Author of the week: Rosalind Wiseman

last updated 8 January 2015

Rosalind Wiseman would be a really good person to know in high school, said Hope Reese in The Atlantic. Her first book, 2002’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, was such an astute study of the social lives of teenage girls that it inspired the film Mean Girls and launched a second career for Wiseman as a lecturer giving talks for students, parents, and educators. But Queen Bees covered only half the story, and in her new book, Masterminds & Wingmen, the author has finally given boys a chance to open up their own oft-wounded hearts. “We have a hard time—even though we think we don’t—-acknowledging that boys have deep emotional lives,” she says. “In so many different ways, we box boys in. We’re not aware of it.”

Wiseman never assumed she had the expertise to map out Boys World on her own, said Anna North in Salon.com. Masterminds credits the assistance of some 200 young male “editors,” ages 8 to 24, who talked candidly about their own experiences and vetted Wiseman’s various conclusions. “It took a while in the beginning to get them to talk to me when they disagreed with me about something,” she says. Once they did, they upended much of what she thought she knew—including about boys’ sex lives. “I had sort of fallen into this stereotype that the boys that are higher up in the social hierarchy have more hookups,” she says. But football players, she learned, simply don’t spend enough time among girls. “I am absolutely convinced after writing this book,” she says, “that band camp is where all the action is.”