Girls Gone Wild as the new feminists?

I have been working on a book for the Free Press about how all the things that feminism once reviled—Playboy, strippers, wet T-shirt contests—are currently being embraced by young women as supposed symbols of personal empowerment and sexual liberation. To most of the girls I've met (at CardioStripTease classes in Los Angeles, at CAKE parties in Manhattan, at shopping malls outside of Chicago), bawdy and liberated are synonymous.

Puck and Sam pass by with three young women who have volunteered to do a "private" out on the balcony. "Here we go," says Bill. "There's some part of me that always wants to shriek, 'Don't do it!' " But he doesn't, and they definitely do. The trio starts making out in a sort of ravenous lump. It all looks very much like interpretive dance. Ultimately, one girl falls over and lands giggling on the floor—a characteristic endpoint for a GGW scene.

On their way back inside, I ask one of them, a blonde in a turquoise miniskirt and now, of course, a hard-earned GGW hat, what they do when they are not on spring break. "We're grad students," she says, with only a slight slur. "It's sad. We'll have Ph.D.s in three years."

There are more Dispatches from Girls Gone Wild.