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Secure girls: Class, ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1363460716658422
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Amy C Wilkins
University of Colorado-Boulder, USA

Sarah A Miller
University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA

Abstract
Public discourse is replete with talk about the fragility of young womens self-esteem,
linking poor self-concept to a range of social problems associated with girlhood. We
know little about the impact of these ideas on young women. In this article, we examine
interviews with 66 girls, aged 1422, to understand how they talk about the link between
self-esteem and sexual expression in everyday life. We find that girls talk about self-
esteem uses classed meanings that unintentionally reinforce and extend the role of sexu-
ality in girls status hierarchies, benefitting those with more class resources, while policing
all girls abilities to claim sexual agency.

Keywords
Class, gender, self-esteem, sexuality, youth

Published in 1994, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, spent
154 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Inuenced by Carol Gilligans
pioneering work on womens and girls development (Brown and Gilligan, 1992;
Gilligan, 1982), Mary Pipher (1994) identied an Ophelia crisis in which previ-
ously condent girls lost their self-esteem as they entered adolescence. Pipher
linked girls loss of self-esteem to a host of social problems associated with girl-
hood, including disordered eating and body image, drug use, cutting, and, perhaps
most urgently for many parents and other adults, sexuality. Reviving Ophelia
powerfully impacted thinking about girls, spawning a growth industry of books
(Brown, 2005; Shandler, 1999; Simmons, 2011; Wiseman, 2009), organizations, and
consumer products aimed at protecting and fostering girls self-esteem. This form

Corresponding author:
Sarah A Miller, Department of Sociology University of Massachusetts, Amherst Thompson Hall 200 Hicks
Way Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
Email: sarahm@soc.umass.edu
2 Sexualities 0(0)

of adult concern about girls has endured: talk about girls vulnerable self-esteem, and
the attendant risks to girls sexuality, continues to ourish in popular culture and
academic research (Bajos et al., 2010; Goodson et al., 2006; Spencer et al., 2002).
This rhetoric provides an available framework for understanding girls sexuality. In
this article, we draw on in-depth interviews with 66 mostly heterosexual adolescent
and young adult women, aged 1422, to examine how girls themselves talk about
self-esteem and sexuality. We argue that girls have taken up talk about self-esteem as
a routine form of labeling and gossip, and we analyze what this talk does.
Most existing discussions of girls self-esteem in qualitative studies take self-
reports of self-esteem at face value, assuming they reveal some psychological truth.
Self-esteem itself eludes focused analysis. Social psychologists dene self-esteem as
the regard in which an individual holds himself or herself (Longmore et al., 2004:
280). However, symbolic interactionist John Hewitt (1998: 129) argues that we
should view self-esteem instead as a named emotion that provides a culturally
relevant and appropriate interpretation of mood. This view calls attention to the
ways individuals use cultural ideas about how particular people should behaveand
how they should feel about that behaviorto attribute self-esteem to self and others.
Following Hewitts insight, we are interested here in how girls use cultural signiers
to evaluate and talk about other girls self-esteem and its relationship to sexuality.
Using girls current and retrospective accounts of high school, we focus on how
girls talk about other girls self-esteem, focusing on the interpersonal dynamics of
mostly heterosexual girls. We cannot assess actual self-esteem. Instead, we are
interested in how girls use cultural ideas about self-esteem to impute more or
less self-esteem to others. In other words, we are concerned with the process
through which the logic of low self-esteem makes cultural sense to girls as a natural
way of explaining other girls sexual behavior even when they have little (or no)
information about the interior lives of the girls they are talking about. We argue
that girls claims about self-esteem use ideas about gendered and classed hetero-
sexuality to evaluate and enforce gendered and classed behavioral expectations.

Feminism, sexuality, class, and self-esteem

Talk about girls sexuality is often mediated through discourses of danger (Fine,
1988; Fine and McClelland, 2006; Miller, 2013), which emphasize the physical,
emotional, and moral risks of sexual behavior while denying girls sexual agency
(Tolman, 2002; Fine and McClelland, 2007). While this talk serves to regulate all
girls sexuality, crosscutting discourses about race, class, and age portray some girls
as more at risk than others (Bettie, 2003; Garcia, 2012; Harris, 2004; Mann,
2013; Wilkins, 2004b, 2008). Feminists have critiqued these discourses, which per-
meate schools (Bay-Cheng, 2003; Bettie, 2003; Fields, 2008; Garcia, 2012), families
(Elliott, 2012; Espiritu, 2001; Schalet, 2011), healthcare centers (Mann, 2013), and
communities (Sennott and Mollborn, 2011); control girls access to both informa-
tion about sexuality and reproductive healthcare; and shape their sexual subjectiv-
ities, often creating negative feelings about sexuality (Martin, 1996; Tolman, 2002).
Wilkins and Miller 3

Talk about self-esteem occupies a complex position in this conversation. With

few exceptions (Bettie, 2003; Walkerdine, 2003), feminists have not viewed the
discourse about self-esteem as part of the package of discourses regulating girls
sexual behavior, but instead have treated low self-esteem as an emotional conse-
quence of the controlling discourses that circulate in schools, families, and the
media. In a central example, a 2007 American Psychological Association Report
on girls sexualization argues that social and cultural pressure objecties girls,
tying a girls worth to her appearance and/or sexual behavior to the exclusion of
other characteristics (American Psychological Association, Task Force on the
Sexualization of Girls, 2007: 1). This, in turn, pressures girls to engage in sexual
behaviors they might not otherwise choose (see also Brumberg, 1997; Lamb and
Brown, 2006). The logic of this argument presumes that girls with good self-esteem
would never, or rarely, make the choice to engage in sexual behavior on their own,
ironically reproducing the missing discourse of desire rst critiqued by Michelle
Fine in 1988.
The rhetoric of self-esteem, as Julie Bettie (2003) argues, celebrates a middle-class
version of girlhoodone in which sex and romance are delayed and adolescence is
extended. As she points out, implicit in the sexualization argument is the idea that,
without these sexualizing messages, girls will focus on more authentic pursuits,
such as school, friends, and activities (see also: Egan, 2013). Anita Harris (2004)
argues that popular rhetoric has divided class- and race-disadvantaged at risk girls
from celebrated can do girls who are expected to be future-oriented. Because the
opportunity structures that enable some, and not other, girls to succeed recede to the
cultural background, all girls are evaluated for their individual fortitude and grit
(Harris, 2004; Walkerdine, 2003). Thus, ideas about self-esteem have become implicit
and explicit ingredients in discourses about girls (over) and (under) achievement. In
this logic, sexual danger lies not so much in its ability to ruin reputations, as it
had in the 1950s (Bailey, 1999), but in its ability to derail class status by disrupting
educational attainment (Nathanson, 1991).
We enter this conversation by examining how girls have taken up talk about self-
esteem and sexuality as they make sense of and explain peer relationships. We
argue that girls talk about self-esteem and (hetero)sexuality creates and reinforces
classed status distinctions. Many scholars have documented how youth negotiate
social hierarchies through sexualized labeling, gossip, and insult rituals, claiming or
repudiating their own or others social status and cementing social groups
(Chambers et al., 2004; Eder et al., 1995; Pascoe, 2007). A large body of work
shows how these negotiations create gender hierarchies. For example, academic
and popular accounts often focus on the use of labels such as slut to stigmatize
young women whose behavior violates normative expectations for girls comport-
ment (Armstrong et al., 2014; Cappiello et al., 2015; Martin, 1996; Ringrose and
Renold, 2012; Tanenbaum, 2015, 1999; White, 2002). Girls may be tagged with
sexually pejorative labels for violation of gendered behavioral expectations that
have little or nothing to do with actual sexual behavior (Kitzinger, 1995; Lees,
1993; Wilkins, 2008). Sexualized labeling both reects and constructs shifting rules
4 Sexualities 0(0)

for sexual comportment, and enforces broader gendered norms, including the
sexual double standard (Fjaer, 2015).
Feminists typically view girls slut shaming and other forms of sexualized label-
ing as evidence of boys control over adolescent status hierarchies. They assume
that girls have internalized sexist messages, and that slut shaming advantages boys
to girls detriment (Cappiello et al., 2015; Phillips, 2000; Ringrose and Renold,
2012). Armstrong et al. (2014) argue, however, that women participate in this
behavior because they, too, have something to gain from its use. In their study,
college women use slut discourse to negotiate status within college sexual hierar-
chies. Girls talk serves their own social purposes: by talking about others, girls not
only regulate behavior, but also make claims about themselves and those who are
like them and cement social connections (Bettie, 2003; Martin, 1996; Miller, 2016;
Wilkins, 2004a, 2008). This talk, however, constrains girls sexuality. Even when
girls attempt to resist some of the limitations in the sexual double standard, the
double standard itself remains intact (Wilkins, 2004a).
Sexualized labeling does not just negotiate gendered boundaries, but raced and
classed hierarchies and meanings as well. These hierarchies are rooted in a history
of controlling images that position girls and women of color as more likely than
middle-class white women to be sexually promiscuous (Collins, 1990). Girls and
women of color, and class-disadvantaged women, may also use sexual talk to defy
sexual stereotypes as bad girls, at risk, promiscuous, and teen mothers (Fields,
2005; Froyum, 2010; Garcia, 2012) by positioning themselves as morally pure in
comparison to loose white girls (Das Gupta, 1997; Espiritu, 2001; Wilkins,
2004b). But, Armstrong et al. (2014) argue that some women have more social
power to make their meanings stick. In their study, class-privileged women have
more control over the content of the label, and are better able to resist its negative
eects within the local context.
Intersectionalitythe notion that gender, race, and class are not distinct cate-
gories of analysis but are experienced conjointlypresumes that dierently raced/
classed/gendered girls and women have discrete interests and experiences at the
specic intersection of race and class (Collins, 1990; Weber, 1998). These distinct
social locations, in turn, mediate their sexual opportunities and self-presentations.
As Julie Bettie (2000: 15) argues, women perform dierent versions of femininity
that [are] integrally linked and inseparable from their class and race performances.
Sexual dierences are not always centrally about sexual concerns, Bettie argues,
but are a key way that girls express class dierences (see also: Trautner, 2005;
Wilkins, 2012). Here, we nd that that dierently classed (and raced) girls
engage in similar kinds of talk about self-esteem and sexuality, but that this talk
nonetheless reinforces classed hierarchies and expectations that favor girls with the
most class resources.
Most studies do not treat self-esteem as a form of labeling or talk. In an excep-
tion, Lorena Garcia (2012) examines how sexually active high school-age Latinas
use ideas about self-respect to expand the category of good girls to include girls
who are sexually active as long as they take steps to avoid unplanned pregnancies.
Wilkins and Miller 5

