A n article in the US magazine the Atlantic this week described one man's childhood horror of boys' open changing rooms and naked school swimming lessons. It felt like an injustice, he said, compared with the privacy that the girls were afforded — and this sense of injustice was only compounded in later life by public medical examinations in the army and extensive training on preserving a patient's modesty in medical school, which mysteriously left out the needs of men. The message was clear throughout his life, says the author: women get toilet and changing cubicles, gowns at the doctors' surgery and separate examination rooms.
Site Information Navigation
Related Articles
Maybe you remember the day your own arrived. Our boys have a lot to say, and they need as much help as possible in finding alternatives to Dick School. Salon spoke recently to Orenstein via phone about her new book, and the secrets boys told her that "pierced my heart. I'm so glad that you decided to do this pivot to talking about boys, because they're integral to the conversation and they really are so not a part of it. What I realized very early on was that we have been talking to girls for. It's really time to bring boys into the conversation, because nobody is talking to them. Nobody is listening to them, to hear how they're thinking about all these issues that are so crucial, not only at this historical moment, but in our lives for our wellbeing around sex and relationships and gender dynamics. What could be more important to our lifelong happiness than our relationships and our ability to navigate them and understand them? What was it that persuaded you that this was the book that you were going to write next? You are an expert on girls.
Site Index
Then she sent the full-length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend. They broke up soon after. In less than 24 hours, the effect was as if Margarite, 14, had sauntered naked down the hallways of the four middle schools in this racially and economically diverse suburb of the state capital, Olympia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it. In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost.
By Louisa Peacock , Deputy women's editor. Research by Professor Emma Renold at Cardiff University, in collaboration with the NSPCC, has highlighted the pressure to turn a close boy-girl friendship into a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship from a young age, because of the stigma attached to girls and boys sharing the same interests. During a qualitative study involving interviews with children aged 10, 11 and 12, one boy admitted that he had to pretend his best friend Alice was a cousin for an entire school year, so that they could hang out free from "heterosexual teasing". One boy talked about how his primary school 'girlfriend' of five years helped him cope with the death of his father. But, says Prof Renold, the children largely talked about boyfriend-girlfriend cultures as something they had little choice about particpating in. The eight types of friends all women need. High heels for girls are sexualising children, parenting groups warn. One boy admitted it was a "virtual rule" that "if you had a girlfriend you were marked out as cool, if you didn't you were a chav". The study, carried out to understand how pre-teens feel about growing up in an increasingly sexualised society, also paints an alternative picture for how young boys and girls are responding to the bombardment of sexual imagery on TV and in music videos.
