Background: Journalist Peggy Orenstein interviewed seventy girls ages 15-20 for her New York Times bestseller Girls and Sex. While many felt entitled to engage in sexual behavior, they didn’t necessarily feel entitled to enjoy it. Orenstein will discuss that disconnect as well as its political and personal implications in girls' lives.
Objectives: Following this presentation participants will better understand the media and sexual landscape young women face, have new ideas about how to talk to young women about sexuality and recognize the critical importance of doing so.
*Girls today feel entitled to engage in sexual behavior; but don't necessarily feel entitled to enjoy it. Why this is a matter of "intimate justice."
*The selling to girls by the media of self-objectification as self-empowerment
*Why teenage girls see oral sex as "not sex," and "no big deal"-- as long as males are on the receiving end.
*How the silence on female sexual pleasure translates into greater risk-taking and victimization among teen girls
*The impact of college "hook-up culture" on relationships, sex, and sexual misconduct
*What we can learn from the 'Dutch model' if sex education--including discussions of ethics, responsibility and joy.
*Girls today feel entitled to engage in sexual behavior; but don't necessarily feel entitled to enjoy it. Why this is a matter of "intimate justice."
*The selling to girls by the media of self-objectification as self-empowerment
*Why teenage girls see oral sex as "not sex," and "no big deal"-- as long as males are on the receiving end.
*How the silence on female sexual pleasure translates into greater risk-taking and victimization among teen girls
*The impact of college "hook-up culture" on relationships, sex, and sexual misconduct
*What we can learn from the 'Dutch model' if sex education--including discussions of ethics, responsibility and joy.
Peggy Orenstein is the author of The New York Times best-sellers Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Waiting for Daisy as well as Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World and the classic SchoolGirls. Named one of the “40 women who changed the media business in the past 40 years” by The Columbia Journalism Review, Peggy is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and has written for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, The London Times, Slate, Mother Jones, The Oprah Magazine and The New Yorker.
