“Easy-to-access online porn fills the vacuum, making porn the de facto sex educator for American youth,” Maggie Jones wrote in The New York Times Magazine last year. Simultaneously, the influence of pornography is growing. (In seven states, laws prohibit educators from portraying same-sex relationships positively.) And that is saying nothing of more complex issues like consent, sexual orientation and gender identity. Abstinence education remains a pillar of most programs. The majority of states don’t mandate sex ed at all, and just 13 require that the material be medically accurate. schools, where curriculum is lacking over all. Such nuances and acknowledgments of female sexuality are largely missing from sex education in U.S. “It is not, to be clear, an altogether glorious time,” she said, adding that “girls’ feelings matter, too.
![puberty you puberty you](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/05/07/well/00well-puberty-blockers/merlin_187380981_0e9ed4d6-1a9e-48d7-8160-1d12ea121c83-articleLarge.jpg)
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“The lustful adolescent girl is having her moment,” wrote Hess, a Times culture critic.
#Puberty you're doing it wrong movie#
In the last year or so, TV and film have made strides in representing pubescent girls as complex and awkward beings who also happen to be sex-obsessed (a trait normally reserved for adolescent boys), my colleague Amanda Hess pointed out in a recent piece about the shows “PEN15” and “Big Mouth” and the movie “Eighth Grade.” I learned what it meant when a pubescent boy carried a book in front of his body (cue laugh track) and that when girls develop breasts, boys (and men) “can’t help but” ogle them. By the time I was 15, most of my knowledge about puberty was gleaned from one-dimensional tales on TV and in movies.