Boys & Sex by Peggy Orenstein

Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
By Peggy Orenstein
Harper Collins, 2020

Peggy Orenstein’s eye-opening 2016 book Girls & Sex took a blunt but nuanced look at some essential questions confronting the sexual activities, conceptions, and misconceptions of young women in the 21st century, and thanks to the combination of Orenstein’s flexible, wide-ranging questions and her remarkable skills at teasing out the patterns and exceptions woven throughout the answers, the book was a continuous revelation, the kind of inquiry that feels immediately like a modern classic.

Now from Harper Orenstein provides an equally-indispensable companion volume, Boys & Sex, which duplicates the methodology of the previous book: dozens of interviews, a great deal of supporting research, and most of all the author’s consistently superb analyses. 

A wary reader might think otherwise at first. Some of Orenstein’s initial scene-settings strike dismaying notes of bland censure: 

When caught out, boys typically claim that they thought they were being “funny,” just joking around. And in a way that makes sense - if, that is, you have been denied full emotional expression, been trained to suppress empathy, and consider cruelty, “ribbing,” or making demeaning sexual comments about women to be forms of bonding. Such “humor” may even, when left unexamined, seem like an extension of the gross-out comedy of childhood; little boys are famous for their fart jokes, booger jokes, poop jokes, barf jokes. It’s how they test boundaries, understand the human body, gain a little social cred with other guys. But, as with sports, their glee in that can both enable and camouflage sexism.

It’s always a discouraging thing to find “humor” in scare-quotes, but the natural question arising from such scolding is: what is Orenstein suggesting be done with the thousands of grown men who still find that whole deplorable list of items funny? Must they all be monorailed to the nearest re-education center? 

Luckily, the bulk of the book is brilliant and balanced. Once again Orenstein amasses a large amount of first-hand responses and then bears down on them with a clarity that’s always thrilling to watch and often oddly counter-intuitive. “Despite their apparent mortification, boys do want their parents to talk to them about physical intimacy, for someone to go beyond the classic don’ts: don’t have sex, don’t get anyone pregnant, don’t get a disease, don’t be disrespectful,” Ornstein writes, for instance. “They are particularly eager to have their fathers talk to them about their own experience with sex, love, even regret.” 

Ultimately, as in Girls & Sex, the future comes down to a question of knowledge - and, as noted, the conscientious transmission of that knowledge. Orenstein sees this route as infinitely preferable to the anger and retributive urges that tend to be evoked by boorish sexual behaviors in boys and young men. “Restorative justice may be promising, but it’s still an after-the-fact solution,” she writes. “Until young people - girls as well as boys - are better educated about gender socialization, sexual consent, ethical engagement, mature relationships, and diverse organization, we will be stuck in damage control mode.”

This book and its predecessor constitute the necessary alternative to damage control. Here’s hoping parents are reading.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.