The phrase "boys will be boys" slips easily off tongues in school corridors, playgrounds, and staffrooms across Aotearoa. Uttered with a knowing smile or a resigned shrug, it appears to offer a simple, biological explanation for rough play, aggressive posturing, or boundary violations—as if testosterone and youthful energy alone account for harm. But this casual dismissal is anything but innocent. "Boys will be boys" operates as a sophisticated ideological apparatus, deeply embedded within Pākehā white settler culture, meticulously designed to reproduce whiteness by naturalising and protecting dominant masculine behaviours that sustain entrenched racial and gender hierarchies.
This phrase does not merely describe boyhood—it actively constructs it, delineating which boys deserve protection, which transgressions warrant forgiveness, and which forms of masculinity are celebrated versus pathologised. In doing so, it functions as a gatekeeping mechanism that shields white Pākehā boys from accountability while simultaneously marking Māori, Pasifika, and other racialised youth as inherently threatening or deviant when they engage in similar behaviours.
Whiteness as Invisible Infrastructure in Aotearoa
In Aotearoa New Zealand, Pākehā culture—rooted in British colonial settler norms—positions whiteness as the unmarked, unspoken default against which all others are measured. Critical whiteness scholars have demonstrated that whiteness here operates through studied invisibility, allowing Pākehā individuals and institutions to distance themselves from direct associations with racial privilege, colonial violence, or systemic racism while continuing to benefit materially and symbolically from these very structures.
The term "Pākehā" itself can sometimes serve as a rhetorical buffer, framing white New Zealanders as simply another cultural group rather than the dominant one wielding structural power inherited from colonisation. This semantic manoeuvre enables what Sara Ahmed calls "declarations of whiteness" that perform progressive racial awareness while avoiding genuine accountability for ongoing colonial harm. Whiteness thus becomes simultaneously everywhere and nowhere—the invisible architecture shaping institutions, norms, and everyday interactions while remaining largely unexamined and unchallenged.
This strategic invisibility extends powerfully to constructions of masculinity. The traditional "Kiwi bloke" culture—characterised by stoic emotional repression, physical toughness and endurance, homosocial bonding through rugby or rural labour, laconic communication styles, and aggressive rejection of anything coded as feminine or vulnerable—has historically been tied inseparably to Pākehā identity. This "man alone" archetype, celebrated in foundational New Zealand literature (from John Mulgan to Barry Crump), film (from Goodbye Pork Pie to The World's Fastest Indian), and everyday discourse, reinforces a rigid, brittle masculinity that frames emotional expression as weakness and dismisses interpersonal harm as inevitable collateral damage of "natural" male behaviour.
"Boys will be boys" becomes the distilled essence of this ideology—a four-word absolution that transforms structural choices about how we raise, educate, and hold accountable young people into supposedly immutable biological fact.
The Feminist Critique: Patriarchy's Tool of Reproduction
Feminist scholars have long identified "boys will be boys" as a cornerstone phrase of patriarchal ideology, one that excuses and thereby reproduces toxic behaviours rooted in male supremacy and gender-based violence. The phrase operates through several interconnected mechanisms:
Biological essentialism: It attributes socially learned behaviours—aggression, dominance, sexual entitlement, emotional unavailability—to innate male nature, erasing the extensive cultural work required to produce these patterns and foreclosing possibilities for change.
Harm minimisation: By framing violence, harassment, or cruelty as "just how boys are," it trivialises the real pain experienced by targets (predominantly girls and women, but also gender-diverse youth and boys who don't conform to hegemonic masculine norms) and blocks pathways to accountability.
Masculine straitjacketing: Paradoxically, while appearing to give boys freedom, the phrase actually imprisons them within narrow scripts, punishing emotional vulnerability, creativity, or tenderness as failures of proper boyhood while fostering isolation, mental health struggles, and stunted relational capacities.
These feminist critiques are essential. Yet in Aotearoa's context, they remain incomplete without explicit analysis of how "boys will be boys" intersects with and serves whiteness. The phrase does not protect all boys equally—it functions as a racialised technology of power.
The Racial Mechanics of "Boys Will Be Boys"
In New Zealand's whitestream educational and social institutions—where Pākehā cultural norms, communication styles, disciplinary frameworks, and aesthetic preferences form the unmarked background—"boys will be boys" operates through profound racial selectivity:
Differential interpretation of identical behaviours: When Pākehā boys engage in physical roughness, boundary violations, or aggressive posturing, these behaviours are routinely interpreted through the forgiving lens of natural boyhood energy requiring gentle redirection. When Māori or Pasifika boys engage in identical behaviours, they are far more likely to be read as threatening, requiring surveillance, containment, and punishment. Research on school discipline in Aotearoa consistently documents this racial disparity, with Māori and Pasifika students receiving harsher consequences for similar infractions.
Protection of white masculine futures: The phrase "boys will be boys" implicitly invokes a trajectory of eventual respectable adulthood—these rough boys will grow into business leaders, politicians, rugby heroes. This futurity is reserved for white boys. For Māori and Pasifika youth, dominant discourse offers different futures: prison pipelines, gang affiliations, failed potential. Their boyhood receives no such protective framing.
Erasure of racist violence as "natural boyhood": Most insidiously, "boys will be boys" actively obscures and excuses racist bullying, harassment, and violence perpetrated by Pākehā boys against children and young people of colour. When white boys engage in racial slurs, exclusionary practices, or physical intimidation targeting Māori, Pasifika, Asian, or other minoritised students, these behaviours are frequently minimised as "just kids being kids" or "not understanding what they're saying"—extensions of natural boyish roughness rather than serious racist violence requiring intervention.
