Hard To Get: Twenty-Something Women

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Identity is hard to apprehend. Teenagers struggle throughout high school to figure out who their friends are and most importantly, who they are. However, their journeys never end; it may take a whole lifetime to discover who one truly is. But as humans, do we really have the ability to choose our identities? Leslie Bell in her book, Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom explains that women often times solve their problems in three types of strategies: Sexual, Relational, and Desiring Women. Women who follow the Sexual Women ideologies have very few problems with sexual desires but they struggle with relationships. On the other hand, a Relational Women are women who don’t have relational problems but fear that…show more content…
Bell comments about the racial hierarchy where white people are placed on the top, above everyone else, black people places on the bottom and other races arranged in the middle. Like any structure, association with one’s own class is highly common while mingling with lower classes is often looked down upon although it shows power and status. Jayanthi “found that the attractive and popular girls were always white” (Bell, 34). What Jayanthi observed here wasn’t just a personal opinion, as Bell also mentions that “families and women Alicia did want to model herself after as a child were Caucasian…their race and class were important parts”(Bell, 38). In both cases, these women desired to be more like the white women. These women felt like they could never be who they wanted to be because they weren’t white. Another connection is that both these women mostly had relationships with African Americans. Both girls felt that African Americans were not suitable life partners, but suitable for sexual ties because Africans are below them in the racial context. Having these types of affairs with African Americans gave the women a sense of power and control in their lives that they have never had before. However their own race has made them ineligible relationship material for classes above them such as white people. In Jayanthi’s case, white men and Indian men would expect her to innocent and they wouldn’t have any serious relationships with her. As a result, she had to resort to African Americans because she knew she would never fall for them. On the other hand, Alicia could never choose Hispanic man because there are far less educated Hispanic men then there are women. Alicia choose Africans because they “understood her and the world she came from, they served to further distance her from her family of origin” (Bell, 38). Bell here argues that Hispanics and African Americans are on the similar social status level. This explains
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