Hysteria about adolescent female sexuality is at fever pitch at the moment. You can’t open a newspaper without having some self-proclaimed figurehead like Michael Carr-Gregg shrilling about teenagers having orgies, tween stars pole dancing on MTV and the effect singing along to that Britney song about threesomes has on five-year-olds.
When reading this fear mongering, I have to remind myself that at that age I was doing dance routines to Salt’n’Pepa’s ‘Let’s Talk about Sex’ and hitching my high school uniform up above my knees as soon as I got out of view of my house, Stephanie Kaye style. This particular ruse came unstuck one day when my older sister caught me and pulled the offending hem down with the warning: ‘People will think you’re a slut.’
So basically, none of this is really new. People have been fighting over women’s sexuality since Eve did the dirty and got everyone locked out of paradise by submitting to her ‘desires’. Thanks a lot, Eve, you slut.
During the early nineties, this fight left the women’s rooms and consciousness raising meetings of the seventies, and stumbled into the publishing world. While affording the debate a larger audience, a lot of these books were inflammatory and divisive, taking pot shots at ideologues as opposed to finding a common way for women to engage with sexuality. The lines were drawn very plainly in the sand. For the pro-sex feminists it was: ‘You either agree with us or you hate sex’, and for the radical feminists it was: ‘You either agree with us or you hate women’. Take your pick.
This decade, however, has produced a number of refreshingly balanced texts for women who want (and rightly so) to pick both. Ariel Levy’s superbly accessible Female Chauvinist Pigs was the opening shot in a new form of feminist debate, one which questions but does not lecture. Emily Maguire’s Your Skirt’s Too Short (Text Publishing) is a welcome addition to this arena.
Your Skirt is Too Short is a revised edition of Maguire’s first book, Princesses and Pornstars – Sex, Power and Identity, aimed at the young adult market. The book is largely the same, notwithstanding some language tweaks, a far superior cover and some thrown in references to ‘your teacher’ and ‘your parents’. Maguire explores a number of issues facing women today, including sexism in the workplace, sex education and body image.
It does not surprise me that Maguire is a journalist by trade. Like fellow scribe Levy, Maguire has a talent for interviewing an idea, turning it over in her words, but ultimately letting it speak for itself. She does not become overly patronising or morally dualistic, which is a common failing in books written for this age group – Girlosophy, anybody?
Her tone is light and the content highly personal. She describes her own teenage years growing up in her suburban middle class high school as ‘the slut’. The chapter entitled ‘Your Vagina Is Not a Car’ is by far the most engaging and thought provoking, not merely because of her passion but also the rather unique viewpoint from which she is writing:
I know now that when most people see a teenage girl with bruised shins, dirty knees and chafed skin they think poor kid or slut. But when I was that girl, I walked tall. I felt beautiful and I felt good.
It is a well written defence of the slut – and it’s about time too.
Maguire’s chapter about pornography, ‘Pornstars and the Women Who Love Them’ is less impressive. She begins by looking at the problematic nature of the production of pornography explaining, ‘you’re not watching actors pretending to be double penetrated; those women are really experiencing that pain’. However, these very real concerns seem to be lost to an ideological debate when the consumption of pornography is discussed. The focus switches firmly to the impact pornography has on the consumer – does it turn her on? Does it make her feel bad about her body? She includes Kath Albury’s checklist for ‘ethical porn consumption’, which focuses largely on narrative concerns – ‘Does it imply that it’s OK to trick or manipulate women?’ but, disappointingly, none of these questions consider whether the woman on the screen is ‘really experiencing that pain’.
However, it is ultimately these contradictions that make the book such a worthwhile read. Maguire is different to Katie Roiphe, Catherine Lumby and Andrea Dworkin – she is not trying to liberate you or berate you; she does not offer you all the answers, because, frankly, she doesn’t have them. She is just trying to ask the questions, a worthy quest that is far too often overlooked in this field.
With its thorough and invigorated exploration of a wide range of issues, Your Skirt’s Too Short works as an introduction to feminism for the modern girl. One that you are allowed to and perhaps even encouraged to disagree with at times.
Anna Barnes lives in Melbourne and writes plays, fiction and really good text messages; and will be taking part in the 2010 Emerging Writers’ Festival 24 Hour Play Generator.
