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

She first wrote about girls and their sexual experiences, agency, and how they experience sexual pleasure. Now she looks at boys, especially young men who are growing into adulthood in a world that still prides itself on the manly ideal of fitting into a crowd, not showing emotion, and “locker room” talk. Peggy Orenstein uses interviews she had with a select number of boys of different age groups, along with psychologists and academics about how access to pornography and other sexual material is changing the way boys interact with girls, and how age-old stereotypes of how men should act have not changed. This is a fairly frank book, so people easily offended by frank descriptions or the use of language should avoid it. But it covers ground that other, more academic books have not covered. What would be considered groundbreaking is that Orenstein is writing this for a more general audience than other academics. Instead targeting parents, and young boys themselves. She covers different topics in each chapter and moves on a thematic scale, with some of her interview subjects finding a sense of redemption and others still struggling to find out what it means to be a man.