Sext and the Single Girl.

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  Sophia Foster-Dimi

GIRLS AND SEX

Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

There’s a moment midway through Peggy Orenstein’s latest book that seems to sum up what it’s like to be a teenage girl right now. An economics major taking a gender studies class is getting dressed in her college dorm room for a night out, cheerfully discussing sexual stereotyping in advertising with Orenstein — while at the same time grabbing a miniskirt and a bottle of vodka, the better to achieve her evening goal: to “get really drunk and make out with someone.” “You look hot,” her friend tells her — and the student, apparently registering the oddness of the scene, turns to Orenstein.
“In my gender class I’m all, ‘That damned patriarchy,’ ” she says. “But . . . what’s the point of a night if you aren’t getting attention from guys?” Her ambition, she explains, “is to be just slutty enough, where you’re not a prude but you’re not a whore. . . . Finding that balance is every college girl’s dream, you know what I mean?”

Exactly how that got to be anyone’s dream is the subject of “Girls and Sex,” a thought-provoking if occasionally hand-wringing investigation by Orenstein, who in previous books has put classroom sexism, princess obsessions and other phenomena under her microscope. Be warned: Orenstein, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the mother of a preteen girl, begins her reporting worried by what she’s heard about “hookup culture” — and ends it even more freaked out. It’s not that girls are having so much sex (the percentage of high-schoolers who have had intercourse is actually dropping); even if they were, Orenstein’s careful to say she wouldn’t judge, really. But the acts the girls are engaging in, from oral sex to sexting, tend to be staged, she argues, more for boys’ enjoyment than their own. For guys, she says, there is fun and pleasure; for girls (at least the straight ones), too little physical joy, too much regret and a general sense that the boys are in charge. Fully half the girls in Orenstein’s book say they’ve been coerced into sex, and many had been raped — among them, by the way, that econ major, who was so confused that when her assailant dropped her off the next morning, she told him, “Thanks, I had fun.” The sexual playing field Orenstein describes is so tilted no girl could win.

I know, I know: Every generation thinks things have gotten more complicated since they were young (it’s one of those universally accepted parental truths, like the fact that kids don’t go outside and play anymore). But the interesting question at the heart of “Girls and Sex” is not really whether things are better or worse for girls. It’s why — at a time when women graduate from college at higher rates than men and are closing the wage gap — ­aren’t young women more satisfied with their most intimate relationships? “When so much has changed for girls in the public realm,” Orenstein writes, “why hasn’t more . . . changed in the private one?”

Peggy Orenstein 

To answer this question, Orenstein interviews more than 70 young women between the ages of 15 and 20. Some of the culprits she locates are more familiar than others: There’s pornography, which teaches boys to expect constantly willing, fully waxed partners, and girls to imitate all those arched backs and ­movie-perfect moans. (Sorry, male college students, but studies show that the percentage of your female peers who fake orgasm has been steadily rising.) There are the ­abstinence-only sex-ed programs of the last two decades, which she argues encourage shame and misinformation; and the unhelpful tendency of even liberal parents to go mute with their daughters on the subject of what they deserve in bed. (“Once parents stopped saying ‘Don’t,’ ” Orenstein observes, “many didn’t know what to say.”) There’s alcohol, so much alcohol, a judgment-dulling menu of Jäger bombs and tequila shots. There’s selfie culture, which Orenstein charges encourages girls to see themselves as objects to be “liked” (or not) — a simple-sounding phenomenon with surprisingly profound implications, since self-objectification has been linked with everything from depression to risky sexual behavior. There are the constant images of naked, writhing women, as well as the idea that taking your clothes off is a sign of power. (“I love Beyoncé,” one girl tells Orenstein. “She’s, like, a queen. But I wonder, if she wasn’t so beautiful, if people didn’t think she was so sexy, would she be able to make the feminist points she makes?”) And despite all the time girls spend “impersonating sexiness,” Orenstein finds that absent from their universe is a sense of actual female sexuality — figuring out what you want and doing it. Society is giving girls, she concludes, a “psychological clitoridectomy.”

