A Quote by Mary Pipher

Girls face two major sexual issues in America in the 1990s: One is an old issue of coming to terms with their own sexuality, defining a sexual self, making sexual choices and learning to enjoy sex. The other issue concerns the dangers girls face of being sexually assaulted. By late adolescence, most girls today either have been traumatized or know girls who have. They are fearful of males even as they are trying to develop intimate relations with them.
Fifty three per cent children in India face sexual abuse - both boys and girls - but we still feel uncomfortable talking about it. We are still hypocrites when it comes to issues like child abuse, sex or for that matter homosexuality. It is high time that we brought the issue from under the carpet.
Sex-ed courses look at girl's internal parts: for boys it's about ejaculation, erection and wet dreams; for girls, it's periods and unwanted pregnancy. We never talk to girls about sexual self-exploration or self-knowledge.
Girls are freer to express their femininity and their sexuality and we're not tamping that down or denying it anymore. But it ends up putting them, first of all, in this box. And secondly, premature sexualization of girls actually does the opposite of what people think it might; it actually disconnects them from their sexuality and makes for decreased sexual health as they get older.
Sexual freedom and liberation has to be of your own making. I'm stunned when I hear about friends' children, ten or twelve years old giving blow jobs. I just don't like the girls being used or exploited in that way. It's just indiscriminate sexual relating. It's just the isolated things.
Sex can be renounced -- but sexuality cannot. We can't avoid sexual issues by avoiding sex, or by dismissing its importance, or by showing disrespect to our own or other people's sexual feelings.
I didn't intend to work on the issue of child marriage, but I felt like it was a topic that is related to a lot of the other issues, like acid attacks, self-immolation, and female genital mutilation. I wanted to continue to drive the conversation, but my overall goal is to protect girls. Photography has a way of addressing the viewer whether they want to deal with it or not, and that's why photography is such a good medium for documenting the issues that girls face.
I found that in a perverse way our culture and parents are far more comfortable talking about girls' vicitimization than girls' sexual agency.
Being a mother of two little girls, it was an absolute nightmare for me to teach them about sexual abuse.
Indeed, girls can be so in need of social approval that they confuse harassment for acceptance--thinking that any attention is better than none. Since many girls as well as boys buy the idea that sexual aggression and exploitation is normal masculine behavior, it may not even occur to them to demand to be treated as equals.
We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology.
Kids are told there are no differences between boys and girls. They are told there is no such thing ultimately as right and wrong. Values are relative. Truth is relative. Morality is defined by individual choice. If that isn't a recipe for sexual harassment and other forms of sexual and physical abuse, I don't know what it is.
There are moments when you are, um, encouraged to dress a certain way. But I can't. It just erodes my soul. That's no criticism to girls who can wear a tiny dress and kill it - that's awesome. People always attribute being a feminist to hating girls being sexual, and that's not it at all. I'm just not into it.
In many parts of the world, women and girls are especially vulnerable to HIV/AIDS because they lack control over most aspects of their life. Cultural expectations and gender roles expose women and girls to violence, sexual exploitation and far greater risk for infection.
Saying "yes" [to sexual activity] is a pretty low baseline for sexual experience and I wanted to write about what was happening to girls after "yes."
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, believed to have one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world, girls and women face increased peril on the road to safety.
If sexuality is beginning in such a skewed way: that boys expect to receive sexual pleasure and girls are expected to give it without reciprocation, is that why young women, even unintentionally, turn to getting something else in return for sex? Whether it be popularity, career success, professional attention.
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