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During the interviews, Orenstein, 53, was stunned to find
that many girls defend Kim Kardashian. “One thing that you
hear about her all the time is that she seems really real and
authentic. I find this bizarre. To me she is the most contrived
product that has ever existed. What could be less authentic?
People like her use the patriarchy’s rules to get ahead, without
challenging or changing the game at all.”
When Orenstein gives lectures, it’s common for parents to
ask her, “Why does my daughter dress like a prostitute, and
what am I supposed to do about it?” She found that there are
no easy answers here. “It’s complicated. Their ideas are different
from ours,” she says. “Girls say, ‘I’m proud of my body, don’t
shout at me.’ ” Orenstein and her husband have a 12-year-old
daughter, Daisy, who isn’t yet interested in boys. For a long
time, she didn’t tell Daisy what the book was about. “When I
finally did, she said it seemed like a good idea, so I pushed on.
I said, ‘Do you know that there are some girls who don’t know
they’re supposed to enjoy sex, and they don’t know what the
clitoris is for?’ At that point my daughter said, ‘Can we stop
talking about the book now?’” Orenstein laughs out loud at
this recollection.
Her subject is serious, but Orenstein is a witty writer. “It’s
important to me to have the book be conversational and funny,
because otherwise things can get very grim and depressing,”
she says. “If you can’t make a joke, then what’s the point?” Many
of the girls Orenstein interviewed talked about performing
oral sex on boys in a nonchalant way. “The girls said it’s impersonal now, like shaking hands with your tongue. Call me
old-fashioned, but having a penis in my mouth is kind of
personal. And the nonreciprocal blow job is something that had
been bugging me for a long time.” A friend told Orenstein that
she had only recently talked with her 20-something daughter
about expressing herself sexually. “This made me think that
the book can be read in tandem with daughters to have these
conversations.”
Girls & Sex discusses social media at length. “It’s been great
for gay kids and trans kids, but at the same time there’s a con-
stant shifting of perspective for girls,” Orenstein says. “It’s the
tyranny of ‘hot’ for them, whether it’s the way they dress or not.
I wonder if Janis Joplin were alive today, would she be consid-
ered hot? She wasn’t particularly attractive. Today it’s all about
looking like Beyoncé or Nicki Minaj.” Orenstein points out
the contradiction inherent in this, in which girls are now free
to become “doctors, commentators, or astronauts, but you’d
better be hot as well.” She says that her generation’s social
challenges and concerns were different from those of girls today.
“You were doing your adolescent experimenting within a known
group of people,” she recalls. “You were seeking likes in your
high school class. While that can be painful enough, it wasn’t
putting yourself on a screen in front of a thousand people that
you might not know. Girls’ identities today are crafted in
response to their online approval or disapproval.”
But not all is bleak in Girls & Sex. Orenstein is pleased by the
rising popularity of young women entertainers who are both
smart and natural. “Amy Schumer is absolutely challenging the
rules. Lena Dunham is another one. There are more people like
that coming up, these new role models who are making room
for alternative ideas and have also been very successful. There
are companies now, including Disney, that are trying to offset
the materialistic, narcissistic, princessy message.”
Part of Orenstein’s research took her to Shreveport, La., to
attend the Ark-La-Tex Purity Ball, where fathers pledge to love
and protect their daughters in individual ceremonies. The
event’s online invitation said that the evening “helps young
women begin to realize the truth: that they are infinitely valu-
able princesses who are worth waiting for.” There are many
similar organizations across the country, such as the Purity Ball
and True Love Waits. Orenstein takes offense to “the idea of
fathers being made the guardians of girls’ ‘sexual purity,’”
finding it patriarchal and regressive. On the other hand, she
notes that the pornification in our culture really isn’t so dif-
ferent. In Girls & Sex she writes, “To me, purity and hypersexu-
alization are flip sides of the same coin. I’d rather girls were
taught that their sexual status, regardless of what it is, is not
the measure of their personhood, their morality, their worth.”
Orenstein points out that girls are under tremendous cul-
tural pressure to make themselves desirable. “Yet they don’t
understand their own desire,” she says. “They want to present
as sexual, but they don’t understand their sexuality.” She sees
this as a major disconnect, in which being hot is viewed as the
most empowering element in a girl’s life. Her interpretation
asks, “What good does it do to be proud of how your body
looks if that confidence comes off with your clothes?”
Writing Girls & Sex was difficult for Orenstein. While conducting her interviews, she encouraged the girls to say whatever
they wanted. “If you want to say blow job, if you want to say eat
me, whatever you say, just say it so that the words are out there,”
she recounts. She made them feel comfortable, and so the language in the book is explicit. Be careful of what you ask for,
though. “Now I have to figure out how to talk about the book
in interviews that won’t get me bleeped,” she says, grinning.■
Wendy Werris is a contributing editor for Publishers Weekly, and a freelance
journalist and editor in Los Angeles.
