Peggy Orenstein

"Peggy Orenstein's Girls & Sex broke ground, shattered taboos, and galvanized conversations about young women's right to pleasure and agency in sexual encounters. It also had an unintended effect on its author: Orenstein realized that talking about girls is only half the conversation. To understand girls and sex, we also need to talk about boys and sex. Today's young men are subject to the same cultural forces as their female peers. They are steeped...

A generation gap has emerged between parents and their girls. The mothers and fathers of tomorrow's women have little idea what their daughters are up to sexually or how they feel about it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than seventy young women and a wide range of psychologists, academics, and experts, renowned journalist Peggy Orenstein goes where most others fear to tread, pulling back the curtain on the hidden truths, hard lessons,

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Pink and pretty or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as a source-the source-of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages....