Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, All the Best. Today we will be discussing Peggy Orinstein's Girls and Sex. I consider this book essential reading for anyone who is a girl or has been a girl or loves a girl, but I'm including it in this podcast on patriarchy specifically because it contributes

meaningfully to a conversation that we started in the very first episodes.

Remember that for millennia, men thought of women's bodies as their possessions and their

reproductive capacity was considered a commodity.

Up until about 100 years ago, women were still considered to be owned by their husbands under the laws of coverture.

And marital rape was outlawed only in 1993 in all of the states of the United States.

And that's a vestige of the belief that a man owned his wife's body, and it was

his to do whatever he wanted with it. And then listeners will remember from the historical timeline

in 1931, Virginia Woolf said that the one thing women couldn't write about was sex, even though

men could write about sex. And in many ways, that's still true today.

Then listeners will remember the book Our Bodies Ourselves, which paved new paths in the 1970s,

but we are still figuring out girls and women's bodies and sexuality in the context of

always having been overseen and monitored and controlled by men.

And I think it's important to remember that historical context as we consider this book as it relates to patriarchy.

Also, I have to throw in, obviously, given the title of the book, this episode is about sex.

So please be advised of the subject

matter, which we are on purpose going to discuss very openly. And I'm very, very excited to

discuss this book with my reading partner today, Natasha Healfour. Thank you so much for being here,

Natasha. I am so honored. I just love being on this show. I love the title. I love

you. I'm super excited. So excited to have you here. Natasha and I met, I don't know if you remember this,

Natasha, but it was in Northern California a few years ago at a lunch for kind of a group of

progressive Mormons. And I was seated next to Carolyn Pearson

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