In short, a host of social institutions failed or abdicated their responsibility to foster an honest discussion with youth about any aspect of sex besides its perils. That void’s been left to be filled by mass media, especially a culture of pornography that Orenstein claims is predicated on “eroticizing the degradation of women.” Young women experience little encouragement to understand their bodies, let alone desires, and instead grow up to associate sex as an act of “pleasing” bereft of their own pleasure. Orenstein brutally assesses this state of affairs: “We’d performed the psychological equivalent of a clitoridectomy on our daughters.”

At its most pernicious, this atmosphere of sex negativity doesn’t only discourage women from exploring what they want from sex, it also shades into a reluctance to state what they don’t want. The issue of consent and sexual assault is Orenstein’s most recurrent theme, and she states within the first few pages that half of her interviewees “had experienced something along the spectrum of coercion to rape.” At least on college campuses, “public-witness bearing” by assault survivors alongside student activism and Title IX lawsuits have forced action by legislators and administrators, including “affirmative consent/’yes means yes'” policies that several states, including California, have implemented. Importantly, Orenstein stresses that while these changes hold promise, men must be held responsible for preventing sexual assault while women should be encouraged to master “assertiveness and self-advocacy [as] crucial defensive skills.”

Surprisingly, though Orenstein insists that “nearly all the girls I interviewed are bright, assertive, ambitious” they rarely appear as such. Part of her point is to highlight that as confident as they may be in other parts of their lives, they’re ill-prepared for sexual situations. But it’s discouraging that the most self-actualized women she profiles tend to be adult researchers and educators rather than her teen interviewees.

Relatedly, Orenstein’s tone can be slightly parental and smacking of middle-class respectability. Within the spectrum of “sex-positivity” she leans more center-left than radical, and there’s a subtle air of disapproval in how she discusses such topics as porn, hooking up and especially anal sex, which is always framed negatively.