Nice A$$

Last weekend I went on what I thought was going to be a delightful bike ride along the lake.  Unfortunately that all diminished when a teenage boy stuck his head out the passenger side of a car and yelled at me, "Nice ass!"  (assuming his age as the car was driving by too quickly for me to process his stupid face).  

Now I'm a grown up, and therefore I have the maturity and life experience to realize that this kid was being... a kid.  But as I continued to ride I was momentarily paralyzed with sadness.  At first I just felt - as any woman would - dehumanized and diminished by a clearly immature (and possibly unintelligent) child for no other reason than his desire to entertain himself.  

This quickly developed into a different level of sadness. 

I was sad for him.  

I was sad that this man-in-the-making had so little of his own self-worth that he lacked the ability to see it in the opposite gender. I was sad that he did not have the self-confidence to know that he need not scream out of turn to get attention from a female (although in my case he was driving too fast to know attention from me would be gross and highly illegal).  I was sad he did not understand that the empowered young man he hopes to be is completely negated by crude behavior... or that even if he understood, that he chose to ignore it anyway. 

...I can hear some people saying, "Well, he's just a kid." or, "He's a boy. They do stupid things." But I'd challenge this by asking, why do we make excuses for boys that we would not girls? If a young girl displays crude behavior in public, society shames her - verbally or otherwise.  (In fact, just recently, I overheard a mother talking about having to get a specific type of shirt for her daughter's school dress code, detailing the school's reasonings.  In that moment I wondered what the school did to reinforce the boys' responsibility to honor and respect sexual boundaries.)...

The level of sadness I felt then turned towards our larger human community. I am sad I have to ask these questions. I'm sad that we don't stand up for boys the way we hope they, as future men, would respect and stand up for women.  I don't know what this boy's story is; what his home life is like or what he's been taught.  But I do know that if we were collectively developing emotionally strong young men, what he's been taught at home wouldn't matter so much.  

"The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face." ~William Makepeace Thackeray