When boys are boys — and know their dignity

Uju Azika at home with her boys, when they were younger. Photo: Natasha Alipour-Faridani (Source)

A while back I read a mother's description of the challenges of raising children, especially boys. She said that when she corrected her daughter, the daughter seemed to react with, "Ahh, so that's the way adults do it", and complied. With her son, the reaction seemed to be, "So what happens if I don't do it that way?" causing battles galore.

Another mother, of three sons, in an article titled "A feminist's guide to raising boys", writes: Me to Joe, our youngest, at some point in 2011: “I don’t like your attitude, young man.” Joe to me: “I love my attitude.”

"Vive la difference" has gone out of vogue these days but in the raising of children it tends to be inescapable. The difference in the characteristics of each sex needs to be recognised, too, for the health of society.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley gave a speech to a group of fellow conservatives at the end of  October, in which he spoke of the signs of distress that males in American society are displaying:

According to the Washington Post:

He said liberals’ “attempt to give us a world beyond men” was part of their larger effort to “deconstruct America”, an endeavor that, according to the senator, includes critical race theory, economic socialism and doing away with the concept of gender altogether.

“The Left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic. They want to define the traditional masculine virtues — things like courage and independence and assertiveness — as a danger to society,” Hawley said.

America’s men are withering as a result, Hawley said. The senator cited a recent Wall Street Journal article that reported men are abandoning higher education in record numbers and lagging behind women. One expert said that if current trends continue, two women will earn a college degree for every man within the next few years.

“Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?” the senator remarked.

Hawley called for conservatives to fight the “attack on men” and push for “a revival of strong and healthy manhood in America”.

“We need men to raise up sons and daughters after them, to pass on the great truths of our culture and history, to defend liberty, to share in the work of self-government,” he said. “We need the kind of men who make republics possible. And it is not too much to say that our ability to get that kind of men will determine the success of our long experiment in liberty.”

Reaction to the speech was typically negative in the mainstream media, but some did look beyond Hawley's continuing association with the long-time misogynist, former president Donald Trump, and find points of agreement.

For instance, Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi writes:  

Hawley’s “manhood” speech is easy to ridicule and has been widely mocked. However, it’s important to note that at the heart of it there is a truth that should be not ignored: men, as a whole, are not doing well. There has been a big rise in single men over the last few decades (from about 29% in 1990 to 39% in 2019); this group has fallen behind partnered men in earnings and education. Nearly 60% of students in American colleges and universities are women, and boys in America have been falling behind girls in school since the 1950s.

And while there’s a loneliness epidemic everywhere, loneliness seems to be more likely in men. So are deaths of despair: men are more likely to die of suicide and alcohol abuse than women. Men are the victims of 77% of homicides and commit 90% of them. As Hawley noted, “Many men in [the US] are in crisis, and their ranks are swelling. And that’s not just a crisis for men. It’s a crisis for the republic.”

Mahdawi sees the truth in this last matter, especially, fearing that "loneliness, resentment and poverty" will give rise to fascism, with "weaponized masculinity" becoming part of the armoury of overly ambitious politicians.

She goes on to offer a solution, namely, a wider emotional repertoire:

Men who identify with a traditional masculine ideology, it has been well-established, are worse off than men who don’t: they are less likely to seek psychological help and more likely to feel isolated.   

That brings us to the questions: What are characteristics of traditional masculinity? and What are those of non-traditional masculinity?

Back to the Washington Post, whose report on the Hawley speech offers some context:

While Hawley claims there’s “an attack on manhood,” experts say they’re not challenging masculinity generally, but rather, some of its harmful downsides — stoicism, dominance, aggression — or what has been colloquially referred to as “toxic masculinity”. The American Psychological Association for the first time in 2018 issued guidelines about what it called “traditional masculinity”. Pressuring boys and men to conform to such a “traditional masculinity ideology” can lead to higher rates of suicide, violence and substance abuse, the association warned.

The group defines that ideology as “a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.”

So far, items identified as part and parcel of traditional masculinity include "stoicism, dominance, aggression", which definitely reflect an extreme state of qualities that might be positively expressed as endurance and protectiveness. The second selection of "anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence” equate what seems to me to be qood qualities and bad. 

Presumably the APA presents "achievement" as a negative when it becomes an unrelenting drive to gain status of some kind;  that "adventure" and "risk" are to be shunned when applied in an anti-social manner, such as dangerous driving, or alcohol and drug consumption, rather than striving to go a step beyond others in sport or science or enterprise-building.

