By David French
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
When you spend time with boys and girls, one of the first
things you notice is that they’re generally profoundly different. I say
generally, of course, because there are exceptions to every human behavioral
rule. All girls aren’t the same. All boys aren’t the same. But there are
general truths, and those who view the world with honest eyes can see them
every day.
I sometimes think back to the week I spent a few years
ago chaperoning my daughter’s eighth-grade class trip to Washington, D.C. It
was like shepherding two different colonies of humans. There was the girl group
— quiet, dutiful, occasionally tearful, but handling their drama via text
message and social media. Then there was the boy group, best described as a
rolling, nonstop low-level brawl. They were constantly pushing, grabbing, and
mocking. One could often discern the best friendships by finding the guys who
most aggressively attacked each other, verbally and physically.
The patterns — though less pronounced, since everything
is less pronounced outside of middle school — persist throughout life. Boys are
stronger than girls. They’re more physically active, less willing to sit still.
They’re more aggressive. In many ways, their very nature rebels against the
increasing emphasis on order and quiet in American schooling. There is less
room for play. There is less room for conflict. There is less room for boys.
At this point, no serious person can argue that boys as a
group aren’t facing profound challenges. No recitation of statistics about the
composition of boardrooms or the ranks of computer programmers (representing
high-achieving outliers) can change the fundamental fact that boys by the
millions are falling behind. Boys by the millions are lost. They’re losing
ground at school. They’re more than three times as likely to commit suicide.
They’re more than twice as likely to die in an opioid overdose. They’re almost
seven times as likely to be a victim of gun violence.
Much of the cultural and ideological war over masculinity
boils down to two competing concepts — channeling or transformation. The
traditional — or channeling — view says that this male nature, more aggressive
and physical, represents neither virtue nor vice. It just is. The necessity is to train a young man to channel his essential
nature to virtuous ends, to give him a meaningful purpose that resonates with his
core identity and sense of self. To oversimplify (and paraphrase a key scene in
American Sniper), wolf or sheepdog?
Make the choice.
The channeling philosophy requires male role models. It
requires a father or (second-best) a father figure who can guide and train a
young man as he grows. At best, the the father shows and tells. He models the
values and behavior he wants to see in his son, and he affirmatively teaches
him why he lives the way he does.
Two recent stories — one in Vox and one in the New York
Times — show the importance of masculine purpose and masculine modeling to
male flourishing. In the first story, Arizona sociology professor Jennifer
Carlson notes that, for men, becoming a “citizen protector” underlies a core
part of American gun culture. It provides a sense of distinct value in a
culture that is increasingly devaluing masculinity in education and commerce.
Here’s Carlson:
Neither aggressive criminals (the
“wolves” in gun culture parlance) nor meek victims (the “sheep”), gun carriers
see themselves as valiantly straddling a moral space of heroic violence. They
are sheepdogs. This citizen-protector ethic redefines men’s social utility to
their families.
I don’t agree with everything in Carlson’s piece, but she
touches on real truth here. To make a man a protector is to give him purpose.
To deny him the means of protecting his family is to undercut that purpose.
The second piece discusses a fascinating and discouraging
long-term study of the disparate outcomes of white boys and black boys. It
turns out that black men tend to have worse outcomes than white men even when
they both start their lives rich and relatively privileged.
There was, however, a limited exception. There were a few
neighborhoods where black men did just as well as whites. These communities
generally had less racial discrimination, recorded lower poverty rates, and
shared this crucial characteristic as well:
Intriguingly, these pockets —
including parts of the Maryland suburbs of Washington, and corners of Queens
and the Bronx — were the places where many lower-income black children had
fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own
fathers were present or not.
In other words, the presence of a critical mass of
fathers had a positive effect even on boys who didn’t have a father at home.
This is an astonishing commentary on the power of male role models. With that
in mind, look at these stunning statistics:
There it is. The fatherhood crisis in two terrible
charts. Those who understand the fundamental nature of young boys and their
fundamental need for men to show them how to live understand instantly the
roots of the challenge for young black men.
Let’s contrast the channeling model, which places a
premium on masculine purpose and masculine role modeling, with the
transformation model — a fashionable view on the social left. According to this
view, traditionally “male” characteristics such as rambunctious play or
aggression are often little more than “gendered” constructs, and even if
they’re partially biological they can be overcome through training and
conditioning.
Traditional masculinity, thus, is toxic to its core. Male
role-modeling (to the extent it models traditional masculinity) is also toxic.
Men can and should learn different ways of being.
My friend Ben Shapiro discusses a radical version of
transformation in a piece today on National
Review. A Swedish preschool has “cleared the room of cars and dolls. They
put the boys in charge of the play kitchen. They made the girls practice
shouting ‘No!’” A glowing New York Times
story described the social experiment this way: “Science may still be divided
over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture, but many of
Sweden’s government-funded preschools are doing what they can to deconstruct
them.”
It would be a mistake to overemphasize the cultural reach
of the transformation model. Boys’ negative outcomes are due to absent fathers
far more than to social radicals (though the transformation model has certainly
contributed to the mistaken notion that women can generally raise boys just as
effectively as men can), but it’s no exaggeration to say that the gender radicals
are aggressive, and that their ideas are gaining increasing acceptance in all
levels of Western education and in the culture at large.
It’s the momentum and energy of the transformation model
that explains much of the hostility, for example, to Canadian professor Jordan
Peterson. He first came to fame by aggressively pushing back against the new
gender orthodoxy in a series of viral videos, but he’s reached entirely new
levels of influence by reaching (mainly) young men with a message of strength and
purpose.
His book 12 Rules
of Life: An Antidote to Chaos is powerful for numerous reasons (I reviewed
it for the magazine here),
but two stand out for these purposes. First, Peterson offers a philosophical
rebuttal to the transformation model of masculinity. He rebuts the notion that
masculinity is either a social construct or something to be socially engineered
away. Yet he also — through his stories and (crucially) through his personal
example of resisting leftist bullying — acts as a role model for young men who
too often lack a meaningful masculine influence in their lives.
In other words, he’s not just providing a purpose; he’s
showing what a purpose-driven life looks like. That’s not to endorse all the
things that he says (I’m hardly an expert on all his writings and all of his
hundreds of videos), but it’s to describe the actual, real-world effect of his
work. It’s why he gives men hope and helps provide meaning.
There’s an old, oft-abused saying, “boys will be boys.”
To the extent that it excuses destructive or oppressive behaviors, it’s
pernicious. But it’s also a statement of fact. Boys will be boys, with all their physicality, aggression, and
exuberance. The task of a nation and a culture is to channel that nature to
virtuous ends and to applaud the proper development of their distinct masculine
identities. That’s what good fathers do. That’s what Peterson does. In the
battle against social transformation, I pray their voices win the day.
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