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Adolescent Girls’ Sexual Empowerment: Two Feminists Explore the Concept
Article  in  Sex Roles · June 2012
DOI: 10.1007/s11199-011-9995-3
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FEMINIST FORUM
Adolescent Girls’ Sexual Empowerment: Two Feminists
Explore the Concept
Sharon Lamb & Zoë D. Peterson
Published online: 11 May 2011
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract Although all feminists tend to value empowered
female sexuality, feminists often disagree, sometimes
heatedly so, about the definition of and path to
empowered sexuality among adolescent girls. In this
theoretical paper, two feminists, who have previously
expressed differing perspectives regarding adolescent
girls’ sexual empowerment (Lamb 2010a, b; Peterson
2010), discuss their disagreements and attempt to find
some common ground in their viewpoints on girls’
sexuality. A critical question related to sexual empowerment
is whether empowerment includes a subjective
sense of efficacy, desire, and pleasure. In other words,
are girls sexually empowered if they feel that they are
empowered? The authors identify three themes that make
answering this question particularly challenging—age
differences, exposure to sexualized media, and the
pressure to please a partner. Despite these challenges,
the authors identify several points of consensus, including
agreeing that adequate sexuality education and media
literacy education are vital to optimizing adolescent girls’
sexual empowerment.
Keywords Feminism . Empowerment . Adolescent girls .
Sexuality
Introduction
Historically, the broad ideology of feminism has included
individuals, who hold a variety of contradictory perspectives,
but who share an overarching set of values about a
need for gender equity (Crawford 2006). Nevertheless, it
has been hard for feminist theorists and researchers not to
fall prey to what we see as endless dichotomizing of
feminist thought, a kind of dichotomizing that splits
feminists from one another, denies commonalities, and
feeds into the thinking of those who would blame feminism
for a myriad of social problems (see Duits and van Zoonen
2007; Gill 2007 for a discussion of this). Some of this
dichotomizing has been around quantitative vs. qualitative
research; the importance of gender difference vs. gender
similarity; and biological vs. social constructionist explanations
of gender. Many of these dichotomies relate
specifically to differing feminist views of girls’ and
women’s sexuality. For example, some of the dichotomies
that are frequently imposed upon feminism include proporn
vs. anti-porn, 2nd wave vs. 3rd wave, and sexnegative
vs. sex-positive (Baumgardner and Richards 2003;
Edut 2003).
This trend is partially why we, as theorists and
researchers, who in previous writings (e.g. Lamb 2002;
Peterson and Muehlenhard 2007) have worked in between
dichotomies, celebrated ambivalence, and promoted the
importance of girls’ and young women’s lived experiences
as they interpret them, found ourselves placed in a position
in which we were expected to argue two sides of a
dichotomy in which we weren’t fully invested. Our
S. Lamb (*)
Department of Counseling and School Psychology,
College of Education and Human Development, UMass Boston,
University of Massachusetts Boston,
100 Morrissey Blvd.,
Boston, MA 02125, USA
e-mail: Sharon.lamb@umb.edu
Z. D. Peterson (*)
Department of Psychology, 325 Stadler Hall,
University of Missouri-St. Louis,
1 University Blvd,
Saint Louis, MO 63121, USA
e-mail: petersonz@umsl.edu
Sex Roles (2012) 66:703–712
DOI 10.1007/s11199-011-9995-3
positioning was unintentionally supported by the “Feminist
Forum” framework in Sex Roles, a framework common in a
number of academic journals, which seemed to call for
opposing positions, yea and nay, for and against, theory and
commentary, or in the words of Saturday Night Live
(Michaels 1978), “point/counterpoint.”
In the “Feminist Forum,” an author (in this case, Lamb
2010a) completes her or his manuscript through the editing
process and one or more other authors then respond to it (in
this case, Peterson 2010). The original author is then
presented with the finished commentary and can rebut or
reply to it in a response to the commentary (Lamb 2010b).
This interactional approach is designed to present the reader
with a lively debate on an important issue, and it typically
does. In our case, however, we found that it inadvertently
and inaccurately led us to positioning our viewpoints about
adolescent girls’ sexuality as diametrically opposed and in
an adversarial way that in retrospect made us uncomfortable.
Further, after the rebuttal to the commentary, the
process of interaction was finished, leaving many issues
unresolved. Through subsequent “behind the scenes”
interactions about the content of our articles and commentaries
in the Feminist Forum, we were reminded that,
although we may have some minor differences in viewpoint,
there is far more overlap than division between our
positions, a fact that might have been obscured in a point/
counterpoint format. We also hypothesized that this might
be the case for other feminists who experience disagreements
among themselves about the complex issues of
adolescent girls’ sexuality.
We hope that by writing this follow-up piece, we not
only will be working out our differences but also will be
developing a more nuanced and incorporative view of
female adolescent sexuality. Such a joining would work
against the tendency to dichotomize and oversimplify
feminist views about adolescent sexuality. In undermining
this tendency, we believe that we might make a
contribution to naming some of the shared theoretical
sticking points around which many feminists—regardless
of their positions on concepts such as pornography and
girls’ sexual expression—likely experience similar conceptual
struggles.
Thus we begin by outlining the points made, commented
on, and rebutted in Sex Roles, volume 62, issues 5–6, and
then move on to work on four points that may have seemed
contentious in our commentary but where we believe that
our views may be more similar than opposing. We also
choose these four points because they reflect conflict in the
field at present.
I, Lamb (2010a), began my article about the idealization
of female adolescent sexuality, by raising questions for
feminist theorists and researchers about our theorizing
about “desire”, “pleasure”, and “subjectivity.” I identified
how these concepts had arisen and become important to
feminist thinking about sexuality. I then criticized the
way these concepts are understood and used today. For
example, I wrote that the idealizing of subjectivity reifies
a dichotomy between subject and object in sexual
practice, one that I believe doesn’t exist so rigidly. I
also criticized the way an overemphasis on pleasure as a
gauge for what makes sex “good” for girls (good in
terms of physical feelings, self-protection, and ethics)
crowds out other important feminist goals regarding girls
and sex. I argued that ideas of desire, pleasure, and
subjectivity may have different historical meanings and
context for girls of color and that a healthy sexuality that
includes all these elements may be unrealistic to achieve
and more of an expression of what adult women want for
themselves, but imposed on teens. I advocated for more
realistic goals for female adolescent sexuality that took
into account girls’ development. In mocking, to some
extent, the idealized picture of the adolescent girl who
feels pleasure, desire, and subjectivity as described by
these theorists, I noted that this picture is ironically
similar to the commodified, sexualized, marketed teen
girl that Levy (2005) brought to our attention in her work
on “raunch culture” and that Gill (2008) has argued is now
a part of advertising culture. I wrote that typically, for
feminist theorists (Debold et al. 1993; Fine 1988; Fine
2005; Horne and Zimmer-Gembeck 2005; Lamb 2002;
Tolman 2002; Tolman, and Debold 1994; Welles 2005), it
would seem that empowerment is conflated with the idea
of choice, and that the choices made may feel like choices
to girls but not be choices at all; that is, imitating sexuality
that’s highly marketed to girls may reveal less agency than
girls themselves may argue they have. I also wrote about
how some theorists tried to resolve this issue about
empowerment by discussing authentic versus inauthentic
sexuality (e.g. Tolman 2002) but I found this a very
problematic solution. In the end, I offered some brief
thoughts on mutuality as an interesting concept to bring to
the table in promoting a certain kind of sexuality to
adolescent girls.
I, Peterson (2010) agreed with many of Lamb’s critiques
of the potential disadvantages of a model of healthy
adolescent sexuality that focuses exclusively on desire,
pleasure, and subjectivity, but I felt that one very specific
aspect of Lamb’s paper—the portion in which Lamb argued
that sexual desire, pleasure, and subjectivity are not necessarily
signs of adolescent girls’ sexual empowerment—
was a risky view and had the potential to be misread and
misused. I did not think that these concepts fully defined
empowerment, but I worried about prioritizing an
“expert” view of empowerment over girls’ own subjective
sense of empowerment. I worried that devaluing
desire, pleasure, and subjectivity could result in giving
704 Sex Roles (2012) 66:703–712
girls the hurtful message that, although they feel
empowered, their sense of power is, in fact, a false
consciousness marketed to them by a sexualized advertising
culture. Thus, in my commentary, I argued that
empowerment might best be conceptualized as a multidimensional
construct. From this perspective, sexual desire
and pleasure could be viewed as two valuable dimensions
of sexual empowerment; in other words a subjective
sense of empowerment is legitimate empowerment,
but it is only one aspect of legitimate empowerment. Other
dimensions of sexual empowerment could include successfully
negotiating with sexual partners about wanted
and unwanted sexual activities and intellectually and
politically challenging restrictive cultural discourses about
girls’ sexuality. Girls might simultaneously experience
empowerment on one level and disempowerment on
another level. However, in attempting to promote the
importance of girls’ pleasure, desire, and subjective
feelings as relevant elements of sexual empowerment, I
may have wrongly suggested that Lamb doesn’t respect or
value girls’ lived experiences.
