Anthony Blasko

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The Miseducation of the American Boy

Why boys crack up at rape jokes, think having a girlfriend is “gay,” and still can’t cry—and why we
need to give them new and better models of masculinity

Anthony Blasko

Story by Peggy Orenstein

J AN U AR Y/ F EB R UA R Y 2 0 2 0 I SS U E O F T HE A T LA N TI C

I KNEW NOTHING about Cole before meeting him; he was just a name on a list of boys at a

private school outside Boston who had volunteered to talk with me (or perhaps had had their

arm twisted a bit by a counselor). The afternoon of our first interview, I was running late. As I

rushed down a hallway at the school, I noticed a boy sitting outside the library, waiting —it had

to be him. He was staring impassively ahead, both feet planted on the floor, hands resting

loosely on his thighs.

My first reaction was Oh no.

It was totally unfair, a scarlet letter of personal bias. Cole would later describe himself to me as

a “typical tall white athlete” guy, and that is exactly what I saw. At 18, he stoo d more than 6

feet tall, with broad shoulders and short-clipped hair. His neck was so thick that it seemed to

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merge into his jawline, and he was planning to enter a military academy for college the

following fall. His friends were “the jock group,” he’d te ll me. “They’re what you’d expect, I

guess. Let’s leave it at that.” If I had closed my eyes and described the boy I imagined would

never open up to me, it would have been him.

But Cole surprised me. He pulled up a picture on his phone of his girlfriend, w hom he’d been

dating for the past 18 months, describing her proudly as “way smarter than I am,” a feminist,

and a bedrock of emotional support. He also confided how he’d worried four years earlier,

during his first weeks as a freshman on a scholarship at a new school, that he wouldn’t know

how to act with other guys, wouldn’t be able to make friends. “I could talk to girls platonically,”

he said. “That was easy. But being around guys was different. I needed to be a ‘bro,’ and I

didn’t know how to do that.”

Whenever Cole uttered the word bro, he shifted his weight to take up more space, rocking back

in his chair, and spoke from low in his throat, like he’d inhaled a lungful of weed. He grinned

when I pointed that out. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s part of it: seem ing relaxed and never

intrusive, yet somehow bringing out that aggression on the sports field. Because a ‘bro’  ”—he

rocked back again—“is always, always an athlete.”

The definition of masculinity seems to be contracting. When asked what traits society values

most in boys, only 2 percent of male survey respondents said honesty and morality.

Cole eventually found his people on the crew team, but it wasn’t a smooth fit at first. He

recalled an incident two years prior when a senior was bragging in the locker room about how

he’d convinced one of Cole’s female classmates—a young sophomore, Cole emphasized—that

they were an item, then started hooking up with other girls behind her back. And the guy

wasn’t shy about sharing the details. Cole and a friend of his, another sophomore, told him to

knock it off. “I started to explain why it wasn’t appropriate,” Cole said, “but he just laughed.”

The next day, a second senior started talking about “getting back at” a “bitch” who’d dumped

him. Cole’s friend spoke up again, but this time Cole stayed silent. “And as I continued to step

back” and the other sophomore “continued to step up, you could tel l that the guys on the team

stopped liking him as much. They stopped listening to him, too. It’s almost as if he spent all

his social currency” trying to get them to stop making sexist jokes. “Meanwhile, I was sitting

there”—Cole thumped his chest—“too afraid to spend any of mine, and I just had buckets left.

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“I don’t know what to do,” he continued earnestly. “Once I’m in the military, and I’m a part of

that culture, I don’t want to have to choose between my own dignity and my relationship with

others I’m serving with. But …” He looked me in the eye. “How do I make it so I don’t have

to choose?”

I’VE SPENT TWO YEARS talking with boys across America—more than 100 of them between the

ages of 16 and 21—about masculinity, sex, and love: about the forces, seen an d unseen, that

shape them as men. Though I spoke with boys of all races and ethnicities, I stuck to those who

were in college or college-bound, because like it or not, they’re the ones most likely to set

cultural norms. Nearly every guy I interviewed held relatively egalitarian views about girls, at

least their role in the public sphere. They considered their female classmates to be smart and

competent, entitled to their place on the athletic field and in school leadership, deserving of

their admission to college and of professional opportunities. They all had female friends; most

had gay male friends as well. That was a huge shift from what you might have seen 50, 40,

maybe even 20 years ago. They could also easily reel off the excesses of masculinity. They ’d

seen the headlines about mass shootings, domestic violence, sexual harassment, campus rape,

presidential Twitter tantrums, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. A Big Ten football

player I interviewed bandied about the term toxic masculinity. “Everyone knows what that is,” he

said, when I seemed surprised.

