What Are We Doing To The Boys?

Five years ago today, I wrote a post about my frustration over the portrayal of boys in movies, books, and video games. We have, I lamented, created a society where girls are witty, brave, and smart; and the boys are the comic relief or the happenstance hero. Where teen and pre-teen female characters take charge and lead through knowledge and cleverness, their male counterparts charge blindly forward relying on the female brain to keep him/them from harm. (Think Hermione in Harry Potter and Annabeth from Percy Jackson.) While many have recently been upset by the lack of the availability of girl action figures (especially from the latest Star Wars movie, and she was the hero!!!), as the mom of boys, I see a different on-going and troubling trend – the dumbing down of manhood.

Five years ago, I wrote:

Where are the heroes? Where are the strong, smart, capable men? The guys on television are crass, rude, and very often too dumb to actually be married to their TV spouses.  The dad on any sitcom is an idiot and his poor wife and children are made to put up with his bumbling buffoonery. The movies are no better.  The male characters start off looking strong, but have to be rescued by the girls they pick up along the way. Even the books he reads perpetuate this smart girl/dumb guy stereotype. The boys may be the main character, but his female sidekick is the brains and cleverness of the whole operation. We often are left with the impression that without the girls, the boys would fail, but without the boys…..the girl would figure it out.

As society trained its  focus on helping girls to succeed in school and the workplace, we have turned our backs on our sons. From the teaching methods we have adopted, which favor the ways in which girls learn best, to the wussification of playtime, and the drugging of the energetic (I have ADD, I get that there’s a real use for the medication. I also believe many children are medicated for not behaving like girls.)  are we tilting success dangerously out of the grasp of boys? Are we setting in place a system in which they are doomed to fail?

It’s something I think about more and more as my own sons get older, and I see the way the world treats their male-ness. I listen to rhetoric about male oppression and glass ceilings, and then I look at my own sweet boys and wonder what the future will look like for them. What effect will the higher college graduation rates of women have on the world in which my sons live? Is this cultural animosity towards men going to somehow translate into a new glass ceiling that they will struggle to break their way through? What will the vilification of pursuits which are traditionally male (like hunting) mean for the way that they raise their own sons?

While I am grateful for the strides women have made in the four decades since I was born, I’m beginning to think that the pendulum is swinging a bit too far. While I’m happy that my daughters have the freedom to be women who roar, it no longer seems that my sons are allowed to. And I can’t help but think that the world is a poorer place when our sons are forced to be still and silent.

Photo credit By Evgeniy Isaev from Moscow, Russia (Artem) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons