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Sex Roles
A Journal of Research
ISSN 0360-0025
Sex Roles
DOI 10.1007/s11199-012-0150-6
The Political Context for Personal
Empowerment: Continuing the
Conversation
Zoë D.Peterson & Sharon Lamb
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FEMINIST FORUM
The Political Context for Personal Empowerment:
Continuing the Conversation
Zoë D. Peterson &Sharon Lamb
#Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract In our joint theoretical piece (Lamb and Peterson
2011), we attempted to find points of agreement and further
elucidate points of disagreement in relation to the challenging
issue of adolescent girls’sexual empowerment. In particular,
we evaluated the divisive question of whether girls’subjective
feelings of sexual empowerment qualify as some useful ver-
sion of empowerment. We are grateful to the commentators
for joining us in this productive and collaborative conversa-
tion. In this response, we summarize some of the themes
raised by the commentators, and we look for points of agree-
ment around which we, as feminists, can continue to build a
conversation on this polarizing issue. We also attempt to better
explore the possible relationship between subjective empow-
erment and political empowerment by resurrecting the idea
that “the personal is political.”
Keywords Feminism .Empowerment .
Sexuality .Adolescence .Sexualization
We begin our reply to the five commentaries that were
written in response to our theoretical piece by thanking
Sex Roles for the opportunity to engage in such a collabo-
rative, thought-provoking process. Our joint piece was the
outcome of a Feminist Forum discussion that began with
Lamb’s(2010a) piece critiquing feminist views of adoles-
cent girls’sexuality which expanded on a piece written for
the Chronicle of Education called “The Right Sexuality for
Girls”(Lamb 2008). What followed was a commentary
from Peterson (2010) and a response to the commentary
from Lamb (2010b) that both authors, in the end were
uncomfortable with because the format highlighted their
differences in a more combative way than either of them
felt. We (Lamb and Peterson 2011) came together to attempt
to work out our differences and move thinking forward on
this issue of adolescent girls’sexuality. Our commentators
have joined with us, many of whom have taken up the spirit
of joint critique, solidarity, and reflexivity, to produce ex-
cellent additions to this body of work meant to capture
current feminist thinking and struggles on this topic. The
five commentaries highlight several points of agreement
among all of us as well as some important sticking points.
We elaborate on these agreements and challenges in this
response.
Clearly the concept of empowerment and its enactments
today are concerning to feminists. Bay-Cheng (2011), in her
piece, “Recovering Empowerment: De-personalizing and
Re-politicizing Adolescent Female Sexuality”revisits some
of the original political meanings of empowerment theory,
adding to the history of the term that Peterson (2010) pre-
sented in her first commentary to Lamb’s initial piece
(2010a). Bay-Cheng argues that the idea of “personal em-
powerment”or a subjective feeling of empowerment has
come to replace the idea of political empowerment. Her
point with regard to our U.S. culture’s over-focus on per-
sonal empowerment at the expense of other more systemic
forms of empowerment is well taken. Gavey (2011) makes a
similar point, saying, “Of primary concern is the way [a
focus on subjective empowerment] is able to be cast as a
property or state of individuals untethered to the situation of
their lives or the meanings ascribed to them, their bodies,
and actions”(this issue).
Zoë D. Peterson and Sharon Lamb contributed equally to this article.
Z. D. Peterson
University of Missouri-St. Louis,
St. Louis, MO, USA
S. Lamb (*)
University of Massachusetts Boston,
Boston, MA, USA
e-mail: sharon.lamb@umb.edu
Sex Roles
DOI 10.1007/s11199-012-0150-6
Author's personal copy
We agree with Bay-Cheng and Gavey that subjective
empowerment cannot and should not be viewed as a re-
placement for political and social empowerment. At most,
subjective empowerment may be one legitimate but limited
form of empowerment. Perhaps, though, a factor that needs
to be addressed in our conversation is the relationship, if any,
between subjective empowerment and social or political
empowerment.
