How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

When it comes to the gaining of genuine confidence and genuine self-respect, even the supposed default humans need a surprising amount of encouragement. What they need, like everyone else, is a) one thing to be good at, and b) one person to notice.

Inappropriate competitiveness is not an exclusively male trait and neither is swaggering around like a bell-end. But we seem to have made both behaviours sufficiently our own that a woman behaving with equivalent awfulness will have her ‘femininity’ called into question. There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting