Sex, Like, Sells
Groupies and sex workers
Valley Girl is on hiatus for the US holidays. We will resume with new essays in the New Year. Over the next couple of months, I’ll be sending some digests promoting past Valley Girl newsletters to get you properly prepped for next year’s installments. This week’s digest focuses on the link between valley girls and transactional sex.
As a valley girl1 myself, I’ve encountered so much innuendo about the “slutty” Valley Girl2. Most of it took the form of fairly standard slut shaming and uncreative gender policing when I was in middle school; god forbid I wear a tube top in 110 degree weather. But this assertion about the sexuality of the Valley Girl—that she is “easy” or sexually available—continues to circulate in pop culture via song lyrics and geographical humor. In my research for this project, I learned that this lore has compelling regional history and enduring gender politics.
In the 1980s, sex workers were reportedly starting to populate the middle-class suburb and passing as “good” suburban girls and stay-at-home wives. The hand-wringing about their presence underscores an enduring class anxiety about the San Fernando Valley and the way said classism collides with gender performance—specifically girls and women behaving a certain way to distinguish geography. And, ultimately, how choreographed that performance is.
This scrutiny of female sexuality goes back even further in the Valley. About a decade earlier, some of the most prominent and self-identified groupies of the rock n’ roll scene were valley girls; white girls born to middle-class homes who didn’t want to perform gender or womanhood as their parents wanted them to. Sex with famous male rock stars, however transactional, predatory, or personally fulfilling, was a way to challenge the Valley’s narrow mores about gender and experience a life beyond marriage, motherhood, and suburban expectations.
Both archives of valley girl life lead pretty seamlessly into the porn boom of the 1990s, when stereotypes of “slutty” Valley Girls took on new heights within the adult film industry. Much like the groupies and the sex workers, the pornographic actress was blurring “important” gender hierarchies by occupying two separate landscapes: sex work and the suburbs.
I loved researching and writing these pieces because I’ve always wanted to understand where specifically this particular flavor of misogyny originated. Twelve-year-old me in a tube top says hi. 🌴
Next week’s digest: be a good girl and smile.
Lowercase “valley girl” to indicate a female-identified or pangender individual who happens to be from or inhabits the San Fernando Valley.
Uppercase “Valley Girl” to indicate the manufactured caricature.