Peggy Orenstein's books include the New York Times best-selling memoir, Waiting for Daisy; Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World; SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap; and Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.Her new book is Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. From her Q & A with Isaac Chotiner at Slate:
A lot has been written about the way porn has influenced the expectations of boys. Can you talk about how is has influenced the expectations of girls?The Page 69 Test: Waiting for Daisy.
In fact, my understanding is that Time magazine is about to have a cover story on that, like, next week or something.
It affects girls in a few ways. It affects how they look at their own bodies: are they good enough, are they adequate, are they going to please their partner because they aren’t like the girls in porn, things like that.
A lot of girls would say to me—and, this really began to irritate me, not at the girls, but just at the fact that they had to think about this—“My boyfriend wants to know why I don’t moan during sex like the girls in porn.” I got so irritated at that that I started dropping my journalistic remove, and I would say, “Look. It’s a movie. Movies need soundtracks. If people didn’t moan, it would be a silent movie. That’s why they’re moaning like that.” That was kind of like a revelation. They’re like, “Oh, I never thought of it that way!”
I think that porn has also probably been responsible for the rise in...[read on]
The Page 99 Test: Cinderella Ate My Daughter.
Writers Read: Peggy Orenstein.
--Marshal Zeringue