But after reading Doing It, I'm not all that sure exactly what the big differences between young men and young women are.
Boys want sex and girls want sex. Boys find it difficult to negotiate the relationships they want and so do a lot of the girls. It's an adolescent world and it's pretty scary for all of them. They have to manage a frenzy of emotions, while coping with trying to communicate - and often failing - handling peer pressure and, of course, sex.
The characters fully realise that you can't separate having sex from emotions, nor from manipulations, worries, lust, nervousness, or the practicalities of where and how you might do it. So to simply dismiss the novel as a "grubby book, which demeans both young women and young men", as the children's laureate Anne Fine did, is to dismiss the learning that some of the characters go through and that readers might share.
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