«What Boys Are Made Of»: In Search Of Manliness

When my son was small and we walked on the playgrounds, a plump-cheeked boy of about seven often caught my eye, whom I called myself Kolya Bulochka. Almost every day he could be seen on the bench next to his grandmother. Usually in his hands he had a large sugar bun or a bag of seeds. In his condescending manner of looking around and in his posture, he was very much like his grandmother.

The unsmiling old woman exuded pride in her grandson and contempt for the «tear-offs». Indeed, Kolya did not rush around the site, raising clouds of sand. He was not at all interested in sticks — a traumatic tool that causes inhuman horror in parents throughout the post-Soviet space. He did not push other children, did not shout, did not tear his clothes to shreds in the dogwood bushes, obediently wore a hat in May and was certainly an excellent student. Or at least a good one.

He was the perfect child who sat quietly, ate neatly and listened to what was said to him. He so wanted to stand out from other «bad» boys that he completely got used to the role. There was not even a ripple of desire to jump up and run after the ball across his round face. However, the grandmother usually held his hand and would have stopped these encroachments.

This «castrating» upbringing is a common extreme. Where many boys are raised by «same-sex couples» — mother and grandmother — it becomes a necessary measure, a way to save one’s nerves, to create an illusion of security. It is not so important that later this “comfortable” boy will grow up into a sluggish bum with an excellent appetite, who will while away his life on the couch in front of the TV or behind the tablet. But he will not go anywhere, will not contact a bad company and will not go to a “hot spot” …

Surprisingly, these same mothers and grandmothers in their hearts cherish a completely different image … A strong, impudent, powerful patriarchal male, able to take responsibility and instantly solve other people’s problems. But for some reason they don’t “sculpt” like that. And then another hypothetical daughter-in-law will get such a prize!

Another educational extreme is the belief that a boy will certainly need a tough male hand and early independence (“A man is growing!”). In advanced cases, urgent injections of this very masculinity are used — as an echo of primitive initiation rituals. How and when to turn on the “hard hand” mode, parents interpret in their own way. For example, a friend’s stepfather took him to a psychiatrist on the grounds that his stepson didn’t like to play in the yard with the boys and hated physical education classes, but at the same time spent a lot of time at home drawing comics.

As a punishment for petty theft, a single mother took another acquaintance to a policeman to lock the first-grader for ten minutes in an empty cell. The third, a tender and dreamy young man, was sent to the Suvorov School to prevent teenage riots. He was poisoned by other cadets, later he could not forgive his parents for this experience of growing up and broke off relations with them …

The fourth, once sickly child, the military father raised at five in the morning for jogging and forced him to douse himself with cold water, until he went to the hospital with bilateral pneumonia and his mother knelt before her husband, begging him to leave the poor man alone.

Mistakes in the upbringing of boys grow out of conflicting ideas about masculinity, which becomes a Procrustean bed for an unformed character. Brutal boys are feared both at school and at home: their inflexible, difficult temper, combined with physical strength, allegedly «prophesies» a criminal future, downward movement.

Restless, hyperactive, frivolous become scapegoats and «shame on the family.» They are taught, worked out and rejected, because a real man must be rational and serious. The timid, vulnerable and shy are trying to forcefully pump testosterone through endless sections and campaigns … The golden mean? But how to find it?

In Finland, in many communities, little boys and girls are dressed in the same way, without separating them by gender. Children in kindergartens play with the same abstract, «genderless» toys. Modern Finns believe that masculinity, like femininity, will manifest itself as the child grows up and in the form he needs.

But in our society, this practice awakens a deep fear of the prospect of indeterminate sex roles — of gender itself, which is not only a biological given, but also a not very stable social construction.

In her research, psychoanalyst Alice Miller proved that too harsh upbringing of German boys led to the emergence of fascism and a world war that resulted in millions of victims. Either soulless tyrants or obedient performers capable of mindlessly following the Fuhrer grow in tight grips.

My friend, the mother of four children, two of whom are boys, when asked how to raise them, said: “All we women can do is try not to harm.” I would add that it is only possible to do no harm if we perceive a child of the opposite sex as a person with individual characteristics and inclinations, strengths and weaknesses, and not as a reality that is mysterious and hostile to you. It’s very difficult, but I hope it’s possible.