If you go anywhere children also go, you know the tone of voice I’m talking about: Female. Sprightly but defeated. A little pleading. 

When you turn to see the owner of this plaintive voice, you almost always see a mom. She’s usually speaking to a toddler, preschooler or early elementary age son, trying to make him "stop it!"

Stop crashing into the grocery shelves. Stop splashing water on the littler kid at the pool. Stop kicking the table. Stop refusing to put on a coat and get going. 

And usually, the boy isn’t listening. He has her attention, but she doesn’t have his. 

Progressive parenting experts and their adherents tell us that we should not, in this moment, reach for the old adage that “boys will be boys.” Clearly, the little guy in question has been taught to act like this, they say. It is our culture of so-called "toxic masculinity" that has made him disposed to rough and rowdy play and noncompliance with parental admonitions.

How right they are — but not in the way they think. 

Yes, toxic masculinity and the justification that “boys will be boys” is out there among the online extreme right, excusing the inexcusable among the kinds of misogynistic adult men who idolize

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