Peggy Orenstein: Boys, Sex & Vulnerability
Podcast Transcript Season 3 Episode 41
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Illustration BY Black Women Animate
The following is a transcript of the interview from the episode:
Liz Goldwyn Intro:
Hello, and welcome to The Sex Ed podcast. I’m Liz Goldwyn, your host and the founder of The Sex Ed, your #1 source for sex, health, and consciousness education. On our website TheSexEd.com, you can read original essays written by our network of experts, watch live talks and videos, listen to past episodes of this podcast, and sign up for our weekly newsletter. You can follow us on Instagram @TheSexEd.
Today, my guest is Peggy Orenstein. Peggy is the author of the groundbreaking NY Times bestsellers Girls & Sex, and its followup, Boys & Sex. Her byline has appeared in the NY Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post and more. I talked to Peggy about “feminist fuckboys”; teaching boys to embrace their vulnerability and process complex emotions; why hookup culture isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, regardless of gender; and what we can do to raise boys away from the shadow of toxic masculinity.
Liz Goldwyn:
Thank you so much for being here with me today.
Peggy Orenstein:
My pleasure.
Liz Goldwyn:
So, I loved Boys & Sex. Some parts of it made me very sad and brought up a lot of memories of things that I've been through in my high school and 20s and even 30s.
It's interesting, one of the things that I've just been thinking about recently with Kobe Bryant's passing is you were talking a lot about boys being allowed to cry and be vulnerable and that there's only certain instances where they are around sports.
Peggy Orenstein:
That would be one and somebody dying in a plane crash, it could be one of them.
Liz Goldwyn:
But just to see so many men I know, it was almost like they took it as well as their opportunity to cry about a lot of other things that they're not allowed to cry about.
Peggy Orenstein:
I know, it was pretty moving. It's so interesting that men were allowed at this moment to fully express grief and sadness and emotion that they are typically not able to express and why only in a time like this and what does it mean and what is the cost of holding all of that all of the time without being able to express it.
So, it was a really... one of the really important things that came out of talking to boys was how they still felt that despite all the progress and despite seeing girls is deserving of their places in the classroom and in leadership and everything, there were still all these old assumptions and old ideas that were still... that they still clung to. And a big one was emotional suppression. And that idea of... they would talk about, "I trained myself not to feel," or, "I built a wall." And that would happen sometime in middle school.
Liz Goldwyn:
"Buck up." We tell kid boys, "Buck up."
Peggy Orenstein:
Yeah. Or-
Liz Goldwyn:
"Be a man."
Peggy Orenstein:
Or, "Don't be so sensitive." And I think a lot too about how to turn that. And one thing I think for parents is to think about what does it mean to raise a resilient person? What does it mean to raise a resilient man? And part of that is about emotional accessibility because I felt like really at the even more than anything about sex in a way at the heart of this... at the heart of the girl book was, it was about disconnection from body and disconnection from desire and disconnection from understanding your wants and needs and limits.
And at the heart of this book, it was disconnection from the heart and the denial of vulnerability. And boys were constantly... I mean, I did a search at one point of the word vulnerable in the book and how often it came up and the wrestling with the taboo against it, with embracing it, capitulating to it, with denying it, and what the cost of that was to boys. And among other things, emotional vulnerability is part of what makes us human.
Liz Goldwyn:
It also is a big part of strength.
Peggy Orenstein:
It's a big part of strength and it's a big part of relationships. Brené Brown calls it the secret sauce that holds relationships together. So, when boys are denying or discounting or made to dismiss their capacity for vulnerability, we deny their capacity or reduce their capacity to be in the kinds of mutually gratifying relationships we want for them.
Liz Goldwyn:
I'm often surprised at how often I have to remind grown women in heterosexual relationships that men have feelings. And that men are vulnerable. I mean, and these are intelligent people.
Peggy Orenstein:
Well, sure. But I mean, we all learned that, right? I mean, everybody that... one of the things that I was really aware of... I mean, this is skipping ahead a little bit, but there's a point in the book where I talk about gay boys. And one of the things that I talk about is that they were a model of consent, of negotiating consent and negotiating and navigating the parameters of a sexual experience because they had to be, because it wasn't obvious or expected who was going to be doing what with whom and how.
And so, the four magic words that gay guys start a sexual encounter with, with which are, what are you into? That to me was such a great... they are magic because it's an open-ended question, right? It's the thing that allows you to rule anything in and anything out. And so, often, when we talk about consent with heterosexual kids, we talk about a guy asking a girl a series of pre-prescribed questions, to which she says yes or no, pretty much.
But then I started thinking about it after I wrote that in the book and I thought, if you... if a heterosexual young man asked that question to a young woman, "What are you into?" She might well say, "I have no earthly idea." Right? Because of the way she socialized. And so, again, it's like there's this dynamic that happens, whether it's around men and feelings or girls and desire where everybody is socialized to have this interlocking idea that doesn't serve anybody.
Liz Goldwyn:
Another thing that I found really interesting is you're talking about the female emotional labor of girlfriends and moms and sisters. And I think a lot of us feel that hetero men in our lives, that we become the therapist. There's a great meme of a guy with a giant backpack on his back. It's like almost as the size of him and then it says, "Men who don't want to pay for therapy, and then women..."
Peggy Orenstein:
You have to send me that. I don't know that meme.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. So, it's a difficult place to be, right? Because we want to be able to support men and lift them up. And have them evolve and grow with us. But we also don't want to be in the position where we're a dumping ground.