In this way and on this particular issue, we had placed
ourselves in familiar feminist dichotomized positions, with
Lamb believing that Peterson could celebrate a teen girl
giving a football player a lap dance at a party as a sign of
empowerment and Peterson believing that Lamb didn’t
value pleasurable sexual experimentation as a sign of
empowerment. Peterson argued that some forms of sexual
expression (even those that imitate media culture) could, on
some levels and in some instances, be viewed as positive
experimentation in the service of future desire, subjectivity,
and pleasure. Lamb argued that borne as many of these acts
are from the worst of pornography, they are always suspect.
We recognize that neither of these positions is very
satisfying, and we would like to take the opportunity to
expand on and identify the shared space between these
positions.
There are certain fundamentals that we would like to set
out as points we agree on.
We do not want to place a burden on the newly
sexually active or merely sexually curious teen to
become a super-teen with regard to sexuality (always
knowing and understanding her desires, pleasure-seeking,
and strongly able to say no or yes in a myriad of
positions and situations). Nor do we want to support the
public opinion that children are asexual before they reach
adolescence (see Lamb 2002, 2006 for work on childhood
sexuality). While it is important to honor the place of
sexual desire, pleasure, the ability to say no, and activism
around restrictive discourses, we agree that this super-girl
ideal is itself restrictive (Girls, Inc. 2006). Moreover, it
doesn’t allow for ambivalence in sexual experiences,
which we both agree is normative. That is to say, it is
not always problematic for a girl to feel ambivalent about
sex and sexual participation (Lamb 2002; Muehlenhard
and Peterson 2005).
We agree that the idea of sexual empowerment is a
potentially important one that could inform sex education
and girls’ growing understanding of how to be sexual in
the world at all ages. We also agree that the term
empowerment has been overused and co-opted by
marketers who then suggest that empowerment can be
achieved through consumerism (e.g., Goldman et al.
1991), so a subjective feeling of empowerment may not
be the only indicator of whether or not a girl is actually
powerful. As Peterson (2010) wrote, “Sexual behavior that
feels sexually empowering for a particular girl may
function to reproduce cultural and institutional constraints
on women‘s sexuality more broadly” (p. 308; see also
Barton 2002). We agree that there are different aspects of
and definitions of empowerment including the subjective
feeling of empowerment (Zimmerman 1995) and access to
political power and resources (Riger 1993).
Despite our many agreements, a sticking point in our
positions seems to be whether we, as “experts”, or in the
very least, as adults who care deeply about girls’ development,
can ever make the strong point, theoretically or
directly to a girl, that a girl who feels empowered is actually
not empowered. There is the smaller dilemma about
whether it is wise or productive to say this to a girl, for
example to influence a daughter’s decisions. And there are
two larger issues associated with this question: One that
asks whether we can ever know if such acts do not
empower or are damaging, and the other which asks
whether experts are the best judges of that. Throughout
the rest of the paper, we explore the complexities of this
conflict: Can an adolescent girl’s subjective feelings of
empowerment—including feelings of sexual desire, pleasure,
and agency—count as one dimension of sexual
empowerment that may in some ways serve her well in
the future and contribute to her ability to know herself
sexually, make positive sexual decisions, become a true
partner in relation to another person, and not participate in
sex in a way that supports oppressive practices? Does the
answer to this question change depending on the age of the
girl? What role does sexualized media, including explicit
pornography, play in our answer? How does our answer
relate to girls’ desire to please a sexual partner? We explore
these challenging topics related to adolescent sexuality
because we recognize that they are potentially fertile
ground for disagreements among feminist scholars, ourselves
included. Most of our discussion of these issues
deals specifically with adolescent girls in the U.S., although
we also use sources that address these issues for adolescent
girls who are from the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand,
and the United Kingdom.
Sex Roles (2012) 66:703–712 705
Age and Sexual Empowerment
In discussions of adolescent girls’ sexual subjectivity and
empowerment, "adolescent" often is poorly defined. In
some cases, this may contribute to feminist disagreements
about what is appropriate sexual exploration for adolescent
girls. Some authors may be thinking of a girl who is 13- or
14-years-old, and some may be thinking of a girl who is 17.
