Very good. It echoed much of my own past — the hunt, the challenge, the chase, the discarded carcass.

These are all deeply disrespectful actions, but I do not think they come from fathers who failed to train their sons properly. Well, sometimes it’s true, but my father was a pillar of honor, too large to live up to.

I think boys hunt girls because there aren’t enough real life challenges to truly overcome. Where else can they gain the sense of conquest, masculine achievement, relative to their peer group? By jumping off high bridges into too shallow rivers or by diving into quarries with concealed rocks just below the surface or by driving too fast?

Not in school. That’s not a masculine achievement any more, is it?

But there is always sports; football and hockey, two bone jarring opportunities to seek honor on the battle rink or field, and yet many of these boys also hunt girls. These boys maybe even more so, worse.

Perhaps mothers are the key? Some mothers so enable their sons to be … less.

Maybe it’s the peer group? Boys hunt girls in competition with their peers, not their fathers. It’s to establish masculinity, conquest, misguided-heroism within the peer group?

Maybe it’s our culture, our pretty open tendency to devalue women in our culture?

Women are still second class citizens, after all, slightly subhuman and not fully deserving of respect?

We dehumanize them, like enemy combatants, with down-putting, denigrating names. We objectify them whether by putting them on a pedestal and cherishing the “object of our desire” or by plastering their naked pornographically denigrated bodies all over our world until they are nothing more than objects of sexual gratification, not human at all.

Denigration is the prelude to violation, whether in combat or cultural conquest.

It’s not all the girls that we quest after, right? The ones, the few, that are respected are not targeted for conquest.

I don’t know.

Maybe it’s all of the above or maybe it’s the compassion, empathy, and respect for others you speak of that matters most.

Boys are not raised to be compassionate, to empathize, or to respect others, in the absence of authority. Boys are taught to respect authority figures, those with power.

But, girls don’t have power. There is no need for respect.

If boys were raised to empathize with others, to feel their pain, to be compassionate … where would we get combat capable personnel from?

Our sports programs train boys to be warriors, to destroy the enemy, to win without regard for self or others. Some of the parents / fans are brutal in their observance of the gladiatorial combat their sons are engaged in. “Hack 'em, take 'em out” the mother screams out as her son is bested on the lacrosse field, yet again. He’ll be chastised at home later, for not being fierce enough, for beings too soft and weak, for having compassion, for being a gentle soul.

He’ll be shamed into greater ferocity. Someone else will pay, probably some poor girl down the road.