Hope Road

Girls Gone Mild [Wendy Shalit]

Girls Gone Mild by Wendy Shalit ****

This book’s lighthearted, colorful cover may indicate fluffy content; but don’t be deceived. Girls Gone Mild is more of a dissertation than a light read; it is based on numerous personal interviews and ample research. All of this is to support Shalit’s thesis: that young, modern North American women are beginning to be discontent with a culture that demands they be bad in order to be accepted.

Girls Gone Mild examines two concurrent trends. The first is the continuing “sluttification,” so to speak, of the culture, and the demands it places on young women to be s*xy, emotionally detached, and tough. The second is the more hopeful trend that forms the subtitle of the book: “Young women reclaim self-respect and find it’s not bad to be good.” Shalit focuses on girls throughout the country who are expressing their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, and are eager to speak out and live differently.

Shalit herself is a twenty/thirty-something woman with a husband of three years and an infant son. She is also the author of A Return to Modesty, a book that several years ago made waves around the country with its “radical” perspective on the lack of dignity, privacy, and reticence in our culture (from what I have gathered secondhand; I have not yet read it).

She is an Orthodox Jew, and her perspective is inherently religious and conservative, but what I really appreciate about this book is that it makes sense, no matter your religious or political bent. I hope that it will encourage countless young women to rethink the paradigm they are blindly following, and realize that living with dignity and self-respect isn’t such a bad thing, after all.

Recommended age level: 16+.