Top 40 Peggy Orenstein Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The notion is called wabi-sabi life, like the cherry blossom, it is beautiful because of its impermanence, not in spite of it, more exquisite for the inevitability of loss.”

— Peggy Orenstein

2. “I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others’ pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality.”

— Peggy Orenstein

3. “Sexualization is the performance of sexuality, the performance of sexiness. Girls are super good at that now.”

— Peggy Orenstein

4. “Displaying yourself as sexy doesn’t do anything to increase sexual self-knowledge or pleasure.”

— Peggy Orenstein

5. “As long as adults still avoid open discussion on sexuality, teens will inevitably seek information on today’s electronic street corner.”

— Peggy Orenstein

6. “The point of creativity is to express and challenge yourself, to make meaning, to embrace your life.”

— Peggy Orenstein

7. “We’ve raised a generation of girls to have a voice, to expect egalitarian treatment in the home, in the classroom, in the workplace. Now it’s time to demand that “intimate justice” in their personal lives as well.”

— Peggy Orenstein

8. “Leaving something unnamed makes it quite literally unspeakable: a void, an absence, a taboo.”

— Peggy Orenstein

9. “Mothers are doing a better job talking about risk, danger, reproduction, consent, unwanted pregnancy. We’re not talking about how to balance the risks and joys and we’re really not talking about the joys.”

— Peggy Orenstein

10. “If we start with that, with wanting girls to see themselves from the inside out rather than outside in, we will go a long way toward helping them find their true happily-ever-afters.”

— Peggy Orenstein

11. “I know that if i could imbue her with a superpower, it would be the ability to withstand the pressures of the cultures around her, to be her own woman despite the potential costs: i would give her the courage of her convictions.”

— Peggy Orenstein

12. “There is a way hook ups are serving young women. And it was important for me to always talk about how behaviours were serving girls, not just making them the victims.”

— Peggy Orenstein

13. “Women are one-half of the world’s people; they do two-thirds of the world’s work; they earn one-tenth of the world’s income; they own one one-hundredth of the world’s property.”

— Peggy Orenstein

14. “Maybe I wanted children, maybe I didn’t, but I wanted the decision to be a choice, not a mandate. Last time I checked, childlessness was only supposed to be a condition of career advancement for nuns.”

— Peggy Orenstein

15. “I talked to a junior in college, and she was fed up. She said, “I’m not doing other girls any favours by faking orgasms and not calling out guys when we’re having unequal experiences.””

— Peggy Orenstein

16. “All girls over age 14 remove pubic hair. The only touching is to remove hair. That’s grim.”

— Peggy Orenstein

17. “It’s not that pink is intrinsically bad, but it is such a tiny slice of the rainbow, and, though it may celebrate girlhood in one way, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girl’s identity to appearance.”

— Peggy Orenstein

18. “Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it.”

— Peggy Orenstein

19. “I’m watching my own daughter grow up. I see this overt sexual culture coming at her like a Mack truck. She’s in seventh grade.”

— Peggy Orenstein

20. “Young women today are sold the idea that sexiness is the same as sexuality, that being desirable is more important than understanding their own desires.”

— Peggy Orenstein

21. “Girls are removing pubic hair before fully having it. They would say I feel cleaner, it’s for me, but then they’d say if a boy saw pubic hair down there they’d head for the hills.”

— Peggy Orenstein

22. “Marketing to girls constantly presents a hypersexualized idea of girls; they’re expected to appear sexy but be cut off from their sexuality.”

— Peggy Orenstein

23. “Sexualization is imposed from the outside as opposed to sexuality, an understanding of the body’s responses and desires and ability to communicate that, cultivated from within.”

— Peggy Orenstein

24. “The anesthetizing against caring really threw me for a loop. I was seeing it with 15-year-olds. It was how they were starting their intimate lives. It alarmed me.”

— Peggy Orenstein

25. “Intimate justice touches on ideas of gender inequity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health. I don’t expect a 15-year-old girl to have that figured out; it’s hard enough to have it figured out when you’re 50.”

— Peggy Orenstein

26. “They too struggle with the expectation to look sexy but not to feel sexual, to provoke desire in others without experience it themselves. Our daughters may not be faced with the decision of whether to strip for maxim, but they will have to figure out how to become sexual beings without being objectified or stigmatized.”

— Peggy Orenstein

27. “How about this, I would counter: try not commenting on your own looks – on the size of your thighs or the tightness of your jeans. At least not in front of your daughter. Girls receive enough messages every day reducing them to their appearance without women they love delivering them, too.”

— Peggy Orenstein

28. “It’s particularly important as parents in our conversations with our daughters and our sons to consider ideas intimate justice when we talk about and set them going on their early formative experience.”

— Peggy Orenstein

29. “Young people are not tabulae rasae. They have a sense of right and wrong. But if they’re repeatedly exposed to certain themes, they are more likely to pick them up, to internalize them and have them become part of their sexual scripts.”

— Peggy Orenstein

30. “Simpson Rowe was quick to say that only perpetrators are responsible for assault, but assertiveness and self-advocacy are crucial defensive skills.”

— Peggy Orenstein

31. “American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture’s emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls’ vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior.”

— Peggy Orenstein

32. “The idea that there could be one solution to breast cancer- screening, early detection, some universal cure- is certainly appealing. All of us, those who fear the disease, those who live with it, our friends and families, the corporations who swath themselves in pink, wish it were true. Wearing a bracelet, sporting a ribbon, running a race, or buying a pink blender expresses our hopes and that feels good – even virtuous. But making a difference is more complicated than that.”

— Peggy Orenstein

33. “Encouraging girls to explore sexuality within mutually caring, emotionally connected relationships is one thing; insisting on it is another.”

— Peggy Orenstein

34. “There is, it’s worth noting, no “Mom-with-three-ungrateful-children Barbie.”

— Peggy Orenstein

35. “But it is Bella, not the supernaturals she falls in with, who is the true horror show here, at least as a female role model.”

— Peggy Orenstein

36. “When we’ve defined femininity for their generation so narrowly, in such a sexualized, commercialized, heteroeroticized way, where is the space, the vision, the celebration of other ways to be a girl?”

— Peggy Orenstein

37. “Psychologist Michael Thompson has pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how boys become men.”

— Peggy Orenstein

38. “As culture critic Dara Mathis tweeted about Kanye West, ‘Daughters are not spiritual retribution for your misogyny.’ They are neither a form of punishment nor “tiny spiritual guides sent to newly show you the humanity of girls and women.”

— Peggy Orenstein

39. “Making something from nothing is the quintessential magic of women, whether turning fiber to thread or flour to bread or engaging in the ultimate creative act: conjuring new humans from nowhere at all.”

— Peggy Orenstein

40. “The stay-at-home mom is just as vulnerable as the working mom.”

— Peggy Orenstein

41. “The way I look at it, impatience may be the enemy of perfection, but the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

— Peggy Orenstein

42. “Can there be true equality in the classroom and the boardroom if there isn’t in the bedroom?”

— Peggy Orenstein

43. “By midway through Kindergarten- that’s age five or six- they’ve learned from their peers to knock that stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings, shun intimacy, and become hierarchical in their behavior. The lifelong physical and mental health consequences of that gender performance are ingrained as early as ten. By fourteen boys become convinced that other guys will “lose respect” for them if they talk about problems.”

— Peggy Orenstein