HOW TO RAISE A BOY

In a world where the very concept of masculinity is demonised by some – with a seemingly inevitable angry reaction by others – how do you bring up a young son to be his best true self?

In a world where the very concept of masculinity is demonised by some, how do you bring up a young son to be his best true self?

On November 19, 2018, a month after The New York Times exposed Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual predator, a shaving supplies company called Harry’s released a short video online for International Men’s Day.

“Now more than ever, being a man demands introspection, humility and optimism,” read the ad copy. “To get to a better tomorrow, we need to take a look at today, and at the misguided stereotypes that got us here in the first place.” The video, a simple black-and-white clip, featured various adages to do with masculinity – “be tough”, “take it like a man”, “boys will be boys” – with lines drawn through them.

So far, so inoffensive. Except not, as Andy Katz-Mayfield, a founder of Harry’s, later recounted. “It got picked up by Infowars [the notorious right-wing conspiracy-nut hangout] and the backlash we got …” You can practically hear his head shake in dismay. There was a well-organised boycott of Harry’s products, and the company’s Facebook page was flooded with outrage. “What’s wrong with being a man?” read the most popular comment. “Guess what? We’re different than women! We act, live and play different. So man up, grow a pair, don’t be a pu$$y, and recognise we’re men!” Harry’s, in response, invoked a familiar catchphrase: “Toxic masculinity is the problem, not being a man.”

When even a personal grooming company throws around a term that sounds straight out of a sociology textbook, and attracts virulent responses as a result, you know it’s having a moment. But how helpful a concept is toxic masculinity in breaking the cycle of violence against women? And in using it, do we risk demonising the little boys who are listening, learning and growing up right now?

I had the chance to contemplate these questions while moderating a discussion at the Sydney Writers’ Festival last year. (Full disclosure: I am on the board of the festival.) The panel, which featured two novelists, was called Power Play: Toxic Masculinity in Storytelling. Writers’ festival attendees often have agendas; the #MeToo movement was on everyone’s minds. I expected emotion, but the extent of the audience’s animosity against men – all men, fictional or otherwise – took me aback. As the three of us fielded increasingly emotive interjections from the crowd, beginning with observations about the awfulness of the novels’ male characters and ending with an outburst of: “How do we stop them from raping our girls?”, my thoughts turned to the boy

I was carrying in my womb and I felt a little sad.

One of the writers on the panel,

Ceridwen Dovey, who is the mother of two boys, maintained that she wasn’t

sure her novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives, had anything useful to say about toxic masculinity. Dovey explained that she wrote her women characters to be just as complex, maddening, untrustworthy and, yes, toxic as she did her men. It’s a stance the novelist also takes in life.

Over the years, Dovey, who lives in the north of Sydney, has become used to people – often other mothers – expressing the worst kinds of anti-boy prejudice openly, even aggressively. “You have two boys?” they’ll say, eyes wide with alarm. “How on earth do you keep them under control?” As she told me: “It’s as if the two sweet little boys I’m raising are miniature rapists in disguise, just waiting to terrorise women everywhere!” This attitude has somehow become culturally acceptable, whereas expressing an equivalently ugly prejudice to a mother of girls (Two girls? How on earth do you cope with their bossiness and emotional clinginess?) is now, for good reason, unthinkable.

Yet often other mothers seem blind to how damaging it is to reinforce these negative stereotypes about what little boys are and can be. And in the rush to pile on boys and blame the men they will become for all of society’s ills, we are not celebrating how today’s little boys – if they are lucky enough to be born into a loving family – are in fact already demonstrating they are nothing like everybody says. Dovey described to me how recently she had watched an entire soccer-field of little boys stop their game and all run over to help a toddler who had wandered onto the field and fallen over. “They knelt around the toddler, stroking his hair, asking if he was okay, holding his hand. It was one of those beautiful moments where I thought, for all that society is doing wrong, we are also doing something right if this generation of boys can so openly show this kind of compassion and ability to nurture.” She’s also amazed that when her older son is asked what he wants to be when he grows up, he answers proudly: “A dad.”

That boys – and men – are capable of such tenderness is in itself worth recognising. You’d be forgiven for forgetting that, though, with toxic masculinity now the go-to explanation for society’s problems. It’s said to be the reason we have Donald Trump in the Oval Office; the root cause of domestic violence; and has even been blamed for Brexit. Yet although ubiquitous, the way the term is now used has shifted quite a bit from its original meaning. First usage was surprisingly recently – the early 1990s – when American Jungian psychologists on wilderness retreats worked to connect with a lost, ‘deep’ masculine identity. Shepherd Bliss, a leader of the so-called Mythopoetic movement, coined the phrase, asserting it was the result of repressing ‘deep masculinity’. Interestingly, toxic masculinity has come to mean almost the very opposite: it now stands for an excess of masculinity, rather than its deficit.

But isn’t it possible that in constantly decrying masculinity itself as the problem, we risk reinforcing existing gender norms? The patriarchy still rules the roost, but in the process of lifting girls up, are we inadvertently sinking our boys? For many mothers I’ve spoken to, there is an instinctual feeling that the message they impart to their sons about manhood needs to be a positive one. The writer Faith Salie has pointed out that while “boys have always known they could do anything … girls have always known they were allowed to feel anything”. Yet, Salie notes, “while girls are encouraged to be not just ballerinas, but astronauts and coders, boys – who already know they can walk on the moon and dominate Silicon Valley – don’t receive explicit encouragement to fully access their emotions”.

Steve Biddulph, the Australian psychologist who 22 years ago published the seminal book Raising Boys, believes that nowadays it’s actually easier

“It’s as if the two sweet little boys I’m raising are miniature rapists in disguise, just waiting to terrorise women!”

to raise sons. In part, Biddulph says, this is because of our greater understanding of biological difference, with psychological research confirming his once-disputed assertion that boys are more vulnerable than girls in the first few years of their lives. He also points to the wider variety of acceptable masculine roles which now exist. “At least now we can see there are many different types of boys,” Biddulph has said.

