Bringing Boys Down

New York Times columnist, and mother of three boys, Ruth Whippman  apparently wants her boys to grow up to become human beings. She has nothing to say about their growing up to become good husbands, fathers, uncles or competitors in the world economy. She wants them to be more girly, to get in touch with their feminine sides, to enhance their capacity for empathy and to indulge in more of what she calls “girl drama.” She imagines that this will make them more human.

Better yet, she seems to think that the problem lies in the free markets of bookselling and toymaking. She imagines that boys become less empathetic and more competitive because they are exposed to more children’s books where emotional lability is downplayed and where competitive intensity is glorified.

In her New York Times column Whippman has nothing to say about these boys’ father. Is he out competing in the real world and thus less involved in the day to day struggles to get them to feel like girls? We do not know. 

We do know that by shifting the responsibility to booksellers and toy companies Whippman is obviously avoiding anything resembling parental responsibility. And she is not considering that boys might just like to read about dragon slayers and military conflict. They might be turned off by novels about knitting clubs and tea parties.

As is well known, at a time when the world is chockablock with literature appealing to women’s tastes, precious few males ever read it. This might be to their detriment, but still, don’t we respect their free choices to read or not to read what they please.

Moreover, in order to malign the business world, which might just be appealing to boys’ taste-- point that Whippman never considers-- she ignores the simple fact that these boys attend school and that the instruction that they receive in school is most often decidedly feminist. 

Feminist schoolteachers teach boys that masculinity is toxic, that they are suffering from an advanced case of white supremacy, that they are responsible for all of the bad and evil things that happen in the world. Might it not be normal for said boys to retreat from this indoctrination into a world where manly competition prevails? Might it not be normal for them to retreat into the world of sports-- another aspect of childhood that Whippman blissfully ignores-- where they can learn the rules of sportsmanship and gamesmanship. 

Obviously, Wippman ignores such considerations and imagines that boys who have learned good sportsmanship and good manners on the playing field are less adept socially than girls who learn to complain at their tea parties while putting together their doll houses.

Anyway, Whippman is torqued that her boys are not growing up to be gender neutered. She never considers whether she might do better to root for them at little league or to allow them to be the boys that their biochemical makeup tells them to be.

So, she opens by claiming, without any evidence, that the stories that her boys read do not contain “fully realized human beings.” For the uninitiated that means, boys who are in touch with their feminine side-- you know the side that will doom them to ignominious defeat on the playing field.

I realized that, despite my liberal vanities about raising my sons in a relatively gender-neutral way, they had most likely never read a story like this, let alone experienced a similar situation in real life. It turns out that there is a bizarre absence of fully realized human beings in my sons’ fictional worlds.

As I noted, Whippman seems to imagine that the toy and publishing businesses have invented trucks and dinosaurs because they want to make boys more toxic. She never considers that boys might, as a myriad of studies has shown, like this world, a world that is one of the few remaining where boys can be boys.

As male toddlers, they were quickly funneled into a vehicle-only narrative reality. Apparently, preschool masculinity norms stipulate that human dilemmas may be explored through the emotional lives of only bulldozers, fire trucks, busy backhoes and the occasional stegosaurus.

Boys like learning how to compete. Whippman finds this to be offensive. At the least it is offensive to an ideology that values how you feel over what you do. As I said, in the boy world, world that Whippman finds alien, it’s all about developing the right attitude to compete in the world. This precludes whining, complaining, introspecting and drama. The horror of it all.

As they aged out of the digger demographic, they transitioned seamlessly into one dominated by battles, fighting, heroes, villains and a whole lot of “saving the day.” Now, they are 10, 7 and 3, and virtually every story they read, TV show they watch or video game they play is essentially a story with two men (or male-identifying nonhuman creatures) pitted against each other in some form of combat, which inevitably ends with one crowned a hero and the other brutally defeated. This narrative world contains almost zero emotional complexity — no interiority, no negotiating or nurturing or friendship dilemmas or internal conflict. None of the mess of being a real human in constant relationship with other humans.

She seems most bothered by the fact that these combat stories do not contain enough raw human emotion. As you know, the appeal to emotion is an appeal to girliness.

They gain a lot from them too — a jumping off point to think about their own real-world challenges and relationships, and a way to open up discussions about the emotional dilemmas they face.

Obviously, the stories tend to put up a barrier between home and arena, something that Whippman finds offensive:

Their driving narrative motivation is often a kind of contempt — for school, teachers, annoying siblings and nagging parents. This background sense of grievance can sometimes be casually misogynistic, in the “stupid, dumb girls” vein. Although later examples of these books have dialed this back, if we follow these characters’ trajectory of resentment and self-loathing to its most extreme conclusion, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine one of them in 10 years’ time, trolling feminists online from his parents’ basement.

It’s less of a stretch to imagine that their feminist teachers, especially teachers who believe that masculinity is toxic, will provoke a counterreaction.

Whippman would have done better to read the follow testimony, by Doris Lessing, in the Guardian a couple of decades ago:

Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she [Lessing] told the Edinburgh book festival, while energy which could be used to get proper child care was being dissipated in the pointless humiliation of men.

"I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed," the 81-year-old Persian-born writer said yesterday.

"Great things have been achieved through feminism. We now have pretty much equality at least on the pay and opportunities front, though almost nothing has been done on child care, the real liberation.

"We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?

"I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.

You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives."

Lessing said the teacher tried to "catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish".

She added: "This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.

"It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests. 

 "Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

So, we expect boys to become world class competitors, whether in the classroom or in the marketplace. And yet, we want them to become more sensitive to feelings, to their own or that of other people.

Whippman concludes:

 Story by story, girls are getting the message that other people’s feelings are their concern and their responsibility. Boys are learning that these things have nothing to do with them.

We have barely even registered this lack of an emotional and relational education as a worrying loss for boys. We tend to dismiss and trivialize teenage girls’ preoccupation with the intricacies of relationships as “girl-drama.”

To her mind, life is about storytelling. To boys, it’s about the game.

The stories we tell become our emotional blueprints, what we come to expect of ourselves and others and how we engage with our lives. And in the vast majority of situations we are likely to encounter in the course of a lifetime, there is no hero or villain, no death and no glory, but rather just a bunch of needy humans kvetching over who said what. Understanding how to navigate that with grace and skill is the beating heart of human connection.

In her world, it’s all about kvetching, that is, complaining:

So let’s work toward a brave new world, in which a boy can proudly shuttle between two birthday parties, sweating with compulsive people-pleasing. Let’s give boys some girl drama, teach them the dark arts of emotional labor and likability. We might all be healthier for it.

Then again, we've been doing this for some five decades now. Are we all healthier for it? And besides, can you really be healthy if you never learn how to compete and thus are consigned to terminal mediocrity.