Leslie Bell’s Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom and Its Ability to Market to a Wide Audience

To what extend is Bell’s “Paradox of Sexual Freedom” applicable to most women of the same age? Use textual evidence to ground your arguments.

Some further questions that may be useful in deploying your argument (you do not need to answer all or any of them):

- Why is the striving for a “strong sense of identity” (33) for both Alicia and Jayanthi so important?

- How is “Splitting”, “a tendency to think in either/or patterns (28),” relevant to Bell’s reflections on “The Paradox of Sexual Freedom”?

Leslie Bell’s Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom and its Ability to Market to a Wide Audience

“It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if it is for the deaf”. Said by a great American author and reporter named Walter Lippmann, it embodies the reasoning for why authors write the way they do. Writing, like all other creative arts, are only important when given an audience and as music for the deaf means nothing, writing for those who do not care mean nothing as well. Leslie Bell fully understands this and her book “Selections from Heard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom” represents her ability to relate to her target audience. Although, Leslie Bell is able to target woman of the late 20’s of various styles of upbringing and culture by using her three patients, Claudia, Jayanthi, and Alicia, she missed the biggest style of upbringing and culture a large population of the United States.

The first patient used in these selections was Claudia, a 28 year old Hispanic woman with religious background and a tendency to sleep with many men. Claudia often plays as the “bad” girl and despite growing up in a Mexican Catholic family, she has extremely strong urges and excitement when she flirts with men she find attractive. The result is a very strong internal conflict between what her family wants her to be, what she wants to be,...