Bay-Cheng (2011) cites feminists who suggest,
When stripped of critical consciousness and social
action to correct system injustices, empowerment is
quickly distorted into a self-improvement discourse
that instructs individuals to identify themselves, rather
than surrounding social conditions, as the problem to
be fixed (Pease 2002) and to compete against others
rather than join with them (Riger 1993). (this issue)
She further suggests that personal empowerment is a
more superficial form of empowerment than political em-
powerment. These are important points, and we agree that
empowerment must not be entirely stripped of critical con-
sciousness. However, we wonder if personal empowerment
has become superficial in some cases because it has been co-
opted in such a way that it is disconnected from a movement
(Tolman 2012, makes a similar point). We question the
dichotomizing of personal empowerment as superficial and
political empowerment as complex or deeper. There are
plenty of political activist events that are superficial, al-
though they feel empowering, and conversely, some acts
of personal empowerment can have political ramifications
beyond self-improvement. We are reminded of the
consciousness-raising groups of the 2
nd
wave, which
instructed individuals in methods of self-improvement.
The difference was that this self-improvement was in light
of what made sense politically for women as a group. It was
connected to a movement. The self-improvement work that
women did in those groups–for example, working on de-
creasing feelings of competition and jealousy with other
women–created solidarity and, in this way, contributed to
changing social conditions.
Bay-Cheng (2011) asks feminists not to decontextualize
empowerment and to create safe spaces to form solidarity.
We recall her earlier piece with regard to feminist
consciousness-raising groups for girls that began with the hope
for empowerment and ended with the girls forming solidarity
with talk of nail polish and boys. The problem, however, was
not in the goals of the group but in the way the current
discourse about empowerment through beauty and “girl talk”
can draw girls in so readily (Bay-Cheng et al. 2006).
Many feminists today were raised on hooks’essays, one
in particular with regard to becoming a subject (Hooks
1989). And no feminist can deny the impact of Gilligan’s
(1982) book, In a Different Voice, which was, for psychologists
and many feminists, the work that started the widespread
useoftheword“voice”and the phrase “coming to voice”
(e.g. Brown 2004; Smith and Watson 1998). In this con-
text, a context that Tolman (2012) describes in her com-
mentary, finding one’s voice was a metaphor for women
taking their place in the world amongst men, having their
subjective experience count, and undermining the silenc-
ing of self (Jack 1991) that was seen as an internalization
of patriarchy, problematic gender socialization, and/or the
enactment of age-old gender stereotypes. This work came
out of the strand of feminism that pronounced “the per-
sonal is political,”claiming, as Hooks (1989) and many
others did (e.g., Bartky 1990; Collins 1990), that coming
to voice, in the classroom and elsewhere, for a woman,
was a political act and not only a personal one. Indeed,
from this perspective, women’s interpreting these acts as
individual was wrong-minded. Hooks argued that many a
Black female student would have told you that she
didn’t speak up because she was shy, but that what the
student conceptualized as an individual personality trait
was, in fact, a representation of oppression internalized
and enacted in the classroom.
Coming to voice in today’s world of hip hop might be
called “representing,”as one speaks not only for oneself but
on behalf of others who have experienced oppression, but it
wasn’t necessarily meant that way at the time. Instead “the
personal is political”was a response to the accusation that
consciousness-raising groups were a kind of therapy. Hanisch
(1969/2007) wrote that doing one’s own work, in groups, was
not doing “therapy”because those in the group together found
that their “problems”were social problems and not individual
ones (p. 5). The phrase “the personal is political”was also a
plea to examine one’s own personal ethics and behavior in a
world where doing so made a public statement and could be
an act of activism. Within this framework of the-personal-is-
political, coming to voice and becoming a subject was to enact
something about being a woman in the world.
Many a personal enactment of empowerment, no matter
how superficial it might seem today (e.g. not shaving one’s
legs), in the 1970s was connected to an identifiable political
movement and somehow made less superficial (Drummond,
no date/2000). But without a clear movement commenting and
couching these acts in the rhetoric, history, and public critique
they are a part of, such acts can represent and be interpreted
according to a multitude of viewpoints. So, it may be that the
lack of a clear feminist movement around sexuality leaves acts
that seem to express sexual freedom to some up for grabs with
regard to interpretation. How does a girl truly express sexual
freedom (e.g. just saying no? flashing her breasts for fun?) and
what aspect of what movement do such acts support?
