The ongoing debate about males and maleness in the age of the feminist revolution is back in the spotlight with a new book by veteran journalist and author Peggy Orenstein, Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity. The book, currently #4 in “Parenting Boys” on Amazon, has been adapted into a long essay in The Atlantic and is also the focus of a Q & A with Orenstein in The New Yorker, under the not-at-all-provocative title, “Can Masculinity Be Redeemed?”
Orenstein, who draws on her own interviews with boys and young men as well as other research, asserts that despite changing gender roles, American boys remain stuck in a 1950s model of masculinity that stresses dominance, aggression, and toughness, and is damaging not only to them but to girls and young women. Without a “counternarrative” of masculinity, she asserts, “there is a chance that [young men] won’t see women as fully human.”
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