Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  In 2015, the small American town of Dietrich, Idaho, was rocked by revelations of sexual abuse emanating from the high school’s football team. The Washington Post described Dietrich as ‘a community on edge’ after charges were filed against three players who were alleged to have sexually assaulted a fellow student.

  While it’s not uncommon for residents to rally around young men with ‘promising futures’, there’s one key difference between this case and most of the ones we hear about—in Dietrich, the victim was a male teammate. He was also an intellectually disabled young black man in an overwhelmingly white town, which can’t be discounted when considering the weight of community defence typically offered to young men who’ve put themselves in situations like this. Had he been white and neurotypical, would supporters have been so quick to back the perpetrators? It’s hard to know for sure, but I think we can safely say that the situation would have been a bit less clear cut for them.

  It seems that the assault was at least partly planned, as the young man testified that it began with an invitation for a hug. While he was being held, another player pushed a coat hanger into his anus. The only man named in the trial, John R.K. Howard, then kicked the hanger, pushing it further into the young man’s rectum. As the victim told the court later, ‘Pain that I have never felt took over my body. I screamed, but afterwards, I kept it to myself.’

  It’s hard to imagine a situation in which anyone could find this kind of behaviour defensible, but it’s incredible how flexible people can be when it comes to forgiving their heroes. Local resident Hubert Shaw told the Washington Post: ‘They’re 15-, 16-, 17-year-old boys who are doing what boys do . . . I would guarantee that those boys had no criminal intent to do anything or any harm to anyone. Boys are boys and sometimes they get carried away.’

  The case isn’t too dissimilar from one that occurred at a party in Brisbane in early 2015. A young man drank too much and passed out in a bedroom. Four of his ‘friends’ coordinated an attack that involved two holding him down, another sexually violating him with a glass bottle and the fourth filming it. Afterwards, the footage was shared on social media. After a week-long trial, Bailey Hayes-Gordon, Nicholas Jackson and Jacob Watson—all of whom had pleaded not guilty—were convicted of rape and sentenced to two years in prison, to be suspended after six months. The fourth man, Frazer Eaton, had pleaded guilty from the outset and was given a sentence of eighteen months, to be wholly suspended.

  When I read about this case, I remember thinking how brave that eighteen-year-old lad was for coming forward and pressing charges—not because what happened to him was significantly worse than the rapes that women are subjected to, but because the framing of his assault as some kind of hilarious ‘prank’ must have made it that much more difficult to speak out.

  ‘Don’t dog the boys’ is still the ridiculous catchcry used by young men when they circle the wagons in defence of each other, and a man speaking out must have been perceived as some kind of deep betrayal of this form of toxic brotherhood. After the trio who pleaded not guilty were sentenced, friends and family members didn’t just openly weep in the courtroom, they also took to social media to lament the supposed miscarriage of justice that had happened that day. It was a joke! Their lives were being ruined over a joke!

  There is a delight in humiliation that rests at the centre of this swaggering machismo, and it must be asked what it is about seeing another human humiliated that is considered a) entertaining and b) a cheap night out. In her book Night Games, Anna Krien explores the notion of the ‘prank’ that underpins so much of the exploitation of others undertaken by groups of men: the secret filming of women engaged in sex acts, the sudden appearance of a second or third or fourth man during intercourse (even to the point of attempting to substitute one for another without her realising), the degradation of unconscious people’s bodies while others watch and laugh (even if, as the judge in this case decided, there was ‘no sexual gratification’).

  It speaks to the absolute repression of male emotional maturity that some circles of men require the use of women (and sometimes other men) as inanimate objects in order to connect with each other and/or use this degradation as a means of elevating their own status. At one point, Krien recounts the story of a woman who agreed to consensual group sex (very, very different to the pack sex so often defended in these scenarios as a mutual activity) with a small group of footballers. But I guess her consent was a problem in the end; being unable to dehumanise her sexually and therefore fulfil the purpose of the standard sexual ‘prank’, one of the footballers decided to do the next best thing. He defecated into her shoe, and waited for her reaction when she went to put it on.

  And to think, when I want to laugh I just watch old episodes of Blackadder and Gavin & Stacey. Is it true what the online trolls say to me? Have I been doing humour wrong all these years?

  Sarcasm aside, I often wonder what it is that draws these men to each other. Is it as simple as falling into line behind a ringleader? Maybe. Patriarchal order that favours you can be a helluva drug, and conforming to the rigid codes of masculinity in your own peer groups must seem easier than challenging it. No one likes to be ostracised as the party pooper. (Except feminists; we live for that shit.) But I suspect what’s probably going on is that a lot of young men want to say no to this kind of activity but don’t really know how. I don’t think that makes their complicity forgivable, but it does give us a point from which we might start to try and disrupt it.

  Of course, we first have to disrupt the impulse shown by broader society to make excuses for them. Consider this example. Around the same time as the sexual assault in Dietrich, yet another group of young men had their community rally around and protect them from the consequences of their actions. A young football player in Florida was arrested after footage was uncovered showing him and up to twenty-five other boys engaged in sexual activity (some just as spectators) with a fifteen-year-old girl in a school bathroom. Afterwards, Lee County schools superintendent Greg Adkins corresponded with parents, urging them to ‘move forward from this incident without further harsh judgment of those involved . . . They are adolescents who have made a serious mistake. They must now be afforded the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.’

  The media and public were predictably quick to condemn the girl. When incidents like this occur, people are often scathing about the ‘sluts’ and ‘hoes’ who need to ‘respect themselves more’, because if we can’t shame teenage girls for being sexually exploited then what can we do? It’s political correctness gone mad!

  It’s telling how much leniency is granted to boys allowed to ‘learn from their mistakes’ while girls continue to be subjected to scrutiny and shame for similar engagement. But there’s an unusual element in this situation that not only compounds this girl’s exploitation but makes the shaming of her especially repugnant. At thirteen, she was trafficked into sex slavery and spent the next two years being raped for the sexual gratification of large groups of adult men. As her advocate argued at the time, she was a victim who had been conditioned into sexuality at the threat of extreme punishment. For her to be now labelled as ‘promiscuous’ by a community more intent on sheltering its boys was simply inflicting further abuse on her.

  But the sexuality of boys is both revered and given free rein to experiment without risk, even as a regressive patriarchal mindset also denies it healthy and positive avenues for exploration. Shortly after the incident in the school bathroom, a twenty-four-year-old female teacher was arrested elsewhere in America and charged with grooming and raping her thirteen-year-old male student. The teacher, now pregnant, briefly tried to flee authorities but was soon captured. And although there is commentary from the public calling this what it is—rape and paedophilia—there’s also a significant amount of back-slapping and praise being foisted on the thirteen-year-old, whose ability to ‘nail and impregnate the teacher’ is apparently the stuff of envy.

  These stories all share the commonality of reduci
ng male sexuality to something base. Why is a thirteen-year-old boy not entitled to the same protection from predatory adult behaviour as a thirteen-year-old girl, just because the society he lives in views his sexuality as something dominant and invulnerable? To what extent do those attitudes inform the behaviour of a pack of boys who gather in a bathroom to watch as sequences more suited to a porn film are re-created with a fifteen-year-old rape victim? Isn’t it at least possible that some of those boys stood there and watched only because they feared not doing so would expose them as somehow less manly in front of their peers? Isn’t it possible that teenage boys aren’t always ready to fuck or to watch someone be fucked? Isn’t it possible that some of them just want to stay kids for a bit longer?

  If all that might possibly be true, how does this kind of uncritical acceptance of What Men Want help to feed an unhealthy pattern of behaviour that might lead a trio of young men to brutally rape a teammate or friend ‘as a joke’?

  It’s perplexing how fiercely some people will defend what they see as the natural impulses of male sexuality, while also demonising feminists for what they argue is some kind of criminal stereotyping. How many times have you either heard or perhaps even expressed the sentiment yourself that it’s feminists who ‘paint all men as rapists’, while ignoring the tacitly accepted belief that this kind of inappropriate and even illegal sexual behaviour in young men is either unavoidable or just what happens when a prank goes too far? Stop making men feel bad, you misandrissssssssst!

  But what could be more misandrist than conditioning young boys to view their sexuality as a weapon that empowers them but is also outside their control? Every time society defends or perpetuates this absurd stereotype, it reinforces to boys that the vibrancy of their masculine identities is dependent on how forcefully they not only express their sexuality but perform it for other men to admire. This is what encourages them to view girls and women as conquests instead of human beings, while denying them the right to prioritise intimacy over physicality, if they choose, or indeed to reject sexuality altogether when it suits them.

  We are doing damage to our young boys, and this in turn compounds the damage we already do to our young girls. We should all be disgusted to live in a world where an assault on either of them can be met with high fives or praise. We should absolutely demand more of boys. But we should also demand more for them.

  I don’t want my son to join in while his friends viciously attack someone who trusts them. I don’t want him to think that ‘humour’ relies on someone being humiliated. I don’t want him to be afraid of showing too much of his softness out of fear others will use it against him. I don’t want him to stand in a bathroom one day, watching a young girl be fucked and filmed by his school friends, and not know how to speak up about it to say no. But worse still is the thought that he could be the one filming it. That he could be the one organising it.

  I don’t want that world for him.

  I will not have that world for him.

  In his book How Not To Be a Boy, the comedian Robert Webb jokes that it’s not so much that masculinity is in crisis as that masculinity is a crisis. He immediately denounces this conclusion as too simplistic, but I’m tempted to agree with the original premise. Boys might be conditioned to believe that their sexuality is a fire-breathing dragon whose life force must never be tamed, but let’s be honest—that’s bullshit. It seems to me more likely that boys are fucking terrified all the time. Terrified that they won’t measure up to what they’re told men have to be, terrified that they’re not doing sex properly, terrified that they’re doing it with the wrong people, terrified that they’ll never get the girl, terrified of what it means that they don’t want to get the girl, terrified that someone might discover that they have feelings, terrified terrified terrified.

  Women may have few advantages over men in this crazy little sideshow we call life, but one thing we definitely don’t have to do is shove all our icky human emotions into a metaphorical box and send it on a one-way trip to the centre of the sun.

  And it isn’t just about what men mean to themselves. It’s also about what they’re allowed to mean to each other. You may have heard the homophobic rejoinder of ‘no homo’ to anything that even vaguely implies an expression of affection or admiration between men determined to maintain their reputations of strict heterosexuality. In this context the phrase is intended to be humorous rather than threatening, a way for otherwise straight men to share their feelings with each other, but maintain what ethnographer C.J. Pascoe referred to as ‘compulsive heterosexuality’ in her 2007 book, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School.

  Pascoe coined the phrase to describe the ways in which masculine power is codified within a community of teenage school peers. While it almost certainly begins in the nightmarish halls of secondary education, it’s a concept that can also be easily recognised alongside our society’s boring, ongoing, mainstream paranoia about men and homosexuality. Pascoe conducted field research for eighteen months at a racially diverse high school in California, interviewing more than fifty students about how gender, sexuality and the concept of masculinity played out for both the male and female students. In the male students’ interactions with each other, she found that homophobia was rife as a bullying tactic between both enemies and friends. The ‘compulsive heterosexuality’ she writes about thus becomes the institutionalised antidote to the emasculation always waiting to undermine boys and their place in the broader social hierarchy.

  And they accuse women of hysteria.

  My son isn’t quite two years old, but he’s perfected the art of the gentle hug. I watch him when he meets his little friends. At first he seems astonished to be suddenly surrounded by people who are the same size as him. But then you can tell he just wants to love on them like crazy. He’ll approach them slowly, carefully wrap his arms around them and then bury his head in their shoulder. The kids aren’t always into it, at which point we have to gently navigate some early lessons about bodily autonomy and respect. But there’s no two ways about it—he just bloody loves hugging people.

  I find myself wondering sometimes at what age this might stop. Will he succumb to the pressures of compulsive heterosexuality and the repressed masculinity that comes with that? And what does this mean for his ability to relate to men later on? Perhaps this is where we need to start: not just teaching men how to navigate healthy intimate relationships with women, but encouraging them to embrace healthy intimate relationships with each other. It breaks my heart to know that men—and young men especially—are conditioned against embracing the pleasures of a physically expressed platonic love for each other for fear that the authenticity of their manhood may be challenged.

  My family was always affectionate when I was growing up, and my father and brother still hug and kiss and say ‘I love you’ today. But it’s sad and surprising to realise how many men don’t express gentle intimacy with their sons, particularly as those boys enter adolescence. That touch isn’t necessarily replicated in their friendships with other men because of the pressures that compulsive heterosexuality presents, which means their emotional isolation from each other often starts at a very young age. More worrying are the dynamics that replace this physical affection. High school boys aren’t the only ones who enforce compulsive heterosexuality, and they’re clearly not the only ones prone to gross, obnoxious ‘pranks’ and the gleeful indulgence of truly toxic misogyny. If the men who frequent my Facebook page are anything to go by, a lot of this harmful shit is being passed down from father to son and nurtured as an obscene replacement for true intimacy.

  Failing to teach and encourage men to express healthy intimacy not just with women but with other men is causing significant damage. For those of us raising boys, it’s vital that we try to counter not just Pascoe’s sense of compulsive heterosexuality but the homophobia that keeps men from truly connecting with one another. How else do you explain a bonding activity that involves four young men shoving a glass bot
tle up their unconscious mate’s arse and filming it, because who could resist recording the high-brow comedy?

  We all have a role to play in dismantling the twin towers of homophobia and misogyny. You might not think any of this is a problem in your house, but in fact you just can’t know. Questioning toxic masculinity and the harm it does to boys and men is an ongoing activity (which is fun for the whole family!). It’s not just about double standards and it’s not just about porn. It’s also about the ways men are socialised to communicate and commune with each other.

  We can be a part of disrupting that, but we have to start by taking it seriously. Make it a practice to have in-depth conversations about all this stuff—about touch, intimacy, healthy expressions of emotion, consent, porn, relationships, feelings and how sexism impacts negatively on all these things. We are doing young men no favours when we allow masculinity to be dictated to them by the status quo.

  Because here’s some news for you. The status quo might revere men as a class, but it destroys them as individuals. And it teaches them to destroy others in return.

  * Sex worker, sex educator and porn producer Gala Vanting has an excellent feminist porn resource list on her website galavanting.info. But don’t just stop there. Search ‘feminist porn’ on Google and discover how amazing and positive porn can actually be!

  6

  MASS DEBATE

  UNFUCKABLE, it screamed, the fluorescent yellow letters filling half the cheap projection screen mounted in the bowels of a suburban function centre in Adelaide. The damning word was superimposed over the top of an extremely unflattering photograph of me, taken when I was roughly nineteen years old and here, almost two decades later, reproduced for the amusement of a 1500-strong crowd of men’s rights activists, online shitlords, teenage boys and the handful of women who can always be found laughing uproariously at events like these because they’re ‘not like other girls’.