Constitutional scholar David A.J. Richards has released Boys’ Secrets and Men’s Loves: A Memoir, a new book examining the political and psychological costs of traditional patriarchy on American manhood. Richards, an NYU School of Law professor with 50 years of teaching experience, explore how societal initiation into patriarchal codes forces boys into emotional disconnection, trauma and shame, feelings she argues can manifest as political anger and hierarchy. Men, Richards, notes, “harbor a secret self as a way of both registering and resisting the trauma of their initiation into patriarchy. That hidden self is not only a source of pain. It can also become the beginning of voice, memory and resistance.”
