by Peggy Orenstein
Peggy Orenstein’s book Boys and Sex takes a deep dive into the uncomfortable and unspoken questions of male adolescence. After publishing New York Times Bestseller, Girls and Sex, Peggy switches the narrative and starts including men in the conversations. With over 100 interviews conducted, Peggy gives readers a full understanding of the effects of “locker room banter” and “bro culture” on all high school and college males.
“What they say is scary and heartbreaking and vitally important for us all to hear. This is a bracing, insightful, humane, engaging, invaluable book. And it charts the course for real change.” — (Richard Weissbourd, Senior Lecturer and Faculty Director of Making Caring Common, Harvard Graduate School of Education). The book both breaks my heart and enstows optimism within. Peggy uses her interviews to demonstrate “both an examination of sexual culture and a guide on how to improve it” (Washington Post).
Why read Boys and Sex and not Girls and Sex? I live aspects of Girls and Sex everyday, I yearned to understand and look through the window at the other side of the story; to know what boys go through day in and day out in our new “hookup culture”. When beginning my reading, I longed to know, “Why do men struggle to talk about their emotions?”, “Why do men turn to hookups more often than relationships?”, “How do mens conversations about sexual encounters differ from women?”. Peggy Orenstein digs into each question, while not answering them completely, she futhers readers’ curiosity and encourages them to continue educating themselves on the issues men struggle with due to societal norms. A New York Times review stated, “Every few pages, the boy world cracks open a little bit….I was wrong to presume that young men couldn’t be beautifully well spoken and lucid about issues of love and sex. In fact, that assumption is so common, it’s at the root of our problems”. Because of this, Boys and Sex, provided me with both a window and a mirror where I was able to reflect on my own actions and assumptions and how they affect the behaviour of men. This allowed me to be heavily engaged in the content of the book. It was a two lane road and brought together the aspects of both men and womens sexual behaviours.
Because of how I identify as a person and my level of experience in “the real world” there were certain aspects of Peggy Orenstein’s book that I connected to more so than others. I was able to understand and engage the most with her writing on “locker room banter” because I think the type of language she discusses is prevalent in my community and on social media. Peggy writes on page 28, “Dismissing that as “locker room banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize and abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity” (Orenstein, 28). Claiming something as “just what we do” denies how harmful the words are to a group of people. If “locker room banter” is the norm for men, they will carry that language and thought process outside of the locker room when they are interacting with women because it becomes ingrained into their heads; It becomes second nature. It becomes part of who they are; an identity.
Harro writes upon the ideas of norms in our society and how we are born into a world already influenced by the past generations who formed the roles people play within our society. The structures of oppression are already in place for the young men and women navigating their masculinity and femininity. “Immediately upon our births we begin to be socialized by the people we love and trust the most, our families or the adults who are raising us. They shape our self-concepts and self-perceptions, the norms and rules we must follow, the roles we are taught to play, our expectations for the future,and our dreams” (Harro, 17). In the interviews Peggy conducted, many of the male students said they felt pressured to join in on the “locker room banter” and that they would get judged if they tried to speak out. I think this resonated with me because sports teams claim to be players’ families; a brother/sister hood. But if men don’t feel comfortable calling their brother out on a comment or action that was harmful, is it really a healthy bond? To have a healthy brotherhood, you have to look out for one another and be able to question each other’s ideas, that’s how people grow and society advances. This also made me think about how in society, women are “allowed” to be emotional, while men are expected to be tough and not talk about their emotions; essentially bottle everything up and pretend nothing is bothering you. In many of the interviews, the male students made comments similar to, “I wish they would talk about sex more like girls do, or at least some of the ones I know: they talk about what felt good and what was fun and what the person did right. It’s not so much about conquest” (Orenstein 132). Boys aren’t comfortable in their masculinity often because of society’s “Man Box”. It’s not cool for men to talk about sex in any way other than “locker room banter” and in a bragging manner to their friends, while girls often feel comfortable talking about the good and bad DETAILS of the encounter. Society needs to change in order to open up space for men to comfortably talk about both their emotions and their sex lives. The way in which Peggy writes about both, makes me believe they are very closely linked.
The other main portion that stuck out to me in Boys and Sex is the discussions of sexual assault and rape. As a senior in high school, I am often talked to about the sexual assault that will occur on my college campus, no matter where I end up. I am warned, educated (to a certain extent) and will be leaving Northbrook with a taser and pepper spray on my keychain. Peggy discusses both the effects on men who rape a partner and the effects on men who are raped. I was most engaged with the parts about men who are raped because I feel like in society, that isn’t talked about enough. As a society there is this idea that men are the rapists and women are the victim, all the time, and I am guilty of these thoughts as well. “…that’s kind of like saying we were the least deadly of all the sharks, isn’t it? Like, ‘yeah, we only kill one person a week!’ But you’re still killing people. So what the fuck?” (Orenstein, 202). Boys and Sex made me truly understand the problem with society disregarding the population of men who are raped. Men need the resources to recover just as much as women and Peggy Orenstein’s book made me want to go off and do my own research about the availability of rape recovery resources for men and women on college campus’s and at high schools.
After finishing the book, I believe that every high school junior or senior should read this book before heading off to college and that every parent should read either Boys and Sex or Girls and Sex before their child enters middle school. It is important for the parents to develop an understanding of their child’s generation and their possible future problems, in order to develop a safe space with their child to discuss issues like sex, rape and sexuality. Every teenager just wants to feel like their parent understands them, and often parents don’t know their children as well as they think, and creating a space to talk about sexual “things” is going to led to the child being more trusting and open to their parents. Parents can have a huge role in who their children become, and they need to take the opportunity to grow with their child more than they are.
What The Helle? 