How To Be Good

She asks, "Why, in the year 2007, should women's focus be completely on pleasing young men?" (Is it?) And she wants us to take heart (and I do, I do) from the growing number of young women whom she describes as "rebellious good girls." These new avatars of girl power give abstinence talks to high-schoolers; they stage "Pure Fashion" shows in which fashion doesn't just mean flesh; they become "girlcotters" who lobby retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch to pull tee-shirts emblazoned with sexist slogans. They don't sleep with the first, or second, or third boy who comes along. They don't become "people-pleasing bad girls" who will do anything, anything, to get a boy's attention.

More power to them. Behind Shalit's celebration of such girls, however, is some very dubious sociology.

I admit she had me scared for a while. I've encountered more than enough young women who have made questionable sartorial and sexual judgments. I'm not blind to the icky cultural messages that my children are subjected to every day. I worry about them, God knows, and the pressures they'll face as they grow into adults. But I worry about global warming, too, and terrorist attacks and paying the mortgage and whether my daughter will get paid as much as her male colleagues do for the same work.

How real is the sexed-out, I Am Charlotte Simmons world Shalit describes? There's plenty of sleaze everywhere you look, but Shalit's reporting leaves me unconvinced. She leans too hard on secondhand evidence, most of it grabbed from the Internet and readers' e-mails. She's promiscuous in her reliance on studies but does not give much detail about their methods; as long as they support her conclusions, they must be sound.

Even more detached from reality is Shalit's takedown of older feminists. These are the good ladies, second- and third-wavers, who run organizations such as NOW and who have fought for years to give women the same chances as men -- not, as Shalit would have it, just the chance to sleep around like men. She attacks them for "the concessions they made to pornography" and for being "so committed to the idea of casual sex as liberation" that they're baffled by younger, more restrained women.

"As the third-wavers continue to advocate a public, crude sexuality and younger girls feel oppressed by how public sexuality is, the two sets of women are on course for an inevitable collision," Shalit writes. This is bone-headed conservatism at its most offensive. Last time I checked my Feminist Manual, letting it all hang out in public didn't appear on the must-do list. Nor did making concessions to pornographers, but maybe I missed that section. Shalit would have us believe that feminism is not a dirty word in her vocabulary. Yet she seems surprised when a Wesleyan undergraduate "rejects sexual exhibitionism even though she identifies as a feminist."

Imagine that! A feminist who doesn't take her clothes off. What is this world coming to? ·

Jennifer Howard writes about the humanities for the Chronicle of Higher Education and is a contributor to the anthology "D.C. Noir."