However, the girls in her study also use talk about self-respect to draw boundaries
against Latinas who dont handle their business, sustaining the good girlbad
girl dichotomy. In our study, we also nd that girls link self-esteem and being
secure to ideas about gendered sexuality and classed behavior, but that they do so
in ways that seem to allow for less sexual exploration than for the girls in Garcias
study. Popular and feminist discourse oer self-esteem as a path to girls empower-
ment, but we nd that girls use the logic of self-esteem, instead, to evaluate and
regulate each other.

Methods
This article draws on in-depth, semi-structured individual interviews with 66 girls,
aged 14 to 22. We focus on participants current and retrospective accounts of high
school. Our sample scales up from two smaller studies, combining them to create a
more robust picture of the prevalence and durability of self-esteem talk among high
school girls. Both studies sampled young women residing in the same large com-
munity in the northeastern USA but at dierent points in time. The rst author
conducted 24 interviews from 1999 to 2003, a few years after the 1994 publication
of Reviving Ophelia. The second author conducted 42 interviews in 2011. We thus
capture self-esteem talk shortly after it rose to prominence in popular discourse
about girls, and as it has endured. Across these two time periods, participants used
near-identical rhetorical strategies linking low self-concept to sexual choices. While
one might expect use of this discourse to dissipate in the wake of an evolving
feminist cultural consciousness, some increasing support for girls sexual agency
(Wilkins, 2004a), or what some call an increasingly post-feminist society, our
ndings indicate that indeed, the gender revolution (England, 2010) within girls
interpersonal relationships is still yet to come.
Each study originated independently, yet both were aimed at better understand-
ing the intersections of gender and sexuality in young womens lives in the same
geographic region. We included related questions that elicited surprisingly similar
responses given the near decade-long separation between studies. Both of our
prompts focused on participants social experiences in schools, asking them to
map the social contours of their high schools, to locate their own friendships
within them, and to discuss their perceptions of their peers and the dynamics of
intimate relationships. For example, questions included could you tell me a little
about the social hierarchy in your high school? Were you or your friends ever
concerned about your reputation in high school? Were there girls who had bad
reputations, if so, why? Why do you think certain girls are called [particular
sexualized names] and not others? Both sets of interviews invited comparisons
between self and other. Social comparisons made visible the discursive use of self-
esteem as a mode of distinction. The interviews each lasted anywhere from 45 minutes
to three hours and took place on college campuses and in coee shops.
We decided to collaborate after a conversation in which we recognized common
patterns in our data. After this conversation, each author returned to her own data
6 Sexualities 0(0)

to generate initial thematic categories. As the scopes of our individual studies were
far more broad than the focus of this article, we did not review every detail from
each others transcripts. Instead, we focused on and systematically analyzed the
relevant portions of both our own and each others data. After generating our
initial themes, we shared data, each reviewing in detail the relevant portions of
each others transcripts, and rening our initial analyses. We then compared
themes to ensure that our dierent data did contain similar patterns, and to identify
the analytic themes used in this article. We rened these themes in the writing
process, focusing on when and how girls talked about self-esteem. Because girls
do not always use the term self-esteem, we examined related terms they do use,
including being secure or insecure, having self-respect, having con-
dence, and seeking attention. We explicate girls use of these terms as varying
forms of self-esteem talk in our analysis following.

Participants
Our ndings are based on participants current and retrospective accounts of high
school. Both types of account reveal similar uses of self-esteem talk. The rst
author recruited participants through various social networks, generating a
sample that included girls occupying dierent social locations in area schools.
Adult community members provided initial contacts, and girls recommended
their friends for inclusion. Initial adult contacts were diverse (white upper-
middle-class adults, Latina middle-class adults, white working-class adults, and
Black working-class adults) and opened up diverse networks of teens. Teens them-
selves referred their friends into the project. Of these 24 girls, 19 were still in high
school at the time of the interview. The mean age of these participants was 16.
The second author recruited 42 participants from large introductory level college
courses fullling general education requirements at ve area post-secondary insti-
tutions. Their mean age was 19, so high school was fresh on the minds of most of
these participants as well.
We recruited our samples independently, but for the purposes of this article, we
analyze them collectively. The mean age of all participants was 18. Approximately
a third were women of color. Most participants described themselves as heterosex-
ual although there were exceptions: one identied as queer, one identied as gay,
one identied as asexual, four identied as bisexual, and three identied as ques-
tioning or open to exploring relationships with women. As our participants were
mostly adolescents, we determined class based on participants reports of parental
occupation and highest level of education. Thus, we designate class based on family
of origin. Roughly one-third of the participants (25 out of 66 total) came from
working-class or poor origins, but because most of these young women had made it
to college, these participants were also upwardly mobile. Further descriptive details
are available in Table 1.
Although we argue that self-esteem talk relies on and reproduces meanings
about class, class (or race) origins did not determine which young women used
Wilkins and Miller 7

Table 1. Girls, aged 1422.

