Review of 'Girls & sex : navigating the complicated new landscape' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
First of all, I agree with a lot of Emily May’s review. In particular, she’s right about the references: Orenstein doesn’t use footnote or endnote numbers, and cites works in a non-standard format. She uses domain names, but not URLs. This makes it hard to look up her sources and spot-check what she says.
Even when her facts are correct, they sometimes give the wrong impression: she’s trying to tell a compelling story, so she concentrates on the more extreme or noteworthy examples of whichever topic she’s talking about: the boy who raped his girlfriend, rather than the one who covered her with a blanket when she passed out on his couch. The former is noteworthy, the latter isn’t, and concentrating on the extreme examples gives a skewed picture of what’s actually going on.
Having said that, the book does present many topics that I hadn’t thought of before. …
First of all, I agree with a lot of Emily May’s review. In particular, she’s right about the references: Orenstein doesn’t use footnote or endnote numbers, and cites works in a non-standard format. She uses domain names, but not URLs. This makes it hard to look up her sources and spot-check what she says.
Even when her facts are correct, they sometimes give the wrong impression: she’s trying to tell a compelling story, so she concentrates on the more extreme or noteworthy examples of whichever topic she’s talking about: the boy who raped his girlfriend, rather than the one who covered her with a blanket when she passed out on his couch. The former is noteworthy, the latter isn’t, and concentrating on the extreme examples gives a skewed picture of what’s actually going on.
Having said that, the book does present many topics that I hadn’t thought of before. That as a straight male, I’d never had to think about before. That maybe girls feel differently about cunnilingus than boys feel about fellatio. That the world looks different when you’ve been taught all your life to play nice and get along, even if it means not standing up for yourself. That girls get called prudes if they don’t have sex, and sluts if they have too much.
In that sense, this book is a valuable grab-bag of topics of conversation and offers much food for thought. But I wouldn’t recommend it to a teenage girl (or boy) because there’s too much information presented as fact that needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