Peggy Orenstein:
Right, right. Absolutely. And I thought a lot about it. I thought about that. I talk about this one boy in particular as a window into that dynamic of how women do that. He was a freshman in college, he had broken up with his girlfriend who had cheated on him and he said, he snapped his fingers and so I just forgot about her, but he hadn't forgotten about her. He got depressed in any objective way. He didn't like going out anymore. His schoolwork suffered. He isolated all these different things.
He tried going to therapy once, but he said it was too weird to talk about feelings. He felt he should just be able to handle it, was what he said, that a guy should be able to handle it and he couldn't talk to his male friends because they just say just forget about her and go fuck somebody else. And finally, he went home for Thanksgiving and he had... he described it as a breakdown in front of his mom though did not include crying.
And she said, "Okay, tell me what's going on." So, he confided in his mom. And that felt better. And I thought the thing is, especially for mothers, I think it feels really sweet when your son confides in you and shows that emotional side and that vulnerability. But if we don't teach our sons to process their own emotions, help them do that as the goal as opposed to processing those emotions for them, we are reinforcing that idea that women do men's emotional labor.
And then, when they are... I think that feels really... it feels really good if you're, the mother. Feels a lot less good when it's in your adult relationship, right? When you're processing your male partner's feelings. So, we really have to think about what it means to teach boys to recognize their feelings and work with their feelings. So that they're not just learning that that's the role of the women in their lives.
Liz Goldwyn:
And create spaces for boys to talk to each other and normalize that, normalize men talking to each other about their feelings.
Peggy Orenstein:
Yeah. If you have little boys, so often, what other research shows is that we over attribute anger to boys all the time, from the time they're in infancy, that we talk to them with less emotional range. Mothers talk to them with less emotional range when they're infants. And that they start losing the capacity to name emotions that they feel. So, I think one thing is that we have to keep naming it for our littlest boys, particularly just saying, "Seems like you feel sad. That must be frustrating."
Or just recognizing that they learn that that whole bucket of emotions around sadness, pain, grief, all that, betrayal, frustration, all is they learn to funnel it all to anger. So, if your young son is angry, taking a step back and saying and thinking like, "What's under that? What else is there that we can talk about?" That's not directly about discussing sexual interaction, but it's about creating an emotionally accessible human being who will be more resilient and who will be capable of being in an adult relationship or a young adult relationship and expressing empathy and compassion.
Liz Goldwyn:
So, just the same way women are taught to suppress anger. Yeah. It's encouraged in men. And there's this also this idea that when men, specifically heterosexual men, have feelings or are vulnerable, they're this label that's so gay or no homo.
Peggy Orenstein:
Right, right, right. So, you're talking about what they call the man box. It's like staying in the man box, right? And one of the things that really policed that were homophobic slurs.
Liz Goldwyn:
Can you break down the man box for us?
Peggy Orenstein:
So, the man box is the... I would say to guys, what's the ideal guy? And immediately these guys who many of whom were very progressive, many of whom were again, had female friends, had gay male friends, saw girls totally as equal and deserving, they would default immediately to athletic, dominant, aggressive or some combination. Aggressive and chill was... they had to be both. Using sex status seeking, sexual conquest and emotional suppression.
And what we know about guys who cling to those more rigid gender norms is that they actually have... I mean, you can be really rewarded, right? It turns out you can become president clinging to those masculine norms. However, they come at a huge cost as well, which is that those guys have higher rates of yes, harassment, that harassing people, bullying, sexual violence, but also being the victims of violence. Also, being the victims of bullying. Also, binge drinking, car accidents, depression, loneliness. It's a tough place to be in that box.
And so, one of the things that draws the lines and the contours is homophobic slurs. And so, one thing that had changed was that guys, the older guys that I talked to, tended to not... they've stopped They're trying to stop using those words. They used them in middle school for sure. High school, mostly. College, less so. But the damage had been done around them. And they also would say, "I would never call a gay a gay person." Those things that would be homophobic, that would be rude.
So, it was okay to call a straight guy the F word, but not a gay guy because it wasn't really about homophobia to them anyway, not overtly. It was about a referendum on masculinity and policing that man box and shutting down any protest or challenge to the idea that masculinity was defined as adversarial towards or opposition to femininity. So, you could be called one of those words for anything for dropping a pencil, or tripping in the hallway, or not knowing the right drug terminology.
I mean, it was fluid the way slut is fluid. And it had that same policing quality. And then, I looked at this research by this sociologist named CJ Pascoe who is in Oregon. And she talks about the #nohomo. And she looked at a thousand tweets using that hashtag from young men and found that they use... yes, it was a homophobic slur. Yes, it was a joke, but it was also guys would use it as a shield to allow themselves to express basic human ideas of connection and affection.
So, they would say things like, "I miss you dude. We should get together more often. #nohomo." So, it was just a safety thing, that if they said no homo, then they could say what they really felt.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. And I think about the pressure of at a very early age thinking that there's a standard dick size you have to have. And who determines that dick size?
Even there was recently a leaked... an allegedly leaked sex tape of a well-known rapper. He was identified based on his tattoos. And Twitter, social media went wild critiquing his performance, critiquing his stroke. So, it's hand in hand, like, "Is your dick big enough? And do you know how to use it?" Well from a very, very early age.
Peggy Orenstein:
I mean, that was something that was really interesting in terms of how guys conceptualize female pleasure, which they had typically wildly inaccurate ideas about. And in the girl book, I talked a lot about the orgasm gap and us particularly in hookups. And about the idea that male pleasure was assumed and female orgasm is nice if it happened, but nobody really was expecting it. But when I talked to guys and went a little further to them talking about how... they did care about female satisfaction in those situations.