Indeed, the range might be even larger when it comes to
discussions of girls’ sexuality. The National Institutes of
Health (1999) defines “child” as anyone under 21 because
many individuals are still in the education system and
dependent on their families until at least age 21. On the
other end of the spectrum, a commonsense.org public
service announcement sparked controversy by featuring an
11- or 12-year-old girl singing into a videocamera, “Fuck
me,” in imitation of a pop star (Morrissey 2010). Thus,
when it comes to discussions of adolescent girls’ sexual
empowerment, feminists may be envisioning girls ranging
in age from 11 to 21!
Most feminists and psychologists would probably agree
that what is developmentally appropriate for a 17 year old
is not necessarily appropriate for a 13 year old. Yet, when
discussing adolescent girls’ sexuality, we often forget to
address the vast differences among adolescents in terms of
their development (Else-Quest and Hyde 2009).
Of course, age is not the only, or necessarily the best,
measure of socio-sexual development. Not all 17 year-olds
are equally prepared to handle sexual activity or equally
capable of interpreting and critiquing sexual media content.
And we would argue against any biological definition of
“readiness” to handle sexual activity, especially given that
we know that even prior to adolescence, individuals
experience a variety of forms of childhood sexuality, some
of which are perceived as positive and normative and some
of which are perceived as confusing and/or abusive
(Friedrich 2007; Lamb 2006). A problematic kind of
readiness discourse exists in Abstinence Only Until
Marriage sexuality education curricula as “emotional
readiness” (Mast 2001), and we do not wish to support
this narrow concept of sexual readiness either. We both
believe that “emotional readiness” discourses as well as
“biological readiness” discourses promote a false idea that
there a specific time point at which every adolescent or
young adult moves from being unambivalently unready for
sex to being unambivalently ready for sex.
Further, it is important not to look at older teens’
expressions of sexuality as standing apart from younger
teens’ and even girls’ sexuality. Younger girls look to older
sisters and older teens in the media for information about
what it means to grow up sexually. Learning about one’s
sexuality doesn’t begin in adolescence, and to some extent,
the representation of sexuality in and by older teens has an
effect on younger girls. So, if an older teen experiments by
pole-dancing and shows off a sense of sexuality and power,
as did Miley Cyrus on the Teen Choice Awards in 2009
(FoxNews 2009), even with the knowledge that she was
just playing around, who is responsible for how this is
understood or “read” by her younger fans? Yet despite these
complications, to ignore age and developmental level
altogether also seems irresponsible.
So, recognizing that all 13-year-olds are developmentally
different, if we consider a typical 13-year-old, the one
who the Sexualization of Girls Task Force may have had in
mind when they warned parents about the dangers of media
sexualization (APA 2007), what might empowerment look
like for her? Must she know and experience “desire” in
order to protect herself from the media, from rape, from
other exploitation? And what does it mean to experience
“desire” in a positive way when one is 13? Many feminists
might agree that it means that this 13-year-old thinks
positively about becoming sexual, that she is learning about
sexual development and sexual relationships in nonthreatening
ways and in places where questions and
exploration are welcome, and that she looks forward to
both initiating and responding to sexual advances in
relationship to peers to whom she is attracted.
Now we consider the ways in which a 13-year-old might
subjectively feel empowered in her decision to have
intercourse, and we choose this example using a 13-yearold
to push the boundaries of the discussion. Neither of us
believe that most 13-year-olds will benefit from choosing to
have sexual intercourse, and research supports that early
sex is very risky for girls (e.g., Kaestle et al. 2005;
O'Donnell et al. 2001). So, (1) She could feel strong and
positively valenced physical and emotional desire for
intercourse (or for some intense sexual experience).
Regardless of her decision about having intercourse, we
might say that this is a form of empowerment because, in a
culture that has suppressed female sexual feeling, it is
something to celebrate when a girl feels desire this
intensely and positively. (2) She could feel empowered
about making the decision to have intercourse. This feeling
of empowerment could derive from thinking about herself
as an independent chooser, weighing options, and becoming
more and more certain over time. This feeling of
empowerment may be supported by her not having to ask
permission from her parents. (3) She could feel empowered
in her decision because she feels certain that it is the right
one (perhaps because she feels she really loves her partner).
(4) She could feel empowered in that she has thought
through birth control and is going out to buy some condoms
or getting on the pill. This would show a sense of
responsibility about her decision. So we have several
situations, one that describes empowerment as desire,
another that describes empowerment as autonomy (e.g.,
706 Sex Roles (2012) 66:703–712
from parents or other influencing forces), another that
describes empowerment as certainty, and a fourth that
describes empowerment as responsibility.
