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Many young heterosexual men interviewed for a new study described sex as a source of anxiety, vigilance, and shame rather than pleasure. The research, published in Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, is based on in-depth interviews with 31 men who came of age amid heightened attention to sexual consent, and suggests that some have internalized a broad cultural suspicion of men, approaching intimacy as a hazard to manage rather than an experience to share. Their constant self-monitoring appeared to combine a sincere wish not to hurt a partner with a fear of social or legal ruin.
Sexual consent is the mutual agreement between partners to participate in sexual activity. Over the past decade, legal reforms, university policies, and public health campaigns have increasingly promoted a standard known as affirmative consent, which requires active, ongoing agreement rather than merely the absence of a “no.” Under many of these policies, that agreement can be expressed in words or through behavior, but silence or a lack of resistance does not count. These initiatives largely focus on educating young men to ask permission, pay attention to their partners, and verify willingness at every step, shifting the responsibility onto men to confirm that their partners want to participate.
Translating those formal standards into real-life bedroom encounters is often difficult for young people. Instead of pausing to ask direct verbal questions, young adults in a 2013 study of college students typically relied on body language and physical cues to gauge whether a partner was interested in sex. Interpreting those unspoken signals is rarely straightforward, as a 2016 review of research on consent among college students indicated that real-world intimacy is frequently complicated by alcohol use, casual dating norms, and traditional expectations that men should initiate physical contact.
Classroom lessons that present consent as a simple verbal checklist often clash with how young people actually interact, and a 2022 study of teenage boys indicated that this disconnect left many students feeling confused and anxious about how to approach dating in their own social circles. Public commentary and academic literature on male sexuality have largely focused on entitlement, aggression, or convicted offenders, leaving ordinary young men’s emotional experiences of consensual intimacy mostly unexamined.
“We wanted to understand the root causes of sexual violence in order to prevent it,” lead author Jossy Forrest, a PhD candidate at the Melbourne School of Public Health at the University of Melbourne, told PsyPost. “Early on, we noticed that almost all of the literature focused on the perspectives of female victims. There were very few studies of men, and those were mainly small, dated studies of incarcerated perpetrators, some decades old.”
Forrest answered PsyPost’s questions jointly with her co-authors, Jessie V. Ford of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and Jonathan Herring of Exeter College at the University of Oxford.
“That led us to a broader question: how this generation of young men navigates sex and consent, including the gray area between bad sex and non-consensual sex,” the researchers explained. “There was almost nothing on it. These men have grown up in a period of rapid cultural change. The past few decades have been described as the ‘age of consent’: young men have been the targets of education programs, public campaigns and a wider conversation about getting consent right.”
“We wanted to know how that messaging had been absorbed, how young men navigate consent in practice, and whether it shapes their emotional experience of sex,” Forrest and her colleagues added. “This generation has also lived through other changes that raised the stakes around sex: online pornography, app-based dating, #MeToo and the conversation about ‘toxic masculinity.’ We did not set out to study those influences. But they made it more important to hear from young men today rather than assume an earlier generation’s perspective still held.”
In an earlier paper drawing on the same interviews, Forrest and Ford found that the men tried to bridge the gap between formal consent rules and real encounters by piecing together multiple cues, such as trust, timing, setting, and physical reciprocity, to infer that a partner was willing.
“Much to our surprise, the young men we spoke to were not careless about consent,” the authors said. “They had absorbed consent education and had a fairly sophisticated understanding of what consent requires. Across the board, they wanted to get it right.”
While their earlier analysis showed how young men attempt to verify consent in practice, it did not address how that constant calculation feels from the inside. In the new study, Forrest and her colleagues sought to understand the emotions, sense of personal responsibility, and self-perceptions that shape how young heterosexual men experience sex today.
“Almost all of them applied a test for consent, which we called ‘multi-factor authentication,’ that sometimes went beyond what affirmative consent requires,” the researchers noted. “One indicator was not enough. They usually needed several to line up: reciprocated and escalating physical cues, contextual signals, and in some cases verbal check-ins before, during and after sex. This paper asked what navigating consent that way felt like.”
