It appears to be Performed Masculinity Day here at Feministe, and across the interwebs. First, we have this tragic story from the Washington Post about how young men are thoroughly confused about what it means to be “manly” — all because the ladies are suddenly stepping on their toes.
Swish or swagger? That’s the choice that men — particularly young men — find themselves facing today. As author Calvin Sandborn — who juggled teaching and child-raising as he wrote “Becoming the Kind Father” — says, society used to assign certain characteristics to men, including power, aggressiveness, professional success and autonomy. Other, shall we say, swishier traits were expected of women, such as the ability to create and nurture connections, kindness and communication.
Of course, you could always find some crossover. But while catching up with or surpassing men at school and at their first jobs, young women have dumped much of the feminine to embrace the masculine traits that they think represent success.
The problem, basically, is that some women are becoming autonomous, powerful, professionally successful people. Since the worst thing for a man is to be like a woman, men are forced to come up with other social markers of masculinity, and they don’t really know where to go.
Of course, feminism has opened the door for men to be more complex human beings as well — while women are allowed to be more aggressive, men are allowed to tone down the false bravado and admit that they have feelings. Apparently, this is horrendously confusing, at least for the reporter — the people she interviews don’t actually seem all that confused. And she doesn’t interview very many actual young men. Instead, she focuses on their anxious dads:
The question, author Sandborn says, is how much self-confidence is behind that swagger. His generation of men may have been too macho, but they also were more self-assured.
But then he and his colleagues did not have women chasing after the same professional degrees and salaries that they wanted in anything approaching today’s numbers.
Parents have paid a lot of attention to girls, he explains, and the results are noticeable: His best, most ambitious students at the University of British Columbia law school are, for the most part, women.
That success may well be true in the years after college as well: The number of college graduates returning home to live is at record levels, and it’s disproportionately male. While women are preparing to run corporations, what are guys doing? Playing the new Nintendo Wii?
“In trying to empower the girls,” Sandborn says, “we implicitly sent a message that the guys were not as good. Women succeeded in creating positive new roles for themselves. What we haven’t come up with is what a positive image of a man would be.”
Yes, those girls “chasing after” the jobs and degrees that men are simply entitled to. They’ve practically forced men to play Nintendo all day!
Have we seriously not come up with what a positive image of a man would be? We see men all the damn time in popular culture, in politics, on the news, in books, on TV, in movies — diverse characterizations of men, handsome men, ugly men, smart men, bumbling-but-lovable men, sensitive men, macho men, grand patriarchs, bad boys, nice guys, and on and on. Is it perfect? No. But men simply get more face time than women in most aspects of life, and so men have a greater variety of role models to follow.
Which isn’t to say that men don’t face strict gender roles. They absolutely do — I just think it’s ludicrous to argue that we haven’t come up with what a positive image of a man looks like. But if young men are facing problems of identity, the solution is not to force them into a narrow gender box and tell them they’d better perform if they want to be a “real” man. The solution is to open up human characteristics to everyone — to not assign things like “aggressive” or “nurturing” to entire groups of people based on whether they were wrapped in the pink blanket or the blue one, and instead allow individuals the room to develop whichever characteristics fit their own personalities and contexts.
But that’s impossible if you believe that boys are “naturally” more aggressive or powerful or rough-and-tumble than girls. Which is exactly what Walter Kirn argues in his New York Times piece about childhood play. I’m with him on the idea that playing outside and risking getting hurt is good for kids — the kids who live in places where that’s an option, anyway. Where he loses me is in his incessant focus on “the young male.”
Perhaps I’m biased, having grown up playing outside constantly, and playing rough. I had a little sister and a neighborhood full of kids — the family next door alone had six of them, and the family on the other side had three. Our parents basically set us loose in our backyards, where we played sports and climbed trees and got dirty and occasionally bloody, bitten, stung, or otherwise injured. We blew things up — really dumb things, like cans of kerosene with half sticks of dynamite (but that was the coolest Fourth of July ever). We occasionally set our farts on fire. We set booby traps that snared many a parent, and sometimes the unsuspecting friend of a parent. I have nasty scars all over my knees and a seriously crooked nose from playing tackle football with the neighbors, three of whom went on to captain the high school football team. My mom was a nurse, and I have no idea the number of bee stings, snake bites and cuts she attended to — not to mention the emergency room visits for the dozens of broken fingers, the partially-sliced-off eyelid, the nail through the foot, the electric drill to the armpit (don’t ask), the dislocated shoulders, the sliced cornea, and the sprained ankles. Even my grandma broke her arm when she was playing with us. We all made it out ok, and the outdoor play times remain some of my happiest childhood memories (except the sliced cornea — that sucked).
So when I read Mr. Kirn’s article, I felt a bit… perturbed. Especially by sections like this:
By pushing that baby-on-board overboard — particularly if that baby was born a male — we can encourage him, the thinking goes, to develop emotional sea legs. That’s the hidden redemptive promise behind the appeal of the “The Dangerous Book for Boys” and the rise of play-positive organizations like the Alliance for Childhood: It’s not too late to raise a scrapper, even if he grew up eating organic and riding to Montessori school in a Volvo.
The perceived, and feared, alternative is rearing a programmed, thin-skinned nonentity. For fathers who grew up skipping stones — and who occasionally hauled off and pelted one another with stones — this can be a gnawing anxiety. Sure, the wife was probably right to enroll little Tim in yoga class as an early stress-reduction measure, and yes, it’s a fact of hectic modern life that play dates need to be scheduled eight days in advance, but what good will any of this do if the lad’s budding masculine soul is starved of the key emotional nutrients that only chaotic goofing off supplies?
The answer: Pump Junior full of joy, the improvised, unplanned, slightly hazardous joy that Dad remembers so fondly from his own youth. Or does he remember it fondly?
Why “especially if the baby is male”? If outdoor play is as important as Kirn says — if it reinstates “healthy childhood spontaneity” and challenging the child psyche — why is it especially important for boys? Why not for all kids?
Well, obviously, because it’s training for those age-old masculine characteristics listed in the previous article: Power, aggressiveness, professional success and autonomy. Whereas girls should be inside playing with dolls, where they can foster the ability to create and nurture connections, kindness and communication. When you allow little girls to experience autonomy, even in childhood play, it lets them get a little too big for their britches, and they turn into moms who emasculate their sons by making them do yoga. And boys who don’t play outside may end up being more like… girls.
If that’s not a reason to lock the kid out in the backyard, I don’t know what is.