Raising a Man

I read an interesting post this morning (on an academic blog, sorry!) in which Dean Dad pondered how best to model manhood for his son.  In particular, he discussed watching Jets-Steelers on Sunday, and trying to explain to his son (who I think is 6 or 7) that he was rooting for the Jets.  He was doing so largely because he couldn't stomach the idea of Ben Roethlisberger, eight months removed from escaping sexual assault charges by the skin of his teeth (for the second time in less than a year, by the way), making the Super Bowl.  The challenge, according to Dean Dad, is how to explain all of this in terms that a child can understand, without completely vilifying a sports culture that he will end up navigating in some way, shape, or form.

We've been lucky so far, in that there hasn't been a lot of pushback externally about how Nicholas views gender (unless they're doing things at day care that haven't filtered back to us).  But the day will come when he has to figure out what it means to be a boy and then a man, and his friends will have a pretty large say in that.  As someone who was never very good at being a stereotypical boy, it's going to take some work to figure out how to help him through that process.  As you might guess, I was never into sports (certainly not after elementary school), and in time-honored tradition, any boy who revealed an affinity for intellectual pursuits became, well, unpopular.  But there's a strong link in American culture among sports, normative masculinity, and misogyny.  That is, you can't be a "real man" in some circles unless you are athletic and treat women as objects for your entertainment.

There's nothing inherently wrong with sports, and I want to underscore that.  If Nicholas wants to participate in sports, I'm all for it, as long as he wants [ed.: future Nicholas, if you stumble on this blog as a teen, your mother and I will have aneurysms if you decide to play football].  But as Dead Dad writes:

I just don’t want him to have to buy into macho-jock-asshole culture to do it. I want him to understand that there’s a difference between being a man and joining the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club.

Teaching a thoughtful boy is a challenge in this culture. One of his friends at school told him about watching games at a Hooters restaurant with his Dad; I had to explain, carefully, why we don’t and won’t go there. Boys in groups can get carried away -- being in the group while maintaining your own sense of boundaries can be hard even for adults.

Like I said, in some ways this is kind of moot at the moment, so for now I guess I'll just keep trying to be the kind of person (and kind of man) that I hope Nicholas will become some day, and hope that some of it seeps in by osmosis.  We'll deal with the rest later.