Sex Roles (2012) 66:758–763 DOI 10.1007/s11199-012-0150-6

FEMINIST FORUM

The Political Context for Personal Empowerment: Continuing the Conversation Zoë D. Peterson & Sharon Lamb

Published online: 22 March 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

Abstract In our joint theoretical piece (Lamb and Peterson 2011), we attempted to find points of agreement and further elucidate points of disagreement in relation to the challenging issue of adolescent girls’ sexual empowerment. In particular, we evaluated the divisive question of whether girls’ subjective feelings of sexual empowerment qualify as some useful version of empowerment. We are grateful to the commentators for joining us in this productive and collaborative conversation. In this response, we summarize some of the themes raised by the commentators, and we look for points of agreement around which we, as feminists, can continue to build a conversation on this polarizing issue. We also attempt to better explore the possible relationship between subjective empowerment and political empowerment by resurrecting the idea that “the personal is political.” Keywords Feminism . Empowerment . Sexuality . Adolescence . Sexualization We begin our reply to the five commentaries that were written in response to our theoretical piece by thanking Sex Roles for the opportunity to engage in such a collaborative, thought-provoking process. Our joint piece was the outcome of a Feminist Forum discussion that began with Lamb’s (2010a) piece critiquing feminist views of adolescent girls’ sexuality which expanded on a piece written for Zoë D. Peterson and Sharon Lamb contributed equally to this article. Z. D. Peterson University of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA S. Lamb (*) University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

the Chronicle of Education called “The Right Sexuality for Girls” (Lamb 2008). What followed was a commentary from Peterson (2010) and a response to the commentary from Lamb (2010b) that both authors, in the end were uncomfortable with because the format highlighted their differences in a more combative way than either of them felt. We (Lamb and Peterson 2011) came together to attempt to work out our differences and move thinking forward on this issue of adolescent girls’ sexuality. Our commentators have joined with us, many of whom have taken up the spirit of joint critique, solidarity, and reflexivity, to produce excellent additions to this body of work meant to capture current feminist thinking and struggles on this topic. The five commentaries highlight several points of agreement among all of us as well as some important sticking points. We elaborate on these agreements and challenges in this response. Clearly the concept of empowerment and its enactments today are concerning to feminists. Bay-Cheng (2011), in her piece, “Recovering Empowerment: De-personalizing and Re-politicizing Adolescent Female Sexuality” revisits some of the original political meanings of empowerment theory, adding to the history of the term that Peterson (2010) presented in her first commentary to Lamb’s initial piece (2010a). Bay-Cheng argues that the idea of “personal empowerment” or a subjective feeling of empowerment has come to replace the idea of political empowerment. Her point with regard to our U.S. culture’s over-focus on personal empowerment at the expense of other more systemic forms of empowerment is well taken. Gavey (2011) makes a similar point, saying, “Of primary concern is the way [a focus on subjective empowerment] is able to be cast as a property or state of individuals untethered to the situation of their lives or the meanings ascribed to them, their bodies, and actions” (this issue).

Sex Roles (2012) 66:758–763

We agree with Bay-Cheng and Gavey that subjective empowerment cannot and should not be viewed as a replacement for political and social empowerment. At most, subjective empowerment may be one legitimate but limited form of empowerment. Perhaps, though, a factor that needs to be addressed in our conversation is the relationship, if any, between subjective empowerment and social or political empowerment. Bay-Cheng (2011) cites feminists who suggest, When stripped of critical consciousness and social action to correct system injustices, empowerment is quickly distorted into a self-improvement discourse that instructs individuals to identify themselves, rather than surrounding social conditions, as the problem to be fixed (Pease 2002) and to compete against others rather than join with them (Riger 1993). (this issue) She further suggests that personal empowerment is a more superficial form of empowerment than political empowerment. These are important points, and we agree that empowerment must not be entirely stripped of critical consciousness. However, we wonder if personal empowerment has become superficial in some cases because it has been coopted in such a way that it is disconnected from a movement (Tolman 2012, makes a similar point). We question the dichotomizing of personal empowerment as superficial and political empowerment as complex or deeper. There are plenty of political activist events that are superficial, although they feel empowering, and conversely, some acts of personal empowerment can have political ramifications beyond self-improvement. We are reminded of the consciousness-raising groups of the 2 nd wave, which instructed individuals in methods of self-improvement. The difference was that this self-improvement was in light of what made sense politically for women as a group. It was connected to a movement. The self-improvement work that women did in those groups–for example, working on decreasing feelings of competition and jealousy with other women–created solidarity and, in this way, contributed to changing social conditions. Bay-Cheng (2011) asks feminists not to decontextualize empowerment and to create safe spaces to form solidarity. We recall her earlier piece with regard to feminist consciousness-raising groups for girls that began with the hope for empowerment and ended with the girls forming solidarity with talk of nail polish and boys. The problem, however, was not in the goals of the group but in the way the current discourse about empowerment through beauty and “girl talk” can draw girls in so readily (Bay-Cheng et al. 2006). Many feminists today were raised on hooks’ essays, one in particular with regard to becoming a subject (Hooks 1989). And no feminist can deny the impact of Gilligan’s

