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    Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
    Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
    Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
    Audiobook7 hours

    Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity

    Written by Peggy Orenstein

    Narrated by Peggy Orenstein

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter now turns her focus to the sexual lives of young men, once again offering ""both an examination of sexual culture and a guide on how to improve it"" (Washington Post).

    Peggy Orenstein’s Girls & Sex broke ground, shattered taboos, and launched conversations about young women’s right to pleasure and agency in sexual encounters. It also had an unexpected effect on its author: Orenstein realized that talking about girls is only half the conversation. Boys are subject to the same cultural forces as girls—steeped in the same distorted media images and binary stereotypes of female sexiness and toxic masculinity—which equally affect how they navigate sexual and emotional relationships. In Boys & Sex, Peggy Orenstein dives back into the lives of young people to once again give voice to the unspoken, revealing how young men understand and negotiate the new rules of physical and emotional intimacy.

    Drawing on comprehensive interviews with young men, psychologists, academics, and experts in the field, Boys & Sex dissects so-called locker room talk; how the word ""hilarious"" robs boys of empathy; pornography as the new sex education; boys’ understanding of hookup culture and consent; and their experience as both victims and perpetrators of sexual violence. By surfacing young men’s experience in all its complexity, Orenstein is able to unravel the hidden truths, hard lessons, and important realities of young male sexuality in today’s world. The result is a provocative and paradigm-shifting work that offers a much-needed vision of how boys can truly move forward as better men.

    Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 7, 2020
    ISBN9780062984715
    Author

    Peggy Orenstein

    Peggy Orenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of Boys & Sex, Don’t Call Me Princess, Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Waiting for Daisy, Flux, and Schoolgirls. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, she has written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Afar, The New Yorker, and other publications, and has contributed commentary to NPR’s All Things Considered and PBS NewsHour. She lives in Northern California.

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    Reviews for Boys & Sex

    4.5/5

    108 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is essential reading for influencing societal progress on this topic.
    • 1/5
      FJB LETS GO BRANDON!!!!!!! Democratic skank. Let’s go Brandon Democratic POS.
    • 5/5
      I am glad this book exists! There must be more conversations around this topic. The book gives you great insights into the complexity of modern day relationships and discusses important questions around consent, hookups, and masculinity ( and many more). Definitely both guys and girls can learn from this book, as it includes personal stories supported by numerous research results. It made me think about my own experiences and beliefs on this topic and i gained a lot of new information and fresh perspective. I feel like it helped me understand more guys, myself and the society.
    • 5/5
      This is very important, especially for parents of boys.
    • 4/5
      This is the followup to Orenstein's book on Girls and Sex. In order to be comparable, she restricts herself to a similar set, which has class limitations (she acknowledges this upfront). However she does specifically examine LGBTQ teens and pays specific attention to nonwhite kids.

      It's a brisk, easy read that relies heavily on interviews, with backup research: the effect of porn on teenage boys (poor), consent, masculinity, assault, hookup culture. The key takeaways here are that we need to be having a lot more conversations with our sons about their feelings, about healthy relationships, about sexuality, about how porn differs from real sex (especially when you consume a great deal of porn before having ever had real world experience), assault, hookup culture and being able to decide what you want out of an encounter, and consent--not just verbal yes and no, but reading emotions, not coercing women, and what respect really means.
    • 4/5
      Negotiating sexuality and relationships today is arguably more complicated than when I was teenager and as the mother of two teenage boys (and girls) I hoped Boys & Sex might provide me with some insights into areas I may have not considered as part of my discussions with them.The ‘sex talk’ has never been a single conversation in our house, it’s been the subject of casual discourse over the years as they’ve grown, often initiated as the result of news stories, gossip, or issues faced by their peers. We’ve talked about most of the topics explored in this book, though I’ve learnt from Orenstein via the young men that she interviews, that I can do more.Thankfully my sons are surrounded by good role models, but one of the most significant takeaways for me from the book is that my boys need the men in their life, particularly their father, to better verbalise their experience, opinions and feelings about relationships, sex and masculinity. Despite my best intentions, it will be the other men with whom they connect that will significantly shape their response to the situations raised in Boys & Sex, and my empathy is not a substitute for their shared experience.I do feel Orenstein’s sampling for her research was quite small (100 young men), and very USA-centric, which meant for me there were elements I didn’t find directly relevant. Racial issues and the experience of college/university life differs here for example, also a Personal Development, Health, and Physical Education syllabus from years K-10 is compulsory in all public schools in Australia. In general this is a medically accurate, current, and inclusive program that explores physical, social and emotional aspects of sexuality in some detail (that abstinence-only is still a feature in any modern day curriculum is absurd). That said I do prefer the anecdotal approach Orenstein has taken, as scientific methodology tends to lack urgency and nuance. I would recommend Boys & Sex to parents, and suggest it be shared and discussed with teens of both sexes, as both will benefit from the information. An extensive bibliography provides additional resources to ensure we raise “...our boys to be the men we know they can become.”
    • 5/5
      An excellently and accessibly written book centering around the conversations that we must have with boys if we want to raise them to be whole, healthy, and loving men who contribute to breaking rape culture instead of participating in it. Worth your time no matter who you are, but critical if you are a parent to boys.I received a complimentary copy of this book via a Goodreads giveaway. Many thanks to all involved in providing me with this opportunity.
    • 4/5
      Both sad and hopeful about the difficulties that her interviewees—American boys, mostly middle-class or wealthy, but varying in race, sexuality, and cis/trans status—face in navigating sexuality. I was most struck by the comment that they’re getting a clear message to “respect women” but no guidance in what that means, as if we handed car keys to teens and told them not to hit pedestrians. Orenstein also suggests, following Dan Savage, that gay sexuality holds important clues for healthy sexuality of any kind: in a same-sex encounter, she suggests, nothing specific is supposed to happen by default, so a key question must be asked: “what are you into?” Boys and girls generally, she argues, should be taught to ask and answer that question, and hear their partners’ answers.