More concerning is how most of her interviewees seem like younger versions of herself: white, well educated and upper middle class. Included is the standard boilerplate that she doesn’t “claim to represent the experience of all young women,” but Orenstein also justifies her exclusive focus on collegiate or college-bound students by describing them as those who “had all options open to them, the ones who had most benefited from women’s economic and political progress.” That’s premised on a rather staid notion of “progress” solely centered on the experiences of middle-class white women. Elided are the generations of both the working class and women of color who’ve had to negotiate sex, desire and power with different challenges, strategies and outcomes.

All this said, I appreciated Orenstein’s bluntness, especially around the role that parents must play. As a dad, it was disconcerting to know that only two of her respondents “had ever had a substantive conversation about sex with their fathers.” I’d like to flatter myself and my wife as being less taciturn: Our 11-year-old already has her own copy of “The New Our Bodies, Ourselves,” and we don’t censor ourselves when she has questions about sex. But as Orenstein makes clear, we won’t be the only ones shaping her sexual self-hood. What will she learn from her peers? From pop culture? From her first boy/girlfriends? If assertiveness and self-advocacy are survival skills, they need to be encouraged at home but reinforced elsewhere.

As least for now, these concerns can feel more abstract than immediate. When I first brought “Girls & Sex” home, my daughter saw the title and loudly proclaimed, “ewwwwww!” She’s still at that age where sex is mysterious enough to perk her curiosity yet weird enough to be discomforting. We both could laugh at her reaction. Yet I know that sex will get more serious soon enough, and I wonder how well prepared either of us will be when that moment arrives.

Curated by Timothy
Original Article