Good Guy on Campus: Gender, Peer Groups, and Sexuality among College Men.

Notions of young men's sexuality as forceful and uncontrollable are central to our culture, especially for adolescents and young adults, and yet we know little about how young men are affected by these cultural beliefs. Overall, contemporary research on young men's sexuality often fails to investigate how young men subjectively experience sexuality. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 34 heterosexual men enrolled at a large Midwestern university, I investigate how young men make sense of sexuality, and also how social environments are related to different orientations toward hegemonic, masculine sexuality. I argue that the inner dialogues of young men's sexual sense making are surprisingly diverse, revealing that, one, young men often struggle with competing and contradictory notions of male sexuality and, two, that social contexts interact in complex ways with young men's beliefs and experiences to influence their sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]