Review of Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity by Peggy Orenstein

We have all heard the tired refrain “boys will be boys.” Challenging this adage has been one of the main undertakings of feminism in the past half-century. Yet how successful have we been in dismantling rape culture and teaching consent? More broadly, what messages do boys and young men receive about sex and sexuality, and how is that influencing their behaviour as they navigate their first intimate relationships? In Boys & Sex, Peggy Orenstein explores these touchy subjects by going to the source: interviewing young men in high school and college.

This 2020 book is a follow-up to Orenstein’s 2011 Girls & Sex, which I haven’t read. I might go back and read it someday. I chose to read Boys & Sex because I feel like I have a strong grasp on how girls and women are told to deal with sex. Despite living the first thirty years of my life as a man (I realized I am trans in 2020), I don’t have any clear idea of what is expected of men when it comes to sex. Reading this book was a revelation in the sense that it confirmed this feeling: none of the experiences described in this book remotely resemble anything I thought, felt, or did during my adolescence or young adulthood. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to being trans and how much to attribute to being ace, yet here we are. What an affirming read in that sense.

Orenstein covers a lot of broad themes chapter by chapter. Some of these include porn, hookup culture, queer men, race, consent, compulsory sexuality, toxic masculinity, and how to talk to our boys. She editorializes a lot, interjecting with her own opinions and estimations of her interview subjects. I think this is a good thing; it is a poor journalist who uncritically reports on what her sources say without offering context, correction, or in some cases, rebuttal. At the same time, Orenstein does her best to “get out of the way” of her subjects, seeking not to tell their stories for them but instead share their unique perspectives.

She has a whole chapter on queer and trans men, noting in her introduction that she regrets Girls & Sex overlooks trans women. I found this chapter in particular super interesting. Although the experiences of trans women and trans men are often thought of as inverses, they are not symmetrical. So it wasn’t so much that I was like, “Oooh, this person is ‘going the other way’” as I was fascinated by the idea of a person who had the experience of compulsory sexuality from a young woman’s perspective before ultimately transitioning and looking at it as a man. In contrast, as I said above, I feel like I noped out of that from the start, so I’m tabula rasa in that regard.

The same was true of the chapter on hookup culture. As Orenstein shares subjects’ stories of feeling the intense pressure to hook up and how many of them regret it as they have aged or are glad they’ve moved away from such behaviour, all I could think was, “That was not me.” Not in a superior kind of way, just a bemused, “Was this happening all around me in high school?” (It was!) and “Is this what I was ‘missing’ in university?” In this respect, Boys & Sex is enlightening for me because I never talked to my peers about this stuff back when we all thought I was a boy. Orenstein reminds us that boys and men are, contrary to stereotypes, incredibly thoughtful when it comes to these subjects. They’re just often discouraged from talking about it.

The book finishes with an intense chapter around how to have difficult conversations. Orenstein shares the story of a young man who eventually realizes that he was the perpetrator of assault on a woman he hooked up with in college. At the time, he didn’t see it that way and saw himself as a “good man” who respected women and looked for consent—but as he started to understand how she remembered that night, he was ashamed. Orenstein shares how he and the woman have undergone a kind of restorative justice process. It’s a fascinating story because it speaks to something I think we often overlook.

Lots of people say, “Men are trash,” and then the defenders of our young men say, “Hashtag not all men.” Which is true! But if that is where we stop, without doing anything about the men and boys inculcated into rape culture, then we aren’t changing anything. Orenstein points out that our current system is raising really flawed (and fucked up) boys and men, and they need compassion and grace as we deprogram the toxic parts of their masculinity. That doesn’t mean unconditional forgiveness or freedom from consequences—but it has to mean a more nuanced conversation.

Boys & Sex is a valuable contribution to that social conversation. It’s thorough yet not too long. It does its best to be intersectional—I didn’t talk too much about it, but I really liked the chapter on race—I think the one lens I really noticed was missing was disability. Obviously, Orenstein’s is not the last word on this subject. This is one important contribution among many others that have come before or since. But if, like me, you feel particularly out of the loop when it comes to how boys and men in Canada and the US are raised to think about and act on their sexuality, this book will open your eyes.