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411 reviews for:
Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
4.25 AVERAGE
411 reviews for:
Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity
4.25 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This book was difficult to read as a survivor of SA. I found the author to be too sympathetic to boys struggles under patriarchal conditions as well as dismissive of their individual culpability and the impact their actions have on girls. The book may be helpful for “older” parental figures but as someone who is of a similar age to the boys being interviewed, I found the book to be lacking and redundant.
fast-paced
Again, very impressive work by Peggy Orenstein. Her ability to connect with young people really shows. This one reads even more smoothly than her previous books. The first response in my head is ... this is less heavy than her books on girls. (Maybe it is actually heavier than I felt but because I'm not a boy...)
Her appeal to parents of boys is really heartfelt and sincere. It seems something very obvious but similar to some of the difficult things in the book, people really can be not aware of something that seems very obvious and that leads to a very much less than ideal culture.
Her appeal to parents of boys is really heartfelt and sincere. It seems something very obvious but similar to some of the difficult things in the book, people really can be not aware of something that seems very obvious and that leads to a very much less than ideal culture.
informative
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual harassment
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
i found the author’s tone patronizing, she had clear and strong bias and the stories felt cherrypicked. i actually skipped ahead and didnt read the entire third chapter because of this. i particularly hated that and the second chapter on porn, on which she characterizes the medium so flatly and doesn’t stop to acknowledge the ways in which it can be beneficial. i was hoping for a more open-ended, wide range of stories and experiences. Nothing in the book really surprised me, although i am a sex ed teacher maybe i’m not the target audience. the information felt already dated for having been published only 5 years ago. the last fee chapters on boys experiences as the victims of assault, and on restorative justice were intriguing enough to get me past the finish line.
Well-researched. I feel the weight of being a parent all the more after hearing these boys’ accounts of the pressures they feel and all the harm that is done to them and the girls/women with whom they act out the masculinity they believe they are expected to embody.
An important, must read featuring the deconstruction of toxic masculinity as well as the construction of a new, refined framework of modern day masculinity. Truly eye-opening.
The quoting of Shafia Zaloom aside, this book is an incredible addition to the conversation about how to shift sex and rape culture.
A real model of “children are the future” if we can properly support and equip them.
A real model of “children are the future” if we can properly support and equip them.
I don't know how to rate this. I was looking forward to reading it. But, I honestly didn't find anything new-to-me. There is nothing here that I haven't read before or have seen in documentaries and other presentations. Even the added shock value of the gross, fetish porn thing? Seen that documentary on tv as well. Already had the discussion with my boys. Perhaps my expectations were too high, thus my disappointment. It is very short but there is multiple pages of references at the end where I could read more. Maybe I will wade through it. Maybe I won't.
My boys and I (of course) have had numerous conversations in the wake of the ME TOO movement regarding respect and consent. I guess I was just hoping for more to help me open up the conversation. My boys are 17 and 15. They are very different and my youngest has been feeling frustrated about how to be a white male at this time and this era. He, in particular, feels the negativity -- whether it is true or not -- he feels like he is painted as the bad guy. I also find myself feeling frustrated at times. I find it difficult to know what to say. As a woman, I have always stressed the importance of ALWAYS being respectful to their girl friends, while maintaining respect for themselves. When alcohol and drugs are mixed in, that makes it all the more difficult. I did think this book tackled that partying theme. But, do we really need a book to tell us that our inhibitions go out the window when we drink?
Sadly, I came away from this read with the feeling that things have not progressed from when I was a teenager. There may have been no cell phones back then, but things still happened. And, growing up in a small town, EVERYONE would know about it. Maybe not necessarily parents, but your peers would know. I did love that Orenstein showed that boys do want to communicate their feelings with parents in an open way. I have one boy who is very open with communication and one who is not as open. (I sometimes wish the communicative one wasn't quite so open as the topics can get a tad uncomfortable
My boys and I (of course) have had numerous conversations in the wake of the ME TOO movement regarding respect and consent. I guess I was just hoping for more to help me open up the conversation. My boys are 17 and 15. They are very different and my youngest has been feeling frustrated about how to be a white male at this time and this era. He, in particular, feels the negativity -- whether it is true or not -- he feels like he is painted as the bad guy. I also find myself feeling frustrated at times. I find it difficult to know what to say. As a woman, I have always stressed the importance of ALWAYS being respectful to their girl friends, while maintaining respect for themselves. When alcohol and drugs are mixed in, that makes it all the more difficult. I did think this book tackled that partying theme. But, do we really need a book to tell us that our inhibitions go out the window when we drink?
Sadly, I came away from this read with the feeling that things have not progressed from when I was a teenager. There may have been no cell phones back then, but things still happened. And, growing up in a small town, EVERYONE would know about it. Maybe not necessarily parents, but your peers would know. I did love that Orenstein showed that boys do want to communicate their feelings with parents in an open way. I have one boy who is very open with communication and one who is not as open. (I sometimes wish the communicative one wasn't quite so open as the topics can get a tad uncomfortable
This book is, in some ways, very good. Ironically, this is what makes it somewhat dangerous, and part of a larger phenomenon of woke-enough liberal commentary that hinders any structural analysis that might be useful in actually dealing with any social problems.
The book is structured as a sequence of chapters centered on somewhat-independent themes, framed through case studies of interviews that the author has done with young people.
The themes are, roughly speaking, the correct ones to analyze if you're interested in a survey of the ways in which our capitalist, patriarchal social structures manifest themselves -- racism, dehumanization of women, machismo, discrimination against LGBTQ people, rape culture, etc.
Unfortunately, the descriptions seem to imply that these things are 1) disconnected 2) come out of nowhere. At no point is the word "capitalism" dropped, as if that isn't relevant to understanding the underlying *reasons* for any of these things. Hmm, perhaps it might be useful to get a sense of WHY it is that there is such pressure for young men in America to have notions of masculinity as aggressive? The author does not seem to agree, and presents everything as a sequence of (oh so sad!) vignettes with the occasional piece of advice that, most likely, won't be useful to you ("COACHES NEED TO DO BETTER WITH THEIR LOCKER ROOM ENVIRONMENTS" -- uh, okay?).
Ultimately, this book is unhelpful: it gives us a description of the problems that we face and pays lip service to the *existence* of structural issues that cause them (racism, misogyny, etc.), while framing things in a way that does not encourage people to understand a bigger picture and history of toxic masculinity. This neutralizes peoples' drive to engage in effective political action, and like most "self-help"-y things, prompts an individual view of systemic problems.
The book is structured as a sequence of chapters centered on somewhat-independent themes, framed through case studies of interviews that the author has done with young people.
The themes are, roughly speaking, the correct ones to analyze if you're interested in a survey of the ways in which our capitalist, patriarchal social structures manifest themselves -- racism, dehumanization of women, machismo, discrimination against LGBTQ people, rape culture, etc.
Unfortunately, the descriptions seem to imply that these things are 1) disconnected 2) come out of nowhere. At no point is the word "capitalism" dropped, as if that isn't relevant to understanding the underlying *reasons* for any of these things. Hmm, perhaps it might be useful to get a sense of WHY it is that there is such pressure for young men in America to have notions of masculinity as aggressive? The author does not seem to agree, and presents everything as a sequence of (oh so sad!) vignettes with the occasional piece of advice that, most likely, won't be useful to you ("COACHES NEED TO DO BETTER WITH THEIR LOCKER ROOM ENVIRONMENTS" -- uh, okay?).
Ultimately, this book is unhelpful: it gives us a description of the problems that we face and pays lip service to the *existence* of structural issues that cause them (racism, misogyny, etc.), while framing things in a way that does not encourage people to understand a bigger picture and history of toxic masculinity. This neutralizes peoples' drive to engage in effective political action, and like most "self-help"-y things, prompts an individual view of systemic problems.