Don’t Call Me Princess audiobook

Peggy Orenstein has helped to reshape my views on sex and feminism. The idea that girls deserve to experience sexual pleasure just as much as boys should not be revolutionary, and it is disturbing that so many young women don't realize this. Orenstein also tackles infertility, egg donation (in one of the more interesting essays), breast cancer (presenting a critical look at breast cancer culture), and even the pitfalls of being a boy in the Trump era.

I only read the essays that interested me, so probably about half the book or more. Great writing style and really interesting and timely topics. A really enjoyable and thought provoking read.

Love Peggy Orenstein! Read her in the post and heard her interview about her new book, Boys & Sex, which I will be sure to read.

I feel stronger just reading this book. And much more thoughtful. Such good food for thought.

Full disclosure- I did not read this book cover-to-cover. I skimmed over or flat out skipped the ones I had on interest in. The essays were about a range of heavy issues experienced by women, such as infertility, pregnancy loss and cancer. These issues are real and common.

A wide range of essays that stoked my angst in a good way.

Columns written over the past thirty years, focus on breast cancer, the trauma and sorrow of miscarriage, sexual pleasure, and other issues, part and parcel of a healthy life. Peggy Orenstein’s reading of her own words is smooth and often matter-of-fact. An essential listen for women, and men, of all ages.Look for a longer review in AudioFile Magazine http://www.audiofilemagazine.com

Very thought provoking. This is a book I'd like to discuss in book club. She doesn't arrive to a right vs wrong conclusion on a lot of topics, but rather asks if she's doing enough to start or continue the conversation with her daughter or society.

“Don’t Call Me Princess” is Peggy Orenstein’s best hits album, and like “Michael Jackson Number Ones,” the content justifies its own compilation. Few pop stars can identify important topics, compose poetry about them, and deliver it with perfect pitch; most do one or two, but not all three. It’s similarly rare for a journalist to write critically on subjects that don’t always seem salient until she dubs them so and with diction that sings (e.g., “April is a distraction, as would be any student who cannot catch up but will not drop out”). Plus, I learned cool stuff. The following excerpts showcase Orenstein’s insightfulness, in the form of introspection and empathy, detail and synthesis:“Looking back on her career, [Nobel prize-winning scientist Elizabeth Blackburn] believes she was subject to plenty of bias; like many successful women in nontraditional fields, she was just particularly adept at denying it. ‘I was oblivious for a long time,’ she recalls, ‘and that’s the way I coped. It was very much a defense. If I had stopped and thought about it, I would’ve felt so vulnerable to it.’” “It isn’t easy to watch a daughter’s incipient forays into romance and sexuality. If Miranda [Cosgrove, Nickelodeon’s “iCarly”] embodies the wish that girls could engage in the former without the latter, Chris was acting out a parent’s desire to ensure it. Most of us don’t (and can’t) chaperone our daughters at school, at concerts, at public appearances. Most of us accept, if with some ambivalence, that our daughters have to navigate the turbulence of romantic life on their own. Most of us have no choice but to let our daughters go.”“In its zeal to find them, science has outpaced the medical, psychological, and ethical implications of its discoveries.” “For years I had thought of myself as a Weeble, one of those roly-poly children’s toys that ‘wobble but they don’t fall down.’ I had, after all, survived breast cancer in my thirties, an age when it tends to be especially deadly; after three miscarriages and six years of infertility, I got pregnant in my forties with my daughter. There were other crises, too, of the heart and the head as well as the body—how could there not be after five decades of living?—but they didn’t define me. I’ve always popped up fine. Yet lately, incrementally, I had begun to feel defective, emotionally diminished rather than strengthened by trauma, in danger of becoming the sum of my pain. Had that happened after this latest bout of cancer or before? I couldn’t say. But I felt cleaved, a word that also means its opposite: cleaved to this body, whether I liked it or not, and from it by its many betrayals.” “During the ‘Mommy Wars’ of the early 2000s, women who stayed home with children were pitted in the media against mothers who worked for pay and neither side emerged a winner. Womens’ insecurities were ripe for exploitation: after all, in what I would come to call a ‘half-changed world,’ others’ choices can feel like a rebuke.” “Whether or not they worked outside the home, the vast majority of women had made concessions to parenthood in a way that men, for the most part, still do not. That’s why words like ‘balance,’ ‘trade-off,’ and ‘work-family conflict’ have become as feminine as pink tulle.” “Women complained to me that their husbands didn’t pull their domestic weight, but time after time, I heard them let men off the hook. A thirty-eight year-old technical writer I interviewed in San Francisco was typical: ‘You know,’ she mused after running down a litany of frustrations, ‘my husband is really involved compared with his own father.’ I pushed, pointing out that this sets the bar too low. Shouldn’t we be comparing men’s involvement with that of their wives instead? ‘Well,’ said another mom, ‘you can’t really expect that.’ I tried putting it another way: ‘It seems to me that women, whatever their arrangements, feel like lesser mothers than those of the previous generation. Meanwhile men, even with minimal participation at home, feel like better fathers.’” “[T]here are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs—who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty—are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception…. [And] school-age girls overwhelmingly reported a paralyzing pressure to be ‘perfect’: not only to get straight A’s and be the student-body president, editor of the newspaper, and captain of the swim team but also to be ‘kind and caring,’ ‘please everyone, be very thin and dress right.’ Give those girls a pumpkin and a glass slipper and they’d be in business…. It doesn’t seem to be ‘having it all’ that’s getting to them; it’s the pressure to be it all. In telling our girls they can be anything, we have inadvertently demanded that they be everything. To everyone. All the time.”

