With the wisdom of hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that increasing women’s freedoms alone was never going to lead to a social utopia. On the contrary, coupled with a lack of enlightened or even shared values among women, this freedom helped unleash what philosopher Nancy Bauer calls “pornutopia”*:

In the pornutopia, autonomy takes the form of exploring and acting on your sexual desires when and in whatever way you like. . . . Everywhere we turn we find images daring women of all sexual temperaments to revel in and express their fuckability, as though a woman’s transforming herself into the ultimate object of desire should or could satisfy her need for other people to attend the depth and breadth of her true self, even her true sexual self.

Perhaps Paris Hilton is simply the living manifestation of what happens when girls and young women receive all the privileges of feminism and unprecedented freedom of choice but live in a pornutopia. Rather than choosing to cultivate soul, morality, or spiritual and intellectual faculties, as the original suffragists may have envisioned young women doing once they were liberated from domesticity, they’ll find a thousand more compelling reasons around them to be beautiful, forever young, famous, and constantly affirmed by sexual admirers. They’ll relish their freedom through flirting, with its sometimes dangerous and titillating boundaries, in whatever ways are easiest and readily available—sex, seduction, or just flashing their breasts for a group of guys on spring break.

Unfortunately, baby boomers—the very generation that initiated the sexual revolution and privileged personal freedom over morality—now seem to be standing on the sidelines aghast that young women can behave as they do. What about their active role in creating the culture that has “empowered” these young women? Time’s recent coverage of the “girls gone wild” phenomenon demonstrated this perfectly when it asked, “What are celebs teaching our kids?” rather than the perhaps more implicating question, “What are we teaching our kids?”

Making a somewhat similar argument in an op-ed for the New York Times, author Judith Warner recently responded to the American Psychological Association’s March 2007 report on the widespread “sexualization” of young girls by pointing out that mothers should begin to take responsibility for their considerable influence on America’s girls:

Maybe it’s time to take a break from bashing the media and start to take a long, hard look instead at the issue of mothers’ sexuality, which is, apparently, after a long and well-documented dormancy, enjoying a kind of rebirth—thanks, it is said, to things like pole dancing classes and sports club stripteases. These new evening antics of the erstwhile book club set are supposed to be fabulous because they give sexless moms a new kind of erotic identity. But what a disaster they really are: an admission that we’ve failed utterly, as adult women, to figure out what it means to look and feel sexy with dignity. We’ve created an aesthetic void.

Reading this, I can’t help but think of Madonna expressing consternation in the press recently that she has to tell her ten-year-old daughter to wear less sexy clothes. I wonder where her daughter could have gotten the idea to do that?

Because there are so many factors at work in the “girls gone wild” phenomenon, it can be all too easy to avoid the tough reality that, nevertheless, young women need to take responsibility for it. Indeed, considering the level of self-determination with which we have been raised, we can’t get away with deflecting blame for our actions onto forces outside of ourselves such as mass culture, patriarchy, capitalism, or even feminism. No one is forcing us to remain “fettered,” as cultural theorist Laura Kipnis puts it, “in so many traditionally feminine ways.” No, these days, Kipnis writes, such things are “entirely self-imposed,” even for those of us “who are supposed to be the vanguard class when it comes to gender progress.” Indeed, it’s quite obvious that many of us, if not most, enjoy being objects of desire—so long as it’s our choice to be. And since this is now an equal opportunity society, we’re also eager to turn the tables on men and objectify them. With this new power, multitudes of us have become, as Ariel Levy so aptly put it, female chauvinists.

So, just what is “liberation” for this generation? We can already do whatever we want—and slap a feminist label on it. Who cares if we want to get breast implants or strip for Joe Francis’ camera! These things are our “right” as postmodern women. It’s difficult for me to argue with this prevalent attitude, in part because I would be loath to give up any of my personal freedoms as a matter of principle, even if I never intend to take advantage of them by buying myself a pair of “double Ds” or becoming the star of “Craziest Frat Parties 2007.” However, I don’t believe the issue facing young women today has to do with whether or not we need to give up our freedom. Rather, it’s about facing the host of difficult and profound questions that this freedom necessarily raises. What sort of responsibility is inherent in the privilege of choice we’ve been given? What are the more meaningful implications of our liberty? What is the real purpose of our equal citizenship with men? These kinds of questions lead to unexplored moral and philosophical territory—territory in which the feminist movements of the last half-century have feared to tread. Finding answers to them would force us not only to consider more seriously our role in society and our actions as individuals but also to examine the state of our interior lives—our very souls.

The great power, and extent, of young women’s self-determination is an undeniable reality of our postmodern lives, at once problematical and thrilling. When Simone de Beauvoir first recognized this as a college student in Paris, she wrote in her diary with a mix of anguish and excitement, “My life is no longer a ready-made path on which from the point where I have arrived I can already discover everything and on which I have only to place one foot after the next. It is a route not yet opened up that my steps alone will create.” Young women today may have inherited a more labyrinthine, contradictory world than Beauvoir’s, but we are still responsible for the same task of creating a new path, through our own steps.

Even though I said I’m often embarrassed to be in the same generation as Paris and Britney, whenever I see them in the media—drunk, exposed, glaring into the paparazzi’s cameras—I’m also paradoxically glad that they’re around, forcing us to contemplate where we really are and how we’re going to proceed.

*The word “pornutopia” was first used by Linda Williams in the preface of the 1999 edition of her book Harcore: Power, Pleasure, and the “frenzy of the Visible.”