Allan Shore and Erick Martinez try to discuss “boys will be boys” with Chad Miller on Twitter. Turns out, the conversation was too long for 140 characters.
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Real men like to poke each other. They are known to do it on an intrapersonal basis with intimates on Facebook, but they do so just as much when it comes to defending their positions when Twittering about the public commentaries. Which is an interesting demonstration of how men like to account for their positions when their ideas get pushed and shoved about. It seems that 140 characters just can’t do justice sometimes to the wisdom of our ideas. So instead we do what real men do: We poke at those who don’t do as we like. Real men like to win. (Don’t take our word for it, a link to verify some of the above is here.)
This is what was happening a few days ago when my work and life collaborator, Erick Martinez (co-contributor to this piece), and I were messaging together about a cultural exploration we’ve been undertaking, a traveling and commentary adventure called The New Man Project. It’s a bit of a different twist on the theme of what it means to be a Good Man. As it happens, in so doing we stumbled upon the wisdom of Chad Miller (aka @ReWritingDad) whose words we took a bit of exception to.
And because what he was doing suggested he was promulgating a common logical trap, it seemed necessary to correct him of the error of his ways. The guy was, after all, trying to put a new coat of paint over the blemishes of an infrastructure that had long passed its “use by” date. Thus, with all good intentions, we poked him. Poked him pretty hard, actually. Maybe even a few times.
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BLAMING THE VICTIMS
What Chad was said that got us started was: “Boys will always be boys. What kind of boys they are is up to us parents.”
It’s a common enough sentiment. Arguably, it is a good part of the reason why people of all sorts turn to The Good Man Project. They think such ideas are a reflection of what is and what might be better.
But Chad is wrong. Boys can’t “be” boys in the sense of the immutable nature that concept implies, and then have us all go about blaming them or more often their parents for the errors of their ways. Boys turn into the kinds of men we have in our society—and sometimes not such good, nice, caring, affection, and other-oriented guys—because childhood teaches them to comply with social normative expectations. And those convictions are strong enough so that even the well-intended of parents cannot override the results!
Blaming the boys or the parents just doesn’t cut it, and it was time (in my opinion, not Erick’s, as he was innocent of the jabbing at this point!) that we helped people stop this kind of thinking.
So I poked, Chad; and then I poked him a couple of more times. It’s what I do.
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THE STORY OF ADVOCACY
To make my points I used a couple of examples and called upon technology to prove the accuracy of my convictions. I’m a sociologist, after all, and that’s what we do now that we are in the place where large amounts of data … Big Data … are about to be unleashed. And I’m confident that capturing massive levels of interactivity will eventually demonstrate what we believe to be true anyway: that people do what is expected of them by society much more than they do what their parents or others ask of them.
And when we come to think about it, that’s a good thing from the viewpoint of those who favor conventionality. If this were not the case, we would have all kinds of revolutionary, let’s do our own thing kind of people—which would be very frustrating by those who seek to cash-in on consistency.
How can we have a Good Man if we don’t agree in general what that person might look like? If we don’t have some level of collective acceptance that Good Men do this and this and this, and they don’t do this, or beat up on those folks, or otherwise unproductively poke at those who challenge their power?
Connectivity technology is about to show us all just how strong our social ties are, and with that will come a rather naked exposure of what it means to be a human being, good, bad or otherwise.
What I was trying to do was demonstrate this to Chad. Apparently my links to particulars weren’t so clear because I went through a rather diverse menu of examples. Chad asked me to clarify, and I thought it might be worth trying to expand up the points here with some longer, hands-on stories about advocacy and the making of boys into men.
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BOYS AND THEIR BURGERS
My first effort at poking Chad was aimed at boys and their burgers, the scourge of obesity. If there is a larger issue that demands our attention right now, I’m not sure what it is. Particularly for the most vulnerable of boys – those from African American and Latino heritages – one of every two children born after the year 2000 will likely develop diet-induced (Type 2) diabetes.
Let’s look at the implication of that. Boys are fat because they live within the confines of a social eating and nutritional system that thrives by making them fat. Mom and dad, for all their good intentions, have little to do with it.
If you are a parent, you have likely tried, and tried, and tried to teach your youngsters to eat better and exercise more. But your efforts have been less than successful; making you now a secret hater of just about McEverything. Except, of course, for the times when you are thankful as an average or below-income parent who sees the other advantages of having readily available fast, convenient, ever-changing, incentive-based, affordable food drive-thru joints offer.
Our food system favors creating boys who like burgers (and girls too, btw). With some 130,000,000 or so transactions daily, we as a society favor these outlets so much that one of the three meals EACH DAY statistically comes from these places. Yet over and over we blame the kids and the parents for being lazy and unable to mold their children better! More detail on how the system can be changed by turning Burgers Against Obesity is here.
Boys will be boys, but parents have to shape what they do. Really? Our adventure at traveling the country to see what the next generation of men is taking shape as suggests that Chad isn’t quite right about this, at least not when it comes to the food and nutrition needed help the boys grow.
Instead, Chad seemed to think I was exercising a personal bias.
We disagree. So we poked Chad again.
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TAKE OUR DAUGHTERS
Having noticed that I wasn’t getting my point across, I switched tactics. I turned to girls. The making of boys has something to do with girls, too. Unfortunately, I missed this boat too. So we decided to clarify this point as well.
In 1993 I had the pleasure of being one of the key persons to sign off on the starting of a national educational and advocacy initiative called at the time Take Our Daughters To Work Day. Many of you likely know about it; some 37 million people have participated in what the project has now become, a daughters and son’s workplace mentoring day of unity.
All sounds good but take into account that this was not what the project was first intended to be. And with its change to something else has come about a failure of it to achieve its gender justice expectations. We didn’t change the culture so girls grow into women who are still mistreated as professionals and colleagues in the workplace (at least when it comes to power, credibility, salary, and other fun stuff like this).
Boys will be boys still prevails in the workplace, no matter how more empowered women seem to be when it comes to parenting to their young employees to be.
Anyway, what was originally supposed to happen was that, as the girls and women went to work on that day to explore the true effects of workplace inequity, the boys (with their fathers) would spend their day in a separate location. In those locations they would go through a number of facilitated power-based workshops and experiences to allow them to understand the depth of influence of the ways in which girls are treated in a boy-dominated society of work and avocations. Take Our Daughters To Work Day sought to confront this structural weakness head on by poking at the heart of male domination in the places where the money resides.
Unfortunately, as already noted, the project was forceably changed to include sons and daughters “equally” because the lawyers, corporations, and even a few social and economic justice advocates couldn’t see the error of their assumption—that boys and girls needed to be fixed together and with the active help of their parents. These critics couldn’t see what it means to challenge the system instead of challenging the victims of the structural bias.
[A NOTE: I tried to have the project changed to Take Our Daughters To Work, Bring Our Sons Home Day to allow for a different perception of equality while valuing domestic contributions. No one liked that idea at all. Around 2002 the name was changed to hide the efforts at structural change.]
My point to Chad was: if we are going to change social convictions, we need to be serious about it. I happen to believe we have to return to the real intention of the daughter’s project and make it again an active social, gender and economic justice challenge.
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THE NEW MAN PROJECT
Erick and I started on a fascinating journey across this country in January 2013. We began on the Golden Gate and have since traversed the coastal regions by going south, across the southwest, and north up the eastern beaches and suburban strips. We undertook this journey for many reasons. One was to do some personal and relationship exploring, which Erick is writing about in a confessional journal called La Parada. The other projects focus on the new ways that location-independent professionals—those who use technology to work from anywhere they happen to be—and our look at what the men of the future are becoming, what we call The New Man Project.
What we have learned on our adventure from listening to, hearing from and respecting the words of men and those who like men have confirmed to us that our structural concerns are many—and that they need to be fixed. Hopefully we will be able to share more from La Parada and SUVpacking in later pieces.
But until that happens, we’re likely to keep pushing home on our beliefs that men are changing (as are women) because the system is changing in regards to what boys and girls have to be. These new social expectations will have many implications. But they will not be sufficient to make good men or women without a concerted effort to understand the power of structural influences.
Blaming the boys and the parents just doesn’t do it. It hasn’t worked yet and it won’t work in the future unless we directly challenge these realities. And this seems to be the perfect thing that The Good Man should do: poke at other men.
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Photo: noodle93 / flickr
Men need to be liberated from this real/gentle/good or whatever the phrase is for the era – man nonsense and define themselves as individual men.