Let's Hear it For the Boys

[mouradar]

When I was about six years old and in Mrs. Manner’s first grade class, they brought in a special speaker one day to tell us about this program called “Take Your Daughter to Work Day.”  I can’t remember the way she looked or sounded, but her smug attitude is still something I keenly recall twenty-one years later.  It was explained to us that the

Comments

[superquail]

You're absolutely right about youth programs for boys. It seems that most adults are rather horrified by the idea of spending time with large groups of adolescent boys and are really a little too happy to let someone else take care of it, and thus sometimes aren't asking the right questions, or any questions, of the adults who volunteer for this task.

There's this kind of strange double-bind for boys. On the one hand, boys are expected to be energetic, active, even wild. On the other hand, most adults are too tired to deal with a wild child, so they either scream at him to stop running around, send him outside, or put him in some kind of youth program. Girls, conversely, are inculturated to engage in quite activities (reading books, playing with dolls, drawing pictures) which, even if the adults around them think what they're doing is kind of stupid and pointless, are willing to let them do it in the home and aren't compelled to send them elsewhere to do their coloring.

Just to be clear, I know that there are plenty of female children who get molested by creepy pedophiles, but there haven't been any major stories that I've heard where the pedophile was working at a youth program for girls and using that as a way to find victims. Maybe it's happened, but I've never heard about it. Maybe that's because youth programs for girls tend to be run by women and women are far less likely to be pedophiles, or maybe it's because there are simply far fewer youth programs for girls and thus the girls who do get molested tend to be victimized by members of their family, rather than douches like Sandusky.