Education Week - May 10, 2017 - 26

IN CONVERSATION

Q&A With Peggy Orenstein:

Let's Talk to K-12 Girls
About Sex

Orenstein's most recent book, Girls & Sex: Navigating the
Complicated New Landscape, which was published last
year, explores female teenagers' attitudes, expectations, and
perceptions of sex and intimacy. She interviewed more than
70 young women ages 15 to 20 from across the country-
African-American, Arab-American, Asian-American,
Latina, and white-about their personal experiences.
Orenstein doesn't claim to represent the experiences of all
young women; those she spoke with expected to attend,
or were in, college. A large majority are heterosexual; 10
percent identify as lesbian or bisexual.
The result is a more personal portrait of the current
landscape, one complicated by cultural expectations of
beauty, the silence surrounding girls' own pleasure and
choice, and the tricky social scene of a dating culture
influenced by the media and the internet. According to
the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
more than 40 percent of high school students have had
sexual intercourse, yet only 24 states and the District of
Columbia require public schools to teach sex education.
Orenstein laments that many schools take an abstinenceonly route, and she is a strong advocate for a more open and
comprehensive conversation.
Commentary Associate Kate Stoltzfus spoke to Orenstein
recently by phone about how parents and educators can
help young women make healthy choices about their most
personal relationships.

WEB COMMENT

What's changed over time? What about the current
landscape of sex is "new"?
There is this disconnect between the new
entitlement that young women feel in the public
realm and their disempowerment in the private
realm. At the same time, they are encouraged
more than ever to present themselves as "sexy"-
not about being attractive or beautiful, but a
very narrow, commercialized idea of sexy. What's
particularly complicated is they're sold that idea [of
sexiness] as being a source of personal power. There
is a complete disconnect between that image of
sexiness and an understanding of their bodies, their
own wants, needs, desires, and limits, what those
might be, having those respected. There's a way that
this image of "sexiness" has not just been conflated
with sexuality, but actually replaced it.

According to a 2013 study by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, 10 percent of high school girls say
they have been forced to have sex. Every girl you spoke
to said she had faced harassment "in middle school, high
school, college, or, often all three." But sexual-assault
statistics in K-12 schools are also rarely reported. Why the
reluctance to report these incidents?
[Young women] are almost conditioned, starting in
middle school, to have their bodies publicly commented
on by young men, [and] they don't think they have any
power to really stop it. I think that's a fair assessment,
given that most schools are not stopping it, unless there
is something so egregious that they have to step in. The
everyday chipping-away of girls' self-worth by reducing
them to their bodies is completely ignored. When the
reason for the dress code is that "girls are distracting
boys," you have basically put a rape culture in place.
Boys need to be responsible for their own reactions and
responses and able to live in the world without thinking
that because a girl is dressed a certain way or behaves
a certain way, they have license to comment, touch, or
assault. And they need to learn that lesson from the
get-go.

How can educators and parents improve the ways they talk
to young people about healthy sexuality and relationships?
What role, if any, should public schools play in these
conversations?
In terms of school, I take a very big breath because I
think what has happened in our school systems-which
is responsible in part for a culture in which girls and
many boys are harassed and assaulted, and in which we
have a hook-up culture that often dehumanizes kids in
their sexual encounters-is that we've have had in place
this abstinence-only garbage for years. Kids are educated
by the culture and often educated by pornography. And

Michael Todd

Even before journalist Peggy Orenstein's daughter reached
adolescence, Orenstein was concerned about what the
experience might mean for her child. As the author of
four books and a contributing writer for The New York
Times Magazine, Orenstein had written about selfesteem and the sexualization of girls and young women.
She considered herself an expert at decoding what she
calls "the mixed messages of girlhood." But when it came
to what was ahead-troubling stories of teenage sex
seemingly dominated by hook-ups, social-media scandals,
objectification, blurred lines of consent, and all-too-easy
access to the internet-she wanted a better handle on what
to expect, and how to help her daughter navigate healthy
choices.

that's not where we want our children to learn about how
people interact sexually. Decades of evidence show that
abstinence-only education doesn't change significantly
when children engage sexually.
We tend to silo conversations about sex as if it is not
about the same values of compassion, kindness, respect,
mutuality, and caring that we want our children to embody
in every other aspect of their lives. You're really, as a
parent, wanting to build a scaffolding from the time your
child is very small. Parents of infant boys tend to name all
their parts, whereas parents of girls go right from navel
to knee. Then girls go into partnered encounters, and we
believe that somehow they're going to have a voice, or
they're going to be able to express their needs, their wants,
their limits, their desires, or even know what those might
be. So we have basically set them up for inequality. We
have got to change that conversation.

The age of the internet has paved a whole new way for
teenagers to engage with sex and relationships. How is this
changing the landscape for young people in terms of their
sexuality?
Unfortunately, the first thing kids google is porn. The
average age that kids today are exposed to porn, either
intentionally or not, is 11. We have to ask what it
means that kids are learning about sex from that realm
before they've even had their first kiss and how that's
shaping them, their attitudes toward sexuality, and their
expectations of sex. I've seen parents protesting because
sex education "wants to talk about porn." What people
want is to teach kids to apply the same critical lens that
we teach them to apply to the media-and the things that
they read in school-to pornography. If we don't teach
them to not look at it uncritically, they won't. They need
some very clear discussions about why that's not real, what
the dynamics are, not only in terms of gender, but in terms
of race and sexuality. n

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. To read the full conversation, go to
www.edweek.org/go/orenstein.

Why is it always either/or in education? Can't we hold two ideas at once?
Without equality, grit only goes so far. Without grit, equality only goes so far."
-USER_002552607, responding to Christine Yeh's Commentary, "Forget Grit. Focus on Inequality."
www.edweek.org/go/yeh

26 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 10, 2017 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

http://www.edweek.org/go/orenstein http://www.edweek.org/go/yeh http://www.edweek.org/go/commentary

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