Boyhood is a battlefield: The dangerous expectations of early masculinity

2014-06-29T10:39:22+00:00

He thinks for a few seconds. “The main message was: Being a boy, you are guilty because you are oppressing the girls by default. Most of us guys resisted in different ways—but what can you do as twelve-year-olds when all the grownups, including your male teachers, think that they are doing a great and right thing?”

Jon’s statement that he and his friends resisted having their positive pride and self-assertion squashed echoes in my mind as he, Peter, and I head out to dinner later that evening. How ironic that he should have chosen that particular word—it was so important in the work that Carol Gilligan, my other colleagues at Harvard, and I did on girls’ psychological development in the 1990s. We discovered that just at the point when girls realized that to be popular and attractive young women they would have to shoehorn themselves into the narrow glass slipper of feminine ideals—being sexy or skinny or ditzy or whatever—they would resist. Resistance came in different forms: questioning, acting out, getting angry, complaining, trying to fight back. For the most part, they eventually gave in, yet this often led to an inner resistance and conflict—depression or self-mutilation or eating disorders or simply a persistent sense of victimization. As Carol said, girls learn that in order to have relationships as young women in patriarchy, they have to give up authentic relationship with themselves and with others. It seems to be a fundamental response: When one’s spirit, integrity, wholehearted love of life, or connection with others is threatened or squashed, we human beings resist however we can with whatever we’ve got. Could it be that in Denmark, and Northern Europe in general, the shoe (or glass slipper) was now on the other foot—that boys even more than girls were having to squeeze themselves into narrowly prescribed norms?

... Martin jumps in, speaking rapidly but softly. “I have tried to give women what they say they want, but they always want something else. Women think that what they want is for the man to really talk and to be at home with the kids. But she doesn’t want that for long. She wants a strong man.”

“We end up relating to women in a way that is more like woman to woman, not man to woman,” says Bo. “We are feminized in our relationships, and they don’t last.”

... “There’s something inside yourself that gets messed up as a man when you have no internal compass, no higher value, and then you do whatever you have to do to keep your sexual relationship,” says Jon. “You are lost.”

... The vilification of all things masculine and the ever-present assertion that men aren’t doing enough to end oppression (which flies in the face of the fact that so much has changed) seem to have created a perfect storm that is bound to run anyone’s Viking impulses into the ground. As a result, men—particularly educated, intelligent, sensitive men—seem increasingly divided against themselves, cut off from the authority of their own experience lest they offend or be seen as dominators. It is a bizarre inverse of women’s traditional self-effacement and lack of authority that is a response to patriarchal domination. As Henrik Jensen, a cultural historian at Roskilde University told me, “There’s not much will any more. No man wants to be mixed up with the old [patriarchal] father, because there is a fear that you would be thrown out, even eliminated from the family. That happens; there are a lot of divorces.”

... As life went on and I walked the uneven stone streets of Copenhagen, I began to notice how many of these tall Viking men slouched, as if they were trying to take up less space. It was extremely disconcerting to see men expressing the kind of confusion, deference, and self-doubt that is so familiar and often tragic to me in studying women. Not simply because we don’t traditionally expect this from men, but because it is undignified and humiliating for anyone to have the fundamental sense that there is something deeply wrong with who they are and that they constantly have to seek validation from others for their existence. That is the horrible predicament that women have been struggling to free themselves from. Ironically, in Northern Europe, in trying to create gender equality, it seems a new form of domination is being created instead.

... I was beginning to realize that killing off the patriarch—the father in the home and in the culture—and validating the mother’s intimate sphere will not liberate us and society as we might have hoped. As the historian Henrik Jensen told me, “Culture is made up of two legs: one leg is duty and one is rights.” The culture of duty is associated with the authority of the father, or patriarch. And the culture of rights “only began with the emergence of the individual, which happened fairly recently.” The culture of rights is what we find in Northern Europe—where society tries to fulfill “mothering functions” and meet each individual’s needs. “But duty,” by which he means a sense of obligation and shared purpose, “was actually gluing things together. It created a mutuality of sorts. Once it goes, people get more and more isolated, thinking about their needs and their rights, but no one feels obligated to anyone or anything.”

Title	Boyhood is a battlefield: The dangerous expectations of early masculinity
Author	ugly_duck
Upvotes	0
Comments	1
Date	June 29, 2014 6:29 AM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/29dl5a/boyhood_is_a_battlefield_the_dangerous/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/boyhood-is-a-battlefield-the-dangerous.998595 https://theredarchive.com/post/998595

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