Orenstein’s Talks Prompt Conversation
New York Times best-selling author, journalist and sex educator Peggy Orenstein spoke at Friday’s panel-style assembly, exploring the pressing and often inequitable sexual landscape that girls face during their high school and college years. In addition, Orenstein hosted a dinner and Q&A session with the Academy’s peer health education group H4 in Wetherell Dining Hall and an evening talk open to the public at the Assembly Hall later that night.
Orenstein is the author of The New York Times best-sellers Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Waiting for Daisy as well as Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World and SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. Orenstein is a guest contributor for The New York Times Magazine and her written works have been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Elle, Time, Mother Jones, Slate, O: The Oprah Magazine and The New Yorker, among other publications. Her commentaries have been featured in NPR’s All Things Considered and PBS Newshour and her articles have been anthologized multiple times, including in The Best American Science Writing. She has been a keynote speaker on Nightline, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, NPR’s Fresh Air and Morning Edition and CBC’s As It Happens.
In 2012, The Columbia Journalism Review named Orenstein one of its “40 women who changed the media business in the past 40 years.” The Council on Contemporary Families recognized Orenstein for her “Outstanding Coverage of Family Diversity,” and she received a Books For A Better Life Award for Waiting for Daisy.
Orenstein began her day at the Academy with an onstage conversation about teenage sexual climate with uppers Willa Canfield, Erica Hogan and Emily Pelliccia at the morning assembly. The girls asked Orenstein questions tailored to Exeter’s sexual culture, addressing issues like consent, casual hookups, age differential power dynamics and the exhibition of sexuality through social media outlets like Snapchat and Instagram.
According to Hogan, the girls prepared for the panel by reading parts of Girls and Sex and watching Orenstein’s previous speeches. Considering Orenstein’s perspective and reflecting on the Academy’s own sexual climate, Canfield, Hogan and Pelliccia formulated questions that would target issues both inside and out of the Exeter bubble. “We wanted to ask questions that would force students to think about their own actions and make all this talk about sex and the hook-up culture relevant to all of our lives,” Hogan said.
In her responses, Orenstein addressed the objectification of girls’ bodies and how they are exploited in a culture that many would argue benefits males, both in terms of the sexual encounters themselves and the consequences of those encounters. “Girls’ bodies are open to public critique and scrutiny—a collection of parts to be judged by others. This makes girls conscious of their bodies during intimacy, feeling inadequate and fearful of disappointing their partner,” Orenstein said. “Girls may declare sexual liberation and pride in their bodies, but that purported confidence comes off with their clothes.”
Orenstein credited female genitalia shame to the stigma that adults place on girls’ body parts from an early age. “Women’s body parts go unnamed from childhood, considered icky and sacred, while widespread media portrays male masturbation and boys are quickly exposed to sexuality,” she said. “I want girls to know that genitals are unique to each person, like a fingerprint, and that there is no right image.”
Pelliccia found that Orenstein’s stance on societal eroticization of female bodies, through pornography and idealizations of femininity, pertained to unhealthy sexual relationships. “Girls in our society are learning to be sexy before even learning what sex is. Thus it’s not so much about sexual gratification or exploration for girls, it’s more about furthering this image for sexiness,” she said. “This sets our girls up for encounters that are not fulfilling physically or emotionally. Conflating sexiness with sexual exploration and gratification leads to a sort of encounter where communications is not [at] the forefront of the parties.”
Pelliccia added that girls are far from attaining sovereignty over their own bodies if their sensuality is subject to scrutiny. “Girls talk about sexual liberation in terms of being proud of their bodies, wearing the ‘typical college girl uniform’ - crop top, short skirt, and high heels,” she said. “From that premise, Peggy reminded us all that this ‘liberation’ isn’t really liberation if public humiliation lurks around the corner.”
Orenstein attested that in today’s society, the acts females engage in, from oral sex to sexting, are often staged more for boys’ enjoyment than for their own. For males, she said, there is fun and pleasure; for females, too little physical joy, too much regret and a general sense that the boys are in charge. “Sexual satisfaction is a gendered idea,” she said. “For many girls, being pleasing during sex is prioritized over being pleased. Females define their satisfaction by the boy’s satisfaction and both boys and girls blame girls for bad sex.”
In a further explanation of today’s one-sided male-female oral sex reciprocation, she asked girls to consider what their reaction would be if boys were habitually asking them for non sex-related favors that they seldom returned. “Say you always bring your partner a glass of water. You would be infuriated if you asked them for a glass of water, and they refused. Or if they only offered a sip,” she laughed.
Orenstein warned against the emotionless sexual relationships that the adolescent hookup culture often glamorizes. She denounced the glorification of passive, casual sex and the potential for miscommunication and blurred consent lines that it could open up. “The hallmark of this culture is to ‘not care’ and teens refrain from ‘catching feelings’ as if feelings are a disease,” Orenstein said. “There’s this idea that sex should be the precursor, rather than the result , of loving relationships, and that sex is supposed to be hot, but not warm —there is no humanity, kindness or respect. This carelessness of the hookup culture is directly linked to sexual assault.”
In the midst of the Academy’s sexual misconduct investigations, Canfield appreciated Orenstein’s acknowledgement that sexual violence is, at its core, a result of societal conventions, rather than detrimental dynamics specific to Exeter. “One thing I liked about her talk was that she was pointing out that Exeter itself is not the problem,” she said. “What’s driving unsafe situations, especially for girls, is societal. And I think she was giving us tools to thinks about how to rewrite certain pressures for ourselves and to rewrite our own willingness to submit to those pressures.”
Canfield also commended Orenstein for her emphasis on the development of healthy and pleasurable sexual relationships, rather than the prevention of negative sexual encounters. “A lot of the education we have had this year was about sexual assault and the prevention of sexual assault on our campus,” Canfield said. “The fact that Orenstein talked so much about good, healthy sex was an invitation for campus-wide conversation about what we as a community should work towards, not just what we should avoid.”
Prep Morgan Lebrun enjoyed the panel-style assembly, saying that Orenstein’s presentation felt less like a lecture and more like a dialogue. “ I appreciated how open Peggy was about teenage sexuality, especially as an adult and mother. The casual way she approached these issues made for a comfortable environment,” Lebrun said. “She was blatant and truthful and she didn’t sugarcoat anything. She shared her personal experience, backed up with expert facts, keeping the mood light and interacting with the audience.”
On Friday night, Orenstein served as guest speaker at the H4 dinner. Attending students were randomly assigned to tables to discuss campus sexual climate, define “healthy relationships” and analyze the role of the male conscience in sex.
On Saturday, Orenstein interviewed Exonian boys for her next book, Boys and Sex, which will examine teenage male sex culture and perceptions of masculinity.
Upper Michael Garcia, one of the boys interviewed, found Orenstein’s deliberation on machismo essential to understanding sexual assault and today’s hookup culture and felt inspired to question and contravene current delusions of masculinity. “I liked thinking about what it means to be masculine and how society forces boys to fit in the ‘man box.’ Women are pressured to have sex and men are encouraged by society to be promiscuous and to instigate the hookup culture. These conditions lead to blurred consent lines,” Garcia said. “Peggy made me wonder, ‘How can we men change this warped concept of masculinity for an equitable sex experience?”
Orenstein ended her evening speech by advocating for equity in intimacy. “We have raised a generation of girls with a voice. We push for egalitarian treatment in legislature, in our homes, in the workplace. It is now time to ask for intimate justice,” she insisted. “I want girls to find pleasure in sex, to avoid diseases and unwanted pregnancy, to be safe, and to ask for something in bed and get it. It’s a lot to ask, but it is not too much.”