Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  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 is 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 have hoped.

  What if we went the other way? What if we spoke to kids about sex more instead of less, what if we could normalize it, integrate it into everyday life and shift our thinking in the ways that we (mostly) have about women’s public roles? Because the truth is, the more frankly and fully teachers, parents, and doctors talk to young people about sexuality, the more likely kids are both to delay sexual activity and to behave responsibly and ethically when they do engage in it.

  Consider a 2010 study published in The International Journal of Sexual Health comparing the early experiences of nearly three hundred randomly chosen American and Dutch women at two similar colleges—mostly white, middle class, with similar religious backgrounds. So, apples to apples. The Americans had become sexually active at a younger age than the Dutch, had had more encounters with more partners and were less likely to use birth control. They were also more likely to say that they’d first had intercourse because of pressure from friends or partners.

  In subsequent interviews with some of the participants, the Americans, much like the ones I met, described interactions that were “driven by hormones,” in which the guys determined relationships, both sexes prioritized male pleasure, and reciprocity was rare. As for the Dutch? Their early sexual activity took place in caring, respectful relationships in which they communicated openly with their partners (whom they said they knew “very well”) about what felt good and what didn’t, about how far they wanted to go, and about what kind of protection they would need along the way. They reported more comfort with their bodies and their desires than the Americans and were more in touch with their own pleasure.

  What’s their secret? The Dutch said that teachers and doctors had talked candidly to them about sex, pleasure, and the importance of a mutual trust, even love. More than that, though, there was a stark difference in how their parents approached those topics.

  While the survey did not reveal a significant difference in how comfortable parents were talking about sex, the subsequent interviews showed that the American moms had focused on the potential risks and dangers, while their dads, if they said anything at all, stuck to lame jokes.

  Dutch parents, by contrast, had talked to their daughters from an early age about both joy and responsibility. As a result, one Dutch woman said she told her mother immediately after she first had intercourse, and that “my friend’s mother also asked me how it was, if I had an orgasm, and if he had one.”

  Meanwhile, according to Amy T. Schalet, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of Not under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex, young Dutch men expect to combine sex and love. In interviews, they generally credited their fathers with teaching them that their partners must be equally up for any sexual activity, that the women could (and should) enjoy themselves as much as men, and that as one respondent said, he would be stupid to have sex “with a drunken head.” Although Schalet found that young Dutch and American men both often yearned for love, only the Americans considered that a personal quirk.

  I thought about all of that recently when, driving home with my daughter, who is now in middle school, we passed a billboard whose giant letters on a neon-orange background read, porn kills love. I asked her if she knew what pornography was. She rolled her eyes and said in that jaded tone that parents of preteenagers know so well, “Yes, Mom, but I’ve never seen it.”

  I could’ve let the matter drop, feeling relieved that she might yet make it to her first kiss unencumbered by those images.

  Goodness knows, that would’ve been easier. Instead I took a deep breath and started the conversation: “I know, honey, but you will, and there are a few things you need to know.”

  How to Be a Man in the Age of Trump

  The first question I get from audiences after giving a talk about Girls & Sex, is nearly always, “Would you please write a similar book about boys?” So, after decades of focusing on young women, I am now doing just that: my next project is on boys’ attitudes, expectations, and experiences of sex and masculinity. I began well before the 2016 election, before the “grab them by the pussy” tape, and the allegations that Donald Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted multiple women—clearly, when this story ran in October of that year, it was beyond my imagination that he would triumph—but now the work feels more urgent than ever.

  One afternoon, while reporting for a book on girls’ sexual experience, I sat in on a health class at a progressive Bay Area high school. Toward the end of the session, a blond boy wearing a school athletic jersey raised his hand. “You know that baseball metaphor for sex?” he asked. “Well, in baseball there’s a winner and a loser. So who is supposed to be the ‘loser’ in sex?”

  That question has floated back to me over the past ten days as the stream of revelations about Donald J. Trump surfaced: the vile comments he fobbed off as boys will be fifty-nine-year-old boys bluster; the allegations that he jammed his tongue down the throat of a People magazine reporter; grabbed the rear of a woman who was visiting his home in Palm Beach; came at a stranger on an airplane “like an octopus”; groped and kissed a former Apprentice contestant during a meeting in his office; and barged into the dressing room of the Miss Teen USA pageant on seminude contestants, some of whom were underage.