Any of these scenarios could qualify as some dimension
of sexual empowerment based on some definitions. Yet,
any of these scenarios could ultimately result in a negative
outcome—she could be left by her partner shortly after they
have intercourse, she could get pregnant, she could contact
a sexually transmitted infection, she could get a bad
reputation among her peers. This raises the following
question: If she experiences a negative and unwanted
outcome as a result of her subjectively empowered sexual
experience, was she ever really empowered? We do not
think that a negative outcome necessarily negates empowerment.
We think instead that the kinds of empowered
feelings she had to begin with may need inspection.
Perhaps her initial feelings of sexual empowerment
reflected only one dimension of empowerment, or put
another way, her sense of empowerment may have been
ambivalent at best (Peterson 2010). Given this, how do we
judge the value or accuracy of her subjective feelings of
empowerment?
On the one hand, these subjective feelings of empowerment
may come from oppressive situations in her life. For
example, what if her feeling of sexual desire comes from
imagining herself re-enacting a pornographic act that she
has seen on the internet? What if she comes to feel that she
has made an autonomous choice about her decision to have
sex after she has received considerable pressure from her
17-year-old boyfriend? Or what if her sense of certainty is
based on her false belief that she and her partner will be
together forever? Any one of these feelings of empowerment
could be encumbered by less than empowering
contextual factors.
On the other hand, many 13-year-olds who do have
intercourse do so without planning and without the requisite
desire, autonomy, certainty, and responsibility that we
feminists associate with empowerment. Surely it is better
that a girl experience her sexual desire as positive rather
than as negative. Surely a subjective sense of autonomy and
responsibility are better and possibly more psychologically
protective than feeling coerced and out of control.
And yet, she is 13. There are good reasons for us as adults,
who have more knowledge and life experience than she does,
to not want her to feel desire so potently at this young an age,
to not want her to make autonomous and absolute decisions
that may place her at emotional or physical risk. Moreover,
she is not even of an age when she can legally consent to sex
except perhaps to another 13 year old (depending on the
state). Thus, perhaps subjective empowerment is suspect
when we are considering a 13 year old who may not be in the
best position to evaluate the context and background behind
her own sense of empowerment. Again, this highlights the
complexity and possibly the multi-dimensionality of our
concept of sexual empowerment.
Now what if we think about older adolescent girls and
young women who are more physically and emotionally
mature and for whom sexual activity is increasingly normative?
After all, research suggests that 30% of girls have had
intercourse by age 16, and 67% of girls have had intercourse
by age 18 (Chandra et al. 2005). If we de-emphasize the
importance of subjective sexual empowerment for 13 yearolds,
at what age can we value subjective feelings of
empowerment as a worthwhile goal? Is it valuable or
important for a 17 year-old girl to feel sexually empowered?
A 21 year old woman? A 35 year old woman? A 55 year old
woman? Or are women’s subjective feelings of empowerment
always suspect? After all, as we discuss in the next
section, girls’ and women’s images and stereotypes of what
it means to be sexually empowered sometimes come from
sources (e.g., sexualized media) that are predominantly
created by and marketed to men. Yet, to challenge all adult
women’s subjective feelings of sexual empowerment seems
invalidating given there are few other sources available to
women that “teach” about sexual empowerment. Thus, these
difficult questions lead us back to empowerment as a
subjective feeling that one of us is eager to validate, the
other of us is afraid to. One of us finds it a useful concept;
the other finds it too mired in a discourse that has been
damaged and connected to heavily to problematic institutions
(media, pornography, heterosexism).
Sexualized Media and Experimenting
with Empowerment
Although Lamb’s (2010a) original Feminist Forum article
and Peterson’s (2010) response did not focus heavily on the
role of pornography and other sexual media in adolescent
girls’ sexual lives, this was an important subtext within a
larger discussion of the “pornification” of the culture in
which adolescent girls live. Indeed, in Lamb’s (2010b)
rebuttal to Peterson, the relationship between explicit sexual
media and empowerment was highlighted as a major source
of disagreement, just as it is has been a major source of
disagreement among feminists for many decades (see e.g.,
Cornell 2000).
Central to our disagreements about the role of sexualized
media in the sexual subjectivity of teen girls were two
questions: (1) If a girl is inspired by highly sexualized
media representations (including explicit pornographic
representations) is she less empowered? (2) Does empowerment
have something to do with the way in which she
positions herself in relation to these representations?
