Quotes from Peggy Orenstein

The minimum I ask for my footwear: to be able to dance in it and that it not get me murdered");

Rihanna! We'll know when she is properly powerful and successful when we see her in a lovely cardigan.

All these hours and chatting and things like that don't make the science better.

Resolved," wrote a girl in 1892, "to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others." And one hundred years later: "I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can. . . . I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.

A headline-grabbing 2005 British study revealed that girls aged six to twelve enjoyed torturing, mutilating, and microwaving their Barbies nearly as much as they liked dressing them up for the prom. What

Children as young as twelve to eighteen months can recognize brands, it went on, and are "strongly influenced" by advertising and marketing. Yikes!

Before World War I, self-improvement meant being less self-involved, less vain: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, and cultivating empathy. Author

Psychologist Michael Thompson has pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how boys become men.

I kind of wish, even after I fired back at him, there was still an opportunity for him to have that conversation with me. Maybe if he had said 'This [porn] will skew the way you view women. It's not real. And it's not going to help you get a girl; it's only going to keep you from interacting with girls in a healthy manner', that might have made a difference for me. But my parents were to fearful to actually deal with any of it.

Alcohol has been shown to diminish boys' ability to read social cues or notice a partner's hesitation. It gives them the nerve they might not otherwise have to use coercion or force to get what they want: drunk guys are more aggressive when they assault and less aware of their victim's distress. Inebriation also makes boys less likely to step in as bystanders than they would be if they were sober.

It's just, honey, Cinderella doesn't really do anything.

girls enjoy torturing, decapitating, and microwaving their Barbies nearly as much as they like to dress them up

When you're talking about over 26,000 items - and that's just Disney - it's a little hard to say where want ends and coercion begins.

I'd believed I could keep out the tales and the toys but had failed on both counts.

I know that if i could imbue her with a superpower, it would be the ability to withstand the pressures of the cultures around her, to be her own woman despite the potential costs: i would give her the courage of her convictions

At one time or another, every young man will get a letter of admission to dick school. The question is will he drop out, graduate, or go for an advanced degree?

That is exactly what teenagers of ass sexualities need: ongoing discussion and education that addresses pleasure, mutuality, safety, love, intimacy, and self-discovery. They need to understand the potential to either be the perpetrator or the victim of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. They need to have agency over their bodies. And for all of them, adult denial puts them at risk of physical and emotional trauma.

What gets to you is the everyday ignorance

One in four men said women would need some convincing in order for sex to happen; this was not twenty or thirty years ago, mind you: this was 2016. Those perception gaps are a setup not only for assault- out of unexamined entitlement, if not flat-out ill will- but also for boys' subsequent denial of responsibility and, quite possibly, their claims of false accusation.

He [Aziz Ansari] was just another overeager guy trying to talk a woman into sex, viewing her limits as a challenge he needed to overcome in order to score. What he did was not unusual and was not, in truth, newsworthy; yet that was the very reason it was news. Because it extended the conversation beyond legality, revealing the most banal and pervasive of power dynamics: that men interpret women's behavior through the filter of their own wishes.

They [boys] are particularly eager to have their fathers talk to them about their own experience with sex, love, even regret.

We are learning to support girls as they 'lean in' educationally and professionally, yet in this most personal of realms, we allow them to topple. It's almost as if parents believe that if they don't tell their daughters that sex should feel good, they won't find out. And perhaps that's correct, they don't. Not easily anyway. But the outcome is hardly what adults could've hoped.

Infertility had rocked me to my core.

If toting the standard equipment is not what male or female, exactly what does? well, duh, its barrettes. At least thats what kids think it is your clothing, hairstyle, toy choice, favorite color. Slippery stuff, that. You can see how perilously easy would be to err