How Can We Avoid A New Generation of Brett Kavanaughs and Harvey Weinsteins

When an event truly captivates the nation, it’s usually because it touches on something that we’re not very good at talking about. Such was the case with the Brett Kavanaugh hearing.

Reactions to Christine Blasey Ford personified a complex contradiction in our society. While many, particularly some men, respected her appearance and professionalism, they were way too quick to identify with and accept Brett Kavanaugh’s college sexual entitlement as some kind of norm. In doing that one wonders what message we are sending to boys and young men.

This disconnect between changing culture and stunted sexuality seems to lie at the heart of confusion that boys are experiencing today as they try to come to grips with intimacy and sexuality in a changing world while most are still stuck with sexuality in a 1955 time warp

It’s no wonder that people like Jordan Peterson tells his audience of angry young men to “look back to the 1950’s”

That's the world that best selling author and journalist Peggy Orenstein examines in Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity

My conversation with Peggy Orenstein:

Girls & Sex

As they have done in so many other areas, the millennial generation has picked and chosen which parts of their social and sexual legacy they want to inherit. Particularly for millennial girls who were handed a legacy of sexual revolution, increased efforts to promote self esteem, Title 9, several waves of feminism and the ability to Lean In, they have made some interesting choices and compromises for themselves.

Nowhere is this more profound and more complicated than in their navigation of their own sexuality. How this plays out in our culture, how it impacts our daughters and what is says for the future of men women and sex is at the heart of Peggy Orenstein's new book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape.

My conversation with Peggy Orenstein:

"The Girlie-Girl Industrial Complex"

Young women today are succeeding at geometric rates. The number of young women graduating from colleges, from law schools and graduate schools is far out stripping young men. Women are succeeding in a remarkable range of careers, including politics and corporate boardrooms, heretofore places built with the proverbial glass ceiling.

Yet paralleling all of this is a culture that is encouraging young girls to wrap themselves up in the pink accouterments of ultra-girlie princess culture and then, to later enter a cultural of extreme sexualization. How can all of these facts be true at the same time? What’s happening they creates this apparent contradiction in the lives of young women? Journalist and best selling author Peggy Orenstein tries to put all of this in perspective in her new book Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.

My conversation with Peggy Orenstein:

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