In 2016, the journalist Peggy Orenstein published “Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape,” a best-selling study of casual hookups, pornography, pop culture, and other aspects of young women’s sexual lives. In the years since “Girls & Sex” was released, the “new landscape” that Orenstein described has shifted. As she puts it, “The pervasiveness, the sheer magnitude of sexual misconduct across every sector of society by men young and old became glaringly, disturbingly obvious.” And yet, as she undertook her reporting for her latest book, “Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity,” she came to realize that a society which painfully required new approaches to masculinity was still imparting outdated notions of it to young men.
Drawing from interviews with more than a hundred young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, Orenstein makes the case for a positive and constructive approach to raising them. “Boys, too, then, need a strong counternarrative to develop grounded, realistic perspectives on women, men, sex, and love,” she writes. “Frankly, without it, there is a chance that they won’t see women as fully human, and that they will view sex as something a female partner does for them and that they do to her.” Orenstein found, however, that the counternarrative was tricky in its own way: many of these young men, although “able to reel off the excesses of masculinity,” were still treating women with disrespect and callousness.
I recently spoke twice by phone with Orenstein. During our conversations, which have been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how much we know about pornography’s impact on young men, the ways to broaden the aims of sex education, and whether men’s ideas of masculinity have changed since the nineteen-fifties.
You write in the book, “Feminism may have afforded girls an escape from the constraints of conventional femininity, offered them alternative identities as women and a language with which to express the myriad problems-that-have-no-name, but it has made few inroads with boys. Whether you label it the ‘mask of masculinity,’ ‘toxic masculinity,’ or ‘the man box,’ the traditional conception of manhood still holds sway, dictating how boys think, feel, and behave.” You then talk about men who “internalize masculine norms.” What are “masculine norms” today?
On some level, things have changed a great deal. Guys are more likely to see women as equal in the classroom, or in leadership roles, or have female friends, or gay male friends, as well. But I would always ask my interview subjects to describe the ideal guy to me, and they would immediately sound like they were channelling some version of 1955. It was athleticism, dominance, and aggression. Actually, it was some weird combination of aggressive and chill, which—I don’t know how you do that. And wealth, sexual conquest, and the big one was emotional suppression. You could argue that there were very different masculine norms a hundred years ago, but it was the classic nineteen-fifties idea of that very stoic, very suppressed kind of man.
So you mean norms from the nineteen-fifties, more than “toxic masculinity” per se?
I don’t like to use that term. I am really trying to back away from it, and in the book, I try to put it in quotes, because I think it is not really serving us as well as a phrase people are starting to use now, which is “precarious masculinity,” which is a little less negative and demonizing. And, particularly when I am writing about high-school-age boys and young men, a lot of this was about not only talking about the issues of sexual misconduct and the revelations the #MeToo movement has brought up but talking to them about what they can do and should do, and what creates a more positive environment, and how to help them have mutually gratifying personal relationships.
But I am definitely looking at those rigid norms, which hardened after the nineteen-fifties, and have continued. My field is not the history of masculinity, but we know that boys who hold certain rigid norms around the idea that masculinity is associated with sexual conquest and dominance and aggression are at risk of a lot of things. They are at risk of harming others, they are more likely to binge-drink, they are more likely to get in car accidents, be violent and consider committing suicide, and have fewer friends. It is not a great place to be.
In a piece you wrote for The Atlantic, which is partially adapted from the book, you argued, “We have to purposefully and repeatedly broaden the masculine repertoire for dealing with disappointment, anger, desire. We have to say not just what we don’t want from boys but what we do want from them. Instructing them to ‘respect women’ and to ‘not get anyone pregnant’ isn’t enough.” Why isn’t that enough?