And they care about orgasm more in a relationship. So, in a way, withholding female orgasm or the activities that would produce it in part was a way too that they unconsciously signaled the value lessness of their partner to them, their indifferent towards their partner. But they did care nonetheless, even in a hookup about female satisfaction. But it wasn't about... it wasn't like the way we might define that. Because so much of a hookup is about the story you tell rather than what's happening in the room, the way that they defined it was through penis size and stamina.
So, it was exactly what you're saying. So one of the guys that I talked to said he had gotten into the habit in a hookup of looking at the clock so that before he started intercourse so he would know that he lasted long enough, not for the girl's pleasure per se, but so that he would feel okay about it, his ego. And that she would go back to her friends and not say she was disappointed, but say that he... she was satisfied that he had lasted long enough. And he said it turned sex into a task for him. And he said, "One that I enjoy to a certain extent, but I wasn't rrrrrr."
Liz Goldwyn:
I think in that section, when he was first telling you that, he said he was at like five minutes, which is actually long for a high school boy.
Peggy Orenstein:
I know. Well, he was in college.
Liz Goldwyn:
Oh, college. Well, still for a college boy. If you think that the average sexual encounter we know lasts between seven and nine minutes, then I would say five for a college kid is it's better than two.
Peggy Orenstein:
And guys would talk to me about... younger guys would talk to me about because they had a very skewed idea of what guys do too, both about their concern about their bodies, about penis size or about the way they look, that was an issue, and the stamina issue and their conviction that they were "premature ejaculators." They were just high school boys. And there was the they didn't express a lot.
They didn't have anybody to talk to about that. They didn't have anybody to correct the record for them. They didn't have anybody who was giving them accurate pleasure-based sex education either in school or at home. So, they were left pretty literally to their own devices to try to figure out what was normal. And what they were seeing was so distorted that they just had these really inaccurate... even more inaccurate ideas I think than possibly in the past.
Liz Goldwyn:
I think one of my biggest issues around why we need Sex Ed for all humans and we need to teach it at an early age and tie it to self-love and self-worth is that hookup culture, no matter what age you're at or sex in our society, is so linked to equals hookups, or number of partners equals I am desired, equals self-worth
Peggy Orenstein:
Also, "That I'm experienced," when it doesn't even mean that.
Liz Goldwyn:
But that also goes back to self-worth. So, either I can say, "Well, I've slept with this many people or this many people desire me. I'm valuable. Because I'm not learning from an early age that I'm valuable. And I'm not coming into my sexual experimentation with that in mind. I'm letting someone else give me that based on..." probably a not great sexual experience.
Peggy Orenstein:
Right. And I feel when young people tell me that they've read the book, older high school or college students, that revelation is so profound to them. Reading the hookup stuff laid out and what it will and won't give you, which I'm always like, "It's not my business to tell you the context in which you have sex. That is not my job. My job is to demythologize that context and let you know what it's like and what people say about it and what you are likely to get and not get from that situation."
And the way that you describe it as exactly right. And for them to read that and reckon with that and go, "Oh, maybe that isn't the way that I'm going to get what I actually want in a sexual experience," is pretty profound.
Liz Goldwyn:
The problem is if adults don't understand that, how are we supposed to teach kids?
Peggy Orenstein:
When I started doing this work, I was... I went out to coffee with a friend who was a teacher. And she said, "Do you know what a hookup is?" And I just said, "No." She said, "Well, the hookup culture is the idea..." And she told me. She's like, "And getting to know somebody who's at the end of that process." And I was shocked.
Liz Goldwyn:
Really? Because that wasn't how your experience was as a teenager?
Peggy Orenstein:
No. That was not my experience as a teenager. I grew up in the post-our-bodies-ourselves generation. So we were, I think, much more... certainly experimental, but much more connected and communicative. I went to college. I went to Oberlin. And when I went there, it was dry. The whole town was dry.
Liz Goldwyn:
Meaning, no alcohol?
Peggy Orenstein:
Meaning, no alcohol. Meaning, really no alcohol. Really, we didn't have alcohol. So, you couldn't have a drunken hookup. It wasn't a thing. You had to be sober when you had sex with somebody or had any sexual encounter. And I think that really changed how we went through that because that meant that you had to like you couldn't obliterate your feelings, you couldn't obliterate the awkward, you couldn't anesthetize yourself. You had to be there. And that changed it. So, it was really shocking to me. I think I just wasn't... it was so not my experience that when I hit it, I was like, "Whoa, I felt like Margaret Mead.
Liz Goldwyn:
Let's talk a little bit about alcohol because, again, I think the things you just said obliterate, leave your body. I think so many of us use sex as a way to escape the way that we would watch television or eating mindlessly or use alcohol or drugs. And it's like this lubricant, right? This social lubricant, not feel awkward because we're taught that it's so shameful and uncomfortable. And what if we get rejected? So how good can an encounter be if you're-
Peggy Orenstein:
Wasted?
Liz Goldwyn:
If you're not super present. And then, I liked this line in the book that one of the boys told you that even bad sex is sex.
Peggy Orenstein:
Right. And whenever I had a conversation with kids about hookup culture, it always devolved into what they didn't like about hookup culture. Like invariably, like why it sucked. But then, it would always, "Well, it's something." But yeah, I mean, it's not really about the sex usually in a hookup culture. It's usually about the story more than the sex and what... because it isn't very good. And one guy said to me, going back again to that vulnerability piece, was he had had... he was a second semester freshman.
