A colleague with whom I used to have lunch on a regular basis would occasionally bring her three-year-old son along. Usually, John was a very animated little boy, asking questions, making a mess, and doing in general what three-year-old boys do to maintain themselves as the focus of attention. On this particular afternoon, however, John sat next to his mother in absolute silence. Both of his hands were bandaged because of a fall he'd taken earlier in the day, and he was still in pain, which made it difficult for him to hold the small pieces his mother cut for him from the pizza we'd just ordered for lunch. From time to time, when the look of frustration on her son's face became especially acute, my friend would stop our conversation, pick up a small square of food, and hold it to his mouth, not continuing with what she'd been saying until he'd chewed and swallowed the whole thing. When we were done, and John stood up so his mother could put his coat on, he held his engauzed palms out to her, silently asking for comfort. My friend squatted in front of her son and asked in a voice filled with empathy, "What's the matter, John? Does it hurt?" When John nodded his head in the affirmative, she stroked his cheek with her fingers and said, "I know, sweetie, but you're a man, right? You can take it." John set his mouth in a firm, thin line, and he again nodded his head up and down. Then his mother helped him slip his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, zipped him up, and motioned to me that we were ready to leave.
As we walked out, I thought of the countless times, and all the different, painful, and humiliating ways in which I was, in which John would be, in which boys routinely are, asked or told, implicitly or explicitly, by both men and women, boys and girls, "to take it." I'm not being melodramatic here. I have no doubt that my friend said what she said without even thinking about it, and I don't want to blow out of proportion this one clearly minor appeal to her son's manliness. The fact is, however, that she could have helped her son understand that we cannot always expect people to comfort us when we are in pain without putting his manhood at stake. Or, more to the point, she could have given him a hug without making any comment at all. That she did not—and I want to be clear that I am not saying my friend did anything wrong—that even in a situation as insignificant as this one, John's manhood became an issue, however small, indicates how deeply and unselfconsciously, perhaps even unwillingly, she valued the line separating the men from the boys.
Along the same lines, another friend told me not too long ago of the change she witnessed in her eleven-year-old son when she responded to his falling grades by explaining that when he got older he would have to support a family, just like his father, so he'd better start learning responsibility now. "All his boyish innocence," she said, "seems to be gone. Everything is homework, homework, homework. He doesn't even play with his toys anymore. I wanted to improve his grades, not turn him into a little man."
No doubt, and hopefully, if he has not done so already, this woman's son will eventually go back to being a kid just like any other kid, his mother's warning growing more and more faint as he begins to realize just how far off the adulthood she threatened him with really is. Indeed, my point here is not that either of these two boys was, in any substantive way, harmed by these interactions with their mothers, but rather that the interactions themselves represent only one small part of the manhood training boys receive and that each boy's response, even in such relatively minor situations, corresponded perfectly to the manhood ideal: he sucked it up and showed that he could "take it."
In Love, Sex, Death and the Making of the Male, Rosliand Miles points out that the old saying, "boys will be boys" can be read not only as it usually is, a statement of resignation in the face of inevitability, but also as an imperative: "Boys will be boys." The degree to which this reading is the more accurate one becomes fully evident when you look at the consequences of not "being a boy." Ask any man, and if he's honest enough to tell you, he will have at least one story, and probably more than one, of how he was hurt when he was a child for not being aggressive enough, athletic enough, stoic enough, sexually objectifying of girls enough, competitive enough, loyal enough to his buddies and so on. The hurt the man tells you about may have been physical, emotional or both; the particular story he tells you may involve something relatively minor, as in the case of the two boys I just told you about, or something deeply serious and even life threatening, like my friend who was sexually assaulted and raped by boys he'd thought were his friends because he was the weakest and least masculine among them.
Yet despite the radical distance we usually assume separates a victim from his or her victimizers, there is one aspect of his rape that my friend and those who raped him have in common, that all boys and men in our culture have in common: their ideas of themselves as men—and my friend's friends' behavior was nothing if it was not intimately connected to their ideas of themselves as men—are a direct result of their confrontation with the violence and aggression considered to be the normal, natural and necessary context in which manhood is formed. None of us can escape this. We may choose to embrace the violence or reject it; we may find some way of accommodating ourselves to it or we may devote our lives to eliminating it, but there is no way we can avoid confronting it. This confrontation takes place so pervasively throughout our lives—how do I respond to the posturing of the male student who is challenging me about not accepting his late paper; or to the neighbor whose threatening body language belies the polite tone of his voice as he argues with me about who saw the parking spot first; or to my son's insistence that he wants a "boy's only" birthday party—that the question of how or why boys and men come to value manhood so highly seems dwarfed by the question Miles asks, "[H]ow do they avoid it?"1
Note:
1Rosalind Miles, Love, Sex, Death, and the Making of the Male (New York: Summit Books, 1991) 58. Author's italics.
