On Behalf of Boys: Lessons from the Field

The creation at The Haverford School of a Mens’ Studies Project represented a fortuitous coincidence for me. A family psychologist for many years, leader of men’s groups and workshops as an outgrowth of this focus on family life, I had not yet had the chance to consider boys’ lives as directly as I had come to wish. Father to two boys, I had developed considerable personal investment in our society’s man-making. The Haverford School, with 110 years of tradition as a boys’ school and a recently completed strategic planning process reconfirming this historic mission, seemed an ideal partner in the effort to advocate for boys.

To assert that boys need advocacy tends to generate controversy. Current convention holds that boys have been overly advantaged in society for generations. But recent work by gender theorists has been successful in deconstructing "monolithic masculinity", with the result that almost all men can be said to have been overlooked and poorly understood by previous generations’ theorizing about men’s lives. There is a great deal we simply have not understood or even noticed about how boys and men experience our lives.

Much of what we do know is alarming. Whatever their position relative to females, boys suffer a host of hardships and dangers – in their families, communities and schools. In a recent volume titled Men’s Health and Illness (1995), Sabo and Gordon include research which paints a compelling picture of the dangerous – for many, deadly – world boys live in. Stillion, for example, analyzing differential mortality rates by cause and category concludes that it is male conditioning that explains such great differences across a wide variety of cultures. In similar fashion, Farrell (1993), Thomas (1993) and Kimbrell (1995) bring together a wealth of data about the casualties of masculinity. Whatever one thinks of these theorists’ politics, boy’s need for protection and advocacy in a social system which seems blind to their well-being is clearly established by their reports.

Carefully characterizing what ails men as "malaise", as opposed to "oppression", is important for some. There has been strong reaction to the "me too" nature of the men’s rights theorists and their unwillingness to address dynamics of power and male privilege relative to women. But we suggest that boys themselves are innocent of these politics and that something quite different than what boys have historically received from their caregivers and educators is needed if we are to alter the triage nature of raising and supporting our sons.

That we teach boys how to be men is clear. In his survey of the socialization of boys in a wide variety of societies, Gilmour (1990) found few exceptions to the rule that boys are channelled and pressured along carefully prescribed paths. We have tended to take this gendering of our children for granted, developing notions of "sex roles" and "socialization" to explain its necessity as a requirement for civilization. Lately, in fact, certain theorists of masculinity have complained that we are neglecting to teach boys sufficiently, calling for even more rigorous attention to the training of boys. The current popularity of male mentors and role models in the literature on parenting (Elium and Elium, 1992), education (Hawley, 1992) and in communities at large recalls earlier periods of embattled masculinity (Kimmel, 1996).

That schools and other cultural institutions contribute in this pressuring, even playing key roles, is also well-established. Next to nuclear families, schools formatively structure how masculinity is developed, rewarded, practiced and punished for boys. While the research on boys in schools is scarce, Thorne (1994) and Sadker and Sadker (1994) suggest that both girls and boys are influenced by gendering processes in schools. From her visit to The Citadel, Faludi (1994) concluded that the defense of its single sex status represented an effort by the school to preserve its tradition of forming boys into men. From another school, a recent large-scale survey of alumni from the past 30 years at The Haverford School indicated that by the time boys graduate from high school, in fact, their attitudes toward masculinity are well-developed and largely fixed (Addelston, 1995).

However one feels about the continuing debate over biologically and socially constructed masculinity, it seems safe to postulate the existence of a curriculum in each school which aims to teach boys how to become men. This gender curriculum has been called "hidden" with respect to girls; for boys it is perhaps even more invisible. Where we have come to challenge limiting assumptions and practices for girls, our generalized concern with the delicate nature of manhood seems to have prevented us from challenging how we do things with boys. It seems so important that boys wind up with carefully selected masculine traits that we tolerate a range of behavior from them (and treatment of them) in the hope that these urgent goals are served. Rationalizations like "boys will be boys" abound in our attitude.

