For the last 25 years, journalist Peggy Orenstein has been documenting and dissecting the inner lives of teenage girls in America, exploring why some young women struggle with confidence or harbor secret Disney princess obsessions. Her method is simple: she talks to teens—hundreds of them—then compiles their stories to share their internal struggles with the world, providing the rest of us with a nuanced look inside their homes, schools, friendships and more. Orenstein: When the Kavanaugh stuff was happening, I checked in with boys and said, "How are you guys talking about this? If they talked about it, it was just with girls. Why is that, do you think? People were like, oh my God, we've layered all these new expectations over the old ones without actually getting rid of the old expectations. It was causing this huge tension and pressure on young girls, which I think is sort of where we are with boys. I speak to parents of girls and they would say to me privately, "But you know, I'm afraid to raise a girl to be more assertive, to stand out, to speak her mind, because what if she gets called a bitch?
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Mrs Bennet may have lamented having five daughters and no son in Pride and Prejudice, but it appears that Lizzy and her sisters would be unlikely to produce a similar set of children: research suggests having multiple offspring of the same sex does not run in the family. In the largest study of its kind, researchers have found that whether a family is dominated by boys or girls — or has an equal mix — is simply down to chance. The team say the new findings scotch — at least for humans — a long-held theory that the sex-ratio of offspring is not random and that biases are heritable. But, he added, the idea had problems. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B , an international team of researchers report how they scrutinised records for all people born in Sweden in or later and had at least one child before Overall, the study included more than 6.
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Terry Gross. They spanned a broad range of races, religions, classes and sexual orientations. Author Peggy Orenstein knows that talking to your son about sex isn't easy: "I know for a lot of parents, you would rather poke yourself in the eye with a fork than speak directly to your son about sex — and probably he would rather poke himself in the eye with a fork as well," she says. But we don't have "the luxury" to continue avoiding this conversation, she says. Orenstein spent 25 years chronicling the lives of adolescent and teen girls and never really expected to focus on boys. Orenstein notes that society doesn't often give boys "permission or space" to discuss their interior lives.
Missing from the discourse is an exploration of the human dimensions of sexual connection and its potential to create meaning, joy, mutual pleasure and unparalleled levels of physical and emotional intimacy. We tell young people what we want them to say no to, but not all the things we want them, eventually, to say yes to. What heartens me is that deep down girls and boys know that they are receiving a partial message at best. Like the research Ms. Both girls and boys overwhelmingly choose genuine intimacy, results I then share. What a gift to boys especially, who as Ms. Deborah M. Her decision to present those observations to a wider audience and spark a public conversation is a welcome one.
