Boys will be Boys.” We’ve been hearing that a lot lately in the news and other media platforms, justifying behaviors that we must all recognize are less than acceptable. I heard this phrase countless times while growing up as a young girl and later as a young adult, instilling a feeling in me that perhaps the acceptableness of certain offensive behaviors was determined not by the behavior itself, but by the context or by the identity of the perpetrator. These phrases that casually brush off the so-called “boyish” behaviors of dangerous masculine entitlement add to a culture in which children are encouraged to define one another by gender, boys are taught to see girls as objects, and girls are taught that their needs and choices for their own bodies don’t matter. (click headline for more….)