Tag Archives: Feminist Pedagogy

“The Thoughts of Six-Hundred Pounders”: Class, Ambition, and the Privilege to Err

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This is an abridged and updated version of a post I wrote in February 2009

Is it irresponsible to tell young people to follow their bliss?

Four weeks into the new semester, my classes are more crowded than ever before, as a changing economy sends more and more people desperate for new skills back to the community colleges for retraining. At the same time, middle-class parents who might once have been able to afford to pay for four years at university for their son or daughter now encourage their kids to spend two years at a far more affordable (if obscenely over-crowded) community college like my own Pasadena City College. And as always happens in an economic downturn, state services are cut at precisely the same moment that demand for those services increases.

In thinking about what we all fear is to be long slow decline in public education — and about the double-dip recession in which we are almost certainly now caught — I think about my role as a gender studies professor and feminist educator. Should how I teach — and what I teach — change, at least in some way, to address the current crisis? I take great pride, and have for years, in the number of my former students who go on to major in Women’s Studies or Gender Studies in part because of what they got out of my classes. I’ve always held that students should major in something they love, rather than something that they think will get them a job. I’ve preached the (at best, optimistic, at worst, criminally misleading) mantra that “If you do what you love, the money will follow.” That was always a questionable proposition, particularly for those students who don’t have access to the kinds of networks which traditionally provide the social and financial capital with which to turn dreams into a sustainable living. Is it even more of a questionable proposition now, as we face what could be a prolonged recession with potentially massive unemployment?

Pursuing Gender Studies as a major is obviously no guarantor of financial security. But neither is a degree in finance; look at the massive layoffs in the banking industry. A career in construction is no more promising, nor a career in real estate. (If I had a dollar for every student I knew who was working on a real estate license during the peak of the housing boom between 2004-06, I’d be able to take an entire class to lunch.) When I was an undergraduate, with the Cold War still the defining global dynamic and with Reagan in office, many people I knew at Cal were studying aerospace engineering. They figured on a never-ending buildup of arms and materiel to confront the Soviet Union; the “smart money” said a career preparing for the defense industry was a sure thing. The Berlin Wall came down five months after I graduated college, and for the next dozen years, aerospace jobs were shed like dog hair. The point is an obvious one: for a student in her late teens, looking ahead to four or five decades in the work force, there is no major at college that will guarantee a steady and reliable income. In times of great instability, a major in something “impractical” like history or women’s studies makes no less sense than anything else. It is not, I insist, irresponsible to point so many undergraduates towards academic gender work.

But I worry that my own privilege may lead me to give poor advice. Continue reading →

Male feminists, sex work, and SlutWalk: part two of a conversation with Meghan Murphy

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On Monday, I posted the first part of an exchange with Meghan Murphy, a blogger and radio host with the Canadian F Word Feminist Media Collective. I answered five questions she had asked of me, and we each posted the same piece at our respective sites. Predictably, we both attracted critics; some of Meghan’s radical allies were incensed that she would legitimize me by engaging, while some of my liberal/sex-positive friends were equally exasperated with my decision to take part in this dialogue.

In any event, what follows below the cut is the second part of our exchange, in which Meghan responds to five of my questions about male feminists, sex work and SlutWalk. Intercourse and puppy dogs also come up for discussion, though not in the same context. Continue reading →

More on tragedy and powerlessness and teaching sexual justice

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From Madison to Ras Lanuf to Itamar, from Japan to Côte d’Ivoire, it has been a heartbreaking week.

I’ve sent money and prayers. I’ve hugged my daughter just a bit tighter. And I’ve reminded myself that in this confusing and turbulent time, advocating for gender justice is not an extravagance or an indulgent irrelevance. As I wrote on Wednesday, I believe that addressing issues of sexual desire and shame, of body image and perfectionism, is all a small but vital component of justice work. The most effective agents of change are not those who are haunted by personal demons and are longing for a distraction — the most effective agents of healing in the world are those whose inner wounds have been healed. It is not bourgeous narcissism to say we must go inward before we go outward; rather, that process of self-discovery is an indispensable stage on the journey to becoming someone with the courage and capacity to heal not only one’s own community but to respond proactively to the kind of human and animal global suffering that seems so particularly acute this week.

