When Everything Changed (52 page)

In the late 1990s
, a team of sociologists led by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas began trying to figure out what caused poor women to choose motherhood before marriage. They moved into low-income neighborhoods in the Philadelphia area that had a mix of white, Hispanic, and black families. After living with the people they were studying for some time, they concluded that poor American women “saw marriage as a luxury, something they aspired to but feared they might never achieve.” Children, on the other hand, were seen as “a necessity, an absolutely essential part of a young woman’s life, the chief source of identity and meaning.” The world Edin and Kefalas described was one in which poor women believed they could rely on only themselves to build a good life. Men would not necessarily stick around, and those who did would not necessarily treat them properly.

These women thought of having a baby as something that happened early, well before the search for a reliable mate was likely to be completed. During her research, Kefalas got pregnant at age 30 and found that the poor women she was living with “couldn’t believe that any woman would postpone childbearing into her 30s by choice.” Having babies early, out of wedlock, was a strategy that made perfect sense for the mothers, who generally were not educated for the kinds of careers that needed to be cultivated and built up before the distraction of motherhood arrived.
But it was not all that great
for the children, who were far more likely than the offspring of two-adult families to be born poor, to be raised poor, and to grow up to be poor adults.

“I
T WAS NO BIG DEAL
.”

Laura Sessions Stepp, who thought she was compromising her career in order to spend more time with her family, created a beat for herself covering adolescent issues for the
Washington Post
and wrote a book on guiding children through their early teens. Rather than downsizing, she had refashioned her work to suit her talents and interests. She was hardly alone. American men and women of all economic groups had to continually retool themselves to keep pace with an economy that no longer had the interest or ability to offer its workers long-term predictable careers. Women, who had been forced to take that kind of approach to their lives anyway, were in some ways better prepared for that economic world than their husbands and brothers.

In the spring of 1998
, Stepp found her next big subject when she heard that twenty-five parents in her son’s school had been called to a special meeting and told that their children had been involved in a sex ring. About a dozen 13- and 14-year-old girls had been regularly performing oral sex on two or three male students for the better part of the school year.

“It was no big deal,” one of the girls told Stepp later.

Stepp’s project expanded into an examination of sex among high-achieving high school and college women,
Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both.
The girls she talked to strove for straight As and excelled in extracurricular activities such as sports, music, or the school newspaper. But they set their sights much lower when it came to romance. Those who weren’t permanently attached went to parties with their girlfriends and then “hooked up” with a boy for a sexual encounter that could mean anything from kissing to oral sex to intercourse, depending on the age, sophistication, and level of attraction of the newly merged parties. Then the partners unhooked and went their separate ways.

“Jamie would flash her fake ID, have a couple of drinks, and dance, either with her girlfriends or, as the night passed, with a guy,” Stepp wrote of one of her subjects. “Occasionally, they would kiss while dancing, which the guy took as a signal that she was willing to go back to his room. It seemed awkward to turn him down, she recalled, given the fact that her friends had usually paired off already. Rather than be stranded, she’d go with the guy to his room and fool around in her underwear because it was easier to hook up than come up with a reason not to.”

Stepp saw the practice as an avoidance of commitment, a dangerous trend that left young women, especially well-educated young women, with little experience in how to build relationships with men. Not everyone agreed with her dismay. Some felt hooking up was just a new term for sexual behavior that had been going on for decades. “Dating does exist,” said Jessica Valenti, the author of
The Purity Myth
and editor of a Web site for young feminists. “The hook-up culture—I’m pretty sure kids always did that. My friends date. Some people hook up without dating, but they do have serious relationships.” And, she said, in all the hand-wringing over hooking up, “the idea that it’s supposed to be pleasurable is kind of lost. There is such a thing as orgasm.”

But Valenti, 29, had her own problems with a culture where preteens wore shirts that said
I’M TIGHT LIKE SPANDEX
and women had plastic surgery to make their labia smaller. (“In Africa they call it female genital mutilation. Here we call it designer vaginas.”) And she worried that young men were so overexposed to pornography that they had trouble getting aroused by regular women—or at least regular women over 25. She saw young women as caught between a conservative culture that obsessed about virginity and a porn culture in which they were urged by jaded cameramen to take off their clothes and writhe for the next edition of
Girls Gone Wild.
“The message is still the same—that women’s sexuality doesn’t belong to them.”

In the new millennia, girls grew up in a world awash in sexuality, thanks to the Internet and cable TV. They connected sex and power very early, shaking their booty at middle-school talent shows and calling up boys to talk dirty in ways they didn’t entirely understand but knew would leave the males on the other end of the line flummoxed.
A 16-year-old boy
told a reporter that girls in his school “overpower guys more. I mean, it’s scary.” The successors to Madonna sang about men as “prey” who were expected to service them and then go away. The Bratz dolls, sexy competitors to Barbie, wore miniskirts, midriff-baring tops, fishnet stockings, and feather boas, and adults were unnerved to see their owners dressing the same way. Meanwhile their older sisters, who were supposed to be preparing to take over the world, sometimes looked more as if they were planning on a career in the sex-services industry. They had spent their formative years watching
Sex and the City,
whose messages were: (1) Only girlfriends last forever, and (2) Anything worth doing is worth doing in a tutu and stiletto heels.

Valerie Steele, the fashion historian, found it to be just business as usual. “If you’re young, you’re trying to attract sexual attention. Nothing new whatsoever,” she said, recalling the see-through blouses and tight jeans of the ’70s. “Short of bringing in an ayatollah, they’re not going to get teenagers to dress modestly.” Gloria Steinem, who remembered “walking around in a miniskirt and a button that said ‘Cunt Power,’ ” was philosophical. “Are they doing it because they are enjoying it or are they doing it because they feel forced into it? That’s the basic question, but body pride and sexuality and adventure is positive.” Once, at a lunch, Steinem was seated next to Reese Witherspoon, who had played the Chihuahua-bearing, couture-clad sorority girl who turns out to have a mind like a steel trap in
Legally Blonde.
Steinem recalled that Witherspoon told her she had decided to take the part because of her: “I heard you say we should be able to wear anything we damn well please and still be considered human beings.”

There is never going to be a straight narrative when it comes to what women choose to wear and how they want to look. In the early twenty-first century, women were going bare-legged and tossing away the panty hose that had felt like such liberation to an older generation that was used to being encased in girdles. “
I stopped wearing panty hose
a long time ago because it was painful and they’d always rip,” said Michelle Obama. But at the same time, many were embracing Spanx, übergirdles made of nylon and spandex, some of which contain the entire body up to the bra line.

“Y
OU CAN’T SAY A WOMAN’S LIFE IS MORE VALUABLE THAN A MAN’S LIFE
.”

The women’s movement had not created the kind of open and caring society its more optimistic leaders had envisioned. It had merely opened doors, and for all the struggles and silliness, women were still racing through them, making use of the opportunities that came in reach. Somehow, many of those shocking little girls who wanted to let their lace training bras show were growing up to be college students who befuddled the nation by ending the boys’ domination of higher education.

They were also demonstrating their willingness to give their lives for their country. After the invasion of Iraq, the army created a small museum in Fort Lee, Virginia, to honor the women who had fallen during the second Gulf War and its aftermath. By early 2009 the memorial contained 115 names. The female soldiers who gave their lives were truck drivers and helicopter pilots, kitchen workers and medics, and almost everything in between. The majority were under 25. A number were mothers. And although their sacrifice had been honored, it had hardly traumatized the nation in the way opponents of women in the military had once predicted. “
I think people
have come to the sensible conclusion that you can’t say a woman’s life is more valuable than a man’s life,” said Wilma Vaught, a retired air force brigadier general who was president of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation.

