Latest Peggy Orenstein Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Not that long ago, the idea of feeding your kid with organic fruit and vegetables or paying attention to sustainability or any of that - that was very fringy. And I guess some people will argue it still is to a degree, but it's kind of mainstream fringy now.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Kids, Long, People

  "Are Disney Princesses Evil?". Interview With Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. January/February 2011.

• I'll tell you what is insidious about the Disney Princess, besides the fact that if you look into their merchandise, the 26,000 items, you're always finding books that are about "my perfect wedding." It's what it puts girls on the path for. And that it poses as something that protects girls, or staves off premature sexualization, when I think it primes them for it. I don't know where to put that on the continuum exactly. I guess eight?

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Book, Princess

• One of the challenges is to create an equally positive, satisfying sense of femininity and feminine identity in a different way so that there are things you're saying yes to and satisfying that urge that your daughter has to be assert her girlness. The surface level of the culture, and really several inches into it, makes that very hard to do. I hate to put another thing on parents' plates. But the culture is very intentional in what it's telling your daughter and what it's telling you about the message of femininity. And if you're not intentional and conscious back, you lose.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Daughter, Hate, Challenges

• My kind of nightmare quote is from Deborah Tolman, who does research on girls and desire and is, I think, brilliant. She told me that by the time girls are teenagers, when she asks them how sexual experience made them feel, they respond by how they think they looked; they think that how they look is how they feel.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Teenager, Thinking

• Girls are freer to express their femininity and their sexuality and we're not tamping that down or denying it anymore. But it ends up putting them, first of all, in this box. And secondly, premature sexualization of girls actually does the opposite of what people think it might; it actually disconnects them from their sexuality and makes for decreased sexual health as they get older.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Thinking, People

• It's particularly important as parents in our conversations with our daughters and our sons to consider ideas intimate justice when we talk about and set them going on their early formative experience.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Daughter, Son, Ideas

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• For years we've used the bases analogy - with intercourse being the "ultimate sex" even though that's probably not going to feel good to girls. That model doesn't let you say "I like it at second base, maybe I'll stay here."

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Sex, Years

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Intimate justice touches on ideas of gender inequity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health. I don't expect a 15-year-old girl to have that figured out; it's hard enough to have it figured out when you're 50.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Integrity, Years

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• A lot of what happens in consensual encounters and in the way we talk to both girls and boys about sex creates a medium in which assault flourishes.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Sex, Boys

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I found that in a perverse way our culture and parents are far more comfortable talking about girls' vicitimization than girls' sexual agency.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Agency, Talking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• We continue to think of virginity as first intercourse. That ends up minimizing and marginalizing other things kids are engaged in, like oral sex. And it's not going to feel particularly good for girls as the big marker of adulthood.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Sex, Kids

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Saying "yes" [to sexual activity] is a pretty low baseline for sexual experience and I wanted to write about what was happening to girls after "yes."

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Writing, Saying Yes

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• We're afraid if girls find out sex is pleasurable they'll stop being gatekeepers, they'll go out and have sex.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Sex, Gatekeepers

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Mothers are doing a better job talking about risk, danger, reproduction, consent, unwanted pregnancy. We're not talking about how to balance the risks and joys and we're really not talking about the joys.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Mother, Jobs, Pregnancy

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• While I completely disagree with the "purity" concept, it was the only place I saw fathers talking to girls about their expectations and attitudes to sex and expressing love and support. I didn't see liberal dads having similar conversations with their daughters.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Daughter, Sex

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I talked to a junior in college, and she was fed up. She said, "I'm not doing other girls any favours by faking orgasms and not calling out guys when we're having unequal experiences."

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, College, Guy

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I had a lot of girls ask me whether it was weird that they didn't make a lot of noise during sex. I would get so irritated that they had learned this.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Sex, Noise

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Girls are removing pubic hair before fully having it. They would say I feel cleaner, it's for me, but then they'd say if a boy saw pubic hair down there they'd head for the hills.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Boys, Hair

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I asked a high school girl about unreciprocated oral sex and said, "What if guys were asking you to get them a glass of water and never offered to you a glass of water? Would you put up with that?" She burst out laughing. It never occurred to her.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Sex, School

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• All girls over age 14 remove pubic hair. The only touching is to remove hair. That's grim.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Hair, Touching

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• There is a way hook ups are serving young women. And it was important for me to always talk about how behaviours were serving girls, not just making them the victims.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Important, Behaviour

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The anesthetizing against caring really threw me for a loop. I was seeing it with 15-year-olds. It was how they were starting their intimate lives. It alarmed me.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Caring, Years, Intimate

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Sexualization is the performance of sexuality, the performance of sexiness. Girls are super good at that now.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Sexuality, Sexiness

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Displaying yourself as sexy doesn't do anything to increase sexual self-knowledge or pleasure.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Sexy, Self, Pleasure

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Girls would say: "I have a boyfriend for that." So in addition to putting their pleasure literally into someone else's hands - an inept teenage boy - these are the same girls who say they do not climax with a partner. It's the opposite with boys; they say because they can do that themselves, girls should perform oral sex.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Girl, Sex, Teenage

  Source: www.macleans.ca