The Code

Boys and girls follow different rules that have evolved over time.

What are little boys made of? Snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails, That's what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all things nice, That's what little girls are made of.

Is no longer true for girls, they can be anything that they dream of. Women are in combat roles, women have gone to space and under the sea. Women can be scientists and engineers. But they still are criticized for their looks and having masculine traits  but they are allowed more latitude in their behavior.

But boys must behave masculine and are punished for having feminine traits or going into “women jobs.”

Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules
In a new poll, girls say they feel empowered, except when it comes to being judged on how they look. Boys still feel they have to be strong, athletic and stoic.
New York Times
By Claire Cain Miller
September 14, 2018

Girls have been told they can be anything they want to be, and it shows. They are seizing opportunities closed to previous generations — in science, math, sports and leadership.

But they’re also getting another message: What they look like matters more than any of that.

Boys seem to have been largely left out of the conversation about gender equality. Even as girls’ options have opened up, boys’ lives are still constricted by traditional gender norms: being strong, athletic and stoic.

These are findings from a new nationally representative poll of 1,000 children and adolescents 10 to 19, along with other research on this age group, which is not surveyed often. They show gender attitudes of a generation on the verge of adulthood.

Girls feel they are looked upon as sex-objects and boys must treat girls as trophies,

Boys, however, don’t always see it that way, she said. “If they see a girl with a nice body, they’re going to go after seeing that body,” she said. “It’s like who can get the most girls.”
[…]
Deborah Tolman, a psychology professor at the City University of New York who researches adolescent sexuality, said: “This is the contradiction we put in front of girls: You should be confident and do well in school and do athletics, but you’re supposed to also be a good sex object at the same time.”

What are we teaching boys on how to behave?

Boys said strength and toughness were the male character traits most valued by society. Three-quarters said they felt pressure to be physically strong, and a majority felt pressure to play sports.

Asked what society expects boys to do when they feel angry, the largest shares said they were supposed to be aggressive or be quiet and suck it up. When they felt sad or scared, they felt pressure to hide those feelings or to be tough and strong instead. Girls were more able to express themselves by crying, screaming or talking about their feelings, respondents said.

Half of boys said they’d heard men in their family make sexual jokes or comments about women; those boys were more likely to feel pressure to be tough and play along with sexism. An even bigger share, 82 percent, said they had heard someone criticize a boy for “acting like a girl.”

And that is what worries me.

Boys are taught that they must be aggressive; they have to respond to being “dised.” If a girl rejects him boys take it as an affront to their manhood.

“He got ridiculously mad; he called me names, used slurs,” she said. “When we get rejected, we don’t explode just because they don’t like us back. Guys just feel more privileged.”

And I have to wonder if this is the cause of mass murders in schools? Boys are not taught on how to work out their feelings without violence. With the prevalence of guns this becomes a lethal combination.

How can we turn this around?

How can we counter this machoism?

I believe that life is rough on the city streets and it takes machoism to survive and that it will take jobs and an improved economy to end it all together. However, there must be something that we can do to end this machoism where everything is taken as affront to their manhood.

I know of one school in Connecticut that is working to end this; instead of detention and expulsion they have peer supported groups to help students find other ways than violence to workout disagreements that is seeming to have positive results in preventing future violence.

One study found that training teachers to spot antisocial behavior problems in kindergarten students and teach them social skills also has cut future violence in their teen years.

When I was a grad student I wrote an essay on “Bullying and the Effects on School Achievement” for the Safe Schools Committee that was run by the CT Department of Education, you can read it here.