Stop Acting Like a Girl

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Facebook Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window)Bluesky Share on X (Opens in new window)X Share using Native toolsShareCopied to clipboard Save 1 Comment Add Daily Kos to Google Uploaded to DailyKos by Jon Paul Sydnor Ever since the story of the accused Cornell Seven’s rape of the incapacitated woman came to light, I have been thinking about the dynamics that creates this situation over and over and over again.

I hear the plaintive cries of women who have raped, groped, and degraded by too many men who are sexual predators. I’m sure many men would be astonished to hear themselves described that way. They will often justify their behavior with all sorts of rationales such as women like men to be aggressive or she led me on.

And women keep wondering why men don’t stop raping and groping and violating their physical boundaries. Just stop raping! It all stems from a rape culture. But if there is a rape culture, where does that come from?

Having been a teenage boy in a locker room and an adult man at the health club, my recollection of what happened in those spaces were not what most women imagine. Yes, there were occasional comments about various girls bodies, but far more often it was about status and how well you handled it when the other boys targeted you for teasing or cruelty. And at the health club conversation could be about patio furniture or a wife’s breast cancer or even once, one on one, a burly guy’s confession that he couldn’t get over the tragic death of Princess Diana!

Rape isn’t a culture. It’s a sick symptom.

It stems from all the messages that little boys receive about girls. Those messages tell boys that girls are somehow less or wrong. When boys are told a message like the headline, they learn that how girls live and move and have their being in this world is, well, pathetic, or undesirable, or contemptible.

If when a boy is told he’s acting like a girl, he hears that that’s horrible and to be avoided at all costs. This, of course, sets him up to become an emotionally stunted adult. Being a man becomes a performance of bluster and bullying and dominance. But it also means he grows up thinking that girls/women only exist to serve him and his needs. They are after all just girls/women. Not full human beings who deserve to be treated as such.

That acid of contempt for all things female corodes healthy relationships between men and women. But it begins when we teach little boys that acting like a girl is something to be avoided at all costs.

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