the girls’ jerseys or “Gentleman” be added to the boys’ jerseys. Amma wore suits to school, and when classmates called her a boy, she shrugged. When I complained about missing my appointment to dye my gray roots, Tish asked, “Why are you trying to change who you are?”
Five years ago, I was cleaning up the kitchen while CNN droned on. I walked over to flip the channel, but then I noticed a particular and disturbing pattern in the reporting.
The first story was about several white male government officials who had been caught lying and cheating to keep their power. The second story included footage of a police officer brutally beating an unarmed black teenager. Then these stories:
A fifteen-year-old school shooter who killed three classmates, one of whom was a girl who had rejected his advances.
Members of a lacrosse team had been charged with gang rape.
A college boy had been killed in a hazing incident.
A middle school gay boy had hung himself because of bullying at school.
A thirty-five-year-old decorated veteran had just “succumbed to PTSD.”
I stared openmouthed at the TV and thought:
Oh my God.
This is what it looks like for boys to try to comply with our culture’s directions.
They are not allowed to be whole, either.
Boys are in cages, too.
Boys who believe that real men are all-powerful will cheat and lie and steal to claim and keep power.
Boys who believe that girls exist to validate them will take a woman’s rejection as a personal affront to their masculinity.
Boys who believe that open, vulnerable connection between men is shameful will violently hate gay boys.
Boys who believe that men don’t cry will become men who rage.
Boys who learn that pain is weakness will die before they ask for help.
* * *
Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret.
Our men are caged, too. The parts of themselves they must hide to fit into those cages are the slices of their humanity that our culture has labeled “feminine”—traits like mercy, tenderness, softness, quietness, kindness, humility, uncertainty, empathy, connection. We tell them, “Don’t be these things, because these are feminine things to be. Be anything but feminine.”
The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits. There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. “Femininity” is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label “feminine.”
Gender is not wild, it’s prescribed. When we say, “Girls are nurturing and boys are ambitious. Girls are soft and boys are tough. Girls are emotional and boys are stoic,” we are not telling truths, we are sharing beliefs—beliefs that have become mandates. If these statements seem true, it’s because everyone has been so well programmed. Human qualities are not gendered. What is gendered is permission to express certain traits. Why? Why would our culture prescribe such strict gender roles? And why would it be so important for our culture to label all tenderness and mercy as feminine?
Because disallowing the expression of these qualities is the way the status quo keeps its power. In a culture as imbalanced as ours—in which a few hoard billions while others starve, in which wars are fought for oil, in which children are shot and killed while gun manufacturers and politicians collect the blood money—mercy, humanity, and vulnerability cannot be tolerated. Mercy and empathy are great threats to an unjust society.
So how does power squash the expression of these traits? In a misogynistic culture, all that is needed is to label them feminine. Then we can forever discount them in women and forever shame them out of men. Ta-da: no more messy, world-changing tenderness to deal with. We can continue on without our shared humanity challenging the status quo in any way.
I stood and stared at the TV. I thought back on how I had prepared my girls from day one to fight for their humanity. I thought:
Fuck.
I have a son,