That’s not true of most men, but we need to do some real work. Clearly for some guys, the messages they’re getting when they’re young are taking root and flowering and being allowed to thrive in a really negative way. The #MeToo movement revealed that these problems exists across every sector of society.
Obviously if we look at the rates of harassment, of coercion, of assault, too many don’t get the message by osmosis. Given how little instruction and counsel boys are given, can we expect them to know better from the start? In today’s new era, we are rightly expecting more of them, but we are not having the discussions with them that would allow them to behave in ways we say we want them to. We greatly underestimate boys’ ability to engage with issues around physical and emotional intimacy-and we do that to their detriment, because they’re really struggling with all of this as well, and have even fewer outlets for talking about it. That was completely blown out of the water. My biggest bias going into this was that I thought boys wouldn’t talk about their feelings and their sex lives. Orenstein: What I ended up feeling when I was talking to girls was that they were systematically disconnected from their bodies, and with boys it was that they were systematically disconnected from their hearts. TIME: Did you have any notions about boys that fell apart while reporting this book?
