57 Quotes by Peggy Orenstein

I’m watching my own daughter grow up. I see this overt sexual culture coming at her like a Mack truck. She’s in seventh grade.

Girls are removing pubic hair before fully having it. They would say I feel cleaner, it’s for me, but then they’d say if a boy saw pubic hair down there they’d head for the hills.

Marketing to girls constantly presents a hypersexualized idea of girls; they’re expected to appear sexy but be cut off from their sexuality.

It’s not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow, and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girl’s identity to appearance.

Intimate justice touches on ideas of gender inequity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health. I don’t expect a 15-year-old girl to have that figured out; it’s hard enough to have it figured out when you’re 50.

The anesthetizing against caring really threw me for a loop. I was seeing it with 15-year-olds. It was how they were starting their intimate lives. It alarmed me.

They too struggle with the expectation to look sexy but not to feel sexual, to provoke desire in others without experience it themselves. Our daughters may not be faced with the decision of whether to strip for maxim, but they will have to figure out how to become sexual beings without being objectified or stigmatized.

Leaving something unnamed makes it quite literally unspeakable: a void, an absence, a taboo.

Sexualization is imposed from the outside as opposed to sexuality, an understanding of the body’s responses and desires and ability to communicate that, cultivated from within.