Sommers: Masculinity More than a Mask

"Are school shooters and mass murderers born out of an aggressive emphasis on masculinity in our society?" asks Christina Hoff Sommers. "The trailer for filmmaker and feminist activist Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s new documentary, The Mask You Live In, would have us think so."

Sommers rejects the "males-are-toxic ideology" expressed in the trailer and suggests 5 ways in which the final documentary, due out later this year, could be improved to more accurately reflect "masculinity" and "how boys' nature can be distinctly good."  Here are her suggestions (although we urge readers to read her full Time article or watch her 3-minute video below):

1. Recognize that masculinity is more than a "mask" — much of the typical boy behavior, such as rough-and-tumble play, risk taking and fascination with gadgets rather than dolls, appears to have a basis in biology. 

Hook-up Culture Hurts Boys Too

"An entire generation of parents has spent years panicking about the effects of hookup culture on girls. But what about boys?" asks Ryan Sager @ Time magazine. "That’s the question Rosalind Wiseman takes on in this week’s issue of TIME."

For her new book, Masterminds and Wingmen, she delves into the world of boys. As the mother of two boys, she was eager to make sure that their side of the story was not left out. During two years of research, she interviewed hundreds of boys across the country — individually, in groups, over the course of extended e-mail correspondences — and their stories are really quite striking.

As Wiseman writes, we assume that boys are the perpetrators and beneficiaries of hookup culture — and thus we tend to ignore its effects on them. But those effects, it turns out, can be rather rough.

Boys and young men are much more complicated than our popular culture acknowledges. Here, then, are nine surprising things Wiseman discovered about boys, drawn both from her book and from her piece in this week’s magazine.

Rosalind Wiseman's full article, What Boys Want, is behind Time's paywall, but Sager's preview article, 9 Reasons 'Hookup Culture' Hurts Boys Too, is online, and the reasons he lists may surprise the ladies.