A unique look into the world of adolescent sexuality, this book offers an intimate and often disturbing, sometimes inspiring, picture of how teenage girls experience, understand, and respond to their sexual feelings, and of how society mediates, shapes, and distorts this experience. In extensive interviews, we listen as actual adolescent girls -- both urban and suburban -- speak candidly of their curiosity and confusion, their pleasure and disappointment, their fears, defiance, or capitulation in the face of a seemingly imperishable double standard that smiles upon burgeoning sexuality in boys yet frowns, even panics, at its equivalent in girls.
As a vivid evocation of girls negotiating some of the most vexing issues of adolescence, and as a thoughtful, richly informed examination of the dilemmas these girls face, this readable and revealing book begins the critical work of understanding the sexuality of young women in all its personal, social, and emotional significance.
"For all the panicky ink devoted to teen sex, until now there has been no academic study on what teenage girls actually want. Tolman, an associate director at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College, fills that gap by focusing on girls' desires, rather than on the social ills they're usually quizzed on.... Tolman also makes a convincing case for why we should listen: girls in touch with their own desires make safer, healthier choices about sex. She advocates making it easier for girls to talk about their sexual wants -- whether with parents, teachers, or other girls-without fear of repercussion." -- Publishers Weekly
Author | Deborah L. Tolman |
---|---|
ISBN | 0674018567 |
Publication Date | Oct 31, 2005 |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Language | English |
Category | Gender Research, Physical / Emotional Development |
Parenting Books Age | Teen |