Sexualities 0(0) 1–20 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1363460716658422 sex.sagepub.com Article Secure girls: Class, sexuality, and self-esteem Amy C Wilkins University of Colorado-Boulder, USA Sarah A Miller University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA Abstract Public discourse is replete with talk about the fragility of young women’s self-esteem, linking poor self-concept to a range of social problems associated with girlhood. We know little about the impact of these ideas on young women. In this article, we examine interviews with 66 girls, aged 14–22, to understand how they talk about the link between self-esteem and sexual expression in everyday life. We find that girls’ talk about self- esteem uses classed meanings that unintentionally reinforce and extend the role of sexu- ality in girls’ status hierarchies, benefitting those with more class resources, while policing all girls’ abilities to claim sexual agency. Keywords Class, gender, self-esteem, sexuality, youth Published in 1994, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, spent 154 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Influenced by Carol Gilligan’s pioneering work on women’s and girls’ development (Brown and Gilligan, 1992; Gilligan, 1982), Mary Pipher (1994) identified an ‘‘Ophelia crisis’’ in which previ- ously confident girls lost their self-esteem as they entered adolescence. Pipher linked girls’ loss of self-esteem to a host of social problems associated with girl- hood, including disordered eating and body image, drug use, cutting, and, perhaps most urgently for many parents and other adults, sexuality. Reviving Ophelia powerfully impacted thinking about girls, spawning a growth industry of books (Brown, 2005; Shandler, 1999; Simmons, 2011; Wiseman, 2009), organizations, and consumer products aimed at protecting and fostering girls’ self-esteem. This form Corresponding author: Sarah A Miller, Department of Sociology University of Massachusetts Amherst Thompson Hall 200 Hicks Way Amherst, MA 01003, USA. Email: sarahm@soc.umass.edu