White Latina Black Asian Mixed-Race Total

Upper Middle Class 18 1 2 21

Middle Class 13 3 3 1 20
Working Class 11 5 2 18
Poor 3 3 1 7
Total 45 11 5 1 4 66

it. Indeed, convinced they would, we compared the data multiple times, looking for
systematic dierences in the use of self-esteem talk by women from dierent class
and race backgrounds. Specically, we asked: do girls from poor or working-class
origins use self-esteem talk in dierent ways than girls from middle- or upper-
middle-class origins? We found that, in our sample, they did not. It is possible
that we would nd more distinct dierences with a dierent sample. However, as
noted earlier, this sample was disproportionately upwardly mobile, suggesting that
self-esteem talk could be a discourse of class aspiration as well as class origin.
We have divided the data in this article into four sections. In the rst section, we
show how girls value security as a mark of gendered status. Then, we analyze
three types of stories girls tell about the link between security, self-esteem, hetero-
sexuality, and class, showing how together, these stories create a tight cultural net
in which it is almost impossible for a girl to be both sexual and secure, harnessing
security to a feminine project best achieved by girls with the most class resources.
This discourse, we argue, reworks the connection between class status, sexual
restraint, and girlhood, giving it a feminist veneer with unintended consequences.

Secure girls
Participants wanted to be secure girls. Consistent with popular discourse, they
viewed girls as more prone to low self-esteem than boys. Most girls viewed them-
selves (and sometimes, their friends) as exceptions. Talk about self-esteem denoted
dierences among girls. Noelle (white, working class) said, I think a lot of times
girls lack condence when they are around other girls, around guys. I think its
almost rare to nd a girl that really has a lot of self-respect and is proud of what
they are. But, I know with at least my friends, I think we all bond over being
strong individuals and being people that have a lot of self-respect and . . . con-
dence . . . Laura (white, upper middle class) claimed, Girls [do not have] as much
self-esteem. She added proudly, It takes a lot of work to be secure in who you
are, but I did that. Nia (mixed-race, working class) said that while other girls
seem lost, so clueless. I never change who I am . . . I was raised to be secure. Girls
thus used ideas about self-esteem to make claims about themselves while also
creating hierarchies among girls. To girls from all class backgrounds, having
high self-esteembeing securewas a sign of status and accomplishment.
8 Sexualities 0(0)

Participants linked being secure to specic behaviors and orientations:

Secure girls are oriented toward educational achievement, rather than romance
or sexuality. Secure girls focus on goals. Insecure girls focus on boys.
Courtney (white, upper middle class) described girls who get into too-serious rela-
tionships as insecure: They seem lost. They are not the smart, goal-oriented
girls to begin with. Laura (white, upper middle class) explained, [Girls who get]
all their value from relationships and their boyfriends . . . dont have as much self-
esteem as girls who get their sense of value from their academic and extracurri-
cular accomplishments. Using her prior insecurity as an example, Charlotte (white,
upper middle class) portrayed accomplishments as a legitimate source of good
feelings, and relationships with boys as illegitimate: I was denitely focused on
like having guys make me feel goodI wasnt, couldnt focus on feeling good
myself or, just doing my work to make myself feel good to beoh look what I
accomplished. I denitely wasnt focused on that. These ways of dening secure
girls favor girls who best adhere to middle-class ideals of delayed girlhood, in which
girls postpone romantic and sexual exploration in favor of educational and voca-
tional development (Bettie, 2003). By attributing low self-esteem to girls who are
interested in boys attention, romance, or sexuality, these girls denitions grant
more status to girls who focus on middle-class achievements and pursuits.
Just as being secure is a sign of status, being called insecure is an insult that
marks low status. Girls used the label insecure regularly in interviews to explain
and label other girls. As we show, the routine use of this label, often without
explication, suggests its common use as a form of explanation, gossip, and labeling
in everyday life. Girls interviews contained three kinds of stories about insecure
girls. In the rst story, girls engage in sexual behavior because they are insecure.
Thus, insecurity causes girls to engage in sexual behaviors that other girls deem
worthy of judgment. The second story says that girls who seem too condent about
their sexuality are actually insecure. Thus, girls who act sexually secure must be
faking their condence. The third story interrogates girls sexual motives, worrying
that girls are doing it for attention or for the guy. These stories propose that
girls almost always have sex to please boys and not because of their own desires. As
we will show, each of these stories not only draws on assumptions about girls
emotional fragility to interpret and explain girls sexual behavior, but also ties girls
sexual behavior to expectations about proper (middle) classed behavior.

Because shes insecure

In the rst story girls tell, low self-esteem causes girls slutty sexual behavior.
Deriding the sexual behavior of some lower-status girls, Nia (mixed-race, working
class) says, She has sex with all these guys, because shes really insecure because
she knows nobody likes her. About another girl: Guys talk about the things [she]
has done with them. Willingly. Because shes insecure. In these stories, girls have
sex because they have low self-esteem. Nia did not oer further explication, instead
assuming the rst author would share her interpretation. She did not feel the need
Wilkins and Miller 9

to explain why or how low self-esteem pushes girls to be sexual. Instead, she took
these explanations for granted as everyday ways of explaining girls behavior.
Nia does not know the girls she describes here well. They are not her friends.
Instead, she assumes both pieces of the story: she assumes that low self-esteem
motivates their sexual behavior, and she assumes they have low self-esteem because
of their sexual behavior (which she only knows about secondhand). In these girls
stories, slutty sexual behavior alone can prove low self-esteem.
Sometimes, stories provide biographical details that seemed to oer psycho-
logical insight. Beths (mixed-race, upper middle class) narrative is evident of this
type:

Her father just . . . ditched her when she was really young so I think thats why she
relied so much on her boyfriend, is because she never had that male gure in her life
and like . . . things kinda fell apart in her life and the decisions she made werent very,
you know, wise.

