Pandagon

It's not like folks are tuning in to see the next world leaders on the Miss USA pageant, but the producers clearly wanted to convey a tad more gravitas by having judges ask deeper questions than the usual "achieving world peace" variety. At this year's pageant, held at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, there were some fireworks.

Sometimes with our Bamboo Reviews, we like to cover something old, in this case, 5 years old, mostly on the grounds that we the bloggers just saw/read/heard it for the first time. Consider this much like you'd consider Nick Hornby's column in The Believer. I picked up Alexandra Robbins' book Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities for a couple bucks at Half-Priced Books, and I'm glad that I read it many years after it came out, because I read it right after reading The Purity Myth, because the latter put me in the proper skeptical frame of mind to deal with the part of Pledged that bothered me the most, which was Robbins' uncritical acceptance of the concept of "promiscuity"---the concept that there's something wrong with women who have more than X (fill in what you think the limit is---everyone has a different answer!) sexual partners, and that sleeping around is automatically worse than being in a relationship or abstaining. Robbins doesn't hesitate to scandalize her audience by dwelling on the hook-ups and the occasional unwillingness to commit exhibited by some of her characters, which bothered me greatly, especially since Robbins does admit that the alternative of having a steady boyfriend isn't feasible for many girls, and for some, it's emotionally damaging and even dangerous to have a boyfriend. The general discomfort with the sexuality of her subjects bothered me, because I think that dating and finding yourself sexually is a fine, well-established college tradition that has more benefits than drawbacks, and in fact, there's evidence that if you don't go through this exploratory period at this age, you run a higher risk of sexual problems later in life. (It's not for certain, but it's something to take into advisement when considering whether or not to panic, or be grateful that our society has built in a period of late adolescence/early adulthood where experimentation is considered normal and healthy.)

There's no real reason this should remind me of the following, but it does, and it gives me a good excuse to post it: