Although there’s nothing wrong with women wanting to raise sons to become good men, the fact of the matter is that they generally can’t, and past a certain point they shouldn’t try, because it becomes counterproductive. It may be the single most damaging myth of feminism that women are capable of rearing boys from infancy to adulthood. Sure, plenty of guys who grow up only with their mothers may turn out alright, but in the cases where she was the only authority figure in the home most were likely damaged in some manner.
In the old days, boys underwent a rite of passage of some sort, preserved in certain rituals such as the Islamic circumcision rite, the Bar Mitzvah, and perhaps for Christian Americans some form of summer camp or the football team. These are relics of a time when there was a point in boys’ lives at which they were separated from their mothers and inducted into the company of men. Generally, it happened right around puberty. The reason this was done is because it was widely recognized that the mother had done her job, and was not equipped to prepare the boy for manhood.
However, these days women are given extended control over their sons, often by the courts, and often simply because fathers are away most of the time. So we have Oprah promoting her typical brand of feel-good treacle to the legions of single mothers out there who are blundering around with sons they will never really understand.
Choosing to focus on a female’s perception of what is masculine and what is feminine is only one of the flaws of the article, but it is telling nonetheless:
When my best friend’s older son and my son were both around three, her boy delighted in swathing himself in glittery tulle and prancing around with a fairy wand. My friend took it in stride, providing generous amounts of fabric and making aesthetic improvements — more sparkles, a bigger star on the wand, etc. — to her son’s great and often delirious satisfaction.
On the face of it, I supported her and her boy, but I confess I was also relieved that my son didn’t express quite the same level of interest. It was such a small thing: A boy, barely out of babyhood, innocently enraptured by clouds of tulle — why was it even the slightest bit threatening to me?
As a father myself, I saw my son play with “girls’ toys” plenty of times before he knew the difference, and he still sometimes plays with his sister’s girly stuff, such as her little pink horse carriage, attaching it to the fire engine or whatever. But it isn’t what a boy is playing with that makes the difference — it’s how he’s playing with it. A boy of three who is waving a wand and throwing glitter around is doing the same thing as a boy who is waving a stick and throwing sand. To a three-year-old there’s really no difference, but the mother sees this as an impropriety; something to be ashamed of. If the boy in question had been playing house and calling himself the “mommy,” then he’d have what is known as “gender identity disorder,” which is an entirely different kettle of fish.
So, what does this mother take away from this? She knows there’s something vaguely wrong with feeling worried about a boy playing with something like glitter and wands, but rather than realize that she just doesn’t get it, she comes to the conclusion that boys should be encouraged to be more like women and, disturbingly, to be physically close to their mothers through adolescence.
… that when a friend who noticed him at 14 snuggling with me on the couch later asked, “Is he interested in girls yet?”
A sensitive, affectionate boy risks being perceived as a “mama’s boy, tied to her apron strings.” Isn’t it interesting that we have no such phrases to describe a girl who is attached to her mother? And that “daddy’s girl” completely lacks the pejorative connotation?
My mother’s and friend’s questions scared me because they suggested that the closeness between me and my son was in some way inhibiting his path to a healthy manhood.
I’d say that maintaining a close physical bond between an adolescent boy and his mother is most assuredly inhibiting his path to a healthy manhood. I’m not going to get Freudian here, but that is a recipe for some later problems, I’d imagine.
The slur “motherf***er” is not seen as the gravest of insults throughout the entire world because of the patriarchy, but rather because it is a taboo based, most likely, on instinct. However, according to Olga Silverstein, an “expert” on raising boys, and William Pollack of Harvard Medical School, both quoted by the author, that’s exactly the kind of man we need for a better society.
Pollack, like notorious National Organization of Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) guru Michael Kimmel, thinks that masculinity is a “mask:”
We know what we get when a boy is raised with the code, says Pollack: a mask of masculinity, false bravado, the need to be aggressive and to win, and to ignore or repress feelings of vulnerability. These are the men who seem strong but who are, ironically, weakest in many ways because they’re hiding or are unaware of their neediness and are poorly equipped to engage in any kind of honest relationship.
Our mother-author concludes with a test of the new ideas bequeathed by the aforementioned intellectual giants, and is thus convinced and affirmed:
One afternoon when my son was a senior in high school, a group of his friends gathered in our living room to play video games.
[...]
I had a question for them, I said, related to a story I was writing: “You guys are 18, right?” I said. “Do you still tell your mothers that you love them?”
…silence swept the room. I stood there uncomfortably.
“Well, sure,” one of the boys said finally.
“Of course,” said another.
“Why not?” said a third.
A fourth boy, whose mother is a doctor, stretched his legs and leaned back in his chair. “My mother raised me and my brother and sister pretty much by herself,” he said. “My mother is a goddess.” No one snickered. It was a statement of fact.
