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10 - From Tightrope to Minefield

How the Sexual Double Standard “Lives” in Adolescent Girls’ and Young Women’s Lives

from Adolescence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

By
Deborah L. Tolman  and
Jennifer F. Chmielewski
Edited by
Sharon Lamb  and
Jen Gilbert
Sharon Lamb
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Jen Gilbert
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
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Summary

This chapter describes the sexual double standard that has prevented women and girls from accessing "the power of the erotic" (Lorde). The authors argue that the sexual double standard has undergone a renovation, which complicates the binaries between "good" and "bad," "respectable," and "slutty." While this emergent and renovated sexual double standard continues to support sexist, classist, and racist societies, it now does so by demanding that women and girls "seem but not be" appropriately sexually excessive.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development
Childhood and Adolescence
 , pp. 198 - 220
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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