High school boys have excellent girl radar. They can zero in on lookers very quickly and sort them from the herd of pick-me’s. But when it comes to having a decent conversation with the opposite sex, boys freeze, crumble, stutter and even run away! It’s like the infamous scene from Inside Out (2015) where Riley picks up a dropped water bottle for a boy whose mind went into absolute meltdown as he stood catatonic.

Then there are boys who want to be assertive and impressive but ultimately fall flat with machoism. The resulting melting pot of toxic masculinity is part fiction and part immaturity. The whole stew of bloated ego just reeks of insincerity which hides an insecure boy who is living up to an imagined standard.

Then there is the cunning who tries to be inventive and seeks the attention of an object of desire with pleas of advice and vulnerabilities. The trick works initially but eventually the hidden agenda reveals itself like phosphorescent under blacklight.

A boy asked my daughter for advice on getting to know a girl. These two have known each other for some time and so my daughter agreed to listen and give a girl’s perspective. The similarities between this girl and herself were uncanny. Eventually my daughter, at point blank, asked if this fictitious girl was she. Startled, the boy was flustered and confessed that it was. That took the purely innocent and platonic friendship into an area where my daughter didn’t want to go. If the kid had been honest and asked my daughter if she was interested in going on a date, at least my daughter would have recognized the courage and honesty and respected the invitation. The friendship could be preserved in this moment of authentic inquiry. That didn’t happen and it made things weird.

 

Be authentic, be aware and be kind are my words to her with respect to relationships. 

 

“Why are boys so stupid, dad?” I don’t know. Probably because groups of boys have pecking orders and it’s truly a Darwinian society out there. “But nobody’s getting eaten or dies.” Young male egos are fragile. They harden over time but remain soft as the Darwinian way of life pervades the locker room through to the boardroom. “Do I need to worry about that?” my daughter asked. I think girls are different as they are taught to seek out friendship and form bonds. This allows the exchange of conversations, ideas and even vulnerabilities. You have no idea how helpful that is for an individual, female or male. 

I told my daughter not to be hard of them. For one, they might not know better as they are constantly fed ideas of masculinity that they simply can’t live up to. This is toxic. Another reason is that they can’t completely cast away their masks, as they have their own reputation to protect, even if they know better. And third, you never know how boys will take rejection. “But what does their rejection have to do with me? They are out of my life,” asked my daughter. It’s not that simplistic. You rebuffing them could be another layer of crushing rejection that they will escape from—sometimes violently.

I explained to her that there have been very public and dreadful crimes committed against women by men who cannot handle the equality of women. The Montreal Massacre in 1989 where 14 female engineering students were gun down is still a painful memory to many. The perverted culture of incel is a disturbing discussion and it opened my daughter’s mind on dimensions of conflict between the sexes that she never knew even existed. And of course, the countless domestic violence that still pervades our society tells us of the struggle that we still face today, every day.

Be authentic, be aware and be kind are my words to her with respect to relationships. Just because he’s not for you, doesn’t mean he’s not for someone else. And vice versa!