*from Soraya Chemaly’s substack, Unmanned; it’s long but she’s a fcking genius, and so right on, I encourage you to stick with it. It even includes a ‘how to talk to your boys’ section because of course this is all fixable, or, at least able to be seriously addressed. And, this is what teenage boys already know:
What’s a Little Rape Compared to a Man’s Potential?
Like tens of millions of people, I’ve been avidly watching the Men’s World Cup. Admittedly, my watching has more to do with loving hanging out with friends than loving the details of soccer. It’s been a fun temporary obsession and, last weekend, a terrific distraction from the debacle of DC’s July 4th.
At a watch party last weekend, I found myself listening to a conversation about players. “I don’t like him,” a friend of mine, a man, said of Thomas Partey (*a Ghanian football player), prompting a teenage girl at the table to ask, “Why? He’s so talented.” “He’s not a good guy,” answered another man quickly while the conversation turned back to the match we were watching. She didn’t know Partey had been charged with seven counts of rape and is awaiting trial. It felt harsh to drop the fact bluntly (like picking the title of this post tbh) or to say he’s one of several players currently under investigation or on trial for sexual assault. This is what the two men were avoiding saying out loud, even while disparaging him. I quietly explained the rape charges, and she expressed surprise. It was a lighthearted conversation; the word rape is such a buzzkill.
It occurred to me in the moment that my experience, of not wanting to say something despite how I felt and what I knew, was the tiniest microcosm of boys’ experiences of witnessing and saying nothing about sexism and the abuse of girls and women by other boys and men. Over and over and over again.
I’m an adult and think and talk about sexual assault every day; I made a choice. Boys’ choices aren’t real ones, though; most have to stay silent, ignore their feelings, and learn to morally detach. Until, as adults, the entire process is normal.
Learning to ignore sexism, homophobia, and misogyny is a male rite of passage.
Dr. Judy Chu, Niobe Way, Carol Gilligan, Naomi Snider, Jackson Katz, Kate Manne Ruth Whippman, Michael Kimmel, bell hooks, Alan Grieg, Alex di Branco, Tommy Curry, Michael Flood, Gary Barker and many others, over decades, have all written extensively about the million different ways masculine socialization demands that boys ignore their instincts, their feelings, their sense of right and wrong, and their empathy for the girls and women they love. If this weren’t true, they would retain their natural moral integrity and refuse to deny, tolerate, and shield male violence as men. Their love, respect, and affection for girls and women as children would remain fully intact.
Like it or not, the boys’ emotional disconnection and moral abandonment of girls, and then women, as equals are part and parcel of traditional masculine expectations. The process of incrementally normalizing harms to girls, women, and gender non-conforming boys and men begins with small signals, in the expectations of peers, older boys, fathers, other men, and, in many cases, mothers.
At five or six, this might look like a boy being mockingly told to “stop crying like a girl” or shamed for clinging too closely to his mother. At eight or nine, it’s the quiet or sensitive boy bullied or teased for playing with girls. By 11 or 12, it’s the boy who’s immersed in games and family films where female characters are typically depicted as sexualized prizes, sidekicks, or nagging obstacles to men’s self-actualization. At 13, the same boy might belong to a group chat where friends have created a deepfake of a classmate or teacher, and even though he knows it’s wrong and doesn’t share it, he says nothing and stays in the chat. By 17, around the time a popular athlete on the high school team is accused of assaulting a girl, his looking away and ignoring emotional discomfort are easy and familiar.
Femininity and queerness are targeted for punishment long before boys have the words to describe or consciously understand them. Boys learn to hide their outrage or confusion from other boys and men. They might feel disgust, but learn to hide it and not make a big deal out of what they’re privy to. It’s clear that defending a girl’s or woman’s humanity brings real risks, of excommunication or being considered weak, effeminate, or untrustworthy. The same self-silencing extends to the treatment of boys who cross heteropatriarchal lines.
Fraternity provides protection, social currency, and professional access but, by adulthood, a man knows that holding other men accountable for sexism has clear costs. The older a boy gets, the higher and more materially consequential both the benefits of complicity and the risks of rocking the boat.
There is no shortage of lessons about how institutions like schools, religious communities, and the justice systems treat boys who hurt girls and women. For every negative outcome of the most egregious abuses, innumerable others disappear. These get lost in cases that are maybe rectified in response to specific but random outrage.
Take a recent case in the U.K.: Three teenage boys — two aged 15, one aged 14 — were convicted at Southampton Crown Court of ten counts of rape against two teenage girls, aged 14 and 15, in two separate attacks during 2024 and 2025. All three offenders were sentenced to non-custodial youth rehabilitation, meaning no incarceration.
One of the girls they raped described the sentencing as “a rock straight to my face.”
As happened last year in a rape case in Belgium, this judge prioritized the boys and their futures over the damage done to the girls and their futures. He praised the boys “for their good conduct from the charge up to the point of their sentence” even though they had all pleaded not guilty and, as a result, both girls had to endure the re-traumatization of a full trial. He minimized rapes that were pre-planned and digitally recorded sexual violence, describing the assaults as the result of “peer pressure,” a relatable adolescent mistake. He focused on the vulnerability and future potential of the perpetrators over the acute trauma and lifelong impacts of the rapes on the victims. He was trying, as part of law reforms, to meet standards established to reduce incarcerations and cruelty to children, but he misapplied a policy regarding comparatively minor offenses with premeditated and particularly cruel rape.
In the Belgian case, the judge suspended the sentence of a medical student found guilty of raping a fellow student, while she was unconscious. The judge, citing his youth, clean record, and “promising future” in medicine, sentenced him to no jail time, triggering protests. He was found guilty again on appeal and still faces no punishment. Not to be undone, a court in Oklahoma decided that an 18-year-old convicted of “repeated, violent sexual assault” and strangling of two former girlfriends should have no jail time and instead was sentenced to counseling and community service.
The judge in the UK case mentioned “peer pressure,” but the larger phenomenon is actually homosociality and patriarchal socialization.
The primary mechanisms of transmission of patriarchal values — and the moral injury they can inflict — to boys is vertical homosociality, men seeking the company and validation of other men. It is among men that boys’ need for connection and belonging can be used to teach them to override their moral sensibilities and their natural respect and affection for women. It’s not only that boys are expected to conform but that they also have to distance themselves from and lie to girls and women, even if only by omission. They learn to keep what Niobe Way calls deep secrets.
Today, media have collapsed a whole host of related and negative outcomes into an all-purpose “masculinity crisis.” These include deaths of despair, male supremacist extremism, gambling, loneliness, reactionary politics, and compensatory hostility towards women.
Because boys have relatively few paths for understanding or repair, and because so few adults explicitly talk to children about gender and heteropatriarchy, boys are left to their own devices to deal with moral discomfort and emotional isolation. Their childhood survival strategies harden into the adult cruelty and carelessness we see every day in our social feeds.
Moral Injury is not the same as PTSD
Like many feminists, I often focus on the male entitlement embedded in harmful beliefs and behaviors. Men learn that protecting other men yields concrete advantages — professional access, domestic labor, sexual impunity, mot because of some tortured conscience. Many entwined theories —gender role stress, gender role conflict, aggrieved entitlement, hegemonic masculinity — are relevant in that context, but the dynamics of moral injury are also notable, qualitatively different, and useful to consider, particularly if you are concerned with children.
Moral injury is the distress that results from actions that violate deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. Either a person witnesses something morally transgressive, does something morally transgressive, or fails to prevent it. It is sometimes confused with trauma, but there are real differences that matter.
Unlike trauma, which is based in a threat to a person’s safety, moral injury is a threat to moral identity. It’s what can happen when a person has to make choices that violate their core values and sense of self. Soldiers, for instance, are not only genuinely traumatized by war but often do and witness things that fragment their moral sensibilities. The same thing happens to nurses and doctors, especially those who cared for people during the overwhelming early days of COVID.
Trauma, specifically PTSD, is a person’s reaction to sustained life stress or to a life-threatening or terrifying event that overloads the nervous system. Moral injury is grounded in a sense of self-wrongness and worthlessness. It prompts numbing and withdrawal, guilt, shame, and disgust.
It seems to me that moral injury is what many men experience as boys. In fact, moral injury is a key component of patriarchal masculinity because becoming a man in the hegemonic sense continuously requires boys’ and men’s self-betrayal, even if that betrayal comes with material and social rewards.
Repairing moral injury is different from treating PTSD because the core issue isn’t fear to be soothed but guilt to be reckoned with — and no amount of being told “you’re safe now” answers a man’s actual question, which is “was I good? Am I good?”
Trauma treatments can often hurt people with moral injury by not incorporating the fact that what is troubling them is not what was done to them but what they themselves did or didn’t do. It’s about their personal complicity and a subsequent denial of self-worth. Treating moral injury as you would PTSD ignores agency and, in men, the mandatory compromise of their beliefs and feelings and ethics for status. Returning to a state of wholeness and goodness takes acknowledging agency.
The problem is, as we see every day, so much of male-dominated culture, across life, has institutionalized this abandonment and detachment. In fact, entitlement and impunity are compensation for both.
Moral injury and entitlement are directly related
With trauma, the question is “What happened to you?” but with moral injury the question is, “What did you do, fail to prevent, or witness that violated your conscience?” That is a significant difference because it speaks directly to agency and entitlement, which boys and men retain.
At lunch, for instance, the men who sanitized the player’s rapes weren’t indifferent to what the player, or others, might have done to women; if they had been, they probably wouldn’t have softened the description. Saying “rape” was uncomfortable for any number of reasons, including that they were perhaps angry that they even had to think about this marring reality. Either man could have been blunter, but neither was, opting instead to shut down the conversation and, with it, his emotional dis-ease.
While a boy’s early compliance with patriarchal misogyny is a blameless survival strategy mandated by adult structures, adult men have agency, and many actively choose to barter away women’s safety and dignity to secure status and material benefits. Platner, for instance, chose to respond to this week’s allegations with what one analyst described as “a bitter, defiant and, frankly, conspiratorial video.” A choice and also a classic, textbook illustration of entitlement.
Entitled people operate in the belief that they are not subject to rules and social contracts. Studies show they are significantly more likely to engage in unethical behavior, rule-breaking, and greedy exploitation of shared resources. This is the basis for the Al Capone Theory of business corruption. When found out or called out, they are highly prone to anger and defensiveness, seeing themselves as persecuted by unjust systems. The “operating motivation is greed, not fear.”
Patriarchal systems don’t leave boys and men in a state of unaddressed pain but rather instantly compensate them for compliance: homosocial networks, inclusion in fraternal power structures, paternal love, unearned authority and respect, social privileges, and material, professional, and economic gains. The shame of having compromised morality is diffused with a patriarchal entitlement as part of the passage to manhood.
Patriarchy fixes men’s moral crises regarding by normalizing behavior that is and should be felt as monstrous. It tells the boys and men that their hostility, sexual entitlement, and systemic disregard for women is not an ethical failure, but a valid, expected expression of masculine control and power.
Sexual assault and non-consensual behaviors like stealthing are acts of entitlement, showing a desire for status, power and control, both in terms of individuals and groups. The person who perpetrates them is acting on the belief that his immediate needs, desires, physical impulses, and comfort are more important and supersede those of the person being abused, their autonomy, safety, and human rights. Society supports this belief in its general carelessness and impunity.
There is also the reality that, by adulthood, many perpetrators of sexual assault have been so thoroughly socialized by misogynistic culture that they experience no guilt, shame, or injury because women are considered subhuman. This is why even the principle of consent is so elusive to begin with.
The problem, exquisitely described by sociologist Jane Ward in her book, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, is that, at the same time, straight men sexually desire women in a culture that simultaneously teaches them to demean, objectify, and hold women in low esteem. She compares this to queer theorist Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism or “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object.”
“It is possible for straight men to like women so much, so deeply,” she writes, “that they actually really like women.” Under our current circumstances, this is evidently difficult. Dominance, control, and entitlement are still winning the day.
I am not suggesting that male entitlement — to comfort, to status, to dominance, to other people’s bodies is the blameless result of childhood wounds. Entitlement is, for instance, wrapped up in the masculine mandate to protect others. More than enough men make self-interested decisions, even when those self-interests are rationalized in terms of supporting their families. We routinely see examples of how, in the pursuit of economic security, religious comfort, professional gain, power, and status, the safety and dignity of women isn’t a priority beyond a man’s “own” women and children.
Choosing to ignore harms to women and not confronting aggressors isn’t the same, however, as living easily with the day-to-day reality of having chosen. There’s not enough entitlement to go around. Men operate within all sorts of hierarchies that dole entitlements out unequally.
Enter the Mansosphere
When a person experiences a moral injury, is aware they have transgressed, and are not socially compensated in significant ways – money, power, social status – they often pursue a redemption story that reframes shame or guilt as a virtue.
For millions of men, the possible discomfort of moral injury, shame, or guilt is dispelled in the deflecting, angry idea that women are attacking men unfairly, in more and more elaborate fantasies of victimization and strange and stupid expressions of “real manhood.” The various parts of the Manosphere promise rigid hierarchies and black-and-white moral systems that superficially restore a sense of righteousness and purpose.
In more than a decade of tracking its growth, I have never seen a healthy outcome or space emerge from these systems.The Manosphere tells men women are the reason for their unhappiness and pain but the pain they name itself proves the opposite: that the trade so many boys and men make was never worth what it cost.
It’s no surprise that this path to pseudo-absolution has exploded during a decade in which women have increasingly asked the men in their lives to listen and change, and have refused to stop insisting on accountability. Researchers studying the far-right, online radicalization, and resurgent white supremacy have concluded that the inversion of victimhood is not a subconscious coping mechanism at all, but a deliberate, often strategic mimicking of the language of trauma and oppression. When a dominant groups seeks to defend, secure, and expand their power, they are, again, making a choice.
Sports and politics are still mainly games in which men compete
During a recent lineup, England defender Died Spence appeared to be the only player on the field who refused to shake hands with Thomas Partey. At this point, apparently, this is the most we can hope for. I appreciated his gesture, but the bar is so low. Arsenal, among the world’s biggest, most prestigious clubs, retained Partey for the full 2024-25 season even though he was under charge for seven rapes of four women that allegedly took place while he was a player. He pleaded not guilty, played in 35 games, and was then traded to another team before appearing at the World Cup for Ghana.
Sports is the acme of both a cultish devotion to men and a masculine reward system that treats them as assets. It’s also an arena where men’s future potential and contributions to a fraternity regularly override concerns about how women are viewed and treated.
I’ve lost track of the number of cases where a man accused of or found guilty of rape is described in headlines or articles in terms of his glowing athletic prowess. Once in a while, a contrary case, like Brock Turner’s assault of Chanel Miller, captures national attention, but eventually the pattern of identifying the man’s skills and, often, of racialized leniency resumes. Gender and race both operate in the question of whose future counts.
When an athlete or group of athletes assaults a woman, a whole defensive machine — of coaches, media, administrators, corporate boards, lawyers, and sponsors — springs into action, treating the incident like a public relations crisis, not the crossing of an inviolable ethical boundary.
Research on athletics has repeatedly found that athletes hold more rape-supportive attitudes than non-athletes. On campuses with major athletic programs, rates of sexual violence are significantly higher, with athletes being the most likely both to perpetrate and to experience sexual violence. Whether elite professional athletes actually commit more sexual violence than other men is unclear, especially since victims of powerful, beloved men are far less likely to come forward. What isn’t disputed, however, is the conviction rate gaps. Athletes are convicted at about half the rate of the general population (some analyses indicate far less than that). These outcomes are not about individual actions but about institutional power that protects men from accountability.
The entire system endangers women more broadly. Fan cultures are also plagued by gender-based violence. Years of studies consistently show that during major tournaments like the World Cup, reported incidents of domestic abuse spike by up to 26% when a national team plays. That jumps to 38% if a team loses. That’s a lot of bystanders, witnesses, participants, victims, survivors, and institutions.
Sports, though — the teams, the principles of leadership and sacrifice, the hierarchies, competitive structures, and domination goals — are a well-understood structural model for politics,
How individual complicity becomes party strategy
The calculations men learn to make as individuals scale up institutionally, on behalf of whatever constitutes “the team” whose interests are deemed worth protecting.
Platner is a prime example. Until the most recent allegations, his survival was talked about mainly in terms of near-absolute necessity. Despite a steadily mounting series of scandals, support for his candidacy remained strong, including among women.
Many remain angry that he’s been forced to suspend his campaign, but this anger isn’t in defense of the working class but of winning, even if it means putting another man— one credibly accused of sexually abusive behaviors by multiple women — in national power.
Progressive gatekeepers who define progressivism strictly through a class-first economic filter build their own patriarchal and white-centered hierarchies — ones that persistently downgrade women’s safety and status. They see class and economic issues — healthcare, union rights, fighting elites — as “universal” material needs, while relegating gender justice and sexual safety to disdained “identity” issues, as though pregnancy criminalization, abortion, rape, and misogyny aren’t material realities.
When men on the left complain about feminism or mock women — as progressive commentator Matt Stoller did recently, dismissing what he called “Dem HR lady politics” — they aren’t engaging in political debates about priorities or the centrality of class; they’re engaging in sexism that infuses everything.
Can you imagine a woman Graham Platner? A woman with “no experience in elected office, no notable history of activist organizing, no college degree, no significant success in the private sector, not even a record of pulling (herself) up by his proverbial bootstraps?” Platner was seemingly little more than potential.
It’s impossible to imagine a woman Graham Platner, because the point of Platner wasn’t primarily about his being the ideal working-class candidate but rather about his being a certain type of fetishized man. His class authenticity was better described as a lazy archetype of masculine roughness. That roughness apparently excused a string of troubling facts, long before “unsettling behavior towards women” and sexual assault allegations were made. Working-class Mainers seemed to realize this.
What did Platner’s potential actually mean for the home health aides, uncompensated caregivers, the women staffing nursing homes and daycare centers, cashiers and stockers on overnight shifts, hotel housekeepers, servers working doubles for tips, the women answering phones at call centers, packing warehouse orders, cleaning office buildings after everyone else has gone home? What do working-class women of color, the people doing the bulk of these jobs, think of his treatment of women? Of the fact that the party chose him repeatedly?
A June 2026 NYT poll revealed that 58% of college-educated voters rated Platner favorably, compared with 36% of non-college-educated voters. He was cratering with working-class voters even as his support among college-educated ones was increasing. Platner appeared to be doing no better with working-class voters than a generic, non-”authentic” Democrat did six years earlier. It looks like the people most taken with Platner’s working-class appeal were not working-class people.
Rather than holding him responsible for almost knowingly putting his party in a terrible position electorally or focusing on the risk that his continued support repeatedly introduced, many people still think of the women who’ve spoken up as saboteurs, not real progressives.
Deeply embedded in resistance to what Platner’s accusers claim is the implicit expectation that the women should do what men have always done: bury their own feelings, pain, and moral compasses to meet the demands of the larger project. The underlying sentiment is resentment — not about electoral risk, but about women refusing to do what men learned to do as boys and have to do as men.
Liberal and progressive leaders, organizations, and supporters are not, as many of us know from experience, magically immune to misogyny and patriarchal conventions.
Republicans may be freer to process allegations of sexual violation through a tribal-warfare lens, but many Democrats are inclined toward the same. They just have, for cultural reasons, a harder time doing so. As a result, the party is more likely to enforce accountability, albeit in messy ways, frustrating ways. A woman, for instance, might be chosen to replace Platner yet again, in another glass cliff scenario that will put the candidate in a vulnerable position and leave her open to relentless criticism.
The progressivism that would put Platner’s electability above harms and risks to women’s coming forward is not only one that prioritizes class. It’s one whose leaders have chosen, despite important facts, whose experiences of class are the most important. That’s also about choice and entitlement.
The question is why people who exhibit sexism and misogyny or ignore their own identities as political identities get to call themselves “progressives.” A progressivism that doesn’t center this feminism isn’t progressive; it’s just another part of the exact systems it claims to reject. Dismantling these foundations is the work of queer, decolonial, intersectional feminism, an eternally progressive political project.
Today, this project is dismantling the social contract that has allowed men to govern how we talk about all of these issues, and, well, people are having a super hard time with the change.
MeToo and other movements have made men’s moral decoupling explicit
Women’s use of technology has made moral decoupling from sexism and misogyny harder for everyone, but especially for men because each hashtag and movement exposes the compelled and corrupting trade at the center of traditional masculine identities, relationships, and systems.
Patriarchal norms have meant men could operate with both a split consciousness and within a protected public-private divide. A man could compartmentalize his life: loving his mother, marrying a woman, and being a gentle brother in private, while simultaneously staying silent about — and benefiting from — the wider culture of sexual entitlement, male dominance, and male predation in public, professional, or fraternal spaces. The current climate has made both far more difficult to maintain.
#Slutwalk, #EverydaySexism, #WhenWomenRefuse, #MeToo, #YesAllWomen, #NiUnaMenos, #TimesUp, #4BMovement, #manvsbear. Each invited men to acknowledge the realities of women’s lives — and one after another, millions of men said no, thanks. Even worse, but more revealing, many say, effectively, “What you are saying is an attack on me personally,” another way of saying, “What you are saying hurts me and makes me feel things I don’t want to feel. Stop.” Instead of pondering the nature of the hurt, millions of men all over the world are blaming women for their having actually to feel it.
A knee-jerk reaction among boys and men hearing women name the effects of sexism and sexual abuse was to do what Platner did: co-opt the language of victimhood. The panic over false accusations that followed MeToo and seems to have never ended is a case of inverted victimhood to protect men’s structural power. It equates an incredibly rare situation (data proves false rape allegations occur at rates of between 2% and 8%, the same as rates for any other felony) with rape (that impacts depending on the group, between 1 in 3 and 1 in 5 women).
What is the widespread adoption of a false narrative of symmetrical vulnerability if not the expression of entitlement? The belief that reputational harm is the same as having someone else penetrate your body and, for many victims, change the trajectory of your life if not the exercise of power?
The mass reaction is what we see: reactionary politics, online harassment, fury, and, this week in bro-progressive circles, peevish sexism. It’s not difficult to see how, in the absence of actual well-informed conversations and feminism, the emotional discomfort and shame of “men are harming women and I’m a man, what does that make me?” morphs into the defensive grievance of “women hate men, and any of them could ruin me.” It’s entitlement, though, that works to effect the underlying and consequential dismissal of what women are experiencing and saying they need.
Accountability is still the word of the day
During the conversation about World Cup players, I was conflicted but grateful for where my conflict led me — to thinking about betraying myself, even for a scant few minutes in a fluffy conversation. Next time someone says “he’s not a good guy” instead of the true words, however, I hope I say the words that matter.
I didn’t write this to pathologize egregious acts or to excuse men who act in harmful ways. I wrote it to think about an idea that provides at least some part of the answer to questions I hear all the time: “What’s wrong with men? Why don’t they believe women or take our problems seriously?” Understanding moral injury and detachment gives us another tool to build the change we need, especially for parents and adults who care for children.
Talking about how boys’ moral injury is implicated in women’s institutional betrayal is useful for the same reasons. Men themselves can see and feel the deep damage done by norms that so often lead them, essentially, to self-harm and hurt others to gain status in other men’s eyes. They can appreciate the power of both their adult agency and the necessity of real solidarity with women in the interest of collective change and democracy. In writing this, I was heartened to find and very happy to read this 2014 speech by Carol Gilligan, Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Difference.” In it, Gilligan revisits and updates her landmark work on feminist care ethics, treating care not through a binary gender lens but through the lenses of political resistance and human development. Instead of asking how we develop morality, she asks “how do we lose the capacity to care?” (This question was, it happens, my starting point for writing The Resilience Myth, a Trojan Horse critique of male supremacist beliefs.)
There will be no safety or justice — no alleviating men’s various crises, no repair — without accountability, and accountability isn’t optional, not therapeutic, and not owed to men before it’s owed to women who’ve been asking for it loudly, everywhere.
Lastly, if you’ve come this far and are still thinking “not my son” and/or “not all men,” it might help to know that the starting and ending point for this conversation is that while not all men practice violence against women all women live with the reality of male violence; every single day, all over the world.
Addendum: Having Conversations with Boys
In their excellent book Talk to Your Boys, Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schroeder explain why everyday conversations with boys about their experiences and place in the world are important. In the book, they share a core principle: boys shut down under direct interrogation but are far more willing to open up when asked low-pressure, curiosity-based questions that don’t suggest they name or accuse others or admit to wrongdoing outright.
They stress open-ended questions rather than yes/no questions. They also suggest asking about boys’ observations before asking about boys’ feelings; to be reporters, not judges. The approach treats boys’ learning to engage and disclose troubling information as an ongoing habit and process built through many small conversations over time, not one big talk. Here are some questions at different ages that might help start a process of talks. (Also, there are no questions here about porn, an important topic for its own post.)
Age 5 – the “stop crying like a girl” stage
1. Has a grown-up or a bigger kid ever told you not to cry, or to ‘be tough,’ because you’re a boy? What did that feel like?
2. Do you ever notice someone being treated differently just because they’re a girl? What did you notice? What did you think about that?
Age 9- the social penalty stage
3. Have you ever seen a boy get made fun of for hanging out with girls, or for being sensitive? What happened, and what did you do?
4. What do the shows or games you like say about what girls are for? Do you think that’s true?
Age 13 – the life is really complicated stage
5. If you were in a chat where someone shared something humiliating about a girl or a woman, and you knew it was wrong but didn’t say anything — what would be going through your head at that time? What do you think you would do?
6. Have you ever laughed at a joke about a girl, or gone along with something, when part of you didn’t actually think it was funny? Why do you think you went along with it anyway? What do you worry would happen if you didn’t?
Age 16 – the status anxiety is real stage
7. “If a guy on your team, or in your friend group, was known for the way he talked about girls — or you’d heard things about him that worried you — would you feel like you could say something to your friends about it? What would stop you?”
8. “Have you ever seen a guy get protected — by a coach, a friend group, or just by being popular or good at something — after doing something which seemed like it should have mattered? What did that teach you about what actually gets someone in trouble?”