Can I confess something? In my 37 years of life I have never, not once, heard a single man use "boys will be boys" as an excuse for bad behavior. Not once, not ever, not in the wild. And when I do hear it, it's for things like:
• Kids rolling in mud like happy little gremlins
• Husbands building backyard siege weapons
• Grandpa telling fart jokes with his buddies
• Brothers wrestling over absolutely nothing
Innocent, a little chaotic but ultimately harmless. But then, as one does, I hope on over to ye 'ol interwebs and find discourse after discourse, article after article, feminist blog after feminist blog claiming every man on earth uses this phrase to excuse everything from mild harassment to straight up rape.
Where? Where are men saying this? I asked that once and do you know what I was told? "Well, my friend Stacy says her dad said it the other day and then my other friend Patricia, her roommate's cousin Steve said it after his girlfriend told him she didn't like how he wouldn't stop touching her even after she told him to stop."
Ah, I see. So you yourself have never heard a man say it, you've just heard or been told by other women that they've heard or been told men say it. Gotcha. Alert the media folks, we've officially found the bigfoot of bad male behavior. Time to send out search parties, National Geographic and a camera crew of broke college kids using Kaden's dad's old camcorder. I'm sure we'll find the footage later.
It's a myth, using "boys will be boys" as an excuse for bad behavior — it's a damn urban legend. We've got whole blogs dedicated to fighting windmills because some woman somewhere once told her friend over a cup of ridiculously priced coffee, "My college roommate's best friend's cousin's lab partner once heard a guy say boys will be boys after he did something bad."
Meanwhile real men are just trying to barbecue and mind their business.
Ladies, have we ever considered maybe, just maybe, the issue isn’t that men are saying it but that we keep telling ourselves and the rest of the coven that men are saying it; creating a moral panic around what is essentially a rumor!?
Don Quixote would be proud of us, that's all I'm saying. I, however, am unimpressed.
As usual, left wingers keep lying to try to manifest reality.
