Narrator: A high school dean stands before an assembly of teenage girls. His message is a familiar one: “Ladies, when you go out you need to dress to respect yourself and respect your family.” He tells them to avoid short shorts and tank tops, to consider what their grandmothers would think. But a senior named Camila hears something else entirely. She hears an old, tired script that places the burden of preventing harassment squarely on the shoulders of girls. She stands up and interrupts him. “What you’re saying is just continuing this cycle of blaming the victim,” she declares, her voice ringing through the auditorium. Her clothing, she argues, has no correlation to her self-respect. The incident reveals a deep and troubling paradox at the heart of modern girlhood: a world that relentlessly pressures girls to be “hot” while simultaneously shaming them for it. This complicated landscape, filled with mixed messages, digital dangers, and profound questions about pleasure and power, is the subject of Peggy Orenstein’s groundbreaking book, Girls & Sex. Orenstein pulls back the curtain on the private lives of young women to uncover the truth behind the headlines and statistics.

Narrator: The book argues that modern culture socializes girls to view their sexuality not as a felt experience, but as a performance for an external audience. This phenomenon, known as self-objectification, teaches them that their primary value lies in their physical appearance and desirability. The story of Camila, the high school senior who challenged her dean, powerfully illustrates this. Despite her defiance, she admits that no matter what she wears, she is catcalled, stared at, and even touched at school. It’s a reality she says you just “accept as part of going to school.”

This pressure is massively amplified by social media. Platforms like Instagram become a stage where girls curate an image of desirability, measuring their self-worth in likes and comments. One girl, Matilda Oh, describes it as using your experiences to create an image with the ultimate goal of proving you are “desirable and attractive and wanted and liked.” This relentless focus on external validation has severe consequences, linked to anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. It also creates a dangerous passivity. As one psychologist quoted in the book starkly puts it, “Objects don’t object.” When girls learn to see themselves as things to be looked at, it can erode their ability to assert their own needs, desires, and boundaries.

Narrator: Orenstein uncovers a significant shift in the landscape of teen intimacy, where oral sex has become a central, yet deeply unequal, act. For many teens, it’s seen as a "workaround"—a way to engage in sexual activity without technically losing one's virginity or risking pregnancy. However, this new norm has created a profound "pleasure gap." The research and interviews in the book reveal that while boys almost universally expect and receive oral sex, the reverse is rarely true, especially outside of committed relationships.

One high school senior, Sam, explains that oral sex has become a form of social currency, a way to “rack up points for hooking up” and increase one’s social status. Another college student, Anna, describes how girls often perform oral sex at the end of a night simply because a guy expects to be satisfied, and it’s easier than refusing or arguing. This dynamic is so ingrained that it’s captured in a crude but common saying: “A hand job is a man job. A blow job is yo’ job.” This lack of reciprocity is more than just a physical imbalance; it teaches girls that their pleasure is secondary and that their role in a sexual encounter is to please their partner. This is compounded by a widespread discomfort many girls feel about their own bodies, fueled by negative cultural messages and a lack of education about female anatomy and pleasure.

Narrator: The concept of virginity, Orenstein shows, is not a medical reality but a powerful social construct. Its definition is fluid and often arbitrary, yet it continues to exert immense pressure on young people. The book explores how teens relate to virginity in different ways: as a gift to be cherished, a stigma to be shed, or simply a process of sexual learning. For many, especially in the face of abstinence-only education, virginity becomes a high-stakes concept loaded with fear and shame.

Christina, a young woman who grew up in a conservative Catholic community, was taught that virginity was a precious thing that, once gone, was gone forever. Her sex education consisted of scare tactics about STDs and warnings that premarital sex was a sin. Yet, in college, she found these black-and-white rules didn't fit the gray realities of love and relationships. After having a positive first sexual experience with her boyfriend, she began to question the entire framework. She realized that focusing on the single act of intercourse had prevented her from learning about communication, mutuality, and other forms of intimacy. The book argues that an overemphasis on virginity—whether through purity culture or the pressure to lose it—ultimately hinders healthy sexual development by framing sex as a one-time event rather than a lifelong journey of learning and discovery.

