Problematizing the Obvious

There are certain things in life so glaringly obvious in their very essence that further debate is surely superfluous: psoriasis truly is heartbreak; diamonds are forever.

That list should surely include boys. Plug simple, remarkably self-similar, and really no more inscrutable than a wedge. Using terms that I am most comfortable with, boys are to paper airplanes as girls are to the Space Shuttle.

Apparently, I need re-educating. Based upon the scholarly blizzard, boys are a puzzle, after all.

My son just turned 3. He loves [insert your own list of typical boy stuff; no point making you read what you already take for granted].

That doesn't make him unusual; in fact, in many ways, he couldn't be more typical. Which may be why a relative recently said, "Well, he's definitely all boy." It's a statement that sounds reasonable enough until you think about it. What does "all boy" mean? Masculine? Straight? Something else? Are there partial boys? And is this relative aware of my son's fondness for Hello Kitty and tea sets?

Just a guess here, but if that relative was aware of a predilection for feline cartoon characters and arranging dishes on a table, that relative would instead have observed a studied silence.

The impetus for this waxing scholarly interest is boys' relative lack of academic success. More girls graduate both high school and college, the theory being that the school environment has become so feminized that it is actively hostile to boys who insist on remaining boys.

Predictably, there is another flurry about the genderization of boys; and just as socially structured binary heterocentric patrimony follows societally bound internalization of oppressive role constructs, it is all the fault of culture:

Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons From Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes offers an analysis of what boys soak in from TV shows, video games, toys, and other facets of boy-directed pop culture. … According to the book, boys are being taught they have to be tough and cool, athletic and stoic. This starts early with toddler T-shirts emblazoned with "Future All-Star" or "Little Champion." Even once-benign toys like Legos and Nerf have assumed a more hostile profile with Lego Exo-Force Assault Tigers and the Nerf N-Strike Raider Rapid Fire CS-35 Dart Blaster. "That kind of surprised us," says one of the book's three authors, Lyn Mikel Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. "What happened to Nerf? What happened to Lego?"

Actually, what is surprising is that someone who could be surprised by the advent of the Dart Blaster has not long since been confined to a closely supervised therapeutic setting.

Some scholars have concluded boys are "more complicated, and less single minded than adults give them credit". Apparently since none of those adults have ever been boys, or have experienced boys, scholarly insight is essential.

From someone whose "… background is in clinical psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer studies".

That has opened the door for scholars like Niobe Way. A professor of applied psychology at New York University, Way recently finished a book … on how boys communicate. She's been interviewing teenage boys about their friendships, and what she's found is remarkable. While it's common wisdom that teenage boys either can't express or don't possess strong feelings about their friends, Way has discovered that boys in their early teens can be downright sentimental when discussing their friendships. When asked what they liked about their best friends, boys frequently said: "They won't laugh at me when I talk about serious things." What has emerged from her research is a portrait of emotionally intelligent boys who care about more than sports and cars. Such an observation might not sound revolutionary, but what boys told her and her fellow researchers during lengthy, probing interviews runs counter to the often one-dimensional portrayal of boys in popular culture. "They were resisting norms of masculinity," she says.

Note the past tense. At some point in high school, that expressiveness vanishes, replaced with a more defensive, closed-off posture, perhaps as boys give in to messages about what it means to be a man. Still, her research undermines the stereotype that boys are somehow incapable of discussing their feelings. "And yet," she says, "this notion of this emotionally illiterate, sex-obsessed, sports-playing boy just keeps getting spit out again and again."

Damn reality.

What surpasses remarkable, though, is that anyone, no matter how intellectually benighted, could give the tiniest credence to the self-compiled results of self-developed questions self-delivered by a woman to boys. She is right, though, that boys are interested in more than sports and cars: computers.

I hate to yank the social construct out from under the imposition of yet another worthless addition to the panoply of money and time wasting university programs, but really I don't, so I will. There are forests and pixels to be saved here, so it is time to cut to the chase: Boys are pack animals, and need an alpha male role model. They generate energy in amounts that girls can't even imagine. Unlike girls, boys spontaneously self organize into competitive team activities that often involve real or imagined violence. Boys like things that go fast, blow up, and shoot, preferably all at once. Boys are more emotionally articulate than dogs, but not much. Boys want to be tough, cool and athletic because boys ostracize boys who are weak, uncool and inept. Boys are sex obsessed, unless they are obsessing about sports, cars, and computers. Boys are not taught any of these things, they are boys. Boys who like Hello Kitty and tea sets are unlikely to provide grandchildren.

I'll leave the penultimate line to Professor Way, upon whom New York University is spending way too much money, no matter the amount:

"If you don't understand the experience of boyhood," she says, "you'll never understand the achievement gaps."

Pot, meet kettle.