Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity

Peggy Orenstein is the author of Boys & Sex. She is an award-winning journalist whose career has focused mostly on covering young women. Boys & Sex is both an outlier and a companion to her previous work. The closest equivalent to Boys & Sex, published in 2020, was her book Girls & Sex, published in 2016. As Orenstein admits in the opening: "I never imagined I'd write about boys. As a journalist, I have spent a quarter of a century chronicling girls' lives" (1). She identifies the logic and necessity of exploring male views on modern sexuality, which she believes is most accurately captured by speaking to teenage boys. In the introduction to this book, she explains that she departed from her usual subject matter because she wanted to understand modern masculinity within the context of the #MeToo movement. She explains that her methodology in the book was to compile conversations and interviews conducted with over a hundred teenage boys in order to understand masculinity through a variety of male experiences. Orenstein's desire is not to expose or shame her interview subjects, nor to simplistically sum up the male experience of sexuality. Instead, Orenstein seeks to understand and portray the complexity of contemporary male sexuality in order to capture key insights and move the conversation forward productively.