We all agree that girls’sexuality deserves a positive
political agenda, but we may not agree on what constitutes
Sex Roles
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an appropriate political agenda. Some might argue that
practicing abstinence supports a movement toward women’s
health, as women are at greater risk of contracting a sexually
transmitted infection through heterosexual intercourse than
are men and because women bear the physical and emotion-
al brunt of unwanted pregnancy. We (Lamb & Peterson)
would disagree with abstinence as a desirable political agen-
da. Others might argue that flashing one’s breasts supports a
movement toward less restrictive female sexuality.
Girls who support each other being sexual in public and
shocking ways, through pole dances, stripteases, and even
proclaiming they are sluts, may, in our opinion, have a
political agenda, one that has to do with sexual freedom.
While we and others have identified this as a neoliberal
discourse (Evans et al. 2010; Gill 2008), the call for freedom
cannot be dismissed. Girls seem to be trying to tie their
behavior to liberal notions of what it means to be a free
sexual agent and in some ways see themselves as fighting
against repressive forces that say that a girl can’tbeas
sexual as a boy, can’t have sexual fun, can’t enjoy her body,
and can’t seek pleasure. That they don’t always achieve
orgasms (Armstrong et al. 2009)or“unfettered pleasure”
(Tolman 2012, this issue) while pleasing boys, does not
mean that the goal of freedom is not being addressed, at
least in part. This is the initial point that Peterson (2010) was
trying to make. And this is not entirely bad politics for girls
to engage in. It is important for feminists to acknowledge
the lessons from the women’s movement that have been
adopted by these girls (e.g., the value of sexual freedom;
an ownership over one’s body and sexuality; a right to
experience sexual pleasure and to be as sexually expressive
as their male counterparts) and not to entirely judge these
acts as regressive as Lamb (2010a) might have done in her
initial piece. Tolman (2012) noted that historically, “the
recognition and articulation of questions about the possibil-
ities of girls’desire, pleasure, and sexual subjectivity was…
extraordinarily radical”(this issue). And although talking
about girls’pleasure and desire is not as radical as it once
was, the role of desire, pleasure, and agency are still some-
times lost in our concern about the hazards of sexualization.
To be clear, we don’t think Bay-Cheng or Gavey are guilty
of devaluing the relevance of sexual agency. Indeed, Bay-
Cheng (2011) is clear in saying that agency and the ability to
speak out or act out isn’t enough but that agency needs to be
accompanied by actions to ensure social and material capital
for others to also do so. We might add, however, that it may
be wrong to combat this joyful urge with the warning to
remember that the political situation for many girls (if not
oneself) is dire (along the lines of, “How can we enjoy our
food when others elsewhere are hungry?”), as this may
squelch any enthusiasm for the larger social movement.
Indeed, what activism around this might do is to promote
girls’personal sexual freedom and also encourage girls to
act in a way that can procure freedom for other girls. Thus,
as feminists we can support adolescent girls in their own
free sexual expression and also help them to realize that
one’s own ability to express oneself sexually does not nec-
essarily contribute to the sexual freedom of all. But therein
is an important point: The very act of expressing one’s
sexual freedoms, because the expression of such is shaped
by what is permissible and what is sexy (generally by men
and marketers in this culture) may sometimes contribute to
the oppression of others.
