In the still ongoing process of clearing out the toot from the study the other day I came across an article from 1989 (Carol Lee, “How We Hurt Our Sons”, Sunday Times Magazine, 22 October 1989, 54-58) in which the author maintains that we are continuing to screw up our boys by not allowing them to understand and express the full range of their emotions, fears, during adolescence.
In re-reading the article I realised the author is right. I realised that I too had been blighted by this – despite having relatively bohemian and enlightened parents. That what Carol Lee was saying was true in the 1980s. And it is still largely true today.
Moreover because this is important (and because Times newspapers are now behind a paywall) here are a few salient extracts of what was for a Sunday magazine article well written, thoughtful and useful.
Time and again when working in schools … I have come across boys who go through agonies … They suffer particular pain because of a strong sense of being alone in whatever they’re feeling. Unlike girls, they are not encouraged to share their problems and more intimate fears. They think they will be laughed at if they show weakness. This leaves them fewer outlets for discovering that their particular “shame” is shared by most of us, and is of human rather than monstrous proportions … The strongest impression they gave was a sense of isolation, guilt and anxiety. Feeling isolated and afraid is a painful experience at any age. It can be devastating during adolescence.
[…]
The loss of “normality” is experienced by both girls and boys as they leave childhood for the difficulties of puberty. Both sexes suffer the loss of the intimate, gaily-coloured world of their primary schools with their own familiar teacher, and classrooms decorated with their own pictures. This Garden of Eden is suddenly replaced at the age of 11 with a large secondary school which is frightening for many children. Then, at the same time as nice, cosy “Miss” or friendly “Sir” has been replaced by a bewildering stream of different subject teachers, children’s bodies suddenly start becoming hostile territory, too. This affects boys more than it does girls … Girls are given positive images of womanhood: menstruation is no longer a “curse” and libraries contain an array of books on young women’s health, rights, body-images and on issues like self-assertion. They do not seem to have similar material for young men.
[…]
Girls are taught to be articulate, to express emotions like anger and to be proud of being female. They are no longer wrapped in cotton wool. Boys are still brought up to be tough … Notions of maleness have changed considerably in the past two decades, but the bringing up of boys has not kept pace. There is little in the way of a rite … of passage which takes them from childhood to the increasingly complex business of being a man.
[…]
[P]uberty for boys is not seen as a positive experience, but a negative one. Mothers withdraw from boys because they are afraid of making cissies of their sons, and also because they are uncertain how to treat developing male sexuality … The confusion is experienced by boys, too. Their bodies are now prone to hydraulic uncertainties called erections. Boys are fearful in case unwanted erections happen in front of – or because of – mothers. Mothers, aunts and other concerned females have the same problem. So boys suddenly find themselves pushed out in the cold.
[…]
When given the chance to discuss such issues … teenage boys will say how abandoned, neglected and anxious they feel. They will tell you that their mothers avoid them “like the plague” and that their fathers don’t talk to them anyway. They will also express envy at the way girls are more mature and self-sufficient than boys of the same age.
[…]
A boy’s journey from childhood into manhood is dictated by his ability to be unemotional, to bear pain and also to die for his country … Why should they be any less hurt when their first romance ends? Do we want them to be human or inhuman? … Man is no longer a slayer of dragons or a knight in shining armour. But this change in attitude has left a vacuum in the condition of being male.
[…]
We hurt boys by believing they are ‘alien’. We deny them their ability to nurture. That’s why they end up different, because we believe they are, and make them so. And fathers still don’t nurture their sons in the way women do their daughters.
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[B]etter adjustment is achieved by allowing boys a full range of emotions instead of the traditional “stiff upper lip”. What goes wrong is that boys are not invited, as girls are, to be sensitive, caring and considerate.
[…]
Society praises youth for the way it flings itself into life, romantically, impetuously, protected; yet this same society offers youth no room for spontaneity, for improvisation or sincerity, for relationships that are irrational or non-utilitarian, either in its social structure or in its everyday routine.
If anyone out there especially wants a copy of the full article, then ask me nicely and I’ll send you a PDF.