Summary: The benefits of taking a gender-neutral approach to solving the problem of highly differential gender pressure on boys and girls are likely to be huge. So we ought to stop buying the same old gendered construction of gender construction.

So I was driving through rural Tennessee just now (I’m home on a very brief visit for an elderly relative’s funeral) and was listening to an NPR program on satellite radio.

The topic involved the beating death of a (Vermont?) college lacrosse player at the hands of her domestic partner. The host and three guests were all women with professional experience related to relationship abuse.

Without taking anything away (seriously!) from the nuanced, non-black-and-white-answer guests, or the somewhat less savvy host, all of whom I thought asked and answered questions pretty well, I would like to make a pitch for a more gender-neutral approach to the problem.

I don’t mean a “but men can be victims too” approach, although several of the guests made clear that sometimes happens. And I don’t mean a “gender blind” approach either because, sorry, even when you factor out stereotypical assumptions and biases by pretty much every measure of relationship violence the patterns of control and abuse are more likely to involve men shepherding, controlling, and injuring their partners than women.

So. What do I mean by “gender neutral” then?

Two items have been on my mind lately, and the discussion helped bring it to a head.

First of all, the host and two of the guests spoke confidently only about problems with “ever younger sexualization of girls.” In her concurrence the third guest, a judge, carefully agreed there’s a problem with increasingly sexualized youth.

And that’s the first important point where gender neutrality seems important. Yes, girls are increasingly sexualized at increasingly younger age (“anyone remember those rhinestone “hottie” and “tease” thong undies for pre-teens? I think they sold them at J.C. Pennies!) What’s overlooked is that boys are being similarly sexualized. Just not as “hotties” or “teases.” Instead they’re being groomed to value themselves by conquests, by self-confidence, by “that’s what bitches want,” and even, more prosaically, “girls my age are doing it already, what should I be doing?”

In other words, while the nature of the sexualization is absolutely, 100%, incontrovertibly gendered, the sexualization itself is gender neutral: it’s happening equally to girls and boys. Failing to recognize this — failing to see that not all the influence is generated by older men grooming eternally more precocious girls but that boys are also sucked into the vortex and are influenced to identify as sexualized earlier.

Which leads me to the other point: I think pretty much everyone on the planet can recognize that girls are often (not always but yeah, pretty often) pressured into performing sexuality before they’re necessarily ready before their ready to be actually sexual. Again, those “hottie” thongs for 4th- or 5th-graders? Rest my case, m’kay?

What I think isn’t as well recognized is that boys are often pressured into performing sexuality before they’re ready to be sexual. In fact I think it’s not just poorly recognized, I think it’s pretty much fucking invisible!

And this is where I think gender neutrality comes in handy again. Because if you just assume, as society as culture does, that “already has a y-chromosome” equals “already ready for sex” then you’re going to interpret the behavior of boys as if a) they instinctively know exactly what they’re doing, b) they instinctively know exactly what they want, and c) they themselves see their (frankly predatory) behavior as predatory rather than as, say, defensive. Oh yes, and that therefore d) predatory boys behavior, being intentional, competent, and instinctive, is therefore immutable. And therefore, e) there’s no point trying to change male behavior – except possibly by supervision, restriction, and threats.

Remember here that I’m really clearly not saying the behavior is gender neutral, it’s way generally not. Instead I’m saying that pressure to behave in gendered ways is gender neutral (it happens to boys and girls of all persuasions.) And I’m saying that the best analysis is gender neutral as a result of effort not to buy into gender-biased assumptions.

In the face of gender-biased analysis items a-e, above are taken as fixed. And consequently you see almost all discourse in the terms I heard tonight: how do we warn girls? How do we train girls to recognize abuse? How do we recognize girls who are abused? All of which, obviously, is itself highly gendered. And all of which, I think, we’re (finally) less willing to tolerate when it comes to questions of sexual assault. (For instance we’re no longer talking only in terms of what women can do to avoid assault. Nor, thank goodness, are we assuming if a girl is assaulted there must have been something she could have done to avoid it.)

A gender neutral approach, one that I think is finally seeping in to the issue of sexual assault, is…

Not just checking in on boys. Not just intervening with boys. Even though thouse are good ideas. But also instructing boys. Also reassuring boys. Also warning boys. About the sexualization that’s happening to them. About the risks of feeling pressure not just to respond but to act before they’re ready. Of the patterns of pressured behavior that can first shade and then plunge into abusiveness.

Because it seems to me it’s doing a great disservice, not just to boys but to everybody to write them off as unalterably malevolent, whether or not its imagined to be intentional or impulsive malevolence.

I’m trying to think of a comparable example and one of them would be the whole “purity ball” abstinence-fetish business where the purity instructions for boys are… all about girl’s purity — “you wouldn’t want your sister…” or “how would you feel about some other boy touching your future bride…” all with no, zero, none regard for the possibility that “purity” could be anything besides a euphemism for “untouched pussy” or that “not ready” could be anything but a euphemism for “keep her pristine for her purchaser,” or that “protect from emotional harm” could mean anything more than “kept naive enough to imagine picking out the wedding dress is the last choice she’ll ever need to make… or be allowed to.”

Never mind that boys don’t automatically know what to do any more than girls do. Never mind that boys actually seem to start being “ready” a year or two after girls their ages are. Never mind that boys have their own emotional needs, their own crushes, their own naive assumptions, their own internal and external experiences of peer pressure.

And here’s the point: it’s a gendered assumption that only girls are vulnerable to sexualization just as it’s a gendered assumption that boys are immune to it. It’s a gendered assumption that only girls are responsive to mitigation of gendered construction. And when we’re able to start assessing boys with a gender-neutral eye I have a feeling the social benefits will be exponential rather than incremental.

We ought to start trying it.