LOOSE GIRL- KERRY COHEN

This is a must have!!

All of us women have a special power that men do not have. We have the ability to seduce and get what we need by using our body parts. Using that, plus our sometimes manipulative talking, allows us to be a very powerful being. Unfortunately by doing this, we are not only disrespecting the person we have turned our attention on, but also we are disrespecting ourselves. Kerry Cohen does just that. In her memoir, Loose Girl, she shows us just what women and young girls are capable of and how our society can take advantage of that.

At the age of eleven, Kerry realizes this power she has when an older man gives her a suggestive smile while he is checking out her young, maturing body. This power she had was lying dormant until this point in time. She got an adrenaline rush, and decided that she really liked how it made her feel. From then on out she started to seek out men, using her body to get their attention. She hung out at clubs, went into the city, went to boys’ homes that she didn’t even know, and hung out with the wrong crowd to accomplish this. She starts to sleep with a lot of these boys and men and eventually even loses count of how many she has slept with. Some people in her life start to lose respect for her and I think at one point she even starts to lose respect for herself.

Kerry realizes along that way that what she really wants is to feel loved. Her parents are split
up, and are not very good role models to boot. She and her sister have grown distant as well. Kerry saw her mother act sexually inappropriate with her sister, and her father tried to climb into bed with her one day. The boundaries of what are sexually appropriate and what is not has been blurred for this young girl. With that image being skewed and her hunger to feel powerful, Kerry gets herself into a routine that is very damaging to her. She has to deal with heartbreak after heartbreak, gets used, contracts STDs, etc. She eventually realizes that she is doing something wrong and that if she keeps acting the way she is acting she will never find true love. Kerry goes to great lengths to get some help for herself.

This memoir does not leave anything out and Kerry Cohen allows you to feel her greatest triumphs and her greatest failures. I was very impressed with this book and how honest Kerry Cohen was able to be with her audience. Her writing was smooth and easy to follow and she gave us just enough detail to really pack a punch. I think this is an excellent book for all young teens to read. The more we can educate these girls the better. All of the events that take place in this book are all things that could easily happen to any one of us. If you have young children and want to try everything you can to help them succeed in a very tough society, where they get lots of attention for all of the wrong reasons, then this is a book you should make sure they own.

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