Yet when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy,” those same boys appeared to be

harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on

height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day). It’s not that all of

these qualities, properly channeled, are bad. But while a 2018 national survey of more than

1,000 10-to-19-year-olds commissioned by Plan International USA and conducted by the

polling firm PerryUndem found that young women believed there were many ways to be a

girl—they could shine in math, sports, music, leadership (the big caveat being that they still felt

valued primarily for their appearance)—young men described just one narrow route to

successful masculinity.* One-third said they felt compelled to suppress their feelings, to “suck

it up” or “be a man” when they were sad or scared, and more than 40 percent said that when

they were angry, society expected them to be combative. In another survey, which compared

young men from the U.S., the U.K., and Mexico, Americans reported more social pressure to

be ever-ready for sex and to get with as many women as possible; they also acknowledged

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more stigma against homosexuality, and they received more messages that they should control

their female partners, as in: Men “deserve to know” the whereabouts of their girlfriends or

wives at all times.

Feminism may have provided girls with a powerful alternative to conventional femininity, and

a language with which to express the myriad problems -that-have-no-name, but there have been

no credible equivalents for boys. Quite the contrary: The definition of masculinity seems to be in

some respects contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent

of male respondents in the PerryUndem survey said honesty and morality, and only 8 percent

said leadership skills—traits that are, of course, admirable in anyone but have traditionally been

considered masculine. When I asked my subjects, as I always did, what they liked about being a

boy, most of them drew a blank. “Huh,” mused Josh, a college sophomore at Washington

State. (All the teenagers I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.) “That’s interesting. I

never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

While following the conventional script may still bring social and professional rewards to boys

and men, research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only

more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence.

They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in ca r accidents. They

are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom

they can confide.

It wasn’t always thus. According to Andrew Smiler, a psycholog ist who has studied the history

of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but

such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization.

In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and

kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. Smiler attributes further

distortions in masculinity to a century-long backlash against women’s rights. During World

War I, women proved that they could keep the economy humming on their own, and soon

afterward they secured the vote. Instead of embracing gender equality, he says, the country’s

leaders “doubled down” on the inalienable male right to power, emphasizing men’s supposedl y

more logical and less emotional nature as a prerequisite for leadership.

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Then, during the second half of the 20th century, traditional paths to manhood —early

marriage, breadwinning—began to close, along with the positive traits associated with them.

Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in

their sons. But as I learned from talking with boys themselves, the culture of adolescence,

which fuses hyperrationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glori fication of male

violence, fills the void.

For Cole, as for many boys, this stunted masculinity is a yardstick again st which all choices,

even those seemingly irrelevant to male identity, are measured. When he had a choice, he

would team up with girls on school projects, to avoid the possibility of appearing subordinate

to another guy. “With a girl, it feels safer to ta lk and ask questions, to work together or to

admit that I did something wrong and want help,” Cole said. During his junior year, he briefly

suggested to his crew teammates that they go vegan for a while, just to show that athletes

could. “And everybody was like, ‘Cole, that is the dumbest idea ever. We’d be the slowest in

any race.’ That’s somewhat true—we do need protein. We do need fats and salts and carbs that

we get from meat. But another reason they all thought it was stupid is because being vegans

would make us pussies.”

LEARNING TO “MAN UP”

THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE between the sexes’ need for connection in infancy, nor between their

capacity for empathy—there’s actually some evidence that male infants are more expressive

than females. Yet, from the get-go, boys are relegated to an impoverished emotional landscape.

In a classic study, adults shown a video of an infant startled by a jack -in-the-box were more

likely to presume the baby was “angry” if they were first told the child was male. Mothers of

young children have repeatedly been found to talk more to their girls and to employ a broader,

richer emotional vocabulary with them; with their sons, again, they tend to lin ger on anger. As

for fathers, they speak with less emotional nuance than mothers regardless of their child’s sex.

