Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Are we prolonging and denying boyhood at the same time

This is just my first, vague thought on this.

I keep seeing signs that men who feel they missed their boyhood by growing up too quickly. At the same time, I'm surrounded by by men who refuse to grow up.

And I keep wondering if there isn't some sort of paradoxical connection between them.

I wonder if our society doesn't sneer at boyish activities in ways that make us short change ourselves in that category, both as boys and as adult men. We still do boyish stuff but we do it with shame so we do it in a furtive or, much worse, a defiant way; that is to say, in the same way that someone has another drink after someone has made them feel like they ought not to. The consequence of this is that we never do boyish stuff the right way to begin with.

And yes, I think this does tie in with the way girls are rejecting their feminist mothers by dressing like princesses as children and then sluts, as teenagers. They want to be girls and are blundering around as best they can. But at no point does anyone tell them that being a woman is a serious project.

And so it is with being a man. Doing things like fishing, hunting, canoeing, heck, being a Boy Scout in a troop where girls aren't allowed, are all things that help us learn about the serious project of being a man. And that is all diminished by our culture.

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