When men are itty-bitty boys, we as their parents and teachers have to dismantle our culture’s ideas of masculinity as we know them at every turn. It has to be okay—encouraged, really—for men to empathize and align with women and to stick up for them when they see other men try to take them down, linguistically and otherwise. “To put their principles above their fraternal loyalties,” as Deborah Cameron once put it. And it has to be not okay to treat anyone who isn’t a man like an intruder in their world.
