In 2015, the small American town of Dietrich, Idaho, was rocked by revelations of sexual abuse emanating from the high school’s football team. The Washington Post described Dietrich as “a community on edge” after charges were filed against three players who were alleged to have sexually assaulted a fellow student.

While it’s not uncommon for residents to rally around young men with “promising futures”, there’s one key difference between this case and most of the ones we hear about – in Dietrich, the victim was a male teammate. He was also a young black man with intellectual disabilities in an overwhelmingly white town.

It seems that the assault was at least partly planned, as the young man testified that it began with an invitation for a hug. While he was being held, another player pushed a coat hanger into his anus. The only man named in the trial, John RK Howard, then kicked the hanger, pushing it further into the young man’s rectum. As the victim told the court later: “Pain that I have never felt took over my body. I screamed, but afterwards, I kept it to myself.”

It’s hard to imagine a situation in which anyone could find this kind of behaviour defensible, but it’s incredible how flexible people can be when it comes to forgiving their heroes. Local resident Hubert Shaw told the Washington Post: “They’re 15-, 16-, 17-year-old boys who are doing what boys do … I would guarantee that those boys had no criminal intent to do anything or any harm to anyone. Boys are boys and sometimes they get carried away.”

The framing of his assault as some kind of hilarious 'prank' must have made it that much more difficult to speak out

The case isn’t too dissimilar from one that occurred at a party in Brisbane in early 2015. A young man drank too much and passed out in a bedroom. Four of his “friends” coordinated an attack that involved two holding him down, another sexually violating him with a glass bottle and the fourth filming it. Afterwards, the footage was shared on social media. After a week-long trial, Bailey Hayes-Gordon, Nicholas Jackson and Jacob Watson – all of whom had pleaded not guilty – were convicted of rape and sentenced to two years in prison, to be suspended after six months. The fourth man, Frazer Eaton, had pleaded guilty from the outset and was given a sentence of 18 months, to be wholly suspended.

When I read about this case, I remember thinking how brave that 18-year-old lad was for coming forward and pressing charges – not because what happened to him was significantly worse than the rapes that women are subjected to, but because the framing of his assault as some kind of hilarious “prank” must have made it that much more difficult to speak out.

“Don’t dog the boys” is still the ridiculous catchcry used by young men when they circle the wagons in defence of each other, and a man speaking out must have been perceived as some kind of deep betrayal of this form of toxic brotherhood. After the trio who pleaded not guilty were sentenced, friends and family members didn’t just openly weep in the courtroom, they also took to social media to lament the supposed miscarriage of justice that had happened that day. It was a joke! Their lives were being ruined over a joke!

There is a delight in humiliation that rests at the centre of this swaggering machismo, and it must be asked what it is about seeing another human humiliated that is considered a) entertaining and b) a cheap night out. In her book Night Games, Anna Krien explores the notion of the “prank” that underpins so much of the exploitation of others undertaken by groups of men: the secret filming of women engaged in sexual acts, the sudden appearance of a second or third or fourth man during intercourse (even to the point of attempting to substitute one for another without her realising), the degradation of unconscious people’s bodies while others watch and laugh (even if, as the judge in this case decided, there was “no sexual gratification”).

It speaks to the absolute repression of male emotional maturity that some circles of men require the use of women (and sometimes other men) as inanimate objects in order to connect with each other and/or use this degradation as a means of elevating their own status.

I often wonder what it is that draws these men to each other. Is it as simple as falling into line behind a ringleader? Maybe. Patriarchal order that favours you can be a helluva drug, and conforming to the rigid codes of masculinity in your own peer groups must seem easier than challenging it. No one likes to be ostracised as the party pooper. (Except feminists; we live for that shit.) But I suspect what’s probably going on is that a lot of young men want to say no to this kind of activity but don’t really know how. I don’t think that makes their complicity forgivable, but it does give us a point from which we might start to try and disrupt it.

Of course, we first have to disrupt the impulse shown by broader society to make excuses for them. It’s telling how much leniency is granted to boys allowed to “learn from their mistakes” while girls continue to be subjected to scrutiny and shame for similar engagement.

