The Dangerous Lesson We Keep Teaching Young Boys

The recent story out of Cornell is unique, but also familiar: A female college student had sex with multiple partners and later alleged she was raped. Whether or not a sexual assault, legally defined, occurred remains unclear at this time. What is clear, though, is that a whole lot of people — and most concerningly, many mothers of sons — have utterly inane and patently wrong ideas about how little boys become predatory men and about how to prevent that outcome. 

If you make the mistake of scrolling Instagram, you know what I’m talking about: Reel after insipid reel about how to talk to your seven-year-old son about consent. So that he understands that he must immediately heed his friend’s “stop” in the middle of a wrestling match, even if said friend is laughing and hitting back (because “affirmative consent”). So that he knows that he himself never has to offer a hug to Grandpa if he doesn’t feel like it (because “bodily autonomy”). So that he learns to stop teasing his sister when she is annoyed (because “dismantling patriarchy”).

So that he doesn’t grow up to become a rapist. 

This makes sense if you accept the premise that these murky cases of possible “date rape” — like the one at Cornell, where a woman initially consents to intimate contact but winds up feeling used and degraded, whether or not she revoked that consent in the moment — are rooted in a patriarchal lack of respect for women’s consent and autonomy. 

The problem is that this premise is wrong. 

It is precisely the miring of sex in the language of consent rather than of morality that creates these “he said, she said” dramas. The truth that we no longer want to acknowledge is that using a girl for sex, whether she consents or not, is in no way related to teasing your sister, or play-wrestling your friend, or suffering an unwanted hug from Grandpa. Prepping a little boy to accept the false relationship between these interactions creates more, not less, potential for him to be one of the next “Cornell 7.”

Beyond consent

The moms posting on social media with their advisories not to violate your kids’ bodily autonomy by telling them to kiss Grandma, and not to codify your boys’ sense of entitlement by allowing play to persist while someone says “no,” are well-meaning. They operate from the premise that as long as everyone is doing what (s)he wants to do, no kind of physical contact between two people can ever be wrong. The instant that someone doesn’t like some type of contact with another person, however (whether physical or verbal), that contact becomes definitionally predatory. In this utopic tyranny of individual preference, a given person’s feelings reign supreme. Consent, in this view, is the only arbiter of morality. 

In reality, however, things are quite a bit more complicated.

Whether your kid wants a hug from Grandpa or not does not determine whether or not said hug is moral. Ditto for play-wresting, teasing, and the like. The fact that a girl wants her brother to stop teasing her does not render his harmless teasing predatory — nor does it render another boy’s inappropriate teasing acceptable just because another girl doesn’t mind (or pretends not to). 

The truth is that context matters — and truth beyond feeling determines that context. 

That is, Grandpa’s hug probably is safe whether you like it or not. Meanwhile, whether teasing and wrestling are okay doesn’t really depend on the preferences of the participants but on universal standards best inculcated and policed first by adults and then by well-formed older children. When we default to feelings as the arbiter of truth regardless of context, we inculcate the antisocial fragility that flattens and dehumanizes all interpersonal interaction and enable the predatory finesse that relies on litigious standards to perpetrate assault.

When consent is considered tantamount to morality, women get hurt by men who did “nothing wrong.”

Positive patriarchy 

Back in the mid-19th century, when first-wave feminists were fighting for women’s suffrage and an end to domestic violence, one of their aims was to extend to women without social standing the same sexual deference accorded the daughters of the wealthy. In other words, they wanted factory workers and house servants — women without the protection of influential fathers or husbands — to be treated with dignity codified by law, rather than raped and sexually assaulted with relative impunity. 

Unfortunately, in its misguided alliance with the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism mostly went the other way. Instead of according presumptive sexual morality to all women, it reduced relations between the sexes, regardless of class, to an unholy quagmire. 

Boys today are being raised in a world where a man telling an off-color joke can be deemed bigotry, misogyny, or even predation if any woman claims to feel uncomfortable, yet group sex between one female and multiple males can be deemed perfectly fun, moral, and normal if a woman agrees to it. This is an unstable and illogical equilibrium, which is why cases like the one at Cornell so confound us. 

Our sons do not need lessons in consent, but in morality. Just like hugs from Grandpa are fine whether you like them or not, group sex is not fine regardless of whether or not the participants claim to like it.

Positive masculinity amounts to men recognizing their superior physical strength and using that unique capacity in relation to women and children to protect those weaker than themselves. The truth is that some measure of patriarchy is a given: Women’s safety and rights fundamentally depend upon the consent of men, while the reverse is not true. 

Thus, positive masculinity is an ideal that we cannot resuscitate unless and until we are willing to be honest about the flimsiness and immorality of anyone’s consent as a barometer for the appropriateness of sexual intimacy. 

Unless and until we restore real social standards around sex — say, sex sans the public, monogamous commitment of at least “boyfriend and girlfriend” is always and indiscriminately wrong, for men and women alike — we will continue to raise men who are unwilling to protect women from predators in part because they are unsure whether or not they should.

So, no, don’t teach your sons to respect women’s “bodily autonomy” and “affirmative consent” in a futile effort to “fight patriarchy.”

Teach them to respect women — as fellow children of God, who need and deserve their protection against immoral men — in a long-overdue effort to produce a patriarchy worth having.

***

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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