![]() ![]() Sales recalls walking back from school with her ninth-grade boyfriend to do homework together at her house. (They are not troubled about teenagers leading active sex lives, they assure us, only about the severely limited forms in which female sexuality is currently allowed to express itself they are not even against casual sex per se, just eager to ensure that there should be, as Orenstein puts it, “reciprocity, respect, and agency regardless of the context of a sexual encounter.”) Even so, neither of their books entirely avoids the exaggerations, the simplifications, the whiff of manufactured crisis that we have come to associate with this genre.īoth writers make rather invidious comparisons between the frenzied, romance-free social lives of today’s young women and their own halcyon youths. ![]() And neither of them can be dismissed as a sexual puritan. Both Sales and Orenstein have undoubtedly grim and arresting information to impart about the lives of American girls. There were some in the 1950s who were pretty sure that the decadent new practice of “going steady” augured moral disaster. The parents of every era tend to be appalled by the sexual manners of their children (regardless of how hectic and disorderly their own sex lives once were, or still are). History has taught us to be wary of middle-aged people complaining about the mores of the young. Zoë Heller reviews Nancy Jo Sales's American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers and Peggy Orenstein's Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape in the NYRB:
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