After I wrote that post on Wednesday, I thought about what I’d written, second-guessing myself. Was I just giving comforting pablum to gender studies majors? Was this just solipsistic self-justification? There was a time, in my much younger years, when I would have been paralysed by that kind of anxiety, and been prone perhaps to a brief (or extended) bout of depression. The difference between 43 and 26 (which was how old I was when I started teaching full-time) is that I’ve been given the gift of certainty. I know the work I do matters, not because it’s me doing it, but because I’ve seen how this work can transform lives.

This doesn’t mean I don’t have moments where I feel powerless in the face of the especially awesome scale of destruction and pain and disappointment we’ve seen this week. But it does mean I channel that pain into working harder at what I know how to do.

I’m looking forward to the classroom tomorrow.

A mea culpa

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I wrote last week about Young Feminists Speak Out, an event I attended in Santa Monica. Though it was an important and interesting discussion, I noted that I was taken aback by what I interpreted as an ageist slight at “older feminists.” I mentioned posing for a Facebook photo with my colleague and friend Shira Tarrant, each of us with our middle fingers raised; the picture was captioned “middle-aged feminists flipping off ageism.” I posted it on Facebook within seconds, while the speakers were still speaking and the event was ongoing. Furthermore, while I tweeted my annoyance, I didn’t bring it up in the Q&A that followed, and I left the event early to have dinner with friends.

I’m fortunate to have thousands of Facebook friends, including a great many people in the feminist community and many, many former students. The photo ended up in everyone’s newsfeed on Facebook, and attracted many comments and much discussion. And the impression it left was that Shira and I, as “professional” feminists and professors in our forties, weren’t spending a lot of effort on connecting with the young people who were speaking. We had constricted around a couple of unfortunate remarks, and my choice to post the photo reinforced the notion that ageism had been the great theme of the event. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Writing at Feminist Fatale today, Miranda Petersen takes issue, rightly so, with how I interpreted the evening. Miranda writes:

The truth is age discrimination goes both ways. It’s funny; we addressed the topic of the “generational divide” to help break down some of those assumptions. Instead, we experienced first hand the lack of respect many young feminists are confronted with: either we are cast as ignorant or naive (e.g., “they’ve got so much to learn…”), or our integrity and motives are questioned (e.g., our justification for using “young feminists” in the title). There is certainly much learning to do on our part, and the distinction between age vs. ideological divides is worth some serious discussion. But how are we supposed to do better if we aren’t taken seriously to begin with?

Emphasis in the original.

Miranda’s right. I take full responsibility for posting a photo that was inappropriate and got a tremendous amount of attention. For the record, the picture was taken with my camera and was my idea; it was an impulsive and frankly juvenile decision to post it. I chose to do at the workshop what I try never to do with my students, and indeed warn against — taking one inflammatory remark out of context and focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else. For someone who considers himself a role model as well as an advocate for egalitarianism and social justice, for someone who works with these young people day in and day out, that was disappointing and inappropriate and I am genuinely, publicly sorry. I was wrong.

Ageism is a real issue. It does go both ways. And the annoyance at being falsely characterized as technologically incompetent hardly justifies tuning out the excellent points made by the many wonderful young speakers at last Thursday’s event.

I look forward to participating with enthusiasm and sincerity (and my twittering thumbs) at another such event soon. I will be participating with my colleagues and friends, for that they are, regardless of age.

The Master’s Tools: feminism and titles on campus

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I got an email last week from Abby (not her real name):

I work in a Feminist Center on my campus and we have recently welcomed a new director to our center. Upon meeting her I used her first name not even thinking about it, and was corrected by a different person who told me she would prefer me to address her as Dr. so and so.

As we work in a feminist center that focuses on outreach and education about feminist issues and ideals to students, I found her request to be addressed as Dr. to be anti-feminist and pompous. Incredibly pompous. I wouldn’t be so bothered if I worked in a center that didn’t focus on feminist ideals. It creates a very clear hierarchy, and thus who’s opinions and views are valued more – hers. It clearly has nothing to do with formality, as she is not going around calling us student workers Ms. and Mr. so and so. It has everything to do with her need for people to toot her horn. I understand she worked hard for a Ph.D, but if she really needs anyone and everyone to keep congratulating her on it by way of calling her Dr., that’s plainly arrogant.

What it says to me is: I’m a better feminist than you because I have a Ph.D. And I have a Ph.D because I had the money and the means to get one. I find all of if very reflective of her feminist philosophies. It may seem harsh, but I really question whether I can consider her a feminist because of it. It just goes against so many feminist principles.

There are a pair of conflicting ideals that appear in response to Abby’s note.

On the one hand, we live in a world where the Ph.D. (and other terminal degrees) are important markers of accomplishment. Some people feel that it’s vitally important for members of groups who have not traditionally earned such degrees (meaning anyone other than white men) to display them proudly in order to send an inspirational message. Abby’s director may believe that young women not only need to see older women with Ph.Ds, they need to see those women addressed with the kind of respect that was once reserved only for men.

And of course Ph.D.s take money. They also take sacrifice, often the sacrifice of a larger community (like spouses and parents). To refuse to use the title, some folks think, is to discount the sacrifices others made so that one member of the family could earn a Ph.D. It’s one thing to be falsely modest on your behalf, another thing altogether to be falsely modest on behalf of those who helped you along the way. Parents have long bragged about their “son, the doctor”. Isn’t it important that they be able to brag about their “daughter, the doctor” as well?

I’ve written before of my personal disdain for the title “doctor”, and my refusal to hang my diplomas on the wall. But I come from an academic family; both my parents, as well as my brother, have doctorates. My paternal grandmother earned her Ph.D. at the University of Vienna in the 1920s. We were raised to see diplomas on the wall or an insistence on titles as vulgar ostentation, evidence of “trying too hard” or “showing off.” But that’s a position of privilege rather than a universal truth, and I freely acknowledge the distinction. Those who are the first in their families to earn something — and those who are particularly mindful about setting an example to those they teach or mentor — may find that using or displaying those titles are essential ways of honoring one generation and inspiring another.

In an academic setting, where the professor has the gradebook and the student doesn’t, the use of first names may suggest a false equality. It may even strike some people as a disingenuous attempt to cover up the power differential. Using the term “doctor” may seem more honest under such circumstances. Of course, the term “professor” (which, used generally, can encompass those with and without Ph.Ds) solves this problem neatly.

But Abby has a point about the danger of hierarchies. Feminism at its best is more than just giving women an opportunity to compete in traditionally male spaces by traditionally male rules. It’s about changing those rules and reimagining those spaces. Most of us know the oft-quoted line from Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” An insistence on titles certainly smacks of the “master’s tools.” It does privilege one kind of knowledge (the sort that comes from writing a dissertation and having the money for grad school) over other kinds of knowledge. Trust me, I have many colleagues who don’t have a Ph.D. who’ve taught me far more about the business of teaching than my fellow holders of the doctorate.

While it might be fine to use titles as a sign of respect for a particular kind of sacrifice, insisting that the title “doctor” be used for Ph.D. holders strikes me as it strikes Abby: incompatible with a feminist commitment to the kind of egalitarian values one might expect in a campus women’s center. A female professor who wishes to be addressed as “doctor” in a classroom setting is one thing; to expect that in an explicitly feminist space like the Women’s Resource Center is something altogether different. A Women’s Resource Center should be a place where traditional campus hierarchies are called into question, where the focus is as much on nurturing the spirit as it is on disciplining the mind. There’s no inconsistency in being “Jane” when one is in the campus WRC, and asking to be called “Dr. Doe” in a more explicitly academic setting. And if I were able to speak to Abby’s campus director, that’s the advice I’d give.

It’s a dangerous thing to be too enchanted with the master’s tools.

Yes, No, and Hmmm revisited

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I’ve been fortunate to have two pieces up in the Guardian and two at Jezebel within the past fortnight. (Here, here, here, here.) It’s been wonderful to read the comments and engage with a much-larger audience than I get on this blog. (Though thanks to the links coming back from those two publications, I had a couple of instances recently where I hit 10,000 unique visitors within a 24-hour period, a much-welcomed milestone.)

Reading the comments at Jezebel and the Guardian is an excellent reminder of the difficulty of writing for a broad audience. There are the flattering notes from those who think you’ve nailed it perfectly — and there are just about an equal number of harsh criticisms from those who think you’ve completely missed the point. The most interesting responses, at least from my perspective, are those that take the conversation deeper, using the original article as a trailhead into a more thoughtful discussion.

I’ve often passed along to my students (and occasionally mentioned to my readers) the tool that was given to me by a wonderful Episcopal priest, Scott Richardson. Scott officiated at my third wedding, and is now dean of the Cathedral of St. Paul in San Diego. Scott was fond of suggesting that we should respond to a sermon — or an article — with a “Yes”, with a “No”, and with an “Hmmm.” If we’re thinking carefully, he noted, we’ll very rarely agree with absolutely everything that we’re told by a parent, a professor, or a pastor. At the same time, except in a few very unfortunate instances, there will surely be something we acknowledge as accurate and insightful in a lecture, a homily, or a post. And then there will be those things we read or hear that leave us stirred up, uncertain, not ready yet to say “that’s spot on” or “that’s totally off-base.” These are the “hmmms”, and they tend to be much more useful in provoking reflection, discussion, and change than the simple “yes” or “no” responses. Continue reading →

For pleasure, for justice, and against shame: on acceptance as a prerequisite for growth

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The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it.

– Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

While listening to Clarisse Thorn lecture in my women’s studies class last Thursday, this quote popped into my head. Though I didn’t mention it in my most recent post, it was already on my mind when I wrote about rethinking my dismissiveness towards the plight of men eager for “feminist dating tips.” One could substitute the word “feminist” for “spiritual” in the AA quote, I think, and get to the heart of what I’m wrestling with this week.

Theory has consequences. Ideas have an impact. That’s not a new insight for me or anyone else. But when it comes to writing about men, women, and feminist sexual ethics, I’m ever more keenly aware that those of us who seek to encourage the transformation of both the individual and society at large often end up inadvertently shaming the very people whom we are trying to inspire.

I wrote a three-part series a couple of years ago, praising Robert Jensen’s wonderful Getting Off. But when I actually assigned the book in my “Men and Masculinity” course, I found that Jensen’s radical anti-porn stance not only aroused disagreement (which is healthy) but shame (which isn’t). This past July, I wrote about rethinking my own anti-porn stance, and about my decision not to reassign Jensen’s book (which I still think is very useful) as mandatory reading for my masculinity course:

I loved Jensen’s thesis… Many of my students did too. But some of my students of both sexes who told me they viewed porn felt overwhelmed, shamed, guilt-ridden as a result. One young woman told me she had stopped looking at porn but felt guilty about the arousing images that still popped into her head. Another young guy, one of my best students, told me that he felt as if he’d been set up for failure, as if Jensen and I were positing abstinence from pornography as the sine qua non of being a decent male. “If I masturbate to porn can I still be a good man was the question I got from more than one anguished participant in the class. And if several of the students were willing to divulge such private pain to me, I can only assume that still others felt the same way but kept silent.

Clarisse is a well-known advocate for what is usually called “sex-positive” feminism, as well as an activist for BDSM acceptance. She takes the position that some folks may have an innate orientation towards BDSM, a stance of which I am deeply suspicious but not immediately dismissive. But watching my students’ reactions to her — and reading the emails and Facebook messages I got from several of them afterwards — I realized how important it is to have feminist voices that celebrate pleasure and desire. Theory matters to Clarisse as it does to me; justice matters to her as well. (In her real life, where she goes by her birth name, she is a committed activist for a variety of causes.) But though she recognizes that our culture is deeply corrupted by what is increasingly often called “kyriarchal” influences, she understands that all of us have to live and love and fuck and create and nurture within that culture. Just as ringing Sunday sermons in church aren’t of much use if they aren’t applied in the weekday lives of the congregation, so too a feminism that is heavy on inspiring classroom rhetoric needs to offer folks reassurance and encouragement in every other aspect of their lives.

One of the critiques that feminists of color had of mainstream white feminism a generation ago was that middle-class white feminists tended to prioritize “sisterhood” over all other values. Women of color who lived in what white feminists considered “patriarchal” and “oppressive” ethnic groups were encouraged to extricate themselves from their families and their cultures for the sake of individual happiness. Black, Latina, and Asian feminists insisted — quite rightly — on a different kind of feminism, one that could be synthesized with traditions and values that they held dear. What seemed hopelessly oppressive to well-to-do WASPy feminists was experienced very differently by many non-white women.

The same problem happens around sex. Continue reading →

Apples and appetite: on anorexia and western faith

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For the first time since Spring 2008, I’m teaching my “Beauty and the Body in the Euro-American Tradition” course. For the past decade or so, I’ve had a fairly predictable schedule. Each semester, I teach at least one section of Western Civ, Modern Europe, and Women in American Society. Those three classes are my “bread and butter”, as it were. I teach a fourth class each semester as well, and rotate among Gay and Lesbian American History, Men and Masculinity in American Society, The Dysfunctional Family in the Western Tradition, and the Beauty and Body course. I sometimes play with or alter the sequence. I’ve taught other courses in my nearly eighteen years here (such as the two-semester sequence of British History) and I’ve got a few other courses I’ve got in mind to develop (A History of Pornography class, and a course on American Religious History.)

Some of my women’s history lectures were recorded and put online last semester by my wonderful student Mon-Shane Chou. At some point, I’d like to get all my lectures up online, both so that my students could review them and interested outsiders could hear them as well. Since I (and the college) make attendance mandatory, I’m not worried about a sudden drop off in the number of folks in my classes as a consequence. In my nearly seven years of blogging, I’ve also written posts that recapitulate some of my lectures, as long-time readers may know.

In yesterday’s Beauty and the Body course, we talked about Christian conceptions of female appetite. In a broad interdisciplinary course like this, it’s hard to spend too much time on any one topic, but I’m introducing them to Western theories of the body and desire as quickly and accessibly as I can. The previous lecture had been on Plato’s mind/body dualism, and the problems that his views pose for us down to the present day. I want my students to see that suspicion of the body and its needs has a history, and that their own struggles for self-acceptance are rooted as much in an ancient tradition as in the effort to conform to a standard set by contemporary culture.

I can’t remember who I was reading in grad school (it might have been Joan Brumberg, or Caroline Walke Bynum) or somebody else when I first realized that the original sin of Adam and Eve revolved around food. Though the serpent tempts Eve with fruit from the tree of knowledge (rather than merely telling her that the apple, or whatever it was, will taste yummy), the means by which she commits the first sin is through eating. Adam eats too, but subsequently. Put plainly, one of the many ways to read the story of what happened in the Garden is that pain and suffering entered the world because a woman couldn’t control what she put in her mouth. That has tremendous implications for women’s relationship with spirituality and food down to the present day.

I’ve written often about the “moral language of food” (the habit of describing being on a diet as “being good” or eating something fattening as being “bad”). We first see this emerging in American vernacular in the 1920s, but of course it’s much, much older than that. The fasting behavior of medieval women that Bynum documents predates, obviously, a modern media culture obsessed with women’s thinness. But the constant throughout history, as I suggest to my students, is that thinness has had a moral dimension.

Thinness is radical self-denial made manifest for all to see. Whether one is virginal or promiscuous, whether one masturbates or lives sadly ignorant of self-pleasure, one’s private sexual behavior rarely leaves enduring marks on the body. Neither sexual virtue or vice shows up the way that extreme dieting or overeating will. (Though the most common consequence of one kind of sex, pregnancy, does leave a mark — but only on women’s bodies.) Food is public in a way that sex isn’t; eating is the most pleasurable thing most of us will ever do in groups. So food has a moral implication that no other source of bodily delight does. Not even sex carries the same, um, heft. Continue reading →

You took a job away from a woman: a preliminary response to “factcheckme”

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Eight days ago, I wrote a post about what I saw as one right way for men to work in feminist communities. In that post,I quoted from this piece by Amelia at Feministe, and I responded in particular to this comment by Factcheckme.

Factcheckme wrote a response to my response to her: On Credibility. By her own description a radical feminist (a term she uses to distinguish herself from what she calls “fun fems”), FCM rejects the case I made for responsible male participation in feminist groups. Her post is short, and she and her commenters develop the thesis at greater length in the thread that follows below it.

There’s a lot to unpack about Factcheckme’s views. She’s particularly concerned (some might say obsessed) with the problem of heterosexual intercourse (which she, like so many these days, abbreviates PIV for penis-in-vagina.) She cites Dworkin’s Intercourse a lot, though FCM’s conclusions seem more radical than the late great writer and theorist. (I’d like to address the PIV intercourse issue in another post.) What I wanted to deal with here is this comment she makes in the thread:

it bothers me very much that so-called “feminist men” are teaching womens studies. there is something so fundamentally wrong with that, its creepy, disgusting, its a violation and they fucking well know it. it also takes work away from women, who are going to be infinitely more qualified to teach it. and thats fucking inexcusable, it really is.

That’s a criticism I’ve heard many times over the years, and it’s a serious one that deserves a serious response. There are three parts to FCM’s critique of men teaching women’s studies, and it may be helpful to answer them in turn:

1. It’s a violation of feminist principles
2. It takes work away from women
3. Women are infinitely more qualified to teach women’s studies than are men

The answer to the first charge is, obviously, that it all depends on whose feminism we’re talking about. Feminism is a patchwork quilt, not a seamless garment; we speak rightly of feminisms. As FCM makes clear, the gulf between radical feminism and what she calls “fun fems” (what others might call classically liberal feminists) is a vast one; the gulf is equally vast at times between both groups and the womanist tradition with which so many non-white activists identify. For some feminists, encouraging men to live out feminist principles (not just in lip service, but in action) is an essential part of transforming society along egalitarian lines.

I’ve written before that the number of men in my women’s studies classes continues to rise. The number of men who claim the name of feminist (or pro-feminist, or feminist ally) has gone up as well. I was very isolated when I started taking women’s studies courses a quarter century ago; the young men in my courses today are not nearly so alone. This isn’t just because I’m a male professor; my female colleagues who teach their own sections of the same courses report a similar rise in male interest over the past decade or so. FCM will have her own conclusions as to why this rise is occurring (she might say that academic feminism has lost its bite, and “sold out”); my feeling is that we’re raising a generation of young people more committed than ever to the principle that biology is not identity. To at least one large bloc of feminists, the success of the movement lies in the adoption of uncompromising egalitarian principles by the broadest possible section of society. That “big tent” feminism can mean, of course, the cynical manipulation of feminist rhetoric by the decidedly anti-feminist likes of Sarah Palin. But it can also mean an increasing acceptance of feminist ideals. And one unimportant sign among many more significant ones of the success of those ideals is the willingness to hire men to teach women’s studies courses. Continue reading →

Biology still isn’t destiny: on creating safe childhoods in an age of ever-earlier puberty

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I’m easing back in from hiatus with a fresh post.

In 2006, I wrote about the historic drop in the onset of menstruation and the rising age of marriage. It’s a topic familiar to many of my women’s history students. The basic premise is that the average age of first menstruation (menarche) dropped by about five years (from about 16 to about 11) between 1900 and 2000 in America, while the average age that women first married increased from about 21 to about 27. Meanwhile, studies have shown that the average American girl (if there is such a thing) loses her virginity around age 16.

