The kids are all right: on awareness, sex-positivity, and political activism

Academics are famous for their tendency to see the wrong more clearly than they see the right. Trained as we are in graduate school seminars to be critics, encouraged to elevate suspicion to the cardinal virtue, we’re often much more articulate in explaining the problems than in proposing workable solutions. And we often tend to forget to celebrate what’s right and what’s good.

After my flurry of recent posts on sexualization, my friend Elyse wrote me and suggested, tactfully, that while I had made a pretty good case for the negative impact contemporary culture is having on young women, I ought to focus as well on what’s exciting and good. Last Wednesday’s post on webcams and privacy was inspired by a query from a student about what changes I’d witnessed in my years of teaching. And it certainly isn’t the only major change I’ve seen.

So, three bits of good news about college students from my perspective.

1. Now in my eighteenth year of community college teaching, I’m excited by the way in which my students in recent years have embraced the Internet to become much more savvy about feminism and gender justice. In my introductory women’s studies course, I still get plenty of students who have no idea what feminism is or why it matters. It was always so. But each semester, the number of young people who enroll already possessed of a feminist foundation grows. Some already read Jessica Valenti and Courtney Martin years ago, or have been visiting feminist websites — famous and obscure — since ninth grade. When I started teaching, radical notions about women’s equality were confined to college campuses and specialty bookstores; they were largely inaccessible to, say, the daughters of immigrants going to high school in the San Gabriel Valley. Now, thanks to the ‘net, those ideas are widely disseminated, often presented in ways that click with a multi-cultural and economically challenged population of young women. By the time they hit my classroom, many of my newest students already have been given a thorough primer in gender justice. That’s a novel and exciting development, and it bodes well.

2. My students today are much more comfortable talking about sexuality than were students just fifteen years ago. In class discussions as well as in their journals, the young women I’m working with are far more willing to talk about issues like masturbation, birth control, enthusiastic consent, and exploring same-sex attraction than were the students I taught when I first came to PCC. (To be fair, I’m a much better teacher today than I was then, and a much safer presence. But I hear similar things from feminist colleagues who’ve been at this gig as long as I have, so I don’t think this new openness has much to do with my particular personality or teaching style.) For example, as recently as a decade ago, I very rarely had female students argue passionately in defense of pornography. When they did take that stance, they invariably took it on First Amendment grounds; today’s students, many of whom have explored visual erotica since the onset of puberty if not before, tend to take a much more positive view of the liberating potential of cybersexuality.

“Sex-positivity” among young women isn’t just an over-hyped media creation, it’s a real and growing trend in the lives of this particular generation of college students. This is the flip side to the Paris Paradox, the equally real problem of being “sexy” but not “sexual”. This is a generation of young women who’ve been able to buy vibrators online from sites like Babeland, and a generation that’s used the same Internet to get the truth about sex education concealed from them by noxious and stultifying abstinence-only campaigns. (Scarleteen is the indispensable source for detailed and authentically empowering information.) This generation of girls grew up more bombarded than ever with confusing messages about what it means to be a young woman — but they also grew up with more tools to decide the question for themselves than any generation before them. I’m excited for them, and excited for what they’ll do in the world. And I’m very excited to meet their younger siblings.

3. There’s been a huge upswing in political activism. I spent my adolescence as a lonely progressive in the early Reagan Era, surrounded by high school classmates who saw apathy as a virtue. The situation was not much better when I started at PCC, in the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Between 1995 and 2006, I served as an advisor to no fewer than six different feminist-themed clubs. Time and again, I tried to interest my students in gender justice activism. Time and again, a club would get started by a few wonderful young people — and then the club would collapse as soon as those leaders graduated. There was no sustained interest in having a presence on campus dedicated to exploring issues around sexuality, feminism, reproductive rights and so forth. But in 2007, with the help of Feminist Majority, we got another club — the seventh since I’ve been here — up and running. And for three years now, it’s thrived.

The club was active in the 2008 election, and when the inevitable hangover came, I worried that many young people would lose interest in feminist work. Instead, I saw the club grow in 2009, galvanized in particular by the assassination of George Tiller and by the campaign to end the disaster of abstinence-only education. In talking with feminist organizers from groups like Planned Parenthood and Feminist Majority, I discovered that our happy experience at PCC was being replicated across the country. We’ve seen a renaissance of feminist political activism on college campuses, a rebirth heavily assisted by social networking. (I have no idea how we’d put a Feminist Club meeting together on this campus without Facebook.) The confluence of these new social networking technologies with a more anxious and politicized era has given birth to a new generation of young women activists. The issues are largely the same as when I started teaching: economic justice, body image, violence prevention, reproductive freedom, the right to pleasure. But the percentage of students involved in the struggle has risen exponentially, and the tools they use to connect to fellow activists are astonishingly effective. There is much reason to hope, and much reason to rejoice.