Girls & Sex Quotes

“I’m going to say this once here, and then—because it is obvious—I will not repeat it in the course of this book: not all boys engage in such behavior, not by a long shot, and many young men are girls’ staunchest allies. However, every girl I spoke with, every single girl—regardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance—had been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three. Who, then, is truly at risk of being “distracted” at school?”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“When we've defined femininity for their generation so narrowly, in such a sexualized, commercialized, heteroeroticized way, where is the space, the vision, the celebration of other ways to be a girl?”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Leaving something unnamed makes it quite literally unspeakable: a void, an absence, a taboo.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others' pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Activists are correct in saying that the only thing that 100 percent of rapes have in common is a rapist. You can shroud women from head to toe, forbid them alcohol, imprison them in their homes—and there will still be rape.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“As long as adults still avoid open discussion on sexuality, teens will inevitably seek information on today's electronic street corner.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Some girls bragged to me that they could "have sex like a guy," by which they meant they could engage without emotion, they could objectify their partners as fully and reductively as boys often objectified them. That seemed a sad, low road to equality. What if, instead, they expected boys to be as sexually giving as girls? What if they were taught that all sexual partners, whether total strangers or intimates, deserved esteem and generosity, just as people do in any human interaction? What if they refused to settle for anything less?”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Girls did not always organize their thinking about themselves around the physical. Before World War I, self-improvement meant being less self-involved, less vain: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, and cultivating empathy. Author Joan Jacobs Brumberg highlighted this change in her book The Body Project by comparing the New Year’s resolutions of girls at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: “Resolved,” wrote a girl in 1892, “to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Simpson Rowe was quick to say that only perpetrators are responsible for assault, but assertiveness and self-advocacy are crucial defensive skills.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Encouraging girls to explore sexuality within mutually caring, emotionally connected relationships is one thing; insisting on it is another.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Fully half the girls had experienced something along a spectrum of coercion to rape. Those stories were agonizing; equally upsetting, only two had previously told another adult what had happened.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Young people are not tabulae rasae. They have a sense of right and wrong. But if they're repeatedly exposed to certain themes, they are more likely to pick them up, to internalize them and have them become part of their sexual scripts.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“We’ve raised a generation of girls to have a voice, to expect egalitarian treatment in the home, in the classroom, in the workplace. Now it’s time to demand that “intimate justice” in their personal lives as well.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Sometimes,” she told me, “a girl will give a guy a blow job at the end of the night because she doesn’t want to have sex with him and he expects to be satisfied. So if I want him to leave and I don’t want anything to happen . . .” She trailed off, leaving me to imagine the rest.

There was so much to unpack in that short statement: why a young man should expect to be sexually satisfied; why a girl not only isn’t outraged, but considers it her obligation to comply; why she doesn’t think a blow job constitutes “anything happening”; the pressure young women face in any personal relationship to put others’ needs before their own; the potential justification of assault with a chaser of self-blame. “It goes back to girls feeling guilty,” Anna said. “If you go to a guy’s room and are hooking up with him, you feel bad leaving him without pleasing him in some way. But, you know, it’s unfair. I don’t think he feels badly for you.”

In their research on high school girls and oral sex, April Burns, a professor of psychology at City University of New York, and her colleagues found that girls thought of fellatio kind of like homework: a chore to get done, a skill to master, one on which they expected to be evaluated, possibly publicly. As with schoolwork, they worried about failing or performing poorly—earning the equivalent of low marks. Although they took satisfaction in a task well done, the pleasure they described was never physical, never located in their own bodies. They were both dispassionate and nonpassionate about oral sex—socialized, the researchers concluded, to see themselves as “learners” in their encounters rather than “yearners.”

The concern with pleasing, as opposed to pleasure, was pervasive among the girls I met, especially among high schoolers, who were just starting sexual experimentation.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Right-wing influence on sex education has played an equal, if not greater role. Federally mandated abstinence-only programs, which began in the early 1980s, not only reinforced that intercourse was the line in the sand of chastity, but also, using the threat of AIDS as justification, hammered home the idea that it might well kill you. Oral sex, then, was the obvious work-around. I doubt, though, that social conservatives would consider it a victory that, across a range of studies, college students who identify as religious are even more likely than others to say oral sex is not “sex,” or that over a third of teenagers included it in their definition of “abstinence” (nearly a quarter included anal sex), or that roughly 70 percent agreed that someone who engages in oral sex is still a virgin.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Any good lover is a good listener. And a bad listener is at best a bad lover and at worst a rapist.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“What this means for parents is that you never know what your child’s “sex education” class may entail. Only fourteen states require that sex ed be medically accurate.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Can there be true equality in the classroom and the boardroom if there isn’t in the bedroom? Back in 1995 the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health declared healthy sexual development a basic human right. Teen intimacy, it said, ought to be “consensual, non-exploitative, honest, pleasurable, and protected against unintended pregnancy and STDs.” How is it, over two decades later, that we are so shamefully short of that goal?

