China, with its rapid modernization and growing affluence, has become a fascinating case study in what happens when a people once encumbered by tradition, authority, and economic disadvantage are given greater freedom. Human behavior, you can be sure, changes in radical ways, and perhaps nowhere as much as in the area of sex. In an article called “Sex Please, We’re Young and Chinese,” published this year in Time magazine, a journalist reported that the Chinese are having more sex, at increasingly younger ages and in increasingly kinky ways. (The country currently produces seventy percent of the world’s sex toys, and not all of them are for export.) According to the census, nearly three-quarters of Beijing residents now have sex before marriage, up from fifteen and a half percent in 1989. Meanwhile, divorce rates and unwanted pregnancies are skyrocketing across the country, and officials are publicly beginning to fret over the yawning moral vacuum around sex, a void that used to be filled by government influence and traditional mores.

However, for China’s youth—such as Muzi Mei, the Carrie Bradshaw of Beijing who became a superstar by blogging about her sexual conquests, which she estimates at “far above one hundred”—these issues are negligible in light of the freedom they can now explore. Shortly after posting an audio recording of herself climaxing during sex (her website crashed the same day when fifty thousand people tried to listen at the same time), Muzi Mei told a reporter, “I express my freedom through sex. It’s my life, and I can do what I want.”

Despite the vast historical and cultural differences between China and the United States, I’m amazed by the uncanny similarities between what is happening there and the seemingly widespread sexual exhibitionism in the name of freedom by young American women. I’ll give you a few snapshots from the past couple of years that epitomize the phenomenon: At nineteen, Paris Hilton tapes herself having sex with a boyfriend, who then releases the video worldwide, calling it “One Night in Paris.” Hilton’s fame hits the stratosphere when it becomes the number one selling video of 2005. At twenty-five, just a couple months after giving birth to her second child and divorcing her husband, Britney Spears gets out of a limousine not wearing underwear and flashes her Brazilian bikini wax to the world. In the ensuing media frenzy, she appears oblivious, showing no sign of regret. In early 2007, both Paris and Britney land themselves on the cover of Newsweek looking sweaty and devilish after a night of drinking on the town, under the headline “Girls Gone Wild: What Are Celebs Teaching Kids?” In the related article, the author expresses a concern that America’s “girls gone bad” are turning the country’s young children into “prosti-tots.”

Newsweek’s cover line, “The Girls Gone Wild Effect,” is a reference to the ubiquitous video series founded and produced by Joe Francis, the Hugh Hefner of Gen X. Accompanied by his camera crews, Francis visits beaches, nightclubs, and parties across America seeking “everyday” college-age women who will flash their breasts, make out with each other, and masturbate on camera in exchange for GGW-emblazoned T-shirts or hats. With videos entitled “Craziest Frat Parties” and “Forbidden Spring Break” selling hundreds of thousands of copies, he manages to rake in as much as forty million dollars a year. When asked why he thinks thousands of young women are so eager to exhibit themselves for his cameras, so willing to objectify themselves in exchange for trucker hats and tank tops, Francis says simply: “It’s empowering. It’s freedom.”

With characteristic hysteria, the media has simultaneously reviled and lavished attention on America’s girls gone wild, who in turn are increasingly seeking their fifteen minutes of fame imitating the brazenness of porn stars. You’d have to barricade yourself in a bomb shelter to avoid the general uproar, but I’m especially captivated by this phenomenon because all of its protagonists—Britney and Paris, along with Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan and Co.—are almost exactly the same age as I am. I’ll just be honest here and say that I don’t like this at all. My celebrity peers’ incessant public bids for sexual affirmation, their lack of self-reflection, their narcissism, and their indulgence embarrass me. I don’t like that they never seem to be able to speak intelligently about anything, even though they are in powerful positions to speak for our generation and influence the next. (“The cool thing about being famous is traveling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.” –Britney Spears, 2006)

My intense dislike is shared by many others. Cultural commentator Kay S. Hymowitz, in her article in City Journal entitled “The Trash Princess: Why Americans Love to Hate Paris Hilton,” writes that despite the fact that Hilton is “a composite of contemporary American sins,” our general revulsion towards Paris is a hopeful sign of “lingering cultural sanity.” Unlike Hymowitz and most of America, however, I can’t “hate” the Brat Pack of my generation, our cheerleaders of entitlement. After all, sans fame and money, I’ve grown up in the same time and place with them, and the truth is, we’re not all that different.

Recently, I was struck by young feminist author Ariel Levy’s recognition that women’s experience of freedom has changed with my generation. As she writes in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs, “The women’s movement introduced revolutionary ideas that caught on so thoroughly they now seem self-evident.” Indeed, it’s extraordinarily difficult for young women to appreciate the significance of the freedom we now lay claim to. We assume that the right to determine the course of our lives is certain and infallible, but we forget it was only a historical nanosecond ago when women grew up with no such assurances and had to fight, desperately at times, for this power. The truth is, my generation has generally not been taught women’s history in a meaningful or significant way, and by meaningful and significant I mean in a way that would illuminate our great historical fortune.

Our ignorance of even the simple facts can be astonishing. I didn’t know until very recently that marital rape wasn’t made illegal in any state until 1975 or that women were not admitted to Princeton or Yale before 1969. That was just a few years after safe, affordable birth control became available, allowing hundreds of thousands of young women to choose their own destinies beyond marriage or motherhood for the first time in history. Because of seemingly simple advances in women’s rights such as these, a girl’s options in life are now nearly limitless. We can still be wives or mothers if we so desire, but we can also become doctors or scientists, writers, academics, engineers, politicians, or business leaders on par with any man. We can be astronauts, soldiers, or nuns. Heck, nowadays we can even be men—thanks to science—complete with male anatomy and the testosterone of an NFL football player.

Second-wave feminism, the movement that spanned the sixties through the eighties (women suffragists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constitute the “first wave”), was rooted in a powerful belief: More freedom for women, via equal rights and equal access to power, would transform society. The revolution born of this conviction was political and legal in nature, as well as cultural, psychological, and personal. Thousands of second-wave feminists from the baby-boom generation, inspired by icons such as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Freidan, and Gloria Steinem, fought for women’s rights in American courts and focused their attention on the structures and dynamics within culture, families, and relationships that kept them imprisoned in the cage of patriarchy. “Feminism,” author and cultural theorist bell hooks said, “ is about men and women sharing power equally. And so it necessarily transforms the world for the better for women and men.”

Second-wave feminism was also rooted in the belief that a woman’s individual liberation was inherently connected to her sexual awakening. Truly emancipated women would “own” their sexuality; divorce it from male-imposed ideas, limitations, and expectations; and be uninhibited in their attainment of pleasure. On the other hand, women should also have the right to not be sexual at all—something that the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin chose later in life and spoke about publicly as a “feminist” choice. This consensus among “second wavers,” that the sexual autonomy of women was a pillar of their revolution, helped spawn (along with rock and roll) America’s sexual revolution in the sixties and seventies. Yet the close relationship between feminism and sexual liberation was a contentious and arguably ruinous one, as Levy describes in Female Chauvinist Pigs:

Within the women’s liberation movement, the question of how to represent sex—even the question of how to have sex—became divisive. Two distinct and passionately oppositional factions developed. On the one hand there were the antiporn feminists, and on the other, there were the women who felt that if feminism was about freedom for women, then women should be free to look at or appear in pornography. Screaming fights became a regular element of feminist conferences once the “pornography wars” got underway in the late seventies. . . Everyone was fighting for freedom, but when it came to sex, freedom meant different things to different people.

Unfortunately, the split between what became known as “sex-positive feminists” and “anti-pornography feminists” was merely one of many splinters that occurred within second-wave feminism. The movement may have begun as a unified front, a collective fight for women’s freedom to make their own choices, but within a decade, it was clear that all women didn’t want to make the same choices. Feminism quickly turned into a loosely connected plurality of diverse factions—radical feminism, separatist feminism, postcolonial feminism, liberal feminism, ecofeminism, Marxist feminism, individualist feminism, essentialist feminism, queer feminism, existentialist feminism—fighting one another for very different agendas based on sometimes diametrically opposed convictions concerning the nature of women and the purpose of liberation.

Then sometime in the very early nineties, third-wave feminism was born. Often characterized as a backlash against second wave, “third wavers” were an aesthetically rebellious, extremely empowered group of mainly Gen-X women who championed minority voices and transgender rights. Indeed, they often criticized second-wave feminists for privileging white middle-class perspectives over those of their more disenfranchised sisters. But this third wave was also, arguably, a direct response to the splintering of its predecessor—an unconscious effort to minimize the hemorrhaging that was occurring in the feminist movement by embracing pluralism and tolerance to an extreme. Indeed, for third wavers, no one should be excluded from the feminist label. As Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner, central figures of the third wave, write in their book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future:

You’re sexy, a wallflower, you shop at Calvin Klein, you are a stay-at-home mom, a big Hollywood producer, a beautiful bride all in white, an ex-wife raising three kids, or you shave, pluck, and wax. In reality, feminism wants you to be whoever you are—but with a political consciousness. And, vice versa: You want to be a feminist because you want to be exactly who you are.

By being pro everything—pro-sex, pro-homemaker, pro-career, pro-motherhood, pro-transgender, pro-queer—third wavers managed to philosophically elevate the exercise of women’s choice over the substance of women’s choices themselves, avoiding the need for discrimination or morality altogether. In an essay for the feminist magazine Bitch entitled “Freedom of Choice: Parsing the Word That Defined a Generation,” Summer Wood writes, “The phrase ‘It’s my choice’ [has] become synonymous with ‘It’s a feminist thing to do’—or, perhaps more precisely, ‘It is antifeminist to criticize my decision.’” Sisterhood, in other words, became all about acceptance. Wood goes on to cite a controversy created by the argument that cosmetic surgery is a “feminist exercise,” a view promoted by feminist academic Kathy Davis in her book Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body: “The paternalistic argument against choice rests on the assumption that women who want cosmetic surgery need to be protected—from themselves (their narcissistic desire for beauty) or from undue influence from others.”

If you want to understand the roots of how young women today can strip for cameras in the name of freedom, you need not look much further than the current zeitgeist epitomized in that statement. To impinge on women’s freedom of choice, the thinking goes—even if it protects them from their own narcissistic actions—is wrong. These days, whatever a woman chooses is an act of feminism, and by logical extension, feminism has become the ability to do whatever we want. Not surprisingly, this trajectory of feminism through its second and third wave mirrors the development of American culture since the sixties in general—not just greater pluralism leading to greater relativism, but an increasing blur between the exercise of individual liberty on the one hand and narcissism, entitlement, and consumerism on the other.

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.”