Despite that, according to Judy Y. Chu, a human -biology lecturer at Stanford who conducted a

study of boys from pre-K through first grade, little boys have a keen understanding of

emotions and a desire for close relationships. But by age 5 or 6, they’ve learned to knock that

stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings of weakness, reject friendships with

girls (or take them underground, outside of school), and become more hierarchical in their

behavior.

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By adolescence, says the Harvard psychologist William Pollack, boys become “shame -phobic,”

convinced that peers will lose respect for them if they discuss their personal problems. My

conversations bore this out. Boys routinely confided that they felt denied—by male peers,

girlfriends, the media, teachers, coaches, and especially their fathers —the full spectrum of

human expression. Cole, for instance, spent most of his childhood with his mother,

grandmother, and sister—his parents split up when he was 10 and his dad, who was in the

military, was often away. Cole spoke of his mom with unbridled love and respect. His father

was another matter. “He’s a nice guy,” Cole said—caring and involved, even after the

divorce—“but I can’t be myself around him. I feel like I need to keep everything that’s in

here”—Cole tapped his chest again—“behind a wall, where he can’t see it. It’s a taboo—like,

not as bad as incest, but …”

A college sophomore told me that he hadn’t been able to cry when his parents divorc ed. “I

really wanted to,” he said. “I needed to.” His solution: He streamed three movies about the

Holocaust over the weekend.

Rob, an 18-year-old from New Jersey in his freshman year at a North Carolina college, said his

father would tell him to “man up” when he was struggling in school or with baseball. “That’s

why I never talk to anybody about my problems.” He’d always think, If you can’t handle this on

your own, then you aren’t a man; you aren’t trying hard enough. Other boys also pointed to their fathers

as the chief of the gender police, though in a less obvious way. “It’s not like my dad is some

alcoholic, emotionally unavailable asshole with a pulse,” said a college sophomore in Southern

California. “He’s a normal, loving, charismatic guy who’s not a t all intimidating.” But “there’s a

block there. There’s a hesitation, even though I don’t like to admit that. A hesitation to talk

about … anything, really. We learn to confide in nobody. You sort of train yourself not to feel.”

I met Rob about four months after he’d broken up with his high -school girlfriend. The two

had dated for more than three years—“I really did love her,” he said—and although their

colleges were far apart, they’d decided to try to stay together. Then, a few weeks into freshman

year, Rob heard from a friend that she was cheating on him. “So I cut her off,” he said,

snapping his fingers. “I stopped talking to her and forgot about her completely.” Only … not

really. Although he didn’t use the word, Rob became depressed. The excitement he’d felt about

leaving home, starting college, and rushing a fraternity all d rained away, and, as the semester

wore on, it didn’t come back.

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When I asked whom he talked to during that time, he shrugged. If he had told his friends he

was “hung up” on a girl, “they’d be like, ‘Stop being a bitch.’  ” Rob looked glum. The only

person with whom he had been able to drop his guard was his girlfriend, but that was no

longer an option.

Girlfriends, mothers, and in some cases sisters were the most common confidants of the boys

I met. While it’s wonderful to know they have someone to talk to—and I’m sure mothers, in

particular, savor the role—teaching boys that women are responsible for emotional labor, for

processing men’s emotional lives in ways that would be emasculating for them to do

themselves, comes at a price for both sexes. Among other things, that dependence can leave

men unable to identify or express their own emotions, and ill -equipped to form caring, lasting

adult relationships.

By Thanksgiving break, Rob was so distraught that he had what he called a “mental

breakdown” one night while chatting in the kitchen with his mom. “I was so stressed out,” he

said. “Classes. The thing with my girlfriend.” He couldn’t describe what that “breakdown” felt

like (though he did say it “scared the crap” out of his mom, who immediately demanded, “Tel l

me everything”). All he could say definitively was that he didn’t cry. “Never,” he insisted. “I

don’t cry, ever.”

I paid close attention when boys mentioned crying —doing it, not doing it, wanting to do it,

not being able to do it. For most, it was a rare and humiliating event —a dangerous crack in a

carefully constructed edifice. A college sophomore in Chicago told me that he hadn’t been able

to cry when his parents divorced. “I really wanted to,” he said. “I needed to cry.” His solution:

He streamed three movies about the Holocaust over the weekend. That worked.

