Berkeley author Peggy Orenstein’s latest is a breakthrough investigation of hookup culture.
Peggy Orenstein has spent the better part of her career thinking about women and sex.
But it wasn’t until her most recent book — “Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape” — that she took the subject head-on. The reason, as often is the case with Orenstein’s work, was personal. Her only child, Daisy, had passed girlhood, the stage whose culture she lambasted in her 2011 girl-marketing investigation, “Cinderella Ate My Daughter.”
“She was headed toward adolescence,” Orenstein said, “and honestly, it put me in a bit of a panic.”
The Berkeley journalist also had a hunch that something was seriously wrong about hook-up culture. So she spent years reading academic studies and interviewing 70 college-bound women ages 15 to 20. At one point in 2014 she was ready to junk the project, worried that “I had nothing to say,” she said. “I was certain the book was a disaster.”
Yet “Girls & Sex” may do more to change how sex education is rethought and how parents and daugh-
ters discuss pleasure and sexuality than any book since the landmark “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
In the book, Orenstein explores how a combination of porn, binge drinking, self-objectification and fear-based sex education that ignores female pleasure has led to a disturbing moment in feminism: Young women may exhibit power and confidence in the public realm, but in the private one they are more subservient and sexually ignorant than a generation ago.
Orenstein’s conclusion is that when it comes to their sexual self-knowledge, American girls have undergone a “psychological clitoridectomy.”
What’s surprising about this diagnosis is that a good deal of the mainstream media and the public is nodding its head while Orenstein relates details of nonreciprocal oral sex. The book is a New York Times bestseller, and Orenstein has been interviewed on NPR, CBS and ABC and praised in a dozen newspapers.
Orenstein said the warm reception comes as much from her style as from the substance of her argument. Since her earliest pieces in magazines like New York Woman, 7 Days and now the New York Times, where she is a contributing writer, Orenstein has cultivated a narrative style that is highly readable, researched, intimate and often intensely funny.
“As a writer who is saying some provocative, serious, sometimes radical, sometimes controversial things, humor works right now,” Orenstein said at Fort Mason’s Interval cafe. “People seem to be able to hear those things better with humor, especially where feminist ideas are concerned.”
Indeed, Orenstein’s new book may sometimes read like mommy lit, soft and comic. But it is actually a breakthrough investigation of hookup culture at a time when no one seems to understand the prevalence of college rape.
1 journalism class
Orenstein was raised by “Ozzie and Harriet” parents in a suburb of Minneapolis and took to writing early. As a 10thgrader at St. Louis Park High School, she found herself in the only journalism class she would ever take, reporting a “sights and sounds” piece at a ski store’s annual tent sale.
“I just remember standing there and watching a mother and daughter arguing over a jacket — whether it was cheap enough, whether it covered enough of her tush — and thinking somewhere in my animal brain: ‘This is the essence of life.’ I knew journalism was what I wanted to do forever.”
Since then, Orenstein has written five books and survived two bouts of cancer, six years of miscarriages and infertility treatment, and the financial uncertainty that comes from being a freelance writer. But she has never wavered from journalism.
In 1983, after graduating from college, she defied her father’s admonition that a writing career was a “pipe dream” and boarded a plane for New York City. Through her brother, she met Esquire editor Adam Moss, a fellow Oberlin graduate, who gave her a job retyping manuscripts into 40-character lines on an IBM Selectric. Orenstein soon started writing her own pieces, and at age 26, five years into her Manhattan stint, she was offered a job as managing editor of Mother Jones.
Mother Jones got Orenstein away from the celebrity journalism that would come to define 1980s New York magazine publishing. San Francisco also proved good to her. She met and married documentary filmmaker Steven Okazaki and in 1991 began writing for the New York Times Magazine.
Her first assignment was a profile of marine biologist Sylvia Earle. “Basically, they assigned it to me because I used to live in New York and I was a woman. I used to joke I became the Times’ ‘women in,’ ‘women and,’ ‘women on’ reporter. But having your beat be half the world is not such a bad deal.”
Focus on females
The beat also helped Orenstein hone her interest in the ordinary lives of American females. Her first book, “Schoolgirls” (1995), was inspired by an academic study about why girls’ self-esteem plummets as they reach adolescence. Orenstein used her reporting skills to humanize the findings, helping to change longtime misconceptions of girls’ academic abilities.
Regardless of this success, Orenstein claims she didn’t really feel like a writer until after her first cancer diagnosis at age 35. She would wake up in the middle of the night and pour a stream of consciousness into her keyboard. Those words became the basis for her 2007 memoir about infertility and IVF, “Waiting for Daisy.” She also did much of the research for her third book, “Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World,” while battling cancer.
Working through and making work from sickness has become Orenstein’s habit. In 2012, when she was diagnosed with cancer again, she wrote a New York Times cover story about the myth of early cancer detection, while laid up from a mastectomy and reconstructive breast surgery.
“I get a little agitated if I’m not working,” she quipped.
Orenstein is currently trying to take the summer off. She is also trying to persuade her 90-year-old father to take a road trip to Bismarck, N.D., to research a book idea on her Jewish homesteader ancestors. And she is busy supporting the work of her large circle of female writer friends, who include Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Traister, Susan Faludi and Rebecca Skloot.
She is also talking to her publisher about writing a sequel to “Girls & Sex” that would focus on boys. “I’ll have to do it differently,” Orenstein said. “Again, I think there’s something interesting there, and I think I have to go out and figure out what it is. That’s how I always start.”