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Carol Platt Liebau

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Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (and America, Too!) Hardcover – November 2, 2007

by Carol Platt Liebau (Author)

3.9 34 ratings

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Political analyst and commentator Carol Platt Liebau takes a hard look at the pervasiveness of sex in today's culture and the havoc it wreaks on young people.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Center Street
Publication date

November 2, 2007
Dimensions

6.25 x 1.13 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

1599956837
ISBN-13

978-1599956831
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Carol Platt Liebau is a political analyst and commentator based near Los Angeles, California. She is a 1989 graduate of Princeton University, where she served as editorial chairman of The Daily Princetonian, and Harvard Law School, where she graduated in 1992 as the first female managing editor of The Harvard Law Review.

Carol has been a law clerk for Reagan appointee Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, legislative assistant to Senator Christopher "Kit" Bond of Missouri, a consultant to the 1994 Senate campaign of John D. Ashcroft, and policy advisor and counsel for Tom Campbell's U.S. Senate campaign in 2000. She also practiced appellate law for four years in her hometown of St. Louis. You can visit her on the Web at www.carolliebau.blogspot.com.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Center Street (November 2, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1599956837
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1599956831
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.16 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.13 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,406,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,271 in Psychology & Counseling Books on Sexuality
- #4,391 in General Sexual Health
- #9,928 in Sex & Sexuality

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3.9 34 ratings

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3.9 out of 5

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Book Worm

Women Be Aware

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2018

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We all need to take a closer look at what our culture is doing to our women. And women need to understand when they are being loved as opposed to being used. This last comment goes for men also!

2 people found this helpful

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Charlotte A.Tyler

Great product and service

Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2011

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This book arrived within the time promised and looked new! I will certainly buy from this seller again. We will use this book to minister to our Girls to Women Church ministry for young girls ages 11 to 18. Thank you so much.

One person found this helpful

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NMMC

Disappointed and left wanting...

Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2008

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For purposes of clarity, and in order to dispel the assertions of comments directed at several other consumers posted here, I have indeed read this book, cover to cover. And no, I am not an idiot. In fact, I suspect that anyone who uses such unattractive epithets toward a person speaking her or his mind has no real evidence or background to rebut in an intelligent and appropriate manner. If anyone reading this review is thusly inclined, you may want to save time and stop reading now, as your words will not deter me from my opinion, nor will they cause me to question my intelligence.

I consider most of my political and moral views to be on the liberal side, but I agree that our culture is sex-obsessed and that our future generations are suffering as a result. Therefore, I picked up Ms. Liebau's book in the hopes of finding deep analysis and optimistic resolutions. Upon completion of the book, I was very disheartened. I did not expect exaggerated nostalgia for a time when women were just as much sex objects as they are now, only for different reasons.

During the "Golden Age" that the author refers to, women were wives, mistresses, or spinsters, and much of the time none of those were desirable roles. Media creations were also just as obscene, in a different way. Magazine articles listed ways in which to be a good wife, which included not asking questions when your husband comes home late, or not at all. Television shows rarely depicted women as anything other than doting housewife and mother who had minimal input to the important matters of the household.

In the real world, working women were limited to mainly secretarial, housekeeping, or childcare positions, where sexual harassment by their male superiors was rampant, assumed, and ignored by higher authorities. Women were often expected to perform sexual favors for promotions or raises, or merely to keep the boss happy. In the home, sex was considered the wifely duty, as marital rape was not illegal, and birth control was nearly impossible to receive, especially without her husband's permission. Women who were bred to be wives were often not taught the intricacies of sex and intimacy, thus rendering a wife dependent on her husband's tutelage. Many men sought relationships outside of the marriage in order to have their more obscure desires fulfilled by more "knowledgeable" women.

A woman had no opportunity to decide that marriage and children were actual ambitions; conventional family life was already on the map the day she was born a girl. And to have a career and a family was simply out of the question. Any attempts to remedy an unhappy marriage or to avoid a fate they did not want was met with disdain by men and women alike. Divorcees were pariahs, and single women of a certain age were either ignored or looked upon as sad and unfortunate. The shame and taboo surrounding sex and talk about sex kept many victims of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse quiet. Thus, an untold number of predators went unseen and unpunished.