Fredric Rabinowitz, a psychology professor who helped the APA develop the 2018 guidelines, said [the guidelines] were designed to help boys and men lead happier, healthier lives.

“We see that men have higher suicide rates, men have more cardiovascular disease and men are lonelier as they get older,” he told the New York Times. “We’re trying to help men by expanding their emotional repertoire, not trying to take away the strengths that men have.”

That distinction didn’t stop [some] from claiming that the APA was pathologizing masculinity. 

Jared Skillings, the APA’s chief of professional practice, made the distinction in defending the guidelines: “We’re talking about negative traits such as violence or over-competitiveness or being unwilling to admit weakness,” he told USA Today. “Of course masculinity also has positive traits — courage, leadership, protectiveness; the report includes both sides.”

A slew of articles lately have tried to prescribe ways to prevent boys turning into oppressive, self-harming monsters.

From the article cited above,  "A feminist's guide to raising boys", we get the mother's surprise at the degree of "boyness" her sons showed: "[I]t was impossible not to notice how differently they behaved to some of the girls we knew." The mother comes to see that how maleness is displayed is definitely from nature, but also from nurture - and so:

What would I do differently? In the end, all you can do is look very, very hard at yourself sometimes and hope that you catch this stuff – your assumptions and gender biases and all the ducked conversations. Hug your boys a lot and tell them, often, how much you love them. Enjoy being with them.

It would be interesting to learn from Mahdawi what she would say about raising sons if the child she had with her wife this year had been male.

But what stance does a feminist dad take in raising a son?  "How to raise a boy: my mission to bring up a son fit for the 21st century" opens with a portrait of the 4-year-old son fully aware of his maleness:

Where does it come from, I wondered, this kneejerk allegiance that distances little boys from little girls and makes an us-v-them of gender distinctions, right from the get-go? Where does it lead, as those boys become men? These are questions I’ve been wondering about a lot as my son gets older. He’s a friendly, curious kid who adores his older sister but his sense of himself, just now, seems to come across most clearly when he emphasises the contrasts between them. Along with millions of other little boys he will be coming of age during a richly complicated time for young men, and I want to help him get this right.

One of the sources of inspiration this father turned to was Indian-born writer and academic Sonora Jha, who has written the book  How to Raise a Feminist Son (2021). Jha tells him how she raised her son (now in his early 20s) as a single mother:

In all that time, bringing him up, I may have used the word ‘feminism’ about three times. It wasn’t like I woke him up every morning and said: ‘Here are the principles of feminism you will learn today.’ Instead it was allowing him to cry. It was talking about how things may be uneven in the world towards girls.

Raising him here in the US as a young man of colour, he was being called to a certain kind of masculinity. And he didn’t necessarily feel comfortable around that. For me it was an act of compassion towards him to introduce feminism. Not as a theoretical concept but as an everyday guiding principle in the way that we were going to lead our lives.

Somehow, as a society, we’ve come to believe [... that] a boy will be bullied if he is not the bully. We’ve decided that this is how men will win, whether that be jobs, women, leadership. It doesn’t need to be that way.

It’s not just about raising gentle, empathic boys. It’s not just about explaining to those boys that there are certain structures preferable to men and we want to dismantle those structures. It’s about explaining why we want things to be more equitable, because if and when they are, boys will get to be not constantly leaders but also followers, they will get to fail, they will get to spend more time at home [in domestic roles], and they can do all of those things without their very humanity being called upon, without them being told: ‘You are less of a man because of this.’

She convinces her interviewer of the need for one key technique: 

Jha insisted that the only indispensable resource in raising awake-to, alert-to sons was conversation. Little and often.

This element of raising a feminist son by means of conversation is stressed, too, by a second interviewee. She is Uju Asika, the London-based author of a parenting blog, the author of  Bringing Up Race (2021), and the mother of two early-teenage boys. She is a firm advocate of listening to gauge a son's attitudes and experience, and to gather topics for pointed conversations:

A quick chat. When I go into lecture mode I can see them zoning out. Kids have really short attention spans. But in a way I see that as something we can use to our advantage.

When you read the various statistics about boys, male violence, toxic masculinity, all this – it really does start to feel overwhelming, like it’s a crisis point for boys and men. I try to be more hopeful and see it as an opportunity to keep adding to their options. The boys coming into the world now? I hope as they get older they’re going to feel a lot more liberated, as opposed to being fit into the boxes that have existed for generations of men. The main thing is to expand the ideal of what we consider manliness to be.

