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I have lived my entire sexual life as someone who knows basically nothing about the best songs to play during sex. I lost my virginity to the decidedly unsensual ska-punk sounds of Operation Ivy; and after a series of boyfriends who liked to bump uglies to the less-than-erotic music of Pearl Jam or the Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle soundtrack, I kind of gave up on the whole sex music thing. I got into running a box fan as white noise to try to keep my roommates from hearing me bone, and I dismissed the pursuit of the perfect sex song as a hopeless endeavor. But recently, I've realized that I was a bit too hasty in my dismissal.

They are but recent examples of the evocative relationship between young women and sexuality in pop music in the second half of the twentieth century. Like their modern-day parallels, the copines were caught in a web consisting of the social limitations of their age and sex, the moral expectations concerning female adolescence, and the special freedoms their commercial success afforded. This web was anchored within a culture of new sexual expectations in which young people were to be sexy without being sexual. The history, reception, and aesthetics of commercially successful music recorded by young women between and illustrates how the long sexual revolution operated in gendered registers in the cultural expression of sexuality.