What Does 'Boys Will Be Boys' Really Mean?

Adults I work with tend to be a lot less clueless. They are sick and tired of watching the advertising and entertainment industries shamelessly pimp the increasingly naked bodies of American women and girls to sell everything from Internet service to floor tiles (I've got the ads to prove it).

Yet from my perspective, these same adults aren't nearly as clued in about how destructive these ubiquitous images and messages can be for boys. It too often takes patient coaching for them to see "boys will be boys" for what it is -- an insidious and long-neglected character issue: People who think of and treat others as objects, in any way, are not kind, decent people. It's bad enough that boys are being trained by the culture to think that behaving in these ways is "cool"; it's outrageous and much more disturbing that many of the immediate adults in their lives can't see it, and may even buy into it.

The "boys will be bad" stereotype no doubt derives from a time when men were the exclusively entitled gender: Many did behave badly, simply because they could. (Interestingly, that's pretty much how Bill Clinton in hindsight ultimately explained his poor behavior in the Lewinsky affair.) For today's boys, however, the low expectations set for them socially and sexually have less to do with any real entitlement than with the blinders we wear to these antiquated and degrading gender myths.

I think, too, that the staying power of these myths has to do with the fact that as stereotypes go, they can be remarkably invisible. I've long asked students to bring in print advertisements using sex to sell products or showing people as sex objects. No surprise that in the vast majority of ads I receive, women are the focus, not men.

And yet, as I try to teach my students, there's always at least one invisible man present -- looking at the advertisement. The messages being delivered to and/or about him are equally if not more powerful.

In one of my least favorite examples, a magazine ad for a video game (brought to me by a sixth-grade boy) depicts a highly sexualized woman with a dominatrix air brandishing a weapon. The heading reads: "Bet you'd like to get your hands on these!," meaning her breasts, er, the game controllers. And the man or boy not in the picture but looking on? The ad implies that he's just another low-life guy who lives and breathes to ogle and grab every large-breasted woman he sees.

Many boys I've talked with are pretty savvy about the permission-giving that "boys will be bad" affords and use it to their advantage in their relationships with adults. "Well, they really don't expect as much from us as they do from girls," said one 10th-grade boy. "It makes it easier to get away with a lot of stuff."

Others play it sexually to their advantage, knowing that in a system where boys are expected to want sex but not necessarily to be responsible about it, the girl will probably face the consequences if anything happens. As long as girls can still be called sluts, the sexual double standard -- and its lack of accountability for boys -- will rule.

Most boys I know are grateful when they finally get clued in to all this. A fifth-grade boy once told me that the worst insult anyone could possibly give him would be to call him a girl. When I walked him through what he seemed to be saying-- that girls are inferior to him -- he was suddenly ashamed that he could have thought such a thing. "I'm a better person than that," he said.

Just as we've adjusted the bar for girls in academics and athletics, we need to let boys know that, in the sexual and social arenas, we've been shortchanging them by setting the bar so low. We need to explain why the notion that "boys will be boys" embodies a bogus and ultimately corrupting set of expectations that are unacceptable.

We'll know we've succeeded when girls and boys better recognize sexual and social mistreatment and become angry and personally offended whenever anyone dares use the word slut against any girl, call any boy a pimp, or suggest that anyone reduce themselves or others to a sexual object.

We'll also know when boys call one another more often on disrespectful behavior, instead of being congratulatory, because they will have the self-respect and confidence that comes with being held to and holding yourself to high standards.

Author's e-mail:debroffman@hotmail.com

Deborah Roffman teaches human sexuality education in Baltimore-area independent schools and is the author of "Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent's Guide to Talking Sense About Sex" (Perseus Books).