“Emodiversity”—being able to experience a broad sweep of emotions, positive as well as negative—is crucial to adults’ emotional and physical health. Yet, in our conversations, boys routinely confided that they felt denied—by parents, male peers, girlfriends, media, teachers, coaches—the full gamut of human expression, especially anything related to sorrow or fear.
Robert Lipsyte, a longtime sports journalist, believes that it is boys’ very joy in athletics that allows the conditioning of “jock culture” to take hold. Sports can teach the kind of courage, cooperation, grace, and grit that lay the groundwork for off-the-field success. But, Lipsyte has written, “jock culture” uses those values as a smokescreen for bullying, entitlement, aggression, violence, and a “win-at-all-costs attitude that can kill a soul.”
Jock culture (or what the young men I met were more likely to call “bro culture”) is the dark underbelly of male-dominated enclaves, whether or not they formally involve athletics: all-boys’ schools, fraternity houses, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the military. Even as they promote bonding, preaching honor and integrity, such groups condition guys to treat anyone who is not “on the team” (a category that may include any woman who is not a blood relative) as the enemy—bros before hos!—justifying hostility or antagonism toward them. Loyalty is unconditional, and masculinity asserted through sharing sexual exploits, misogynist language, and homophobia.
If emotional suppression and disparagement of the feminine are two legs of the stool that supports “toxic masculinity,” the third is bragging about sexual conquest.
At the furthest, most disturbing end of that continuum, “funny” and “hilarious” become a defense against charges of sexual harassment, misconduct, or assault. “Rape isn’t funny—it’s hilarious!” One of the boys from Maryville, Missouri, who assaulted the unconscious fourteen-year-old Daisy Coleman, a subject of the Netflix documentary Audrie and Daisy, told police that at the moment he thought what they were doing was “funny.”
Porn World Versus Real World
It’s no secret that today’s children are guinea pigs in a massive porn experiment. Whereas (mostly) boys of previous generations might have passed around a filched, soiled copy of Playboy or possibly Penthouse, today anyone with a broadband connection can instantly access anything you can imagine—and a whole lot of stuff you don’t want to imagine—right on their phones, more or less anonymously and regardless of how many obstacles parents try to put in place.
It was the advent of Pornhub. Launched in 2007, when the boys I interviewed were on the cusp of puberty, Pornhub, like YouTube, allows users to upload, view, rate, and share videos for free, including professionally produced content. One hundred million visitors per day (the combined populations of Canada, Poland, and Australia) engage in fifty-seven thousand searches per minute of videos that are divided into categories such as oral, anal, blond, ebony, MILF, cuckold, squirting, teen, and My Little Pony. The site is owned by Montreal-based MindGeek, which also controls the other major adult “tubes”: YouPorn and Red Porn, as well as the production studios Brazzers, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, Sean Cody, and Men.com (the latter two of which feature gay and bisexual performers). MindGeek’s virtual monopoly in the industry, along with abundant free X-rated content (despite “no nudity” policies) on sites such as Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, has made porn simultaneously ubiquitous and, for its performers and producers, largely unprofitable—not unlike the effect of Napster and YouTube on musicians.
Cole, the guy from the previous chapter who is now attending a military academy, recalled, “I have a friend who was a legend among the high school crew team. He claimed that he’d stopped using porn completely. He said, ‘I just close my eyes and use my imagination.’ We were like, ‘Whoa! How does he do that?’”
Female gamers and Twitch streamers are subject to a torrent of misogynist vitriol. Video games, incidentally, are now a $140 billion annual global business, as opposed to Hollywood’s mere $38 billion;
Grindr, which is to Tinder what a booty call is to a candlelit dinner and a movie. Whether they were openly gay with limited options or closeted, Grindr had become their outlet—a safe distance from that neutered public expression of gay-best-friend sexuality—for exploring actual sex.
Rape allegations have been used as a means of social control of African Americans for generations, but rape itself is a tool for social control of all women everywhere. That can put feminists, particularly white feminists fighting to have assault charges taken seriously, at odds with black men; it also puts black women in an untenable position, wanting to protect men of their race from further trauma, even, at times, at their own expense.
According to the AAU Campus Climate Survey, which consisted of one hundred fifty thousand students at twenty-seven public and private universities, 23.1 percent of female students had been sexually assaulted through physical force, violence, or incapacitation since entering college, including 10.8 percent who experienced penetration. By 2014, the state of California had mandated that all universities receiving public funds use the “affirmative consent” standard in sexual misconduct hearings. Sometimes called “yes means yes,” the law requires a sexual partner to obtain “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary” agreement at each stage of an intimate encounter.
When they drink, young (and not so young) men are even more likely to overestimate female sexual interest—as well as to overstate women’s role as initiators—interpreting any expression of friendliness by a girl as: It’s on.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, we—men, women, adults, teens, and, perhaps especially, parents—still want to believe that only “monsters” commit assault. True, it may now be monsters we know—our employers, our clergy, our classmates, our teachers, our favorite celebrities, our politicians, our Supreme Court Justices—but they are monsters, nonetheless.
The narcissism of male desire is instilled early, reinforced by media, peers, and parental silence, and by girls who have themselves been trained from an early age to take men’s needs and desires more seriously than their own.
It’s Not “The Talk”
Parents need to have habitual, brief, often casual conversations that increase in complexity as children grow older. By now it should be abundantly clear that the content of those
Consent Is Crucial
Most of us adults did not grow up with the current “yes means yes” standard;
But Sex Is Not Just About Consent . . .
“Good” sex is not only legal and ethical but pleasurable and mutually satisfying. For that to be the case, boys must have an accurate conception of female bodies and sexual responses.
And It Isn’t Only About Intercourse
we allow kids to label other acts—including manual, oral, and anal sex—as “not sex” and so potentially not subject to the same rules; that opens the door to risky behavior and disrespect.
It’s Not Even Just About Sex
Start young, by offering little boys books, films, and other media featuring complex female protagonists. Take notice when women are absent or misrepresented on-screen or the playing field. Intervene, even if it annoys guys, to question how the media they consume presents gender roles, bodies (men’s as well as women’s), race, sex
Promote the Healthy and Name the Toxic
Close relationships, whether platonic or romantic, have been found to be the number one key to personal well-being, and emotional literacy—the ability to understand and express feelings—is the key to those close relationships.
You Must, You Simply Must, Talk About Porn
If They Have That Solid Relationship, Consider the Sleepover
Decline Admission to “Dick School”
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