Gavey (2011) suggests this when she introduces the idea
that some acts that seem regressive can in actuality be used
and interpreted in progressive ways; she provides the in-
triguing example of a woman who fakes an orgasm. We
agree that we must be cautious labeling acts as regressive
and progressive and that there are multiple and contradictory
meanings to many acts such as this one. Gavey (2011) says,
While a woman may enjoy her performance of (fake)
orgasm for a myriad of reasons, and gain benefits in
terms of identity and relationship, it might also be
marked by negative affect (including potentially, dis-
appointment, embarrassment, guilt, shame, or anger),
or so on. (this issue)
We very much appreciate this example of ambiguity and
believe that, in some cases, a “real”orgasm could produce
similarly ambivalent feelings. One question here, though, is
whether this personal act of faking an orgasm is a form of
betrayal with regard to larger goals of a movement in which
this woman might feel a part or in which we wish she would
feel a part. It could be argued that in an era in which drug
companies are attempting to create and market drugs to
combat women’s“sexual dysfunction”and in which “sexual
functioning”is defined in relation to a mostly male model of
sexual response (Tiefer 1995), the production of fake
orgasms, although enacted only in a woman’s own bedroom
contributes in some small way to a host of ideas and prac-
tices that harm all women (e.g., that women who do not
have consistently have orgasms are dysfunctional; that lack
of orgasm is always a woman’s problem rather than a
relational problem, etc.). Lamb (2006) also wrote about this
with regard to some victims forgiving perpetrators of rape
and sexual abuse and its effect on other victims who don’t
want to or can’t forgive. Today someone might laugh at the
idea that Judy Jones faking an orgasm in her condo in
Baltimore might have an effect on the sexual freedoms of
Jody Jacobs in Sacramento. But that was the point of the
‘60s cry that the personal is political, that when we raise
consciousness in small ways in our personal lives, we create
larger social change. For example, a woman may move
toward making the personal political by saying to a partner,
“Hey, that was a fake orgasm. We need to work on what it is
that’s making sex not all that pleasurable for me and, well, it
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might be our relationship, your sexual strategies, violence in
my past, and/or stress of the day (which, by the way, may
also have a gendered component),”or even by saying to a
partner, “I didn’t have an orgasm this time, but that’s ok. I
would really rather just focus on physical and emotional
closeness as opposed to trying to have an orgasm every
time.”
On the other hand, this discussion is complicated by the
fact that men also fake orgasms (Muehlenhard and Shippee
2010). And this suggests that not all fake orgasms are a
reflection of women’s political disempowerment. Further,
intuitively, it seems unjust that an individual woman is
responsible for considering whether her private sexual
behaviors harm all women, while her male partner is free
to enjoy his sexuality in whatever manner he chooses.
However, this injustice is a burden borne by all members
of oppressed groups, and the extent to which one owes one’s
group is a question that is still hotly debated (Howze and
Weberman 2001).
Here we tried to reintroduce the idea of the personal as
political, not to revisit the adolescent girl who does the
striptease as a political actor, but to situate her act, however,
sexualized, as part of a feminist political movement that has
some political value no matter how co-opted by marketers
and media it remains or how distorted her act appears. We
also want to acknowledge that we and all of the commenta-
tors refuse to see girls as only representing one-dimensional
gendered sex roles in their actions. Indeed, Murnen and
Smolak (2011) remind us that “There are two, main polar-
ized models for female sexuality: either the ‘good girl’
‘perfect virgin’who might attend a ‘purity ball’and sign a
‘virginity pledge’… to show her commitment to this stan-
dard; or the hypersexualized ‘girl gone wild’…” (this issue).
We all want to break apart that dichotomy and take a more
nuanced approach that allows for a girl who (1) is sexual
and enjoys her sexuality and (2) has not lost control of her
sexuality or given up all of her sexual power. But we also all
recognize, as Gavey (2011) reminds us, that because of
these polarized models of female sexuality, most girls prob-
ably feel ambivalent about their sexual choices and identi-
ties and uncertain about how to exist in the middle of these
two extreme poles.
Murnen and Smolak (2011) provide us with an up to date
review of the empirical literature on sexualization, media
objectification, and self objectification, describing the con-
text in which girls come to view empowerment as being
attractive to boys, as assertively displaying heterosexuality,
and as self-objectification. Tolman (2012) also notes, as did
Lamb (2010a) in the original essay, the pervasive sexualiza-
tion of girls in popular media as an important context for
girls’sexuality. Their reviews highlight that problematic sex
roles and messages about girls’sexuality are present
throughout the media and not just in sexually explicit media
or even in media that we might label as being influenced by
pornography. In other words, focusing on pornography as
the culprit will not get us very far in correcting the problem.
This means that all girls are unavoidably exposed to these
images and messages, and thus, girls are exhibiting a variety
of negotiations around these images, including positive re-
sistance. That is, despite the inescapable media pressure to
adopt one of the polarized versions of girls’sexuality, some
girls are able to find a middle ground, perhaps through their
ability to thoughtfully critique media messages. We also
appreciate Gill’s(2012) important reminder that, just as girls
are diverse in their interactions with media; media them-
selves are diverse, and media can function as a source of
resistance to “sexualized culture,”while at the same time we
reply that the vast majority of media marketed to girls today
still contain these problematic images and messages.
