I think we're failing boys and young men by not educating them about the full spectrum of what a man can be. Over recent decades, we've done a good job showing girls a lot of positive female role models. Biographies of women written for preschoolers or grade school children is a whole cottage industry. Most of these are fairly well done, and give an age-appropriate version of the lives of women who were successful or admirable in some way. For early grades children, that looks something like, "Rosa Parks did a brave thing by not giving up her seat on the bus. She did it even though she knew she would be arrested and go to jail, because the law was unfair. She wanted the unfair law changed, so everyone would be treated equally on the bus. She ended up helping many people that day." I realize my writing style is shit for beginning readers; the point is the passage explains what Rosa Parks did and why she was admirable. Children learn that a woman can be brave, can pursue justice, and can provide important service to the community. There are literally hundreds of these biographies out there, and all kids are going to be exposed to at least a few during the course of their childhood.
We don't have an equivalent library of biographies about admirable men written for the same age group or with the same purpose. What we say to small boys is, "What do you want to be when you grow up? A fireman? A police officer? A train engineer?" Those aren't positive examples of manhood, those are just jobs. (Also, nobody's a train engineer, and I don't know why people like dressing toddler boys in old-timey engineer outfits.)
Nobody explicitly says that there is only one acceptable kind of man, but nobody has to. The gender of boys is ruthlessly policed, by men as well as women, and especially by other children. I've seen fights break out between little boys over whether one of them accidentally touched a pink crayon and now has "girl germs." The adult world is not much better. For some reason, Twitter has become a gender-policing weapon of choice. There's a whole sub-genre of tweet dedicated to telling other people how they should live out their manhood or womanhood. But it's usually manhood. (Non-binary people get harassed too, but it usually has more to do with if their gender is real and if they're "really trans" or not. Twitter is the absolute worst.)
As far as I can tell, Twitter's idea of the ideal man is someone who is a caricature of eternal strength. He can like cars and sports and looking at women's butts, and that's about it. Well, put beer and boobs on the list too. He's forbidden to enjoy any kind of sensory pleasure other than beer and sex. No brightly-colored thing. No soft thing (boobs and butts are exempt from the ban). He can't like fancy food. He can't be interested in art. He can't take long showers. He can't nap during the day. Twitter frowns on male dancing. The list is endless, and it's so stupid. Tragically stupid, because some men and boys face serious consequences for stepping outside the narrow bounds of what's permitted for them. Children may be harshly criticized and punished by their parents. Adult guys have been beaten up in parking lots. Being killed is not outside the realm of possibility.
I'm not saying that men can't be classic tough guys if that is their authentic self. We need classic tough guys. We just don't need ONLY classic tough guys.
There's a poster I really like by Karen Hallion, an artist on Etsy. It depicts several men and a word illustrating their contributions to society. Maybe you like these particular guys or not, but they are a diverse bunch, and I think our boys and young men need to see that. Obviously a poster isn't going to solve everything, but I think it was done in the right spirit, and it's a start.
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