759

(1982) book, In a Different Voice, which was, for psychologists and many feminists, the work that started the widespread use of the word “voice” and the phrase “coming to voice” (e.g. Brown 2004; Smith and Watson 1998). In this context, a context that Tolman (2012) describes in her commentary, finding one’s voice was a metaphor for women taking their place in the world amongst men, having their subjective experience count, and undermining the silencing of self (Jack 1991) that was seen as an internalization of patriarchy, problematic gender socialization, and/or the enactment of age-old gender stereotypes. This work came out of the strand of feminism that pronounced “the personal is political,” claiming, as Hooks (1989) and many others did (e.g., Bartky 1990; Collins 1990), that coming to voice, in the classroom and elsewhere, for a woman, was a political act and not only a personal one. Indeed, from this perspective, women’s interpreting these acts as individual was wrong-minded. Hooks argued that many a Black female student would have told you that she didn’t speak up because she was shy, but that what the student conceptualized as an individual personality trait was, in fact, a representation of oppression internalized and enacted in the classroom. Coming to voice in today’s world of hip hop might be called “representing,” as one speaks not only for oneself but on behalf of others who have experienced oppression, but it wasn’t necessarily meant that way at the time. Instead “the personal is political” was a response to the accusation that consciousness-raising groups were a kind of therapy. Hanisch (1969/2007) wrote that doing one’s own work, in groups, was not doing “therapy” because those in the group together found that their “problems” were social problems and not individual ones (p. 5). The phrase “the personal is political” was also a plea to examine one’s own personal ethics and behavior in a world where doing so made a public statement and could be an act of activism. Within this framework of the-personal-ispolitical, coming to voice and becoming a subject was to enact something about being a woman in the world. Many a personal enactment of empowerment, no matter how superficial it might seem today (e.g. not shaving one’s legs), in the 1970s was connected to an identifiable political movement and somehow made less superficial (Drummond, no date/2000). But without a clear movement commenting and couching these acts in the rhetoric, history, and public critique they are a part of, such acts can represent and be interpreted according to a multitude of viewpoints. So, it may be that the lack of a clear feminist movement around sexuality leaves acts that seem to express sexual freedom to some up for grabs with regard to interpretation. How does a girl truly express sexual freedom (e.g. just saying no? flashing her breasts for fun?) and what aspect of what movement do such acts support? We all agree that girls’ sexuality deserves a positive political agenda, but we may not agree on what constitutes

