Abstract
Losses of capacity—of emotional expression, educational investment, intimacy and connection, health and well-being, and virtue—have long been casualties of boyhood. But present generations of boys may experience something very different. Alarms about a “boy crisis” (Farrell and Gray 2018) notwithstanding, there is evidence of improvement in their prospects for healthier, more adaptive ways of being. As younger men rise to the challenges posed by feminism and a new emphasis on social and emotional skills, the reinvention of boyhood is underway (Reichert 2019; Risman 1999).
Yet popular conversations about masculinity are still fraught. The recent Gillette advertisement campaign tackling sexual harassment and bullying, “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” evoked an intense backlash, including in a tweet by media personality Piers Morgan: “Let boys be damn boys. Let men be damn men.” Esquire magazine received a similar public reaction to a cover story, “An American Boy” (Percy 2019), for portraying a white, Midwestern, athletic, high schooler as struggling, a bit lost, and adrift. And the American Psychological Association’s new Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men (APA 2018) were drawn into the same ideological maelstrom for daring to point out the downside of conventional masculine socialization.
That the loudest reactions come from those most invested in the status quo is not surprising. Michael Gurian, whose Gurian Institute has trained thousands of educators and youth workers in the pseudoscience of brain-based gender differences, characterized the Guidelines as an attack on masculinity itself and rose nobly to its defense: “But masculinity is fragile, too, as millions of failing males prove. It is too fragile to be accused by our nation’s smartest people of crimes it has not committed. And our sons are too fragile to survive and thrive if those who ostensibly care for them…suggest our sons’ biggest crime is their very existence” (Gurian 2019).
Framing masculinity as in need of saving overlooks the risks and harm built into boyhood. The essentialist myth that violence springs naturally from primal male impulses, for example, actually drives parents to teach their sons to “man up” and schools to turn a blind eye to the daily threat of peer bullying. In truth, it is not masculinity that needs saving but boys themselves, from a boyhood that was not built to foster the development of their human capacities.
The APA Guidelines address boys’ education only briefly, making a link between supportive learning environments and positive development. But as the second major institution of boyhood, invented to reproduce conventional gender identities, schools shape how boys imagine their lives. In Kaufman’s (1994) terms, they are socialization sites where the contradictions of boyhood, the “strange combination of power and powerlessness, privilege and pain” (142), are imparted by schoolmasters and peers on playgrounds, in classrooms, and in school hallways. Boys are unable to escape these contradictions, as each boy must fashion his identity within a limited set of options.
Those working with boys need to be aware of how these limitations and contradictions are naturalized through school structures and practices. In particular, the masculinized and authoritarian regime of schooling, as well as teachers’ expectations for boys (e.g. “boys will be boys”), elicit resistance and disengagement from boys themselves. School cultures in which conventional masculinity is fervently policed (by exclusion and bullying) ensure that boys who do not “measure up” (see Keddie and Mills 2007) appreciate their peril. Being “cool,” academically disinvested, and anti-school is typically valorized within these cultures (see Connell 1989; DiPrete and Buchmann 2013, 2014).
To help schools move beyond these constricted cultures requires a “productive pedagogies” approach that engages boys’ imaginations, that supports their reflection on unhealthy norms, and that acknowledges their experiences of masculinity within spaces of social support and mutual respect (Keddie and Mills 2007). These pedagogies enable boys’ resistance to social pressures that shape unhealthy choices and normalize casualties and losses, and rationalize broader inequities of gender, race, and class. They help boys challenge hierarchies that distort, suppress, and harm themselves and others.
Can the aspirations expressed in the APA Guidelines inspire a freer and fairer school experience for boys? Hopefully schools will be motivated to offer curricula that avoid generic, “boy-friendly” approaches and that incorporate, as Marcus Weaver-Hightower (2005) recommends, “deep knowledge of the particular students and contexts” (4). Especially important to oppose are curricula and measurement policies that threaten to erode the aesthetic, creative, relational, and social aspects of learning (Apple 2013).
Despite these political threats, the perpetuation of conventional masculine norms, along with their routine losses and casualties, grows more and more unstable. As mainstream organizations like the APA call these norms into question, healthier and fairer ways of being a boy become increasingly accessible, ushering in new possibilities for a more equitable world.