Book Review: Boys and Sex (2020). Peggy Orenstein.

After the success of Girls and Sex (2016), which I previously reviewed, and her experience researching and writing it, Orenstein decided it wasn’t either fair, or complete, to leave out the boys’ side of the story.   So she initiated a similar set of candid conversations with young high school and college boys, to find out how it felt to be a boy trying to navigate early sexuality in our society.  

Not surprisingly, she found out plenty about boys’ use of and experience with consuming large amounts of pornography online, but discovered that for many boys (as with the girls), watching porn was more an attempt to know what to expect and to do in sexual encounters than a real pleasure in itself.  

Orenstein also finds out more about the social pressure that boys feel in a wide variety of settings (especially college fraternities) to have a large number of sexual “conquests”, and to avoid sharing their emotions with partners, or getting involved in ongoing love relationships.   

In one particularly powerful section, she talks about the impact of colleges’ and the courts’ changing responses in the #METOO era in how they handle young men who have been abusive to women.  She talks about the often-difficult nature of defining and recognizing consent, particularly in alcohol-infused situations, and describes some of the ways now being developed to promote accountability and greater awareness in victimizers, in the hope of preventing a lifetime of these sorts of exploitative and destructive behaviors toward women by these men.

More so than in Girls and Sex, she also explores some of the experiences and attitudes of gay and trans boys and young men, as they try to establish their own sexual identities and comfort zones in the midst of the pressured, predominantly heterosexual young male environments and social scenes of school and college.

This companion book, like Girls and Sex, is a fascinating, thoughtful and well-researched look at what ails our current approach to raising our children to have healthy sexual attitudes and behaviors, and what we could do to make it better.  Highly recommended.