The modern girl is aggro, on the hunt

IK - Interesting read from today's SMH. Interesting to me both as a former young person (who feels a tad ripped off that I never had a chance to be as open with sexuality as kids are today), and as a father of two soon-to-be-less-young-than-they-currently-are girls.

July 27, 2005

There's been a seismic shift in the sexual landscape, writes Brigid Delaney.

Want to observe the drinking and mating rituals of the world's youth? Running a pub crawl in Barcelona isn't a bad place to start. Paul has been doing it for close to a decade - and although the faces change, the nights have a sameness about them.

Everyone is nervous at first, until they start drinking free shots. They loosen up, people start to dance, they drink more, some people hook up, some people throw up.

But in the past couple of years Paul has noticed a shift. The women are different, he says. They drink more, and are sexually aggressive. They will approach groups of men and start draping themselves across them, or kissing them. In summer, when the weather's hot, they'll take off their tops and if the men won't dance with them, they'll get it on with each other.

This new generation of women (he puts them at 24 and under) are frightening men, he says. "The blokes just end up getting uncomfortable, then getting drunk and hanging with the other guys."

You see it in the Big Brother house. This new breed of female is libidinous - and comfortable with it. Sexualised early by women's magazines and explicit TV shows such as Sex and the City, she knows her sex drive is nothing to be ashamed of and, in fact, she has the right to exercise it at will.

Call it a legacy of feminism; the post-feminist woman is playing out Germaine Greer's 1971 maxim "Lady, love your c---" to its logical conclusion.

After yet another night of complaining that the men of the Big Brother house don't seem interested in them, housemates Kate, 22, and Christie, 19, go to the sauna for a masturbation session. On Big Brother Uncut on Monday, the women of the house complained of being "horny" - with the men in the house refusing to satisfy them sexually.

When a semi-naked Christie climbed on top of Logan Greg in the bath in the rewards room last week, he seemed more terrified than excited. The men claim they don't want a relationship in the house, that getting involved with a housemate would poison the atmosphere.

Such concerns were previously seen as "feminine" - with women worried that a romantic relationship with a male friend may "spoil the friendship".

The female housemates seem to have no such qualms.

A tilt in the sexual landscape has had an impact on the men in the house. Even with their perfect bodies and their sexual availability, they seem curiously emasculated - the sexual intensity of the women having a sort of Samson and Delilah effect on their masculinity. They seem reticent - scared almost, except for the doomed romantic figure of Tim.

Rebecca Huntley, author of an upcoming book on generation Y, The World According to Y, says the highly sexed, post-feminist woman takes her cues from the likes of Paris Hilton, who is seen as a "man-eater, but there's power associated with this".

Magazines, pop culture and the "strong-sexy" image of women in music videos such as Gwen Stefani and Christina Aguilera provide the DNA of this breed of post-feminist, but the reality is always less clear-cut. Ordinary young men and women are left to negotiate the new "full-on sexual landscape operating at the moment", Huntley says.

"Girls have grown up with an 'I can do what ever I want' attitude; they feel like they can play those kind of roles and deal with the consequences because we have grown up with a society that protects us against sexual assault. The gender script for women has definitely changed, but at least for girls it's full of action. Women propose to men, women proposition men, have one-night stands with men. But for men it's all about what they can't do and they are scared of that."

In this shifting landscape, the backlash has already begun. "Predatory young women" were blamed by several Australian rules football commentators, including Tim Watson and Sam Newman, for allegations of sexual assault against players, while baby-boomer commentators have been shocked by the content of Big Brother Uncut.

Huntley sees the backlash as inevitable. "Some of the biggest critics are baby boomers who themselves spent their youth pushing boundaries of social expectation," she says. "What they find confronting is that the young generation changing the sexual landscape are their children."