What’s the interesting point? Call it the “constancy of five”. Today, the “average” American girl first has heterosexual intercourse approximately five years after menarche. In 1900, if we can make the dangerous assumption that at least a fair percentage of American young women were virgins when they wed, they too were having their first intercourse approximately five years after they began menstruating. The five year gap is the one constant even as all the other variables have shifted.

This is statistically intriguing, but has huge implications for those who wish to foist nineteenth century morality onto twenty-first century minds and bodies. Parents who expect (as many parents from traditional cultures expect) their daughters to marry as virgins, but to only marry after finishing a degree and starting a career, are asking their girls to “wait” three times as long as women “waited” a century ago. When the old folks lament the “declining morality” of the younger generation, they miss the fact that what they’re asking their daughters to do is considerably more than was expected of their great-grandmothers.

I thought of all this when the study came out last week showing that girls are continuing to enter puberty earlier and earlier. Since 1997, when Joan Brumberg’s indispensable Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls was published, the percentage of girls aged 6-8 who exhibited early breast development has doubled among whites and gone up 50% among African-Americans. (Thelarche is the term for the beginning of secondary breast development, btw.) There has been a corresponding increase, other studies report, in the percentage of girls who have their first period before their tenth birthday.

Whatever the reasons (obesity, a diet heavy in meat, etc.) there’s little question that the real challenge for feminists is to focus on the needs of this very vulnerable population. There’s no question that fifteen year-olds are better (if imperfectly) equipped to deal with the challenges of menstruation and changing bodies than are girls five years younger. There has been no concomitant rise in the rate of emotional maturation to go along with the declining age of menarche. As school nurses across the country can attest, adapting advice about menstruation to an ever younger group of girls presents special challenges, the anxieties of parents not least among them.

It’s important to remember that earlier maturation doesn’t need to lead inexorably to premature sexualization. We need to distinguish these as two separate issues. Physiological changes that cause preteens to develop breasts and hips do not cause adult men to leer. The fetishization of young women (pedophila chic, as some have dubbed it) is a cultural response to men’s anxiety about women’s increasing power. Part of the anti-feminist backlash is the sexualization of the very young. For those who fantasize about a pre-feminist world in which women are pliable and submissive, it makes perverse sense to focus desire increasingly on the very youngest girls whose capacity to set boundaries and to exercise agency is obviously limited. The growing physiological reality of early puberty serves as justification for sexualizing preteen and “tween” girls. The vulgar expression “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed” dates back at least as far as the Second World War (and may be much older) — but read in the light of a dramatically falling age of menarche, it becomes more unconscionable to repeat with each passing decade.

We can start to carve out safe space for this vulnerable population of pubescent youngsters by committing ourselves individually and collectively to a zero-tolerance policy on their sexualization. This doesn’t mean forbidding your eleven year-old daughter from wearing a miniskirt. It means holding adults (parents, teachers, strangers on the street, Uncle Bert) responsible for seeing these girls in women’s bodies as children still. It means watching our language; for some, it may mean watching their eyes. It means sending a message to girls and to everyone who interacts with them that their bodies are theirs and theirs alone. It means redefining our notion of development so that ten year-olds who have already entered puberty continue to be allowed to be children safe for as long as possible from the harassment, the leers, and the judgment that is so much a part of female adolescence in our society.

The next time you hear an adult man make a sexualized remark about a teen girl –even a celebrity such as, say, Miley Cyrus — call him on it. Make it clear that a girl in what appears to be a woman’s body is still a girl, and that adult men are fully capable of distinguishing between eroticising a well-developed 13 year-old child and a woman twice her age. Men are not so weak, so stupid, or so blind that they cannot make these distinctions in their actions, in their words, and in their very thoughts. Now, more than ever, we need to commit ourselves to empowering a generation of girls who are confronting unprecedented challenges. And we empower them by giving them the safe space to mature emotionally at their own pace, regardless of the ever-increasing speed at which their bodies are developing.