He'd had 10 partners for something and five of them involved intercourse. I don't know if the other ones involved. And he said, it's weird because it's like two people having really two distinct experiences and there's not a lot of eye contact and there's not a lot of communication. And it's like you're acting vulnerable but not being vulnerable with somebody that you don't know or care about very much. He said, which is not necessarily a problem, but it's odd and it's frankly not very much fun. And I thought that really encapsulated a lot of what I would hear.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah, I think it's interesting, again, just not preparing people to have experience their own pleasure first. To really learn how to masturbate, to really understand their bodies before we get into being involved with another person. Because so much of it is... I mean, from the point of reference of your book, is people masturbating into someone else essentially versus like a just explicit discussion of pleasure.
Peggy Orenstein:
Right. I mean, at the end, one of the things that I say, Andrew Smiler, who's this wonderful psychologist said, "If you really want to get acquainted with your boy, you can say, do you want your partner to be something other than somebody, something that you masturbate into and..." what orgasm is it that you want to have? What's the context? Do you want it just to be somebody who masturbating too? Is that what you really want? Most people don't want that. Certainly not in a consistent way.
They don't want that to be their primary experience. But yeah, I mean, again, the... I will say that I had... I was just the other day talking to one of the guys who actually isn't... didn't make the cut into the book, but not through any... for any reason. He just, for whatever, it's just redundancy. And he is in college now. He was someone who actually had really high quality, inclusive pleasure based human development sex education. He had a fantastic course. And he is in college now.
And he was talking to me about how few of his peers had anything even the tiniest glimmer of what he had and how much time he spends educating other students. Because he's one of the only ones who really has this bigger lens in this perspective. So, when they get that, it's not only valuable for them, but they ended up being the person in their peer group who spreads that outward.
Liz Goldwyn:
That's a tough role to play to. Particularly when it comes to the section, or just thinking about locker room talk is having to be the person who's policing. Because nobody wants to be that kid.
Peggy Orenstein:
Right. And I do talk about that. Because the guys were not... they were not blank slates. They were living in this new era. And what was really interesting and the reason I wanted to write this now was because there are contradictions that they're living with new messages and old assumptions in the way that for 25 years I've been looking at that with girls. The new messages versus the old assumptions and the ways that we want this thing over here, but we haven't let go of this other thing over here with them.
And those things cause conflict and strife for them. And with guys too, they were thinking about issues around consent. They were thinking about what equality sexual encounter was. And they were thinking about how guys relate to one another. And so, yeah, the locker room talk, how do they talk? They say, "I banged that. I hit that, I tapped that, I piped that, I-"
Liz Goldwyn:
Smashed it.
Peggy Orenstein:
... pounded that, I smashed that, right. You can go on and on, right? It's like they visited a construction site, not like they engaged in an act of intimacy. And so, one of the guys that I spoke with, he and a friend tried to challenge that. They went up against an older boy who was saying something. And they got made fun of and mocked and probably called names. And so, the next time it happened, Cole, the boy that I was interviewing, didn't say anything.
And his friend kept stepping up. And he said, the more his friends stepped up and the more he himself stepped back, the more he watched his friend be marginalized and guys weren't listening to him. And he said he was spending all his social capital. And I was sitting here with just buckets of it, not spending it. And he looked at me and said, "And I don't know what to do. I don't want to have to choose between my dignity and these guys, but how do I make it so I don't have to choose?"
And I thought a lot about Michael Thompson, this psychologist talks about how silence in the face of misogyny and cruelty is how boys learn to become men. And so, so much of the conversation with boys was not only about what they did, what they said, but what they couldn't do, what they couldn't say, what they wouldn't say, and how that was affecting them.
Liz Goldwyn:
Silence in general, I think, and holding onto processing is very much directed towards how boys become men. That's the message we give.
Peggy Orenstein:
Exactly. So, and that's just another space for it. So, and just the other day, a guy came up to me when I was in another city. And he was a division one athlete and said he was really troubled by locker room talk, but he did not know what to do or how to handle it. Or when his responsibility kicked in to say something or how to say something.
And we're just so silent around that in supporting boys because most of them are standing there saying, thinking, "Eww," right? Most of them don't find that okay. They don't find that acceptable. But they don't know that others feel that way or how to create community that would allow them to change those social norms and that's the support they need.
Liz Goldwyn:
And then, we also have a whole new several generations of boys and men growing up with a very different version of porn than we had like even 20 years ago. And we know from studies just how much... for example, erectile dysfunction or any ejaculatory disorders is directly linked over the course of since porn has become so readily available and those numbers have risen.
Now, we're not anti-porn over here at the Sex Ed at all. But I am just throwing it out there to listeners here. How many of you who use porn as your primary way to masturbate break that up with using your imagination or a book or audio? Just something to think about. Just put that into your routine or even look into other sources of porn that are more ethical maybe.
Peggy Orenstein:
Right. Well, and we're also talking about... I don't know if you're... when you said that you're talking about adults or you're talking about kids, but when we're talking about kids, yeah, I mean, what has changed is, yes, we can talk about feminist porn or ethical... but that stuff is all behind a paywall. And what is easily accessible to young people and what they're accessing from a really young age is basically what got... when the paywall dropped, a lot of porn that reinforces that idea that sex is something men do to women and that female pleasure is a performance for male satisfaction.
And they are using that because we don't talk to them either about sex or about porn and what's real and what's not real and what's missing and what could or should be. They use that as Sex Ed.
