The authenticity-watchman state

I promised myself no more posting about gender until I finished my homework, but maybe just this one:

The idea of the ‘bad girl’ has long been linked to deviance, particularly criminal and ‘unacceptable’ sexual behaviour. Embedded in a diversity of discourses, popular culture, rules and systems that regulate people’s behaviour, the ‘bad girl’ plays counterpoint to the idealised ‘good girl’. Many archetypes have defined ‘appropriate’ gender roles, domains and behaviour for young women, centred on a feminine ideal. To avoid being labeled, girls have had to negotiate carefully the double binds governing their sexuality and behaviour over generations (Lees 1993). Early feminist scholarship identified such regulation as integral to women’s inequality in public and private worlds.

If you replace "bad girl" with "bad boy" and "feminine" with "masculine," you get an equally true and much more interesting paragraph. It's ain't easy winning all that bread, and Brando still gets the chicks!

The final paragraph, though, is where Dorothy Bottrell goes completely off the rails for reasons that have nothing to do with gender:

Yet many young women challenge and resist the ways they are represented in media and culture (although these books do not discuss this), and access to "can-do" success is clearly shaped by race and class inequities. Further, there are feminist standpoints that challenge neoliberal individualism. These standpoints emphasise that we need to understand how knowledge and power are related in systematic ways and that expertise and risk management can both mask and expose the particular groups targeted through institutional regulation. This does not, however, mean that we have to give up the emancipatory potential of individualist feminism. Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen (2004) argues that young women are developing a "relational individualism." Embracing individuality and agency can include both pursuing personal interests and social, cultural, and environmental projects that incorporate political and social justice orientations. Negotiating the tensions between desire for unique achievement and for elements of conformity, for autonomy and responsibility to others, may point to new ways of conceptualising the personal as political that better incorporate individuality and difference. The idea that individualism "may also become a shared identity, a sort of 'social skin' that protects and improves social integration" supports Maguire’s optimism about change and Chesney-Lind and Irwin’s call for shifting attention to the problems girls face.

Oh, dear. I thought the whole point of libertarians was that they were too busy living the good life to make everyone else's "social, cultural, and environmental projects" their business.

To reduce all human relationships to mutually beneficial contracts and then get really worked up about them seems like a recipe for disaster, or at least for really twisted understanding of, among other things, husband-wife and politician-citizen. If the fundamental principle of the new social justice is that individuality has to be protected, then we get a situation where no one is allowed to make too many demands (social, ethical, emotional) on anyone else for fear of diluting their authenticity. And she still wants strong social ties, too? I worry about how quickly this could devolve into "That which we are unwilling to do by means of social pressure we must therefore accomplish by means of the state."

See? This wasn't a post about gender after all.