To explain her friends sexual behavior, Beth evoked the cultural story that girls
without father gures seek male attention elsewhere. This story, and others that
girls tell, contains unspoken class meanings. Americans often encode talk about
social class in talk about other things, such as families, space, achievement, mor-
ality, and sexuality (Ortner, 2003). Here, Beths story used this familiar cultural
trope to suture together low-income family, absent father, (poor) self-esteem, and
(unwise) sexual behavior.
Although Nia and Beth are not the only participants who told this kind of story,
as mixed-raced women, telling these stories does additional work. These narratives
help both girls distance themselves from controlling images (Collins, 1990) that
depict women of color as particularly promiscuous. Here, Nia and Beth use stories
about insecure girls to stake out their claims as secure girls and, by extension,
their own relative sexual morality.
Girls often proered the cultural logic of low self-esteem, poor home life, and
class-disadvantage without explaining all the pieces. Rebecca (white, upper middle
class) illustrates how girls used this logic without explicitly naming self-esteem:

For a long time I criticized her as sort of . . . I feel bad about that now, because when
she was like 14 . . . she just wanted to get rid of her virginity or something so fast . . . she
just was like, so many dudes I cant even keep track. I dont even know how many,
I couldnt guess . . . She just had a tough home life and I think a lot of factors in that.

Rebecca assumed her audience (the second author) would understand what she
meant by a lot of factors in that. Holstein and Gubrium (1995) note that inter-
view narratives often refer to cultural stories found outside the interview context.
These girls stories did not require exposition because they called up cultural nar-
ratives in which some girls are seen to be rendered (emotionally) vulnerable
by their circumstances (Harris, 2004: 25), and assume that at-risk (class-
10 Sexualities 0(0)

disadvantaged) girls engage in non-normative behavior to cope with the psycho-

logical fragility their circumstances engender. In the foregoing examples, girls
attributed low self-esteem and unwise sexual behavior to tough home lives.
The cultural familiarity of these stories allowed girls to elide narrative details,
but also enabled the audience to take for granted the gendered, and often classed,
cultural assumptions that made these stories intelligible to both storyteller and
audience. Stories like Beths and Rebeccas seem to oer more psychological know-
ledge than stories like Nias, but these young women made emotional assumptions
that harnessed together ideas about home life, sexuality, and possibly other emo-
tional or behavioral signiers. In these cases, class disadvantage (via bad home
lives) is an additional piece of evidence supporting their diagnosis of low self-
esteem. They seem true because they make cultural sense and not because young
women have actual psychological knowledge about other girls self-concepts.
These stories police the boundaries of gendered sexual behavior. They may
partially exonerate a girl by attributing her sexual activities to some other problem,
but they also deate her status by calling attention to a bad home life or other
potentially polluting biographical detail. By telling these stories, participants craft
boundaries between themselves and the girls they talk about, claiming their own
status by positioning themselves as both more secure and more sexually restrained.

The so-called confident girls

The second kind of story is about how girls carry themselves. In this story, girls
condemn those who act too sexually secure: the so-called condent girls.
Condent girls, they say, are masking inner insecurity. In this logic, a girl can
beindeed, should besecure, but she cannot get her security from her sexuality.
Sexual condence means girls do not care. Not caring reveals shamelessness
and a lack of self-respect that indicates a girl, at heart, is deeply insecure. When
participants criticized girls for being sexually shameless, they claimed to be con-
cerned about their improper emotions, not their sexual behavior.
Using identical language, several participants said that girls who act too con-
dent about their sexuality are begging for attention. Women from all class
backgrounds told these stories. Carrie (white, upper middle class) explained: girls
who are uncomfortable make themselves seem comfortable by engaging in sexu-
ally open practices. Noelle (white, working class) elaborated:

Maybe if a girl is really kinda promiscuous and wild, you know the so-called condent
girls or whatever . . . I think a lot of times people think they have more condence
because I feel like, a lot of times, condence in a girl is seen as oh, shes the one thats
really loud, you know, shows o her body, and you know, thats the condent one
but I see that as less condent.

