Ms. Wiseman, who also wrote “Queen Bees & Wannabes,” a nonfiction book about the social pecking order of tween girls, speaks with students around the country. Even in rural North Dakota, she said, 12-year-old boys were highlighting their hair, a focus on appearance that was almost nonexistent five years ago.
“We consistently look at boys in a position of privilege and power,” she said. “But if you ask a 12-year-old boy if they’re in a position of power, they feel out of control of themselves, their bodies.” She added: “I defy anyone to tell me that an eighth-grade girl doesn’t look like she has more power and control than a boy.”
Yes, boys are increasingly coming under the rubric of branded self-examination and presentation. Yes, boys are often made to feel bad about themselves, about their bodies. Wiseman's comments, though, make me take pause -- I doubt she intended them this way, but they seem just shy of so many arguments that claim that girls "have all the power" in schools, distracting and controlling their male peers.
I think we should be concerned about these kinds of trends in marketing towards younger male audiences and the effects it can have on boys, but that doesn't mean we can ignore girls, as some might want to. Gender dynamics in schools are complicated and too often advocates for helping boys try to turn things into a zero-sum conflict. We need more dialogue about boys that doesn't come from MRAs or anti-feminist alarmists, and that acknowledges that gender dynamics are intertwined -- that we can't look at what's going on with boys in isolation from what's going on with girls.
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