“Boys Will Be Boys” Is a Job Description for Women

Men get excuses; women get extra work. The “Cornell 7,” feminist rage, and a case for decentering men. #TransparentTuesday

Hi friend,

The “Cornell 7” story has taken over my brain this last week, with my entire social media filled with news and responses, many of my clients needing to talk about what it’s bringing up for them, and my own ever-present feminist rage shifting back and forth between fury and despair about it.

The allegations of unfathomable sexual violence, the massive wave of people responding to it with their own insights and experiences (ie: the “I am Jane Doe” solidarity trend), and the hideous pushback of people saying Jane Doe is making it all up or “should have known what was going to happen” all feels very reminiscent of the early #MeToo movement. 

Except… back then, in 2017, I think we all felt empowered and hopeful. We thought telling our stories would matter. We thought we were changing the world, and that if only people understood how widespread sexual violence against girls and women actually is, they would step in and do something about it.

But it didn’t, we didn’t, and they didn’t. 

So this time around I think many of us are coming to the conversation from a different place—a place more akin to wanting to burn the world down, rather than one of wanting to change hearts and minds.

Personally, I keep thinking about the “boys will be boys” to worrying about a rapist’s "promising future” pipeline, both of which signal that the traumatization of girls and women is an acceptable trade-off for the protection from accountability that our society believes boys and men are entitled to.

But it’s weird how we talk about men in our culture, isn’t it? Like we simultaneously imagine them as competent enough to run the world, and incompetent enough to need help understanding whether someone wants to have sex with them. 

I can’t stop thinking about the mental gymnastics we go through to hold these contradictory views in our minds at one time. That includes all of us to some degree, but especially those of a certain religious and political affiliation. 

I mean… how are men such wise and moral natural leaders that it’s only right for them to be trusted and respected as the “head of the family,” while men are simultaneously too stupid or immature to care whether the woman he puts his dick inside is fully conscious and present, let alone turned on, enthusiastic about the sex, experiencing pleasure, or having an orgasm.

And how are men such logical and intelligent creatures that we put them in positions of leadership across nearly every level of society, while simultaneously thinking of them as dumb helpless babies when it comes to how impossible they seem to find things at home, like noticing with his own eyeballs when the house is dirty (instead of asking his wife to “just make him a list”), remembering the birthdays of people in his family, soothing a crying child, or taking out the trash without being reminded?

Because apparently men can manage companies, govern countries, perform surgery, and invent complicated technology. But recognizing another person’s humanity while horny, or doing laundry? That’s just so harrrrddd! It’s because of their biology, that stuff just doesn’t come naturally to them so they need helppp! Mothers just need to be teaching them this kind of thing, and their wives should be more understanding too… if he’s at least trying, that’s what counts!

It always comes down to that; it’s always women who end up needing to step in and teach men stuff, put in the labor of trying to get them to understand, or to just go ahead and do the damn thing themselves. 

He can’t figure out cooking, cleaning, laundry, and bedtime routines? She tries and tries and tries to get him to learn, but eventually it’s just easier if she does those things herself. 

He can’t figure out how to not sexually harass, coerce, or assault women?

She learns that it’s actually her job to prevent sexual harassment, corersion, and assault, by being hyper-vigilent and above reproach at all times in her appearance, clothing, behavior, and choices. 

To be clear, there is a lot of information about things like consent, coercion, intoxication, and trauma responses that people genuinely does need to be taught and learned, for all genders. I even genuinely love teaching that stuff in my work, because I’ve seen how powerful it can be when someone learns about something like the “tend and befriend” or “fawning” response to trauma, and suddenly understands an experience they had in a completely different, shame-free way.

But what I’m interested in is how “he needs to learn” has become an endlessly renewable excuse, paid for almost exclusively by women. 

When do we stop treating his lack of understanding as a problem all the

women around him must step in to help, solve, or explain? When do we start expecting a man to take responsibility for their own fucking learning and growth, and leave him to deal with the consequences if he doesn’t?

I think in order to get to that point, we need to unlearn a whole lot of gender essentialist beliefs that we’ve been taught about gender and biology. 

“Gender essentialism” is the idea that men and women have fundamentally different, fixed and biological qualities and natures that determine what we’re capable of and how we behave, and that men and women are essentially “opposites” in many ways.

These are stereotypes, of course, and they’re all built around false information, but some common examples of gender essentialist beliefs would be:

• Men are naturally very sexual with high libidos. Women can enjoy sex sometimes, but it’s not something she’ll usually seek out. 

• Men are “more visual,” meaning their attraction is based first on a woman’s appearance, with sex being pre-requisite for an emotional connection. Women are the opposite, the emotional connection has to come first. 

• Women are naturally very emotional, sensitive, and nurturing. Men are the opposite, they’re just logical and rational and don’t feel things as deeply.

See what I mean? We all know plenty of people who are "exceptions" to these kinds of “rules,” of course, but in general we do tend to think these kinds of beliefs as “pretty much true,” or “true for most people.” They sound like harmless observations, and we can always think of some people and experiences that seem to “prove” them to be true. 

But look at how easily they become explanations for who should be responsible for what.

If men supposedly require sex first in order to feel emotionally connected, then his wife is responsible for “giving him sex” regularly in order to keep the marriage in tact… and if she doesn’t want or enjoy that sex, that’s ok, because that’s “natural” for women.

If men are supposedly more visual then it’s normal for him to stray, then women are responsible for keeping herself looking as attractive as possible her entire life, and she’s to blame if she “lets herself go” and he cheats.

If men supposedly struggle to understand and talk about emotions, women have to learn how to explain our feelings in increasingly careful, digestible, non-confrontational ways, and also to help him identify, make sense of, and appropriately respond to his own emotions…and since women are supposedly “naturally more empathetic and nurturing,” she should be happy to do this labor, and find it very fulfilling. 

“They can’t help it” or “it’s not in their nature” somehow always seems to turn into “therefore, we have to.”

And that’s what makes “boys will be boys” so much more than an excuse.

It’s actually a work assignment for other people around them. 

Someone has to anticipate the behavior, prevent the harm, explain why it was harmful, manage the consequences, help him plan to do better next time, extend grace and compassion when he tries and fails to do better, and process, carry, or heal from the trauma of being the person he “makes his mistakes” on.

That “someone” is nearly always a woman.

We extend this arrangement into areas of life that have nothing to do with sexual violence, too. A man doesn’t know where things belong, so you supply the answer. He doesn’t initiate meaningful conversation, so you ask the questions and create the connection and tell him how to communicate better. He doesn’t understand what makes sex pleasurable for you, so you research, explain, reassure, extend grace, and somehow end up managing his disappointment about your disappointment.

These experiences are obviously different from assault. But the explanation we use to make each arrangement seem inevitable: men are just “like this,” so women must adapt.

Sometimes that adaptation looks like teaching, educating, communicating, and explaining. Sometimes it’s extending grace, patience, compassion, and understanding for his mistakes, or treating his inadequacies like a disability—something he can’t help, and must be accommodated. Sometimes it’s tying ourselves up in knots trying to be desirable, or lovable, or worthy of protection, respect, or approval in his eyes. Sometimes it's going to therapy, reading self-help books, and working on ourselves and our “communication style” because we think if we just figure out the right way to explain it or respond, he’ll finally understand. 

Often, it looks like us giving up on trying to get him to understand and do it himself, and just doing it ourselves because something just… needs doing. 

The kid needs dinner. The dishes need cleaning. The work needs doing. The marriage needs nurturing. The birthday presents need to be bought. The grocery list needs to be made. The spark needs to be “kept alive.”

Sure we wish he put the work in and took the initiative, or followed through, or stepped up. But he’s trying, which is all you can really ask for, right? And it needs to get done, so we do it. 

Over time, though, all that compensating and accommodating has a cost. 

We spend so much energy supplying what’s missing, and then we spend even more energy trying to understand why it’s missing (is he incapable? inexperienced? overwhelmed?) and then explain, teach, and support him in changing. 

We first process it in therapy, journal about it, and talk to our friends. Then we wait for the right moment, articulate it carefully so he won’t get defensive, and tend to his ego if he does. We apologize for making him feel attacked or unappreciated, assure him that we know he’s trying, and agree to whatever extra labor he asks us to do, to support him in changing. 

And it does get better for a while. But it doesn’t come naturally to him, and we’re just so good at it! Eventually, for the sake of the relationship (and our own sanity), we realize the labor we really need to be doing is “accepting him the way he is,” instead of asking him to “become someone he’s not.” 

So we take that to therapy (and the journal, and our friends), and we process our grief and disappointment about this relationship not being what we hoped it would be, by ourselves. 

I know this cycle absurdly and bitterly well. I hope you don’t, but I know a lot of you do. 

You can really and truly love someone, and feel furious about what they aren’t bringing. You can understand their history and conditioning, and still be exhausted by the consequences. You can know that something isn’t fair and keep participating anyway, because society has taught you to believe this is as good as it gets. 

This is why we need to be challenging (and divesting from) the fixed and essentialist mindset we’ve learned to apply to gender. 

