In her forthcoming book The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, journalist Carter Sherman accuses a New York Times reporter of being disappointed that members of a sorority she was writing about were not more sexually active. Indeed, the reporter was so disappointed that the sorority’s non-partying ways were left out of the book the Times reporter wrote about the sex lives of young women. 

In other words, when a Times reporter wanted some hot and heavy copy to sell a book and the sorority girls she interviewed did not offer it, the reporter left the girls on the cutting room floor.

In 2013, New York Times reporter Peggy Orenstein was working on a book about girls and sex. It would be published in 2017 as Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. During her research, Orenstein spent time with Carter Sherman, who was then an undergrad at Northwestern University. Sherman is now a journalist herself and writes for the Guardian, but in 2013 she was just a student dreaming of working at The New York Times. In The Second Coming she offers this description of Orenstein:

The journalist perched on a stool in the corner of the bedroom, pen in hand, ready to jot down the most intimate details of our sex lives. Her name was Peggy Orenstein, and I knew exactly three facts about her. First: She knew my favorite journalism professor. Second: She wrote for the New York Times, where, as an aspiring reporter myself, I desperately wanted to work. Third: She was writing a book about girls and sex. As a twenty-year-old college sophomore, I apparently still qualified as a girl, and I was having sex. So, one night in late 2013, I agreed to let Orenstein hang out at my sorority house. We swanned about the tiny bedroom, dodging piles of clothes and admiring one another’s earrings in the mirror, while Orenstein quizzed us on boys and parties and relationships. 

Unfortunately, as Sherman explains, the girls were just not ribald enough for Orenstein’s purposes: 

I could feel her eyes taking in all the pink in the room—the hot pink carpeting, the pale pink walls. Elle Woods would have been jealous. I mostly felt like a stereotype. As we continued to answer her questions, I could sense her slow deflation. Our sex lives were not what she was looking for. We weren’t having sex often enough, with enough boys. Frankly, we weren’t slutty enough. (There’s no such thing as a slut, but I was years away from realizing that.) After Orenstein left, I couldn’t shake my suspicion that we had been drawn into playing a rigged game. While it was clear that Orenstein did not want to claim that young women were immoral for sleeping around, I felt like she had wanted to frame my sorority sisters and me as victims of “hookup culture,” the 2000s moral panic that posited that young Americans were having sex so casual it barred on indifferent. Like practically every other adult we encountered, she had wanted to prove that we were doing sex wrong. 

“Orenstein’s book Girls and Sex was published in 2016,” Sherman concludes, “during my senior year of college. My sorority sisters and I did not make the final draft.” 

In her book, Orenstein calls for more and better sex education, but she also laments that “the girls I talked to often spoke of ‘going crazy’ as an integral part of the ‘college experience’; they sounded like they were all quoting from the same travel brochure.” In her day, Orenstein wrote, “the college experience” involved less drinking and hooking up and more friendship, love, and “exposure to alternative music and film.”

Writer Emily May also had issues with Orenstein. “Orenstein’s research claims are a little sketchy and she doesn’t cite references or use footnotes in the body of the text to make it clear where she’s pulled her ‘facts’ from,” May wrote in a review.

Maybe this is just something that bothers me personally, as a former Politics student, but I like traditional Harvard or Chicago styles of reference … not just notes and bibliography in the back. Unfortunately, a lot of this book is the author’s own opinion, roughly backed up here and there by a quote from an educated, upper middle class young woman. And sometimes she seems to use a single girl’s testimony to draw a huge conclusion about the nature of sexuality and sexual relations.

May’s conclusion: “Like most influential people and convincing politicians, Orenstein makes a lot of shocking, interesting and emotive points, and never backs it up with any real evidence.” She also, if Sherman is to be believed, ignores all evidence that contradicts her suppositions. This is standard operating procedure at The New York Times.

For her part, Sherman (of course) blames conservatives for the sexual difficulties facing America’s young people.

As young Americans navigate unprecedented access to sex,” she writes, “they are simultaneously and increasingly at the mercy of activists, politicians, and institutions that have not only failed to keep up with the times but are actively working to turn back the clock. They have razed access to abortion, comprehensive sex ed, pornography, information about LGBTQ+ identities, and tools to combat sexual assault—to name just a few of their favorite areas of attack—on behalf of a movement that I call sexual conservatism.

It gets worse: 

Over the past twenty-five years, this movement has steadily amassed power to the point that it has dramatically restricted young Americans’ sex lives and imperiled their ability to grow up safely and happily. Sexual conservatism has been a cultural, political, and legal force in American life for centuries, yet its existence, the connections between its various wings, and its overarching goals are all too often overlooked or obscured.

Specifically, sexual conservatism aims to implement policies that make it difficult and dangerous to have any kind of sex that is not heterosexual, married, and—as it seeks to limit access to abortion and birth control—potentially procreative. In addition to elevating heterosexual and married sex, American sexual conservatism tries to enforce specific ideas about gender, about what makes a man and what makes a woman. It wants to turn the United States back to a pre-internet age—to, say, the 1950s, before the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism of the 1960s and ’70s, a time when a (white) man was expected to have a (white) wife, 2.5 (white) kids, and a suburban home on a single salary. This is not a short-term plot. It is a slow-drip corrosion of community and state-level attacks that normalizes the loss of freedoms and ultimately clears the path for national action.

Sherman’s ranting is dated, of course, and out of step with the current rediscovery that women—and people in general—can’t have everything, that there is and has been plenty of sexual “education” in schools and our sex-saturated culture, and that living a more religiously traditional family life can be rewarding.

I recently attended a screening of the film Housewife of the Year, and the audience reaction was revealing. The Irish documentary by Ciaran Cassidy is mostly footage of Housewife of the Year, a popular show that ran on Irish television from the 1969 to 1995. The show was a competition to see which wife did the best job at home cooking for and raising her kids. The winner got 300 pounds and a new stove.

It’s exactly the kind of “retro” nightmare that Carter Sherman thunders against. Housewife of the Year women show off their smiles, dresses, fruit salads, “pork tropicana” and “personality interviews.” Yet most of the women loved having big families and staying at home. The grainy footage of the big Irish clans making music together are joyful and alive. At the screening I attended in liberal Washington, D.C., there were plenty of smirks at the clips of women cooking, sweeping, and raising children in the 1960s. Yet there was also moments of longing silence when women talked about how fulfilled they were staying at home and having families.

One reviewer put it well:

The film’s purpose is, plainly, in part to stand up for the cradle rockers. This is a film filled with much sadness. Women abandoned. Women who survived institutions. But it also allows a fair degree of celebration. Nobody here is wagging figures at surviving contributors for participating in a competition that allowed them a smidgen of recognition and renown.

A woman named Philomena Delaney was the last Housewife of the Year in 1995 before the show was canceled to make way for more “enlightened” progamming.  “I’m still reigning,” Delaney quips, her words carrying humor and pride. She’s not the kind of woman either Peggy Orenstein or Carter Sherman would include in one of their books.