Liz Goldwyn:
That's the problem is that we should... and there are really amazing people in the adult industry that are making explicit Sex Ed. And we're not going to put it back in the box. Porn is what it is. So...
Peggy Orenstein:
But we have to talk to people.
Liz Goldwyn:
We have to have the education along with it.
Peggy Orenstein:
We have to have the education along with it. We have to have them, give them a critical lens. And I think that that's one area, not porn specifically, but media in general where we've done a much better job and can look a little bit at the model of what we've done for girls. Because in the 25 years that I wrote about girls, there was a growing awareness and concern about the impact of the media messages that girls consume on their body image, on their mental health, on their cognition. All these different things.
We were aware that it wasn't healthy. Or it wasn't productive, or it wasn't positive. Parents, teachers, organizations, advocates, activists, we've done so much on media literacy for girls. So, to give them some critical lens when they... not because they're not going to consume the media, but at least they can have a larger perspective on what they're consuming. And maybe that will help them resist some of the more harmful messages.
But we don't say anything to boys and they're swimming like in the same stew. And maybe even you could argue that it's turned up higher for them in certain ways. And nobody's giving them a critical lens. Nobody's talking to them about what the messages are that they're being bombarded with around what sex is, around male sexual entitlement, around female sexual availability, around body image, male and female body image, any of it.
Liz Goldwyn:
There was a great film, an independent film. I can't remember how long it came out. Don Jon, I think it was...
Peggy Orenstein:
Yeah. Oh God, I love that film.
Liz Goldwyn:
... yeah, Joseph Gordon Levitt directed and wrote it and it's great. And it's about his character grappling with his porn viewing habits and his ability to be intimate with IRL women. And it was really great. I mean, it's at least five or six years ago, that movie.
Peggy Orenstein:
I wrote about it in Girls & Sex.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. So, and that's a great film.
Peggy Orenstein:
It was really impressive.
Liz Goldwyn:
Don Jon came out in 2013. I think it's important for a lot of this stuff to be talked about and relayed to through people who are in that generation and living it. Because we were talking about what activists or academics have done for literacy. But that requires reading… it's a privilege. It's a certain type of person, socio economic, racial background that has access to that.
Peggy Orenstein:
Yeah. Yep. Yep. That's for sure true. And although I think... a lot of the media literacy type things for girls really reach out to cover broad populations and work their curriculum for broad populations. But it's for sure true. And for me, the young people that I was looking up, although they weren't all from privileged backgrounds, they were all college bound or in college. And that was partly because that's what I was looking at Girls & Sex.
And I also noticed a really troubling tendency that the most elite boys that I spoke with, the ones who were in the most elite institutions were the most likely to say it was only those other boys who engaged in misconduct or troubling sexual behavior. And they would say that against... they would always, they're like, "Oh, it's those boys in the state schools. Oh, it's boys that are in public school. It's not us," against all evidence.
And to the point where I was at an elite college in California and I was in a... hanging out at a freshmen pregame party because that's not at all awkward for me. And I was just... I was wanting to write... have a scene around hookup culture, to frame my hookup culture chapter. But the boys assumed that I was there to write about assault. And a group of them came up to me and they said, "It's really the boys in the state schools who do that stuff."
And I said, "Really? Because Brock Turner went to Stanford." And one of the guys said, "Well, I mean, he wasn't there on merit. He was an athlete." So, there was a belief among the most elite kids that their superior SAT scores precluded misconduct rather than just better insulating them from its consequence.
Liz Goldwyn:
Well, I think, again, it just goes back to this idea that a lot of this stuff we're teaching based on intellect in the mind. And so much of this I feel like is heart-based, is empathetic, is things like teaching people to tune into their gut, to their intuition, to how does this make you feel. One thing that really resonated with me and I worked at Planned Parenthood from 13. I have a super feminist mother who took me to pro-choice rallies when I was nine.
When you were talking about how often boys will push girls heads down. That's happened to me so many times over the course of just becoming my first experiences with sex and hooking up. And I'm someone who's read Betty Friedan and Colette and Simone de Beauvoir.
Peggy Orenstein:
But none of that is about teaching you that-
Liz Goldwyn:
No, it doesn't teach me how to tune in to what does that make.
Peggy Orenstein:
Yeah, it doesn't.
Liz Goldwyn:
And even reading that, I mean it really... I texted our producer Chloe and said, "God, this book is really depressing me," because it brings you back to so many times, that you let behavior slide.
Peggy Orenstein:
I know. And the thing about that, I think about that so much about in my own life too, how those moments... and they aren't moments that... it's not like... again, as we know, assault does not mean somebody's holding you... a stranger holding you down in a dark alley. But there's a way that I think we're still not recognizing how those experiences stick with you that we can still remember. You can still remember that moment pretty damned clearly.
Liz Goldwyn:
And I'm just not one moment.
Peggy Orenstein:
And whatever that moment is, I mean, I have something that...
Liz Goldwyn:
And the fact that like-
Peggy Orenstein:
... when you're 17, that boy who did... I mean, that never goes away. And adult men will often ask me around this book like, "Well, most of these guys are going to be fine, right?" I'm like, "Yeah, most of them will find their way one way or another through the thicket." Many of them will have good relationships with somebody.
They will have kids. They will be parents. Maybe there will be things that will be diminished, but there'll be fundamentally okay, but at what cost? At what cost as they went through those years to their partners along the way? And I think a lot of us... and I think this is true of men too, we carry the weight of those moments that maybe they don't do anymore, but that they did when they were 17.
