The track “Boys Will Be Boys,” from the album Future Nostalgia by singer Dua Lipa, has never captured society’s expectations of women so well. Or rather, of a child.
In the track, the singer explores the fact that even the kids are not alright: they hear and repeat what they see on TV. Shows and productions often portray the relationship between men and women as troubled, and it is in this mirror that boys and girls learn what is “normal.”
Dua Lipa told The Sunday Times that, from a young age, girls learn that boys’ behavior toward them is normal, and she gave the example of kiss chase. The scene seems harmless, but if boys and girls grow up in apparently the same environment, why do only the boys reproduce sexualized games that make the girls uncomfortable?
Because inequality is learned early.
Inequality starts in the schoolyard
The answer to many unpleasant incidents at school lies more in the adults’ reaction than in the nature of the children. When a boy lifts a girl’s skirt, pulls her braid, or steals a kiss without asking, the girl is taught that it’s because he likes her, or that it’s just “kids being kids.” She then grows up with one lesson: that her discomfort is an overreaction and that the right thing to do is to endure it in silence, because when the 10-year-old boy was wrong, he was never punished.
It’s “boys will be boys” applied to the schoolyard. While the girl’s mother teaches her to protect herself, to behave, and to “respect herself,” the boy who played with her grows into an adult who feels entitled to harass women.
You’ve probably heard Simone de Beauvoir’s famous line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, and it is a lesson about the system we live in. For Simone, being a woman goes beyond biological destiny. No biology alone explains how a woman is treated, it’s civilization, the set of rules, education, and expectations, that produces the “feminine.”
A woman becomes a woman within an imposed situation.
If, for some reason, you still believe that girls are not pushed to be women before their time, well, a UNICEF report published in 2016 showed that girls aged 5 to 14 spend 40% more time than boys on unpaid household chores, which adds up to 160 million more hours a day worldwide. Between ages 5 and 9, the gap is already 30%. Between 10 and 14, it rises to 50%.
The girl becomes a “little adult” at home, and at school she has to deal with boys bothering her. It seems life doesn’t change much between 14 and 24, does it?
Boys will be boys starts at the dinner table
We can’t just come here and blame the parents. They don’t act out of malice, but by repeating what they also learned. Heleieth Saffioti, a brazilian sociologist explains in O Poder do Macho (The Power of the Macho), that sexism is structural and that women also reproduce it. Parents are only one part of a system, along with schools, the media, and society, but that doesn’t free them from the responsibility to change what they pass on.
In her song, Dua Lipa talks about children who repeat what they see. But the first mirror they see is their parents: who washes the dishes, who does the caring, who apologizes. And how do we change that?
A few simple attitudes can change everything: sharing domestic tasks equally between sons and daughters; not answering “he likes you” to a complaint; teaching body boundaries and consent and praising girls for more than good behavior. Boys also aren’t born sexist. They gradually come to understand that the world demands different things from them, but if you start to demand the same chores from a boy as from a girl, that is the first step. The Brazilian Forum on Public Security has argued that repressive measures alone are not enough and that an agenda of prevention, education, and transformation of social norms is urgent. Change comes through education, and education starts at the dinner table.
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The article above was edited and translated by Ana Beatriz Carvalho Sapata.
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