'Boys & Sex' Review — Essential Reading for Everybody

I hadn’t expected to buy this book, but its predecessor Girls & Sex (2016) was just so interesting I couldn’t not. As a read, Boys & Sex doesn’t disappoint, and as far as cultural anthropology can be, it’s a real page-turner. Just like Girls & Sex, Orenstein interviews and researches high school and college-age Americans, but this time, men and trans men, regarding all things sex — from porn to consent to virginity.

Orenstein is smart and astute in both her observation and her writing, and even if I differ (usually only very slightly) on her opinions, I appreciate her clarity and perspective on sexual culture. Her interviews and the data regarding young men are appalling and fascinating and hopeful in equal measures (and weirdly touching at times). Although part of me crosses my fingers in the hope that it is just young men in the US who are this awful, I know that is an entirely wishful thought; they are undoubtedly different shades of terrible everywhere. Be prepared for some truly painful and depressing perspectives on women. The major takeaway is that the young men who hold the most ignorant and misguided views miss out on so much in terms of connection and belonging, ending up burned by their own toxic masculinity.

Boys & Sex is very culturally specific to the US, so if you are outside the culture (as I am) certain things like the Greek college culture (why, oh, why. Really, why?) read like a weird, deeply misguided, social experiment, much like the chastity balls in Girls & Sex. But a majority of the other stuff, particularly from a Western standpoint, feels familiar and relevant. That being said, Orenstein’s case studies and critical commentary are focused on a very small stratum of young people; American high schoolers and college-age folk, a majority of whom are white, middle-class, cis-gendered and straight men. (Although it’s worth noting there is a much greater effort at diverse representation in Boys & Sex, than Girls & Sex, particularly for Black men, and trans and queer folk.) The fact that it is weighted so heavily on this small but powerful demographic is not as huge a limitation as it first seems; it is just another example of white men who need rescuing from themselves, and the trouble they cause through their unfortunate domination of power.

There is an unfortunate timeliness and timelessness to such a book. Boys & Sex was published in early 2020, a year that shined a light on inequalities and injustices caused by a global pandemic, including the rise in domestic violence of which intimate partner violence, be that physical or sexual, is most ubiquitous. The World Health Organisation reports that globally 1 in 3 women have been subjected to physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Given that so much of the violence against women is unreported, and a lot of it so normalised that the victim may not recognise it as abuse or assault, it is safe to assume this is an incredibly conservative estimate. This review will be published in the wake of the Atlanta shootings, a misogynistic hate crime motivated by race and justified by sex, and the murder and abuduction of Sarah Everard in the UK by a serving police office officer, who was not known to her. The threat of male violence is perhaps the most painful aspect of being a woman.

Orenstein’s book covers male attitudes toward women at a formative age. How they think of and behave towards women often coincides with the at best careless, at worse devastating, treatment of women, to enforce either a sense of self, or, appallingly, status in front of peers. Boys & Sex demonstrates the gulf in male comprehension in understanding how their actions can be coercive, manipulative, and abusive. Given how many women’s lives are destroyed by men, which in turn affects all women, a book that lays out the more commonplace violations in such sympathetic and relatable terms can only be a good thing.

By far the biggest limitation of the book is not really the fault of the book its self; I want a UK version, and then I want versions of Girls & Sex and Boys & Sex from everywhere else and covering broader social demographics. And I want them written with Orenstein’s candour and deeply intelligent but consumable prose.

Buy it for all the parents and men in your life, not just the boys.

A version of this review was originally published here.