Carrie and Noelle both assumed that displaying sexual condence meant girls were
hiding real insecurity or attempting to x it by getting attention.
Wilkins and Miller 11

Participants suggested that improper emotional display, rather than sexual

behavior itself, caused girls to be vulnerable to the slut label. Emma (white,
upper middle class) reected, If theres two girls and they both slept with the
same number of people, but they have dierent behavior, one would be called a
slut and one wouldnt. The girl who exuded like mass amounts of condence
would be called a slut. Mel (white, upper middle class) recalled that a high school
peer was seen as slutty, because she did fuck a lot of people, like really a lot, like
signicantly many. And was not shy about it. Holly (white, middle class)
explained: The bad girl obviously is someone whos like getting around . . . wher-
eas a good girl doesnt mean you dont do things like that, it just means that you
are self-conscious and you respect yourself. In these examples, girls labeled other
girls sluts because they did not display the right emotionsshame, self-conscious-
ness, reserveabout their sexual behavior.
Although girls from all backgrounds told these stories, girls evaluations, as in
the previous stories, were about class. In these stories, participants were specically
concerned with class futures. When participants accused a girl of not caring or
not having self-respect, they meant she had shown inadequate concern about the
future of her class status. Holly (white, middle class) made these ideas clear when
she described a group of pregnant girls in her high school:

[They were] classied as like scummy . . . How they carried themselves, like, wore
pajamas to school, didnt brush their hair, failing, didnt care . . . just like trashy,
like I dont know . . . and just like people wont want to like associate with [them]
just for the fact of how they carried themselves, its just like they didnt care, no
self-respect.

Holly condemned the girls for their bad grooming, for their (evident) lack of shame
about being pregnant, and for their failure to perform interest in schoolall of
which signied, to her, that they didnt care and were scummy. Not caring
suggested a lack of self-respect by violating middle-class expectations that girls
treat themselves as future-oriented projects (Harris, 2004). To Holly, this lack of
self-respect, more than the sexual behavior itself, justied her contempt.
These stories were often (though not always) more venomous than the stories in
the previous section. This intensied judgment, perhaps, comes from the desire to
police the terms of the status hierarchy so that girls who claim sexual security
cannot also claim high status. Noelles comment about the so-called condent
girls provides a glimpse of the need to ensure that sexually condent girls do
not try to seize territory from the top of the status hierarchy. It is likely that
some boys seek out these girls, and boys exercise much control over peer hierar-
chies (Eder et al., 1995). Thus, these stories police the boundaries of secure girlhood
to exclude sexually condent girls, as being secure can only be a source of status if a
girls security comes from sources other than her sexuality or boys. These stories
also favor middle-class expectations for girlhood, censoring gendered performances
associated with working-class girlhood. Indeed, they make it dicult, if not
12 Sexualities 0(0)

impossible, for girls to claim to be secure about their sexuality, as such claims are
taken as evidence of deep insecurity.
Reviving Ophelia encouraged girls to nd their voices and to exhibit condence
in a range of arenas, yet these stories reveal an economy of capital in which some
repertoires of girls selfhood are seen as socially valuable, while others, particularly
those related to sexuality, are viewed as undermining girls social power. This leads
to a paradox where girls can neither govern their own claims to sexual condence
or security, nor turn them into a form of capital in the high school marketplace.

It depends on your motives

In the third kind of story, girls labeled other girls as insecure if they had the
wrong motives for being sexual. In high school, where girls admit that they
cannot (or could not, in the retrospective accounts) imagine that a girl could lay
claim to her own desires, it is unclear that a girl could ever have the right motives.
The wrong motives include seeking attention, letting boys use you, or doing
it for the guy. Girls viewed these motives as wrong because they violate their
expectations that girls be both autonomous and in control.
Because it is dicult for girls to judge other girls motives for sexual behavior,
they used assumptions about gendered behavior to make evaluations. Charlotte,
who views herself as sexually progressive, provides an example: Like Im a big fan
of like equal rights whatever, so like if I want to be a player, a pimp and I want to
go have tons of sex, its like power to you . . . She hedges:

But, I mean, if youre like hooking up with multiple guys in a weekend, its like thats
denitely a little too much. It depends on your motives. If . . . I dont know what your
motive is, like I dont know (emphasis added). Thats too slutty . . . its when youre
doing it for attention instead of just because you enjoy it or because its, I feel like they
denitely do it for attention.

To Charlotte, motives matter. Being a pimp, or having sex out of a sense of

conquest or because you enjoy it, is acceptable, even empowering, but doing it for
attention is too slutty. But she assumes that, unless she knows a girls motives,
shes denitely doing it for attention. Its hard to know how Charlotte would
get accurate information about motives, especially about girls with whom she is
not friendly.
Perhaps Charlotte is limited in imagining a girl who is motivated by the desire
for tons of sex (even though she wants to imagine one) because such a desire is so
thoroughly associated with masculinity, as her use of the words player and
pimp reveals. The pimp symbolizes masculine sexual prowess, as well as mas-
culine manipulation and generalized social power (Staiger, 2005). Doing it for
attention, on the other hand, meshes with the cultural commonsense that girls are
often insecure. Boys are expected to boast about their sexual conquests, a form of
attention seeking, but this is rarely portrayed as psychologically troubling.
Wilkins and Miller 13

Charlotte uses gendered ideas to determine that attention-seeking motivates most

girls sexual behavior, and to negatively evaluate and label such behavior. Here,
concern with motives provides a tool for making sense of her negative judgments
about sexual conduct while also claiming to be sexually progressive.
In practice, the kinds of stories Charlotte and other girls tell can be directed
against anyone outside of their immediate social circle, but these stories also x
sexual standards to ideas about class. Janelle (mixed-race, middle class) illustrates:

A good girl . . . doesnt need attention from guys to reassure her that shes
something . . . A bad girl is somebody whos just the opposite. Like goes around
having sex, sleeps around with whoever, and who isnt really stable, grades arent
good, not really doing much with their lives, theyre not heading in the right direction.
And they like thrive on the attention of guys and what guys think of them . . .

