Oh, No!

At the outset of her new book, Boys & Sex, Peggy Orenstein recounts walking down a high-school hallway to meet an 18-year-old named Cole who was sitting outside the library: “He topped six feet, with broad shoulders and short-clipped, dirty blond hair. His neck was so thick that it seemed to merge right into his jawline.” Her first reaction to the sight of the boy was this: “Oh no.” Orenstein describes her instinct as “a breach of journalistic objectivity, a scarlet letter of personal bias.” But she has written a whole book that confirms it—a book whose thesis is that young men, particularly those who are white, straight, athletic, and reluctant to gush openly about their feelings, pose a nightmarish threat to American society. Hiding behind an authorial guise of a sympathetic observer trying to help this population and the adults who care about them, Orenstein gets the boys with whom she talks in the book to spill the most intimate details of their lives—and then throws them under the bus.