The sexuality of boys is both revered and given free rein to experiment without risk, even as a regressive patriarchal mindset also denies it healthy and positive avenues for exploration, ﻿instead reducing it to something base, dominant and invulnerable. To what extent do those attitudes inform the behaviour of a pack of boys who gather in a bathroom to watch as sequences more suited to a porn film are recreated with a 15-year-old rape victim? Isn’t it at least possible that some of those boys stood there and watched only because they feared not doing so would expose them as somehow less manly in front of their peers? Isn’t it possible that teenage boys aren’t always ready to fuck or to watch someone be fucked? Isn’t it possible that some of them just want to stay kids for a bit longer?

We are conditioning young boys to view their sexuality as a weapon that empowers them but is also outside their control. We are reinforcing to boys that the vibrancy of their masculine identities is dependent on how forcefully they not only express their sexuality but perform it for other men to admire. This is what encourages them to view girls and women as conquests instead of human beings, while denying them the right to prioritise intimacy over physicality, if they choose, or indeed to reject sexuality altogether when it suits them.

We are doing damage to our young boys, and this in turn compounds the damage we already do to our young girls. We should absolutely demand more of boys. But we should also demand more for them.

In his book How Not To Be a Boy, the comedian Robert Webb jokes that it’s not so much that masculinity is in crisis as that masculinity is a crisis. He immediately denounces this conclusion as too simplistic, but I’m tempted to agree with the original premise. Boys might be conditioned to believe that their sexuality is a fire-breathing dragon whose life force must never be tamed, but let’s be honest – that’s bullshit. It seems to me more likely that boys are fucking terrified all the time. Terrified that they won’t measure up to what they’re told men have to be, terrified that they’re not doing sex properly, terrified that they’re doing it with the wrong people, terrified that they’ll never get the girl, terrified of what it means that they don’t want to get the girl, terrified that someone might discover that they have feelings, terrified terrified terrified.

Women may have few advantages over men in this crazy little sideshow we call life, but one thing we definitely don’t have to do is shove all our icky human emotions into a metaphorical box and send it on a one-way trip to the centre of the sun.

Failing to teach and encourage men to express healthy intimacy … with other men is causing significant damage

My son isn’t quite two years old, but he’s perfected the art of the gentle hug. I watch him when he meets his little friends. At first he seems astonished to be suddenly surrounded by people who are the same size as him. But then you can tell he just wants to love on them like crazy. He’ll approach them slowly, carefully wrap his arms around them and then bury his head in their shoulder. The kids aren’t always into it, at which point we have to gently navigate some early lessons about bodily autonomy and respect. But there’s no two ways about it – he just bloody loves hugging people.

I find myself wondering sometimes at what age this might stop. Will he succumb, in high school, to the pressures of what CJ Pascoe refers to as “compulsive heterosexuality”, and the repressed masculinity that comes with that? And what does this mean for his ability to relate to men later on?

I don’t want my son to join in while his friends viciously attack someone who trusts them. I don’t want him to think that “humour” relies on someone being humiliated. I don’t want him to be afraid of showing too much of his softness out of fear others will use it against him.

I don’t want him to stand in a bathroom one day, watching a young girl be fucked and filmed by his school friends, and not know how to speak up about it to say no. But worse still is the thought that he could be the one filming it. That he could be the one organising it.

I don’t want that world for him.

I will not have that world for him.

Photograph: Allen & Unwin

So perhaps this is where we need to start: not just teaching men how to navigate healthy intimate relationships with women, but encouraging them to embrace healthy intimate relationships with each other, without fearing that the authenticity of their manhood may be challenged.

Failing to teach and encourage men to express healthy intimacy not just with women but with other men is causing significant damage. For those of us raising boys, it’s vital that we try to counter not just Pascoe’s sense of compulsive heterosexuality but the homophobia that keeps men from truly connecting with one another. How else do you explain a bonding activity that involves four young men shoving a glass bottle up their unconscious mate’s arse and filming it?

We all have a role to play in dismantling the twin towers of homophobia and misogyny. ﻿But we are doing young men no favours when we allow masculinity to be dictated to them by the status quo.

Because here’s some news for you. The status quo might revere men as a class, but it destroys them as individuals. And it teaches them to destroy others in return.

• This is an edited extract from Boys Will Be Boys by Clementine Ford, out now through Allen & Unwin