The Real Problem with Caitlin Flanagan's Boyfriend Stories

Noah Berlatsky and Sady Doyle have ably dismantled the social science and assumptions about safety and wellbeing that underly Caitlin Flanagan's latest essay on the inner lives of adolescent girls in The Atlantic. They're absolutely correct, of course, but I think there's one other problem with the piece.  Flanagan's misreading many of the cultural examples she picks to demonstrate that girls today are embracing stories about long-term relationships that involve waiting for sex. High School Musical may be sexless, but Glee has a teenager who is pregnant, and not by immaculate conception. One of the show's main characters delivers a memorable speech about how girls want to get it on early in the series, and two others pursue sexual relationships cheerfully, and get away with it remarkably consequence-free. In the Twilight series, Bella Swan may have a boyfriend, but she also wants to go further, and faster, with him, than he's willing to go with her. Taylor Swift's songs may be about love, but the characters in them have sex, as they do in "Fifteen" or want to, as in "Love Story." Caitlin Flanagan may want everything teenage girls to be simple. But judging by the cultural choices they're making, it isn't--and she's not getting it.