Narrator: On college campuses, the dominant social script is hookup culture, a world of casual, non-committal sexual encounters. Orenstein finds this culture is far more complex than simple narratives of either liberation or degradation suggest. For some young women, it offers a sense of empowerment and freedom from emotional entanglement. But for many others, it’s a landscape fraught with anxiety, dissatisfaction, and danger.

The story of Holly, a college sophomore, captures this complexity. She enters college "very pure" but quickly embraces hooking up, feeling accomplished and in control. However, her journey is also marked by regret over drunken encounters, heartbreak from a "friends with benefits" situation gone wrong, and a growing awareness of the inequality in pleasure. A key factor in this culture is alcohol, which often serves as "liquid courage" but also creates what Orenstein calls "compulsory carelessness." It provides an excuse for lowered inhibitions and blurs the lines of consent, making it difficult to distinguish between enthusiastic participation and reluctant compliance. This environment, combined with persistent gendered double standards, can become a breeding ground for sexual assault, where the pressure to be the "fun, cool girl" can leave women vulnerable to exploitation.

Narrator: For LGBTQ+ teens, the journey of self-discovery presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities, particularly in the digital age. The internet, Orenstein finds, is a double-edged sword. It can be a place of intense cyberbullying, where LGBTQ+ youth are targeted at three times the rate of their heterosexual peers. Yet, it is also an invaluable lifeline. For teens in unaccepting homes or communities, the internet provides access to information, community, and validation that is unavailable offline.

Amber, a 19-year-old, grew up in a conservative environment where she felt she had to hide her attraction to girls. Online, she could explore her identity, first by posing as a boy to flirt with girls, and later by connecting with her future girlfriend, Hannah. Her story highlights the critical role of parental acceptance. When Amber came out to her mother, the initial rejection was devastating, a reaction that research shows dramatically increases an LGBTQ+ child's risk for depression and suicide. Over time, her mother’s eventual, if hesitant, acceptance was crucial to her well-being. The book emphasizes that for these young people, coming out is not a single event but a continuous process, and that family support is the single most important factor in their ability to thrive.

Narrator: The book culminates in a powerful argument for a radical shift in how we talk to young people about sex. It contrasts the widespread failure of fear-based, abstinence-only education with the success of comprehensive, pleasure-positive models. The author Alice Dreger’s live-tweeting of her son’s sex-ed class provides a stark example of the former, where instructors use misinformation—like claiming a whole box of condoms had holes—to scare students away from sex.

In sharp contrast is the work of educator Charis Denison. In her classes, she uses a vulva puppet to openly discuss the clitoris, encourages girls to understand their own bodies through masturbation, and frames her entire job as helping teens make decisions that lead to “joy and honor rather than regret, guilt, or shame.” She talks about pleasure, communication, and respect, creating a space for honest questions. This approach mirrors the Dutch model, which has resulted in one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates in the world. By treating sex as a natural part of life that requires guidance and skill-building—not just risk avoidance—the Dutch empower their youth to have healthier, more respectful, and more satisfying intimate lives.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Girls & Sex is that true equality for women cannot be achieved in the boardroom or the classroom if it does not exist in the bedroom. Peggy Orenstein compellingly argues that a culture that objectifies young women, dismisses their pleasure, and fails to provide them with honest education about their bodies and desires is fundamentally undermining their power and agency in all other aspects of life.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge: to move beyond a conversation about sex that is dominated by fear, risk, and performance. How can we, as parents, educators, and a society, begin to foster a new culture—one built on a foundation of mutual respect, open communication, and the radical idea that for girls, just as for boys, sex should be a source of pleasure and authentic human connection?