Orenstein notes that the roots of this maddening double standard partly lie in societal expectations for women to uphold the moral standard for both sexes a woman’s modesty is treated as “the inertia that stops the velocity of male libido.” In the U.S., the sexual revolution of the 1960s created more leeway for many adult women, but the book chronicles how panicked parents and lawmakers “responded by treating teen sex as a health crisis.” Since the 1980s, that hysteria has given rise to $1.7 billion in federal spending for abstinence-only sex education that has been derided as an utter failure. Orenstein brutally assesses this state of affairs: “We’d performed the psychological equivalent of a clitoridectomy on our daughters.” Men go unburdened with these contradictions, but as one of her older interviewees insists, “every college girl’s dream” is finding a balance between being “just slutty enough, where you’re not a prude but you’re not a whore.” Welcome to the new Sophie’s choice. The young women Orenstein interviews are trying to become sexual subjects amid pressures to serve as sexualized objects. She’s just coming into her own awareness about sex, and I wanted to anticipate what lies ahead. Orenstein cites her own adolescent daughter and nieces as inspirations to write the book, and likewise, my 11-year-old daughter was a reason I wanted to read it. “Girls & Sex” moves into the later teen years, relaying how girls explore a social terrain studded with conflicting expectations about their behavior yet blanketed in premeditated silences around their pleasure and agency. “Girls & Sex” is a sequel of sorts to Orenstein’s “Cinderella Ate My Daughter” (2011) - her investigation into the marketing of corporatized femininity to children - and “Schoolgirls” (1995), which examined self-esteem among adolescents.

Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein