Girls Gone Mild (eBook)

'Hi, Slut!'

There is a metal go-go cage in which a group of Duke girls clad in tiny denim skirts and halters perform a modified pole dance, but no one seems to be watching. . . . Much to the disappointment of many students, female and male, there's no real dating scene at Duke--true for a lot of colleges. 'I've never been asked out on a date in my entire life--not once,' says one stunning brunette. Nor has a guy ever bought her a drink. 'I think that if anybody ever did that, I would ask him if he were on drugs,' she says. Rather, there's the casual one-night stand, usually bolstered by heavy drinking and followed the next morning by--well, nothing, usually. 'You'll hook up with a guy, and you know that nothing will come out of it,' says Anna. The best thing you can hope for, she says, 'is that you'll get to hook up with him again.'
--Janet Reitman, Rolling Stone, June 1, 2006

When Rolling Stone magazine starts to read like the National Review, then clearly something has gone very wrong. Not since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 has there been such bipartisan agreement that we have a problem. It is certainly puzzling. On the one hand, girls are more educated and women more successful in business than ever before. At the same time, girls report that in their private lives, they are feeling enormous pressure to be sexually active and don't know how to say no. Numerous studies from left, right, and center have shown that when women get to college, they are extremely dissatisfied with the lack of a 'dating scene.' They long to be taken out but instead are made to feel they are weird if they don't 'go with the flow' of the hookup scene instead. 'The guy means nothing to you' is the socially correct view to adopt. Even an article in a women's magazine encouraging the sisterhood to be happy as singles--'Down with the Husband Hunt!' was the charming title--the author had to admit that she 'succumbs . . . from time to time' to the theory 'that we are living in a lopsided dating universe in which the cards are all stacked in favor of the guys.' Kerry Ball, twenty-nine, of Miami, told her, 'Men are just looking for girls to mess around with rather than have a relationship with or even simply date. There are so many single girls looking for relationships that these guys have no trouble finding someone to sleep with them.' The number of unmarried women between ages thirty and thirty-four has more than tripled during the past thirty years, and the percentage of childless women in their early forties has doubled. You might say that the 'glass ceiling' has shifted from work to women's personal lives.

At this writing, something called PSD is all over the news, and perhaps it may be helpful. I first read about PSD in Wired, and since Wired is a technology magazine, I assumed it was referring to Photoshop files (which have PSD file extensions) or that the writer had misspelled Canada's PST, provincial sales tax. Neither assumption was right. But this new breakthrough is revolutionizing people's intimate lives.

PSD stands for 'pre-sex discussion.' As Regina Lynn glowingly reports, the sex therapist Roger Libby has recently discovered that if you get to know the person you're about to have sex with, even a little bit, the sex itself is improved. 'Sex is so much more than intercourse and [in his new book] he encourages readers to have an extensive pre-sex discussion, or PSD, before becoming sexually involved with a partner.'

Is sex more than just intercourse. This idea is not old-fashioned, like modesty or courtship, you understand. This is a modern thing. Libby is an adjunct professor at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco,...