I agree that changes need to be made, in the direction of both women and men recognizing the value of committed relationships that entail both enjoyable and healthy sex as well as honesty, communication, and equality. In truth, and what Ms. Liebau fails to mention, is that good relationships are the responsibility of both partners. Any liability placed with men, according to her, is negated by women who don't value themselves and thereby "[breed] in men a lack of respect for women in general." There can't be much respect present to begin with, if sex is the primary focus of men, as the author claims, and as indicated by her research detailing the enormous number of times men claim to be thinking about sex daily.

Men are cited as being biologically different from women in ways that cause their uncontrollable sexual urges, just waiting to be satisfied by any willing (i.e., "easy") woman, and that such women are predators bred by the evils of contemporary feminism. The author takes for granted that women are intrinsically more emotional and more likely to seek love and affection, than men, who are inherently sexual in nature. The only scientific evidence I could find in the book for this assertion was that men have "ten to one hundred times more testosterone" than women. That's it? No brain scans, no longitudinal or cross-cultural studies? No accounting for the difference in socialization between girls and boys? Men may be just as emotional and attached as women, and just as intent on finding commitment and happiness- they may just be more apt to follow in the stream of machismo they have witnessed as boys and have grown to believe is expected and desirable. I would have liked to read a chapter or two on how the sexualized culture damages our boys as well, and not because girls have "forced" them to accept easy sex in lieu of committed relationships.

Women and girls objectify themselves today, as they have been (and still are) objectified by men, and it's still all our fault? Okay, so some feminists got it wrong when they insisted that we could liberate ourselves with free love and the result was free sex. But they meant well. They were angry and frustrated, as I have been, at the way women have been treated, and how many still prefer to be treated because of the false security it offers. Free love was meant to be a way to wake women from the slumber of unhappy relationships, personal and professional, and shake up society in a way to grab attention for the cause of equality. Some women may still insist that they are perfectly happy being single, or unmarried and involved, or any other number of situations that don't include marriage. I take their words for it. After all, who am I, or anyone else, to assume that I know better?

That said, I do agree that many women are mainly looking for happiness, love, affection, stability, romance, and commitment, or any one or a combination of these or others. I think that over time we have tried many methods of figuring out how to get those things, and many of us have failed. We're not sure what is expected of us, and socialization, instinct, and experience are all pulling us in different directions sometimes. What we're seeing in history and at present is women trying to find how we may fit in equally, with the only expectations set in place are the ones we also find acceptable.

Feminists have tried to use sex as a manipulator, much as the author suggests we all use virginity, in order to receive the genuine affection we crave. They're both mistaken. The focus of remedy for our oversexed culture cannot be focused simply on girls and women, and their sexual power (or lack thereof). It must also come down on the shoulders of our boys and men, and how we teach them to treat the opposite sex- neither as delicate flowers needing protection, nor as objects waiting to satisfy any sexual (or other) whim they may have, but as equals who deserve respect and consideration, incidentally the same things that they should also expect in return.

As part of a team effort, we need to place value on education and respecting others' intelligence and opinions. We need to find interest in things that will increase our inherent value, such as world events, humanitarianism, art, and spirituality, to name a few. We need to find within ourselves the love and affection that we seek from others, and the confidence to accept who we are, as we are. Only then may we find true attraction and the appeal of those who have similar values, rather than thinking we can experience the gift of love from merely physical expression. And only when we can display these healthfully as examples for our children will they follow suit.

16 people found this helpful

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Katherine Wilson

Worthwhile for parents

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2008

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"Prude" is a great book for parents. I must say that my eyes were opened to some things I wasn't aware of, and knowledge is power, right? I would say, however, that if you have teenagers in your home, be careful about letting them read this book. It may give them new ideas of ways to be bad, or they may find the author's explicitness titillating. I did think she took some of her ideas a bit too far, but then perhaps I've just been tainted by our wicked society.
If you consider yourself "conservative" and wish our society would reign back a bit, you will probably appreciate the author's point of view. She demonstrates how our society has become overly sexualized, but also gives us hope that the pendulum may be starting to swing the other way. Overall, very beneficial, especially for parents.

10 people found this helpful

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S. French

Prude:

Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2008

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An excellent albeit frightening book. Should be read by every parent of a teen age, or soon to be teen age girl. Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (and America, Too!)

