As it turns out, a lot of women are well aware that the cultural expectations placed on our bodies can be absurd, unhealthy, and largely impossible for us to fulfill. But awareness alone won't necessarily curb our attempts to satisfy the feminine ideal anyway.

First: Sex educator Emily Nagoski, who blogs as Sex Nerd, writes about the difficulty of dispensing good sex advice. Why? Because Nagoski's dual roles as responsible sex educator and helpful sex therapist are in constant conflict. Nagoski offers up a typical exchange between herself and a sex-advice seeker:

STUDENT: I don’t have orgasms from penetration. What’s wrong with me?

ME: Nuthin’! Sounds to me like you’re in the 70% majority of women who aren’t generally orgasmic from intercourse. You’re completely normal.

STUDENT: …Oh.

ME: But you still feel like you ought to be having orgasms from penetration, huh?

STUDENT: Well my partner wants me to be able to, and I want my partner to be satisfied. And anyway, that’s, like, what everyone says is normal.

ME: Yeah. I know. But everyone is wrong. I wish the media and the culture and everyone hadn’t lied to you and your partner and made you feel broken. But they did and you do, even though you’re not. So what could I say that would help?

STUDENT: Well, you could tell me how to have orgasms from penetration.

ME: *sigh* …Okay.

Nagoski notes that "most of the time it takes more than normalizing statistics to liberate someone from the burden of fear." In other words, simple awareness that our cultural ideal has been hoodwinking women into hating ourselves isn't enough to make us stop. "What can an educator provide? Sadly, most often it’s advice about how to conform more to the cultural lie. Which makes me feel like a fraud," she writes. "It’s like trying to send the message that weight doesn’t matter, and then giving dieting tips."

Which brings us to Chloe Angyal's recent piece on the Huffington Post. Angyal examines a Girls Scouts Research Institute study that examines how 1,000 teenage girls think about body image. Angyal writes:

of the young women surveyed, 65% think that the female bodies they see walking the runways and gracing the pages of fashion magazines are "too skinny" and 63% think that such a body shape is "unrealistic." Forty-seven percent say that "the fashion industry body image looks unhealthy" and 28% say it looks "sick." Fashion models, these girls believe, are too skinny, unrealistic, and look unhealthy and sick. And yet 48% wish they could look just like them.

There is a strong awareness among girls that the beauty ideal—the race to look younger, thinner, whiter—is not only unattainable for most women, but actually an offensive and unpleasant expectation to lay on women of all ages, sizes, races, and gender presentations. But girls are still struggling to attain the ideal. Angyal writes:

It's one thing to want to be beautiful for beauty's sake. It's quite another to want to be unhealthy for beauty's sake. Sadly, it's a desire that many young women are acting on, at great risk to their own health. The new findings indicate that about a third of young women have starved themselves in an attempt to lose weight. Compared the findings from other studies on the subject, that number is quite low: One study found that more than half of adolescent girls had "engaged in unhealthy weight control behaviours such as fasting, skipping meals, vomiting or smoking" in the past year. That's half of the adolescent female population, high school and middle school girls who are obsessing over their weight, going deliberately hungry, stunting their own growth, skipping class to throw up in secret, hurting themselves in the pursuit of an ideal that is simply unattainable for 98% of the population.

A simple awareness of feminist issues can't magically negate the power of the culture in which we live. Here, validation is still dispensed based on how well you conform to the ideal. As Angyal writes, "What's fascinating about the new findings is that they seem to indicate an increased awareness in young women that the ideal presented by the fashion industry and by the media is unrealistic and unhealthy. . . And yet, they still think those women are beautiful, and they still want to look like them."

Why do women who know that many women can't orgasm from intercourse still attempt to orgasm from intercourse—or give up and fake it? And why do girls who know that the body image being sold to them is an unhealthy one still skip meals and stick their fingers down their throats? After all, speaking up for some clitoral stimulation and eating what you feel like is, in theory, a lot easier than the alternative. I think part of the reason it's so difficult to translate feminist awareness into our lives is the particular cultural belief that being a "good" person—and a good woman—does require a lot of work. Girls today don't just earn social validation by being skinny—they establish their spot in the pecking order by unearthing how much work they spend trying to get there, obsessively discussing how fat they are, and publicly flogging themselves when they fail to live up to perfection—even if they are still very, very skinny.

