How does the girls-gone-wild culture reflect the prudification of society?

From Time Magazine:

Says a Minneapolis priest: "The young American male is increasingly bewildered and confused by the aggressive, coarse, dominant attitudes and behavior of his women. I believe it is one of the most serious social traits of our time-and one that is certain to have most serious social consequences."

The shrieking blonde ripped the big tackle's shirt from his shoulder and Charlestoned off through the crowded room, fan-dancing with a ragged sleeve. In her wake, shirts fell in shreds on the floor, until half the male guests roared around bare to the waist. Shouts and laughs rose above the full-volume records from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The party, celebrating the departure of a University of Texas coed who had flunked out, had begun in midafternoon some three hours earlier. In one corner, four tipsily serious coeds tried to revive a passed-out couple with more salty dog (a mixture of gin, grapefruit juice and salt). About 10 p.m., a brunette bounded on to the coffee table, in a limited striptease. At 2 a.m., when the party broke up, one carload of youngsters decided to take off on a two-day drive into Mexico (they got there all right, and sent back picture postcards to the folks).

That's from the original 1951 article on the Silent Generation, although it sounds remarkably familiar. Unlike the femme fatale of film noir, or the "Whatever Lola Wants" type, young girls from the '60s through the '80s were definitely not "aggressive, coarse, dominant" -- that was the era of the high school sweetheart type, from Marcia Brady to Mallory Keaton to Kelly Kapowski.

Also familiar is the semi-public striptease and the general atmosphere of girls gone wild. Sex is a private affair, so when young people are truly more sexual, they play Seven Minutes in Heaven, where the maker-outers enjoy the privacy of a dark closet, or they pair off into unoccupied rooms in the house, the back seat of someone's car, or other place where they can slip out of public view. Spin the Bottle involves public sexuality, but hardly -- just a kiss.

Aside from the streaking fad -- and I think a good deal of them were males anyway -- there was not a whole lot of attention whoring based on sex appeal during more sexual times. Here we have to distinguish sluts, teases, and attention whores. Sluts make themselves up to signal an easy sexuality, and they follow through on that promise. Teases also sexualize their appearance, and although they won't just give everything away up front like a slut will, they will still give something back to the guys who approach them, even if only a little. They are also flirty and social, and they have a boy-crazy sort of mind.

Attention whores, though, use their appearance and behavior to draw in the looks of a large male audience, but they don't give anything back to the clueless dorks who follow them around like it's the first girl they've ever seen. They don't get a rush from the playful back-and-forth like teases do, as they are not very interested in interacting with boys in the first place. They're only out to get lots of easy attention and validation without having to put out for the boys, flirt with them, or even be physically near them -- just within eyesight. The majority of girls dancing around on YouTube or in night clubs (these days anyway) are attention whores, for example.

This also explains the whole girl-on-girl fad at parties during the housing bubble euphoria. Most of us, me included, looked at that and thought, "How slutty is our society becoming?" But now that we know that young people have become steadily less sexual since a peak sometime in the late '80s or early '90s, it makes better sense -- what easier way to get maximal male attention while not having to interact with them at all? Just kiss your bff, or maybe have her grind her ass in your lap, in front of a large crowd.

Back when kids were still sexual, a girl at a party wanted to talk to, make out with, or sleep with a boy -- and what would making out with another girl in public do to achieve that goal? So instead, they sought out boys to flirt with or sent them a signal to come over and make the first move.

The tendency for boys and girls to move apart from each other during times of falling crime therefore shifts the distribution of female sexuality away from the slut-and-tease direction and toward the attention whore. The tease is the ideal for society -- young girls are going to crave attention no matter what, so it's best that they be somewhat choosy and cautious while still being flirtatious and social. When the distribution has more teases, its extreme will include more sluts, but a handful of sluts is far more preferable to a mass of attention whores. Sluts more or less keep their business to themselves, whereas attention whores give off public pollution by the ton. And those handful of sluts aren't going to destroy society, whereas the off-putting behavior of attention whores just grates away further at the falling trust levels during safer times.

And while a girl who sleeps around is somewhat of a sexual deviant, she still seems mostly recognizable as a human being, just one with poor impulse control or something. The complete anti-sociality of the attention whore, though, not to mention the public displays of omg look at those two chicks in thongs making out!!!! that they use to get their attention, make them even more bizarre specimens and harder to sympathize with.

When falling violence levels push the sexes apart, probably because females feel less of a need for males then, the civilizing effect that we have on each other degrades. Look at men who have withdrawn from interacting with girls -- their whole lives just break down, as they hide away in their man-cave all day. The counterpart to the extreme male tendency of "just leave me alone with my stuff" is the extreme female tendency to pose and prance around just to soak up attention without giving anything back, like some parasite.

If you're not already, it's time to get comfortable with a higher level of violence than we currently have, unless you prefer a world peopled with coarse and pushy attention whores.