Peggy Orenstein Quotes

I found that in a perverse way our culture and parents are far more comfortable talking about girls' vicitimization than girls' sexual agency.

Sex-ed courses look at girl's internal parts: for boys it's about ejaculation, erection and wet dreams; for girls, it's periods and unwanted pregnancy. We never talk to girls about sexual self-exploration or self-knowledge.

Girls would say: "I have a boyfriend for that." So in addition to putting their pleasure literally into someone else's hands - an inept teenage boy - these are the same girls who say they do not climax with a partner. It's the opposite with boys; they say because they can do that themselves, girls should perform oral sex.

Marketing to girls constantly presents a hypersexualized idea of girls; they're expected to appear sexy but be cut off from their sexuality.

Sexualization is the performance of sexuality, the performance of sexiness. Girls are super good at that now.

All girls over age 14 remove pubic hair. The only touching is to remove hair. That's grim.

Girls are removing pubic hair before fully having it. They would say I feel cleaner, it's for me, but then they'd say if a boy saw pubic hair down there they'd head for the hills.

Displaying yourself as sexy doesn't do anything to increase sexual self-knowledge or pleasure.

One of the challenges is to create an equally positive, satisfying sense of femininity and feminine identity in a different way so that there are things you're saying yes to and satisfying that urge that your daughter has to be assert her girlness. The surface level of the culture, and really several inches into it, makes that very hard to do. I hate to put another thing on parents' plates. But the culture is very intentional in what it's telling your daughter and what it's telling you about the message of femininity. And if you're not intentional and conscious back, you lose.

Girls are freer to express their femininity and their sexuality and we're not tamping that down or denying it anymore. But it ends up putting them, first of all, in this box. And secondly, premature sexualization of girls actually does the opposite of what people think it might; it actually disconnects them from their sexuality and makes for decreased sexual health as they get older.

It's not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow, and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girl's identity to appearance.

Sexualization is imposed from the outside as opposed to sexuality, an understanding of the body's responses and desires and ability to communicate that, cultivated from within.

We're afraid if girls find out sex is pleasurable they'll stop being gatekeepers, they'll go out and have sex.

I talked to a junior in college, and she was fed up. She said, "I'm not doing other girls any favours by faking orgasms and not calling out guys when we're having unequal experiences."

American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture’s emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls’ vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior.

For years we've used the bases analogy - with intercourse being the "ultimate sex" even though that's probably not going to feel good to girls. That model doesn't let you say "I like it at second base, maybe I'll stay here."

I never expected, when I had a daughter, that one of my most important jobs would be to protect her childhood from becoming a marketers' land grab.

Parents tend to name all of baby boys' body parts, but with girls they go from belly button to knees with this void in the middle. That doesn't change as kids go into puberty.

The anesthetizing against caring really threw me for a loop. I was seeing it with 15-year-olds. It was how they were starting their intimate lives. It alarmed me.

Intimate justice touches on ideas of gender inequity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health. I don't expect a 15-year-old girl to have that figured out; it's hard enough to have it figured out when you're 50.

My kind of nightmare quote is from Deborah Tolman, who does research on girls and desire and is, I think, brilliant. She told me that by the time girls are teenagers, when she asks them how sexual experience made them feel, they respond by how they think they looked; they think that how they look is how they feel.

Saying "yes" [to sexual activity] is a pretty low baseline for sexual experience and I wanted to write about what was happening to girls after "yes."

I'll tell you what is insidious about the Disney Princess, besides the fact that if you look into their merchandise, the 26,000 items, you're always finding books that are about "my perfect wedding." It's what it puts girls on the path for. And that it poses as something that protects girls, or staves off premature sexualization, when I think it primes them for it. I don't know where to put that on the continuum exactly. I guess eight?

Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it.

We continue to think of virginity as first intercourse. That ends up minimizing and marginalizing other things kids are engaged in, like oral sex. And it's not going to feel particularly good for girls as the big marker of adulthood.