As someone who, by virtue of my sex, has always had permi ssion to weep, I didn’t initially

understand this. Only after multiple interviews did I realize that when boys confided in me

about crying—or, even more so, when they teared up right in front of me —they were taking a

risk, trusting me with something private and precious: evidence of vulnerability, or a desire for

it. Or, as with Rob, an inability to acknowledge any human frailty that was so poignant, it made

me want to, well, cry.

BRO CULTURE

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WHILE MY INTERVIEW SUBJECTS struggled when I asked what they liked about being a boy, the

most frequent response was sports. They recalled their early days on the playing field with

almost romantic warmth. But I was struck by how many had dropped athletics they’d enjoyed

because they couldn’t stand the Lord of the Flies mentality of teammates or coaches. Perhaps the

most extreme example was Ethan, a kid from the Bay Area who had been recruited by a small

liberal-arts college in New England to play lacrosse. He said he’d expected to encounter the

East Coast “ ‘lax bro’ culture,” but he’d underestimated its intensity. “It was all about sex” and

bragging about hooking up, and even the coaches endorsed victim -blaming, Ethan told me.

“They weren’t like that in class or around other people; it was a super -liberal school. But once

you got them in the locker room …” He shook his head. “It was one of the most jarring

experiences of my life.”

As a freshman, Ethan didn’t feel he could challenge his older teammates, especially without

support from the coaches. So he quit the team; not only that, he transferred. “If I’d stayed,

there would’ve been a lot of pressure on me to play, a lot of resentment, and I would’ve run

into those guys all the time. This way I didn’t really have to explain anything.” At his new

school, Ethan didn’t play lacrosse, or anything else.

What the longtime sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls “jock culture” (or what the boys I talked

with more often referred to as “bro culture”) is the dark underbelly of male-dominated

enclaves, whether or not they formally involve athletics: all -boys’ schools, fraternity houses,

Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the military. Even as such groups promote bonding,

even as they preach honor, pride, and integrity, t hey tend to condition young men to treat

anyone who is not “on the team” as the enemy (the only women who ordinarily make the cut

are blood relatives— bros before hos!), justifying any hostility toward them. Loyalty is paramount,

and masculinity is habitually established through misogynist language and homophobia.

As a senior in high school, Cole was made captain of the crew team. He relished being part of

a unit, a band of brothers. When he raced, he imagined pulling each stroke for the guy in front

of him, for the guy behind him—never for himself alone. But not everyone could muster such

higher purpose. “Crew demands you push yourself to a threshold of pain and keep yourself

there,” Cole said. “And it’s hard to find something to motivate you to do that other than anger

and aggression.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/jocks-vs-pukes/

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I asked him about how his teammates talked in the locker room. That question always made

these young men squirm. They’d rather talk about looking at porn, erectile dysfunction,

premature ejaculation—anything else. Cole cut his eyes to the side, shifted in his seat, and

sighed deeply. “Okay,” he finally said, “so here’s my best shot: We definitely say fuck a

lot; fuckin’ can go anywhere in a sentence. And we call each other pussies, bitches. We never

say the N-word, though. That’s going too far.”

“What about fag?” I asked.

“No,” he said, shaking his head firmly.

“So why can’t you say fag or the N-word but you can say pussy and bitch? Aren’t those just as

offensive?”

“One of my friends said we probably shouldn’t say those words anymore either, but what

would we replace them with? We couldn’t think of anything that bites as much.”

“Bites?”

“Yeah. It’s like … for some reason pussy just works. When someone calls me a pussy —‘Don’t

be a pussy! Come on! Fuckin’ go! Pull! Pull! Pull!’ —it just flows. If someone said, ‘Come on,

Cole, don’t be weak! Be tough! Pull! Pull! Pull!,’ it just wouldn’t get inside my head the same

way. I don’t know why that is.” He paused. “Well,” he said, “maybe I do. Maybe I just try not

to dig too deeply.”

ALTHOUGH LOSING GROUND in more progressive circles, like the one Cole runs

in, fag remained pervasive in the language of the boys I interviewed—including those who

insisted that they would never use the word in reference to an actual homosexual. Fag has

become less a comment on a boy’s sexuality, says the University of Oregon sociology professor

C. J. Pascoe, than a referendum on his manhood. It can be used to mock anything, she told

me, even something as random as a guy “dropping the meat out of his sandwich.” (Perhaps

oddest to me, Pascoe found that one of the more common reasons boys get tagged with fag is

for acting romantically with a girl. That’s seen as heterosexual in the “wrong” way, which

explains why one high-school junior told me that having a girlfriend was “gay.”) That fluidity,

the elusiveness of the word’s definition, only intensifies its power, much like slut for girls.

