Hard to Get

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Leslie Bell. Hard to Get

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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR LESLIE C. BELL’S HARD TO GET

—Karin A. Martin, author of Puberty, Sexuality, and the Self: Boys and Girls at Adolescence

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I argue that splitting came to predominate among many of the women with whom I spoke, not because they were in any way pathological, but because of the unsettled nature of this new in-between period of early adulthood for women, and the uncertainty and anxiety that accompany it.34 Confused about freedom and what it is to be a woman today, young women often split their social and psychological options—into independence, strength, safety, and control versus relatedness, vulnerability, need, and desire—as though they’re mutually exclusive and not equally important to human development.35 Despite all the advances of women over the past fifty years, these experiences are frequently split into masculine and feminine ones, with the masculine being overvalued socially and psychologically. In modern western culture, autonomy and all that accompany it are much more highly valued than are interdependence and all that accompany it. Splitting leads some women to assume that they cannot be strong and autonomous when they are interdependent with others, vulnerable, and intimate. Vulnerability, needs, desires, and intimacy, then, often become new taboos for young women—experiences to be avoided rather than embraced.

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