In their commentaries, Murnen and Smolak (2011) sug-
gest that media literacy is not enough and that the culture
needs to change, and Gill (2012) similarly argues that media
literacy is not a “panacea”and that treating it as such “leave
[s] media themselves untouched, shifting all the responsi-
bility onto young people to think critically and decon-
struct…” (this issue). This is an excellent point. Gill also
makes the point that we do not respond to racism in the
media with calls to educate young Black people to identify
the racist images and yet anti-racist education offered to
students of all races in the U.S. does address this issue. Still,
we do not intend to promote media literacy as a panacea. It
must indeed be frustrating to be a media theorist reading
psychologists’turn toward the media in this simplistic way,
and we welcome her call for more collaborations between
psychologists and media and culture theorists. In short, we
agree that broader social change (including changing media
representations of sexuality) is the ultimate goal; however, it
is difficult to see how broad-based cultural change can work
without consciousness-raising actions, of which media liter-
acy is one, and media literacy does not only have to apply
only to youths but to the rest of us as well. Tolman (2012)
presents other forms of education that might help to address
this issue as an important first step in the fight against
oppression. Murnen and Smolak (2011) make the important
point that the groundwork for adolescent sexuality is laid
out in the grade school years and that efforts towards cul-
tural change must happen there. Thus, in the short-term,
media-literacy training for grade school children may lead
to adolescents who are better able to resist unwanted and
disempowering media messages; in the long-term this may
translate to cultural change. Although we agree with Gill’s
(2012) important point, that “media representations still get
to us even after inoculation”(this issue), we also think that
continued ambivalence following media literacy does not
necessarily suggest that the literacy training is not working.
As Lamb (2010a) began this conversation, the desire for a
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perfect sexuality for girls or an ideal response to media
literacy is a projection we could do without. Ambivalence
seems to us an inevitable consequence of carefully and
thoughtfully examining and questioning one’s own values,
beliefs, and desires in relation to broader cultural messages.
In fact, the discomfort produced by these ambivalent feel-
ings may help to propel adolescent girls toward activism.
Tolman’s(2012) commentary begins with a critique of
the original Lamb (2010a) article, which started this entire
conversation. Although a thorough response to this would
divert the direction of this conversation specifically about
empowerment, a few comments do seem relevant here. In
our discussion of empowerment, neither Lamb (2010a) nor
Lamb and Peterson (2011) intended to minimize Tolman’s
work or the work of other feminists by suggesting that they
define healthy sexuality as only pleasure, desire, and sub-
jectivity, but instead meant to uncover where this earlier
work had gotten us. We recognize that Tolman and other
feminist researchers were not intending to mandate that
adolescent girls live up to “the idealized picture of the
adolescent girl who feels pleasure, desire, and subjectivity”
(Lamb and Peterson 2011, this issue). Nevertheless, we do
worry that by focusing on the remarkable “resistor”girls
who (at least some of the time and to some degree) are
sexually confident, experience embodied desire, and asser-
tively seek out sexual pleasure, we may unintentionally set
up a standard that is impossible for many girls to meet. Gill
(2012) supports this view by saying as Lamb (2010a) did in
the original essay that feminist scholars may indeed be
projecting onto girls an unreachable sexuality that they
themselves wish for, as one generation often hopes that the
next will accomplish what they could not. We also have
concerns regarding the romanticized language use to de-
scribe girls’sexuality, such as our process in uncovering
the ““thick desire”(Fine and McClelland 2006, p. 301),
“delicious and treacherous”(Fine and McClelland 2006,p.
305) as having “fleshy”parts (Tolman 2012, this issue) in a
“stew”of desires (Fine and McClelland 2006,p.326;
Tolman 2012, this issue) that we must peek “beneath skirts”
and “sheets”to find (Tolman 2012, this issue). Indeed, the
romanticization of girls’sexuality may contribute to our
neglect of certain emotions, experiences, and reactions that
do not fit with these evocative descriptions.
