Maddie Crum discusses Peggy Orenstein’s new book, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, about female sexuality in our hook-up culture, the problems with school sex ed., and the role of porn in rape culture:
Orenstein is clear about her opinion on porn, if only through the statistics she presents. She doesn’t touch on the burgeoning options available to young women on Tumblr and in porn made explicitly for women. In her defense, those communities are still growing and the male gaze is still present within them, but in any case, they exist. Instead, she provides a smattering of grim figures relating to porn, including the fact that both young men and young women who’ve watched porn recently are more likely than their peers to believe rape myths: “that only strangers commit sexual assault or that the victim ‘asked for it.’”
