Boys are demonstrably "more aggressive and active members of the species," while "females are usually more gentle and passive" Pat Keogh, a primary school principal, argued in his article in last week. The education system should therefore avoid "attempts to feminise boys or to diminish their masculinity," he wrote - instead they should actively encourage boys to be their "naturally more robust selves."

While I believe that it's vital that boys are enabled to feel good about their gender identity, I couldn't disagree more with Keogh's celebration of traditional masculinity. As Terence Real, an American psychotherapist, argues in his brilliant book, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Hidden Legancy of Male Depression, the traditional process of becoming masculine "teaches boys to replace inherent self-worth with performance-based esteem. It insists that boys disown vulnerable feelings (which could help them connect) while reinforcing their entitlement to express anger."

Keogh falls into the trap of hopelessly confusing cause and effect. What he describes is not the inevitable outcome of biological differences but the product of socialisation processes which are based on an ideology of sex differences.

This ideology succeeds by associating emotionality and capacities for relatedness with the "feminine." Becoming masculine then means repudiating the feminine - providing a systematic basis for men to regard women as subordinate. The impact of this is so rapid that the leading sociologist of masculinity, Michael Kimmel, claims that he can walk into a school playground of six-year-old boys and start a fight by asking just one question: Who's the sissy around here?

Boys are relentlessly policed by other boys to "out the sissies" and schools are crucial sites of violence and oppression. This provides the basis for homophobia, as being a sissy is also equated with being gay. In order to prove their heterosexuality, boys soon learn that they must deny all feelings of closeness for other boys and direct all their energy in competitive ways at girls and into performance-based esteem.

By all means, let us allow boys to express their athleticism - and girls, too. But schools need to devote even more time to recognising boys' fears of being harshly judged by other boys, helping them to connect with their emotional lives and give value to inherent self-worth in ways which do not depend on competition and aggression, but on love and intimacy.

This is not a matter of "feminising" boys but of advancing a definition of maleness which includes those intimate qualities which boys have at birth but which we have taught them systematically to fear and reject with too-often devastating human costs.

This work can truly succeed, however, only if teachers themselves, and perhaps male principals in particular, are prepared to reflect critically on their own homophobic tendencies.

A senior lecturer in the Department of Applied Social Studies at UCC