The only place that many people see strippers is in movies and television shows - or at once-yearly bachelor parties. Most entertainment portrayals of strippers feed the false ideas that these women are completely down-and-out. Or the stripper is gratuitous, just eye candy in a scene. //

When I was growing up I chafed against sexual rules and stereotypes. It bothered me that I was told "Don't wear that it's too tight; don't talk about sex or you'll be called a 'slut'; don't have sex." 

When I first became aware that there were such a thing as strippers, it occurred to me that they didn't have the same rules; they can be ostentatious and brazen and sexual, and this looked fun and exciting to me. ...

Stripping is not something I will do again. When I first started I was definitely not questioning the social ramifications of what I was doing. That's one of the things I figured out when I went back to write this book. ...

Occasionally [I miss it]. There are moments while you're stripping that are truly fun. You're the center of attention and you're dancing - I like to dance anyway - you're getting all this sexual attention and this makes you feel attractive. //

I think it was fascinating [to be a stripper] and I learned a lot about myself. It was something I really wanted to do at the time.

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Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a wide-eyed, bookish freshman from a strict, devout, poor and poorly educated family in the Blue Ridge Mountains at North Carolina. 

But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the upper crust coeds of Dupon, sex, Cool and kegs trump her towering academic ambitions every time. [from the book]

When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone. And they find themselves in a world of unprecedented ambiguity, where it's not clear if you're going out with the person you're having sex with, where it's not clear if anything can be said to be absolutely true.

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However, the "What I Like About You" actress, who won Favorite Movie Actress honors at this month's Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, makes it clear she's not one to succumb to industry pressures.

"I know who I am and I know what I want to do -- and I would never let anyone push me into anything I don't want to do," notes Amanda, who also believes such pressures are more prevalent in the music world than they are for actresses.

"But in the end, it's important to remember, we're paying them."

The gifted Amanda -- who has been compared to funny ladies from Lucille Ball to Gilda Radner to Goldie Hawn since her days on Nickelodeon's "All That" and her own "Amanda Show" -- turned 18 on April 3.

Although she calls the birthday "kind of momentous," it's not going to make profound differences in her life. At least, not immediately.

"I try not to live my life by numbers. I'm still going to do my best to make good choices career-wise and in my life. I don't want to grow up too fast."

She also says, "I want longevity and I don't want to cash out now. That would have been easy to do after the movie (last year's hit "What a Girl Wants"). I was offered a couple of others that would have been very similar."

In her book ''From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in 20th-Century America,'' Beth Bailey, a professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, points out that magazine advice columns at the time urged teenagers to keep their options open -- and, most important, to appear to be always in demand. //

''Straight teens have abandoned the rituals of dating, while gay teens have taken them on,'' says Peter Ian Cummings, the editor of XY [subscription], a national magazine for young gay men.

The Internet, Cummings says, has made it possible for heterosexual teenagers to act the way ''most of straight society assumes gay men act.''

from article Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall - by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, NY Times May 30, 2004

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Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it.

For how can a real woman -- with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond "More, more, you big stud!") -- possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

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For the first time in human history, the images' power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.

For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography -- and now Internet pornography -- has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value.

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..

Women's magazines, such as Glamour and Cosmopolitan are known to run articles promoting topless dancing as a viable job option for female students wanting to put themselves through college.

There has been a sharp increase in the popularity of "sophisticated" topless bars and strip clubs. .... 

In the U.S. more money is spent at strip clubs than at Broadway, off-Broadway, regional, and nonprofit theaters, the opera, ballet, jazz and classical music performances combined.

..
..

These are exemplary front women the media pushes into the spotlight to show how lucrative it is and how successful you can become if you strip in pornography. 

Unfortunately, when individuals who have survived human rights abuses as a result of pornography speak out, they are most often attacked again for having the nerve to speak out.

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"Yes, but it's not as appealing as having sex," replied the physician, who is a married father of three. 

Promiscuous sex is unhealthy, said Dr. Pinsky, adding that college women's unhappiness over casual sex is "what I've been hearing over and over again."

