Boys & Sex

My 9 highlights

• while girls I’d met often sought more intimacy, trust, and safety in their personal relationships after a nonconsensual encounter, boys did the opposite, sometimes to the point of hostility toward women.

• (the largest survey ever conducted found that only 37 percent of gay or bisexual American men reported anal intercourse in their last partnered encounter).

• Uncommitted sex in college is certainly nothing new. The real shift, then, is not “hookups” but hookup culture: the idea that casual sex is no longer an exception, but that physical intimacy is expected to be the precursor to emotional intimacy rather than its product.

• media scripts influence real-life emotions and behavior, even when we think they don’t.

• gay men now earn on average 10 percent more than straight men with similar education, experience, and job profiles.

• Only 40 percent of African American men graduate from predominantly white four-year colleges within six years of matriculating.

• According to sociologist Lisa Wade’s research, partners are expected to be less friendly after a hookup than they were before, at least for a while, as the last step toward affirming that requisite meaninglessness.

• Over time—and here’s where this generation is unique—most of the boys learned masturbation entirely in tandem with porn, yoking it to their cycle of desire, arousal, and release.

• Intentional searches started, for most, somewhere between sixth and eighth grade—usually before the boys had masturbated or were able to ejaculate.