In Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Carol Platt Liebau says popular culture is undermining girls’ sense of worth in their most vulnerable, formative years and glorifying destructive behaviour.

“The overwhelming lesson teenagers are now learning from the world around them is that being ‘sexy’ is the ultimate accolade, trumping intelligence, character and all other accomplishments at every stage of a woman's life,” said Liebau, a political analyst and the review's first female managing editor.

“The new female imperative is that it is only through promiscuity and sexual aggression that girls can achieve admiration and recognition,” she adds.

Citing films such as Cruel Intentions and Mean Girls, the music and videos of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Lil’ Kim, she says, “In a culture that celebrates Paris Hilton, thong underwear and songs like My Humps — where the female singer expounds the sexual magnetism of her breasts and buttocks — there’s scant recognition or respect for female modesty or achievement that isn't coupled with sex appeal.”

“Girls are being led to believe they're in control when it comes to sexual relationships, but they're actually living in a profoundly anti-feminist landscape where girls compete for attention on the basis of how much they are sexually willing for the boys.”

In Prude, to be published in Britain by Centre Street Books this month, Liebau questions how society has created a climate in which being raunchy is believed to make girls look cool and being called a “slut” is preferable to being labelled a ‘prude’. “By most measures, young women have never had it better, given the breathtaking opportunities before them and the magnificent advantages they enjoy,” she said.

In her book, Liebau charts how the same “creeping sexualising” of young girls is endemic across a mass media which, she says, constitutes the main source of information about sex for 13 to 15-year-olds. “Over the last few decades, the West has experienced an incremental but aggressive sexualising of its culture,” she says. Today there exists a status quo in which almost everything seems focused on what's going on ‘below the waist,’ she adds.

Liebau is keen to deflect any accusations of prudishness. “This is about far more than short-term sexual mores,” she says. “Living in an overly sexualised culture takes a toll. The emphasis on sexiness, revealing fashions and the overvaluing of physical appeal creates pressure to measure up to bone-slim models or celebrities leading to unrealistic expectations among young women about how their bodies should actually look,” she observes.