Our Guys.

The man was screaming at a teenage boy. "Why are you being so nice to him?" he yelled. "Why?"

The boy looked sheepish, and was silent.

"You hit him, and you hit him hard next time," the older man insisted.

I was out walking the dog on a trail that surrounds the local high school, and I had stumbled upon football practice--blocking practice, to be precise. I didn't know this at first. I heard only the man's voice, serrated and alien, cutting though the sounds of crickets and rustling leaves and disrupting my rich inner thoughts about what to make for dinner and where to get my daughter's school supplies.

She and I had just reviewed "Promoting Responsible Behavior," a flier sent home with her on the first day of school that listed "guidelines for a respectful, self-disciplined, and caring school community." Hitting, pushing, and any other forms of physical aggression are verboten, and now children as young as six can be overheard talking about respecting others' "personal space."

The young man berated for being a wuss was probably drilled in the school district's "conflict-management curriculum," also touted in the flier. What was he to do? Should he learn to hit as hard as possible? Or would he be nice and fail? How would he manage to be peaceable yet a brute?

The coach's instructions caught me at the height of the police scandal in New York. White male officers holding positions of enormous power and authority conducted a sexually monstrous invasion of a black man's body. At the time, I was also reading Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz, his disturbing account of the 1989 rape of a retarded girl in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. The stars of the school's football team attacked her with a baseball bat and broom handle, no less. Like the cops in New York, these guys assumed they'd never get caught, or that such things would be tolerated.

The cops were "rogues," "renegades," according to New York officials. But Lefkowitz's account is much more chilling. It was the revered jock culture of Glen Ridge--one that reigns supreme in high schools throughout the land--that produced and then sought to dismiss the despicable acts against the girl in the basement.

Feminists get into trouble when we suggest that there might be a deep and pathological crisis surrounding masculinity in this country. We get into even bigger trouble when we ask about the relationship between cherished male institutions--football teams, military academies, police squads, fret houses--and brutal, criminal behavior. We are male-bashers, or we are making glib causal associations, ignoring the good these institutions do. No matter that as macho an institution as the FBI documented, in the mid-1980s, that athletes in sports in which aggressiveness and physical force are prided--most notably football and basketball players--were reported to the police for sexual assault 38 percent more often than the average male college student.

But all too many news stories--from the scandals in the military to the epidemic of police brutality and the rapes by athletes--point to the truth that much of our culture is built upon a tolerance, even a reverence, for an aggressive, above-the-law, bullying version of manhood.

Many feminists, for good reason, have emphasized the loss of self-esteem that all too many girls experience when they hit adolescence. But it is time now to start focusing on the boys as well. Too many boys are growing up in a culture that compels them to suppress their fundamental humanity. When that happens, those they have power over suffer, sometimes brutally.

Challenging the precepts of masculinity is virtually unspeakable in this country. But figuring out exactly what constitutes successful manhood is no easy matter, either--take a step off the tightrope one way and you're a nerd; step off in the other direction and you're a brute. Punching a guy repeatedly until his innards turn into polenta makes you a hero and a multimillionaire; biting the same guy on the ear makes you a barbarian.

Our male children confront deeply conflicting messages about their identities. Media images of New Age, compassionate men like the doctors on ER intermix with the strutting macho men in action films where the hero invariably wields a very, very big stick. We are expected to applaud the gun-toting, karate-chopping, quasi-vigilante movie heroes, yet to revile real-life bounty hunters who, just recently, behaved not unlike Steven Seagal on the screen. But despite these warring messages, the dominant image of ideal masculinity is of a guy who learned, in high school, how to hit hard. Is this really the mantle of manhood we want them to drape over their shoulders?

As the mother of a daughter, I worry about what harassments, or worse, she will confront from insecure guys who are trying to inflate their own image at her expense, trying to mimic what Lefkowitz calls "a grotesque version of manhood." Just last year, when she was in the first grade and sitting on the swings during recess, a boy came up to her and said, "Suck my cock." Despite the conflict-management curriculum, the lesson that such comments are an outrage is not getting through.

Lefkowitz, in Our Guys, sees the culture in Glen Ridge--where "jocks ruled" and where "callous, abusive behavior toward girls" was an everyday occurrence in school--as typical. The press repeatedly described the retarded girl as someone "who had not progressed beyond the mental age of an eight-year-old." Ignored, notes Lefkowitz, was the fact that "the values of the community she grew up in had not progressed beyond those of a high-school pep rally." Across the country, schools didn't think that "the everyday treatment of girls by boys was a serious issue that merited discussion among faculty and students."

Not all football players are rapists, and not all cops are sadists. But Our Guys--a book every middle- and high-school teacher should read--reveals that we need to have a national conversation not just about race. We need to have one about masculinity, too.