TALKING SEX IN THE MODERN AGE
Writer Peggy Orenstein tells ouragonyaunt about today’s hook-up culture
IF YOU’RE not comfortable with frank discussions about sex, look away now. When I met author Peggy Orenstein recently, the conversation was about the issues that most families don’t discuss over the Friday-night dinner table — although Orenstein would probably approve if we did.
The New York Times’s bestselling author and journalist is in London to promote her new book, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New
Landscape, which explores the wide generation gap that has emerged between parents and their daughters. Drawing on interviews with psychologists, academics and experts, as well as girls themselves, it reveals what girls feel about sex, the pressures and expectations they face, and how parents can help them negotiate their relationships.
Orenstein grew up in an observant, Conservative-synagogueattending home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where her family was part of a small, tight-knit community. Unusually, her Eastern European great-grandparents didn’t have the 19th-century emigration experience that marks the history of so many American Jews. Rather than arriving off the boat in New York, they were among “Jewish pioneers” relocated to rural Minnesota to create small Jewish homesteads.
“My synagogue was completely egalitarian,” she recalls. “The girls did everything the boys did, so I grew up reading Torah. I’ve got mad synagogue skills!”
Now 54, she lives in Berkeley California with her Japanese-American husband. She says she has drifted away from observant Judaism but, after having a daughter, realised that she wanted to imbue her with a strong Jewish identity. “She’s just had her batmitzvah — a do-it-yourself affair, which was all about the ceremony, not the party. We made our own siddur and tallit out of old kimono fabric, to show the dualculture aspect. It ended up being a really meaningful celebration.” Her motivation to write
came partly out of concern for her daughter.
“She was becoming a teen and I was hearing stories about ‘hookup culture’ and sexting and binge drinking. At the same time, we were having a larger culture conversation about sexual assault and consent on college campuses. It seemed to me that there needed to be more discussion about what happens after ‘yes’, particularly for girls. I wanted to know what was going on with them, how they were thinking about sex, what their attitudes and expectations were. I wondered: can you really be equal in the classroom and boardroom if you’re not equal in the bedroom?”
Orenstein chose to focus on 15 to 20-year-olds — the age at which most become sexually active — and on girls who were either at college, or college-bound. She conducted interviews with 70 girls from a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds, including Jewish (“although not enough Jews to make any generalisations.”). What was she expecting to learn? “I didn’t know. I’d written about the difference between sexuality and sexualisation in my previous books — sexualisation being something imposed on girls from without, and sexuality as a process from within — and how the two were being blurred by popular culture. I was interested in finding out more about that.”
What she discovered was a sexual landscape virtually unrecognisable to her generation. “Sometime around the 1990s, the script flipped,” she says. “Casual sex used to be the exception; you were in a relationship and then you had intimacy. But with the advent of ‘hookup culture’ it’s become normalised that sex precedes intimacy, rather than derives from it. Instead of being the first thing you do, dating is now the last.”
The term “hooking up” does not necessarily always denote intercourse. Remaining undefined and consequently ambiguous, it can be used to describe anything from kissing to penetrative sex — one reason why girls over-estimate the number of partners their peers have had. “In terms of intercourse, kids are actually not having more partners today, and they’re not doing it any younger. What’s changed is that they are doing
Instead of being thing you do, dating is the last