Kerry Cohen - Dirty Little Secrets

6. Gerald R. Adams and Michael D. Berzonsky, Blackwell Handbook on Adolescence (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).

7. William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (New York: Owl Books, 1999).

1. Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2009), Lynn M. Phillips, referred to later in this chapter, calls this virgin icon “the pleasing woman discourse.” The pleasing woman is “pleasant, feminine, and subordinate to men,” and she lacks sexual desire herself. Her entire being is based on pleasing and being in service to others, especially men.

2. Hannah Brückner and Peter S. Bearman, “After the Promise: The STD Consequences of Adolescent Virginity Pledges,” Journal of Adolescent Health 36 (2005): 271–278.

3. Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and The Myth of the Slut (New York: Scribner, 2002).

4. Ibid.

5. Kate Snow and Kelly Hagan, “Teen Girls Hazed on N.J. High School ‘Slut List,’” Good Morning America , September 23, 2009, abcnews.go.com/GMA/teen-girls-hazed-slut-list/story?id=8649050&tqkw=&tqshow=GMA.

6. “2009 AP-MTV Digital Abuse Study,” MTV’s A Thin Line Project, www.athinline.org/MTV-AP_Digital_Abuse_Study_Executive_Summary.pdf.

7. Lynn M. Phillips, Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

8. Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005).

9. Laura Sessions Stepp, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007).

10. To read the full Marie Claire interview, see Sarah Z. Wexler, “Confessions of a Sex Addict,” Marie Claire , April 2008, www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/articles/sex-addict-confessions.

11. Find the Jezebel.com blog post I refer to at Moe Tkacik, “Is ‘Sex Addict’ Memoirist Kerry Cohen Even a Slut?” April 22, 2008, jezebel.com/382609/is-sex-addict-memoirist-kerry-cohen-even-actually-a-slut. The blog post is intact, but almost all the original comments were deleted. Why? Less than a month after the posting, Jezebel ran into problems because their readers and bloggers were often deeply cruel and nasty. You can read about that at Lauren Lipton, “Not on Our Blog You Won’t,” New York Times , May 4, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04jezebel-1.html. It seemed to me that most of the blog posts and comments that were truly mean were ones about women who had achieved success—and this at a blog created for “smart” women.

12. Erica Jong, quoted in Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs , 76.

13. Phillips, Flirting with Danger , 52.

14. Kerry Cohen, Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity (New York: Hyperion, 2008). For those who are interested, I wrote about the work it took to find the meaning inside this scene in the essay Kerry Cohen, “Excavating a Moment’s Truth,” Brevity.com , January 2010, www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/craft/craft_cohen1_10.htm.

15. Biddy Martin, “Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance , ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 3–19.

1. James Jaccard, Patricia J. Dittus, and Vivian V. Gordon, “Parent-Adolescent Congruency in Reports of Adolescent Sexual Behavior and in Communications about Sexual Behavior,” Child Development 69, no. 1 (1998): 247–261.

2. Robert W. Blum, “Mothers’ Influence on Teen Sex: Connections That Promote Postponing Sexual Intercourse,” Center for Adolescent Health and Development , University of Minnesota, 2002, www.allaboutkids.umn.edu/presskit/MonographMS.pdf.

3. Liz Brody, “The O/Seventeen Sex Survey: Mothers and Daughters Talk about Sex,” O, The Oprah Magazine , April 14, 2009, www.oprah.com/relationships/The-Sex-Survey-Oprah-Magazine-Womens-Sex-Survey.

4. P. Averett, “Parental Communications and Young Women’s Struggle for Sexual Agency,” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2004; Virginal Blacksburg and Kimberlee S. Schear, “Factors That Contribute to, and Constrain, Conversations between Adolescent Females and Their Mothers about Sexual Matters,” Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of The Oxford Roundtable , September 22, 2006, 4751–4872.

5. Aimee Lee Ball, “Everyone’s Doing What ?” O, The Oprah Magazine , April 7, 2009, www.oprah.com/relationships/Teenage-Sex-Dr-Laura-Berman-on-How-to-Talk-to-Teenagers-About-Sex.

6. D. Herbenick, M. Reece, V. Schick, S. A. Sanders, B. Dodge, and J. D. Fortenberry, “Sexual Behavior in the United States: Results from a National Probability Sample of Men and Women Ages 14-94,” Journal of Sexual Medicine , 2010, 7 (suppl. 5), 255–265.

7. A. Das, “Masturbation in the United States,” Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 33, no. 4 (2007): 301–317.

8. Christine O’Donnell’s now-famous television interview is available at “Christine O’Donnell’s 90s Anti-Masturbation Campaign,” www.msnbc.com, September 14, 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzHcqcXo_NA.

9. D. Rosenthal, S. Moore, and I. Flynn, “Adolescent Self-Efficacy, Self-Esteem, and Sexual Risk-Taking,” Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 1, no. 2 (June 1991): 77–88.

10. Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), 160–161.

11. Lynn Ponton, The Sex Lives of Teenagers: Revealing the Secret World of Adolescent Boys and Girls (New York: Penguin Group, 2000).

12. Michael Reece, D. Herbenick, V. Schick, A. Sanders, B. Dodge, and J. D. Fortenberry, “Condom Use Rates in a National Probability Sample of Males and Females Ages 14 to 94 in the United States,” Journal of Sexual Medicine 7, suppl. 5 (2010): 266–276. Interestingly, black and Hispanic adolescents use condoms the most.

13. “Patterns of Condom Use Among Adolescents: The Impact of Mother-Adolescent Communication,” American Journal of Public Health , October 1, 1998, www.cdc.gov/std/general/Condom_Use_Among_Adolescents.htm, www.cdc.gov, June 8, 2009, retrieved April 2, 2011.

14. Peter R. Kilmann, Jennifer M. C. Vendemia, Michele M. Parnell, and Geoffrey C. Urbaniak, “Parent Characteristics Linked with Daughters’ Attachment Styles,” Adolescence 44, no. 175 (Autumn 2009): 557–568.

15. Episode 3.10, “The Giving Tree.” For the full transcript and a comparison with a sex talk that went nowhere on My So-Called Life , see S. Seltzer, “ On Friday Night Lights , the TV Sex Talk Done Right,” RH Reality Check , March 27, 2009, www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/03/26/on-friday-nightlights-tv-sex-talk-done-right. Another excellent television sex talk was between father and son on Glee . For the video clip, see “Watch Kurt and His Dad Have a Gay Sex Talk on Glee ,” retrieved April 2, 2011, vodpod.com/watch/5729957-watch-kurt-and-his-dad-have-a-gay-sex-talk-on-glee.