Here, Janelle links seeking attention to a broader set of behaviors she associates
with heading in the [wrong] [class] direction.
In girls stories, doing it for the guy and letting boys use you are related to
wrong motives. These phrases imply that a sense of obligation or romance,
rather than her own desires, motivates a girl to be sexually intimate with a boy,
and that it is girls low self-worth that lets boys needs determine the course of
relationships. In these stories, girls often express worry for other girls. Heather
(white, upper middle class) laments: I just really wish that a lot of the girls I went
to high school with had more self-respect. And the fact that . . . girls like that who
just . . . let guys use them. When you have so little respect for yourself, I nd it very
dicult to respect you. Mary (Latina, working class) says that girls should
respect themselves enough to . . . sex wise at least, wait for someone whos good
enough for them . . . Not allow them to feel so worthless that they have to do this
over and over and over again. Note how girls from a range of race and class
backgrounds told similar kinds of stories. These stories were useful to dierent girls
as ways of claiming to be the kind of girls who didnt let a guy use them. By telling
these stories, women dierentiated themselves from the girls who were doing both
sexuality and self-esteem incorrectly, and laid claim to a repertoire of sexuality and
self-condence linked to upward class mobility. In this sense, girls self-esteem talk
is a kind of aspirational class discourse.
Contrary to what other research has found (e.g. Tolman, 2002), girls in rela-
tionships were not immune from these stories. These comments raise real concerns
about inequitable gendered power within heterosexual relationships, while simul-
taneously assuming it is girls responsibility to ensure good treatment. Girls do not
lament that boys use girls, but instead blame girls for letting boys use them.
The emphasis in these stories on girls rather than boys behavior is not new, and
relies on dominant cultural tropes that privilege boys desires over girls (Crawford
and Popp, 2003; Greene and Faulkner, 2005). However, it also underscores the
moral imperative girls face to develop enough self-respect that they do not allow
themselves to be used.
14 Sexualities 0(0)

Many participants express emphatically that they dont let guys use them,
drawing rm boundaries against girls who do. They do not, however, say I do it
for myself. Instead, their stories leave little room for the idea that girls could
experience and act on sexual desire. Lindsey (white, upper middle class) notes
that, in high school, she and other girls could not imagine that girls could experi-
ence sexual desire and pleasure: Its all about the mens sexual desire, not about
the womensespecially in high school. Sara (white, middle class) also explains
that high school youth cannot imagine that girls could act on their own desire:

I think theres just like an expectation that girls and women are supposed to be
subdued, and kind of take it without saying anything, and theyre not supposed to
like go after what they want in the same way. And nobody would assume that when a
girl is like sleeping around that shes doing it for herself. They would think shes like
doing it for the guy.

Saras explanation suggests that because high school youth assume that sexually
active girls must be doing it for the guy, sexual rumors themselves prove
a girls low self-esteem.
In telling these stories, girls often resist the idea that girls should be subordinate
to boys, yet they simultaneously hold girls responsible for their subordination.
Good self-esteem is the antidote to unequal heterosexual relationships. At the
same time, because girls struggle to imagine sexual subjectivity, stories about
motives automatically become stories about low self-esteem, sorting girls into a gen-
dered hierarchy in which avoiding sex ensures status. In these kinds of stories,
allegations that a girl has the wrong motives are a kind of lite version of slutti-
ness, marking girls and invalidating their sexual agency without necessarily labeling
them sluts. Instead, these stories work alongside slut discourse, providing an alter-
native kind of stigmaa gendered mark of potential class failure.

Conclusion
In this article, we make two contributions. First, we argue that girls talk about self-
esteem should be analyzed for its cultural meaning, not just treated as uncompli-
cated information on self-concept. Second, we argue that the girls in our study
do not talk about self-esteem in ways that empower them, but instead use talk
about self-esteem to regulate and classify each other, albeit in complex ways that
they may not always fully comprehend. The stories they tell not only constrain
girls sexuality, but also regulate emotional displays, favoring girls who display the
right emotions about sexuality and the future.
Girls stories tie low self-esteem to sexuality in complex and sometimes contra-
dictory ways. They assume that girls with bad reputations are insecure. They
assume that girls who dont display shame about their sexualitywho carry them-
selves with securitydo not care, and that not caring indicates a lack of self-
respect, which, in turn, reveals true insecurity. They assume that when they hear
Wilkins and Miller 15