Oh, but just one thing — plenty of the girls Orenstein interviews don’t see it that way at all, and it’s to her credit that she documents them pushing back against what they view as her old-school assumptions. (No, they tell her, Nicki Minaj isn’t a sex object — she’s a self-determining superstar.) These conversations are the most interesting, least expected part of “Girls and Sex,” as when girls share that while an endless string of hookups can bum them out, many of them prefer it to “catching feelings” for a guy, which would make them more vulnerable. (The interviews also reveal an almost comical generation gap. When one recent high school graduate explains to Orenstein that performing oral sex is “like money or some kind of currency. . . . It’s how you make friends with the popular guys. . . . It’s more impersonal than sex,” Orenstein writes, “I may be of a different generation, but, frankly, it’s hard for me to consider a penis in my mouth as ‘impersonal.’ ”)

It’s a laugh-out-loud line, but Orenstein is of a different generation, and teenagers themselves may bristle at her judgment of them as victims. When she attends a Miley Cyrus concert and dismisses the half-naked star as “the opposite” of “unique,” and a “lint trap of ­images and ideas,” you know what she means — but that lint trap is also an actual young woman who is working out many of the same issues facing Orenstein’s subjects (a fact that surely accounts for some of her popularity: “Slut-shamed” after her romp with Robin Thicke on the MTV Video Music Awards, Cyrus has held her own — a teen-girl revenge fantasy). What’s more, the real-life teenage world isn’t all Kardashians, anyway: Celebrities like Lorde have become popular without embracing the sex-doll style Orenstein frets over; thrift-shop dresses and Converse high-tops now mingle with minis and stilettos in teenage closets everywhere; even the Pirelli calendar dumped its nude models this year for shots of high-achieving women like the young blogger Tavi Gevinson, clothed. When Kim Kardashian tweeted a nude selfie recently, sure, some young women cheered her on — but plenty posted the Twitter version of an eye-roll. The truth is, female culture is more varied and rebellious than “Girls and Sex” lets on.

And “Girls and Sex” isn’t really about all girls: Though gay teenagers are included (and seem generally happier in their relationships than their straight peers), Orenstein’s interviewees are mostly upper-middle-class, and she is mainly concerned with sex’s impact on their emotional lives, not physical well-being — pregnancy and S.T.D.s come up rarely in her interviews, and current-day abortion access not at all. But given that low-income young women are less able to pay, say, to travel across state lines to an open abortion clinic, you wonder how the picture of sex and its implications would have looked if girls of all incomes had been included. A bad night is one thing; a baby at 17 is another.

At any rate, the true audience for “Girls and Sex” isn’t girls at all — but parents trying to understand them. So what should a mother or father hoping for a sexually well-adjusted daughter do? “Here’s a solution,” Orenstein offers, only somewhat in jest. “Move to the Netherlands.” Dutch girls, she points out, are more likely to have sex in the context of loving relationships, and less because of boys’ expectations, than here at home. There are useful lessons from the Dutch examples: Parents and teachers there, she explains, talk to kids about sex — not just the birds and bees and condoms, but also pleasure and consent and exactly how to say no, or yes; they even endorse in-home sleepovers versus sneaking around. Orenstein makes an excellent case that all this will help (though it may not be easy: My own 13-year-old bolted from the room every time I tried to talk about this book with her and is probably in Nebraska by now). But the sweeping issues her reporting illuminates clearly can’t be solved by dinner-table or classroom conversations alone.

To really fix things, you’ll need bigger solutions, and it’s tempting to wish Orenstein would put down her reporter’s notebook to write a more focused sexual bill of rights that girls themselves, and not just their parents, can get behind. “Girls and Sex” is full of thoughtful concern and empathetic questions: What if girls learned that their sex drives mattered as much as boys’? What if hookups took place sober? What if? But Orenstein is uniquely positioned to do more than ask questions; you want her next book to tell us: Here’s how. Let’s go.

 

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