You can see why this book is a fascinating-and sometimes disturbing-read. She tried to find out why a girls' underwear manufacturer would market thongs to 5-7 year olds. She spoke with tots who've learned from Bratz toys and TV shows how to strut their stuff, and middle school teachers who think it's appropriate and empowering for girls to be taught pole-dancing and lap-dancing and perform in front of the whole school. She quotes women who are upset if construction workers don't wolf-whistle when they walk by and parents who can't understand why their daughters are still virgins (why don't they "just get it over with"?). Shalit quotes extensively from interviews and email conversations with women coming from all perspectives, including those representative of the oversexualized view of women today. It's more of a documentary of contrasting points of view. Girls Gone Mild is similarly well-researched and very current, but it doesn't have the unity and the passion of A Return to Modesty. Overall, Girls Gone Mild didn't grip me as much as her first book, which was a comprehensively-researched, compellingly-presented case for modesty as the truest way to empower women, with examples from the pages of history to the pages of Cosmopolitan, driven by the author's passion, good sense and sound logic. There are "3rd and 4th wave feminists," as Shalit calls them-"feminist" girls who don't buy the militantly anti-feminine feminist thinking of 1st and 2nd wave feminists.
There are girls fighting Abercrombie & Fitch over their t-shirt messages, girls speaking out as role models for abstinence, and girls starting a nationwide movement of fashion shows of flattering, modest clothing. The subtitle is "Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to be Good," and the book documents hopeful pockets of cultural revolution against the prevailing ideas that women have to be aggressively sexual to get ahead. Girls Gone Mild, by Wendy Shalit, picks up where her last book- A Return to Modesty: Recovering the Lost Virtue-left off.
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