Hyper-masculinity is the devil: Ruminations on the possibility of having a boy

I should say straight away that when I get amped up about the difficulties inherent in raising a son or daughter in These Modern Times, and moreover with feminist values in mind, I’m not really concerned about what kind of parents we’re going to be.  Spouse reminds me often that it’s not about that checklist of values parents set out to teach, it’s about what parents model on a daily basis in their interactions with each other.  And barring any unforeseen brain tumors that turn one or both of us inside out, I feel pretty optimistic about the likelihood that we will set good examples for How To Be A Woman and How To Be A Man, and How To Be A Good Partner in A Relationship.

My concerns, like those summed up in my conniption over girls’ clothing and toys, are about the other crap that’s out there.  What frightens me most about raising children in general is the narrowing space allowed for “unfeminine” and “unmasculine” behavior in girls and boys respectively, and the sometimes not-so-subtle threats of violence that are made to enforce those boundaries.  To illustrate my point, I cut and paste from elsewhere on the interwebs.

A well-intentioned woman turns to the Ask Yahoo community to ask for pointers on what else she and her husband can do to raise a son who’s mindful of gender equality besides model 50/50 household-chore responsibilities and not automatically suggesting male-specific toys for him.  Here are some responses:

• You breach your duty of care by denying your child the basic dignity to be a member of the male gender.  I hope he takes a civil case when he grows up and sues you for emotional harm. It’s like forcing a black kid to value the confederacy.
• You’re denying him the most basic autonomy, the right to value what you want and to lead a life free from the ideological imperialisation of others
• Your poor kid is going to end up confused as hell when he figures out that men and women are different. (Men and women are different but to be valued equally).
•  …you want to raise your son feminist ? the only things you will accomplish is 1) turning him gay , and 2) making him hate you ,and he will hate you later in life because you raised him that way. my mother tried to raise me that way and now she is dead to me.
• I dont think that you would want to try that because your sons gonna be a little wimp for lack of a better term. And your daughter not gonna have such a good life if she think a mans gonna do every thing for her.
• Teach him that women/girls are better than men/boys and that they deserve more rights.
• Seriously, anyone who’s trying to turn their own children into a feminist deserve to be spray [wow!] and/or neuter so that they can’t reproduce anymore.
• Please don’t, boys need to grow up to be men , not some androgynous, gender confused mutant.
• There are plenty of those already , please , Please just let him grow up to be a normal man!
• Be careful, I raised my son to believe in equality between the sexes, now his wife walks all over him. I should have taught him to give as good as you get.
• Castration is the easiest way. Sounds like you are halfway there.
• You can try to turn a Timber Wolf into the Family Pet. But it is hard wired to be a Predator. Men are hard wired to be Men. The relentless attempts by Feminists to “Reprogram Boys” into PC Feminist Friendly emasculated Males doesn’t work. 
• Ehm, why would you raise your son to be a feminist? My mom tried to do this to me, and when I hit puberty I had a gender identity crisis, and I was super feminine and not masculine, and I couldn’t get a girl for sh1t. …If you want your son to suffer the scorn and ridicule that I did, be my guest and go ahead. However, when your son finally gets his balls strapped on correctly and figures out what you did, don’t blame him if he decides to never talk to you again due to the humiliation and hardship.  Welcome to the position my mom is in!

I guess this is as good a time as any to mention why we might want to describe the values we intend to instill as feminist.  Feminism is fundamentally about equality, which the above commenters don’t understand.  Far from being radical or scary, it’s about preserving the integrity of girls’ and women’s selves and bodies in the face of reactionary threats.  It’s about women and men being responsible for themselves and expecting others to be responsible for themselves.  

Feminism is also about recognizing and pushing against the social boundaries our culture assigns to biological facts, both for women and men.  I grew up pretty tomboyish, but that was pretty acceptable since I also grew up on a farm.  Spouse, on the other hand, grew up with the dubious distinction of being, for lack of a better word, the sissy in a family full of dudes, merely because he preferred his guitar to football and didn’t develop much aptitude for all things mechanical.  He also had long beautiful curls, but if any of us had hair like his and played in bands in high school, we’d do the same.  I suppose we were both lucky to have come of age in the fairly gender-bendy grunge era, since it offered an acceptable alternative to the girliness and dudeliness that didn’t speak to either one of us.  But as far as I can tell, no comparable space exists in popular culture these days, and I don’t know whether it’s because I pay more attention now than ever, but there seems to be more free-floating vehemence dedicated to denouncing and correcting those who don’t fall neatly into girly and dudely categories.

It’s not just a cosmetic issue.  I said in the girl post that figuring out what you like and don’t like, and who you are and aren’t is pretty much your full-time job as a adolescent and young adult.  Being forced to wear an uncomfortable pair of pants is akin to, but ultimately nothing compared to being forced to wear an uncomfortable identity.  If you know that having your junk twisted and squeezed in ridiculous ways turns you into an unbearable jerk right quick, it doesn’t take much to imagine what kind of monster you can become when you’re not given the opportunity to be whatever kind of man or woman that comes naturally to you.

A sense of masculinity that is defined primarily by dominance and violence (the kind I see most often portrayed in popular culture) rather than self-control and independence creates problems for all of us.  That kind of masculinity mistakes aggressiveness for assertiveness, and masks a dangerous fragility and volatility.  Take for example the rise in violence perpetrated by teenage boys against their girlfriends:

For Ms. Berry [a counselor], 43, the issue is personal. Her high school boyfriend “wanted a commitment right away, which was very flattering,” she said. But she soon found herself “walking on eggshells,” she said.

Even after he went to college, she said, the relationship was so “addictive” that she kept returning — until it “turned violent and he beat me up when I was 21.”

A study, published last July in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, suggests that such behavior is not unusual. The study found that more than one-third of the 920 students questioned were victims of emotional and physical abuse by romantic partners before they started college.

Now here’s a thoroughly wrong-headed approach to said violence: make girls responsible for stopping it.

During school assemblies, the girls are told to realize that fights among themselves, spats with their boyfriends, even idle gossip or a dirty look can spark a chain reaction that leads to bloodshed. The campaign asks young women to acknowledge the part they play in a culture of violence. It is a marked shift from the traditional calls for peace that usually ask young men to put down their guns.

High school boys “won’t listen to their parents or their teachers,” said Michael Hennessey, the assistant chief of the Boston School Police. “It’s the girls who have a shortcut to the way these kids will react, and it’s a very important thing for them to know and a lot of them don’t realize it.”

Because there are a lot of writers out there who ruminate on these issues more consistently and fruitfully than I do, I can plug in their responses and say “Amen.”  Take this response of Jesse Taylor at Pandagon:

What’s most bothersome about this rise in violence isn’t just the rise; it’s that it’s based on attitudes imbued from very young ages in both men and women.  Men are told to defend their territory with violence, women are told they’re the territory.  As seemingly perfect as this arrangement would be to protect women from, say, the Huns, it works slightly less ideally when the women decide they’re no longer territory.  …

You don’t break this cycle by telling fifteen years olds that abusive relationships are never okay, you break this cycle by telling five year olds to respect each other and then telling six and seven and eight year olds the same thing.  You break up paternalistic, patriarchal behavior before it takes root rather than tell young men that it’s really not okay to bring violence into their relationships (really!) and subsequently forcing young women to be constant vanguards against the field of abusive men who were lectured very sternly during study hall to Not Do That Shit.

So what, we tend our own garden and hope for the best?