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AN ANTIDOTE FOR TESTOSTERONE POISONING: YA BOOKS GIRLS-AND BOYS-SHOULD READ
Today's world is loaded with dangers and dangerous people; it's a place where kids-good and bad, naive and worldly, cautious and reckless-are at risk. The sources of these risks are sometimes masked in the mixed messages children learn from society-messages about gender roles, about behavior, about what's right and what's not.
Some of the fuzzy messages that concern me most are the ones that influence the behavior of young adult males. All teachers know that teenage boys can be some of the most obnoxious creatures on earth. I know this from personal experience as a former obnoxious boy and as a teacher. As a junior high student, I considered a day successful if I had driven at least one teacher a little closer to the brink of insanity. Years later when I was a high school English teacher, fate made sure that I received regular, large, and very bitter doses of my own medicine.
Other than this personal experience, I make no claim for scientific understanding of boys' antics, but based on my experience, I believe that annoying male behavior has various causes: ignorance, nervousness, inexperience, ADHD, alcohol or drugs, hormones, peer pressure, lack of social skills, growing pains, and any number of other things-including what one of my colleagues likes to call "testosterone poisoning."
Of course, testosterone does influence male behavior, but I think that one cause of boys' inappropriate behavior is their desire to be real males, true men in the making. Unfortunately, many teenage boys don't really understand what it means to be male, so they rely on faux male role models presented in popular media and try to adapt these men's behavior and attitudes to their own adolescent lives. While these boys are trying to figure who they are and how they should act, people around them, especially their female peers, often endure all sorts of agonies, from minor frustrations to major trauma.
Select young adult novels about boys cannot solve this problem, but they can help teenage girls gain some insight into the workings of the adolescent male mind; this will help them understand their male counterparts and, in some cases, realize how to protect themselves from boys. I don't...