In boys' case, this typically takes the form of, first of all, repudiation of any behavior considered feminine. To give a personal example, I can remember that my favorite color as a small child was pink. I discovered pretty quickly that this was not an acceptable choice, and was pressured to change it. So, I picked blue, since even though it wasn't my favorite, it wouldn't cause me any trouble. I also learned not to socialize with girls too much, and most importantly to never express myself emotionally, especially by crying or other expressions of pain or weakness.
Not all of this development is so relatively harmless, however; as Charis says:
During these years they are, to a certain extent, protected from the worst extremes of masculine peer pressure by their ‘child’ status in that teachers or parents will step in if the going gets too tough. This situation changes radically when boys move on to secondary education.
Once boys are out of elementary school, their masculinity is observed even more hawkishly than before; they're expected more often to protect themselves against bullies; the insults become more abusive and graphic; boys are required to put down other boys, physically if necessary, in order to prove their own "hardness"; and must at all times attack femininity in other boys whenever they see it.
To add some personal commentary on this, I think it's important to stress just how prison-like the social system boys are raised in is. Routinely, the bullies in the neighborhood would bully the other children into miniature gang wars, where they'd find a social outcast and degrade and/or beat them up (I was lucky to be fairly strong as a child, so even when all the other kids in the neighborhood ganged up on me, I could give as good as I got). The older boys (and occasionally girls) would beat, insult, or otherwise harass the younger children, either to scare off potential bullies, or just to give themselves a power trip. I knew boys who had their older brothers pin them down during recess and kick them in the balls for the whole thirty minutes - I heard of a few that supposedly wouldn't be able to have children as adults because of the abuse. Recently, sack tapping has become more popular. If you were physically weak, you could expect such beatings to be fairly routine: I remember one of my best friends at the time sobbing to me that he couldn't stand to go back to school again, because he didn't want to be beaten up any more. My other best friend turned to drugs. (The main bully I knew, on the other hand, went on his mission for the LDS Church, got married to an attractive young woman when he came back, and is now a respected member of his community. As they say, life is unfair.)
And I grew up in a middle-class, suburban environment. From what I've read, the "bad schools" have the same thing, but with guns, hack-saws, and cocaine.
As the author says, the mutual predation, aggression, and gender-enforcement is not a good recipe for the creation of mature, pro-social, interdependent human beings. While, on the one hand, males still do have a social drive to connect, for intimacy, the only socially prescribed ways to foment such connections are through activities and sports - in short, through external, indirect connections. This effect is so pervasive that when boys are asked to describe themselves, most are unable to articulate a response except through describing things they like, or activities they perform, whereas girls the same age have no such difficulty.
As Charis says:
This is a desperately fragile way to construct a self-concept. By the time boys are in their mid-teens they have learnt that credible masculinity is a constantly constructed veneer with very little on the inside. They have come to exist in a situation where they are under acute pressure to accede to the defining of themselves by others whilst being simultaneously denied the inner resources they need to adequately define themselves.
The result is an acquired over-dependence on external affirmation to construct and maintain a satisfactory sense of self.This is hardly a good prognosis for either personal security or personal development. It is not difficult to see that the ongoing stereotype of the fragility of the male ego is not, perhaps, without foundation.
[...]
It is no exaggeration to say that, for young males, the self is the price paid for entry into the fraternity of men. Payment starts immediately and the cost, as we will see, will continue to be enacted at virtually every stage of the individual male’s life. Unfortunately it is not only he who will be paying.
Charis spends a decent amount of the chapter specifically on boys' anti-femininity. While that's understandable coming from a feminist, I think she's heading the wrong direction to equate anti-femininity in males with misogyny in general. Most boys, at least after they hit puberty, probably don't have much of a problem with women acting in feminine ways, just with men doing so. In fact, in the most conservative societies it's considered men's proper role to defend, protect, and provide for women (to be honest, it always annoyed me while growing up that women get to do men's stuff, but men can't do women's stuff, and men still had to be all chivalrous, but that's just me). Moreover, it comes off as contradictory with one of the most common feminist claims - that men somehow created or control gender roles - that so much effort has to be spent to keep men masculine.
All in all, though, I think that this is one of the stronger chapters in the book, probably because it tends to provide more actual reports, more data than most of the other chapters.
No comments:
Post a Comment