Salon.com
3.19.16 | Peggy Orenstein
I’m not going to tell you to go right now and buy a copy of Peggy Orenstein’s “Girls & Sex.” I’m going to tell you to buy two copies: One for yourself, and one for the teenager in your life. Because kids — boys and girls, gay and straight — need to understand not just what a new generation of girls is doing in its intimate life. They need to know what those girls are not doing. Like when they’re not saying no to stuff they’re not into, because it’s easier than arguing about it. Like when they’re not asking themselves what feels good — for them. And it’s high time, in a cultural moment fraught with sexual panic about hookups and sexting and questions of consent, to shift the conversation — and to fight for young women’s right to orgasm.
Peggy Orenstein is a uniquely qualified advocate. As she told me recently in a raucous, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”-referencing Skype session, “I feel this really intense connection and resonance with girls. I love talking to girls; I love hanging out with girls. That’s why I keep coming back.” That she does — Orenstein has spent much of her journalistic career in girl world, from 1994’s “Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap” through her 2011 bestseller “Cinderella Ate My Daughter.”
It’s been five years since Orenstein’s bold, hilarious and occasionally terrifying foray into the princess industrial complex. Now, the same girls she wrote about then — including those high heels-wearing baby divas — are hitting puberty and beyond, and Orenstein is back to see what happens after growing up with “that 21-piece Disney princess makeup set.” Her newest book is an exploration of the lives of high school and college-aged girls today, shown through their various forays into purity balls and walks of shame, into hooking up and coming out. It is not, refreshingly, a condemnation of millennials and their successors — or a hand-wringing call to alarmism. Yes, it discusses frankly the often performative aspects of female adolescent sexuality and doesn’t ignore the realities of sexual assault, but “Girls & Sex” refuses to be judgmental or doom and gloom. Instead, it offers something else — a demand for education, enlightenment, and ultimately, the radical notion of equal satisfaction.
