Loving the bookish and the cool

I’ve been thinking about some of the comments on my post on real manhood, especially one from Charles that I’m going to quote at length:

I totally agree that it might have been helpful to me to have had a male role model who could have told me clearly, “No, look, what they tell you a man is, is a very limited thing. If you make yourself into a man by their instrucitons, you will hurt yourself badly, and you will spend decades trying to find your way back out to be a full human being. The only thing that makes you a man is your body. What makes you a human being is both your body and your mind.” And of course, it would have been better if he could simply have modelled that.

Do you mentor only aggressive, hyper-masculinized teens? Or do you need to mentor introverted, bookish teens as well?

Let me begin an answer to those excellent questions with an autobiographical note: I was an introverted, clumsy, bookish, unathletic, slightly chubby teen boy. I was teased and harassed throughout my elementary and junior high school years. I found solace in two places: books and the theater. I spent years working with a community theater group as a kid, and it was in drama that I first found “folks like me” who felt like misfits. Most of my good friends were girls — and boys who were on their way out of the closet! I was not remotely good-looking. I had unrequited crushes on several of my female friends, who thought I was “nice, but…” I had only one straight male friend in high school, and even that was often a tense and ambivalent relationship. So, Charles, I think my bona fides as a certifiable geek are in place!

By the way, it was the theater that turned me into an extrovert (enough that I went from an INFJ to an ENFP on Myers-Briggs tests over the years).

I spent years loathing the available models of masculinity. Indeed, one of the reasons I first went into gender work was to find something different! I wanted to know how to be a different kind of man than the men I saw around me. It was women’s studies work that led me to men and masculinity workshops and led me to want to re-define and reclaim authentic (I won’t use the word “real” anymore, it is too easily misunderstood) masculinity.

When I first started working with teenagers, I was scared to work with the boys! The girls came easily to me. I found it much more easy to offer aid and comfort and support to young women than to young men. Over time, that reality began to gnaw at me. Why was I so scared of reaching out to boys half my age? Was I afraid that I would be found wanting in their eyes too? Was I afraid that they would reject me the way I had been rejected by so many of my male peers in high school? Eventually, a dear friend of mine pointed out to me that by not reaching out to the boys out of my own fear, I was missing a vital opportunity to both heal some of my own wounds and to nurture young men in a way that they were not usually nurtured. It was time for me to grow up and get to work loving boys.

When I’m in youth group with the kids, I make sure to pay equal attention to the boys and girls. But I really enjoy those times when the boys and I get some time just to talk amongst ourselves. No, we don’t beat our chests or beat on drums or beat on anything. We talk. The shy, bookish, clumsy ones who look like Hugo at 15 talk. The graceful, proud, “alpha male cool boys” talk. The black boys talk. The white boys talk. The Peruvian boy talks. There are moments of rough humor, but I never use objectification of women to try and create a bond with these guys. (Nothing could be more counter-productive.) We talk about girls, and we talk about parents, and we talk about the pressure to “be a man”. And I don’t deliver stirring lectures about self-control and responsibility. Mostly, I shut up and listen. And I ask questions. And I always, always, always try and suggest that they think of manhood in terms different from those that our culture uses to define the term. It isn’t easy work, but it’s good work.

Oh, and yes, all the boys in my youth group hug. Squirrelly, chest-bumping boy hugs to be sure, but hugs nonetheless.

What can I offer my boys that a female youth leader can’t? Not much, except for one crucial thing: Most of these boys have been loved on and cared for by women all of their lives. They are accustomed to getting whatever validation and acceptance they do get primarily (if not in some cases, exclusively) from women. That validation and love and affirmation is terrific — but as a young man, I longed for older men to approve of me (hence my hero worship of my graduate advisers). To say that sex makes no difference is to ignore the longing that I know was in my heart and which is clearly in the hearts of so many of these boys whom I love so damn much.

And for the record, I’m still bookish. I’m still a geek. If my posts have created the impression that I am some sort of “hail fellow, well met” bouncing ball of testosterone, I am sorry.