Finally, we want to address the issues raised by the
commentators around the hypothetical female adolescent
we proposed who may feel empowered enacting a kind of
sexuality that is derived from marketing and has been de-
scribed by some as pornified (e.g., Dines 2010). We won-
dered to what extent that subjective feeling of empowerment
can count as a legitimate form of empowerment and to what
extent it is a form of “false consciousness”.Gill(2012)
characterized this 13 year old girl as the “privileged object
of anxiety and ‘concern”’ who is a “White, western, middle
class, girl-child”(this issue). Although we did choose this
hypothetical girl as a representation of the girl that seems to
be at the center of concerns regarding sexualization, we did
not necessarily imagine her as either White or middle-class.
(We did specify that she was heterosexual because much of
the discourse of “anxiety and concern”seems to focus on a
“girl-child”who is taken advantage of by a male sexual
partner.) In fact, our struggles to define what counts as
empowerment for this hypothetical 13 year old girl attemp-
ted to take into account that she may be disempowered in
many aspects of her life; without reaching a clear answer,
we were attempting to explore what sexual empowerment
might mean in the context of relatively limited social power.
In relation to this hypothetical 13 year old, Bay-Cheng
(2011) and Gavey (2011) also point out that it is important
not to confuse a feeling of empowerment with a feeling of
agency (although girls themselves might do so). The percep-
tion of oneself as having a choice, and indeed choosing, is an
important aspect of empowerment but doesn’t necessarily
equate with being empowered. We agree with this point. We
would argue that agency is perhaps necessary but not suffi-
cient for empowerment, and in fact, this is one of the things
that makes it very difficult to define empowered sexuality for
this hypothetical 13 year old. Gavey’s(2011) solution is that
“We can and should still talk about desire, pleasure, enjoy-
ment, satisfaction, and so on”(this issue); however, we should
not conflate this with empowerment. And when Gill (2012),
entertainingly suggests that no woman says “Phwoar, that was
empowering!”(this issue) after good sex, we do want to point
out that the empowerment that girls seem to be feeling is not
about sex per se but about the power of obtaining a close
imitation of what the culture is calls sexy. See Whitehead and
Kurtz (2009) for the “empowerment”discourse around pole-
dancing or the teens’responses online to teen pop star Miley
Cyrus’s striptease at the KidsChoice awards in 2009.
In conclusion, we are grateful for the opportunity to read
these 5 commentaries that address the issue of empower-
ment that we struggled with separately (Lamb 2010a,
2010b; Peterson 2010) and together (Lamb and Peterson
2011), and we are very pleased to have begun what we hope
will be an ongoing conversation. We have moved forward a
bit in disentangling some of the knottier issues, but some of
us still disagree on other important points. Three of the five
commentators (Bay-Cheng 2011; Gavey 2011; and Gill
2012) suggested we even stop using the word empower-
ment, because it has so come to represent personal empow-
erment and because it has been co-opted by sexualized
media. But that surely feels like giving up. It has been rare
for feminists to give up language (see Muscio 2001; Redfern
and Aune 2010), and instead, there have been several move-
ments to reclaim and rework language much like the origi-
nators of the “slut walk”are desperately trying to reclaim
the word slut in a context that keeps grabbing it back from
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those that would use it to disparage women (Chloe 2011;See
also Dines and Long 2011). Our commentators rightly differ-
entiate agency and pleasure from empowerment and reconnect
empowerment to activism, social justice, change, and politics.
Right or wrong, this word empowerment (used to refer to both
subjective and social power), has been adopted and valued by
the general public and by adolescent girls. As Tolman (2012)
noted, discussions of “girls’healthy sexuality under these
present conditions…must…inevitably engage the question
of sexual empowerment”(this issue). Indeed, the fact that
empowerment has been co-opted by marketers and the self-
improvement movement is an unwanted consequence of the
success of feminists in promoting empowerment as an impor-
tant goal. Exploring one’s own sense of agency, one’s voice,
and one’s feelings of power in relation to other girls’power and
in the context of the political and social issues facing girls
today, is the kind of solidarity work that Bay-Cheng (2011)
hopes we can achieve. As Gavey (2011) suggests, we must
continue to support agency, pleasure, desire, assertiveness, and
we might add self-efficacy, because these personal qualities are
historically and politically important for girls, not just person-
ally so. They relate to a future that reflects better self-
protection, better choices, better treatment, and a better world
for girls who may not have the material and social capital to
achieve these at the present time. The personal can be political,
but sometimes we all need a light shone on just how.
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Sex Roles
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