One is not born, but rather becomes, a dude.

This, at any rate, is the conclusion suggested by a recent report in The Journal of Adolescence, which seems to show that teenage boys are more interested in emotional connection than in sex for its own sake.

The report concerns a survey of 105 tenth-grade boys, who answered questions about dating and sex, along with several more general questions of health and lifestyle. When asked about their reasons for pursuing a relationship, over 80% of the boys responded that they did it because they “really liked the person.”

When asked about their reasons for having sex, the boys were as likely to say that they did it for love as they were to say that they had been motivated by pure physical attraction or curiosity about sex.

This evidence flies in the face of the common stereotypes that young men are supposed to be interested in sex rather than relationships (whereas girls, of course, are believed to prize relationships over sex). And so, not surprisingly, some people refuse to believe it.

Tara Parker-Pope, in her New York Times column on the subject, pointed out that, in her experience, the majority of the backlash to these findings came from grown men, several of whom commented on her original blog post to insist that the boys must have been lying. (As far as I can see, these men failed to provide any realistic explanation as to why the boys would have done so - my own research confirms that the “free pizza if you fake interest in a relationship” strategy is usually ineffective.) Why are these grown men so invested in denying the emotional life of teenage boys?

Well, why wouldn’t they be? Read More »