4 people found this helpful

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Amanda Hamlin

Doesn't deliver what it promises

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2013

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I bought the book because its back blurb claims it's about girls being expected and pressured to engage in sexual activity, a topic I feel very strongly about. However, this seemed to comprise a very small part of the actual content of the book. Most of it seemed aimed at condemning modern sexual values in general. In most of the earlier chapters, the author would present laundry lists and statistics of all the horrible things expressed in the medium that was the topic of that chapter (books, music, the internet, etc) but didn't actually provide much information on how these things are damaging girls. Are we supposed to assume that, simply because sexual media exists, girls feel pressured to follow it? I do believe this is often the case but it is irresponsible of an author not to state such an assumption, to say nothing of providing evidence to back it up. What she does say is in almost every chapter is that these things harm and cause damage to girls but doesn't provide any more detail of the harm and damage being caused. In fact, she sometimes quotes or cites girls who actual have positive things to say about their sexual activity and she actually seems more upset by this than by girls who get hurt by it. It is true that these girls could be talking big and being in denial, even to themselves, about the damage that is being caused to them--something else that I do believe happens with a certain amount of frequency. But, again, the author neither openly states this nor provides evidence to support it. One is left feeling that she either thinks women are all the same as so MUST be harmed by sexuality to the same degree or that sexuality is inherently bad and remains so regardless of whether anyone is harmed by it or not.

This is pretty much confirmed by the fact that she repeatedly decries the fact that media sources, even those that provide "accurate information" about sex, do so devoid of moral or religious connotations. I'm not saying sex should be morally neutral, quite probably the reverse. However, it's tricky because people's moral and religious beliefs vary widely and these media sources, Planned Parenthood for example can't know the moral and religious beliefs of those who will be reading their pamphlets. Nor can they write them in a way that accommodates and respects the infinite variety of moral and religious beliefs that exist in the world. I do think that, rather than ignoring the issue of morality altogether, sexual material could be constructed to acknowledge the fact that readers do have moral beliefs and encourage those readers to be aware of and honor those beliefs, whatever they may be, when making decisions about their sexuality. However, the author doesn't make any such argument. Instead, she simply seems offended that the entire world isn't trying to promote HER personal moral and religious beliefs. Not only that, but she never actually states what these beliefs are, as if her monopoly on truth and right is so overwhelming and obvious that it doesn't need to be stated.

In addition, the author is so focused on pushing her particular brand of morality, that she often contradicts herself. For example she describes a story about a girl who made advances to another girl by giving her a kiss on her hand. This actually sounds like the kind of restrained romantic behavior that the author seems to be advocating during most of book but, suddenly, because it involves two females, it's horrible. As a side note, I found her extremely negative attitude towards anything relating to homosexuality, especially with no explanation or reasoning given, to be extremely offensive and a bit beside the point. Even more off topic, she would digress into the positive portrayal of things like drugs and skipping class in the media she was describing. Sure these things are a problem but they are, at best, tangentially related to girls' sexuality so disrupt the focus in a book on that topic, especially the author never actually explains the connection between the different topics.

But the thing that really got me was in the chapter where she finally explains more specifically how overly sexual culture harms girls (for the record, this chapter shouldn't have been put so far into the book. As an English teacher, I always tell my students not to overload the reader with pure facts before explaining their reasoning, or the reader might get confused and lose interest). Throughout the book, the author had at least paid lip service to the idea that a culture that encourages girls to be promiscuous is bad because it tries to influence them to act in the ways that guys want them to act rather than trying to figure out what they, themselves, really want. But here, she says that one of the ways this harms girls is that, if they are too promiscuous when they're young no guy will want to marry them later. What? I can't even begin to wrap my head around the problems with this statement. 1. It's telling girls to make decisions about the actions and life course based on what guys want (in addition to the innate problems with this, it also contradicts arguments she made earlier) 2. It assumes all women want to marry and thus will find this a problem. 3. It endorses the double standard as she does explicitly point out that the same guys who are glad to take advantage of girls' promiscuous behavior when they are young are likely to not want to marry someone with a sexual past. 4. It assumes that all any man cares about is sex and isn't really capable of caring about a woman as a human being. I don't know about anyone else but I find the idea that a guy would agree to date me, marry me, whatever, because I was withholding sex, to be a pretty disturbing idea. How about him wanting to do those things because he likes my personality? Sure, growing in a overly sexual atmosphere can and does cause damage to many girls and women (yours truly for example) but to frighten them away from sex with the argument that it will make them "fallen women" who are no longer "marriage material" seems likely to cause at least as much damage and emotional neurosis in its own way. I certainly wouldn't recommend this book to my friend who has two young daughters.

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Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (and America, Too!) Hardcover – November 2, 2007

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