Recent research from the Education Review Office starkly illuminates these consequences: In a report published in March 2023, one in five learners from ethnic communities experienced racist bullying in the past month alone, with over half witnessing racist incidents and nearly a third reporting that schools do not take these incidents seriously. These statistics represent actual children—Māori, Pasifika, Asian, African, Middle Eastern students—enduring daily violence in institutions that claim to educate and protect them.
When ERO researchers examined school responses to racist bullying, they found predictable patterns: minimisation ("they didn't mean it that way"), responsibilisation of targets ("you're being too sensitive"), and protection of perpetrators through explanatory frameworks that sound remarkably like "boys will be boys"—just delivered in more coded institutional language about "developmental stages," "misunderstandings," or "learning opportunities."
Reproducing Whiteness Through Masculine Normativity
"Boys will be boys" thus functions as what critical race theorist Zeus Leonardo calls a "technology of whiteness"—a discursive and material practice that actively reproduces white dominance while appearing neutral, natural, or even progressive (when framed as "not being too hard on kids").
The phrase accomplishes several forms of reproductive labour for whiteness:
Naturalising white masculine aggression: By attributing dominance behaviours to biology rather than culture, it protects the social investments white families and institutions make in cultivating particular forms of masculinity—confidence verging on entitlement, competitiveness unto ruthlessness, self-assertion regardless of others' boundaries. These traits serve Pākehā boys well in maintaining racial and gender hierarchies but cannot be named as such without revealing whiteness's active construction.
Creating racial discipline hierarchies: The selective application of "boys will be boys" versus punitive discipline creates a two-tier system where white boys receive developmental understanding while racialised boys receive criminalisation—training both groups in their respective positions within racial capitalism.
Protecting white innocence: Perhaps most crucially, the phrase shields Pākehā institutions and families from confronting how they actively teach racism. When white boys engage in racist violence that schools then minimise as "boyish behaviour," everyone can maintain fictions of colour-blindness and meritocracy. The phrase becomes infrastructure for white ignorance—a structured practice of not knowing that sustains racial dominance.
Cultural Specificity: Pākehā Masculinity as Unmarked Norm
It bears emphasising that the particular content of "boyhood" being naturalised here is culturally specific to Pākehā settler norms, yet is positioned as universal human nature. The emotional restraint, hierarchical dominance, individualistic competition, and physical aggression celebrated in traditional Kiwi bloke culture differ markedly from Māori concepts of masculinity rooted in whanaungatanga (kinship obligations), manaakitanga (caring for others), and kaitiakitanga (guardianship).
When schools invoke "boys will be boys," they are not referencing Māori masculinities characterised by responsibility to collective wellbeing, but rather Pākehā masculine norms. Yet this cultural specificity remains unmarked, allowing white settler masculinity to masquerade as simply "how boys naturally are."
This unmarking is itself colonial violence—it centres Pākehā norms while marginalising Māori and Pasifika cultural frameworks for raising rangatahi, then pathologises Māori and Pasifika boys who don't conform to Pākehā masculine scripts or who resist whitestream institutional authority.
Beyond Critique: Toward Transformative Accountability
Dismantling "boys will be boys" as an ideological weapon of whiteness requires action across multiple scales:
Naming whiteness explicitly in educational policy and practice: Schools must develop sophisticated literacy about how whiteness operates institutionally—not as individual prejudice but as systemic structuring of norms, resources, authority, and futures. Professional development must move beyond cultural competency frameworks that treat cultures as static traditions toward critical analysis of whiteness as active, contemporary power.
Robust anti-racism accountability structures: This includes mandatory reporting on disciplinary disparities by race and gender, independent investigation of racist bullying incidents that does not defer to schools' self-assessment, consequences for staff who minimise or dismiss racist violence, and meaningful partnership with Māori, Pasifika, and other communities of colour in governance and policy-making.
Deconstructing and reconstructing masculinities: Educational curricula must explicitly examine constructions of masculinity, teaching boys (and all students) to recognise how gender norms are culturally produced, how they intersect with race and class, and how they can be transformed. This means creating space for boys to practice emotional literacy, interdependence, accountability for harm, and diverse ways of being male that don't centre dominance.
Centring targeted communities' knowledge and leadership: Māori, Pasifika, Asian, and other communities of colour have extensive knowledge about navigating and resisting racist violence, including in schools. Transformation requires following their leadership rather than tokenising their experiences to justify white-led "solutions."
Refusing complicity: Finally, those of us positioned as Pākehā must refuse the seductions of "boys will be boys"—refuse to minimise, refuse to explain away, refuse the comfort of biological determinism. When we witness racist violence by white boys being dismissed as natural roughness, we must name it clearly: this is whiteness reproducing itself through selective protection of white masculine futures at the direct expense of children of colour's safety, wellbeing, and belonging.
Conclusion: No More Excuses
"Boys will be boys" is not a description of nature. It is a choice—a choice about which boys we protect, which futures we invest in, which harms we're willing to tolerate, and which children we're prepared to sacrifice to maintain white supremacy.
It is time to refuse this choice. It is time to retire this phrase permanently—not through polite suggestion but through comprehensive institutional transformation that makes it impossible to continue business as usual.
Our children and young people of colour deserve educational institutions where their humanity is not negotiable, where their safety is not conditional, where racism is treated as the urgent crisis it is rather than minimised as boyish play. Our white boys deserve liberation from toxic scripts that stunt their humanity while training them as agents of racial domination. Our collective future requires nothing less than the complete dismantling of ideological weapons like "boys will be boys" that reproduce white supremacy under cover of nature.
The work begins with naming. Whiteness. Pākehā dominance. Colonial reproduction. Racist violence. No more euphemisms. No more excuses.
The work continues with accountability, with transformation, with building new worlds where all our children can flourish—not despite but because we've finally confronted the violence at the heart of "boys will be boys."