“Men are like this” closes a question that needs to stay open. Like what can this particular man learn? What does he practice, and what is expected of him? What is he protecting, and how is he growing? And why is it that he can figure out how to solve problems that require planning, remembering, and communicating at work—where he’s motivated to do a good job, and there are consequences to failing—but not at home? 

The truth is that the tales of men and women being so dramatically different from each other have been wildly exaggerated. (Science has my back on this one, but that’s a topic for another day… or maybe a whole second book!)

As it turns out, men and women have more in common with each other, on average—with regard to nearly every biological, psychological, and behavioral metric—than men have with each other. 

Where “average differences” across the sexes do exist, they tend to be very small, and they don’t actually tell us anything about how any random individual is likely to score. They don’t tell us anything about an individual’s person’s “natural state,” nor their capacity for growth and change. And they certainly shouldn’t be used to predict, excuse, or accommodate behavior. 

TLDR: Men are not just “born like this.”

They’re not biologically wired to be sexual predators any more than they’re wired to suck at chores and childcare. Which is to say… not at all. Plus they are perfectly capable of learning, growing, and doing better, they just need to believe that doing so would benefit them. 

But in a world where people keep stepping in to pick up the slack, make excuses for his behavior, and save him from the consequences of his own actions, he simply doesn’t see the benefit to changing.

This is also why the strategy of “decentering men” is so damn important.

If you haven’t come across the phrase “decentering men” before, it’s the microfeminist practice of shifting our focus, identity, and decision-making away from male approval and romantic relationships, and redirecting it toward personal goals, values, and fulfillment, and it was coined by Sherese (Charlie) Taylor in her book Decentering Men!

In practice, decentering men means noticing how often their preferences, limitations, comfort, approval, and potential become the reference point for our choices, and choosing to prioritize our own instead.

It means refusing to automatically pick up the slack, and letting him deal with the consequences of his own lacking skills and behaviors. It means meeting him with the same energy he gives you, instead of trying to close the gap and cultivate connection, intimacy, or attraction by putting in twice as much emotional labor. It means saying no when you want to say no, communicating directly and unapologetically about what you need (and what you won’t tolerate), and refusing to make him feel better for the ways in which he disappoints you.

• Maybe you stop letting him “borrow your brain,” and let him find the thing he’s looking for, or look things up in his own calendar, instead of telling him the answer to where/when it is. 

• Maybe you start refusing to educate, debate, or convince men who aren’t actively educating themselves. 

• Maybe you decide to never again have sex that you don’t want, aren’t fully turned on and ready for, or don’t expect 100% to have an orgasm during. 

• If your husband usually spends half the weekend on his hobbies, maybe you go ahead and schedule the other half for yours, instead of picking up the slack and prioritizing time together. 

• Maybe you stop reading books written by cis men, start prioritizing queer dating, or refuse to let men’s preferences determine how you dress.

Some changes are small. Others require planning, because refusing to step in and compensate can have consequences for us or other people we care about. 

But if we all do this, men will start to feel the difference. If we don’t automatically step in to support them in how uncomfortable it is, they’ll eventually figure it out. 

Is this going to help stop frat boys from raping? No, not immediately. But it does give us something we can start doing; something to start channeling our feminist rage into. 

And by breaking the pattern of overfunctioning and accommodating men’s inadequacies, then we’ll see that they are not just biologically “built this way,” and it’ll get easier to hold them accountable for their behavior in general, and we’ll stop talking about their “promising futures,” and start viewing “their futures getting ruined” as the appropriate consequence to such disgusting, immoral, and illegal acts, like—oh I don’t know— gang-raping a girl for seven hours. 

I also want us to make room for whatever comes up when we change the pattern. Shame about being selfish. Anxiety about being disliked, or upsetting someone. Confusion about where the line is between being compassionate and kind, versus enabling bad behavior. 

These feelings are valid and deserve care, but they don’t have to determine what we do.

The rage about Cornell deserves accountability and collective action. But alongside that, I think we need to be asking where we can stop participating in the everyday arrangements that give men endless room to underfunction, while asking women to absorb the cost.

Inspired by recent events (and a lifetime of rage), this is actually the direction I’m currently exploring in my coaching work: helping women and AFAbs stop overfunctioning to make up for men’s inadequacies, challenge the false beliefs about gender and biology that make it feel “natural” or unchangeable, and practice decentering men so that they can reclaim their energy for themselves and their own lives. 

If that’s work you’re ready to do, I’d love to help. Apply for coaching here.

Big hug,

Jessi