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Recently, Pascoe turned her attention to no homo, a phrase that gained traction in the 1990s. She

sifted through more than 1,000 tweets, primarily by young men, that included the phrase. Most

were expressing a positive emotion, sometimes as innocuous as “I love chocolate ice cream,

#nohomo” or “I loved the movie The Day After Tomorrow, #nohomo.” “A lot of times they

were saying things like ‘I miss you’ to a friend or ‘We should hang out soon,’  ” she said. “Just

normal expressions of joy or connection.” No homo is a form of inoculation against insults from

other guys, Pascoe concluded, a “shield that allows boys to be fully human.”

Just because some young men now draw the line at referring to someone who is openly gay as

a fag doesn’t mean, by the way, that gay men (or men with traits that read as gay) are suddenly

safe. If anything, the gay guys I met were more conscious of the rules of manhood than their

straight peers were. They had to be—and because of that, they were like spies in the hous e of

hypermasculinity.

Mateo, 17, attended the same Boston-area high school as Cole, also on a scholarship, but the

two could not have presented more differently. Mateo, whose father is Salvadoran, was slim

and tan, with an animated expression and a tenden cy to wave his arms as he spoke. Where

Cole sat straight and still, Mateo crossed his legs at the knee and swung his foot, propping his

chin on one hand.

This was Mateo’s second private high school. The oldest of six children, he had been identified

as academically gifted and encouraged by an eighth -grade teacher to apply to an all-boys prep

school for his freshman year. When he arrived, he discovered that his classmates were nearly

all white, athletic, affluent, and, as far as he could tell, straight. Mate o—Latino and gay, the son

of a janitor—was none of those things. He felt immediately conscious of how he held himself,

of how he sat, and especially of the pitch of his voice. He tried lowering it, but that felt

unnatural, so he withdrew from conversation altogether. He changed the way he walked as

well, to avoid being targeted as “girly.” “One of my only friends there was gay too,” he said,

“and he was a lot more outward about it. He just got destroyed.”

Guys who identify as straight but aren’t athletic, o r are involved in the arts, or have a lot of

female friends, all risk having their masculinity impugned. What has changed for this

generation, though, is that some young men, particularly if they grew up around LGBTQ

people, don’t rise to the bait. “I don’t mind when people mistake me for being gay,” said Luke,

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a high-school senior from New York City. “It’s more of an annoyance than anything, because I

want people to believe me when I say I’m straight.” The way he described himself did, indeed,

tick every stereotypical box. “I’m a very thin person,” he said. “I like clothing. I care about my

appearance in maybe a more delicate way. I’m very in touch with my sensitive side. So when

people think I’m gay?” He shrugged. “It can feel like more of a compliment. Li ke, ‘Oh, you

like the way I dress? Thank you! ’ ”

One of Luke’s friends, who was labeled “the faggot frosh” in ninth grade, is not so

philosophical. “He treats everything as a test of his masculinity,” Luke told me. “Like, once

when I was wearing red pants, I heard him say to other people, ‘He looks like such a faggot.’ I

didn’t care, and maybe in that situation no one was really harmed, but when you apply that

attitude to whole populations, you end up with Donald Trump as president.”

W’s AND L’s

SEXUAL CONQUEST—or perhaps more specifically, bragging about your experiences to other

boys—is, arguably, the most crucial aspect of toxic masculinity. Nate, who attended a public

high school in the Bay Area, knew this well. At a party held near the beginning of his junior

year of high school, he sank deep into the couch, trying to look chill. Kids were doing shots

and smoking weed. Some were Juuling. Nate didn’t drink much himself and never got high. He

wasn’t morally opposed to it; he just didn’t like the feeling o f being out of control.

At 16, reputation meant everything to Nate, and certain things could cement your status. “The

whole goal of going to a party is to hook up with girls and then tell your guys about it,” he

said. And there’s this “race for experience, ” because if you get behind, by the time you do

hook up with a girl “she’ll have hit it …