Sara McClelland, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, writes about sexuality as a matter of “intimate justice,” touching on fundamental issues of gender inequality, economic disparity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health, self-efficacy, and power dynamics in our most personal relationships. She asks us to consider: Who has the right to engage in sexual behavior? Who has the right to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary of the experience? Who feels deserving? How does each partner define “good enough?” Those are thorny questions when looking at female sexuality at any age, but particularly when considering girls’ early, formative experience. Nonetheless, I was determined to ask them.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Wait a minute,' I countered. 'Didn't you just tell me about all the strong women role models in your family, about how you were loud and have a big personality and didn't take shit?'
'I know,' she said. 'I think I didn't realize...' She paused, trying to reconcile the contradiction. 'I guess no one ever told me that the strong female image also applies to sex.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“At the same time, she [Charis Denison] offered this to an eleventh-grader whose friend was having sex with many different people. "Your response doesn't have to be 'That's gross' of 'That's bad.' You can ask, 'How did that feel to you? What does it bring you? How does it serve you?' Approached in the right way, that can be a great conversation. Then, if you really care about that person, your job is to be their human shield from shame.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“But I want to leave Denison there, with a boy, because making change has to include them as well. It’s no longer enough simply to caution young men against “getting a girl pregnant,” or, more likely in the current climate, to warn about the shifting definition of rape. Parents need to discuss the spectrum of pressure, coercion, and consent with their sons, the forces urging them to see girls’ limits as a challenge to overcome. Boys need to understand how they, too, are harmed by sexualized media and porn.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Can there be true equality in the classroom and the boardroom if there isn’t in the bedroom?”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana’s campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing “good sex.” “Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm,” Herbenick said. “Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men.”

The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it’s become disproportionately common in porn—and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List—it’s also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old—and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?—found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being “naïve or flawed,” unable to “relax.” Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal “the new oral.” “Since all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she said, “anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’” And still, she added, “girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. “It’s a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don’t want to do it you’re suddenly not good enough, you’re frigid, you’re missing out, you’re not exploring your sexuality, you’re not adventurous.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Despite those risks, hypersexualization is ubiquitous, so visible as to be nearly invisible: it is the water in which girls swim, the air they breathe. Whatever else they might be—athletes, artists, scientists, musicians, newscasters, politicians—they learn that they must, as a female, first and foremost project sex appeal. Consider a report released by Princeton University in 2011 exploring the drop over the previous decade in public leadership positions held by female students. Among the reasons these über-elite young women gave for avoiding such roles was that being qualified was not enough. They needed to be “smart, driven, involved in many different activities (as are men), and, in addition, they are supposed to be pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly.” Or, as one alumna put it, women had to “do everything, do it well, and look ‘hot’ while doing it.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“As for Amber, “I looked heavily into it,” she told me during our first meeting. “I could tell you everything under the sun about being transgender. I’d go through these lists I’d find online. They would ask questions like, ‘Do you cry when you think about having a vagina?’ And I’d think, ‘No, not really.’ Maybe if somebody told me I could choose one sex or the other I would have picked the other, but I don’t feel upset about it. I had all these conflicting feelings. Like, I don’t really care about my boobs. That’s weird, right? So then I dealt with ‘Am I a biological mistake?’” Ultimately, Amber realized she did not want to give up who she was, did not want to be someone completely new: “I mean, say your name is Cheryl,” she explained, “and you’re becoming Sean. You have to not want to be Cheryl anymore and never talk about Cheryl again. “Well,” she added, sitting forward in her chair, “I love being Amber. I could never in a million years imagine not being Amber. I am Amber. And I don’t know if I fit being a lesbian perfectly, but I’m definitely not a transgender person. I can live my life in this body, confident and happy, and in a healthy relationship.” She leaned back again, letting her hands drop to her lap. “And it took me a year, an entire year, to be able to sit here and tell you that.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“(interestingly, after age forty, men become the more dominant selfie posters—perhaps in midlife, women unconsciously render themselves invisible).”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Resolved,” wrote a girl in 1892, “to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.” And one hundred years later: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can. . . . I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“The culture is littered with female body parts, with clothes and posturing that purportedly express sexual confidence. But who cares how “proud” you are of your body’s appearance if you don’t enjoy its responses?”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Before World War I, self-improvement meant being less self-involved, less vain: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, and cultivating empathy. Author”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“The key may be to keep the bright light of public attention shining. According to a study by the American Psychological Association, the reported numbers of assaults increase an average of about 44 percent when campuses are under formal scrutiny. Afterward, though, they sink back to their original levels, indicating that some schools provide a more accurate picture of sexual assault only when forced to do so.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape