Quotes from Peggy Orenstein

The key may be to keep the bright light of public attention shining. According to a study by the American Psychological Association, the reported numbers of assaults increase an average of about 44 percent when campuses are under formal scrutiny. Afterward, though, they sink back to their original levels, indicating that some schools provide a more accurate picture of sexual assault only when forced to do so.

It was fuckups within fuckups.

The culture is littered with female body parts, with clothes and posturing that purportedly express sexual confidence. But who cares how "proud" you are of your body's appearance if you don't enjoy its responses?

interestingly, after age forty, men become the more dominant selfie posters—perhaps in midlife, women unconsciously render themselves invisible).

It wasn't just hostility I felt around my mother, it was inadequacy. I had loved my early childhood with her. We'd spent long hours playing beauty parlor and teay party, baking holiday cookies.

It is one thing, I was discovering, to think, Maybe I won't have kids, and quite another to be told, Maybe you can't. This is how impatience turns to desperation.

Shikataganai, she added. It can't be helped.

I understood that impulse. I felt so broken, my well-being so battered- who was going to give me an Rx for that?

People in pain are so vulnerable, such easy marks. We're desperate for reasons, for a sense of control, even if it means incriminating ourselves.

The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.

housework is bullshit

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.

...What's more, I live in Berkeley, California. If princesses had infiltrated OUR little retro hippie hamlet, imagine what was going on places where women actually shaved their legs!

There is only one princess in the Disney tales, one girl who gets to be exalted. Princesses may confide in a sympathetic mouse or teacup, but they do not have girlfriends. God forbid Snow White should give Sleeping Beauty a little support. Let's review: princesses avoid female bonding. Their goals are to be saved by a prince, get married, and be taken care of the rest of their lives.

But it is Bella, not the supernaturals she falls in with, who is the true horror show here, at least as a female role model.

The notion is called wabi-sabi life, like the cherry blossom, it is beautiful because of its impermanence, not in spite of it, more exquisite for the inevitability of loss.

Maybe I wanted children, maybe I didn't, but I wanted the decision to be a choice, not a mandate. Last time I checked, childlessness was only supposed to be a condition of career advancement for nuns.

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

When we've defined femininity for their generation so narrowly, in such a sexualized, commercialized, heteroeroticized way, where is the space, the vision, the celebration of other ways to be a girl?

I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others' pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality.

As long as adults still avoid open discussion on sexuality, teens will inevitably seek information on today's electronic street corner.

Activists are correct in saying that the only thing that 100 percent of rapes have in common is a rapist. You can shroud women from head to toe, forbid them alcohol, imprison them in their homes—and there will still be rape.

Women are one-half of the world's people; they do two-thirds of the world's work; they earn one-tenth of the world's income; they own one one-hundredth of the world's property.

princess play feels like proof of our daughters' innocence, protection against the sexualization it may actually be courting. It reassures us that, despite the pressure to be precocious, little girls are still -- and ever will be -- little girls. And that knowledge restores our faith not only in wonder but, quite possibly, in goodness itself.