I've been a fan of Peggy Orenstein's work for some years now, ever since that fateful day I stumbled across her article, "What's Wrong With Cinderella?" In a Women Studies class, I was working on a paper about the Disney Princesses and the type of "role models" they were for girls. I was hooked. Since then, I've read most of her books, many of her articles, and always make sure I add her to my "to-read" if I see she's cranking out something new. Orenstein is insightful and funny. Do I always agree with her? Of course not, but what I appreciate about her voice is that it does not feel like an unwavering one. She, of course, has firm stances in her feminism, but she does not feel stubborn. She discussions her own internal conflicts about certain topics and feels like she wrestles with certain points-- not wanting to come off an an unbending feminist of a by-gone era, but also not willing to concede certain points. I feel like she makes some damn good arguments and has plenty to say. This book was a collection of her works from over the years, so some of these I've read before and others were new to me. new to me AND news to me. Some of the pieces collected in this book discussed topics I've never read into before or really had much thought on. As always, she's given me plenty to think about and mull over. I'd definitely recommend.

This book would have gotten 5 stars, but for some completely inconceivable reason, the author prefaces one of her essays (about getting her ovaries removed and what it means to be a woman with reproductive cancers) by pandering to trans women. This book is about issues and oppression that only WOMEN (female humans) face, why even cater to males with gender dysphoria? They experience NONE of the things this book is about. They don't have female socialisation, they won't get pregnant, they won't get abortions, they won't get ovarian/cervical/uterine cancer, they won't be mothers, etc. I'm so tired of "feminist" authors capitulating to trans-identified males. A male author would never do this. A man wouldn't write a book about toxic masculinity, prostate cancer, being a father, etc and feel the need to include trans men, because it's completely irrelevant to the subject.Women should be able to write about exclusively women's issues without bending over backwards to appease males. Trans women are completely irrelevant to the subject of this book, yet the author felt the peculiar need to post-edit her work, probably out of fear of being labeled a "TERF" for exclusively focusing on women, heaven forbid.

After watching "Diary of a Teenage Girl" with my wife and one of our sons, a search on Phoebe Gloeckner pointed me towards this collection of essays by Peggy Orenstein. Read that first, but then went and read the entire book cover-to-cover. Quite a gamut, sure plenty of stuff for me to just shut up and listen to, or mourn over ("Breast Friends" concluding that sad arc, and later "Children Are Alone" leading off the final cluster...the book like a mix tape is well put-together.) In an alternate universe it would be wonderful to have a daughter to discuss the topics here (and we do with our sons), but back in this universe I am glad Orenstein is here and has her daughter.

These essays covered a wide range of topics, from profiles to personal essays to takes on feminism, sex, and child-rearing. While I found myself more invested in the final section of the book, Orenstein's insightfulness, empathy, and honesty made the sections I couldn't relate to (miscarriage, infertility, breast cancer) far more compelling than I anticipated. It's easy to skip around and read the small sections here and there, and I found myself more than once sending snippets and article recommendations to friends.

I find Peggy’s works enthralling and informative. She has reminded me that it is so important to be open and to have these discussions with mixed company. The selection of essays, most of which I had read, are only the tip of the iceberg. Peggy has helped me reconsider my position on many thoughts and ideas. I am anxious to discuss these many essays with others to discover which ones resonated the most with them. Peggy writes in a way that is both personal and inclusive. I appreciate her candor and ability to help us maintain a dialogue.