  The reports have sparked unprecedented discussions in the news media of “rape culture” and sexual consent. Except that the discussions aren’t really unprecedented. They are part of a cycle of soul-searching that is repeated whenever news of a high-profile incident of alleged harassment or assault breaks—Robert Chambers; the Spur Posse in Lakewood, California; Glen Ridge, New Jersey; Clarence Thomas; William Kennedy Smith; Mike Tyson; Steubenville, Ohio; Bill Cosby; Ray Rice; St. Paul’s; Roger Ailes; Brock Turner. In each case, by the time it’s over, we turn away from the broader implications toward a more comforting narrative: the perpetrators are exceptions, monsters whom we can isolate, eliminate, and occasionally even prosecute.

  Certainly, such behavior is not representative of men, not by a long shot. Yet neither is it entirely atypical. Sexual coercion, in one form or another, is as American as that baseball metaphor—a metaphor that sees girls’ limits as a challenge boys should overcome.

  For many high school and college women I met, enduring a certain level of manhandling was the ticket to a social life. It started at their first middle school dance, when male classmates would sidle up behind them on the dance floor, grab them by the waist, and, without asking, begin to “grind” against their rears. Sometimes the girls were fine with that, even excited by it. Still, all had, over time, been forced to develop strategies to disengage without offending an unwanted partner—they were, to a girl, deeply concerned with preserving boys’ feelings and dignity, even when the reverse was not true.

  By college, young women told me, drunken party boys felt free to kiss, touch, and rub up against them at will. “You’re supposed to swat them away like flies,” a junior at a school in the Northeast explained, adding that the behavior is “just accepted as the way of the world.”

  I’ve listened to girls try to make sense of feeling like objects: Was it empowering or the opposite, and under which circumstances? I’ve also realized—known all along, really—that they were neither the only ones struggling, nor solely responsible for solutions.

  Lately, I have begun interviewing young men about their attitudes toward sexuality. Most are not mini-Trumps in the making. Instead, they, too, express confusion, uncertainty: eager to fit in, yet troubled by assumptions and expectations of masculinity. Many are girls’ staunchest allies—or would like to be. One nineteen-year-o
ld in Northern California, for instance, told me he’d spent the summer working at a bicycle shop. The all-guy staff whiled away their days talking in what he described as “incredibly degrading ways” about girls. At the printable end of the spectrum, they referred to the cafe down the street, which was entirely staffed by young women, as “the Bitches.” As in, “Hey, you want to go grab coffee from the Bitches?”

  He didn’t participate in such “locker room talk,” but neither did he challenge it. “I was just there for the summer,” he said. “So I put my head down and did my job.” Yet, according to Michael Kimmel, the author of Guyland and a sociologist at Stony Brook University, silence in the face of cruelty or sexism “is one of the ways boys become men.”

  I wonder if any of those snickering male staffers on the Access Hollywood bus were actually thinking, “Jesus, God, get me out of here.” How many reassured themselves, as Billy Bush would later claim, that they were just “playing along” with Mr. Trump? How many more remained mum, believing that made them good guys rather than complicit?

  Sometimes coercion is actually part of the script. Mr. Bush’s responses to Mr. Trump (“Donald is good! Whoa, my man!” and “Yes, the Donald has scored!”) were repugnant, but also reminiscent of the sports narration accompanying the old Meatloaf hit “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”: “Holy cow, stolen base.”

  Recently, when Fox broadcast a live production of the musical Grease, a favorite of high school drama clubs, I was struck by the lyrics to “Summer Nights.” A chorus of girls, enthralled by Sandy’s account of her school break romance, sings: “Tell me more! Tell me more! Was it love at first sight?” A parallel chorus of boys, listening to Danny tell his version, comes back with: “Tell me more! Tell me more! Did she put up a fight?” Despite the progress women have made since the 1950s, when that show was set, or even 1971, when the original musical was written, some things have not changed.

  Michelle Obama was right when she said that were Mr. Trump to win the election, we would be “telling our sons that it’s okay to humiliate women.” While the warning that assault will cost you the presidency may be the beginning of a conversation, it should not be the end. “Don’t sexually assault women” (or, for that matter, “Don’t get a girl pregnant”) is an awfully low bar for acceptable behavior. It does little to address the complexity of boys’ lives, the presumption of their always-down-for-it sexuality, the threat of being called a “pussy” if you won’t grab one, or the collusion that comes with keeping quiet. Boys need continuing, serious guidance about sexual ethics, reciprocity, and respect. Rather than silence or swagger, they need models of masculinity that are not grounded in domination or aggression.