Much is changing on the gender landscape, however. As we discover how our preconceptions have affected our ability to see girls clearly and proceed to root out prejudice and discrimination from our educational and family practices, what is often left exposed are the preconceptions we bring to our consideration of their brothers and friends. The growing willingness to question such preconceptions and conventions upsets some who seek to maintain the old order of relations between men and women.

But as the economic order changes, mandating new masculine characteristics of cooperation and relationship (Winter and Roberts, 1980), the history of masculinity suggests that social constructions will also change; conservative social thinkers are likely to become even more threatened. Kimmel (1996) has chronicled how fundamentally definitions of masculinity have changed over time, even in such practices as dressing baby boys in blue or pink. There is every reason to suspect that many aspects of manhood we take for granted will also change as history further unfolds.

In this period of flux and change, new opportunities for understanding boys and the particular challenges of supporting their growth open up. Of great assistance in realizing this opportunity is the analysis of gender. Rather than stuffing boys and girls into narrowly determined, rigid and enduring sex roles, gender theorists have argued that cultures instead provide "offers" to boys, parameters, for identity, behavior and attitude development. Boys form their masculine behaviors and attitudes in a "state of play" (Connell, 1995), actively appropriating responses to social contexts from a set of possibilities and within certain institutional constraints. This appropriation of fashion, behavior and attitude is what we mean by gender identity; it has everything to do with what is deemed right and possible by the child. Identities reflect what is offered. Fluid rather than fixed, relational rather than intrapsychic, gender reflects the structure of relations between men and women, adults and children, each group in the overall context of social control and privilege.

Once we understand the relative nature of what we offer boys and its relevance to the kind of society we wish to create, parents and educators are in a position of considerable power. We can evaluate the gender practice in our families and schools to insure that it offers boys healthy and appropriate support, guidance and understanding.

None of us is bound merely by what has been.

At The Haverford School, historic commitment to boys has come to mean advocacy for their "freedom and integrity". As Director of the School’s Men’s Studies Project, I have been in a position to listen to boys discuss their lives and to evaluate educational and family practice. Through sponsoring and conducting school-based research, hosting seminars and forums on raising sons, conducting programs for boys and girls on "gender issues", instituting schoolwide dialogue on assumptions and practices, we are beginning to discern the outlines of a program to guide our advocacy. Many of us, moreover, are fathers to boys ourselves; all of us have been children to our own fathers.

We offer the following thoughts not as guidelines or a recipe, but as our current conclusions, a work in progress, while we continue to research and evaluate our efforts with respect to boys. These points reflect conclusions from our practice that appear central to the task of caring for boys.

Lesson One: Help Boys Stay Close

Cultural pressures operate in families to let boys go on their own very early, resulting at times in a virtual abandonment of male children. Both parents and boys themselves receive powerful messages from everywhere in the culture that intimacy and affection between sons and parents could undermine a boy’s masculinity. Role expectations for parents and sons can cause boys to push away from their parents prematurely and unnecessarily at the same time as parents surrender to subtle pressures to let their sons go. The idea of masculinity as fragile and vulnerable to interference generates a hands off policy toward boys. Silverstein (1994) has argued in her book, aptly titled The Courage to Raise Good Men, that parents, particularly mothers, should worry less about spoiling masculinity and bear in mind the fundamental needs of all children, including boys, for nurturance and closeness.

Helping boys to stay close means thinking clearly ourselves about their needs for affection, guidance and limits as well as helping them to resist enormous pressures and anxieties which define manhood as not needing anyone. At the same time, closeness must be understood as distinct from control or overinvolvement. All children need to be able to grow independent and to develop a full sense of themselves as individuals. This is the tightrope of parenting: encouraging independence, fostering relationship, while setting appropriate limits and policies.

We all want for our boys that they be able to establish intimate relationships as they mature. For various cultural reasons, intimacy can be a psychologically challenging task for many adult males. Osherson (1992) has detailed the ambivalence men experience with respect to intimacy as they shuttle between loneliness and rigid counter-dependence. But today, we are clearer about the ingredients for a healthy life and know that having close friend and love relationships are essential features. Where rugged individualism may have been necessary on the frontier, the need for cooperation and mutuality in today’s workplace makes a renewed understanding of relationship, closeness and intimacy for boys an important curriculum.


