As “toxic masculinity” has become a new buzz phrase, many have suggested that there is an empathy gap between boy and girls, with boys on the short side of empathy. Some suggest an evolutionary/genetic basis, while others argue that empathy is learned. This is a complex debate, but it is important to remember that kids generally reflect back the behaviors that are directed towards them. If we treat boys with less empathy, it isn’t surprising that they reflect that behavior right back at us. Of course, nothing described below meant to imply that girls don’t also suffer from any number of biases. Also, even the biases described below might harm girls as well as boys—double standards can harm both genders. Yet, if society is hoping to raise empathetic boys, it needs to treat boys with a lot more empathy.
Examples abound. Just last week, a federal appellate court sided with the plaintiffs in a suit challenging the constitutionality of Minnesota’s exclusion of boys from competitive dance teams. The Minnesota State High School League offered a politically correct explanation for the exclusion: it was just trying to expand athletic opportunities for girls. The court correctly batted that excuse away, noting that for the past two years girls have been slightly overrepresented in Minnesota high school sports, and that gender differences in high school sports participation have been minimal for some time.
As any schoolboy who has been bullied for bringing ballet shoes or tap shoes to school can attest, dance is still considered effeminate by many people. The exclusion of boys from dance programs more likely reflects this bias than it does a good faith attempt to rectify an apparently non-existent gender imbalance in sports participation in Minnesota.
Instead of dance, boys are pushed towards other sports. These sports, especially football, basketball and baseball, just happen to be the sports that have by far the highest injury rates. (Baseball has a significantly higher injury rate than softball.) It should be no surprise that when boys grow up they go on to be vastly overrepresented in virtually all the most dangerous and lethal jobs in America and are more than ten times more likely than women to be killed at work.
Society has too much trouble seeing harm to boys even when the harm is there for all to be seen. This pattern holds even in the context of sexual predation. The legal system appears to be significantly less willing to protect boys from sexual predation by adults than it is to protect girls. A study of a decade’s worth of cases in the New Jersey school system concluded that when teachers have sex with minor students, male teachers are more likely to go to jail for that transgression, and of those teachers who go to jail, male teachers are given longer sentences. (The report did not break down the gender of victims, but from the discussion, it appears that overwhelmingly the cases involved a teacher and student of opposite genders.)
This disparity shouldn’t be a surprise. Courts too often have trouble seeing boys as victims, even in the context of statutory rape. In County of San Luis Obispo v. Nathaniel J., an appellate court held that a 15-year-old boy who was statutorily raped by a 34-year women was on the hook for many years of paying her child support. The appellate court simply couldn’t see the boy as a victim: "[T]here is an important distinction between a party who is injured through no fault of his or her own and an injured party who willingly participated in the offense about which a complaint is made. One who is injured as a result of criminal conduct in which he willingly participated is not a typical crime victim. It does not necessarily follow that a minor over the age of 14 who voluntarily engages in sexual intercourse is a victim of sexual abuse.” The court cited many other similar rulings by courts involving boys as young as 13 years old. In 2014, USA Today reported on a case in which a man who was statutorily raped when he was just 14, was served with papers by the State of Arizona six years later demanding child support for a son he never knew existed.
The lack of empathy for boys also plays out in the context of school discipline. As NPR reported last year, boys (as well as African Americans and students with disabilities) are “disproportionately disciplined in K-12 schools across the country.” According to researchers at the Government Accountability Office, “Those disparities were consistent, ‘regardless of the type of disciplinary action, regardless of the level of school poverty, and regardless of the type of public school attended.’"
If society wants less “toxic” boys who grow into good, empathetic men, perhaps, as the song says, society should try a little tenderness. Protect boys from sexual predation with the same zeal that we protect girls and don’t tell them that they are complicit in their own statutory rapes. Don’t push them into the most dangerous sports and jobs. Don’t punish them more harshly for their infractions than girls. And let them dance.
