Advice for parents of sons
Three new books offer advice for anxious parents of 21st-century sons
Raising Boys to Be Good Men
Aaron Gouveia
Skyhorse
Boys & Sex
Peggy Orenstein
Harper
Gay Like Me
Richie Jackson
Harper
Books about how to raise sons come packaged with assumptions. Chiefly, that dads are, at best, semi-prepared for the job, fearful, even terrified, of the kinds of conversations the books demand. Responsible fatherhood in 2020 means open discussions about porn, relationships and toxic masculinity.
In Raising Boys to Be Good Men, Aaron Gouveia presents himself as a relatable bro who’s acquired some high-profile good-dad bona fides. His sensitivity to matters of consent and misogyny are hardearned after a youth of macho preening and homophobic slurs. He recalls with shame the brickbats he received after writing an essay defending old-fashioned chivalric gestures such as holding doors open for women. He was briefly in the national spotlight last year for a tweetstorm defending his kindergarten-age son after he was bullied at school for his colourfully polished nails.
He’s an engaging guide whose writing is informed by honest mistakes, solid research and social media flare-ups. Still, he sometimes delivers his advice with an intensity so earnest it borders on self-parody. At one point, he recalls the time his wife came home with a onesie reading Mommy’s Little Stud, which sets off a tirade about how girls’ garments celebrate cupcakes and shopping while boys’ highlight physicality and unchecked libido. “Sure, it’s a onesie,” he writes, “but small things add up, and every time we buy into this gendered B.S., we perpetuate the problem and further set ourselves up for failure.” (Gouveia’s book is larded with vulgar language, as if Quentin Tarantino had adapted a Dr. Spock manual.)
But for all of his posturing, Gouveia approaches his subject with honesty and concern for the dad as much as the son.
Peggy Orenstein’s bestselling Boys & Sex operates from a similar sense that shortcomings in the way boys are being raised today have troubling consequences. Boys is based on interviews with more than 100 young men, and it paints a distressing picture: women treated disposably, hardcore porn treated as aspirational and machismo taken on as a kind of assigned uniform to cover for uncertainty about how to develop deeper relationships.
“Boys know such sentiments are wrong — they are not completely blank slates for the culture to enscribe,” Orenstein writes. “Still, they are barraged by these images and ideas, usually without challenge or context.”
But Orenstein doesn’t scold. She just lets examples from her reporting clarify the challenges and the stakes. One of the most potent of those stories involves Sameer and Anwen, two college students who hooked up at an off-campus party where he pressured her into what they now agree was sexual assault. They addressed the incident together through a campus restorative-justice program, ultimately sharing the experience publicly for a training program. If two college students can find the courage to not just confront a traumatic moment but also share it, the implication goes, a parent can bring up Pornhub, gay slurs, body image, consent and more before such trauma occurs.
The “letter to” genre has had a good century — from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet to Ta-nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me — framing advice on difficult challenges in a way that’s sympathetic, confessional and prescriptive. Richie Jackson, in Gay Like Me, grasps how effective this form can be. A longtime stage and TV producer, Jackson was developing a show about two gay man and their separate dating lives when his 18-year-old son came out to him.
Gay Like Me is very much a book about raising a gay son. Jackson was too deeply affected by the AIDS crisis — and too troubled by the laissez-faire attitudes about sex promoted by Grindr and PREP — to not want to address them directly and emphasize that a gay identity is a great gift and legacy to honour. Gay Like Me also models an openness that ought to resonate for any parent. In his closing chapter, Jackson offers a brief “parent’s prayer” that in part reads: “I hope you’ll try, and if you fail, try some more.”
The Washington Post