Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  This is a book about what lies beneath all of this. It’s a book about patriarchy, gendered oppression and toxic masculinity. It’s a book about how gender inequality and the specific kind of violence meted out to women is maintained because all three of these things work together to keep structures in place that are harmful to everyone, but more superficially beneficial than not to men.

  It’s not a book about how men are shit. It’s a book about how the systems we live in allow men to get away with doing deeply shitty things.

  A month before I published my first book, Fight Like A Girl, I faced one of my toughest challenges yet as a feminist: I became the mother of a boy.

  I often hear from parents that they’re frightened of having girls in this world. We know what violence can be done to our daughters, and people on the whole seem desperate to find a solution to this. (Practise situational awareness!) Curiously, this search for solutions has yet to include looking at ways to change the behaviour of boys. Instead, we see general pleas to recognise the humanity of girls and women by positioning them in relation to men: she’s somebody’s daughter/sister/mother/wife, so you must treat her with the reverence with which you treat your own daughters/sisters/mothers/wives.

  But who is ‘he’, the Shadow Man thought to be responsible for all this harm? Is he a mythical creature who hides in the cracks of alley walls, emerging only to wreak havoc on the women who will later be considered naive and foolish for failing to take their own safety seriously? Is he a monster? A loner? A basement dweller getting his kicks out of harassing women on the internet because he’s never talked to one in his entire life? A sexual deviant, a criminal, a sadist?

  In some cases, yes. (Okay, except for the bit about living in the wall.) But in the vast majority of cases, no. These Shadow Men live very much in the daylight. And just like the women they victimise, hurt, belittle, betray and wield power over, they also have familial connections. They are probably somebody’s brother/father/husband. They are more likely than not somebody’s colleague, teammate, friend.

  In every single case, they are somebody’s son.

  And yet, we never hear anyone say that they’re afraid of having a son in the way that they fear having a daughter. Why? Why are they not afraid of how the world conditions boys to ignore sexism? To dismiss emotions that are considered ‘too feminine’? To become macho, to express entitlement, to believe themselves worthy of privilege and praise just because they have grown up hearing how special they are? To hurt women, either alone but sometimes together, because it makes them feel powerful?

  Our culture is geared towards privileging boys. They are supported to be our leaders, our bosses, our CEOs, heads of households and legislators. Indeed, the world we live in has been designed by men with the purpose of elevating them to (and keeping them in) power. The patriarchal system under which we all labour is designed to uphold this power while punishing those who challenge its existence in any way. Within this structure, boys are given the space to unfurl and grow, to creep further and further outwards, while girls are forced to retreat ever more inwards.

  Every excuse is made for boys to allow them to continue on this path to greatness, even as it creates a rigid blueprint for what masculinity and its inscribed power is supposed to look like. Because everyone knows what boys are like. They’re rambunctious. They like to roughhouse and fool around. Boys are drawn to adventure. As children, they like dinosaurs and toy guns and clothes emblazoned with cars. They have no such thing as an inside voice, preferring instead to roar wherever they go. Boys are messy and boisterous, barrelling through the world with an admirable lack of restraint. Here comes trouble! Trouble is their middle name!

  Boys are instructed from a very early age to pledge their allegiance to each other. They take care of each other. They have each other’s backs. They look after their mates. Mateship is very important to boys. Boys don’t cut each other’s lunches. You don’t go after your mate’s missus and you aren’t allowed to date their sister unless you get permission. Boys respect each other’s property, especially when they’re married to it or share the same DNA. Boys respect each other most of all, and close ranks against anyone else who threatens that. Don’t dog the boys.

  Boys like girls too though. They tease and hit girls because they like them so much, pulling their hair and pushing them around in accordance with the strength of their crushes. Boys are red-blooded. They go after what they want. They can’t help themselves. Girls have to be on their guard around boys. If girls fail to take the proper precautions to keep themselves out of harm’s way, they only have themselves to blame. Boys don’t mean to hurt girls. They just lose control. They make mistakes. Hasn’t everyone made a mistake at some point in their life? They don’t deserve to have their lives ruined over it. Boys have promising futures. They shouldn’t be punished for a lapse in judgment, an action that was entirely out of character. Where was the girl in all this? Doesn’t it take two to tango? Shouldn’t she have been more careful? She should have known what she was getting into, dealing with a boy. It’s not as if we don’t know what boys are like.

  Boys will be boys, after all.

  The kind of boyhood that’s codified by mainstream cis-normative western society is not an innate state of being. Boys can and will be many things, but what the boys in our world are currently conditioned to be as a rule is entitled, domineering, sexist, privileged and, in all too many cases, violent.

  We have the power to change that.

  In Fight Like A Girl, I took a phrase that’s commonly used to denigrate girls and repurposed it as something more powerful. My intention with this book is to do the same but in reverse—to take hold of a common sentiment that’s bandied about without thought and expose just how damaging it is for everyone, boys included.

  Boys Will Be Boys takes aim at toxic male spaces and behaviours that are used to codify male power and dominance, but that also secure protection from the consequences of them. I’ve looked at how gender inequality is first learned in the home and then filtered down through pop culture, and how this provides the perfect launching pad into even more damaging practices later on—the embrace of online abuse, rape culture, men’s rights baloney and even the freezing out of women from governance and leadership.

  Of course, there are people who are reluctant to unpack this reality. There’s a prevailing belief that toxic masculinity is little more than laddishness. That it’s part and parcel of what it means to be a man. But I think we should all be deeply concerned about allowing masculinity to be constructed in such a dangerous and, above all, lazy way.

  As the mother of a boy, I don’t believe that he’s incapable of controlling his impulses or distinguishing between right and wrong. And as a citizen of the world, I don’t accept that this is the best we can offer to boys and men. Why is the perceived freedom of boys to exert their power over space, bodies and society considered so much more important than the dignity and humanity of those harmed in this process, including the boys and men unable or unwilling to collude in this power?

  One of the many benefits that will come from dismantling patriarchy is the liberation of boys and men from its grip. Boys are not born with a disdain for girls or for the parts of themselves that are coded as feminine. The unapologetic, unselfconscious desire for affection and tenderness that pours out of little boys is not a gift given to them by nature to be enjoyed briefly before receding against the grain of their growing limbs. Society forces this tenderness out of boys in the same way it punishes forthrightness in girls, rebranding them as ‘sissy’ and ‘bossy’ respectively. As hooks says, patriarchy and its insidious messaging teaches boys to kill off the emotional parts of themselves, but if we as their protectors do nothing to stop this then we might as well be handing them the knives.

  Very few people seem to worry about boyhood, because it’s far easier to frame the real concern as lying with their counterparts (who are always seen as the reflection of boys, rather than individuals in their own right).
Fathers of girls joke about erecting force fields around them, sitting on porches with shotguns to scare off any boys who come sniffing around. ‘She can date when she’s thirty-five!’ they holler, because of course they know ‘what boys are like’. When stories of sexual harassment or assault hit the news or even arise in conversation, the same men who once upon a time turned away as they saw it happening or perhaps even participated in it themselves now respond with declaration: ‘As the father of daughters . . .’—because of course his ownership of a young girl has enabled him to see her as a human being instead of a conquest.

  Everyone’s afraid that their daughters might be hurt. No one seems to be scared that their sons might be the ones to do it.

  This book took me a year to write, but it is the culmination of many years of writing about power, abuse, privilege, male entitlement and rape culture. After all that, here’s what I’ve learned: we shouldn’t just be scared. We should be fucking terrified.

  1

  IT’S A BOY

  Roughly halfway through my pregnancy, I turned up to a clinic in Melbourne for my second trimester morphology ultrasound. It’s a fairly standard procedure, the purpose of which is to determine that the foetus is growing and developing as expected. Among other things, your sonographer will examine the foetus’s head and brain, heart, kidneys, bladder, stomach, spine and limbs, including their hands and feet.

  Oh yeah, and whether they have a ding or a dong.

  As I very quickly discovered once my pregnancy became obvious, one of the first questions asked of expectant parents is whether or not they know the sex of their baby. While there’s nothing consciously nefarious about this enquiry, the subtle motivations for it are worthy of critique. Forming an idea of something or someone may well be a natural part of connection, but one of the first ways we’re socially conditioned to imagine the outline of a person is by assigning them a gender.

  As such, ‘gender reveal parties’ have been growing steadily more popular alongside the rise of social media. Expectant parents can now use Pinterest to source inspiration, Instagram and Snapchat to upload photographs, Facebook to share the results with friends and YouTube to try to land themselves some sweet advertising coin and a spot on Ellen. Why do they do it? Well, it seems that no matter how many conversations are being had around the complexities of identity (not least of which is that no test can determine gender, only biological sex characteristics—and even that has some wiggle room), the rush to assign babies to a rigid category of blue or pink persists. On arrival, guests may be asked to cast a vote for either of those colours, because nothing says welcome to the world like having a roomful of Saturday-drunk strangers take a punt on your junk. After the bets have been cast, typical reveals include things like cutting into a cake to discover a pink or blue interior, smashing piñatas to be showered in pink or blue bonbons or opening a box to release a bunch of balloons in—you guessed it!—either pink or blue.

  If the idea of gathering your closest friends and family to celebrate your child’s genitalia isn’t disconcerting enough, the dominant themes of such parties should flip your nausea switch. A cursory search on Pinterest (the go-to site for DIY party planning, interior decorating and basically anything else that is guaranteed to look worse when mere mortals try to copy it) highlights such grotesque hits as ‘Wheels or Heels’, ‘Touchdowns or Tutus’, ‘’Staches or Lashes’ and, sickeningly, ‘Rifles or Ruffles’ (with ‘Guns or Glitter’ being a variation on that theme). Personally, I cannot fathom what kind of strange vortex you’d need to live in to think it was appropriate to enthusiastically connect an innocent little baby with a fucking gun, but I’m wacky that way.

  Let’s just get something out of the way, because I’m aware that critiquing cultural practices like this can sometimes feel like a criticism of an individual and their worth. Some of you reading this may have hosted your own version of these parties or may be planning one for when the times comes. You might feel a little defensive about the fact I’m deriding something you consider to be just a bit of light-hearted fun. It’s okay. I’m not calling you a terrible person or questioning your taste (I listen exclusively to musical theatre and used the opportunity of turning thirty-five to freely embrace wearing socks with sandals, so I am in no position to judge). What I’m suggesting is that your impulse to assign meaning to something as arbitrary and functional as genitalia is born out of a cultural imperative to affix labels where none are necessary, and that individual participation in these rituals enforces a larger pattern of collective gender stereotyping that ultimately proves harmful for everyone. You are not a bad person (probably), but you are doing a bad thing.

  But why are gender reveal parties bad? you might be wondering. Isn’t this just a case of feminism going too far (again!) and ruining everything for everyone in the entire world?

  First, let’s talk about the concept itself. Gender is neither fixed nor tangible. It cannot be seen and categorised as easily as genitalia, though the two are so often assumed to be one and the same. The characteristics we associate with biological sex—a chromosomic make up of XX or XY, for example—might be indicators of certain hormonal probabilities within the body, but they no more define gender than wearing pink skirts or blue ties do. Assigning gender based on what we assume to be the visible indicators of chromosomal sex characteristics (vaginas with XX chromosomes = girl; penises with XY chromosomes = boy) is therefore not just a guess at best, it also perpetuates the trauma experienced by trans and gender non-conforming people born into a cis-normative world.

  Then there are the multitude of biological possibilities that contradict the idea of biological sex itself being the ultimate arbiter of whether or not your child will be declared a ‘touchdown’ or a ‘tutu’ and gifted either guns or glitter. An intersex child may present with biological and anatomical sex characteristics traditionally considered both male and female, but still identify as a single gender. Is their chosen gender any less authentic because their biology is more colourful than it is straightforward?

  That’s before we take into account the fact that even when sex characteristics and genitalia present in a way considered biologically common, there’s still little we can determine about gender identity from either. If we can understand that biological discrepancies may create circumstances that complicate how society might traditionally assign sex, why is it so difficult to understand that gender may equally be felt and understood as something separate to the way our down-theres look?

  So back to the concept of the gender reveal party. Aside from being a manifestation of capitalist ideals and the showcasing of a certain kind of individual affluence (seriously, how many parties are people entitled to throw to celebrate something that basically only impacts their own life?), the whole premise of a ‘gender reveal’ is flawed, cis-normative and, if you consider how dodgy it would be to sit around with our friends and discuss the junk of born children, also kind of unethical. Parties like this should really be called ‘genitalia reveals’, because they invite a community to assign an entire identity to an unborn child on the extremely basic and arguably deceptive premise of what those children are still in the process of growing between their legs!

  Personally, I like my friend Dev’s idea. Invite your friends around for a big bash and have them place bets on the following themes: ‘books or books’, ‘balloons or balloons’, ‘ice cream or ice cream’, ‘shoes or socks’, ‘yellow or green’, ‘Angel or Spike’. Bake a cake and dye the inside of it neon green. Make a piñata in the shape of the renowned philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler and fill it with birdseed. Open a box to release a flock of parrots all trained to squawk, ‘GENDER IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT!’

  You might be laughing, but I’m 100 percent serious. Especially about the Judith Butler piñata.

  These kinds of ceremonies might seem harmless to you, and maybe on a superficial level they are. After all, the baby chilling out in the human hot tub doesn’t know or care about the effort being put into
deciding what kind of clothes they’re going to be gifted for the next three years. But that’s not really the point. The unborn baby doesn’t have an opinion about these things because they aren’t yet aware of social conditioning, nor have they been exposed to it. It’s all the people around them who’ll be responsible for policing that in their formative years, and gender reveal parties are an open invitation to let them begin straight away. It might seem like a cute joke to compare hair bows (a girl!) to bows and arrows (a boy!), but line all those choices up against each other and you’ll see just what kind of picture it paints about how we collectively view girlhood and boyhood. Girls are heels and lashes and bows and tutus. Boys are cars and touchdowns and arrows and rifles and guns. Girls are expected to be pretty and delicate, boys are supposed to dominate and destroy shit. This isn’t just a totally fucked-up way to define humans—it’s also deeply unimaginative.

  An unexamined view of gender that perpetuates stereotypes such as these isn’t harmless, nor is it passive. Rather, it underpins the very structure of gender inequality. It’s impossible to examine the conditioning that leads boys and men to exhibit some of the more harmful aspects of the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality later on in life without critiquing the mindset and practice from which this evolves. If we weren’t so invested collectively in policing a binary vision of gender and the limited ways those who sit on either side are encouraged (and in some cases forced) to express themselves, we wouldn’t need to ostentatiously announce to anyone—let alone an entire backyard full of people—what category of child we were preparing to welcome into our lives.