31 pages • 1 hour read
Peggy OrensteinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
In the final chapter of the book—"Deep Breath: Talking to Boys"—Orenstein acknowledges that the restorative justice approach explained at the end of the previous chapter "may be promising, but it is still an after-the-fact solution" (219). She calls for broader initiatives on sexual education, which will ultimately provide young men with a proactive space to explore their emotions and questions about sex. While she acknowledges the awkwardness of talking to teenagers about sex, she urges parents to have conversations at home. She then provides some advice for parents.
Her first piece of advice is to make sure not to just have "the talk" one time, but to ensure that conversations about sex are habitual and forthright. She advises parents to reinforce the message that consent is absolutely crucial in sexual encounters; as much as parents need to understand that their sons are growing and learning even as they make mistakes, they "cannot enable his denial, deflection, or avoidance of taking full responsibility for his behavior" (223). She argues that consent is only the beginning of sex, whereas sex that is "good" or ethical consists of so much more. Sex is also not only about penis-vagina intercourse—a notion that excludes LGBTQ+ young people—but about physically intimate moments of various kinds.
Orenstein advises parents to discuss porn with their sons, and to communicate that the depictions of sex in porn are distorted and unrealistic. Finally, Orenstein suggests that allowing sleepovers may be one way to encourage healthy sexual encounters. She ends the book by pleading with parents to raise their boys to be compassionate and egalitarian. Orenstein shifts the tone and bares her own emotional perspective, synthesizing her conversations with over a hundred teenage boys into an impassioned plea to have open healthy dialogue about sex. She alludes to the #MeToo movement as a barometer for the current state of masculinity in relation to sex, raising the stakes of her advice and contextualizing it within a broader movement.
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