Orenstein carefully navigated the new complexities added to her work as she sought to better understand how race, queerness, and technology (texting and social media, for example) shape how boys today navigate their own romantic and sexual lives, and their understanding of their own masculinity or lack thereof. It’s a book we need urgently, and one that I hope spawns more like it. Hopefully, helping to slowly shift the culture that robs them of empathy, kindness, and, all too often, leads to their robbing the women in their lives of bodily autonomy and positive romantic and sexual experiences.Īs a whole, I was impressed with Boys & Sex: After all, it’s a large and daunting task to take on, even more so given its timeliness. Unlike Girls & Sex, which felt more white, and certainly more straight and more cis, Boys & Sex has charged itself with speaking to a wider group in hopes of understanding the world as young men see it. The book seeks to cover a wide scope of topics, and it does so in a very 2020 context, discussing the “feminist fuckboy” and widening its scope in terms of diversity. Orenstein is clear in her mission, explaining that this book will not be all things to all readers, and that, though she spoke with experts and researchers alongside the boys themselves, the book only scratches the surface of the culture surrounding boys and sex. Author Peggy Orenstein delves into the urgency of the subject in the book’s introduction, exploring #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein and other predators, and, of course, the fact that a misogynist sexual assaulter currently presides over the entire United States. Findings suggest the need for more targeted, culturally congruent PrEP dissemination strategies and PrEP prescription policies that acknowledge the various social locations and ecologies in which young Black gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men reside.īlack-Canadian PrEP biomedical HIV prevention bisexual and other men who have sex with men sexual health literacy young gay.Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter (Photo credit: Michael Todd)īoys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity is a timely and relevant read, perhaps even more so than its predecessor, 2016’s Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape-and it knows it.
The second focused on the impact of participants' social locations and perceptions of PrEP users based on their PrEP knowledge. The first centred on the ineffectiveness of institutions in disseminating PrEP information to participants. Our analysis revealed two interrelated barriers to PrEP knowledge and uptake. race, sexual orientation), interacted with individual, interpersonal and community contexts to shape their understanding. Intersectionality and the social ecological model allowed us to explore how social locations (e.g.
We interviewed twenty-two young men and used a constructivist grounded theory approach to qualitatively analyse these young men's PrEP knowledge. While research has explored the factors associated with their higher HIV exposure and the efficacy of STI/HIV prevention programmes, there remains a paucity of research on their knowledge of HIV prevention strategies such as PrEP. Despite significant advances in the HIV treatment and prevention landscape such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), young Black-Canadian gay, bisexual and other sexual minority men continue to experience disproportionately high rates of HIV infection.