760

an appropriate political agenda. Some might argue that practicing abstinence supports a movement toward women’s health, as women are at greater risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection through heterosexual intercourse than are men and because women bear the physical and emotional brunt of unwanted pregnancy. We (Lamb & Peterson) would disagree with abstinence as a desirable political agenda. Others might argue that flashing one’s breasts supports a movement toward less restrictive female sexuality. Girls who support each other being sexual in public and shocking ways, through pole dances, stripteases, and even proclaiming they are sluts, may, in our opinion, have a political agenda, one that has to do with sexual freedom. While we and others have identified this as a neoliberal discourse (Evans et al. 2010; Gill 2008), the call for freedom cannot be dismissed. Girls seem to be trying to tie their behavior to liberal notions of what it means to be a free sexual agent and in some ways see themselves as fighting against repressive forces that say that a girl can’t be as sexual as a boy, can’t have sexual fun, can’t enjoy her body, and can’t seek pleasure. That they don’t always achieve orgasms (Armstrong et al. 2009) or “unfettered pleasure” (Tolman 2012, this issue) while pleasing boys, does not mean that the goal of freedom is not being addressed, at least in part. This is the initial point that Peterson (2010) was trying to make. And this is not entirely bad politics for girls to engage in. It is important for feminists to acknowledge the lessons from the women’s movement that have been adopted by these girls (e.g., the value of sexual freedom; an ownership over one’s body and sexuality; a right to experience sexual pleasure and to be as sexually expressive as their male counterparts) and not to entirely judge these acts as regressive as Lamb (2010a) might have done in her initial piece. Tolman (2012) noted that historically, “the recognition and articulation of questions about the possibilities of girls’ desire, pleasure, and sexual subjectivity was… extraordinarily radical” (this issue). And although talking about girls’ pleasure and desire is not as radical as it once was, the role of desire, pleasure, and agency are still sometimes lost in our concern about the hazards of sexualization. To be clear, we don’t think Bay-Cheng or Gavey are guilty of devaluing the relevance of sexual agency. Indeed, BayCheng (2011) is clear in saying that agency and the ability to speak out or act out isn’t enough but that agency needs to be accompanied by actions to ensure social and material capital for others to also do so. We might add, however, that it may be wrong to combat this joyful urge with the warning to remember that the political situation for many girls (if not oneself) is dire (along the lines of, “How can we enjoy our food when others elsewhere are hungry?”), as this may squelch any enthusiasm for the larger social movement. Indeed, what activism around this might do is to promote girls’ personal sexual freedom and also encourage girls to

Sex Roles (2012) 66:758–763

act in a way that can procure freedom for other girls. Thus, as feminists we can support adolescent girls in their own free sexual expression and also help them to realize that one’s own ability to express oneself sexually does not necessarily contribute to the sexual freedom of all. But therein is an important point: The very act of expressing one’s sexual freedoms, because the expression of such is shaped by what is permissible and what is sexy (generally by men and marketers in this culture) may sometimes contribute to the oppression of others. Gavey (2011) suggests this when she introduces the idea that some acts that seem regressive can in actuality be used and interpreted in progressive ways; she provides the intriguing example of a woman who fakes an orgasm. We agree that we must be cautious labeling acts as regressive and progressive and that there are multiple and contradictory meanings to many acts such as this one. Gavey (2011) says, While a woman may enjoy her performance of (fake) orgasm for a myriad of reasons, and gain benefits in terms of identity and relationship, it might also be marked by negative affect (including potentially, disappointment, embarrassment, guilt, shame, or anger), or so on. (this issue) We very much appreciate this example of ambiguity and believe that, in some cases, a “real” orgasm could produce similarly ambivalent feelings. One question here, though, is whether this personal act of faking an orgasm is a form of betrayal with regard to larger goals of a movement in which this woman might feel a part or in which we wish she would feel a part. It could be argued that in an era in which drug companies are attempting to create and market drugs to combat women’s “sexual dysfunction” and in which “sexual functioning” is defined in relation to a mostly male model of sexual response (Tiefer 1995), the production of fake orgasms, although enacted only in a woman’s own bedroom contributes in some small way to a host of ideas and practices that harm all women (e.g., that women who do not have consistently have orgasms are dysfunctional; that lack of orgasm is always a woman’s problem rather than a relational problem, etc.). Lamb (2006) also wrote about this with regard to some victims forgiving perpetrators of rape and sexual abuse and its effect on other victims who don’t want to or can’t forgive. Today someone might laugh at the idea that Judy Jones faking an orgasm in her condo in Baltimore might have an effect on the sexual freedoms of Jody Jacobs in Sacramento. But that was the point of the ‘60s cry that the personal is political, that when we raise consciousness in small ways in our personal lives, we create larger social change. For example, a woman may move toward making the personal political by saying to a partner, “Hey, that was a fake orgasm. We need to work on what it is that’s making sex not all that pleasurable for me and, well, it