What's not widely understood is that young men and young women have different biological triggers for emotional intimacy, he explained.

Young women typically link intimacy to romantic or sexual encounters. In contrast, he said, young men are fighting a "testosterone storm," which overrides their triggers for intimacy.

..
..

Men's capacity for emotional intimacy develops as they mature and testosterone levels decrease. 

"We're not bad, we're just lame," he said.

College women don't help themselves when they watch sexualized shows like HBO's "Sex and the City," or read magazines like Cosmopolitan, said Dr. Pinsky. 

The "sexually liberated" characters on "Sex and the City" are "pathetic," he said. "They're not liberated. They're sick."

Claire [Molly Ringwald]: I don't even have a psychiatrist.

Allison: Have you ever done it with a normal person?

Claire: Didn't we already cover this?

Allison: It's kind of a double-edged sword, isn't it?

Claire: A what?

You want to but you can't and when you do you wish you didn't, right?

Claire: Wrong.

Allison: Or are you a tease?...

Claire: I don't do anything.

Allison: That's why you're a tease.

..
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"I'm really interested in inappropriate relationships," writer and director Karen Moncrieff says with a laugh. "I like all the dark, difficult feelings that most of us don't want to admit to, like being attracted to somebody you shouldn't have sex with because they're underage, or being attracted to pain, or wanting to give away our power to somebody who will improve us somehow."

What makes "Blue Car" less exploitative than it could have been - despite an unsavory motel-room scene in which Auster seduces Meg - is Moncrieff's deft handling of the actors and their roles.

As Strathairn puts it, "She wanted Auster to be vulnerable, not a predator. You see his complications. He's a crippled person, but there is a potential for redemption. He tried to help this girl but fell prey to his own desires."

In Bruckner, Moncrieff found someone who not only related to Meg's distress - the actress' parents had divorced five months before the shoot - but was willing to tackle the emotionally -troubling scenes.

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..

"That created a very interesting tension that's palpable onscreen. We talked, before I cast her, about how I would shoot the hotel room scene. I wanted her to feel protected."

"I was creeped out by the whole thing," admits Bruckner, now 17. "But David and I were really close by that time. And Karen, David, the cameraman, the boom guy, and the camera assistant all wore boxer shorts [in solidarity with her while shooting the scene]. So that made me feel more comfortable."

"During the experience of having sex with this man, Meg goes from being a girl to seeing him for who he is, seeing that a sexual relationship with him is not going to solve all her problems, is not going to fill her up, is not going to save her," Moncrieff says. 

"I think that there is something in girls - and women - who are searching for father figures. They sometimes trade their sexual power for some other sort of connection."

Katharine Isabelle:  Definitely. I have a few girlfriends but nearly all my friends are guys. I don't think I ever wore girl clothes. I wore baggy jeans, baggy T-shirts, sweaters, just to avoid the looks that everyone gives you when you're a young female in the world. It's just really hard to be a woman growing up in these days, what with all the media and all the images of sexuality that are forced on you. You know, Britney Spears, these little outfits. I can't stand it.

[from interview in The Guardian - posted on a British fan site]
photo from "Ginger Snaps" [2000]: Emily Perkins [left] and Katharine Isabelle [from ginger-snaps.com]

Like Carrie before it, Ginger Snaps uses horror-movie conventions as an inspired metaphor for puberty. When beautiful but reclusive goth teenager Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) is attacked by a monstrous wolf on the eve of her first period, her body starts changing in a big way, as do her suddenly lusty, feral appetites. [from a review]

By age 11, Elina Kuusisto knew that she had no interest in boys. She also knew that being gay was clearly unpopular. But, she says, her sexuality education stopped there. 

Open about being a lesbian since ninth grade, Kuusisto, now 18, says she sat through sex education classes that addressed her boy-crazy classmates, but failed to acknowledge her confusion.

Despite support at home from her mother, the lack of discussion about homosexuality and harassment from her peers and teachers left her depressed and frequently visiting the school counselor.

"I just felt like the only weird kid out there. I didn't have any idea what I was supposed to act like, how I was supposed to dress, how to protect myself," Kuusisto says.