in examinations of media specifically targeting younger generations. Although the findings are revealing, we cannot yet know whether this is mirrored in other print media with readerships spanning other generations, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds, or whether the two contradictory discourses have any relation to each other. This paper aimed to contribute to this absence by presenting the findings of an analysis of articles from ‘the big three’ US newsweeklies (Journalism.org., 2005. 2005 Annual report: introduction. Available from: http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2005/narrative_magazines_newsinvestment.asp).
Notes
1. The 1970s and 1980s ‘porn wars’ created a historically significant division among/between feminists debating whether pornography was harmful and degrading to women, or conversely, if shutting down pornography was a way of closeting sexuality, thus ensuring that people, especially women, were ashamed of their desires.
2. The 1982 Barnard College conference on women's sexuality was billed as an exploration of women's sexuality. However, a number of prominent feminists involved in the anti-pornography movement picketed the conference. Protests of feminists by feminists were coined the ‘sex wars.’
3. Purity Balls are formal dances attended by fathers and daughters created to promote abstinence until marriage. It is often at these balls that young girls ‘pledge’ their virginity.
4. LexisNexus is a commercial search engine chosen for this research project as it contained all of the ‘big three’ publications in full text format.
5. A vaccine administered to teenage girls to protect against sexually transmitted diseases.
6. The recent chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ company appears at this writing to be an attempt by CEO Joe Francis to escape the rather large number of legal claims against him. It is reported that Francis has lost cases over everything from slander and unpaid gambling debt to inappropriate use of film showing underage women. While this has certainly caused trouble for the company, it is doubtful that this will actually be its end.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kimberly N. Bachechi
Kimberly Bachechi is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at Boston College.
Matthew Hall
Matthew Hall completed his Ph.D. on ‘metrosexuality’ at Nottingham Trent University. He is interested in, and has published papers on, men and masculinities; new, mediated, and cyberspace identities; gender and sexuality in the media and marketing; and conversation and social interaction.