What a Girl Wants

PAULA Kamen is no academic. She is a “Chicago-based journalist, lecturer, playwright, and the author of what is widely regarded as the first postboomer feminist book, Feminist Fatale.” None of which has kept her from occupying a position since 1994 as a “visiting research scholar” with Northwestern University’s gender-studies program.

Kamen interviewed 72 young women in an unscientific but eclectic sample, and hopes to emerge with Her Way as the voice of her generation, loosely defined as those too young to remember a time when sexual coupling was even tangentially assumed to relate to social coupling, in or out of wedlock. Kamen bravely celebrates this state of affairs as a new frontier in women’s liberation, a.k.a. the expansion of sexual choice and the destruction of double standards. Her thesis? “Young women’s sexual power has grown slowly and widely” in what she calls a new “sexual evolution.”

About the Author

Maggie Gallagher

Maggie Gallagher is the author of four books on marriage and is a longtime contributor to National Review.

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PAULA Kamen is no academic. She is a “Chicago-based journalist, lecturer, playwright, and the author of what is widely regarded as the first postboomer feminist book, Feminist Fatale.” None of which has kept her from occupying a position since 1994 as a “visiting research scholar” with Northwestern University’s gender-studies program.

Kamen interviewed 72 young women in an unscientific but eclectic sample, and hopes to emerge with Her Way as the voice of her generation, loosely defined as those too young to remember a time when sexual coupling was even tangentially assumed to relate to social coupling, in or out of wedlock. Kamen bravely celebrates this state of affairs as a new frontier in women’s liberation, a.k.a. the expansion of sexual choice and the destruction of double standards. Her thesis? “Young women’s sexual power has grown slowly and widely” in what she calls a new “sexual evolution.”