Sex Roles (2012) 66:758–763

might be our relationship, your sexual strategies, violence in my past, and/or stress of the day (which, by the way, may also have a gendered component),” or even by saying to a partner, “I didn’t have an orgasm this time, but that’s ok. I would really rather just focus on physical and emotional closeness as opposed to trying to have an orgasm every time.” On the other hand, this discussion is complicated by the fact that men also fake orgasms (Muehlenhard and Shippee 2010). And this suggests that not all fake orgasms are a reflection of women’s political disempowerment. Further, intuitively, it seems unjust that an individual woman is responsible for considering whether her private sexual behaviors harm all women, while her male partner is free to enjoy his sexuality in whatever manner he chooses. However, this injustice is a burden borne by all members of oppressed groups, and the extent to which one owes one’s group is a question that is still hotly debated (Howze and Weberman 2001). Here we tried to reintroduce the idea of the personal as political, not to revisit the adolescent girl who does the striptease as a political actor, but to situate her act, however, sexualized, as part of a feminist political movement that has some political value no matter how co-opted by marketers and media it remains or how distorted her act appears. We also want to acknowledge that we and all of the commentators refuse to see girls as only representing one-dimensional gendered sex roles in their actions. Indeed, Murnen and Smolak (2011) remind us that “There are two, main polarized models for female sexuality: either the ‘good girl’ ‘perfect virgin’ who might attend a ‘purity ball’ and sign a ‘virginity pledge’… to show her commitment to this standard; or the hypersexualized ‘girl gone wild’…” (this issue). We all want to break apart that dichotomy and take a more nuanced approach that allows for a girl who (1) is sexual and enjoys her sexuality and (2) has not lost control of her sexuality or given up all of her sexual power. But we also all recognize, as Gavey (2011) reminds us, that because of these polarized models of female sexuality, most girls probably feel ambivalent about their sexual choices and identities and uncertain about how to exist in the middle of these two extreme poles. Murnen and Smolak (2011) provide us with an up to date review of the empirical literature on sexualization, media objectification, and self objectification, describing the context in which girls come to view empowerment as being attractive to boys, as assertively displaying heterosexuality, and as self-objectification. Tolman (2012) also notes, as did Lamb (2010a) in the original essay, the pervasive sexualization of girls in popular media as an important context for girls’ sexuality. Their reviews highlight that problematic sex roles and messages about girls’ sexuality are present throughout the media and not just in sexually explicit media

761

or even in media that we might label as being influenced by pornography. In other words, focusing on pornography as the culprit will not get us very far in correcting the problem. This means that all girls are unavoidably exposed to these images and messages, and thus, girls are exhibiting a variety of negotiations around these images, including positive resistance. That is, despite the inescapable media pressure to adopt one of the polarized versions of girls’ sexuality, some girls are able to find a middle ground, perhaps through their ability to thoughtfully critique media messages. We also appreciate Gill’s (2012) important reminder that, just as girls are diverse in their interactions with media; media themselves are diverse, and media can function as a source of resistance to “sexualized culture,” while at the same time we reply that the vast majority of media marketed to girls today still contain these problematic images and messages. In their commentaries, Murnen and Smolak (2011) suggest that media literacy is not enough and that the culture needs to change, and Gill (2012) similarly argues that media literacy is not a “panacea” and that treating it as such “leave [s] media themselves untouched, shifting all the responsibility onto young people to think critically and deconstruct…” (this issue). This is an excellent point. Gill also makes the point that we do not respond to racism in the media with calls to educate young Black people to identify the racist images and yet anti-racist education offered to students of all races in the U.S. does address this issue. Still, we do not intend to promote media literacy as a panacea. It must indeed be frustrating to be a media theorist reading psychologists’ turn toward the media in this simplistic way, and we welcome her call for more collaborations between psychologists and media and culture theorists. In short, we agree that broader social change (including changing media representations of sexuality) is the ultimate goal; however, it is difficult to see how broad-based cultural change can work without consciousness-raising actions, of which media literacy is one, and media literacy does not only have to apply only to youths but to the rest of us as well. Tolman (2012) presents other forms of education that might help to address this issue as an important first step in the fight against oppression. Murnen and Smolak (2011) make the important point that the groundwork for adolescent sexuality is laid out in the grade school years and that efforts towards cultural change must happen there. Thus, in the short-term, media-literacy training for grade school children may lead to adolescents who are better able to resist unwanted and disempowering media messages; in the long-term this may translate to cultural change. Although we agree with Gill’s (2012) important point, that “media representations still get to us even after inoculation” (this issue), we also think that continued ambivalence following media literacy does not necessarily suggest that the literacy training is not working. As Lamb (2010a) began this conversation, the desire for a

762

perfect sexuality for girls or an ideal response to media literacy is a projection we could do without. Ambivalence seems to us an inevitable consequence of carefully and thoughtfully examining and questioning one’s own values, beliefs, and desires in relation to broader cultural messages. In fact, the discomfort produced by these ambivalent feelings may help to propel adolescent girls toward activism. Tolman’s (2012) commentary begins with a critique of the original Lamb (2010a) article, which started this entire conversation. Although a thorough response to this would divert the direction of this conversation specifically about empowerment, a few comments do seem relevant here. In our discussion of empowerment, neither Lamb (2010a) nor Lamb and Peterson (2011) intended to minimize Tolman’s work or the work of other feminists by suggesting that they define healthy sexuality as only pleasure, desire, and subjectivity, but instead meant to uncover where this earlier work had gotten us. We recognize that Tolman and other feminist researchers were not intending to mandate that adolescent girls live up to “the idealized picture of the adolescent girl who feels pleasure, desire, and subjectivity” (Lamb and Peterson 2011, this issue). Nevertheless, we do worry that by focusing on the remarkable “resistor” girls who (at least some of the time and to some degree) are sexually confident, experience embodied desire, and assertively seek out sexual pleasure, we may unintentionally set up a standard that is impossible for many girls to meet. Gill (2012) supports this view by saying as Lamb (2010a) did in the original essay that feminist scholars may indeed be projecting onto girls an unreachable sexuality that they themselves wish for, as one generation often hopes that the next will accomplish what they could not. We also have concerns regarding the romanticized language use to describe girls’ sexuality, such as our process in uncovering the “ “thick desire” (Fine and McClelland 2006, p. 301), “delicious and treacherous” (Fine and McClelland 2006, p. 305) as having “fleshy” parts (Tolman 2012, this issue) in a “stew” of desires (Fine and McClelland 2006, p. 326; Tolman 2012, this issue) that we must peek “beneath skirts” and “sheets” to find (Tolman 2012, this issue). Indeed, the romanticization of girls’ sexuality may contribute to our neglect of certain emotions, experiences, and reactions that do not fit with these evocative descriptions. Finally, we want to address the issues raised by the commentators around the hypothetical female adolescent we proposed who may feel empowered enacting a kind of sexuality that is derived from marketing and has been described by some as pornified (e.g., Dines 2010). We wondered to what extent that subjective feeling of empowerment can count as a legitimate form of empowerment and to what extent it is a form of “false consciousness”. Gill (2012) characterized this 13 year old girl as the “privileged object of anxiety and ‘concern”’ who is a “White, western, middle

Sex Roles (2012) 66:758–763

class, girl-child” (this issue). Although we did choose this hypothetical girl as a representation of the girl that seems to be at the center of concerns regarding sexualization, we did not necessarily imagine her as either White or middle-class. (We did specify that she was heterosexual because much of the discourse of “anxiety and concern” seems to focus on a “girl-child” who is taken advantage of by a male sexual partner.) In fact, our struggles to define what counts as empowerment for this hypothetical 13 year old girl attempted to take into account that she may be disempowered in many aspects of her life; without reaching a clear answer, we were attempting to explore what sexual empowerment might mean in the context of relatively limited social power. In relation to this hypothetical 13 year old, Bay-Cheng (2011) and Gavey (2011) also point out that it is important not to confuse a feeling of empowerment with a feeling of agency (although girls themselves might do so). The perception of oneself as having a choice, and indeed choosing, is an important aspect of empowerment but doesn’t necessarily equate with being empowered. We agree with this point. We would argue that agency is perhaps necessary but not sufficient for empowerment, and in fact, this is one of the things that makes it very difficult to define empowered sexuality for this hypothetical 13 year old. Gavey’s (2011) solution is that “We can and should still talk about desire, pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction, and so on” (this issue); however, we should not conflate this with empowerment. And when Gill (2012), entertainingly suggests that no woman says “Phwoar, that was empowering!” (this issue) after good sex, we do want to point out that the empowerment that girls seem to be feeling is not about sex per se but about the power of obtaining a close imitation of what the culture is calls sexy. See Whitehead and Kurtz (2009) for the “empowerment” discourse around poledancing or the teens’ responses online to teen pop star Miley Cyrus’s striptease at the KidsChoice awards in 2009. In conclusion, we are grateful for the opportunity to read these 5 commentaries that address the issue of empowerment that we struggled with separately (Lamb 2010a, 2010b; Peterson 2010) and together (Lamb and Peterson 2011), and we are very pleased to have begun what we hope will be an ongoing conversation. We have moved forward a bit in disentangling some of the knottier issues, but some of us still disagree on other important points. Three of the five commentators (Bay-Cheng 2011; Gavey 2011; and Gill 2012) suggested we even stop using the word empowerment, because it has so come to represent personal empowerment and because it has been co-opted by sexualized media. But that surely feels like giving up. It has been rare for feminists to give up language (see Muscio 2001; Redfern and Aune 2010), and instead, there have been several movements to reclaim and rework language much like the originators of the “slut walk” are desperately trying to reclaim the word slut in a context that keeps grabbing it back from

Sex Roles (2012) 66:758–763

those that would use it to disparage women (Chloe 2011; See also Dines and Long 2011). Our commentators rightly differentiate agency and pleasure from empowerment and reconnect empowerment to activism, social justice, change, and politics. Right or wrong, this word empowerment (used to refer to both subjective and social power), has been adopted and valued by the general public and by adolescent girls. As Tolman (2012) noted, discussions of “girls’ healthy sexuality under these present conditions…must…inevitably engage the question of sexual empowerment” (this issue). Indeed, the fact that empowerment has been co-opted by marketers and the selfimprovement movement is an unwanted consequence of the success of feminists in promoting empowerment as an important goal. Exploring one’s own sense of agency, one’s voice, and one’s feelings of power in relation to other girls’ power and in the context of the political and social issues facing girls today, is the kind of solidarity work that Bay-Cheng (2011) hopes we can achieve. As Gavey (2011) suggests, we must continue to support agency, pleasure, desire, assertiveness, and we might add self-efficacy, because these personal qualities are historically and politically important for girls, not just personally so. They relate to a future that reflects better selfprotection, better choices, better treatment, and a better world for girls who may not have the material and social capital to achieve these at the present time. The personal can be political, but sometimes we all need a light shone on just how.

References Armstrong, E. A., England, P., & Fogarty, A. C. K. (2009). Orgasm in college hook ups and relationships. In B. Risman (Ed.), Families as they really are (pp. 362–377). New York: Norton. Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. New York, NY: Routledge. Bay-Cheng, L. (2011). Recovering empowerment: De-personalizing and re-politicizing adolescent female sexuality. Sex Roles, this issue.. doi:10.1007/s11199-011-0070-x. Bay-Cheng, L. Y., Lewis, A. E., Stewart, A. J., & Malley, J. E. (2006). Disciplining “girl talk”: The paradox of empowerment in a feminist mentorship program. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 13, 73–92. doi:10.1300/J137v13n02_05. Brown, L. (2004). Raising their voices: The politics of girls’ anger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chloe (2011, May 16). A few words about reclaiming “slut”. Feministing. Retrieved from http://feministing.com/2011/05/16/a-fewwords-about-reclaiming-“slut”/ Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Dines, G. (2010). Pornland: How pornography has hijacked our sexuality. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Dines, G., & Long, J. (2011, December 1). Moral panic? No. We are resisting the pornofication of women. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/01/ feminists-pornification-of-women Drummond, S. (no date/2000). Hairy legs freak fishy liberal. In R. Baxandall & L. Gordon (Eds.), Dear sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement (pp. 187–188), NY: Basic Books.

