We Can’t Just Let Boys Be Boys
Locker rooms are not the place to learn about sexual ethics. Neither is the internet.
One of the most stunning moments in a week of stunning moments leading up to the decision to delay the Senate vote on whether to confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court came Friday morning, when two women confronted Senator Jeff Flake as he stood trapped in an elevator, eyes averted. If he let the nomination advance, one of them said, her voice ragged, he would be “telling all women that they don’t matter.”
True enough, and maybe that influenced his ultimate insistence on an F.B.I. investigation into the allegations against the judge. But I wanted to shout something else at Senator Flake (and O.K., I admit it, I yelled it at my TV screen), something that hasn’t been emphasized enough in this discussion: the message we are sending to boys.
For the past two years I have been interviewing high school and college-age men for a book on their experience of physical and emotional intimacy. I’m not convinced they are always reliable narrators of their own experience. At times, I can almost see the shadow of a girl behind them as they speak — a girl who is furious, traumatized, grieving over harms big and small that the boy in question simply didn’t recognize, or didn’t want to.
At some point in our conversation, these young men usually referred to themselves as “good guys,” and mostly, I would say, they were. They had also all been duly admonished by some adult in their lives — a parent, a coach — to “respect women.” But that, along with “don’t get anyone pregnant,” was pretty much the totality of their sex education. As one college sophomore said to me, “That’s kind of like telling someone who’s learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course, you think you’re not going to run over an old lady. But you still don’t know how to drive.”
Although there is now broader understanding that young women are most likely to be assaulted by an acquaintance, friend or date, no one — and especially not parents of boys — wants to make a true reckoning of what that means. We still want our rapists to be monsters, exceptions, degenerates whose expulsion from the community solves the problem. The image of the stranger jumping out of a dark alley has been replaced by Brock Turner, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby — men whose behavior is patently egregious: men who are clearly not “good guys.”
In a quick, informal survey on Thursday, some of my interview subjects honed in on Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that Brett Kavanaugh placed his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming. They were disgusted. They said that neither they nor any of their friends would ever do such a thing, and I believe them; but that repellent detail also allowed them to distance themselves from the more common coercive or nonconsensual behavior that too many young men do engage in.
“You never think that you’re part of the problem,” a college junior in Chicago told me when explaining why he’d engaged in only a single conversation with another boy about the implications of the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. “It’s always someone else that’s the bad guy, so you never think about addressing something that doesn’t concern you.”
An influential 2002 study on campus rape has not helped matters. It reported that 90 percent of assaults were committed by a small group of serial perpetrators, allowing most parents to breathe a sigh of relief. But that statistic has since been debunked. A more recent analysis of the same research, co-written by Mary Koss, a University of Arizona professor who published the first national study on campus rape in 1987, found such men to be a small minority of offenders.
Rather than a deviant’s expression of pathology, assault among adolescents is more likely to be a crime of opportunity. Boys do it because they can: because they are oblivious, because they are ignorant, because they are impulsive, because they have not learned to see girls and women as fully human. And yes, science has confirmed what common sense presumes: Boys are much more likely to rape when they are drunk. And the more they drink, the more aggressive they are, and the less aware of their victims’ distress. By contrast, sober guys not only are less sexually coercive but also will more readily intervene to prevent assaults by others.
A boy who assaults once in high school may not do it again, which in some ways is good to hear. At the same time, that means a seemingly “good guy” may well do a bad thing. A very bad thing. And afterward it is completely plausible for him to get away without apologizing, facing consequences, making amends. The monster-good guy dichotomy contributes to his denial: He could not possibly really be a rapist because that would make him a “monster,” and he is a “good guy.” So he rationalizes, forgets, goes on to professional success and even a happy marriage. Meanwhile, he may have derailed the life of another human being, causing her years, decades, of pain and trauma.
It is natural for parents to think their own sons would be incapable of sexual misconduct, but that does not absolve them of responsibility for educating their boys. Yet according to a survey of more than 3,000 18- to 25-year-olds published last year by the Making Caring Common project, which is part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, more than 60 percent of respondents had never had a single conversation with their parents about how to be sure that your partner wants to be having sex with you. A similar share had never been told about “the importance of not pressuring someone to have sex with you.”
Essentially, said Richard Weissbourd, the lead author of the survey, parents have abdicated responsibility for talking with their children, especially their boys, about sexual ethics or emotional intimacy. “If you ask many parents whether it’s really important that your son has a lot of integrity and is a good person, they would absolutely say yes,” he said. “But if you were to ask, ‘Have you talked to your son in a concrete way about the many ways you can degrade women?’ Most parents, I think, would say no.”
Other research has found that parents are vastly more likely to talk to their daughters about sexual readiness and disease protection, perhaps because they believe girls are more vulnerable, emotionally as well as physically. But that leaves boys to learn appropriate behavior from one another as well as the digital street corner.
In locker rooms, fraternity houses and other all-male spaces, they hear that sex is about conquest, about asserting masculinity through domination of girls’ bodies. “It’s not like guys say, ‘Dude, I made her feel great!’” a high school junior in New England told me. “That never happens. It’s always, ‘Bro! I slammed her!’” They’ve banged, they’ve nailed, they’ve smashed, they’ve torn up, they’ve destroyed. It all sounds less that they’ve had sex than that they’ve just returned from a visit to a construction site.
Boys grow up in a world in which women are either hyper-sexualized or absent. In the G-rated movies little boys watch, according to researchers at the University of Southern California, fewer than a third of the speaking characters are female — a figure that has held steady over the 10 years it has been tracked — and the percentage of skin women show is similar to that in R-rated movies (and that’s not because R-rated movies have gotten more conservative).
By their teen years, according to survey results released this month by PerryUndem, a research and polling firm, about half of boys say that several times a week or more they see female characters in video games presented as “hot,” as well as “unrealistic images” of female bodies, or “women whose bodies are more important than their brains or abilities” on TV and in movies and videos. Frankly, 50 percent seems low — and “unrealistic portrayals” an almost comic euphemism.
These days, many parents (myself included) have been vigilant, nearly obsessive, about providing our daughters with positive images of women to counteract the incessant messages telling them their greatest value comes from their body and appearance. We buy them “Nevertheless, she persisted” T-shirts. We provide books and videos featuring estimable female characters. We encourage bravery, intelligence, resilience. We point out the misogyny of the culture and engage them in media critique from the time they can say “Snow White.”
That has had an impact: Most of the young women in the PerryUndem survey believed that while sexism was still rampant, there were “many ways to be a girl.” Still, that is only half the equation, and I fear that the quest for equality — including a reduction of violence against women — will stall if we don’t start providing more powerful counternarratives about women’s worth, particularly in sexual encounters, to boys.
Rejecting Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court would be one way to let them know their actions matter. On an individual level, adults need to talk to boys early and often about sexual ethics, gender dynamics, consent, pleasure, healthy relationships and the risks to them of mixing sex and alcohol. As challenging as it can be, boys need to learn to stand up against sexism when they see or hear it, despite the potential social cost.
That education can never begin too young. Recently, a friend of mine gave birth to a baby boy. I sent him a onesie with the words “Wild Feminist!” emblazoned on it. I’m not sure I would have done that a few years ago, but now it felt like a start, almost like hope.
Peggy Orenstein is the author, most recently, of “Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape.”
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