Dirty Little Secrets: Breaking the Silence on Teenage Girls and Promiscuity Paperback – September 1, 2011

I learned so much about how and why young girls turn to promiscuous sex. This is story of the authors own life, and is subtle in its approach. it starts with innocent flirtations and then progresses from there. Every parent, daughter, and male offspring should read this book I praise the author on her courage to write this memoir of her early life and transition into sobriety. Her memoir will stand as a true testament that its never too late to be free of any addiction.

Kerry Cohen asserted in Dirty Little Secrets Breaking the Silence on Teenage Girls and Promiscuity that:"...almost every girl you see. They believe in their hearts that they are worth nothing, that they have little to offer. They believe boys will pull them out of their ordinariness and finally, finally, transform them into someone better than who they are.""They give out blow jobs like kisses and hope for love in return.""But they aren't sex addicts or even love addicts. What they crave is the attention [which is their "dirty little secret"], that moment when a boy looks at them and they can believe that they are worth something to someone. They can believe that they matter.Cohen wrote that despite wide-spread belief to the contrary, girls are sexual and "...have just as much sexual desire and curiosity as boys." And we know that Cohen's claim that girls masturbate can be confirmed by Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies; thus, it isn't surprising that she shared that the Guttmacher Institute reported that:Almost 50% of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 had sex at least once and 27% of girls between the ages of 13 and 16 had sex more than once.Approximately 8.8 million girls between the ages of 15 and 24 acquire a STD every year.And approximately 750,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 get pregnant every year - 82% of them are unplanned.In addition, Cohen wrote that "Thirteen year old girls proudly extol their abilities to give blow jobs, which they do in the bathrooms at parties or at school. Middle and high schoolers have sex parties...and lots of adolescent girls watch porn."Cohen makes a vital point that there's a distinction between "... acting on natural sexual feelings and using male attention and sex to fill emptiness..." In other words, nymphets enjoy sex just as much as boys do, but they often use sex to get the attention that they crave from boys and men.And Cohen points out that the desire to get the attention of the opposite is reinforced by the media. She advised readers to "Take a quick glance at some of the top teen girls' magazines and you see these headlines [like]: "How do Get a Guy's Attention"...[and] just about every Disney princess plot revolves around snagging a man. The Little Mermaid is a perfect example. The main character Ariel doesn't even speak, and then she gives up her entire identity as a mermaid and singer to get her guy."Cohen gives a number of examples of girls who haven't handled the distinction between being sexual and craving attention well e.g.,:12-year-old Lana gave blow jobs regularly.When Kelsey was in the 6th grade she gave a Burger King cashier a handjob during his break14-year-old Lourdes met her 24-year-old boyfriend at an underage clubBut psychologist Marta Meana wrote in a New York Times Magazine piece that "women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic. It is dominated by the yearnings of 'self-love,' by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need." Therefore, a nymphets desire for attention may be more powerful than her sexual desires, which would, at least partially, explain why so many nymphets produce raunchy cellphone pictures and webcam videos, which boys and men desperately crave. For example, Cohen shared how 15-year-old Johanna gets "...a rush from the power..." that comes from the attention she gets on the Internet."Thus, it's a feedback loop i.e., Girls crave attention. Girls use sex to get attention. Boys crave sex. Boys give girls the attention they crave - temporarily. And a boy can only imagine how a girl feels when she gets both attention and sex - two things that she enjoys tremendously.I related the preceding information, because I can verify Cohen's information based on my own research The Allure of Nymphets; however, the following claims made by Cohen are erroneous. She claimed that "...girls who chose men so far out of their age range also tend toward low self-esteem and depression. Many of these girls are looking to replace their abusive or difficult families with new ones." But in the prior 48 pages of the book she surmised that most girls suffer from a low self-esteem - not just the teleiophiles.In addition, she wrote "...girls I interviewed told me they felt that teenage boys were immature and that they like how the older men treated them..." But in the next paragraph she wrote "...men who choose teenage girls tend to be immature and insecure, with egos matching those of teenage boys. Many have criminal histories..." I hope that the contradiction is apparent. And to make the claim that "many" ephebophiles are criminals is preposterous.Lastly, Cohen warns that raunchy teen behavior can lead to raunchy adult behavior if the addiction to attention isn't held under control after marriage. She wrote "When their emptiness, their sense of being worthless, isn't healed through the relationship, they head back out there, certain it means they just didn't find the right one yet."The Allure of Nymphets

I have not quite finished reading the book, however, her previous book was more interesting to me. I think this current book bogs down in too many sociological references. This would be a good book to read if you are a Sociology student.

I think this book should be read by all young teen women and Mothers. It has some very powerful messages. Great book

I raised boys. They were not promiscuous and avoided girls who were. They dated girls long term in high school. Some boys use slutty girls, and others avoid them. I am saying this as it comes across that all boys will assault a loose girl or even have sex with her. Some men just don't like them. Learned a lot from this book I went to a girls school and was thin, tall and innocent looking, so men usually ignored me. Thank goodness. But I remember in gym how the well-developed girls walked around naked while we under-developed ones hid under our towels. And how the boys and men enjoyed looking at these girls. I felt men didn't really like thin girls. How times have changed! We felt like we were girls and not women.

I was hoping and looking for an actual novel and a story to read and this was more of a reference book to me. I didn't like it and didn't go any farther than about 20 pages before I shelved it for good.

This book encourages us to ask a really important question - not when are girls having sex, or with how many people, but WHY?Whether girls and women start young or wait until they are older, we should be more concerned with why they are doing what they are doing and we as a society should work to stop shaming them for their actions and start supporting them in their desire to make good choices and to love and be loved.

Redundant, poorly written, a disappointment.