rumors about a girl engaging in sexual behavior with a boy, the girl was either
seeking attention or letting the boy use her. We did not nd any room in
these stories for a high school girl to have sex, enjoy it, and feel good about it. Girls
almost always had little knowledge about other girls actual self-concepts: In these
stories, girls used sexual behavior (and rumors about sexual behavior), class signi-
ers, and assumptions about behavior to impute self-esteem, and, in turn, used self-
esteem to explain sexual behavior, and label girls. The utility of self-esteem as a
form of talk lies in its exibility, ambiguity, and its cultural power. Self-esteem
stories make sense because they align with what we assume we already know about
girls. Because they work in this way, they can be imprecise and empty of actual
details about girls emotional or sexual lives.
Class matters in multi-layered ways. First, girls portray low-status girls as
obviously insecure. Low self-esteem, in turn, explains bad sexual reputations.
These stories portray disadvantaged class origins (e.g. bad home lives), promis-
cuity, and low self-esteem as naturally aligned. Second, girls reinterpret other girls
who (implicitly or explicitly) claim sexual condence as insecure. These stories
evoke ideas about class futures by positioning such girls as not caring. The girls
in these stories were often the girls whose feminine self-presentation violated
middle-class expectations most visibly. Third, girls use ideas about self-esteem to
perform middle-class expectations for feminine comportment. In our data, girls
from all class and race backgrounds talk about self-esteem in similar ways, but
the link between achievement and secure girlhood privileges girls from auent
backgrounds who are more likely to have the resources to enact educational and
vocational achievement. Thus, talk about self-esteem naturalizes and reproduces
class-stratied gender hierarchies, but in ways that encourage the buy-in of indi-
vidual class- and race-disadvantaged girls. The emphasis on performing gendered
class expectations as a way of managing anxieties about class futures make the
promise of self-esteem seem available to every girl who works hard enough to get it.
Moreover, they position self-esteem as a moral imperative for contemporary girls if
they hope to achieve upward mobility.
The complex ways that class matters in these stories expands how we think
about how intersectionality works. It is not just that class-privileged girls are
doing sexuality dierently from other girls, but rather girls from a range of class
backgrounds mobilize the link between sexuality and self-concept in multiple, ex-
ible ways, using rhetorics of the self as a kind of class capital as they aim to secure
status, gain mobility, or repudiate disrepute. These stories serve additional pur-
poses for girls of color, who can use them to distance themselves from racialized
controlling images. The girls in this study were primarily heterosexual and the
stories told here were primarily about heterosexual behavior. Yet, it is dicult to
know if self-esteem talk is primarily a heterosexualizing tool. Elizabeth Payne
(2010) nds that lesbian youth adopt heteronormative language to evaluate and
police other lesbians, deriding them as sluts for having sexual experience or desires.
It seems possible that the discourse of self-esteem could as easily be directed by and
at girls queer sexualities. More research is needed to know.
16 Sexualities 0(0)

By telling stories about other girls self-esteem, dierently situated girls make
claims about their own sexuality, self-esteem, and status. They draw boundaries
against girls who are less secure and whose sexual behavior is less restrained,
claiming security for themselves. Yet, self-esteem talk constrains the girls who
use it by narrowing the terms of acceptable comportment. Because they often
explain that girls are sexual not for pleasure but for attention, that attention
is the wrong kind of pleasure, and that heterosexuality between young people
frequently entails the negotiation of unequal levels of desire, the girls in this
study often presume that girls sexual actions are about getting attention and not
about desire. These assumptions make it dicult, if not impossible, to prove that a
girl is motivated by something other than attention or insecurity. The vagueness
of motivation and self-esteem make it dicult for most girls to defend their
own sexual choices. Instead, a girls sexual actions themselves are evidence of her
insecurity. While gender inequity in young adult heterosexual relationships is per-
vasive (Armstrong et al., 2012; Holland et al., 2004), the logic of self-esteem limits
girls ability to dene their own experiences (and motivations), claim sexual desire,
or imagine that sexual conduct emerges from girls own desires. Moreover, they
hold girls, not boys, responsible for ensuring that they are treated well. By inter-
preting girls sexual behaviors as a sign of low self-esteem, girls talk often unin-
tentionally reinforces, manipulates, and extends the role of sexuality in enforcing
hierarchies among girls, while dening secure girlhood narrowly, claiming self-
esteem only for the girls who already have the most resources. In the new post-
Ophelia economy of condence,1 secure girlhood is reserved for girls who can and
do claim security through activities valued by upper-middle-class adults: high
grades, extracurricular participation and leadership, and so forth.
The ways in which girls have put the Reviving Ophelia discourse to cultural work
is an unintended outcome of a feminist project aimed at empowering girls.
As feminists worried rightly about girls condence and sexual agency, their own
advocacy, likely unintentionally, linked girls self-esteem to a specic set of sexual
choices. Girls themselves have taken up these links as a kind of cultural common-
sense, using them to evaluate each other in their everyday lives, and to solidify and
justify not only persistent gender inequalities, but also classed hierarchies among
girls. Beyond promoting self-esteem as a primary goal for girls to attain, feminists
invested in girls empowerment must start attending to the multi-layered meanings
embedded in the rhetoric of self-esteem as well as its classed, raced and gendered
consequences.

Funding
This research received funding from the Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst.

Note
1. Many thanks to one of our anonymous reviewers for this useful phrase.
Wilkins and Miller 17

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20 Sexualities 0(0)

Amy C Wilkins is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado-

Boulder. Her research on race, gender, class, sexuality, and emotions among youth
and young adults has been published in various articles and in a book, Wannabes,
Goths, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status (University of
Chicago Press, 2008). Her current research examines race, class, gender, and sexu-
ality identity dilemmas in the transition to college.

Sarah A Miller is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at University of Massachusetts-

Amherst who studies youth and social inequality. Her research has focused on
community conicts over adolescent sexuality and the intersection of slut-shaming
and homophobia in girls experiences with peer aggression. Her current work
ethnographically explores the varying impacts of youth conict and anti-bullying
initiatives on a high school community in the Northeast.