A book I was tempted to like is Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. A mild polemic, it explores the apparent proliferation of “raunch culture” where women adopte male attitudes and prowess about sex and sexual presentation, or go the ultimate girlie route and Barbie-ize themselves, or adorn themselves in stripper/porn trappings to be attractive. Yes, I was tempted me, I must admit, and much of it ran along purely generational lines.

But then I thought back to my college years, years which saw the invention of the wet t-shirt contest, t&a jiggling on weekly television, and Farah Fawcett posters. We even had insincere girl-on-girl, but it happened during menage a trois moments, not on the dancefloor in hopes of a hook-up. Given that, I’d say women’s claim to power remains almost as unresolved now as it was then. We have a more public life, but it hasn’t actually granted us more power, and the only places we’ve made clearly visible headway are in college and workplace populations.

In other words, the song largely remains the same.

I look as well to my own teenage daughter and her friends, none of whom have adopted the trappings of raunch. All seniors in high school, they remain sensible in dress and attitude and routinely turn their backs on Girls Gone Wild and The Girls Next Door. To them, thongs remain silly things that get stuck in your ass. Why waste your time with such discomfort and distraction?

They seem, in fact, to be the very kind of young women Levy longs for in her book: Young women who spend their time developing their identities around their interests, talents, and growing independence. None of them are considering big party schools for college, either.

But that doesn’t render the discussions that Levy’s book provokes useless. It is important to understand how pervasive raunch is in our culture, and it’s valuable to understand where we adopt and reject in various aspects of our lives. However, I simply can’t be an alarmist when I see young women like my daughter and her friends who completely reject raunch in all its permutations. I can’t be an alarmist about it when the wet t-shirt contests of my day were almost as revealing and raunchy as flashing tit is today. (And, hell, woman have been flashing tit since the start of biker’s gatherings. I’m thinking Laconia here, folks.)

Yes, the song remains the same. We just never got around to rewriting the lyrics.