Lesson Two: Enjoy and Appreciate Boys

As gender analysis has developed a critique of certain behaviors and attitudes common among men, one effect has been an ambivalence about the goodness of being male. While the culture learns how to nurture and cherish the minds of its females, there has been a tendency to blame males in general for the obstacles confronting girls and sometimes even to denigrate maleness itself, identifying maleness with the masculinity of oppression. Bednall (1995) has described a situation in Australia, where he heads a boys’ school, in which legislation aimed at producing equitable treatment for girls came to mean antagonism towards boys. Such policies and reactions as these problematize masculinity and leave boys searching for solid footing. They need those who care to offer them as a baseline the rightness and goodness of being male.

Boys need clear messages that it is great to be a boy, that our society welcomes and celebrates them as males. It seems difficult to advocate for boys in this way without recalling the centuries of celebration of manhood which virtually fetishized masculinity, always at the expense of women and girls. Saying that it is great to be a boy is not saying that being male is better than being a girl, but that it is great to be what one happens to be. It is simply affirming how good it is to be alive. Both genders provide real opportunities for expression, satisfaction, and challenge.

What do we mean when we exclaim that it is great to be male? What is there to being male that is not defined in opposition to (and by exclusion of) the female? Controversy has raged on this question, ranging over the past several decades from sociobiologists like Gilder (1973) and mythopoets like Bly (1990) to profeminists like Stoltenberg (1990). Some feel they can point to "deep masculine" characteristics while others regard masculinity as a construction entirely devoted to maintaining male privilege and the unjust treatment of women. Given the "hot" nature of this question is it possible to think about boys independent of the politics of our time?

There are some things we can say. Clearly boys are different in certain respects from girls. Certainly, also, they enter a world in which their slight biological differences are amplified in systems of culturally constructed gender relations. What is essential about being male remains beyond our ability to discern uninfluenced by our own and our culture’s bias. While we sort out the social from the biological, the political from the essential, however, we must offer boys something resembling unequivocal delight in their beings. Hurtful or insensitive behaviors do not have to be endorsed in order to approve of boys and to love them wholeheartedly. And while we emerge from our historic confusion, we can consider that our current uncertainty offers freedom and opportunity for self-definition. We get to decide what it means to be male.


Lesson Three: Protect Boys from Violence

There is a popular notion regarding boys that aggression and violent behavior are normal. Assuring ourselves that "boys will be boys", we have permitted harshness, intimidation and violence to dominate the lives of most boys, from their playgrounds and schools to the athletic field. Miedzian (1991) has reviewed the historic explanations for this phenomenon, ranging from vestigial aggression to hormonal determination; she concluded that it was the social construction of a "masculine mystique" which explained it best. We make boys violent, in other words, in the treatment we accord them and the violence we expect and permit from them.

Most all men have experienced or witnessed violence. By violence, I do not mean the encouragement to try hard, to give one’s all or the confident sense that we will not break if we are physical in our play or challenges. Violence is interpersonal harm, usually instrumental, based on the idea that hurting another or threatening to hurt is a legitimate means to an end. While the violence which men perpetrate against women is systematic and deplorable, the largest group of victims of violence are other males. In our families from older siblings or from parents, at school in the recess yard, hallways or in gym class, in neighborhoods at playgrounds or randomly on the streets, violence can strike a boy. Because all boys know this, hypervigilance, a constant lookout for potential attack, often dominates their attention.

Subjecting boys to normative, systematic violence, often under the noses of those charged with their care, has obvious consequences for both men and the society. Trauma theory suggests, with respect to the growing problem of male-perpetrated domestic and street violence, that "hurt people hurt people" (Bloom and Reichert, in press). We are compelled in our search to break the cycle of violence to notice how normal it is in boys’ lives. If we wish boys to expect a world which will cherish them, we must start by offering them reasonable protection from random violence. We must also do something about the violence on TV and throughout the media, the war games in the schoolyard and misguided, exploitative sports programs. We must resist any image of men as "cannon fodder" or any fatalistic resignation to male "nature" as inherently domineering, combative or violent.

Parents are in a particularly powerful position to respond to those who would argue that, because biology is destiny, boys are meant to jostle and fight with each other, to taunt and bully and scapegoat. We know, because of our love for our sons and the way that we value them, that no child is expendable. We want our boys to feel safe and protected from the harsher forces of the world, at least until they are strong enough to understand what is natural and what is wrong. We can begin with our own attitudes and what we permit in our families, schools and communities.


Lesson Four: Permit Many Paths to Manhood

Traditionally, a boy’s choices regarding his life have been narrowly constrained by the society’s need from its men. We have indicated to boys that they may express themselves and sample life’s menu – in lifestyle, identity, vocation and relationship – only in certain, limited ways. The overriding purpose of a man’s life, and hence the determinant of a boy’s choices, has been to be responsible, productive and willing to sacrifice. In service to this dictate, all aspects of boyhood have tended to be evaluated in light of the contribution they make toward the boy’s efficient pursuit of his goals. Society encourages with images and rewards – our public heroes, for example – and discourages with taboos, stereotypes and sanctions. The experience of boys as they grow to manhood suggests that the message that there is one best way to be a man is continually reinforced.

One of the strongest influences on a boy’s sense of possibility comes from his peer group. This peer group, though, as Thorne (1994) found in her study of playground life in an elementary school, does not assemble its norms in a vacuum.The code of manhood which our sons encounter among their friends and schoolmates absorbs and enforces the norms of the culture. Not the static reproduction theory of earlier sociology, however, but a fluid social relations of testing boundaries and competing definitions best characterizes the peer culture. Boys, as sensitive as anyone else to society’s reward structure, contest each other for dominance in a hierarchical world of winners and losers.

In an ethnographic study of peer relations in a boys’ school (Reichert, in submission), student life was found to be both contained by institutional culture – the "offers" available to boys for defining their masculinities – and continually redefining it through the contest for recognition and value which took place among a wide variety of masculine expressions.Ý The homogenization of boys’ notions of what it is to be a man occurred over the course of their careers in school, subjected to daily pressures, threats, inducements and rewards. Jewish boys, African-American boys, Catholic boys, working class boys: all had family and cultural images and lessons about being male that were held quite dear. What they met with in the life of the school was a hierarchical response to their masculinity which compelled them to further define themselves, often by yielding public space and expression to the hegemony of a masculinity which was quite foreign to them. This "silencing" of different voices and the marginalization of subordinate masculinities robbed most all boys of permission to be themselves.

Recognizing and respecting difference is the currency of multicultural movements popular on many campuses. The roots of respect for difference will be found for boys in what respect they encounter for their own differences. An enforced submission to the rule of an oppressive masculine code will tend to perpetuate itself in relations between these boys and other groups. We must allow each boy to build his own sense of self based on a sensitive ear to himself and a careful consideration of a full spectrum of possibility. To do this we must find new ways to model for, value and reward boys who exhibit the courage to resist mere conformity.

Being a man is not one thing – it can be many things, a function ultimately of a boy’s aspirations, needs and abilities. Good men come from many directions. What they have in common, perhaps, is a full sense of themselves which allows them to be generous.


Lesson Five: Assist Boys in Their Relationship to Women

Early in a boy’s life, a separation from females takes place. Boys learn that they must distinguish themselves from girls and things feminine, must exclude girls and establish a very different image. Developmental essentialists, whether of the sociobiological stripe or from the neo-Freudian, psychobiological school, argue that the separation matches normal gender development and that boys need to be apart from girls. Culturalists respond that we teach boys to distance themselves from girls in service to a misogynist power structure.

In any event, the result is that two very distinct cultures emerge from childhood, the outcome of very different experiences, influences and challenges. Popular books speak of males and females as coming from different planets, the cultural separation being so complete. Ethnolinguists like Tannen (1990) are able to describe features of speech and styles of communication so different as virtually to constitute different languages.