  Last year, California became the first state to make lessons on sexual consent mandatory for high school students. Meanwhile, the Our Whole Lives program—a model for positive, comprehensive sex education that was developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ—encourages students to dismantle stereotypes from a young age. The Population Council’s It’s All One Curriculum offers adolescents lessons about gender, power, and rights within intimate relationships (not for nothing: including those discussions in sex ed has been proven to reduce rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections). And, of course, we can meet kids on their own turf, with clever Internet resources such as the viral video comparing sexual consent to a cup of tea (just because a person wanted tea last week doesn’t mean she wants it now; unconscious people never want tea) or “The Sexually Enlightened R&B Song.”

  Republican leaders and big donors are now distancing themselves from Mr. Trump, piously proclaiming that no one with daughters can in good conscience support him. Who would have guessed that Donald Trump, of all people, would inspire a bipartisan feminist movement? Despite that tasty irony, though, if we see this moment as exclusively about girls’ and women’s rights, we are bound to repeat the cycle.

  Donald Trump (and, for that matter, Billy Bush) have unwittingly provided grist for a more radical, challenging discussion: about what it means—what it should mean, what it could mean—to be a man, a discussion that must continue in public and in our homes long after the candidate himself is told it’s game over.

  Credits

  “A Graphic Life,” “The Good Girl,” “Thirty-five and Mortal: A Breast Cancer Diary,” “The Problem with Pink,” “Mourning My Miscarriage,” “Baby Lust,” “Your Gamete, Myself,” “The Femivore’s Dilemma,” “Children Are Alone,” “What’s Wrong with Cinderella?,” “The Hillary Lesson,” “The Fat Trap,” “The Battle over Dress Codes,” “When Did Porn Become Sex Ed?,” and “How to Be a Man in the Age of Trump” all first appeared in the New York Times. “Ms. Fights for its Life,” and “Our Barbie Vaginas, Ourselves” first appeared in Mother Jones. “Put to the Test” and “Call of the Wild” first appeared in MORE. “The Nonconformist” first appeared in New York Woman, “The Story of My Life” in O: The Oprah Magazine, “Breast Friends” in Elle, “They Don’t Make Feminists This Outrageous Anymore” on Slate, “The Perfect Mother Trap” in Redbook, “Does Father Know Best?” in Vogue, “Why Science Must Adapt to Women” in Discover, “Bringing Down Baby” in the Los Angeles Times, and “Where I Got Daisy” in Parenting.

  Acknowledgments

  A writer is only as good as her editor and I’ve been lucky enough to work with the best. Thank you to Laurie Abraham, Jane Amsterdam, Bruce Anderson, Lisa Bain, Gillian Blake, Katherine Bouton, Betsy Carter, Sewell Chan, Susan Chumsky, Judith Coyne, Will Dana, Lucy Danziger, Paula Derrow, Lee Eisenberg, the late Clay Felker, Douglas Foster, Deb Futter, Penelope Green, David Hirshey, Sue Horton, the late Nora Kerr, Laura Marmor, Douglas McGray, Mike Mechanic, Chris Miles, Robbie Myers, Peggy Northrop, Karen Rinaldi, Hanna Rosin, the late Duncan Stalker, Ila Stanger, Maria Streshinsky, Vera Titunik, Deborah Way, Doreen Weisenhaus, Anna Wintour, and Patti Wolter. And special love and gratitude to Jennifer Barth, Adam Moss, Aaron Retica, and Ilena Silverman.

  I dedicate this book to my husband, Steven Okazaki. Early in our relationship he hosted a champagne brunch to toast my first New York Times Magazine cover story. In the twenty-seven years since then, we have celebrated all our successes and weathered all of our losses together. SP, your true partnership has made my work possible and my life a joy.

  About the Author

  PEGGY ORENSTEIN is the New York Times bestselling author of Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Waiting for Daisy, Flux, and Schoolgirls. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, she has been published in USA Today, Parenting, Salon, The New Yorker, and other publications, and has contributed commentary to NPR’s All Things Considered and PBS NewsHour. She lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter.

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  Also by Peggy Orenstein

  Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

  Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture

  Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother

  Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World

  Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap

  Copyright

  don’t call me princess. Copyright © 2018 by Peggy Orenstein. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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  Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-268891-0

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268890-3

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