So in the last 15 years the relationship between femininity and sexuality (never straight-forward) has become increasingly problematic. While I was busy watching cartoons and playing with action figures with my kids, the role of women and girls within the narrative of twenty-first-century American identity became publicly sexualized in a way that makes me feel old.

I tend to think of girls in terms of daughters, and having missed most of the 90s (busy with Tom & Jerry – I love animated violence as much as my sons), I never knew Steven Tyler had made a video with his daughter, Liv. Somehow I’d never even heard the song, but I watched Crazy with my friends on Youtube a while back. Wow! He had his 16-year-old daughter work the pole to the lame music of his old, pervy-looking friends? On MTV? Who thought this was a good idea?

More recently, I read a story in the Huffington Post on Britney Spears. No longer hovering on the brink of a complete break-down, she is getting in shape and on the come-back. Britney’s father guides the now slimmer and more photogenic popstar through her apparent recovery. But his description of her, and all of us daughters, struck me as sad and odd. In commenting on the new-found closeness with Britney, he said that “like all daughters, she is very manipulative and cunning.” Really? You mean she’s not just all fucked up because you and the rest of her family promoted an unreal and exaggeratedly sexualized image of her body instead of insisting she develop her consciousness beyond childlike narcissism? Anyway, my goal here is not to join the chorus of Britney analysts, since Matt Stone and Trey Parker have said all perfectly and completely, but instead to explore where we women fit in the here and now, and how this generation of daughters can understand their identities.

What do we expect all the daughters to become? Of course fathers who feature their daughters pole-dancing in their music videos, or work from the assumption that all girls (however damaged and/or ill-prepared) cunningly deceive, are merely convenient caricatures of a popular culture that devours daughters.

But what really are the options? I propose that our girls face an impossible and irreconcilable triangle of choices. Simultaneous and contradictory constructions of femininity bombard girls and women with unachievable and paradoxical standards of beauty, sexuality, success, validation and power. When you boil it all down (and omit crone, sorry Grandma) we have three overlapping, yet ill-fitting options for our daughters: virgin, mother, and whore.

The paradox is immediately clear. A woman cannot simultaneously be a virgin, a mother and a whore. But the idea that a successful woman must be at least two out of the three is pervasive in modern society. Ubiquitous advertising images reflect the widespread cultural emphasis on physical perfection and sexiness in the way we view and judge our girls and ourselves. At the same time, purity and virginity are celebrated in churches, schoolrooms, and in charity programs all over the country. This juxtaposition of expectations and instincts – purity and sexiness – has been explored in depth in literature and movies, but usually through a lens of masculine lust.

In a format that lays Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus, Bratz dolls, S & M Barbie and pole-dancing exercise videos alongside of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), Burkas, Hijabs, and the lucrative, if doomed, Abstinence-Only sex-ed and international AIDS programs, the relationship between purity and sexiness seems hopelessly contradictory. Daughters navigate a treacherous path. They are expected to be virgins, but suspected (and encouraged?) to be cunning, manipulative and, ultimately, whorish – if not by a stage-father, than by a society awash in celebratory images of sexy daughters.

The virgin-whore construction is only one angle of the impossible triangle. Both the other dual relationships involve women’s roles as mother. I should have saved “ubiquitous” for mothers because everyone has/had one to blame. Mothers prop up the republic, birth and raise the next generation in the midst of hardship, and serve as the conscious of the people in times of extreme repression.

Many little girls (presumably little virgins and future whores) expect to grow up and become mothers. A steady percentage of women in the US remain childless, but those who do usually have a well-worn explanation ready for conversations. It’s the social norm. Maternal iconography attests to the timeless narrative of the cosmic womb and the depth of meaning attached to feminine fertility.

How do mothers fit with virgins and whores? Why force motherhood into this uncomfortable triangle with obviously contradictory feminine characteristics like chastity and promiscuity?

Well, people do like the mothers of their saviors and kings to be virgins. Mary and Isis were both virgins, as were the mothers of Buddha, Mithras, and Montezuma I. This seems like a Jungian example of collective human mythology to me, unless all the women were hermaphrodites who had both male and female reproductive organs. Either way, the virgin-mother is a popular construction that reflects ways we find meaning in our lives. Mothers are great, but the really important ones should be sexually pure. Kings and Messiahs come from unsullied vaginas.

