Peggy Orenstein is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate my Daughter, Waiting for Daisy, Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World, and Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, she's also one of the fiercest, smartest women on the planet. I'm so honored to host her here! Thank you so much, Peggy!
Why given the way the
women's movement has been making such strides, and more and more people are
talking about different kinds of sexuality, are girls and young women so
unwilling to ask for what they want from boys and young men? How on earth did
this happen and what can we do about this?
I love the tone of
that last question, it communicates the astonishment that I felt when I first
started interviewing girls. What happened???? And I think that a very
deceptive thing has been going on: young women feel entitled to engage in
sexual behavior, but they don’t necessarily feel entitled to enjoy it.
There’s the illusion that they have agency and choice and control because they
have sexual encounters or hook up or whatever—combined with the media selling
this narrow, distorted vision of “sexiness” as the way they’re supposed to
express confidence—but in fact they are completely disconnected from their
bodies.
And I don’t know that
we should be so surprised—it’s not like girls are growing up in a culture that
values female bodies, or encourages girls to understand their bodies, except in
relation to how those bodies can please others. The media tells them what makes
them sexually “confident” is looking a certain way, attracting male attention,
being desirable, not necessarily feeling or understanding their own desires.
In their sex ed
classes—whether they are abstinence-based or “comprehensive”— boys’ puberty is
characterized by erections and ejaculations while girls’ is characterized
by…periods. And unwanted pregnancy. Not the same thing. Even in something like
American Girl’s Care and Keeping of You, Book 2 in which they have
a diagram of the external female genitalia, they don’t include the clitoris.
They just don’t name it. Not surprisingly, fewer than half of girls age 14-17
have ever masturbated. Then they go into their partnered encounters and we
somehow expect that they’ll feel it is about them, that they will have a voice,
that they will magically be able to articulate their desires, wants needs,
limits. It’s absolutely unrealistic.
My favorite phrase
ever in talking about this was coined Sarah McClelland, a psychologist at
University of Michigan: “intimate justice.” That’s the that sex has
political implications as well as personal ones, just like …who does the dishes
in your home or who vacuums the rug. And it brings up similar issues of
inequality, economic disparity, violence, physical and mental health. “Intimate
justice” asks us to consider: who is entitled to engage in a sexual experience?
Who is entitled to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary? How does each
partner define good enough?
Honestly? Those
questions are really tricky—and sometimes traumatic—for adult women. But when
we’re talking about girls and their early sexual experiences, one thing I kept
coming back to was that…I didn’t want those experiences to be something that
girls had to get over.
Please would you
consider writing a book about boy/young men culture and how we can teach them
the value of girls--and do you think this will teach girls the value of girls,
or is this just another thing coming from another gender?
Well, you’ll be happy
to know that I’m now at work on “Boys & Sex,” so there you go.
What was it like
interviewing all of these girls? What surprised you the most? Were you able to
convince any of these girls toward something different than what they thought
was their place in the culture?
I love talking to
girls. I just love it. I will say that at first it was super hard to talk about
sex. For one thing I was shocked. was shocked by the dehumanization of the
hookup culture, where sex precedes rather than arises from intimacy. I was
shocked by their willingness to accept male pleasure as the goal of a sexual
encounter—especially the whole issue of the blow job in hookups, the one-way
aspect of that. Again, that intimate justice perspective. And I had to learn to
listen, to hear their experience told their way with their concerns and their
explanations and to hear that without judgment before I really got the kind of
deep interviews I was hoping for and that I think are in the book.
It wasn’t my job to
convince my interview subjects that they should be conducting their lives
differently. I’m a journalist. But I have stayed in touch with some of them and
even those relatively short interviews had a big impact on them, whether it was
changing their majors, talking to a boyfriend more honestly, being more mindful
of campus social life in making college choices….And that keeps going. I get
emails all the time from girls who say the book changed their perspective or
made them feel less alone, or gave them something to think about. It’s been
tremendously rewarding. I get similar emails from boys, by the way, which was
part of why I decided to start the new book.
Why oh why is frat
culture still around? And do any of these girls realize that by playing into
its rules they are allowing it to survive? Couldn't it be more like Lysistrata, where
girls say fine, act that boorish way and we're never sleeping with you.
Consider us, be kind, and we'll consider you? And what about educating our
boys?
I think educating boys
is critical. This isn’t all about girls, and it shouldn’t be all on girls to
create change, to create a culture in which their sexual and emotional needs
feel as central to them as boys’ do. That’s why I want to explore boys’ world
now. To see how they’re being socialized through parents, peers, school, media,
porn; what they’re learning, what their pressures are, what their hopes are
around sex, love, relationships so that we can create more dialogue with all
our kids.
What about those with
fluid or trans genders? Is navigating the sexual scene any earlier?
Earlier? Kids are
coming out earlier is that what you mean? That makes parental support more
important than ever.
I didn’t really look
at trans kids, but I did interview gay and bisexual girls. And there was a
really interesting difference—or kind of a similarity, I guess. Girls are more
likely than boys to measure their pleasure by their partner’s satisfaction.
That holds true regardless of the gender of the partner. So in same sex
encounters, the orgasm gap that you see in hetero encounters disappears, and
young women climax at the same rate as men. Lesbian and bisexual girls would
talk to me about feeling liberated to get “off the script,” feeling free to
create a sexual encounter that worked for them. It made sex less of a race to a
goal than a pool of experiences involving closeness, desire, arousal,
touch, intimacy….And it’s worth asking young people, “Who is truly the more
sexually ‘experienced’ person: The one who has kissed a partner for three
hours and experimented with erotic tension and sensuality and communication or
the one who gets wasted at a party and hooks up with a random so they can cash
in their v-card before college?
You write that many
college boys think it's "hilarious" to post videos of raping someone.
I can't help but think that something deeper is going on--is it fear of women
so they have to make degrading them funny?
Not “many,” that’s an
overstatement. But I did become conscious of the way guys used hilarious in a
situation that an adult would find disturbing, at best. I don’t think it was
about degrading women. I think it was about insecurity. I think they use
“hilarious”when they are unsure of how to respond, particularly to something
that is both sexually explicit and dehumanizing, something that perhaps
actually upsets them, offends them, unnerves them, repulses them, confuses
them, or defies their ethics. “Hilarious” is safe. It offers distance, allowing
them to look without feeling, without compromising their masculinity.
When is the right time
to tell your teenager these things? Do you talk about rape when a girl is
11? If you try when she is 15, chances are she's going to roll her eyes
at you and not want to hear it?
“Things” is too broad.
If you’re asking about sex education….It begins right away. In infancy. With
naming body parts. With acknowledging to your 3-year- old that “Yes, it feels
good to touch your vulva, Honey, but we don’t do it at Grandma’s Thanksgiving
table, we do it in private.” Honestly, I think that we silo off sexuality into
this special area like it’s different than everything else. But the same rules
apply about ethics, responsibility, caring, compassion, being a good person
that we try to cultivate in other realms of a child’s life. It’s all about
raising a good citizen, a good person, you know? So when you tell your
5-year-old that if someone says they don’t want to be hugged you don’t hug them
(or that if you say you don’t want to be hugged they can’t hug you—and that
includes Great Aunt Nancy or whomever) that is a lesson in consent. Helping
kids understand and deconstruct gendered media messages can happen from an
early age as well. Or for girls, staying connected to pleasure in their bodies
can take all kinds of forms—noticing how good the sun feels, how great that
cookie tastes, slowing down, being aware, emphasizing feeling good and strong
in our bodies.
As to the more nuts
and bolts and/or explicit stuff, I would recommend parents read Talk to Me
First by Deborah Roffman, For Goodness Sex by Al Vernacchio and
parents of infants-age 13 read From Diapers to Dating by Debra
Haffner. Parents of young children can have any of the book by Robie Harris in
the house, and parents of high school and college students can give them S.E.X.:
The All-You-Need-To-Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and
Twenties by Heather Corinna.Those are great resources for girls and
for boys and any other gender kids identify as.
What's obsessing you
now and why?
You mean aside from
politics? Because that is pretty all-consuming in a way it never has been. I am
worried about so many things at the moment, including about the rolling back of
women’s rights and reproductive freedom. But because I’m working on the boy
book, I’m actually more obsessed with the thoughts of teenage boys around sex
than I have been in about, um, 30 years….
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