Red Flag Psychologist Questions How Boys Are Taught About Sex
Parents say the right words to sons.
Boys are told to be respectful of women; to hold them in regard; and treat them in kind. Be good.
But what the boys learn is something else entirely.
Ever so gingerly, psychologist Gary R. Brooks would like to advance the idea - just give it a little air - that it’s time to begin questioning how boys learn to think about sex.
“It’s unfortunate that we really don’t look at the enormous discrepancy,” says Brooks. “On the one hand we’re telling them to respect women, act maturely and be sexually appropriate. On the other hand, men together are encouraging the old value system of competing with each other, trying to score.”
Brooks, of the Central Texas Veterans Health Care System in Temple, Texas, is active in the American Psychological Association’s division on the psychology of men. He calls his theory on men and their sexual beliefs “the Centerfold Syndrome.” (It is still a theory, not yet subjected to research; he calls it “a distillation of ideas about the problems of men” regarding women and sex.) He spoke at this year’s APA convention at a symposium on “Men and the Problem of Nonrelational Sex.”
The argument that men just can’t help acting like men - they can’t help but have a conquest mentality - is nonsense to Brooks. Rather, he says, people learn about sexuality just as they learn about manners.
“When we talk about a given, it’s as if we’re supposed to accept it whole hog,” Brooks says. “We go for that either-or polarity.”
The Centerfold Syndrome is the dominant way American men come to think about sex, Brooks says - voyeurism; seeing women as bodies, rather than people; the idea that men must keep proving their masculinity with sex; the “scoring” mentality; and a “fear of true intimacy.”
Boys learn this not from mother or Sunday school, but from being in all-male groups, from sports culture (“badly out of control”), from commercialized sex, and the media in general.
“I think what really fosters this kind of intense opposition and bullying and abusing the weak - the in-your-face kind of mentality, is masculinity run amok,” Brooks says. “The leaders become the Mike Ditkas - supermacho. There really is no countervailing voice of more moderate men speaking out.
“But I’m not trying to say that football coaches are inherently evil, or that male culture is something that needs to be completely thrown out,” Brooks says. “I’m trying to look at ways to expand the idea of masculinity, and look at the harm that comes from too much of this.”
In winking at “boys will be boys” behavior, parents miss the point that their sons are adopting an outlook that can only hurt them in real-life relationships with women, Brooks says.
Ideally, he says, boys would learn in the family that:
“They will be told by other men that somehow or other you can trick women and score with them, and you’ll be some kind of stud. You also will be told that women really want sex when they say no, that they have to be talked into it - and that’s a very destructive thing” to having good relationships.
“The most difficult one of all,” he says, is challenging pornography - “the idea that pornography and the idealization of women’s bodies is good for you.
“Obviously, you can’t say, ‘You must not look at women’s bodies, that’s evil.’ I guess what I would encourage, and this is where it gets really tricky - is for guys to be very careful about their use of pornography and masturbation - that can teach some pretty scary things.”
It’s probably foolish for parents to think they are going to raise the one boy who’s going to know better. “It’s much larger than that. It’s something that goes on at multiple levels.”
Families “need to look at the enormous power and influence they do have if they start asserting some sort of leadership” - primarily through teaching kids to interpret what they see and hear, Brooks says, and also by “parents standing together and exerting influence on cultural institutions.”