Pleasure

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‘Girls & Sex’ And The Importance Of Talking To Young Women About Pleasure

Some of the points in this interview really resonated with me. Especially the parts about queer women feeling like that can get a little breathing space from  heterosexual sexual scripts. But a lot of things that she talked about did not seem in any way new. I’m 9 years younger than Orenstein, and all of these issues were around when I was a teen.

And though she says that things like teen oral sex have changed in alarming ways, her data doesn’t seem to really match the data from larger peer reviewed studies. I would like to know more about how she recruited her sample. Especially since higher rates of teen oral sex correlate with family income, parent’s college education and being white, and it seems like that is the demographic she is mainly looking at.

Also, I can’t find any peer reviewed evidence that teen oral sex has been increasing in last few decades, mostly because the older data sets don’t include oral sex. Clearly oral sex has increased over the last 100 years (based on data in compiled in George Chauncey’s Gay New York), but Orenstein seems to be primarily comparing today’s teens to her Our Bodies Ourselves teenage years in the 70s.

Though, from everything else I’ve read, the 70s were actually a really terrible time for male entitlement to teen women’s bodies (see Rebecca Solnit talking about groupie culture here). Also see Viv Albertine’s description of all the 70s punk boys wanting blowjobs here.

I guess I am just worried that alarmist books about young women by older women, especially books that are based on faulty and anecdotal data, have a real potential to do harm. I think that the whole backlash against “princess culture” ended up further pathologizing and ghettoizing girl’s interests without creating helpful solutions. In our house, we have a no military or police uniform rule, and I think that is a much more important issue than worrying about Disney-branded lego.

Though if the main take away is that parents should be talking to their daughters about pleasure and reciprocity in sex, that seems OK.