Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Feminists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries fought double standards for women regarding sexuality. Women’s sexual autonomy and men’s sexual violence were and continue to be at the forefront of feminist thought and activism, and today’s feminists continue to fight for sexual equality. Adolescent girls’ sexual equality, however, has only been a visible topic of feminist discussion since the 1990s, and the discussion has gained more traction in recent years due to greater access to information through the internet. Girls & Sex entered the conversation amid nationwide controversies about date rape, abstinence, and sex education.

Discomfort around the topics of teenage girls and sex is nothing new. Western culture has sexualized teenage girls for decades, and concern over this sexualization dominates the dialogue about girls’ sexual equality. Young women have attempted to reverse their objectification and disenfranchisement by reclaiming the word “slut” and participating in self-objectification—placing outsized importance on their appearance and reducing their own sense of self-worth to their desirability. But as Ariel Levy discussed in her 2005 book Female-Chauvinist Pigs, this provides a false sense of liberation because the template for empowerment is still rooted in men’s objectification of women. Self-objectification doesn’t come from an equal, autonomous experience of desire and therefore isn’t a genuine stride forward for women. Female Chauvinist Pigs and Dilemmas of Desire, written by gender studies professor Deborah Tolman in 2002, put forward groundbreaking arguments about teenage girls and sexual desire, providing critical, in-depth analysis of the lack of language for girls to describe their sexual desire, as well as society’s silence on the topic in general.

Orenstein continues this discourse as an award-winning journalist who specializes in girl culture. When researching for Girls & Sex, she spoke directly with teenage girls to give them a voice and backed up her claims with statistics, expert commentary, and reasoned argumentation. While positively received, Girls & Sex has been criticized for only including the voices of socioeconomically advantaged youth, most of them white, although Orenstein does explain in her introduction that she “specifically wanted to talk to those who felt they had all options open to them, the ones who had most benefited from women’s economic and political progress” (4). This suggests, however, that only those who are white and middle class or above benefit from that progress. Nonetheless, Orenstein’s concerns about hypersexualization are less about individual interests and more about the way gendered expectations of sexuality permeate culture as a whole, affecting girls’ sexuality whether or not they consciously engage with it.

Another critique is Orenstein’s age; some reviewers question whether she is too culturally distant from the experiences the girls share. She’s a Generation X parent, and she approaches her analysis with pre-established disapproval of porn and anal sex. Anti-pornography stances were common in second-and-third-wave feminism, with prominent thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon leading the movement to ban pornography. Orenstein’s arguments, while in good company, often feel outdated; for example, she limits her discussion to heterosexual porn and doesn’t include the extensive array of online pornography available today, which includes new movements towards story-oriented and women-directed content that centers female pleasure. She likewise only spotlights physical pain when discussing anal sex rather than acknowledging that it’s an activity that can be performed safely and pleasurably. Her audience is fellow parents and adults, not the girls themselves, and some of her arguments on these topics feel like parental hand-wringing.

Mostly, though, Girls & Sex has been well received. Unlike many books written on the subject, this one doesn’t suggest that this generation is dealing with a more alarming sex culture than past generations. Instead, she asks why, after so much economic and educational progress for women, girls are still struggling with age-old double standards when it comes to sex. Through her research, she aimed to understand why girls aren’t getting what the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health describes as healthy sexual development among teens: “consensual, non-exploitive, honest, pleasurable, and protected against unintended pregnancy and STDs” (5). The girls Orenstein interviewed shared experiences that rarely included these qualities. Orenstein also provides research that corroborates that girls’ sexual lives fall short of the Commission’s criteria. Orenstein unflinchingly explores the truth about girls and sex in a culture where silence and misplaced morality have hampered the discussion.