But as Blum sees it, achieving gender equality also requires attention for boys. The movement for gender equality has often focused on empowering girls. “Our data suggest that the myth that boys are advantaged and girls are disadvantaged simply isn’t true.” “The story about boys has yet to be told, and I think it’s a really important story,” Blum explained to me. But Robert Blum, a physician who has studied adolescents for 40 years and is one of the Johns Hopkins scholars leading the study, wants people to understand that it also hurts boys. The global script clearly harms girls, who face disproportionate levels of sexual violence, not to mention greater risk of early pregnancy and leaving school. Girls learn that they’re supposed to be attractive and submissive, according to the study, led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Boys learn that they’re supposed to be tough and strong and sexually dominant, according to a massive study of gender attitudes among 10- to 14-year-olds in the United States and countries across four other continents.
I didn’t know how to help him resist the stresses and stereotypes of boyhood, because I had never grappled with the fact that boys face stresses and stereotypes at all.īut of course they do. What could I give him to help him ignore the tired old expectations of boys? I had no idea. Reminding a boy to be strong and fearless seemed unnecessary and maybe even counterproductive, fortifying a stereotype instead of unraveling it. It just appeared on my tongue, distilling what I wanted her to be and how I hoped she would think of herself. There was nothing premeditated about that little sentence. “I am strong and fearless,” I taught her to say when she was 2, as she hesitated on the playground, her lips quivering as she considered crossing a rope-netting bridge strung 10 feet above the ground. She could be fierce and funny and loving and steely-spined. But after decades of navigating life as a woman, I knew unequivocally what I wanted for her: to see herself as capable of anything, constrained by none of the old limits on who women must be and how they must move through the world.
When I gave birth to my daughter, three years before my son was born, I had no idea how to be a mother. Raising a boy sometimes feels like traveling in a foreign land.