Liz Goldwyn:
And I think they do. And I think the unconscious behavior of... for example, just that little symbol, instead of saying, "Hey," instead of talking about oral sex or.
Peggy Orenstein:
How do you feel about oral?
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. "How do you feel about oral or making it reciprocal?" It's just the movement of a hand pushing her head down. And I think adult men do that too.
Peggy Orenstein:
Yeah. And one thing that... again, looking back and forth in the way that boys and sex and girls is a certain conversation, I remember talking to girls and thinking girls were so uncomfortable with guys performing oral sex on them. And what their motion was... well, you can't run. We're an audio. But it was like a pulling up motion with the hands. So, that was like the boys was the pushing down and the girls was the pulling up and that's a lot too.
Liz Goldwyn:
Because the girls are sitting there worried, "Do I smell bad? Do I taste bad?"
Peggy Orenstein:
Is it taking too long? It is icky. It's too intimate or like they have all the whole running... there's a whole series of internal monologues that are going on for girls in that situation that resist pleasure and reciprocity from their socialization. I was so struck by the pulling up versus pushing down metaphor with the hands that really, in the two books, that really struck me.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. Again, why we need to teach people at a very early age that all of this is beautiful and healthy and natural and you're in... learn the correct names for your genitals. And parents need to...
Peggy Orenstein:
Put your base and feeling that you are... you need to understand, and, "I'm like touching myself, my chest now," because it's like you need to feel in your body, what does it mean to feel in your body? What does it mean to trust your gut? What does it mean to connect? How do you make people more human in those encounters rather than less human, which is what you're learning from the culture is the ideal?
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. And that consent has... there are very hard lines obviously. And then, there's a lot of gray areas. You have a section in your book that's a heterosexual encounter between a young man and woman that has a lot of gray areas and they end up really talking about it afterwards and maintaining a friendship years after they have a really uncomfortable experiences very different for both parties.
Peggy Orenstein:
Yeah. That's a chapter on restorative justice. I really struggled with how to... what I could add to the conversation about campus sexual assault. I just couldn't find a good... I certainly had guys who committed misconduct, but the stories just didn't go where I wanted or needed or hoped they would go. And then I met [Antoine and Samir 00:44:56] who had... and it's a great... the chapter... Well, it's a play on, the way that I wrote it, on like a he said, she said, because it goes back and forth between their two voices as they're both having this experience, having this encounter and then the aftermath of the encounter.
And the encounter happens until freshman year of college and it is an encounter where he thinks he was trying to be a nice guy in a teacher by forcing her head down and holding it down. And she recognizes this as sexual assault. And then, they go two different directions and things happened. He ultimately has to come to terms with what he did and that that was not being a nice guy in a teacher, that that was having somebody do something against her will. And she doesn't want him to be.
And so many people don't, she doesn't want him to be punished. She doesn't want him to be expelled. She doesn't want him to be jailed. She just wants him to get it. She wants him to hear her, understand what happened, to take accountability for it, and to move forward as a better person. And he really does. He takes the opportunity to really go deep and wrestle with his whole socialization as a guy and what he's learned and to come out the other side as a much truer person.
I was tempted in telling that story to feel like he was an exception or a unicorn or just this guy, wonderful guy. And this would not normally happen. But there was nothing about him at the beginning of the story that would indicate that he had this capacity. I think if I had met him his freshman year in college, I would've thought, "Okay, that boy's a stereotype." He grew up watching Van Wilder movies and porn and wanting to be in a frat so he could hook up with as many girls as possible and be wasted every time.
And it wasn't a good night out and he was coercive, in retrospect, he was super coercive with everybody he came into contact with. So, his change, I think, shows the hope and potential of... and it's an after the fact thing, so not ideal. But at least it shows the potential and another path forward towards justice and healing and accountability.
Liz Goldwyn:
What were some of the things that you didn't include in that section that you felt like didn't... you said there were stories that didn't end up the way you wanted it to.
Peggy Orenstein:
I mentioned them in the beginning as a little bit of a throwaway, like the boy who took a Snapchat video of his prom date giving him a blow job and sending it to the baseball team, stuff like that. I mean, just the things that guys would tell me that they had done. Or another guy who really did want to take accountability for a sexual assault.
But was struggling with how to...like there was no pathway for him to do that. There was only punishment or silence. And so, he was really struggling about how do you stand up and say, "I realize I did this and I want to take accountability and responsibility for it and apologize and do what I need to do. But I also don't want to get kicked out of school."
Liz Goldwyn:
"I want to take accountability, but I don't want to live with the scars of it."
Peggy Orenstein:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But is there a place... I mean, I think that... I don't know that the people who have been harmed always want the person to be punished. Sometimes, they do. And sometimes, they need to be. But when a person can acknowledge that they have caused harm, sometimes there's another path forward to something that would feel better for everybody in terms of what creates justice, what creates healing, what constitutes accountability.
Whereas sometimes when we're just kicking these guys out of school or suspending them, we're kicking the can down the road. They don't think they've done anything wrong. They feel that they've been falsely accused. They feel that they shouldn't... that they're having consequences they shouldn't have to face. And that just hardens and deepens their resentment and anger, which isn't really helping.
Liz Goldwyn:
And then, we have this whole culture as well where we were... yeah, I see this a lot. "Oh, well, I'm a father of girls. So now, I know how to treat women." We have this like, "Let's applaud you because you have... that, you have daughters."
