NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A Time Top 10 Book of the Year ā¢ A San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year The author of the New York Times bestseller Cinderella Ate My Daughter offers a clear-eyed picture of the new sexual landscape girls face in the post-princess stageāhigh school through collegeāand reveals how they are negotiating it. A generation gap has emerged between parents and their girls. Even in this age of helicopter parenting, the mothers and fathers of tomorrowās women have little idea what their daughters are up to sexually or how they feel about it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with over seventy young women and a wide range of psychologists, academics, and experts, renowned journalist Peggy Orenstein goes where most others fear to tread, pulling back the curtain on the hidden truths, hard lessons, and important possibilities of girlsā sex lives in the modern world. While the media has focusedāoften to sensational effectāon the rise of casual sex and the prevalence of rape on campus, in Girls and Sex Peggy Orenstein brings much more to the table. She examines the ways in which porn and all its sexual myths have seeped into young peopleās lives; what it means to be the āthe perfect slutā and why many girls scorn virginity; the complicated terrain of hookup culture and the unfortunate realities surrounding assault. In Orensteinās hands these issues are never reduced to simplistic ātruths;ā rather, her powerful reporting opens up a dialogue on a potent, often silent, subtext of American life todayāgiving readers comprehensive and in-depth information with which to understand, and navigate, this complicated new world.
