By: Caitlin Easter
I ran across an image on the internet the other day while just casually scrolling through
my Facebook feed, and I couldn’t help but to stop and save it. It was uploaded by a page called
“Feminist News” and it was the image of a poster that said, “Boys will be boys what they are
taught.”
It made me consider the societal and structural violence that we see perpetuated against
women in our society that cause the misattribution of blame to be shifted off onto females and
away from the perpetrators. “Boys will be boys” has been a statement that allowed people to hide
their transgressions behind their “expected behavior” for too long. Making the word “boy”
synonymous with doing abhorrent things does nothing to help or further our society, and instead
serves to symbolically (and sometimes, physically) hurt everybody.
We teach boys from a young age that when they do something wrong, that it isn’t
completely their fault. This serves to hurt girls from a young age, and men once they’ve grown
up and society expects them to act a little more like adults than they were previously expected to.
This brings me to another saying that I love, “Boys will be boys held accountable for their
actions, just like girls.” I have seen this one plastered on posters and embroidered onto dish
towels for so long, and I think it is a very nice complement to the earlier quote. We need to hold
boys accountable for their actions from an early age in order to set the standard early. If we don’t
teach them to be better, it will never get better. We can’t expect every male in the world to
suddenly figure out what they are doing wrong, we need to help them to see their subtle issues,
even if it’s one boy at a time. If you are taught something from a young age, it’s hard to unlearn
it, especially when it is a thing you can take advantage of to get ahead in life. We inadvertently use our privilege every day, and it’s time we show boys the effect that the toxicity of their behavior has not only on the females of the world, but also themselves.
I’m going to leave you with one more thought: “girls don’t mature faster than boys, girls are punished from an early age for the same behavior that boys are allowed to indulge in well into
adulthood.”