The ongoing debate about males and maleness in the age of the feminist revolution is back in the spotlight with a new book by veteran journalist and author Peggy Orenstein, Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity. The book, currently #4 in “Parenting Boys” on Amazon, has been adapted into a long essay in The Atlantic and is also the focus of a Q & A with Orenstein in The New Yorker, under the not-at-all-provocative title, “Can Masculinity Be Redeemed?”

Orenstein, who draws on her own interviews with boys and young men as well as other research, asserts that despite changing gender roles, American boys remain stuck in a 1950s model of masculinity that stresses dominance, aggression, and toughness, and is damaging not only to them but to girls and young women. Without a “counternarrative” of masculinity, she asserts, “there is a chance that [young men] won’t see women as fully human.”

Along with the accolades, Orenstein has come under some caustic criticism for ignoring biology (by asserting that boys have no less natural capacity for empathy than girls) and trying to feminize males (by suggesting that “boys still can’t cry” and that this is a problem).

I think some of Orenstein’s detractors go way too far in the direction of Mars vs. Venus stereotypes and paint with way too broad a brush. I’m against the “politically correct” know-nothingism that rejects any possibility of innate psychological sex differences, but I’m also firmly in the “men are from Earth, women are from Earth” camp. The problem is not that Orenstein is too pro-equality; it’s that, under an egalitarian guise, she promotes her own brand of stereotypes and double standards.

First, about that Mars/Venus gap.

Is it feminine to cry? It’s true that women cry more than men in just about every culture, almost certainly in part for physiological reasons. There is evidence that male hormones may suppress tears while certain female hormones may induce them; what’s more, men’s tear ducts apparently tend to be longer and deeper, which means that tears are less likely to make it out.

Yet cultural variations in both male and female lachrymosity are huge. The elevation of “sensibility” and sentiment in 18th-century Europe bred generations of weepy men. (In my undergraduate days at Rutgers circa 1985, a female student in 18th-century French lit asked in apparently sincere confusion whether the narrator of Manon Lescaut, the Chevalier des Grieux, was gay: to be sure, the story focuses on his romantic woes with a woman … but then again, “he’s always crying!”) For that matter, there are extremely macho subcultures in which sentimental male tears are entirely normal in some situations; the other day, re-reading Nikolai Gogol’s 19th-century novella Viy, I came across a gently humorous scene in which some traveling Cossacks start bawling and hugging once they’ve had a few drinks, behavior that Gogol notes is customary for “Little Russians” (i.e., Ukrainians).

As for gender and empathy, it’s even more complicated. Studies in which empathy levels are measured by people’s responses to questions such as “I find it easy to put myself in somebody else’s shoes” or “Seeing people cry doesn’t really upset me” generally find that women have a higher “empathy quotient” than men. It’s hardly a Mars-Venus-sized gulf, though. In one 2012 study with a large U.S. sample, the mean “empathizing score” on a 0–4 scale was 3.089 for women, 2.897 for men, and there was quite a bit of overlap. (In a random male-female pair, the male would score higher on empathy about a third of the time.) Still, some 22 percent of men in the sample were classified as “low empathy,” compared to just over 8 percent of women; about 10 percent of men and 24 percent of women were classified as “high empathy.”

However, all these results are based on self-reports — an important caveat. You don’t need to be a “social construction of gender” zealot to acknowledge that gender-specific social norms may influence someone’s assessment of his or her own empathy levels. Women may have more of an investment in seeing and presenting themselves as compassionate and emotionally aware; men, as tough. In modern Western societies, these norms aren’t nearly as pervasive or extreme as many feminists claim, and they may vary tremendously depending on subculture and social milieu; but it would be silly to claim that they don’t exist at all. At least some research shows that studies of empathy based on “objective” measures (e.g., measurements and recordings of physiological or facial responses to another’s distress) reveal much less of a gender gap than self-reports. One large review of available data published in 2014 finds that at least some female edge in empathy does exist on objective measures — e.g., speed and accuracy of identifying emotions based on facial expression — but much depends on specific variables. (One interesting factoid from a feminist standpoint: Starting in adolescence, males apparently feel less empathy toward other males but more empathy toward females, while females make no such distinction.)

To sum up: I don’t think crying is unmanly or should be regarded as such. I also don’t think that males who don’t cry must be “fixed” — or that boys or young men being unable to cry is as much of a problem as Orenstein makes it out to be: the same studies that show a “crying gap” also show that crying is not exceptionally rare male behavior, certainly not in response to sad life events or emotional crises. (The biggest difference is that women are far more likely to cry out of frustration or anger.)

I don’t think that men and boys in general are any less capable of empathy than women and girls, aside from minor variations (and aside from outliers with neurological or personality disorders, who are more likely to be male). But unlike Orenstein, I believe the sexes are roughly equal in actual — not just potential — compassion, warmth, and kindness.

Orenstein’s critics may exaggerate innate sex differences, but Orenstein vastly exaggerates “patriarchal” influences.

For instance: Is there any real evidence that boys are in thrall to “rigid masculine norms”? Orenstein herself writes in the Atlantic essay:

Nearly every guy I interviewed held relatively egalitarian views about girls, at least their role in the public sphere. They considered their female classmates to be smart and competent, entitled to their place on the athletic field and in school leadership, deserving of their admission to college and of professional opportunities. They all had female friends; most had gay male friends as well.

She also notes that all of her subjects seemed aware of the excesses of “toxic masculinity.” So what’s the problem? Where is the evidence that these young men’s norms of masculinity remain as patriarchal as ever? Orenstein points to a 2018 national survey of over 1000 children and adolescents 10 to 19 years old conducted by the PerryUndem firm for Plan International USA in which boys and young men supposedly saw “just one narrow route to successful masculinity” based on dominance, aggression, sexual prowess, stoicism, and athleticism:

One-third said they felt compelled to suppress their feelings, to “suck it up” or “be a man” when they were sad or scared, and more than 40 percent said that when they were angry, society expected them to be combative.

Yet the PerryUndem survey actually presents a far more complicated and nuanced picture.

It’s true that when asked an open-ended question about what “society” expects boys and girls to do when they feel angry, sad, or scared, teens gave extremely stereotypical responses: Boys are expected to “be a man/suck it up” when sad or scared, girls to “cry/scream.” This is where 41 percent of boys said that men are expected to be aggressive or violent when angry.

But were these answers reflective of what these teens saw in their own lives, or of what they had learned at school about gender roles and societal norms? (The kids in the sample were quite aware of feminist social analysis: over 80 percent of girls and about 70 percent of boys said that sexual harassment and assault were probably or definitely related to “the desire for power and control over girls” and “boys living in a culture where they have more power than girls”).

In fact, when boys and girls were asked about pressures they actually feel in their own lives, their responses were far more similar than one would expect:

Ironically, “hide feelings when sad or anxious” was one item with virtually no gender gap: 35 percent of boys and 33 percent of girls said they felt “a lot” of pressure to do so, and 29 percent of both sexes said they felt “some” pressure. More boys said they felt pressure to “dominate or be in charge of others”; still, only 14 percent reported feeling “a lot” of such pressure, compared to five percent of girls. (Altogether, 31 percent of adolescent girls and 36 percent of boys felt at least some pressure to be dominant and in charge.) More girls reported feeling a lot of pressure to “be emotionally strong.” Many more boys reported pressure to be physically strong; but, interestingly, only 18 percent said they felt a lot of pressure to “be willing to punch someone if provoked” — as did 12 percent of girls, a surprisingly small gap.

One could see these answers as evidence that restrictive traditional norms persist — or one could see them as evidence that these norms are enormously varied and flexible. It is also worth noting that, when asked how well a series of words and phrases described them, by far the #1 word picked by both boys and girls — with hardly any gender gap — was “nice.”

There is a curious detail in the PerryUndem list of questions on pressures faced by teens. Girls are asked if they feel pressure to do what boys want in sexual situations; boys, if they feel pressure to “join in when other boys talk about girls in a sexual way.” Both items frame girls as victims, whether of sexual coercion of sexual objectification.

The same assumption shows up in Orenstein’s approach to her subjects.

Take the adapted excerpt from Boys & Sex in The Atlantic. One private school senior Orenstein interviews, who proudly shows off a photo of his smart feminist girlfriend and talks about not fitting in with the sexist “bro” culture, mentions an incident in which a male student in the locker room “started talking about ‘getting back at’ a ‘bitch’ who’d dumped him.” We’re expected to see this as self-evident misogyny. But is it? Could a girl have said something similar about an ex-boyfriend? Is bad, callous behavior in heterosexual relationships a one-way street?

As it happens, the same book excerpt contains a striking story showing that it’s anything but. One of Orenstein’s interviewees, Nate, has a hookup with a girl at a party — initiated by the girl, who plops into his lap and then leads him to an upstairs bedroom. Then, she starts telling everyone how lousy it was.

By Monday morning, Nicole had spread the word that Nate was bad at hooking up: that he’d bit her lip, that he didn’t know how to finger a girl. That his nails were ragged. “The stereotype is that guys go into gory detail,” Nate said, but “it’s the other way around.” Guys will brag, but they’re not specific. Girls will go into “what his penis looked like,” every single thing he did. Nate said he felt “completely emasculated,” so mortified that he told his mom he was sick and stayed home from school the next day. “I was basically crying,” he said. “I was like, Shit! I fucked up.”

Eventually, Nate texted Nicole to ask why she was doing this. “She stopped telling people, but it took me until the next semester to recover,” he tells Orenstein.

This episode suggests that girls are quite capable of cruelty, lacking empathy, and maybe even treating boys as “less than human.” Reverse the sexes, and there is no doubt that Orenstein would treat it as a horrific example of misogynistic abuse. Instead, she uses it merely an example of the pressure on boys to perform; then, it’s back to concerns about the “misogyny” implicit in boys using language like “I hit that” to describe sexual experiences.

Orenstein’s New Yorker interview has another illuminating passage in which she reveals how her interviews with boys shed new light on girls’ complaints about “guys who ignored them the day after a hookup”:

And then talking to guys about why they would avert their eyes from someone they had sex with the night before was really interesting, because it would always come down to what is at the heart of what I am writing about in this book, which is fear of vulnerability. One guy said to me, “Well, I don’t know if she thinks it was a one-off at a party or if she thinks it is something more, and I don’t want to be the guy who tries to connect, and then have her say, ‘That was just a party thing.’” So he said, “If there is that question mark there, I am not going to look weak.” And I said, “So you would rather miss the opportunity to connect with somebody than take that tiny emotional risk of saying hi?” And he just went, “Yeah.”

It seems to me that if Orenstein is interested in equality, perhaps she should be talking about girls sharing the “emotional risk” more. In a world where it can no longer be automatically presumed that a girl who hooks up with a boy wants “something more,” why shouldn’t the girl sometimes be the one who “tries to connect” and says hi? Instead, it all comes back to boys behaving badly and the prescription to scrutinize media consumed by boys — “even if it annoys guys” — for disrespectful images of women.

Lastly, Orenstein’s analysis of the pressures faced by boys completely leaves out — at least going by the New Yorker interview and the Atlantic piece — one important factor: polarizing, male-blaming forms of modern feminism. There is, for instance, this remarkable passage:

When I asked my subjects, as I always did, what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank. “Huh,” mused Josh, a college sophomore at Washington State. (All the teenagers I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.) “That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

Earlier in the same paragraph, Orenstein reflects that while feminism has given girls “a powerful alternative to conventional femininity … there have been no credible equivalents for boys.” But it’s actually worse than that: much of modern feminist rhetoric is a relentless tirade about “what is wrong with guys.” While Orenstein frets about boys and young men being unable to cry, other feminists gleefully mock objections to male-bashing as “male tears.”

Nor does Orenstein ever ask whether boys’ confusion over sex has anything to do with double standards of “consent” under which a mutual drunken hookup can result in the boy being labeled a rapist and the girl a victim.

There is a failure of empathy in this narrative. But it’s not on the part of boys.