Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

People h- have written about this, uh, from the lens of looking at adolescent sexuality.

So like Peggy Orenstein, for example, in her book Girls and Sex, and Boys and Sex as well, and d- describing this kind of picture of what we are seeing more and more of, and that is young people engaging in sexual activity, which is not a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing [laughs] for young people to engage in sex, as long as it's consensual.

But they're doing so without any sort of sense of agency, of wanting, of even knowing why they're engaging in sexual activity.

And interestingly, we also ...

But in, even in writing that very first season, I remember there was this book by Peggy Orenstein called Girls and Sex, and we read that l- right as we were starting the show, and we realized, oh, wow, the thing that she talked about, how boys get all kind of sexual pleasure stuff, and girls are just periods.

Mm-hmm.

That's what everyone talks about.

It, the question isn't how do I keep my son away from the internet? Because that's not realistic.

It's what do I do when the world is teaching my kid things about sex and girls and what it means to be a man faster than I can teach him? Our expert today is Peggy Orenstein, who wrote Girls & Sex, and then, after hearing the same question everywhere she went, "What about the boys?" She spent years actually listening to those boys, and what she found is that boys believe they're allowed exactly two emotions, happy and angry, and everything else gets funneled into one of those.

We cover a lot in the next half hour, pornography and when, when to bring it up, the difference between the golden rule and what some educators call the platinum rule, why silence, not cruelty, might be the bigger thing to worry about with our kids.

And before we plunge in, let me offer three things to carry with you.

To help Heather and Ian with their 13-year-old son, Henry, we turn to Peggy Orenstein.

Peggy has spent a lot of her career writing about how to help kids learn about things like sex and romantic relationships.

And she had this really eye-opening experience in 2016, when she published a book named Girls & Sex.

As I went around the country after publishing that book, which was about the kind of contradictions that young women still faced in their intimate encounters, everywhere that I went, parents of girls and boys, and boys themselves would say, "What about boys? When are you gonna write about boys?" And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, in fact, nobody was talking to boys.

I was interviewed in college by a woman named Peggy Orenstein, who was at the time a New York Times journalist.

And she was working on a book called Girls and Sex.

And it was about millennials and sex, because I think with every generation, we're always constantly trying to be figuring out, OK, what does it mean for this generation to have sex? How are they doing it differently? How are they doing it better? How are they doing it worse? And oftentimes the focus is on, OK, how are they doing it worse? We love to act as though younger people are somehow getting sex wrong and to tell them that they're getting sex wrong.

And so in my experience, Peggy came to my sorority house when I was in college, and she interviewed my sorority sisters and I about our sex lives.

for me

to learn things that I didn't know about young people's relationship with sex and maybe even my own relationship with sex.

And I do want to say, you know, the book that Peggy Ornstein ultimately wrote, Girls and Sex, it is a lot more nuanced than I think my conversation would have led me to originally believe.

But I do think that there is this constant struggle for journalists to figure out, OK, how do we tell these stories without mapping our own insecurities about sex onto younger people?