Peggy Orenstein Quotes

#1. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

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

Peggy Orenstein

#3. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

#4. I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others' pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality.

Peggy Orenstein

#5. As long as adults still avoid open discussion on sexuality, teens will inevitably seek information on today's electronic street corner.

Peggy Orenstein

#6. Encouraging girls to explore sexuality within mutually caring, emotionally connected relationships is one thing; insisting on it is another.

Peggy Orenstein

#7. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

#8. What this means for parents is that you never know what your child's "sex education" class may entail. Only fourteen states require that sex ed be medically accurate.

Peggy Orenstein

#9. Rather than freedom from traditional constraints, then, girls were free to "choose" them. Yet, the line between "get to" and "have to" blurs awfully fast.

Peggy Orenstein

#10. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

#11. Simpson Rowe was quick to say that only perpetrators are responsible for assault, but assertiveness and self-advocacy are crucial defensive skills.

Peggy Orenstein

#12. The point of creativity is to express and challenge yourself, to make meaning, to embrace your life.

Peggy Orenstein

#13. How about this, I would counter: try not commenting on your own looks - on the size of your thighs or the tightness of your jeans. At least not in front of your daughter. Girls receive enough messages every day reducing them to their appearance without women they love delivering them, too.

Peggy Orenstein

#14. Before World War I, self-improvement meant being less self-involved, less vain: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, and cultivating empathy. Author

Peggy Orenstein

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

Peggy Orenstein

#16. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

#17. It's particularly important as parents in our conversations with our daughters and our sons to consider ideas intimate justice when we talk about and set them going on their early formative experience.

Peggy Orenstein

#18. Maybe I wanted children, maybe I didn't, but I wanted the decision to be a choice, not a mandate. Last time I checked, childlessness was only supposed to be a condition of career advancement for nuns.

Peggy Orenstein

#19. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

#20. I'd believed I could keep out the tales and the toys but had failed on both counts.

Peggy Orenstein

#21. I know that if i could imbue her with a superpower, it would be the ability to withstand the pressures of the cultures around her, to be her own woman despite the potential costs: i would give her the courage of her convictions

Peggy Orenstein

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

Peggy Orenstein

#23. Children as young as twelve to eighteen months can recognize brands, it went on, and are "strongly influenced" by advertising and marketing. Yikes!

Peggy Orenstein

#24. Leaving something unnamed makes it quite literally unspeakable: a void, an absence, a taboo.

Peggy Orenstein

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

Peggy Orenstein

#26. 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."

Peggy Orenstein

#27. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

#28. Young people are not tabulae rasae. They have a sense of right and wrong. But if they're repeatedly exposed to certain themes, they are more likely to pick them up, to internalize them and have them become part of their sexual scripts.

Peggy Orenstein

#29. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

#30. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

#31. If toting the standard equipment is not what male or female, exactly what does?
well, duh, its barrettes.
At least thats what kids think it is your clothing, hairstyle, toy choice, favorite color.
Slippery stuff, that. You can see how perilously easy would be to err

Peggy Orenstein

#32. What's more, I live in Berkeley, California. If princesses had infiltrated OUR little retro hippie hamlet, imagine what was going on places where women actually shaved their legs!

Peggy Orenstein

#33. 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.

Peggy Orenstein

#34. The notion is called wabi-sabi life, like the cherry blossom, it is beautiful because of its impermanence, not in spite of it, more exquisite for the inevitability of loss.

Peggy Orenstein

#35. 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."

Peggy Orenstein

#36. Identify, I've learned, can be sliced many ways and there is gain with every loss.

Peggy Orenstein

#37. But it is Bella, not the supernaturals she falls in with, who is the true horror show here, at least as a female role model.

Peggy Orenstein

#38. When we've defined femininity for their generation so narrowly, in such a sexualized, commercialized, heteroeroticized way, where is the space, the vision, the celebration of other ways to be a girl?

Peggy Orenstein

#39. Women are one-half of the world's people; they do two-thirds of the world's work; they earn one-tenth of the world's income; they own one one-hundredth of the world's property.

Peggy Orenstein

#40. 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."

Peggy Orenstein