One point that we agreed on in our original article and
commentary (Lamb 2010a; Peterson 2010) is that there is
Sex Roles (2012) 66:703–712 707
no such thing as an “authentic” sexuality. All sexuality is
shaped and modified by social forces and cultural discourses
(e.g., Gagnon and Simon 1973), so it does not
make sense to discuss an “authentic” sexuality that is
somehow free from social constraints and influences, and
sexualized media is one potentially important social
influence. Nevertheless, even if all girls are influenced
directly or indirectly by sexualized media, the amount of
ownership or control that girls feel over their own sexuality
in the face of strong media messages may vary—both
between different girls and within the same girl over time
and across relationships. Some imitation of sexualized
media may be playful and lighthearted and some may be
more obligatory or self-defining, and yet we can’t base our
judgments on these forms of imitation simply on how lightheartedly
they seem to be enacted.
Why do girls imitate sexualized media and how
conscious is this imitation? A girl may imitate sexualized
media thinking this is the norm for teen sexuality and
simply that she is conforming to what “all the kids” do. She
may imitate it because she has learned “boys like this.” She
may also imitate it in a more conscious or deliberate way,
experimenting, playing around with how it feels and
finding that it’s pretty exciting to imitate these sexualized
moves and ways of expression. These three descriptions of
imitation aren’t mutually exclusive, either, but they all raise
the broader question—Is a girl who “buys into” massmedia-promoted
forms of sexuality less empowered and
does an awareness of media, an ability to critique it or
observe its influence, make a girl more empowered even as
she imitates?
On the one hand, it seems likely that teen girls’
interpretation and conceptualization of their own sexual
imitation is central in determining the psychological and
interpersonal impact of their mimicry. If a girl sees herself
as a sexual object who must perform to get or keep a boy’s
attention, aren’t the consequences likely to be different than
if she sees herself as engaging in fun, playful experimentation?
Of course, this is potentially an empirical question
that could and should be tested in future research.
On the other hand, even if we were to agree (and
potentially demonstrate through research) that experimentation,
consciously or unconsciously, with mass-mediaproduced
versions of sexuality could be healthy and
nonproblematic, there would still be a secondary critique
about what the goals and intentions of these representations
are and to whom they are sold. There is a problem with
these kinds of representations being “sold” to younger and
younger girls; these images seem to dictate that girls need
to be sexual at a young age, and they may dictate to
adolescent girls some narrow version of what it means to be
sexual. Indeed, advertisers may intentionally promote
sexual insecurity among young girls in order to sell
products that will supposedly turn girls into sexy teens
(APA 2007; Durham 2008; Levin and Kilbourne 2008).
There is also a problematic lack of diversity of sexual
expression and of models of “sexiness” in mainstream and
explicit pornographic media. Gill (2008) writes that this
version of media sexuality is profoundly ageist and
heteronormative as well as classist and racist. Thus while
these media images of sexuality may be empowering to
some extent, they are also incredibly restrictive and shape
desire and subjectivity into forms that are more mainstream.
And they bring up the issue that what might feel
empowering to some may feel so in a context in which
these images disempower others. Is it thus better to have
desire and subjectivity even if it’s an imitation of a
marketer’s version than to have no desire or subjectivity
at all?
We agree that girls are not passive viewers of the media.
Even when advertisers and other producers of sexualized
media have ill intentions, as they commonly do (such as to
promote and exploit girls’ insecurities for the sake of
product sales), that does not necessarily imply that girls
automatically accept the intended message (Lerum and
Dworkin 2009). Thus, even when undesirable or limiting
representations are sold to girls, these representations do
not necessarily leave all girls harmed or unempowered.
Thus, one can and should critique the methods and motives
of those that create the media without taking the position
that media representations of female sexuality are always
harmful to all girls. Further, this highlights the potential
value of media literacy training for adolescents; in classrooms,
adolescents can get some distance from the images’
potential to transform their sexuality by dissecting the
intentions and multiple possible meanings of these messages.
It is encouraging that such efforts to include media
training in sexuality education curricula are already
underway (APA, personal communication, 2010; Dines,
personal communication 2010; Lamb, personal communication,
2009; Tolman, personal communication, 2010).
Finally, we need to consider the argument made by some
feminists that when empowered young women imitate
sexualized media there is potential for them to transform
it in ways that undermine its original intention (i.e., make it
empowering rather than demeaning), and this kind of
imitation needs to be examined differently. There was
considerable discussion in the 1980s and 90s in LGBT
studies about reappropriating and reclaiming labels and
events that derived from oppression and by reclaiming and
re-using them, changing their meaning. The possibilities for
this kind of reclaiming were explored by Butler and hooks
in their essays on the film Paris is Burning (Butler 1993;
hooks 1991). The term “queer” has more or less been
successfully reclaimed to mean something different than it
was originally meant to mean. We agree that the possibil-
708 Sex Roles (2012) 66:703–712
ities for this kind of transformation of sexualized media
messages are there; however, this political kind of resistance
through redesigning and subverting media representations
seems unlikely in the average 17-year-old, let alone
in a 13-year-old, but perhaps with good sexuality education
and media literacy training it is not impossible.
Empowerment and Pleasing a Partner
Regardless of whether one is interested in Abstinence Only
Until Marriage or Comprehensive Sexuality Education for
adolescents (Kirby 2007; Lamb 2010c; Luker 2006), in
U.S. culture it is the norm to tell girls to wait for sexual
activity until they are certain that they want and desire sex;
we tell them not to engage in unwanted sex just to please
their partner. However, sometimes girls and young women
may feel ambivalent about wanting sex (Lamb 2002;
O’Sullivan and Gaines’s 1998; Peterson and Muehlenhard
2007; Tolman and Szalacha 1999), and sometimes girls and
young women may legitimately desire sex because they
want to please their partner or increase closeness with their
partner (Impett et al. 2005; Peterson and Muehlenhard
2007). Indeed, Lamb (2010c) points out that far too often in
sexuality education, the other person (or partner) is ignored
so that sexuality education is all about making the right
choices for oneself with no consideration of other people.
Thus, girls may be left feeling confused and uncertain about
how to follow our well-intentioned advice to wait until they
clearly want and desire sex.
Of course, engaging in sex to please a partner can mean
a variety of different things, and there is likely a range of
subjective positions by which girls sexually please boys.
For example, Impett & Peplau (2003) suggested that
complying with sex due to approach motives (e.g., to show
love or promote intimacy with a partner) may frequently
have positive consequences, whereas complying with sex
for avoidance motives (e.g., to avoid a partner’s anger or
rejection) may tend to have negative consequences.
Further, when we tell girls to wait until they want and
desire sex (and when we make this a condition of sexual
empowerment), we may be (sometimes unintentionally)
promoting traditional sexual scripts that suggest that boys
are constantly striving to get sex and that girls are
responsible for sexual gatekeeping (Edgar and Fitzpatrick
1993). In these scripts, girls are supposed to be unambivalent
about their [lack of] desire and boys are assumed to
always unambivalently want and desire sex. In actuality,
research shows that boys and men feel much more
ambivalently about sex and wanting it, than public opinion
and media representations might indicate (Giordano et al.
2006; Oswalt et al. 2005; Tolman et al. 2003), and certainly
we know that girls often do want and desire sex.
It is also important to note that sometimes girls don’t
have the option to only have sex when they want and desire
it; some girls are forced into sex. Thus knowing and not
knowing what one wants becomes complicated and
sometimes irrelevant when the other person is exploitative.
If we define sexual empowerment as including sexual
assertiveness skills (e.g., being able to clearly refuse
unwanted sexual activity), sexual empowerment may help
to protect some girls/women from coercive sexual experiences,
but even women who are assertive can be sexually
victimized, so sexual empowerment (regardless of how we
define it) certainly is not guaranteed protection against
forced sex.
Considering Empowerment as a Continuum
Peterson (2010) proposed that one way of resolving the
many complexities of sexual empowerment might be to
conceptualize girls as on a developmental path toward
empowerment and on the way, trying on a variety of forms
of sexual expression, some of which might be modeled
after media images of girls’ and women’s sexuality. Thus, a
girl performing a strip tease for her boyfriend because she
watched a pole dance on TV, might in some cases merely
be showing playful sexual experimentation rather than a
sign of sexual oppression. The strip tease need not define
the girl’s sexuality. In other words, the same girl could
perform a strip tease on one occasion and also assertively
refuse unwanted sexual activity on another occasion. After
all, adolescents “try on” on a variety of behaviors, values,
and identities along the road to adulthood (La Guardia and
Ryan 2002); it makes sense that they would try on different
ways of being sexual as well. Peterson (2010) acknowledged
that there is no ultimate version of sexual empowerment
at the end of the pathway; rather, empowerment is a
continuous and multidimensional construct. Although empowerment
may be a developmental process, at any given
time, girls (and women) are likely to experience sexual
empowerment on some levels and disempowerment on
other levels.
