The Good Girl Revolution

Hookup Ink, a review by Wendy Shalit of three books on the hookup culture on campus: 

When I critiqued the hookup culture back in 1999, and was summarily dismissed as a prude by my elders, it would have been an enormous comfort to know that less than ten years later my “prudish” position would be considered cutting-edge. But today there is little satisfaction in being buried under the avalanche of recent books like Unhooked (Riverhead, 2007) and Unhooked Generation (Hyperion, 2006),which have put the misery of postmodern sexual (non)intimacy utterly beyond dispute, and on the shelf. Even The Hookup Handbook(Pocket Books, 2005), billed as a chipper “Single Girl’s Guide to Living It Up,” can hardly be said to reflect living, much less “living it up.” 

In this week's column in The Washington Times, Marybeth Hicks writes that "The Good Girl Revolution brilliantly explores the cultural conundrum my daughter is experiencing. This is a book - and a movement - whose time has come."

In her keynote address at the "Future of Feminism" conference at Harvard on April 10, 2008, Camille Paglia had some surprising things to say about the movement for higher standards:

"Wendy Shalit’s first book, A Return to Modesty. . . created a storm when it was published nine years ago but whose influence can be detected in today’s campus chastity clubs, including here at Harvard. As a veteran of pro-sex feminism who still endorses pornography and prostitution, I say more power to all these chaste young women who are defending their individuality and defying groupthink and social convention. That is true feminism!"

Read Camille's full address

Sam Schulman writes in the October issue of Commentary magazine:

In Shalit’s re-creation, the vulgar sexualization against which her heroines struggle is thus in most cases something imposed on them not so much by their peers as by adults, in an act of imperialism de haut en bas. It is the authorities who have gone wild, and the young who suffer. . .

And the good news? Shalit’s evangel is that, spontaneously, many girls are beginning to resist—rediscovering the virtues of self-assertion by rejecting the expectations of others to be “people-pleasing bad girls."

The Toronto Star's Judy Gerstel reports on a lunch meeting with Wendy:

"An American who became a Torontonian by marriage four years ago, Shalit is the author of two thoroughly researched books about "young women reclaiming their self-respect" and rejecting promiscuity and the hypersexuality of popular culture and fashion.

Girls Gone Mild has just arrived on bookshelves. Her previous book, A Return to Modesty, was praised by Salon, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, which called her "a prodigy at cracking the codes of culture." Playboy, on the other hand, put it under the heading, A Man's Worst Nightmare."