763 Evans, A., Riley, S., & Shankar, A. (2010). Technologies of sexiness: Theorizing women’s engagement in the sexualization of culture. Feminism & Psychology, 20(1), 114–131. doi:10.1177/0959353509351854. Fine, M., & McClelland, S. (2006). Sexuality education and desire: Still missing after all these years. Harvard Educational Review, 76, 297–338. Gavey, N. (2011). Beyond "empowerment"? Sexuality in a sexist world. Sex Roles, this issue.. doi:10.1007/s11199-011-0069-3. Gill, R. (2008). Empowerment/sexism: Figuring female sexual agency in contemporary advertising. Feminism and Psychology, 18, 35–60. Gill, R. (2012). Media, empowerment and the 'sexualization of culture' debates. Sex Roles, this issue.. doi:10.1007/s11199-011-0107-1. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hanisch, C. (1969/2007). The personal is political: The women’s liberation movement classic with a new explanatory introduction. Retrieved from http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PersonalisPol.pdf Hooks, B. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist thinking black. Boston, MA: South End Press. Howze, Y., & Weberman, D. (2001). On racial kinship. Social Theory & Practice, 27, 419–36. Jack, D. (1991). Silencing the self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lamb, S. (2006). Forgiveness, women, and responsibility to the group. Journal of Human Rights, 5, 1–16. doi:10.1080/14754830500485874. Lamb, S. (2008). The right sexuality for girls. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 54, B14–B15. Lamb, S. (2010a). Feminist ideals for a healthy female adolescent sexuality: A critique. Sex Roles, 62, 294–306. doi:10.1007/ s11199-009-9698-1. Lamb, S. (2010b). Porn as a pathway to empowerment? A response to Peterson’s commentary. Sex Roles, 62, 314–317. doi:10.1007/s11199010-9756-8. Lamb, S., & Peterson, Z. D. (2011). Adolescent girls' sexual empowerment: Two feminists explore the concept. Sex Roles, this issue.. doi:10.1007/s11199-011-9995-3. Muehlenhard, C. L., & Shippee, S. K. (2010). Men’s and women’s reports of pretending orgasm. Journal of Sex Research, 47, 552– 567. doi:10.1080/00224490903171794. Murnen, S. K., & Smolak, L. (2011). Social considerations related to adolescent girls' sexual empowerment: A response to Lamb and Peterson. Sex Roles, this issue.. doi:10.1007/s11199-011-0079-1. Muscio, I. (2001). Cunt: A declaration of independence. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. Pease, B. (2002). Rethinking empowerment: A postmodern reappraisal for emancipatory practice. British Journal of Social Work, 32, 135–147. doi:10.1093/bjsw/32.2.135. Peterson, Z. D. (2010). What is sexual empowerment? A multidimensional and process-oriented approach to adolescent girls’ sexual empowerment. Sex Roles, 62, 307–313. doi:10.1007/s11199-009-9725-2. Redfern, C., & Aune, K. (2010). Reclaiming the F word: The new feminist movement. London: Zed Books. Riger, S. (1993). What‘s wrong with empowerment. American Journal of Community Psychology, 21, 279–292. doi:10.1007/BF00941504. Smith, S., & Watson, J. (1998). Introduction. In S. Smith & J. Watson (Eds.), Women, autobiography, theory: A reader (pp. 3–52). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Tiefer, L. (1995). Sex is not a natural act and other essays. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press. Tolman, D. L. (2012). Female adolescents, sexual empowerment and desire: A missing discourse of gender inequity. Sex Roles, this issue.. doi:10.1007/s11199-012-0122-x. Whitehead, K., & Kurz, T. (2009). “Empowerment” and the pole: A discursive investigation of the reinvention of pole dancing as a recreational activity. Feminism & Psychology, 19, 224–244. doi:10.1177/0959353509102218.