That really isn’t enough to tell anybody, even before the #MeToo revelations, even before the discussion of consent, to only tell your child, “Don’t get anyone pregnant. Don’t get a disease.” It was hardly adequate sexual education. But now boys are in a situation where the expectations have changed, where there is a whole new discussion about consent and what constitutes misconduct, and having ramifications for that misconduct, and they are drenched in a media culture that tells them over and over about male sexual entitlement and female sexual submission. It is a whole culture of conquest, that “hit it and quit it” is what they should be after, and those two things are very much in conflict. And what parents would tell their boys, if they told them anything, was to “respect women,” and “respect women” meant pretty much nothing to them. As one guy said to me, “It’s kind of like telling someone who is learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies, and then handing them the car keys.” Of course, you shouldn’t run over any little old ladies, but you don’t know how to drive.
Right, but it seemed like you were arguing that this had to go beyond sex education, that society needed a broader new way of talking to men about masculinity separate from sex. Is that accurate?
Absolutely, and I think those things are absolutely related, because one of the things that I think scares us about sex as Americans is that we want to put it off into this silo. And when we are talking to our kids about it, we act like it is separate from all other aspects of life and who we are. But the truth is that talking to them about sex is not just talking to them about sex. It’s talking to them about gender. It’s talking to them about power. It’s talking to them about our ideas of masculinity and femininity. It’s talking to them about the media. It’s talking to them about culture. For the most part, people would rather poke themselves in the eye with a fork than talk to their children about sex, but there are a whole bunch of conversations that radiate outward from that, which are just as crucial.
So what would this positive vision look like?
I think we have to help boys broaden their emotional repertoire so they have a broader sense of what it means to deal with disappointment, to deal with sadness. Boys funnel that whole bucket of emotions—betrayal, frustration, disappointment, sadness, fear—into anger. That’s what they learn from the time they are very little, from the get-go. They are in a more impoverished emotional environment than girls. And, when parents do talk to boys, they really narrow down the spectrum to happiness and anger. Is this all about sex? Not on the surface. But when you rob people of the ability to feel and express the whole range of human emotions in an appropriate way, you also undermine their ability to connect and have the kinds of relationships we want our boys to have. And, when they are disconnected from vulnerability and emotion, that plays into ideas about the culture of conquest. And it plays into having disconnected sexual interactions, on one end, and, at the far end, potential coercion and misconduct.
How did your research on boys make you think differently about something or some things in your earlier book and work on girls?
It gave clarity, or put some meat, on things girls would talk about. For instance, girls would often complain about guys who ignored them the day after a hookup. And then talking to guys about why they would avert their eyes from someone they had sex with the night before was really interesting, because it would always come down to what is at the heart of what I am writing about in this book, which is fear of vulnerability. One guy said to me, “Well, I don’t know if she thinks it was a one-off at a party or if she thinks it is something more, and I don’t want to be the guy who tries to connect, and then have her say, ‘That was just a party thing.’ ” So he said, “If there is that question mark there, I am not going to look weak.” And I said, “So you would rather miss the opportunity to connect with somebody than take that tiny emotional risk of saying hi?” And he just went, “Yeah.”
There is a Medium post that was widely read a couple of years ago about the so-called Softboy, who knows how to manipulate women. It reads, in part, “The Softboy knows this behavior is selfish and cruel, though his desire to get laid can trump this. He feels shame. He does it again. He wants to know if you’re mad at him. He already knows. . . . Obviously, he is an Ally. . . . He hasn’t texted you back for a reason; he was not blowing you off. He’s had a Weird Day. Or maybe he’s Trying To Figure Some Shit Out. Sometimes, he finds pride in declaring that he Just Needs A Night To Himself.” This is funny, but I think most people who have dated or know people who have dated recently know it’s pretty acute. How does it fit into what you are saying? Are men being manipulative with new notions of masculinity?
One of the boys that I talked to was basically a Softboy. He called himself a “feminist fuckboy,” which meant that he could say all the right things, knew all the right language. He ran consent workshops for men at his school. And that’s part of why I say consent is the beginning of these conversations, not the end of these conversations, because he was nonetheless using the skewed ratio of men to women that put men more in control of the hookup culture to his advantage, and he knew it. He was still using partners as disposable. He was still manipulative. But he was legal. So I think there is a way we can evolve some of the ideas and layer them on or kind of stretch them. There are tensions within the way our ideas about gender and sex are evolving right now. That is what is so fascinating to me, beyond even the desire to make the world more expansive for the young people.
So they feel more like complex tensions than simple dishonesty or manipulation?
No, they can be dishonest and manipulative! For sure. The components of that dishonesty and manipulation now versus twenty or thirty years ago reflects something fundamental in the culture and the specific tensions of the moment. That particular boy was recognizing that he had done that, and coming to terms with that, and I was challenging him on that. He starts out by saying you can be loving and respectful in hookup culture, and talks about his practice of consent, etc. But then he goes along and starts telling me about how manipulative and a little bit unethical he has been in his hookups, and says that maybe he should be thinking about that. There are all kinds of ways people can be unethical and manipulative, but it’s interesting what the trappings are at any given time. And right now these trappings can look like the boy who has the feminist veneer but is still doing the same old stuff. That’s why talking about sexual ethics, and not just sexual legality, is really important.
Your book doesn’t really delve into this, but are you making an argument about biology at all? You keep talking about men and what they need. Do you want to weigh in and say they need these things, in part, because of how they are “wired”?
[Laughs.] No. What we know is that nurture becomes nature. You see that all the time. The sorts of things that we learn as small people or from the media that we absorb or from the messages we get from family shape whatever that clay is of how we are born.
But there is certainly no evidence that boys have less capacity for empathy at birth than girls do, so that is learned behavior about what it means to be masculine. There is a classic study where they show a baby being startled by a video of a jack-in-the-box, and when the adults are told in advance that the baby is male, regardless of whether the baby is male, they are much more likely to project the response that the baby is having as anger. We see that over and over. Mothers have a tendency to use a broader range of emotional language and more emotional language with their daughters than they do with their sons.
Kids are bombarded with messages in the media about male sexual entitlement and female sexual subjectification. We have long recognized how those messages can undermine girls’ self-esteem and reduce girls to their bodies and affect their cognition, all these different things. But boys are cooking in that same stew, and I would argue in some ways the temperature is higher. And we never say anything to them. We give them no critical lens or media literacy. Parents and activists and advocates and everybody who works with girls have been so conscious of trying to equip girls to deal with the media culture that comes at them. But we are at a much more primitive state with boys, and I think that is really one place where we can really step up and make a difference.
I wasn’t sure what to make of your porn chapter. You report a lot of stuff that seems not great about young people watching porn, but do you feel that there is enough data to make broad claims about its impact?
I don’t think that we really know enough. However, in some ways, it doesn’t matter whether we do or don’t know. Our kids are part of a giant experiment of what it means to be steeped in this culture, and not just with porn but with mainstream media and social media, and what it means to be growing up with these images that are constantly bombarding them. And what I do know is that we have to help them decode them, and we don’t have the luxury to be silent about it.
We have to start talking to young men—not to say, “Don’t use porn,” or to shame them for it, but to help them understand what is real and what’s not real and what’s missing. They will say, “I know it’s not real. I know the difference between fantasy and reality.” That’s the line. But the fact is that that is not how media works. Media influences your thoughts and feelings and beliefs, and they have no actual personal experience when they are looking at this stuff. What you see in the research is that boys who use porn are more likely to believe the images they are looking at are real. I don’t know where they get control groups for these types of studies, Isaac, honestly.
What was the demographic makeup of the boys you talked to?
They were either college-bound or in college, and most of them were in that broad swath we call the middle class. All different ethnicities, different religions. They were from small towns, suburbs, cities. I tried to overrepresent talking to boys of color, which is something I didn’t break out in “Girls & Sex” and wanted to break out more in the boy book.
You raised the question in the book of how your interviews might have been different if you were a man. What is your answer now?
I think that there were certain advantages to being a woman, and I think the main advantage was that, with a woman, guys felt more comfortable dropping the pose, dropping that wall, and exposing more emotional vulnerability to me. They were pretty blunt. It’s not like they were pulling any punches in their language. They were telling me about their sexual interactions, their porn use, the times that they felt that they crossed lines or possibly assaulted somebody. They tell me all that stuff.
