For the last 25 years, journalist Peggy Orenstein has been documenting and dissecting the inner lives of teenage girls in America, exploring why some young women struggle with confidence or harbor secret Disney princess obsessions. Her method is simple: she talks to teens—hundreds of them—then compiles their stories to share their internal struggles with the world, providing the rest of us with a nuanced look inside their homes, schools, friendships and more. Orenstein: When the Kavanaugh stuff was happening, I checked in with boys and said, "How are you guys talking about this? If they talked about it, it was just with girls. Why is that, do you think? People were like, oh my God, we've layered all these new expectations over the old ones without actually getting rid of the old expectations. It was causing this huge tension and pressure on young girls, which I think is sort of where we are with boys. I speak to parents of girls and they would say to me privately, "But you know, I'm afraid to raise a girl to be more assertive, to stand out, to speak her mind, because what if she gets called a bitch? What if nobody wants to be her friend, what if guys don't like her?


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Lawyers for the boy told the court he was pressured by an older boy into performing the act.
Terry Gross. They spanned a broad range of races, religions, classes and sexual orientations. Author Peggy Orenstein knows that talking to your son about sex isn't easy: "I know for a lot of parents, you would rather poke yourself in the eye with a fork than speak directly to your son about sex — and probably he would rather poke himself in the eye with a fork as well," she says. But we don't have "the luxury" to continue avoiding this conversation, she says. Orenstein spent 25 years chronicling the lives of adolescent and teen girls and never really expected to focus on boys.
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Both Peggy Orenstein and Cara Natterson have children who — deliberately, I assume — are mentioned only occasionally in their excellent books about raising better boys. Instead, Orenstein relies on the revealing and sometimes painfully intimate interviews she conducted over the course of two years with boys aged 16 to 22, and Natterson draws from years of practical experience as a pediatrician, and her ability to boil down complicated scientific studies to their tablespoon of curative parental medicine. But the personal stakes for both authors are clear, and urgent. These writers are worried. Our boys get awkward and quiet; we parents get awkwarder and quieter. To her credit, Orenstein acknowledges her biases. Orenstein takes the same eagle-eyed approach to jock culture, rape culture, L. Oh my God, the porn.
Roisin Lacey SC, defending, said the incident, which lasted for about ten seconds before the girl ran off, was stage managed by the older boy. Her client, now aged 17, subsequently pleaded guilty to engaging in a sexual act with a child at a place in Co. Dublin on 25 August The Central Criminal Court heard that four days earlier the older boy forced the girl to give him oral sex while other boys, including the 14 year old, were present nearby. Some of these took images of the incident though this defendant did not.