Lamb wonders two things. First, how can we assume a
developmental path when we are unclear about the
endpoint? Second, Lamb wonders what makes experimentation
“just” experimentation and thinks that much of the
literature on play supports the idea that play has real
influence and power to constitute who one is as one grows
up. She wonders if imitating a stripper in the dancing of a
13 year old or a porn star in the act of intercourse for the
18 year old, because it is such a powerful image that may
reap rewards from boys and men (who are also influenced
by narrow representations of male sexuality), could lead a
girl at any age to construct sexuality along a narrow
Sex Roles (2012) 66:703–712 709
dimension. And while she may feel empowered, even feel
sexual feelings in her body (and imitative sex does not
necessarily mean that a girl won’t feel sexy, sexual, and
even have an orgasm), one has to consider that, in the
developing adolescentthese experiences may have a formative
effect. In other words, even if it’s experimentation,
these experiments, with their concomitant rewards and
sexual feelings are pretty powerful and can form the adult
sexuality of a person in problematic ways. So is there a path
(or multiple paths) to sexual empowerment?
We agree (to varying extents) that media images have the
potential to be both promoters of and threats to girls’ sexual
empowerment. Especially as girls get older and begin
developing their sexual identities, sexual media has the
potential to play a positive role. Sexual media has the
potential to help dispel sexual shame, provide education,
and promote a diversity of ways of being sexual (Strossen
1993; Tiefer 1995). We also agree that most mainstream
media fails to achieve its positive potential and instead
constructs girls’ sexuality in a way that is narrow and
restrictive. Perhaps one reason that restrictive media images
are a threat to girls’ sexual empowerment is that, for many
girls, the media may be their primary or only source of
information about sexuality and that girls take in media in a
way that isn’t mediated given the poor state of sexuality
education and media literacy in the US.
We further agree that sexuality education is an important
component of sexual empowerment and denial of access to
this is tantamount to oppression (Fine and McClelland
2006). Even Obama’s call for evidence-based sexuality
education (2009) still only gives funding for pregnancy
prevention, which is a very limited form of sexuality
education. Girls who are disadvantaged in multiple ways—
for example, girls who are living in poverty, who have
immigrant parents, and/or who have limited access to health
information or health care—are particularly harmed by the
lack of readily available sexuality education. These girls may
be forced to rely on media depictions of sexuality as their sole
source of education. One path to empowerment might include
a good sexuality education course, which is rarely available
(especially to these disadvantaged girls) given the decades of
exclusive government funding of Abstinence Only courses
(Fine and McClelland 2006). Another path to empowerment
might include media literacy training, which also doesn’t
exist in most schools except occasionally as a couple of
lessons added on to an English curriculum.
Conclusions
One of our goals for this paper was to identify the many
points of agreement that we as feminists share regarding
adolescent girls’ sexuality because many of these commonalities
were obscured in our original point/counterpoint
articles. We have addressed our areas of agreement
throughout the paper. Below we summarize some of the
most important points on which we whole heartedly agree:
1. We want adolescent girls to grow into women who can
receive pleasure and enjoyment from their sexuality.
2. We agree that the media often provides girls with
confusing and damaging messages about their bodies
and their sexuality, and we agree that the media,
especially when combined with media literacy training,
has the potential to promote positive images of girls’
sexuality.
3. We agree that girls frequently experience ambivalence
and uncertainty about their sexual wants and desires. To
deny or pathologize that ambivalence is harmful to
girls.
4. We agree that comprehensive sexuality education is
essential to help address negative media messages,
acknowledge and validate girls’ ambivalence, and
encourage sexual communication skills, all of which
will contribute to long-term sexual satisfaction and
pleasure.
Throughout this article we have raised many questions
that we have left unanswered. In many cases these
unanswered questions reflect our differing perspectives as
individuals on the difficult issues that we have discussed
here. However, even in cases in which we might provide
different answers to the questions we have raised, we
both agree that there is not a single clear or definitive
answer. For example, sexually empowered behavior
likely varies across different individuals, different ages,
different relationships, and different social and cultural
contexts.
We have discussed these questions theoretically, but
empirical research could also shed light on these topics.
Potentially fruitful areas of research in the future include
investigating how adolescent girls’ conceptualizations of
sexual empowerment, sexual desire, and sexual pleasure
differ as a function of their age; examining how girls (of
varying races, ages, and ethnicities) interpret and respond to
sexualized media images; and investigating how girls’
desire to please their partner may have an impact on their
sense of empowerment, their sexual desire and pleasure,
and their ability to practice sexual assertiveness.
We believe that these unanswered questions will require
on-going discussions, struggles, and perhaps even conflict
among feminist researchers and writers, and we think that
these issues are worthy of this attention. We also believe
that differing feminist perspectives on these challenging
questions are valuable in that they will contribute to a richer
and more productive exploration of adolescent girls’
sexuality.
710 Sex Roles (2012) 66:703–712
Acknowledgement The order of authorship is alphabetical. The
authors contributed equally to this article.
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