Of course in real life, virgins can’t have babies unless they have sex first and just lie about it. And this is where the paradox again becomes messy. If our daughters are forced to live on the narrow border between virgin and whore that is presented to them in our society, than wouldn’t motherhood (or some version of it) be a potential outcome? Sex is often reproductive, if accidentally so, and for whatever reason reproduction takes a toll on women. Having babies, using birth control, and getting abortions (while hilarious when Sarah Silverman does it) has a spectrum of personal, physical, emotional and economic consequences. From the pill to planned parenthood, reproductive choices are part of almost every woman’s life. Few forms of birth control are ideal, as they are invasive, alter hormone levels, or put too great a burden on the female partner.

Abortion divides our society over false positions, pitting unreal “do you want fries with that abortion” attitudes against judgmental pro-lifers who, although riddled with their own metastasizing sin, throw the first stones. Abortion, and the surrounding debates, also reveals the confusion over whom and what a mother should be in modern times. Are we free to be what we want to be? Do we have agency over our bodies and ourselves? Or are we responsible for the safety and character of the next generation? Both? What would we do with the million or so extra babies that would be born if they weren’t aborted anyway? Are we really that into them? And who is lining up to assure women that motherhood is a preferable option? Does Sarah Palin really loves babies once they have exited the womb, or just her own self-righteous power to control the intimate and at times tragic decicions of others?

For ordinary women, those not giving birth to kings and gods, motherhood has always been a risky endeavor. Even today, motherhood puts one at a disadvantage. Refugee camps teem with women and their children, not men and their families. Social justice and reproductive rights are limited and denied throughout the world, and as a result women become less economically secure and mothers become increasingly vulnerable. Here in the US, mothers have WIC, Head Start, foodstamps, public schools and school lunches. In many western European countries, motherhood is treated like a public good, and rewarded monetarily. Mothers in third-world countries often have no safety-nets, and even those who aren’t feeding their starving children dirt-cakes in Haiti, or fleeing Soviet invasion in Georgia, live with material uncertainty.

A mother’s right to material security is often associated with her virtue. A mother-whore shames the family, the community, the nation. The patriarchy is threatened by nothing if not uncertainty over who may have fertilized the eggs. The welfare queen condemned in Reagan’s speech, the crack whore on COPS with nine children, the baby mama humiliated on Jerry Springer, and the adulteress stoned to death by the righteous – they all got what they had coming. That far corner of the triangle makes neighbors gossip, children cringe, and men unite. The mother-whore has no political, moral, economic or social capital. Within the patriarchal structure that we all accept to one degree or another, women who are judged to be mother-whores can be laid low, neglected, and forced into poverty and cycles of violence.

So what will become of a generation of virgin-whores who grow up to be mothers? Has femininity been so redefined in the twenty-first century that seventeen and eighteen-year-olds can Go Wild every spring break, little girls can get stripper dolls for Christmas, and porn can be dirty and commonplace?

Maybe humans are in the midst of a radical redefinition of gender norms and expectations. Maybe when our daughters return from their service in Iraq and Afghanistan they will have only stories of egalitarianism, security and empowerment. Maybe motherhood is on the brink of legitimacy as a civic contribution. Perhaps the world our daughters must engage will encourage them to choose from a variety of feminine models – Sarah Silverman’s singing vagina, my beautiful lesbian cousins, pundits, adventurers, vagabonds or minstrels.

But I fear the opposite. I fear that we have forced our daughters into a double (or even triple) bind, no-win situation. Allowed to enjoy neither chastity nor free love, inured to a culture that celebrates their degradation, and chasing the unachievable, our daughters may end up looking like anonymous Spears girls – not cunning and manipulative (if only!) but dumpy and disappointed virgin-mother-whores who society has permission to screw, humiliate, and abandon.

In danger of being tricked into bartering their innocence and sexuality for the impossible modern female ideal, our daughters must be inoculated against destructive behavior and harmful expectations en masses. Sort of like Gardasil, but instead requiring a complete cultural revolution, a robust examination of power and gender relationships, and a global commitment to both social justice and a moral, sustainable economy. Until then, I guess I would keep them ugly – thick glasses, baggy clothes, no braces or acne medicine (or nose and/or boob jobs – what the FUCK were you thinking mothers?) I would also go for girls-only private schools. But then luckily, I only have sons.

© Feather Crawford Freed 2008

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