Peggy Orenstein:
Right. Kanye did that with... he had his couple songs after he had a daughter where he said, "Father, forgive me, I'm scared of the karma," was one of his lines in one of the songs now that he has a daughter. And there was a critic who said, "Daughters are not sent down from heaven to punish you for your behavior or to show you the light."
Liz Goldwyn:
And there's been some very successful white male actors I've seen in Hollywood who've actually been accused of misconduct, who've...
Peggy Orenstein:
Who used the daughter defense?
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah, who used the daughter defense as well.
Peggy Orenstein:
The daughter defense and the good guy defense are very, "I can't possibly have done this because only monsters assault, and I'm a good guy. What I did could not possibly have been assault," is a very... I feel like also and in that particular thing we... in those situations what guys will say was, "It was miscommunication." But I feel like miscommunication puts too much onus on the, usually, woman in this case to communicate. "If she just communicated better, then I would have understood." That's not right. It's false assumptions. That's what's happening.
And it's false assumptions based on years of socialization where guys learn that their pleasure is more important than a woman's feelings. And that can look like things like the assumption that any act of friendliness on the part of a woman means she wants to have sex with you. Or the assumption that consent to one act like kissing is consent to intercourse. Or that the place where you have an encounter constitutes consent.
So, somebody asks you back to their dorm room, that's consent. Those are assumptions that people make.
Liz Goldwyn:
And also, that we assume that it's not sexy to communicate. That we're only going to communicate around sex if we're in a kink-friendly, queer-friendly situation.
Peggy Orenstein:
And that's where I found it. That's exactly where I found that communication happening was in queer friendly situations. And that's why I brought up the... earlier when we were talking the what are you into. And this is not to say that there's not abuse, assault, bad communication, all kinds of things in gay encounters, but... or same genital encounters. They were much better as a rule at navigating and negotiating the terms.
And what one of the guys said to me was, "I don't get straight guys resistance to this because when we talk... start having this conversation, it means we're going to have sex. That's great. Why would you not want to have that conversation?"
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. The other thing that I loved, is this whole feminist fuckboy. I've referenced this Instagram account all the time, Awards for Good Boys. She gives awards for boys doing the bare minimum. But I see this whole feminist fuckboy... “I'm an ally, I'm a supporter” all the time even with men I know. And they think somehow, they've got, got a free pass.
Peggy Orenstein:
I love that boy, Wyatt, and he was really important to include because, again, I mean, I'm always struggling to try to not allow you to disconnect or deny as a reader. And there's always a way to distance yourself just like those boys that, "Well, he's an athlete so that doesn't count." And I have elite boys say, “it’s those state school boys.” And progressive boys will say “it's those Trump voting boys, right?” That's not true.
And so, Wyatt who referred to himself as a feminist fuck boy and was coming to terms with that was... or you can call them soft boys or whatever you want to call them. He was somebody who was scrupulous about consent, was very egalitarian in many ways but was still using the skewed gender dynamic on his campus to advantage him as a guy. And that allowed guys to call the shots, that allowed... it put women in no-win situations that allowed him to use partners as disposable. And he was starting to reckon with that when I met him.
He was like, "It doesn't feel good." And then, he said, "Well, no, I mean, yeah, of course it felt good, but I'm starting to realize it doesn't feel good." And there was a soul sucking aspect to it that he was coming to terms with when we met. So, it was really interesting to include his... it was important. I didn't want to just have the frat boy who is hooking up all the time, anybody, that's what you would expect. And that's what a lot of people could then say, "Well, that's not my kid."
But I think with Wyatt, you see a lot more of like if you're a progressive, positive feminist parent, you look at him and go, "Whoops, that's my kid."
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. So, did you feel like the audience for this book or what you want to take away... because in the end, you have a lot of advice for parents, is really a guidebook for parents to begin to grapple with some of these things with their children?
Peggy Orenstein:
Well I think it has two levels and Girls & Sex did too. The first level of readers is presumed to be parents who are thinking about how do we... and who can, I hope, in hearing the voices and the stories of these boys, can get a better sense of what their world is like, what the world their son is in is like, whether their son is totally reflected in these stories or not. But the second line of readers for me has always been young people themselves because it is a journalistic book. It's very story heavy.
It's really accessible. And it's a fast read. And it reflects their experience. And my hope was that in reading the book that boys themselves would feel seen and that it would also allow them perhaps to start making those connections with their peers that allow for a deeper level of conversation or at least having that in their own head. And actually, with Wyatt, the boy was the feminist fuck boy, I had this amazing moment where I was interviewing him via Skype one day because I... we talk over time.
And this other boy texted in, who was a boy who really did value having that connection with another person when he was sexually active. And he was down... he was looking at colleges where he'd been accepted. He texted me, it was something like, "WTF, what do I do with hookup culture? It's like an orgy down here. Do I just go to bone town and worry about it later or do I try to make a connection or do I forget about that part?" And so, I asked Wyatt what he thought I should say to Nate. And they ended up having this whole conversation through me.
That was really amazing and about who you are as a person and where you're not having to follow the script and doing what's right for you and all these different things. And they don't know each other. They don't know each other's names. They're never going to meet. They barely know me really. And I just thought, what if they could have these conversations? What if they could have them in real life with their male friends or with trusted adults? And so, that I guess was what I hope I could provide with this. And that that would help guys make their best choices.
Liz Goldwyn:
And another takeaway from the book, texting after hookups still goes on no matter what age you are, I think the lesson is. What would you do to a friend? I mean, if you've just shared an intimate encounter with someone, it doesn't matter if you want to be with them forever or for another time. But that's just polite. It’s just nice.
