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Sex Roles (2012) 66:703712 DOI 10.1007/s11199-011-9995-3
FEMINIST FORUM
Adolescent Girls Sexual Empowerment: Two Feminists Explore the Concept
Sharon Lamb & Zo 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 challengingage 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 womens sexuality. For example, some of the dichotomies that are frequently imposed upon feminism include proporn vs. anti-porn, 2nd wave vs. 3rd wave, and sex-negative vs. sex-positive (Baumgardner and Richards 2003; Edut 2003).
This trend is partially why we, as theorists and researchers,...