Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

An Amazon Best Book of April 2016: It would be easy to pigeonhole Girls & Sex as essential reading only for parents of female teens or preteens. But as I traveled deeper into Orenstein’s honest and thoughtful exploration of “the complicated new landscape” of sex as seen from the points of view of seventy high school and college-age girls she interviewed, I realized this book is for anyone who cares for a girl approaching womanhood, whether she is a daughter, niece, granddaughter, or friend of the family. Orenstein is the perfect guide, empathetic with the girls she interviews while also calling out how views on being “hot,” consensual sex, drinking, and the very definition of virginity and intercourse has changed in the past ten or twenty years. She’s so direct, the reader can’t help but face how dramatically the landscape has shifted. (I admit to being horrified at the latest definition of “second base.” But better to be wide-eyed than blind.) It’s a tribute to Orenstein’s perceptive investigations and her ability to make you question your own long-held beliefs about young people and sex that as I turned the last page, I felt an intense desire to read a Boys & Sex edition so that our young men could be given the clear voice that Orenstein has given young women. —Adrian Liang

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• Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
• S.E.X., second edition: The All-You-Need-To-Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties
• Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood
• For Goodness Sex: Changing the Way We Talk to Teens About Sexuality, Values, and Health
• The Social Construction of Sexuality (Third Edition) (Contemporary Societies)
• Gender, Sex, and Politics
• Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New Perspectives in Crime, Deviance, and Law)
• Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change