Girls Are Better Than Boys

No one comes out and says it directly, at least not when you’re little. You reach your own
conclusions based on what you observe every day in the classroom. Who the teacher smiles
upon when choosing among the raised hands. How the teacher’s voice goes hard when you or
one of the other boys are told to be still. The difference between “inside” and “outside” voices
is often lost upon you, and sitting in that one chair forever feels impossible. Your body wants to
move and make noise, or just pay attention to something else … and you’re learning daily that
this is wrong. A girl almost never hears the words, “If I have to tell you one more time …”
Girls seem to understand all these rules so much better than you do, as if they have an inborn
grasp of them. No one needs to come out and say it because you can clearly see for yourself
that girls are better than boys.

As you get older, the messages take a turn. Your teacher will one day hand out a worksheet
asking you to name all the ways in which you “hold privilege.” The lesson plan guides you to the
answers, and this is a good thing because otherwise you’d have no idea which boxes to check,
or how to complete those sentences. You come to understand that you hold privilege because
you’re white … because the rules are made by and for the benefit of white people … because,
as a white person, you are an oppressor and must bear the guilt of slavery, which you first
heard about last year in school. All of this is very bad.

Even worse, you learn that, as a boy, you are part of the patriarchy, and after hearing the word
enough times, you come to understand what it means: a power system that unjustly favors
boys and men. The patriarchy is obviously very bad, and men are obviously very bad because
they’ve used the system on purpose to take advantage of women and hold them back. Of all
the colors of men, white is the worst. White men are the worst because they hold way more
privilege than everyone else and they’ve always used that privilege in selfish and violent ways,
against women and against people who are not white.

This does not seem to describe how your school world actually works, where girls get better
grades and win more praise, where lots of those “victims” are awarded bonus points, but you
absorb the lesson. During the later modules on toxic masculinity, you learn to feel even more
deeply ashamed. Pretty much all straight men are bad because they’re too competitive and
violent, too interested in things instead of people, and too focused on status. Plus they don’t
have enough empathy, which is another girl superpower. You want badly to become an ally to
all the victims of the white patriarchy because that’s the only chance you have to become less
bad.

It’s harder if you already have other reasons to hate yourself. You might feel like a failed boy,
which seems unfair because, even if you fall short of it, your boy-ness taints you. Maybe you
were bullied and have since disappeared into a self-loathing cave of silence, desperate to avoid
being noticed. Perhaps you feel like a misfit or an outcast, too strange to fit in anywhere
because you’re just weird. Or you’ve got something wrong with your body that no one else can
see. Divergent strains of self-hatred merge into the badness of being a boy. Life would’ve gone
so much better for you had you been born a girl.

Sometime after your fantasy life starts revolving around your erections and online porn, you
hear about “rape culture.” Even if you don’t follow the news, it’s hard to avoid hearing about
the scandals, about #MeToo, and the names of all the bad white men wielding toxic masculinity
to exploit and humiliate the women in their power. You see it in the porn you like to watch, and
your excitement frightens you. Maybe you’re a rapist, too. How could you ever actually do what
you wish to do with your body and not become all the bad things you’ve learned to hate? At
times, you worry that you’re just another creep.

You hate the hair beginning to grow in new places on your body, hate the sound of your
deepening voice and broadening shoulders, and hate the porn you can’t stop watching.
Sometimes you even hate having a penis though the sensations arising from it feel central to
who you are. You’d never tell any of the people you know in real life that there’s something
about sexual humiliation that excites you, but you find online strangers who share your taste.
They guide you toward new categories of porn that soon become irresistible. You hate yourself
for being a bad porn-addicted member of the patriarchy.

And then you learn you can opt out – from male privilege, toxic masculinity, and rape culture –
from all of it. Being non-binary or pansexual or some gender identity even more exotic means
you don’t have to be a member of the bad patriarchy. You can’t help being white, of course, but
you can offset that particular stain by standing as an ally to women and oppressed minorities.
You can tell people you’re attracted to all spirits, regardless of the bodies they inhabit. Once
you identify as trans, your escape is complete, and you find solidarity with all those other
victims of the patriarchy, of white supremacy, of cis-heteronormativity. You, too, have been
harmed by toxic masculinity.

Meanwhile, your devotion to porn grows deeper. More and more, the excitement you feel, and
the humiliation that fuels so much it, arises from seeing yourself as a woman. Your virtual
friends online convince you that you’ve been a woman all along, and that there’s an obvious
solution to the shame-ridden distress you have felt since … well … forever.