It's about damned time.

With Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution, Paula Kamen brings a long-awaited dose of perspective to the complex and often controversial topic of younger women's sexual lives, relationships, and behaviors. As a thirty-something myself, I've been frustrated by the opportunism of the press when discussing the sex lives of the so-called "third wave" generation (women currently in their 20s and 30s). Depending on what flavor of chip a given commentator has got on his shoulder, post-Sexual Revolution women are commonly painted as being either amoral, purely hedonistic sluts, or else as unfortunates who have had the liberatory promise of the Sexual Revolution yanked out from beneath our feet by the resurgence of the Christian right and the ghastly spectre of AIDS.

Kamen acknowledges both of these viewpoints, but spends her time making a more sensible and responsible case: that rather than a sexual revolution that happened in the past and is now over, we should think in terms of sexual evolution. Today's twenty- and thirty-somethings, in other words, do not represent some ultimate product of an apocalyptic cultural change, but rather a point on the growth curve toward our common cultural-sexual future.

Bolstered by copious research, close readings of numerous large-scale studies, and a wide range of in-person interviews with young women across the United States, Kamen surveys broad tracts of the sexual and sexual-political landscape. Sexual individualism, shifts in sexual "scripts" that dictate the kinds of behaviors and actions that are expected and allowed, attitudes toward virginity, marriage, singlehood, sexual orientation, and relationships between partners all come under Kamen's scope. Acknowledging the dramatic differences between younger women today and their mothers' and grandmothers' generations, Kamen likewise points out a necessary truth: that as far as we have come and as much liberation as women have achieved on the sexual front, we still act and react in relationship to a sex and gender framework that largely predates the so called Sexual Revolution. Kamen herself refers to young women's sexual behaviors and opportunities as "becoming like men," an explanation which is both enlightening and troublesome: isn't the whole point of liberation to become like ourselves, and the idea of revolution to get out from under the weight of no-longer-useful structures and systems?

Well, yes. Kamen does make this point in her conclusion, where she posits the prospective trajectory of our collective sexual evolution toward something that enables real and lasting sexual power and agency, not merely the rather transitory sexual power that is currently wielded (due to our culture's sexual preoccupation with the desirability of nubility and youth) primarily by women in the very generation with which this book is concerned.

But for now, Kamen still uses the traditional rhetoric of "male" and "female" to indicate the spectrum from optimally available sexual expression and power ("male") to sexual repression and subjection ("female"), as when she characterizes the cultural swing toward
greater sexual self-determination for women as "becoming like men." This makes sense to us culturally... but isn't this precisely the rhetoric of the gender-based presumption of sexual and behavioral difference that we're trying to shed? Yes, and I think Kamen would agree: the right to sexual self-determination is a human right. Women behaving in any of the myriad ways in which human beings are capable of behaving sexually -- and I do mean any of those ways, or many at once -- aren't being "male" or "female," they're being human, because the capacity to be sexual is a human capacity.

For my money, we can't shake off the "male/female" apparatus for describing sexual behaviors and attitudes soon enough, and Kamen's use of that terminological apparatus is one of the few flaws in an otherwise long-overdue and incredibly useful book. And I do mean that wholeheartedly. Kamen is a worthy heir to Shere Hite: her nonjudgmental,
documentarian, non-dogmatic approach to letting women tell their own sexual truths is a much-needed antidote to our national prity to foam at the mouth whenever a woman says "yes, I fuck" in public.

Her Way is, in its understated way, a celebratory document, one that should be a source of reassurance to second-wave feminists, sex-positive activists, and other seekers of social equality. Its very moderateness and utter lack of hysteria or finger-pointing is a simple and incredibly effective confirmation of the truly deep and significant breadth and depth of the sexual changes that have occurred in our culture since the late 1960's.

By revealing the way women's sex lives really are and demonstrating the lack of drama with which young women today accept and embrace their sexual possibilities, Kamen proves that sexual agency for women is now woven quite deeply into the fabric of our culture. When even politically conservative fundamentalist Christian women speak -- with the education and awareness to make it meaningful -- in the feminist rhetoric of choice and women's rights of control over their own sexuality, we've gotten somewhere significant. Whether we agree with their choices, or the reasoning behind them, is less important than the fact that young women know, on an unprecedentedly universal level, that they have the right to make those choices for themselves.

No, of course the battles haven't all been fought and the barricades haven't all been brought down. Many readers will doubtless finish Her Way with an overwhelming, even depressing, awareness of just how much further we have to go before we run any real risk of wandering into a future that is truly liberated of presumptive ideas about sex, gender, sexuality, and relationships. But by the same token, those who read this book cannot help but come away heartened. In a very real, solid, meaningful way, Kamen's examination of the current generation of younger women proves that it has come to be not only possible but downright common, even expected, for a woman to have a great deal of latitude in living her sexual life "her way."

No, it's not perfection. But there's certainly nothing wrong with progress.

Hanne Blank is a writer, editor, and educator whose work includes such joyously in-your-face tomes as Big Big Love: A Sourcebook on Sex for People of Size and Those Who Love Them, Zaftig: Well Rounded Erotica, Shameless, and Best Transgender Erotica. She has taught college, edited feminist newsmonthlies (this piece originally appeared in Sojourner: The Women's Forum), sung opera, and been a sex worker, a waitress, and a childcare worker, among other things. Currently she lives near Baltimore and online at www.hanne.net.

© Hanne Blank, 2002
All Rights Reserved

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