Masculinity In Crisis (Page 2)
Dobson in his book Raising Boys calls boys all afterburner without a rudder and I believe this is a good description of boys. Without the guidance and training boys can and will run off in unpredictable directions, sometimes with dire consequences.
Teaching boys to deal with there emotions by controlling them is necessary because boys will experience those emotions differently than girls. As noted above, the physiological differences between boys and girls is going to cause a difference in how emotions are experienced as well as how boys and girls are going to want to express those feelings. Boys are clearly going to want to express their emotions at times with action. I don't believe that you can train this out of a boy. Instead, you need to train a boy to channel that action into something constructive. Do boys need to learn to talk about their feelings? Yes and no. I believe that we need to give boys the opportunity to talk and this means spending time with them, being aware of their moods and approaching them and engaging them in order to provide the environment in which they will open up to us. But I am also convinced that boys will need to be taught how to channel those emotions into appropriate actions.
The above mentioned school shootings is an excellent example of boys who had strong emotions and set those emotions into action. The most recent example, the Virginia Tech shooting demonstrates that this individual had a least talked a few times about his feelings in mental health settings, to the point that it mandated that he seek care. The difficulty was that this poor individual felt isolated as did the boys in the Collumbine shooting, both who were in therapy. What these individuals lacked, among many things, are the ability to take their hurt and frustrations and turn them into actions that were not destructive. I don't suggest that having an old fashion sense of masculinity would have prevented these shootings; the shootings are far more complex than that. The shootings are far more complex than simply getting boys to talk more about their feelings. What I am suggesting is that boys are prone to acting on their feelings. I don't believe that you can train this out of them.
Boys need a sense of adventure, the opportunity to explore, the chance to create and a place to belong. Mark Twain's books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn display boys in their greatest glory. They have friends, they have a community and they have marvelous adventures. I recently reviewed some books written for boys who do not like to read. The books are adventure books with the types of adventures boys dream about. Boys have little opportunity for adventure in our world unless we provide those opportunities. Boys will create their own adventure if left to their own devices, hence the jumping of bicycles off of ramps, shooting each other with paint ball guns, climbing as high as possible in a tree, capturing a snake and so on. Boys need adventure. Boys are naturally explorers as well, they want to see inside the cave, to check out what is beyond the deep woods, to see how deep the water really is, to know what is inside the clock, or in the case of my brother, what is inside the car engine. Again, our world does not permit a great deal of exploring, we will be trespassing or we will be putting our child into harm's way, so they are left to explore on their own the things that are immediately around them, often with unintended consequences. The opportunity to create, to build things also appears to be an inherent part of boys. The reason, I believe, that boys are so destructive is that they are simply taking things apart in an attempt to understand them, that and a tendency to move from one activity to the next without finishing any one thing. But it is this curiosity about how things work that eventually turns boys into men that create and build. Do some women desire to build, of course, but it is definitely a male thing to want to build something. Boys also have a desire to belong. The evidence of this is strong considering for centuries men have had clubs, secret societies, sports teams and leagues and so on. Not given the appropriate place to belong boys will become hurt and frustrated or they will join leagues with other disenfranchised youths and become a menace, such as gangs.
So what does all of this mean? I believe that it means that boys need to be trained to be men with a clear sense of what it means to be masculine. That quality traits such as courage, integrity, boldness, strength, emotional self control, honor, compassion, a love of adventure, self sacrifice, enterprise, exploration and love are great qualities and need to be shaped in our boys. The ability to be a part of a larger fraternity is a desire that most men share, to feel like he is a man among men and not a boy among men. To be trained to be a man is not a disservice, to the individual or to society and it does not encourage the stuffing of emotions resulting in undue harm to our boys. It helps boys be men who can deal with their emotions in a healthy and constructive fashion. "Real men" can be tough without being stuffers and the values of the old fashion form of masculinity would be a great addition to our hurting society.