Boys Will Be Boys

By: Clementine Ford

Narrated by: Clementine Ford

The incendiary new audiobook about toxic masculinity and misogyny from Clementine Ford, author of the best-selling feminist manifesto Fight Like a Girl.

Clementine Ford reports that one of the questions she is most asked in person and online is 'how do I raise my son to be a feminist? How do I make sure he's a supporter rather than a perpetrator?' That is a question that many parents with sons are haunted by. Now that Clem is mother to a baby boy of her own, it is a question that haunts her, too.

How does a feminist raise a son in a world that conditions boys into entitlement, privilege and power at the expense not just of girls' humanity but also their own? All boys start innocent, but by the time they are adolescents many of them will subscribe to a view of masculinity that is openly contemptuous of women and girls. This explosive new work will look at toxic masculinity and the closed ranks of brotherhood that shape an entitled, disrespectful and potentially dangerous idea of manhood.

In Boys Will Be Boys, best-selling and groundbreaking author of Fight Like a Girl Clementine Ford dismantles the age-old idea that entitlement, aggression and toxicity are natural realms for boys and reveals how the patriarchy we live in is as harmful to boys and men as it is to women and girls.

©2018 Clementine Ford (P)2018 Audible, Ltd

Men are not born violent

Society beats tenderness, empathy, understanding, and the right to human emotions out of male humans, and violence into them. Our culture creates misogyny by setting expectations of male superiority: men are supposed to be bigger, stronger, smarter, funnier, more skillful, more successful…in short, better than women at everything. This creates the feeling that if any female is superior in any way, it threatens the very essence of what it is to be a man, and is therefore intolerable. Add to that the ingrained fallacy that women exist to serve men, should be controlled by men, and do not deserve the same level of respect as men (or any in the minds of many) - and you have a system in which men are taught to believe it’s the duty of women to prioritize the well-being of men above all else (without reciprocity). Thus males can feel fully justified in blaming women if there needs are not being met, justified in hating women for that, and that women deserve to have that hatred taken out on them in horrific, violent, and inhuman ways.
Take a very long, deep look at whether you are perpetuating this - in your own life, and/or the lives of others.

Visceral and necessary

I have lived in a world coloured and carved into rape culture all my life, but that reality has meant I need to forget sometimes what that truly means. Clementine Ford has brought it all back my rage and fear, despair and hope. And yet I not the best audience fir this book. It is for my male friends, my partner, my father, the men who shouted at me from car thus week and the man who groped me without my consent on a first date.
Please please hear us. This time, please this time, listen to what you are doing and stop. Just stop.

Clementine Ford broke me into tears

As a father
As an unloved child
As a 31yo man

Your epilogue broke me.

Essential reading

Another essential work by Clementine Ford. Powerful from start to finish. Reading performance 10 stars as well.