But mothers on the parenting front lines don’t necessarily share Biddulph’s rosy assessment. Susie Sugden, an e-commerce manager in Sydney, is raising a young son, Edgar. Sugden has consciously looked for male role models for Edgar but is frustrated that Australians still “focus so much on stereotypically masculine behaviours. Why aren’t we talking about Richard Flanagan, Bob Brown, the amazing men we have? The traditional Australian man is a football guy who gets drunk and gets into trouble, but it’d be so much nicer to focus on the values we all think are fantastic, like looking after the environment, being an amazing communicator.”

Progress is also slow in areas like children’s clothing and toys. After my son was born I was disheartened to see how many of the onesies I’d accumulated featuring tired tropes of boyhood: all macho slogans, trucks and power tools. Not to mention that their palette was confined to various shade of blue. (In a reminder that gender norms aren’t nearly as fixed as we think, the colour associated with boys until the middle of the last century was pink. It was girls who wore blue. And in Japan, where I live now, a muted red which some might deem pink is still the colour more commonly associated with boys.)

The limitations of girls’ clothing have been much discussed, and their outcomes documented. A recent, widely circulated op-ed in The New York Times by Sara Clemence denounced “girls’ sections filled with lightweight leggings, scoop-neck tops and embellished shoes”. Clemence was particularly annoyed that girls’ clothing lacked the practical details of boys’, like knee pads and pockets.

But what of boys who want beauty, or a little whimsy, in their outfits? Recognition that they too are held back by clothing options is harder to come by. A Sydney mother I spoke to named Ange – who didn’t want her last name used because she feared more social condemnation than she’d already received – happily allows her young son to wear dresses, which he prefers over shorts. “He just loves the feel of them, and loves twirling around,” Ange says. The boy’s choice, which he’s been making since before he was two, has been difficult for many people in his life, starting with his father, who, Ange says, was “very confronted by it. He didn’t think it was right.” And what about reactions out of the house? “I get comments all the time. Some of the other parents at school pickup initially were like: ‘That’s really funny, that’s so cute.’ But there’s less of that now, and the other kids keep being like: ‘Is he a boy or a girl? Why is he wearing a dress?’”

Hearing that broke my heart. Evidently, subconscious biases run deep, start early, and – crucially – cut both ways. The fact that the pay gap still exists, and is estimated to add up to about $1 million for each universityeducated woman in her lifetime, is rage-inducing. But that shouldn’t stop us from acknowledging that young men are one of society’s most vulnerable groups. You only have to consider their alarmingly disproportionate number of suicides to see as much. (In Australia the suicide rate for males in three times higher than for females.) Increasingly, women outnumber men at university. As a result, levels of class mobility are lower for men. The default question is how to boost girls’ achievement in maths and science, but what about also encouraging boys to do better in English? Or coaxing them into valuing their education above success on the sports field?

Maybe both sexes would be better served if they were given the opportunity to socialise more from an early age. Yet even mothers in the most progressive of suburbs say that gender segregation is impossible to avoid. Alex Carthey, a biologist at Macquarie University and mother to pre-schoolaged Finn, says that while her son loves playing with girls, “I already see the two genders separating at daycare. Part of me worries that social expectation is such that he will feel the need to do that, rather than be true to himself.”

Allowing her son the freedom to form his own identity isn’t easy, Carthey says. “I try to give him a full range of options in terms of toys and clothes and not express any inherent judgment as to what’s girlie or for boys, but it still comes through.” She describes the experience of going to buy Finn a backpack: “He gravitated to the pink butterfly one and I had to squash down the urge to get him the generic brown one instead.”

The books they read together are also frustratingly regressive. “You’d be amazed how many of the inanimate objects are boys,” she says. “I just switch them into ‘shes’, which is all minor, but hopefully helps to create a more even representation of the world.” Still, despite all Carthey’s efforts, gendered behaviours are sneaking in. Finn tends towards wanting to kick a football. “And lately he’s fascinated with wheels,” Carthey adds. “He pulls drawers open and watches them run along their tracks to see how they work. I don’t know where he gets it from!”

And there’s the rub: a boy remains fundamentally mysterious to the woman who birthed him. A friend got at this truth when she admitted to feeling “slightly incredulous” on hearing the news she was having a son. “I thought, absurdly, since I was a girl I would be having a girl.” The experience has opened her eyes, and she concludes now that “the sense of difference has been wonderful”. Prominent Australian feminist writer Clementine Ford, herself the mother of a boy, reports that the question she gets asked the most is: “How do I raise my son to respect women?” (Her book Boys Will Be Boys seeks to answer it.) For many women, as they get to know their sons, the concept of toxic masculinity just doesn’t seem to apply; their chubby-cheeked little boy is already so much more complicated, and so much more vulnerable, than that label allows for.

Beyoncé, as usual, put it best, in an interview with US Vogue after the birth of her twins, a girl, Rumi, and a boy, Sir. “As the mother of two girls, it’s important to me that they see themselves – in books, films and on runways.” This makes sense, from a woman who once performed a pop song in front of a giant neon sign flashing the word ‘feminist’. More surprising was what she said next, and it’s something I think about all the time in parenting: “I want the same things for my son. I want him to know that he can be strong and brave, but that he can also be sensitive and kind. I want my son to have a high emotional IQ where he is free to be caring, truthful and honest. It’s everything a woman wants in a man, and yet we don’t teach it to our boys.” Nothing toxic about it.

For many women, as they get to know their sons, the concept of toxic masculinity just doesn’t seem to apply