Oh, would you look at that? 👀Men found a new loophole to smuggle porn into TikTok filters.
Because, of course they did. Give them a tool meant for harmless fun and one of them will test if it can carry their penis. Every… Single…Time. 🙄And society will excuse it with the same tired line: “boys will be boys.” As if urges are natural disasters the rest of us must endure.
But, can we take please take a beat and put this in perspective?
🎒At roughly 12 years old, girls get responsibility slammed on them. Periods arrive, and overnight they’re buying tampons or pads, tracking cycles, hiding leaks, managing cramps, and paying out of pocket for a biological function they never asked for. The average lifetime cost of menstruation products runs into the thousands. Society demands they do it discreetly, reliably, and without complaint. For the sake of pearl clutching we will save the birth control burden for now.
🛑Now, lets stop and consider, at roughly the same age, what do boys get? Nothing. No responsibility. No cultural expectation to manage their biology. Their urges are treated like wild weather systems; random inevitable storms the rest of us just have to live through. They’re allowed to stumble into adolescence with zero accountability, then we all act shocked when they can’t control themselves at 16, 26, or 56.
And here’s the part society likes to pretend doesn’t exist: this lack of accountability has a body count.
- Completed or attempted rape — lifetime prevalence
- Women (U.S.): 26.8% reported experiencing completed or attempted rape at some point in their lives; Men (U.S.): 3.8% reported the same.
TIME+15CDC+15CDC+15 - Intimate partner homicide (U.S., 2021)
- Females: ~34% of homicides were committed by an intimate partner; Males: ~6%.
Bureau of Justice Statistics+2Dolan + Zimmerman LLP+2 - Contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner
- 47.3% of women in the U.S. reported experiencing at least one of these forms of violence in their lifetime.
National Sexual Violence Resource Center+15National Sexual Violence Resource Center+15CDC+15 - Child sexual abuse — familiarity of perpetrator
- 93% of juvenile victims knew their abuser (acquaintance, family, etc.).
sanctuaryforfamilies.org
The Obscene Inversion
Girls bear burdens in silence. Boys get free rein. When boys inevitably lash out, who pays? Everyone else.
So here’s the solution (hold on to your socks because this is super complex): Teach boys exactly what we teach girls. No euphemisms.
“This is your body. This is your problem. It is normal, and yes, its amazing, but you do not have a right to put the burden on anyone else. With that amazing comes great power and great pain. It is your responsibility to make sure you don’t get it on anyone else. Take care of it daily if you feel like you need to. That is also normal. You can treat it like a reward after brushing your teeth. In the shower.”
We are no longer in a position to accept this double standard. If we claim to be civilized, we can’t keep excusing this. We have to normalize private responsibility. We absolutely must refuse to accept this passive entitlement.
Let’s stop pretending. The obscenity isn’t saying this out loud. What’s obscene is believing men can’t be raised to be held accountable while women and children bleed in silence.
To the mothers, sisters, and caretakers raising boys right now, yours is a uniquely important task. You hold precariously, the future of our girls as much, if not more due to the present political landscape. So, today I call on all women to hold each other up as we teach our boys a new way to think, and actually how to feel. How to feel something besides urges, and the hollow superiority patriarchy feeds them.
At the end of the day:
We keep hearing about the constant fight to “keep kids safe” from inappropriate adult content and contact. Every headline, every platform policy, every pearl-clutching sound bite insists that protecting children is the highest priority.
And yet, the silence is deafening when it comes to the damage done by men who were never taught accountability. The culture treats tampons in a cartoon as too scandalous to show, but has no problem letting harassment, exploitation, and violent entitlement keep spilling over onto women and children every day.
That’s the obscene double standard. Girls are forced to take responsibility for their biology before they even understand it, while boys are shielded from even the suggestion that they should take care of their own bodies. We censor the conversation, not the harm.
If we were serious about keeping kids safe, we’d stop wasting energy on sanitizing language and start teaching boys real responsibility. Safety doesn’t come from filters, loopholes, or parental-control theater—it comes from raising boys who know their urges are theirs to handle, privately and respectfully, just like girls already learn.
Dispatch by Cassandra Speaks w/ G
AI-Enhanced Authorship: Acknowledged