Embracing feminist cognitive dissonance can be a helpful tactic for continuing our theoretical work while still allowing ourselves to live normal lives. And a big part of living our lives includes working to receive the validation that comes with being a "good woman," even when we know the idea of being a good woman is some fucked up shit. Hopefully, the theoretical work we do will help to contribute to the much more difficult task of changing our cultural values, even as we capitulate to them in our personal lives. But admitting that this stuff is fucked up—and then doing it anyway—also gives an added little boost to the cultural ideal. We know that it's bad for us (and for other women), but we still want it—and by wanting it even though it's bad for us (and for other women), we reveal ourselves to be even better women in our culture's eyes, because we've demonstrated just how deep our allegiance is to its ideals.

It is a simple formula for both comedy and political commentary:

Take a public figure (Sarah Palin) who holds disagreeable views (abstinence-only education). Zero in on an aspect of her personal life counter to those views (her own teen daughter, Bristol Palin, becoming pregnant). Reveal the comedic irony and/or hypocrisy of the public/private contrast. Repeat ad nauseam on blogs, 24-hour news channels, and late night talk shows.

We should all beware this construction. Though very easy to pull off—and often journalistically and comedically sound—it is a trap. And it will render us all hypocrites. Three lessons from history, after the jump.

SARAH PALIN

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: Too many to count, but in this case, it's the abstinence thing.

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: When Palin's 17-year-old daughter Bristol became pregnant months before Palin rose to political fame as John McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential election, political commentators and comedians held up Bristol's pregnancy as evidence that abstinence is futile—even under the roof of your state's no-sex-before-marriage Governor.

IT'S A TRAP! The revelation came at the height of election season fervor, and liberal commentators ate Bristol's sexual activity up with a spoon. The term "knocked up" became par for the course. When the baby's father, Levi Johnston, told Tyra Banks that he and Bristol had practiced safe sex, Tyra et. al dismissed him as a liar. The late-night comedy cycle feasted on the Bristol-is-a-slut jokes. Even Palin family cheerleader Greta Van Susteren asked Bristol if she had been "lazy."

We forgot that even the most responsible of 17-year-old condom users don't put it on right every time. We forgot that condoms break. And we forgot that, when you're the governor's daughter in the small town of Wasilla, requesting birth control from your family doctor, seeking Plan B at a local pharmacy, or even buying condoms—anywhere—could cause such a shit-storm for you, your boyfriend, and your family, that it would have been hard to mount the courage to even approach the counter.

At some point, we forgot about why Bristol having sex was funny to begin with. The insane glee that we all derived from a teenage girl having sex before marriage became counter-intuitive—and downright creepy. We had crossed the hypocrisy bridge. We were no longer making a point about how young women should be free to choose to be sexually active. We no longer joked to show how bogus abstinence was. We joked to show that Bristol Palin was slutty, and that was enough to make it funny.

—

CARRIE PREJEAN

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: During the Q-and-A section of  the 2009 Miss USA pageant, Miss USA California Carrie Prejean described her views on same-sex marriage this way:

"I think it's great that americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage, and in my country, and my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be a man or a woman. No offense to anyone out there, but that was how I was raised, and that's how I think it should be. Between a man and a woman. Thank you."

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: After rising to blogosphere infamy—with the help of question-asker Perez Hilton's videoblog declaring her a "bitch"—Prejean's past modeling career caught up to her. When topless photos of the 21-year-old Prejean surfaced on the Web, Prejean was accused of both violating her pageant contract and preaching inconsistent moral views. Who is she to preach good Christian values when she's flaunting her assets for cash?

IT'S A TRAP! Wait a second—since when did we start caring about women upholding the contractual obligations of beauty pageants? Pageants are among the most sexist and anti-feminist of American traditions. They encourage patriarchal views about the traditional roles women and men should hold in society. And guess what—gays don't have a place there.

But the patriarchy is also responsible for one of the most damaging of all hypocrisy constructions: the virgin-whore dichotomy. Shaming Carrie Prejean—a woman we've elevated through beauty pageants—for taking topless modeling photos is a very short leap for shaming gays and lesbians for expressing their sexuality. That's why this whole thing was hypocritical in the first place—but perhaps we're all too distracted by Carrie Prejean's boobs to remember. We may keep posting them in the interest of "revealing hypocrisy." But we all know the real reason they're on the Web: It's not hypocrisy anymore; it's hotness.

—

LARRY CRAIG

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: As a Republican Senator from Idaho, Craig often championed conservative moral values. William Saletan got specific in 2007, pointing out that Craig "helped to enact the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," revealing his "anti-gay hypocrisy."

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: In June of 2007, Craig was arrested for soliciting sex from a male undercover cop in the Minneapolis airport:

According to the report filed by the officer who arrested Craig at the Minneapolis airport in June, Craig stood outside the officer's bathroom stall for two minutes, repeatedly looked at the officer "through the crack in the door," sat in the stall next to the officer, tapped his foot, and gradually "moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot … within my stall area." Craig proceeded to "swipe his hand under the stall divider for a few seconds" three times, palm up, using the hand farthest from that side of Craig's stall. Most of these gestures, the officer explained, were known pickup signals in a room known (and hence under surveillance for) public sex. When the officer took Craig outside and told him so, Craig claimed he had been reaching down with his hand to retrieve a piece of paper from the floor. The officer wrote that no such paper had been on the floor.

IT'S A TRAP! I'll admit it—this is rich, fertile ground for the hypocrisy construction. Craig blows Palin and Prejean out of the water with this Perfect 10 hypocritical move: enacting anti-gay policies in law, and being gay in private. Jokes at Craig's expense were easy, valid, and very popular.

Conservatives, when not denying that any of this happened, joined in the shit-throwing. After all, this is the stuff homophobes' nightmares are made of—strange gay men attempting to have sex with them while they're taking care of business in a public restroom. For them, Craig reinforced the idea that homosexuals are sick and disgusting individuals just waiting to pounce on your unsuspecting bare penis. In other words, gays can pose a very real threat to their heterosexuality, and Craig proved it.

And yet, those who railed against Craig's institutionalized homophobia were the ones who took the most immense joy in the gay jokes. So—again—reveling in jokes about Larry Craig being gay began to lose their hypocritical anchor. On some level, the hypocritical construction allows people with pro-gay political views to indulge in some homophobic ribbing of their own. They see a rare window where making fun of gay sex is politically acceptable, and they sieze it. It's the same tale with Sarah Palin: People who support progressive sexual health policies, like comprehensive sex education, sieze the opportunity to make jokes about sluts. It's the same tale with Carrie Prejean: People who rail against patriarchal values, like "opposite marriage" and beauty pageants, sieze the opportunity to make sexist jokes.

So, let's all try not to descend too deeply into the hypocrisy construction's rabbit hole. Fall too far, and we become ripe for ironic commentary ourselves.

Last month, I wrote a story on why the government won't fund local youth AIDS prevention group WAIT (or Washington AIDS International Teens). WAIT's problem was this:

a. Their goal was stopping the spread of HIV.

b. Their methodology was abstinence.

c. The government only funds one or the other.

Last week, President Obama proposed to add another roadblock to their fight for funding by cutting abstinence-only cash from the budget altogether.

Now, groups like WAIT, which represent the most practical side of abstinence eduction—delaying sex only to prevent an uncurable deadly disease—will remain, well, pretty much unaffected. As I detailed in my piece, federally-funded abstinence-only education was always itself too much of a "comprehensive" strategy. In order to receive federal funding, abstinence groups couldn't just work against AIDS—they also had to teach prevention of “out-of-wedlock pregnancy”; that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity”; and that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

So while proponents of comprehensive sex education rejoice at the White House rule, some abstinence advocates, at least, aren't lamenting the move: abstinence's realists have always been left behind.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery.