Elle Beau ❇︎
1 min readApr 5, 2021

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That was an insightful comment and it may very well have been a factor. The cultural narrative is that "real men" want sex all of the time in whatever way they can get it, but this really isn't the case. Besides my own experiences of being turned down by men a time or two (when I was a 20 year old hottie), I've just finished reading Peggy Orenstein's book Boys & Sex. She talks quite a bit about the boys she interviewed revealing that they too had been pressured into sex they didn't want, and that some had even been coerced or taken advantage of when drunk - things that we'd call date rape if they happened to a girl.

“There is this notion of gender and sexual scripts in which men in heterosexual sex are understood to be responsible for moving the ball down the field,” observed Jennifer Hirsh, codirector of the SHIFT study. “Men are supposed to be the aggressors and girls the blockers, so that makes it hard for men to understand and label their own experiences of unwanted sex. Agency and consent are assumed. It also makes it hard for women to understand the necessity of getting consent from men.”

Orenstein, Peggy. Boys & Sex (p. 193). Harper. Kindle Edition.

I'll be curious to see what your other commenters think.

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Elle Beau ❇︎
Elle Beau ❇︎

Written by Elle Beau ❇︎

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother, I'm a sinner, I'm a saint. I do not feel ashamed. I'm your hell, I'm your dream, I'm nothing in between.

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