What You Haven’t Asked Your Son About Kavanaugh
The unspoken violence of boy culture
Like many others, I’ve been following the Brett Kavanaugh hearing closely. The testimony is like the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape or the rise of the #MeToo movement—a troubling catalyst for the growing conversation about our culture of masculinity and the concomitant toxicity being absorbed by our boys.
The truth about ‘boys will be boys,’ wrote Courtney Enlow in The Huffington Post last week, is that if boys will be boys, girls will be assaulted. To help end this, Joanna Rothkopf wrote an editorial in Esquire calling on parents to show Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to their sons. The argument in both of these articles is that in order to embody the ending of sexual violence, boys need to understand the consequences for its victims.
I don’t disagree. But I do want to push this conversation further by discussing a piece of research mentioned in Rachel Giese’s recent book, Boys: What It Means to Become a Man.
