The Republican assault on contraception and abortion rights seems to have revived an old question: is sexual freedom good for women? Other creaky perennial questions about a woman’s ambit have finally been laid to rest: virtually no one in American public life seriously worries that higher education spoils a woman, and fewer and fewer fret that working outside the home warps her destiny. But sex is another matter. In a world that always seems to need a woman problem of some sort, it’s as good as any, and more entertaining than most. The trouble is that a problem like this tends to engage the extremes—this time it’s the neo-Puritans, who imagine they can turn back the clock, and the exhibitionists, who hardly know that there is one. We’re left “between ‘Jersey Shore’ and Rick Santorum,” as the Wall Street Journal headlined a recent article on the sexual revolution.
For a more nuanced view, you could watch the new HBO show “Girls,” a series created by and starring the young director Lena Dunham, about post-college life in New York. The girls in “Girls” are fundamentally all right. They’re smart, verbal, and clearly the protagonists of their own lives, though in the way that Woody Allen used to be the protagonist of his movies, because—especially in the case of Dunham’s character, Hannah—they are neurotic and over-thinky, with a comic tendency to get in their own way. They have a fair amount of sex with boyfriends and sort-of boyfriends, and the sex is often awkward—“awkward” being a word that these young women seem notably attuned to. What disappoints them more often than boys do, however, is the post-recession economy: the regimen of unpaid internships, jobs that don’t match up with their estimation of themselves, and crazy rents.
At least, they have one another. In popular culture, women’s friendships are often foregrounded at times when there’s less of an organized feminist movement in the background: it’s a D.I.Y., cultivate-your-own-garden vision of female solidarity. The pioneering TV shows about young women in the big city, during the women’s-liberated nineteen-sixties and seventies, featured heroines who focussed most on their relationships with their boyfriends (“That Girl”) and co-workers (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show”). These women were independent types with dating lives but without a rich array of female friends. The women on “Sex and the City,” on the other hand, were a tight sisterhood. So were those in the gold-digger movies of the nineteen-thirties: the crafty chorus girls who shared digs and often beds (it was the Depression, after all), loved one another best, and took advantage of men. Like them, the girls of “Girls” are the center of one another’s emotional lives, and they work around the boys, from whom they expect a certain amount of lame behavior.
Over all, it’s a show that reminds you that the sexual revolution is a done deal, that few women today see sex as a bargaining chip in a bid for commitment, and that gender parity tends to go along with more sex. You can see that as a tradeoff or as a benefit, but studies have shown it to be true: societies in which the sexes are more equal are societies in which people have more sex. Still, to those disinclined to see this as a good thing, “Girls” offers some validation. Much of that awkward sex is awkward in familiar and timeless ways, but some of it is awkward very specifically. That would be solipsistic, niche sex that takes its expectations from porn, in which the man involved seems to feel weirdly and arrogantly entitled to the satisfaction of his particular fantasies—the guy Hannah is sleeping with has one about an eleven-year-old heroin addict with a Cabbage Patch-doll lunchbox—and to the coöperation of a partner who really isn’t that into them. “Guys my age watch so much pornography,” Dunham told the Times. “When I first started kissing boys, I remember noticing things, certain behaviors, where I thought, ‘There’s no way you learned that anywhere but on YouPorn.com.’ ”
“Girls” also paints a revealing picture because of what, or whom, it leaves out. The show’s young women are protected, in part, by privilege: they went to good colleges and, to a greater or lesser extent, have the financial and moral support of families that believe in them. The sexual revolution has mostly been a boon for upper-middle-class women like them, who have been able to use its freedoms to delay marriage and to find mates they can stay with for the duration, while enjoying active sex lives in the meantime. For the poor, the unmooring of marriage from childbearing has been much more damaging. You can’t take class and economic realities out of the discussion about women and sexual freedom. In fact, the more we learn, the more subtly these things seem to be entwined. A working paper released in March by the economists Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip B. Levine finds that poor teen-agers who live in states where there is greater income inequality are more likely to have babies. It’s not just that they are poor but that they see little chance for advancement if they stay in school, play by the rules, and avoid becoming mothers. Kearney and Levine write, “We speculate that the combination of being poor and living in a more unequal (and less mobile) society contributes to a low perception of possible economic success, and hence leads to choices that favor short-term satisfaction—in this case, the decision to have a baby when young and unmarried.” Teen birth rates have been falling in the United States for two decades, but they are still higher than in any other industrialized country, and perhaps economic inequality offers an insight into why.
When people talk about the sexual “revolution,” they can make the changes in sexual mores seem more intentional than they were, more like a strategically planned uprising with a neat manifesto. In some ways, it was: the feminist movement did call for, and then achieve, greater sexual freedom for women, and access to birth control and abortion as rights. But unintended consequences, and particularly economic forces, have played perhaps an even bigger role in arranging the new sexual landscape: certain moral barriers drop, and then capitalism rushes in with, say, Internet porn, stoking old desires and creating new ones. Like the young women on “Girls,” most young women in the real world are surely grateful for their sexual freedom, but they didn’t necessarily want it shaped by sleazy entrepreneurs. To paraphrase Marx, women make their own circumstances, but not under circumstances of their own making. ♦
