How Can Boys Truly Move Forward as Better Men?

This week on Just the Right Book, Peggy Orenstein join Roxanne Coady to discuss her latest book, Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity, out now in paperback from Harper.

From the episode:

Peggy Orenstein: I felt at the heart of this book, beyond the discussion of hookup culture, beyond the discussion of consent, beyond the discussion of pornography, at the very heart was a discussion of vulnerability. I did a search at one point of how often boys use that word in our conversations, and it was so often. It was all about wrestling with it, deflecting it, embracing it, capitulating to it. It was all this, and the relationship to vulnerability and vulnerability is a fundamental human trait. … When we undermine boys capacity for vulnerability, we reduce their capacity to have the kind of mutually gratifying, personally fulfilling relationships that we want them to be able to have, and that hurts them.

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Peggy Orenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Waiting for Daisy, Flux, and Schoolgirls. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, she has been published in USA Today, Parenting, Salon, the New Yorker, and other publications, and has contributed commentary to NPR’s All Things Considered. She lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter.

Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.