It’s almost as if he spent all his social currency” trying to get them to stop making sexist jokes. “And as I continued to step back” and the other sophomore “continued to step up, you could tell that the guys on the team stopped liking him as much. Cole’s friend spoke up again, but this time Cole stayed silent. The next day, a second senior started talking about “getting back at” a “bitch” who’d dumped him. “I started to explain why it wasn’t appropriate,” Cole said, “but he just laughed.” Cole and a friend of his, another sophomore, told him to knock it off. And the guy wasn’t shy about sharing the details. He recalled an incident two years prior when a senior was bragging in the locker room about how he’d convinced one of Cole’s female classmates-a young sophomore, Cole emphasized-that they were an item, then started hooking up with other girls behind her back. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of male survey respondents said honesty and morality.Ĭole eventually found his people on the crew team, but it wasn’t a smooth fit at first. Because a ‘bro’ ”-he rocked back again-“is always, always an athlete.” The definition of masculinity seems to be contracting. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s part of it: seeming relaxed and never intrusive, yet somehow bringing out that aggression on the sports field.
Whenever Cole uttered the word bro, he shifted his weight to take up more space, rocking back in his chair, and spoke from low in his throat, like he’d inhaled a lungful of weed.
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I needed to be a ‘bro,’ and I didn’t know how to do that.” “I could talk to girls platonically,” he said. He also confided how he’d worried four years earlier, during his first weeks as a freshman on a scholarship at a new school, that he wouldn’t know how to act with other guys, wouldn’t be able to make friends.
He pulled up a picture on his phone of his girlfriend, whom he’d been dating for the past 18 months, describing her proudly as “way smarter than I am,” a feminist, and a bedrock of emotional support. Let’s leave it at that.” If I had closed my eyes and described the boy I imagined would never open up to me, it would have been him.īut Cole surprised me. His friends were “the jock group,” he’d tell me. His neck was so thick that it seemed to merge into his jawline, and he was planning to enter a military academy for college the following fall. At 18, he stood more than 6 feet tall, with broad shoulders and short-clipped hair. Cole would later describe himself to me as a “typical tall white athlete” guy, and that is exactly what I saw.
It was totally unfair, a scarlet letter of personal bias. He was staring impassively ahead, both feet planted on the floor, hands resting loosely on his thighs. As I rushed down a hallway at the school, I noticed a boy sitting outside the library, waiting-it had to be him. The afternoon of our first interview, I was running late. I knew nothing about Cole before meeting him he was just a name on a list of boys at a private school outside Boston who had volunteered to talk with me (or perhaps had had their arm twisted a bit by a counselor).
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