For the last 25 years, journalist Peggy Orenstein has been documenting and dissecting the inner lives of teenage girls in America, exploring why some young women struggle with confidence or harbor secret Disney princess obsessions. But with the #MeToo movement shining an overdue light on sexual assault, she’s turned her reporting to a newly urgent subject: the burgeoning sex lives of teenage boys, and the lessons they’re learning (or not learning) about how to be a man.
Her method is simple: she talks to teens—hundreds of them—then compiles their stories to share their internal struggles with the world, providing the rest of us with a nuanced look inside their homes, schools, friendships and more. “It’s truly about being open and curious," she told GQ over the phone, “giving them the space to explore themselves without criticism or judgment.”
In 2016, Orenstein released a groundbreaking study (and massive New York Times bestseller), Girls & Sex, that pulled back the curtain on the complicated terrain of hookup culture, the unfortunate realities surrounding assault, and how porn and its misrepresentations of women have seeped into girls’ lives.
For her new book, Boys & Sex, she asked more than 100 college and college-bound guys between the ages of 16 and 22 about things they don’t often open up about: intimacy, masculinity, and consent. The result is a stunning portrait of young men in quiet crisis: desperate to break out of the “man box,” where emotional vulnerability is taboo, but afraid of being ostracized and ridiculed if they do, and unsure of where to turn for help and advice.
She spoke with GQ about why adults need to have uncomfortable conversations with teenagers, how free porn has changed the way guys think about sex, and what kids really mean when they say the word “hilarious.”
GQ: I noticed you mentioned GQ in your book, in relation to a study we performed in 2018 that showed 47 percent of American guys hadn’t discussed #MeToo with anyone.Orenstein: When the Kavanaugh stuff was happening, I checked in with boys and said, "How are you guys talking about this?" They basically said they weren't, that boys weren't discussing it with other boys at all. If they talked about it, it was just with girls.
Why is that, do you think?When I first started writing about girls in the ‘90s, there was a recognition that it was an inflection point. People were like, oh my God, we've layered all these new expectations over the old ones without actually getting rid of the old expectations. It was causing this huge tension and pressure on young girls, which I think is sort of where we are with boys.
I speak to parents of girls and they would say to me privately, "But you know, I'm afraid to raise a girl to be more assertive, to stand out, to speak her mind, because what if she gets called a bitch? What if nobody wants to be her friend, what if guys don't like her?" I feel like that's what I'm hearing right now about boys. "Okay, we know we have to do something different, but it's risky and it's scary. What happens if it bounces back and hurts my child?"
Since then, a lot of people have created an environment where we could talk to girls about these issues. It's not perfect. There's still a lot to be addressed, but girls have a much more expansive idea now about what it means to be female and that's to their benefit. It's time to bring boys into that conversation.
What’s stopping people from doing that now?I do think that a taboo against emotional vulnerability is pretty central. When you cut boys off from their vulnerability and when they narrow their emotional range to happiness and anger, it's very hard for them to have meaningful, mutually gratifying, personally fulfilling relationships. It can also undergird a predilection for conquest and locker room talk and disconnection on one hand, and on the other, coercion and assault.
The boys in your book were really honest with you. How did you convince them to open up?There's no trick. I learned with Girls & Sex because I had been talking to kids about really intimate, personal stuff for years. Early on in that book, I made big mistakes in my interviews and would betray surprise or shock or judgment. That would shut them down, and they would ghost me. I thought, okay, I’m doing this wrong. What do I need to do in order to get kids to talk to me? It was just truly about being open and curious and giving them the space to explore themselves without criticism or judgment. A lot of the boys would talk about how it had been cathartic, like therapy. They had never told anybody any of these things before because nobody talks to them, and they're not allowed to talk to one another.
I loved your insight about the word “hilarious,” and how boys wield it.It's a word that acts as a shield and offers forced distance when boys face something that's inappropriate or confusing or unnerving or disgusting. Or when they know that something is violating their ethics. Especially when it combines sex and aggression, when somebody says something really raunchy and offensive. “Hilarious” is always a safe word.
It's another way that boys used to keep them from being marginalized or targeted or pushing back against the man box. But it also is a way that boys' heads and their hearts are severed because what they say and what they know are two different things. I started listening to the ways that boys who were in the headlines for really high profile rape cases like Steubenville tended to say, "Well, we just thought what we were doing was hilarious. We just thought we were being funny."
Hilarious can also be a challenge asserted by a misbehaving boy to see if other boys will say anything. "That was hilarious, wasn't it?"They’re words used to bond. On the surface it seems like an extension of gross out jokes from when you're 10. A dead baby joke can be hilarious unless I first tell you about how much those parents wanted that baby and the horrible way it died and how really tragic the funeral was. Then if I told you a dead baby joke, it’s not hilarious. There’s a pretense of horseplay and bonding, but underneath is disconnection and a lack of empathy. When that’s turned towards something like a rape joke or something that combines sex and aggression, that can be concerning. When we see that the rates of athletes being brought up on sexual assault charges are three times higher than other boys, you can see that it's not just talk. For most boys it will be, but not for all of them.
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If you are in that room and you're not saying anything or you're defaulting to “hilarious,” on one hand, I get it. You don't want to be marginalized. You don't want to be stigmatized. You want to be a part of the crowd. On the other hand, you're colluding. That's why I feel really strongly that adult men who work with boys need to get in there and start establishing a different kind of culture.
Your book offers a roadmap for parents who want to raise better men. But what things can adults be doing to unlearn their own unhealthy lessons about sex and masculinity?The first thing to know is that you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to know all the answers, you don't have to know all the questions. You don't have to be in the perfect relationship or be adept at talking to your partner about these issues. You just have to start somewhere. It involves taking a leap.
Talking about what makes a mutually gratifying, reciprocal relationship, talking about the media, talking about porn is really important for today's boys because if you went through puberty after 2007, you went through puberty in a different porn world. Boys need to hear from somebody that what they're looking at is not reality. We don't have the luxury of silence because if we don't talk to our kids, the media is going to teach them. That's the world that we live in.
This is not the big, one-time thing that we refer to as “the talk.” It's a lot of small conversations over time. You wouldn't sit your son down and say, "Okay, this is what table manners are. You put the napkin on your lap, you pick up your fork and this is how you hold it. Then you say, please pass. You say thank you. Now go forth and have table manners.” That would be ridiculous. Anybody who's raised a child knows that you have to tell them to say thank you 400 billion times before they remember to do it themselves. I would argue that our interpersonal relationships are at least as important as table manners and yet we basically only say to boys, don't get somebody pregnant, don't get a disease, and respect women.
And then, as you say in the book, you end up with women doing the processing for men's emotional lives because it would be emasculating for guys to do it themselves.When I talked to girls, they would say that part of the reason that they wanted to hook up was that they didn't want to take care of a boyfriend. "I don't want to take care of a guy. I've got enough to do." If we don't teach boys how to name and process their own emotions rather than having their moms do it for them, it's reinforcing that idea that women are there to do their emotional labor. When you do that with your son, you're training him to depend on women to do that for him, rather than helping him learn how to do that himself or with another male peer, even another female peer. Learn how to deal with your own emotions, instead of making somebody else translate them for you, explain them to you, carry them for you.
Most PopularYou say in the book that heavy porn use can encourage that disconnect for teens.I really want to throw up some caveats whenever I talk about porn. Curiosity about sex is natural. Masturbation, go for it. There's all kinds of different porn. There's queer porn and there's feminist porn and there's ethical porn, but all of that is behind a paywall. Post-2007, Pornhub went online and dropped the paywall. You could suddenly see anything that you can imagine and a lot of stuff that you don't want to imagine. Now it’s on your smartphone 24/7.
It’s that easily accessible porn that reinforces a lot of the dynamics that we've been talking about. It portrays sex as something men do to women and female pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction.
A lot of guys will tell me, "I know the difference between reality and fantasy." Well, as it happens, that's not what the entire academic study of how media works on people tells us. Boys who watch porn regularly tend to believe those images reflect reality, and they are more likely to act them out. There's research that says they're less satisfied with their sex lives than other boys.
There’s also an intrinsic feedback loop that can make objectionable porn seem more desirable than actual intimacy, right?Sometimes, something that is simultaneously taboo and sexual can actually create this kind of tension in you. If I said, “Don't think about polar bears,” well, you weren't thinking about polar bears, but you are now. And now, if I say, “Stop it, get that polar bear right out of your head,” you can't. You're thinking about polar bears. Embedded in the message of, “Don't be aroused by this really gross scatological thing,” is, “Be aroused by this gross scatological thing.” That tension can actually turbo charge arousal and make something objectionable feel more arousing than something that's desired or less objectionable.
That’s one of the reasons it's really important to talk to boys about porn. Not demonizing or shaming, but helping them differentiate between what's just super arousing and what's actually wanted, desired, and pleasurable. We're not talking about adults. If you are an adult, do what you want. Godspeed. We're talking about 14-year-olds, 13-year-olds. It's really confusing for them to be super aroused by weird shit. How could they possibly know it’s not real? They haven't even kissed anybody yet. That's why it's absolutely essential for fathers or older brothers to talk to young guys about what porn is and what porn isn't. It's doing them a disservice and setting them up not only for lousy relationships and bad sex, but for potentially engaging in misconduct that they think is normal.
So man up, men.Man up, man. Talk to the boys.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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