"More muggings. More incidents of knife crime. I ask my sons: ‘What would you do if you came across this happening? Or, if someone tried to steal your phone, how would you respond?’” She tried to help her sons expand their definition of manliness to include smart submission (“A phone is just property, not relevant, you hand it over”) and verbal instead of physical intervention. Walking away intact from a dangerous situation? Manly. Choosing words over fists? Manly.

Asika said: “It’s one of those tricky, where-do-you-draw-the-line problems, between telling them to stand up for themselves, not be victimised – and at the same time not wanting them to become an actual victim because they stood up for themselves. As a mother the main thing I want is for my sons to be safe. But I do still tell them: ‘Stand up to bullies, stand up against racism, stand up for what you believe in. But does that necessarily have to mean a physical altercation? Does it have to mean fists? Can’t it be with your voice, with your values?’”

 At the end of the day, mine are boy-boys and always have been. They’re still gonna be punching each other on the arm when they’re in their 40s. You do wonder, sometimes, where it comes from.

The direct answer to that query, the spark giving rise to our wonderment at the distinctiveness of the male or female human being from the start of their life, is the nature of God's creation: 

For this reason we cannot neglect giving the necessary attention to the ecology of the human person, that is, to the nature of the human as created.

Pope Francis told participants of the 24th General Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2018:

In a holistic view of the person, it is necessary to articulate with ever greater clarity all the concrete connections and differences in which the universal human condition dwells and which involve us, starting from our body. 

Citing his 2015 encyclical Laudato si', Francis continued:

The acceptance of our body as a gift from God is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy an absolute power over creation.

Learning to accept your body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology.

This acceptance of the body also recognizes the differences between persons, he said.

It is therefore necessary to proceed with a careful discernment of the complex fundamental differences of human life: of man and woman, of fatherhood and motherhood, of filiation and fraternity, of sociality and also of all the different ages of life.

Valuing one's own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different.

In a like spiritual setting, the male person has a dignity and vocation distinct from the female person. Male qualities express themselves as a "generous initiative and caretaking of what has been entrusted to him".

But international speaker and author Katrina Zeno sees an even deeper element:

The nature of the male is not to dominate with power or to withdraw into passivity, but to be priest – to offer his body and blood for the sanctification of others.

[Just as] motherhood is knit into the very structure of a woman’s being, [... meaning] that some women are called to biological motherhood, [...] but every woman is called to spiritual motherhood, [...] man – every man without exception – is called to spiritual priesthood.

Priesthood, then, is knit into the very structure of a man’s being. He offers his body and blood so that others can draw closer to God. His life is a sacrificial offering not for material comfort, status, or power, but to purify his family, wife, neighborhood, and workplace of sin and its effects.

That’s a mighty tall order and a very distinctive way to live the masculine language of the body. It’s also painfully counter-cultural in a society that is consumed by affluence and has forgotten the distinctiveness of the ordained priesthood. 

 The masculine vocation is to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, the Great High Priest – to imitate the priestly language of Jesus’ body upon the cross.

But how do men do this if they’re not ordained priests? St. Paul hits the nail on the head in Ephesians 5 where he writes, “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. He gave himself up for her to make her holy, purifying her in the bath of water by the power of the word, to present to himself a glorious church, holy and immaculate, without stain or wrinkle or anything of that sort. Husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies.”

Without apology, St. Paul describes the priestly role of the husband to his wife and his domestic church (i.e., his family). Put in everyday language, a man is being priestly when he drags his body and blood out of bed in the morning to pray and then lead his family in prayer. He’s being priestly when his body and blood go to work for the thirty-second year in a row. And he’s being priestly when his “body and blood” resist the temptation to look at pornography or to be unfaithful to his wife (even if she’s his future wife). Priesthood, even spiritual priesthood, is very incarnational. It doesn’t take place in some ultra-spiritual realm, but is expressed through the concrete language of a man’s body.

Every man, without exception, can bring the priestly presence of Christ through his body and blood into the marketplace and political arena to transform society and culture from within.Through the masculine language of their bodies, men can be an alter Christus, another Christ; they can offer their lives to purify the world of sin and its effects and bring others closer to God. 

The spiritual dimension certainly gives the male a role and perspective that precludes the display of any form of self-seeking power but rather elevates the male's life to one of service, a life built on respect for himself - which includes the exercise of a wide emotional repertoire - and a vision of a goal much greater than himself.

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