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Talking to Boys the Way We Talk to Girls By  ANDREW REINER JUNE 15, 2017 245 Photo   Credit James Yang  At a Father’s Day breakfast, my 5-year-old son and his classmates sang a song about fathers, crooning about “my dad who’s big and strong” and “fixes things with his hammer” and, above all else, “is really cool.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with most of these qualities in and of themselves. But when these lyrics are passed down as the defining soundtrack to masculine identity, we limit children’s understanding not just of what it means to be a father but of what it means to be a man — and a boy, as well. When fathers appear in children’s picture books, they’re angling for laughs, taking their sons on adventures or modeling physical strength or stoic independence. There is the rare exception in children’s books where a father baldly demonstrates — without symbolic gestures — his love for his son (a few are “ Guess How Much I Love You ” and “ Oh, Oh, Ba...

Why So Many Rape Victims Don’t Simply ‘Fight Back’ A new study shows it’s common for women to experience involuntary paralysis during sexual assault. By Catherine Pearson PORTRA IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES A new study has found that involuntary paralysis is a common response to sexual assault. 2.2k Last winter, a judge in Turin, Italy, acquitted a 46-year-old man who had been accused of sexually assaulting a female colleague. His rationale for tossing the case,  The Washington Post reported , was that the woman did not react strongly enough. She said “stop it!” and “enough” while being attacked, but did not scream.  Saying that a woman cannot have been raped because her response was too muted is a deeply flawed argument, but the Italy case is not an anomaly. Women are expected to fight back, and when they don’t, their stories are questioned and even discredited ― sometimes by the very people  and systems  meant to protect them....

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