Peggy Orenstein

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.

Teenagers have to assert their independence, of course.

And, and we want our kids to be exposed to new ideas, but how do we equip them to know right from wrong, particularly when it comes to things like sex and relationships, when we don't know what they're seeing on the internet? On today's show, we've got an expert who has spent years talking to teenagers about all of this, and she'll give us some great advice after this quick break.

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 now we accept things like the Cornell 7.

And one of the things that I keep coming back to is for all the progress that we thought we'd made, have we actually gotten any better at teaching boys to become good men in the world now i love good men i love my husband i have a son and i think it's really important work to raise a boy who grows up into a good man but if the but if the world isn't going to change that often feels sort of impossible so i wanted to run a conversation that i so i wanted to rerun an episode today It's a chat that I had with Peggy Orenstein.

Peggy's the author of the book Boys and Sex.

And she spent years researching how boys get indoctrinated into toxic culture and how we can possibly deprogram it.

So part of the reason I really wanted to write the book was because I had experience being a part of a book like mine.

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.

So about a decade ago, I started to notice the mainstreaming of strangulation or choking in porn.

So fast forward about eight years later, we start studying this and sounding the alarm in a series of Peggy Orenstein did in the New York Times, they moved up the publication of it because they were so shocked because what they found is that there's no such thing as safe strangulation.

There just isn't.

The whole point is it's cutting oxygen off to your brain.