From a reader:
I’m a college junior and chair of the feminist org at my college. I was raised by a feminist and a single mom, along with my 16 year old brother. My brother is a good kid, I think that a lot of our problems are standard brother/sister stuff, and I know a lot of his stock misogyny is to annoy me and my mother, because he’s in that rebellious phase and he’s under academic pressure. But some things are really starting to bother me. He routinely yells over me and my mother instead of letting us talk, refers to me and my mother as “woman” (my mother ignores him because she also thinks he’s doing it to be annoying, which is true, but I think ignoring it isn’t getting at the issue), and makes sexist statements all the time about what women are and are not capable of, things that I know he knows aren’t true. I want advice, from mothers of teenage boys, other sisters or brothers of teenage boys, and men who remember being teenage boys about talking to him about it. In the car the other day, I asked if he had a girlfriend, or if he was interested in any girls. And his answer was, “No, all the girls in my grade are sluts.” Okay. So I said, “Why are they sluts?” and he said basically because they date older guys who want to use them for sex. So I said, “Wouldn’t the boys be the jerks, then?” and he said “I guess,” but followed that up with “Every girl in my grade is dumb anyway.” I said, “Every one?” and he said “Yup.” except for one of his friends. I want to know how to talk to him about this, is there a stealth Feminism 101 for teenage boys? Advice?
Ideas?