Peggy Orenstein:
I've been with my partner for many years, so we predated texting. We didn't ever have to text one another. I mean, you had phone calls, it was deciding whether to phone call them, right? So, when kids would talk to me about the morning after text, it seemed like such a low bar. How risky is it to send a bloody text to somebody?
But they would talk about it. I had a boy, a reader, a guy, an 18 year old reader who said to me, "That section was so key to me because as I was reading it, I was sitting on my bed that afternoon I'd been sitting in my bed trying to decide what to text this girl I was with. And it was so fraught that I just decided not to text her at all."
Liz Goldwyn:
The problem with the low bar is that I had... I mean, that it, again, all this stuff carries into adulthood. I had someone, with a mother the other day say something to me about someone she was seeing and say, "He got me water," or... that was like such a big deal. I'm like, "Can you just repeat that back to yourself? He got you water. That's the bar we're going to start at?" I think it's really interesting book and it's very relevant no matter-
Peggy Orenstein:
Thank you.
Liz Goldwyn:
No matter what age you're in, what age you are.
Liz Goldwyn:
I'm curious, did you ask any of the heterosexual boys if they knew where or what the clitoris was? Is?
Peggy Orenstein:
Yeah, I did and the younger guys thought that... I mean, they would talk about, how they put it, as fingering, that's what they call it. It was like they were rummaging around for keys, the way that they were describing it. They really tended to be doing a lot of jamming inside of a person. When they really tended to learn, no surprise, was when they were in a trusting relationship, where they could drop the idea that they were supposed to know already. Because they often felt they were supposed to know already. They were supposed to present an idea of experience. They were experienced, but they didn't know and the girl wasn't going to say anything and they weren't going to ask, because they didn't want to look in a weak position.
One of the guys who had been in a relationship in high school, where he and his girlfriend had really explored and learned and he did learn about female orgasm and stuff, he said, "My guy friends will say that what you're supposed to do is stick your finger inside of a girl and make the come hither motion and that's what's going to make her come." I think they probably partly got that idea because girls pretend it does.
Liz Goldwyn:
So parents...
Peggy Orenstein:
I mean, they have to know you. On my website, which is Peggyorenstein.com, I have a lot of resources and you probably do too. But I have a lot of resources for parents of teenagers, parents of infants, parents of five-year-olds, parents of middle schoolers. And those include resources that will positively educate both boys and girls about the existence of the clitoris and its role in female pleasure and orgasm. And I think there's some great books. Do you know Heather Corinna? So, Scarleteen, the website-
Liz Goldwyn:
I love Scarleteen.
Peggy Orenstein:
Right? It's the best.
Liz Goldwyn:
Scarleteen is amazing. It's been around forever. It's a nonprofit.
Peggy Orenstein:
It's fantastic.
Liz Goldwyn:
S-C-A-R-L-E... No, Scarlet, sorry. Scarleteen.
Peggy Orenstein:
I don't know if it's two Ts.
Liz Goldwyn:
I think it's one T.
Peggy Orenstein:
One T, I think it's one T. And then she has a book that I consider to be like the Our Bodies, Ourselves, for this generation. That's called S.E.X.: An All-You-Need Guide To... I can't remember what the subtitle is, but it's S.E.X., by Heather Corrina. If you can't talk to your child yourself and you don't have somebody, like the cool aunt to do it for you, at least get them this book. And boys, what if they got, She Comes First, when they were in high school? Or what if they got a subscription to OMG Yes, as a counter to porn, and actually learned about female desire and pleasure? How would that change things?
Liz Goldwyn:
What are you still learning about sex?
Peggy Orenstein:
I keep learning from the books and about young people as I talk about them. More comes up, more comes out more. My thinking evolves even on things like when I was talking earlier about vulnerability being at the core of the book, I didn't realize that until after it was published. And I re-read it and it just struck me.
But I am thinking, and I don't know if this is what I'm going to do, but whether I should now turn my lens back to adults again and think about... I think in a way that by writing about teenagers and young adults, I felt like I could get adults to pay attention without threatening them too much because we all want better for our kids. It's harder to look at ourselves. But that maybe I need to be looking at ourselves a little more.
Liz Goldwyn:
So, what you're learning about sex is where-
Peggy Orenstein:
That is a lifelong learning process. That it keeps evolving and growing and changing and that those patterns that we get into as young people, if we don't take a look at them, can stick with us indefinitely.
Liz Goldwyn:
And you learned about hookups.
Peggy Orenstein:
And I learned about hookups.
Liz Goldwyn:
Well, thank you so much.
Peggy Orenstein:
Thank you. I just want to say, which is not to say that I never had one, I just didn't call it that. Yeah.
Liz Goldwyn:
What'd you call it?
Peggy Orenstein:
Well, we called it casual sex, we just didn't have that word.
Liz Goldwyn:
Or one-night stand?
Peggy Orenstein:
Or one-night stand or something. I mean, they didn't invent that. They invented hookup culture, but they didn't invent hookups.
Liz Goldwyn:
There's really nothing new in sex. It was just the technology around it. Thank you.
Peggy Orenstein:
Thank you. It was nice to talk to you.
Liz Goldwyn:
You too.
Liz Goldwyn Outro:
That was my conversation with Peggy Orenstein. You can buy her books, including Boys & Sex, at your favorite bookstore. She can be found on Twitter @PeggyOrenstein and Instagram @PJOrenstein. That’s O R E N S T E I N.