THE WAR ON BOYS. TIM BARRUS, THE NEW YORK TIMES
I work with adolescent boys. Jessica Valenti is right.
Boys are conflicted. Living in cultures that are themselves conflicted. This is not simply gender warfare, but it’s cultural warfare, too. Boys are both compelled and attracted. They are also threatened by a looming lack of privilege. What a self-created sociological mess.
One problem is how we have turned the idea of the family into a cheap sacred cow.
The American family is sacrosanct. Yet we give up on boys in foster care, group homes, detention, mammoth homeless shelters, education, and we make it very clear to boys in these settings that if they step out of the compliant lines, their bubble of tribal connections gets severed. They are their own connections.
We don’t want to pay the cost to make their lives viable. We condemn them with impunity. How do we pretend to be surprised.
My boys are all at-risk. Addiction is not ephemeral.
If you are thinking at-risk for HIV, you would be wrong. They already have HIV. They do sex work to survive, and it’s not just women they hate, it’s everyone.
All. All. All.
Women become the visceral enemy. You don’t want to believe it. So extreme. I know this: Men hate women.
Then, boys with shared histories of abuse. Parenting? We act on intuition. My boys see religion as a generic lie. I hear the following. And I am editing because their language isn’t fit for Americans.
“Trump is a serial sexual predator. I am not that bad.”
What is role modeling. Where do we go from here.