When boys are reunited with females, the pressures are tremendous and the resources slim. Dating and adolescent interactions are steeped in the limitations resultant from the near-complete separation just described. In addition to a virtual absence of opportunities to learn about girls, boys have the added handicap of having absorbed numerous derogatory images of girls. Kimmel (1990), for example, has detailed how early in a boy’s life comes exposure to pornography. If anything, the culture subjects boys to these distorted and confusing images earlier and earlier. Trying to establish relationships with girls in which real contact can be made in the face of these circumstances can be an overwhelming challenge for boys.

Even more fundamentally, however, a barrier to good relationship occurs in the ignorance boys exhibit about the different social circumstances offered to girls and in their blindness to their relative privilege. Against the backdrop of pressured circumstances in their own lives, boys generally fail to notice girls’ experiences of discrimination and disadvantage. Moreover, they encounter frequent messages about the "naturalness" of their relative position of dominance; in the U.S., particularly, biological difference as an explanation for different treatment of men and women has recently enjoyed a boom time. Boys have a hard time grasping the notion that they are a privileged group, that they are "overvalued" (McIntosh, 1988). As Kaufman (1993) has put it, they have a "contradictory experience of power", with subjective experiences of powerlessness, deriving from their own subjugation to hegemonic masculinity, determining their relationship to others.

The rigidity and completeness of the separation of boys from girls and their blindness to the situation for girls is a variable which those who care about boys can address. Thorne (1994) found hopeful signs that boys will cross gendered boundaries where there are "openings". We can find ways to support and to extend such openings for boys. We can model relationships between adult males and females that reflect friendship and mutual respect. We can encourage contact with girls in all avenues of life and, where necessary, engineer opportunities for our boys to engage in activities with girls as their peers. And we can find ways to permit girls and boys to talk to each other about their lives and experiences, pressures, challenges and hopes.

Boys will find this uncomfortable, particularly where the terms of the exchange are not necessarily familiar to them. In workshops organized for upper school boys and girls from neighboring single sex schools, for example, there has been ongoing dispute over the degree of emotional expression encouraged.Ý Boys generally cannot understand girls’ freedom to express hurt and struggle; they prefer intellectual contest and debate. In just this one instance, though, as in many examples through the course of the workshop, boys find their ability to withstand some discomfort ultimately yielding a liberatory perspective (Levinson, 1995). Girls, meanwhile, find it remarkable that boys in these workshops reveal selves so different from their more familiar postures (Garnier, 1995).


Lesson Six: Provide Models and Mentors for Boys

There is another popular notion that boys must be instructed and initiated in the passage to manhood. Contemporary men’s theorists, in fact, like Bly (1990) and Osherson (1986) have popularized a concept – "father hunger" ‘to describe boys’ presumed need for father figures. The psychological model on which this idea rests may not appeal to all thoughtful parents today, however, especially when its result is that mothers are warned to get out of their sons’ way.

But for a boy the value of a man to interact with, to question and regard and react to, seems unarguable. Masculinity for boys is not an abstract thing: it is the lessons drawn from the human society in which he operates, the conclusions from all of the day to day transactions the boy makes with his world. The value of a relationship with an adult male is the chance to learn firsthand the human dimension to manhood. How does a man get up in the morning, eat his cereal, create his life, correct his mistakes, love his partners? With flesh and blood interaction, notions of manhood can be placed in perspective; without it, they tend to be stereotypic and often exaggerated, absolute and tyrannical to the boy who has no model for forging male passage.

Old notions of male identity have evolved through postmodern theory to notions of masculinity as "constitutive" (Connell, 1995), an ongoing process of choice and self-definition in the face of social constraints and openings. For boys, it helps to see a man negotiating these parameters, struggling himself and explaining the options he perceives, the choices he makes.

This lesson tends to be reduced to a social bromide, overlooking the contributions of mothers, overestimating the mere presence of a father and altogether reproducing old patterns of patriarchal family life. And we often fail to find men who can tolerate the relational nature of these demands. But the message from boys is that they like to be around men, particularly men who can notice and enjoy them.

These lessons are ones that we have discovered from our research and practice; they are neither complete nor finished. They are offered as a way to initiate conversation about boys and about our responsibility toward them. One key lesson from gender studies is about our power to affect the lives of our children. Boys are in need of our thoughtful care.


References

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