BY ERIC MULLIGAN

In print | Published November 17, 2005

A friend of mine recently asserted that the three fundamental instincts of the human male are “eating, fucking and blowing shit up.” A look at men in popular culture would support this assertion. After all, the average male protagonist in an action or adventure book, movie, TV series or video game must kill or otherwise defeat numerous bad guys, a feat that often involves “blowing shit up.” After he has done so enough times to save the day, he usually wins the affection of the story’s leading lady, allowing him to take care of another one of his fundamental instincts. As for eating, I think we can agree that it’s essential for anyone’s survival regardless of gender.

But men can’t all be action heroes, and I believe that it’s time for the popular conception of maleness to undergo an overhaul. Just as feminists have successfully changed many of society’s assumptions about girls and women and are working to elicit fairer attitudes towards them, we must work to propagate realistic attitudes towards boys and men.

As Dr. William Pollack states in “Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood,” boys are pressured from infancy into following what he calls the Boy Code, a collection of behaviors that a boy must follow to be seen as “manly.” This pressure comes from parents, teachers, peers, the media and almost everywhere a young boy looks, and may be intentional or unintentional.

The Boy Code, as Dr. Pollack describes it, tells boys to be “strong,” and to show a very limited range of emotion, one that includes only “manly” emotions such as anger. The Code may also include being steered toward certain interests (math/science, competitive sports, violent movies/games, etc.) and away from others (English, less competitive sports, arts, etc.).

Any boy or man who has been through elementary, middle, or high school (and almost any girl or woman also) knows the consequences of failing or refusing to follow the Boy Code. The guilty party is branded a “sissy,” “wuss,” or something more unpleasant. He may be assumed to be gay regardless of his actual sexual orientation and further harassed based on this assumption. He is frequently a target of bullies. While I believe that Dr. Pollack exaggerates somewhat in his analysis of being raised male in America, his basic point — that boys and men are trained to repress large parts of their emotional selves and that this repression is harmful both to those who practice it and to those around them is accurate.

Redefining maleness could have positive effects not just on repressed boys and men who feel repressed but also on society at large. For example, as the Web site of the White Ribbon Campaign, a Canadian organization of “[m]en working to end violence against women [as their slogan reads],” states, “[m]ost individual acts of men’s violence are a pathetic attempt [sic] to assert control over women children, or other men.” A broader image of maleness could reduce violence against women substantially.

Larger-scale benefits are also likely if men are allowed to be more than “strong” and “tough.” Imagine the options that would become available to politicians, who are still mostly men, if certain issues came down to more than which candidate were “tougher.” In debates on sentencing of convicted criminals, for example, one of the most common charges leveled against a candidate is that he is “soft on crime.” Military policy follows a similar pattern, one in which cutting the military budget is simply not an option because of the stigma attached to doing so.

The Code is fortunately not as strong at Swarthmore as it is in society at large. In particular, discrimination against gay men is rarer, and the use of anti-gay language as insults by and against men is not generally accepted. However, there are still some expectations without which I could live. For example, I’ve never seen a man here hoping for a particular woman to ask him out; in my experience, the man is still expected to make the first move in a heterosexual relationship. Overall, though, men of all sexual orientations have it relatively easy at Swarthmore.

In many parts of society, however, boys and men, particularly those who identify as heterosexual, are in many ways simply not allowed to be their full emotional selves, forced instead to conform to the narrow range of behavior deemed “manly.” By revising our conceptions of maleness, though, we can work toward a society that accepts boys and men for who they are and consequently sees its boys grow up to become better adjusted, more emotionally mature and often less violent men.

Eric is a sophomore. You can reach him at emullig1@swarthmore.edu.

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