At the time of the Iraq invasion, 350,000 women were serving in the American military—about 15 percent of the active-duty personnel. Their performance during the invasion of Iraq and the conflict that followed would make it clear how much the military had come to depend on them. The Iraq experience also underscored Dena Ivey’s concern about what would happen when the sexes were mixed in the field. Women returned with post-traumatic stress disorder at much higher rates than men, and experts began to wonder if that was because, along with the inevitable stress of being in danger in a strange, hostile place, women also lived in fear of sexual assault from their fellow soldiers.
Studies of female veterans
seeking help from the Veterans Administration indicated that high proportions of them had suffered sexual trauma. Representative Jane Harman of California visited a VA hospital in the Los Angeles area and told a congressional panel, “My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that forty-one percent of the female veterans seen there say they were victims of sexual assault while serving in the military.” Twenty-nine percent of those women reported having been raped, she added. “Women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.”

And while women were still barred from high-risk jobs such as tank operator, Iraq demonstrated how little difference that made. “
Frankly one of the most dangerous
things you can do in Iraq is drive a truck,” an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder told the
New York Times.
There were plenty of women driving trucks. And the impossibility of making a clear distinction between combat and noncombat posts was highlighted early in the war when the U.S. Army 507th Maintenance Company—a unit full of cooks, clerks, and maintenance workers—was separated from a convoy crossing the desert and wound up lost in the hostile city of Nasiriyah. Nine Americans were killed, and the world saw the dazed faces of others who had been taken prisoner, one of them an African-American woman simply saying she was “Shauna” from Texas. It was Shoshana Johnson, a single mother who joined the army intending to follow her father’s career as a cook and who was shot in both ankles before she was taken captive and held for twenty-two days.

Another prisoner, Jessica Lynch, became famous when word went around the nation that Lynch, a tiny blond woman from West Virginia who had joined the military at 18 in hopes of getting enough money to go to college, had valiantly held off hostile forces who surrounded the lost caravan until her gun ran out of bullets. Later, after she was retrieved from an Iraqi hospital, Lynch would make it clear that her rifle had jammed and she had never fired a shot. “Lori was the real hero,” she said.

Lynch’s best friend in the army
, 23-year-old private Lori Piestewa, was lying beside her in the Iraqi hospital, but the doctors had neither the equipment nor the supplies to treat her severe head injuries, and she died before help arrived. Piestewa, the daughter of a Hopi father and a Hispanic mother, was raised on a reservation in Arizona. She was the first American woman to die in the war.

Piestewa had hoped to become the first person in her family to go to college, but she became pregnant at 17 and got married instead. Two children later, she and her husband divorced, and Piestewa was living with her parents in a trailer on the reservation, where the astronomical unemployment rate left her with very few options. Looking for a way out, she left her children with her parents and enlisted, promising that when she returned, she would build the whole family a real house. She was so determined to make good that when she broke her foot in basic training, she concealed it from her officers. “She didn’t want to get held back,” said her father. Later, when her unit was deployed to the Middle East, Piestewa had the option of remaining behind for treatment of a badly injured shoulder. But once again, she covered up her physical problems in order to stay with the rest of the company.

The 507th left Kuwait as part of a convoy headed across the desert to Baghdad, but it fell behind because of the weight of its vehicles. The big water truck Lynch was driving broke down, leaving her stranded in the sands until a Humvee raced over and Piestewa, behind the wheel, called out, “Get in, roommate.” The lost company eventually found a road; then its leaders made a wrong turn and led the line of trucks into enemy territory in Nasiriyah. Piestewa’s Humvee was in the rear when the men in the front discovered their mistake and tried to turn the line of trucks around. At one point she was offered a chance to switch to a safer car, but Piestewa felt it was her responsibility to stay with Sergeant Robert Dowdy, the senior noncommissioned officer she was driving. Her manner was so serene, another driver said, that she calmed the people around her. “If it wasn’t for her, I probably would have freaked out.”