Peggy Orenstein

...What's more, I live in Berkeley, California. If princesses had infiltrated OUR little retro hippie hamlet, imagine what was going on places where women actually shaved their legs!

Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana__ campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing __ood sex._ __en are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm,_ Herbenick said. __omen talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men._ The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it__ become disproportionately common in porn__nd the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List__t__ also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it__ up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old__nd can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?__ound that it was mainly boys who pushed for __ifth base,_ approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being __aïve or flawed,_ unable to __elax._ Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal __he new oral._ __ince all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,_ she said, __nal sex is becoming the new __ill she do it or not?_ behavior, the new __rove you love me.__ And still, she added, __irls_ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation._ According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. __t__ a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don__ want to do it you__e suddenly not good enough, you__e frigid, you__e missing out, you__e not exploring your sexuality, you__e not adventurous.

I__ going to say this once here, and then__ecause it is obvious__ will not repeat it in the course of this book: not all boys engage in such behavior, not by a long shot, and many young men are girls_ staunchest allies. However, every girl I spoke with, every single girl__egardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance__ad been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three. Who, then, is truly at risk of being __istracted_ at school? At best, blaming girls_ clothing for the thoughts and actions of boys is counterproductive. At worst, it__ a short step from there to __he was asking for it._ Yet, I also can__ help but feel that girls such as Camila, who favors what she called __ore so-called provocative_ clothing, are missing something. Taking up the right to bare arms (and legs and cleavage and midriffs) as a feminist rallying cry strikes me as suspiciously Orwellian. I recall the simple litmus test for sexism proposed by British feminist Caitlin Moran, one that Camila unconsciously referenced: Are the guys doing it, too? __f they aren__,_ Moran wrote, __hances are you__e dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as __ome total fucking bullshit.__ So while only girls get catcalled, it__ also true that only girls_ fashions urge body consciousness at the very youngest ages. Target offers bikinis for infants. The Gap hawks __kinny jeans_ for toddlers. Preschoolers worship Disney princesses, characters whose eyes are larger than their waists. No one is trying to convince eleven-year-old boys to wear itty-bitty booty shorts or bare their bellies in the middle of winter. As concerned as I am about the policing of girls_ sexuality through clothing, I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others_ pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality. I recall a conversation I had with Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and perhaps the foremost expert on teenage girls_ sexual desire. In her work, she said, girls had begun responding __o questions about how their bodies feel__uestions about sexuality or arousal__y describing how they think they look. I have to remind them that looking good is not a feeling.