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Meghan, I, too, felt Rebecca Traister's "The Great Girl Gross-Out" raises more questions than it answers. Moe Tkacik's tampon-gone-missing tale, Tracie Egan's female ejaculation chronicles, Miranda Purves' post-childbirth sex life—they're all a strange mix of the need to confess, the desire to shock, and the want of page-views. I don't think any of this "gross-out girl" writing is particularly feminist, postfeminist, or whatever else kind of feminist, nor do I think it is without import or solely designed to garner attention. It strikes me as copycat fratire—the boneheaded hijinks of Tucker Max meets the Farrelly brothers. How about: chicktire. Boys can sleep around? We can too! Boys can do gross-out stuff! We can too! Freud: "The sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology." Taking the metaphor literally, they've located the dark continent between their legs and, scrutinizing it in public, presume themselves investigators of female sexuality by way of taking a trip up the river of their vaginal canals.
I'm more interested in Meghan's question: "Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting [the] female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect?" Perhaps "modest" isn't exactly what we're looking for here; maybe not "neutral" either. Can writing about the female body go beyond the literal, transcend the body itself, make a point that exposes something more than the fact that bad things happen when you leave your tampon in for 10 days?
Looking around, it's hard to come up with examples of writing that does so, frankly. Marguerite Duras? Hélène Cixous? Molly Bloom? Addie Bundren has a great line in As I Lay Dying: "I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a ----- and I couldn't think Anse, couldn't remember Anse." The place where Faulkner "writes" what Addie "is" is a blank space on the page. Écriture féminine it ain't (or is it?), but the place where the words aren't may speak more to the totality of womanhood than any gross-out girl's words could ever hope to reveal about their writer's darkest places.