To explore these experiences, the researchers analyzed interviews with the 31 men, out of 35 interviewed for the larger project, who identified as heterosexual, all between the ages of 18 and 32. The participants were recruited through that project, called The Blurred Lines Project, at the University of Melbourne, using campus flyers and snowball sampling, a recruitment method in which initial volunteers refer acquaintances to the study.
To be eligible, participants needed to have had at least one sexual encounter with a known adult and could not have any history of being charged with or convicted of a sexual offense. At the time of the study, 24 of the men lived in Australia and 7 lived in the United States, and each received a $40 grocery voucher for participating.
Forrest conducted all 31 interviews in person or over video calls between September and November 2023, with 26 conversations held in English and 5 in Spanish. The sessions lasted an average of 92 minutes and followed a guide of seven open-ended questions. Participants were asked what sexual consent meant to them and to share stories about encounters in which they were sure both people consented, in which they themselves had not consented but had sex anyway, in which they were unsure whether their partner consented, and in which their partner had not consented. They were also asked why young men sometimes go ahead with sex when unsure of a partner’s consent.
Notably, the interview questions never directly asked the men about their emotions, their sense of moral burden, or their fears of being accused of wrongdoing. Those topics surfaced spontaneously as the men reflected on their dating lives. The researchers transcribed the recordings and used thematic analysis, a qualitative method for identifying recurring patterns of meaning across interviews. Through inductive coding, which builds themes directly from participants’ own words rather than sorting responses into pre-existing categories, the team identified three major overlapping patterns.
“This is qualitative research, so there are no effect sizes in the statistical sense,” Forrest, Ford, and Herring explained. “The study aimed for depth rather than breadth. To our knowledge it is one of the most in-depth interview studies of young men on this topic to date.”
Asked whether anything had surprised them, the researchers replied, “Almost everything. We asked these men how they navigate consent, and left room for them to say how they feel about sex. The fear, the vigilance and the shame came up unprompted, again and again.”
Across the entire group, the authors noticed that participants rarely talked about sex as fun, relaxing, or pleasurable. Instead, 29 of the 31 men (94 percent) described sexual encounters as spaces of high anxiety, fear, and constant vigilance. Several participants described feeling caught in a bind, facing social pressure to be sexually active while also feeling they could not afford to make a mistake.
One 28-year-old participant put it this way: “It’s like you’re trying to defuse a bomb, but you don’t know which wire to cut,” adding that it was “a very tense situation” in something “meant to be enjoyable and open and free.” Two of the younger participants reported that fear overpowered any happiness they might feel during intimacy. Many also described performance anxiety, worrying that they would fail to satisfy their partner or last long enough in bed, and for some, it was hard to separate from anxiety about consent. Rather than being present in the moment, the men described operating in a habitual state of self-monitoring, constantly scanning their partner’s reactions and filtering their own behavior.
A second major theme, also expressed by 29 of the 31 participants (94 percent), centered on a deep moral concern about causing harm. The men emphasized that they wanted to be decent, ethical partners and were petrified of accidentally scaring, pressuring, or hurting a woman. They were also acutely aware that, as they saw it, men are viewed with suspicion around sex, and the authors write that this healthy moral concern often tipped into an unhealthy extreme of people-pleasing and self-erasure.
To make sure their partners felt safe and never felt used, many participants prioritized the woman’s comfort to the point of ignoring their own desires. One man admitted he did not even know what he personally liked in bed because he was so focused on pleasing his partners, while another explained that he simply handed over full control of sexual encounters to the other person. The authors write that for many of these men, care for a partner seemed to become a kind of performance, of consent and of pleasure, rather than a shared desire.
“The interviews challenged a lot of our assumptions about young men,” the researchers told PsyPost. “These were not the confident, entitled men that society, and much of the literature, had led us to expect. They were thoughtful and articulate about consent. They were also acutely anxious and often overwhelmed.”
“Many had internalized a cultural suspicion of young men. One man told us young men feel like ‘ticking time bombs for sexual assault,'” the authors continued. “We did not expect that this was how young men might have come to see themselves. As we say in the paper, it suggests that well-intentioned efforts to make men more responsible for consent may be working, but with unintended side effects.”
Alongside empathy for their partners, 26 of the 31 men (84 percent) described an intense fear of shame and personal ruin. Specifically, 19 participants (61 percent) worried about formal accusations that could destroy their careers or lead to jail time, expressing fear that an encounter that seemed consensual in the moment might be reinterpreted as assault afterward.
One participant likened youth sexual culture to waking up at age 13 and being expected to pass a legal bar exam without a single lesson, where failing meant prison. Seventeen participants (55 percent) also feared the informal court of social gossip, noting that rumors of inappropriate behavior could trigger immediate and permanent banishment from friend groups and professional circles.
Participants described a social environment that left little room for seeking advice or talking honestly with male friends when they felt uncertain about a sexual interaction. One participant said that admitting to another man that he might have overstepped would be “the same as saying you’re a child molester,” and the authors observed that the men could talk to each other about sexual performance but not about doubt. Even more troubling to the researchers, 16 of the 31 men (52 percent) turned this harsh judgment inward. Rather than feeling guilt over a specific action, they expressed what the authors describe as a standing sense of shame about who they were, using phrases such as “I’m not a good person” and “I’m so bad.”
“The most concerning thing we learned was that these men had no one to speak to honestly about consent,” Forrest and her co-authors said. “They could not admit uncertainty to themselves. They could not raise doubts with friends, family or anyone else. They believed that admitting any imperfection would be taken as admitting they were sexual predators.”
“From that, there was no coming back,” the researchers added. “If no one can discuss consent, no one learns. And if no one learns, it is hard to see how we end up with better partners or less harm.”
The authors argue that the men’s experiences seemed to be shaped by two exaggerated fears: that they might commit sexual assault despite their best efforts, and that a partner might falsely accuse them. False accusations do occur, but the authors note that police and legal reviews consistently find them to be rare, far rarer than these men assumed. In the authors’ view, these fears made it hard for the men to trust either their partners or themselves, and several described pulling back from intimacy to protect themselves.
“The findings paint a rather gloomy picture of young men’s sexual experiences, seemingly colored more by anxiety, vigilant self-monitoring, and responsibility than by the pleasure, excitement, and sense of adventure one might expect from people exploring the relatively new terrain of sexuality,” Gurit E. Birnbaum, a professor of psychology at Reichman University, who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost. “Their relative inexperience, combined with the contemporary cultural climate surrounding sexual consent, may contribute to these feelings.”
“It would be interesting to investigate whether this pattern reflects a broader trend and whether growing anxiety surrounding sexual encounters might help explain the decline in sexual frequency among younger generations, beyond the factors already identified in previous research,” Birnbaum said. “After all, constant vigilance and self-monitoring may make it difficult to let go, a psychological state that is often essential for sexual enjoyment and functioning.”
In the wake of the study’s publication, the researchers addressed online reactions suggesting that the participants wanted to roll back consent standards or feel less responsible for their partners. In both phases of their interview project, the men emphasized that mutual trust and genuine connection were what they valued most in a sexual relationship.
“That is not what they told us,” Forrest, Ford, and Herring said. “They cared acutely about consent, but they wanted more than consent. They told us that trust and mutuality mattered as much as consent itself. What they were looking for was connection with a partner, not perfection.”
“Another misreading is that the study is a plea for sympathy for young men,” the researchers explained. “It isn’t. The aim was understanding. The only way to understand young men is to take their own accounts seriously, as we do for everyone else.”
The authors noted that research examining men’s perspectives on sex and consent often faces skepticism in public debates, where critics sometimes assume that studying men’s anxieties excuses harmful behavior. In their view, examining how public messaging affects young men is necessary for preventing sexual violence and improving relationships for both partners.
“If we want to protect women and men from non-consensual sex, we need to know how young men think and feel,” the authors continued. “The same is true if we want more than that: ethical, healthy sexual relationships. Knowing how young men think shows us which efforts are landing, which are not, and which are producing consequences nobody intended.”
“We have been surprised by the level of resistance to the idea of studying men and taking their accounts seriously,” Forrest, Ford, and Herring said. “This is a highly loaded space, and some responses assume, without engaging with the findings or the methods, that this must be research with a pro-male or anti-feminist agenda. That troubles us. If anything, we came to the study skeptical of young men.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these accounts. The findings come from a relatively small group of 31 young men, most of whom were recruited through a single Australian university and grew up in Judeo-Christian households, meaning their perspectives may not reflect young men from different cultural, religious, or educational backgrounds.
In addition, four of the seven interview questions focused on uncertain or non-consensual sexual encounters, which may have primed the men to focus on stressful memories rather than positive ones. The study also relied on single interviews with the men and did not include their sexual partners, whose accounts of the same interactions might differ.
“However, these findings should be interpreted cautiously,” Birnbaum noted. “This is a qualitative study based on a small, nonrepresentative sample, and its findings cannot be generalized to young men as a whole. More importantly, the interviews focused heavily on sexual consent, uncertainty, and potentially problematic encounters. Such questions may have directed participants’ attention toward anxiety and negative experiences rather than pleasure and enjoyment.”
“The absence of spontaneous descriptions of pleasure in these interviews should not be mistaken for evidence that pleasure is absent from these men’s sexual lives,” Birnbaum added. “Another important limitation is that the study cannot establish whether these anxieties are specific to the current generation or reflect concerns that have always accompanied sexual exploration. Nor can it establish that contemporary discourse about consent is responsible for them.”
The authors stress that their counts describe only these 31 men and are not estimates of how common these experiences are among young men in general. They also note that a woman conducted the interviews, which may have helped some men open up about vulnerability and shame, though the accounts might have come out differently with a male interviewer.
“As for caveats, the 31 men we interviewed were recruited mainly through one Australian university,” the researchers cautioned. “Their accounts cannot stand in for young heterosexual men more broadly, let alone men in other cultural settings. The study tells us what these men experience and how they make sense of it. It suggests lines of inquiry for others to test.”
“Participants came not only from Australia but from China, Singapore, Nepal, India, Sweden, Italy, Colombia, Argentina, Lebanon, Nigeria and New Zealand,” Forrest and her colleagues pointed out. “That such a mixed group described so similar a pattern suggests this way of relating to sex may be common among young men in Western, post-#MeToo societies. The study may usefully guide future research, including quantitative research.”
Despite these constraints, the findings point to important considerations for educators, therapists, and researchers. The authors suggest that consent education programs focusing exclusively on men’s duty to avoid harm and legal punishment may inadvertently teach young men to view sex as a technical problem to be solved without error.
In the authors’ reading, the men had taken on the duty side of consent, making sure a partner wants what is happening, without the matching right to ask for what they themselves want. Shifting educational messaging to emphasize mutual trust, shared communication, and the right of both partners to express what they enjoy could help young people build healthier connections, while future studies could track young men over time and incorporate partners’ perspectives.
As for their own next steps, the researchers told PsyPost, “We are now looking at how these same men understand and make sense of their own unwanted or ambivalent sexual experiences, a question almost never asked of men.”
“Perhaps the most important implication is that sexual consent and sexual pleasure should not be treated as competing concerns,” Birnbaum said. “Ideally, sex education should emphasize not only avoiding harm but also fostering mutual desire, responsiveness, communication, and enjoyment.”
For Forrest and her co-authors, fostering that mutual desire requires moving past the assumption that men’s and women’s interests in sexual relationships are inherently at odds. They hope the study encourages researchers and educators to engage directly with young men about their experiences.
“Its purpose was to learn how to better protect women,” the researchers explained. “And its premise is that men and women are not rivals. They complement one another. Understanding one helps the other.”
“We went into this research expecting to confirm what the literature says about young men,” the authors concluded. “The men themselves showed us a far more complex picture. Their honesty, thoughtfulness and vulnerability reminded us of their humanity. If readers take one thing from this study, let it be this: young men are worth listening to, and the way to find out what they think is to ask them.”
The study, “‘It’s Like You’re Trying to Defuse a Bomb’: Fear, Responsibility, and Shame in Young Men’s Sexual Lives,” was authored by Jossy Forrest, Jessie V. Ford, and Jonathan Herring.