Not even the most loving father can protect his son from the playgrounds, bars, and parking lots where bullies lurk, where soft emotions are hunted down and targeted, where fear becomes rage, and rage becomes violence.
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Why would a man hope for a daughter over a son? Steve Almond—one of the Good Men Project book contributors—answers that question in this week’s installment of the GMP book excerpt series. (To read more like this, you can check out the book here.)
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Here’s the Bad News, Son
By Steve Almond
I’m in the library of a small college in Salt Lake City when my cell phone rings. It’s my wife calling from our home in Boston. She’s just visited her ob-gyn. We’ve been waiting for the results of various prenatal tests. I walk to the bathroom, lock the door, and flip the phone open.
My wife sounds happy, a little out of breath. “Everything went great. No problems.” She pauses. “They did another ultrasound.”
By this she means, I know the gender of the child. This is a touchy subject, because both of us have been forthright about our desire for female offspring. When my wife told me, two years ago, that our first child was a daughter, I flushed with joy.
“Do you want to know?” my wife asks.
She’s in such a buoyant mood. We must be having another girl.
“Sure,” I say.
“It’s a boy,” she says.
I close my eyes. My forehead thuds softly against the mirror over the sink. It’s my job now to say something, rather quickly, about how great this is, how excited I am to be having a son, a bouncing baby boy, an heir to carry on our silly family name. But when I open my eyes, the light inside the bathroom is a sickly yellow and my chest is hammering with panic.
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My older brother Dave and I are fighting in the TV room. It’s a boy fight: hurled fists and grunting. Our dad is seated on the piano bench, watching this awkward spectacle. He believes we need to “get our aggression out,” and that there’s no other way to do it. He’s even sort of rooting me on, because Dave is bigger and I need to stand up for myself.
Dave grabs my hair and pulls down until I’m jackknifed at the waist, my head trapped below his chest. “Calm down,” he says. “I’m not going to let you up until you quit spazzing out.”
“You fucking pulled my hair!”
I’m appealing, I guess, to our dad. But he’s no longer in the room.
I finally agree to calm down.
The moment Dave lets me up, I swing for his jaw and land a glancing blow. Later, after we’ve retreated to our rooms, our father comes to check on me. I’m lying on the blue rug, crying. He tells me Dave has a broken hand, from when he hit the coffee table. He’d been aiming for my skull.
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Around this time, I become convinced that Peter Guerrero wants to kick my ass. I have no idea how this notion has taken root, but I spend every lunch period obsessing over it. Peter is a pudgy kid with a rash that makes the skin on his arms red and flaky. I am constantly thinking about where he is, where I can and cannot walk, what to say if he approaches me.
This is how I understand masculinity to operate: Either you are a bully or you are bullied. You find a weaker boy to absorb your humiliation, or you are that boy.
This is how I understand masculinity to operate: Either you are a bully or you are bullied. You find a weaker boy to absorb your humiliation, or you are that boy.
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A few years later, the bully is a kid named Sean Linden, who organizes a posse of his friends to antagonize me. For months, they call me names and issue threats. Linden never gives any indication of why he has targeted me, and I never ask. All we know is that because I’m too frightened to fight back, I’ve consented to this arrangement.
The only arena in which I enjoy some measure of physical pride is the soccer field, where I’m small but quick, a star. One year, I lead my team all the way to the city championship game. I score a goal early and assist on a second, which puts us up 2-0 at halftime. Then a teammate tells me that the toughest kid on the other team is going to beat me up after the game. I spend the second half in a silent panic. We lose the game 3-2. I’m convinced my cowardice is to blame.
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I work hard in college to convince the world I’ve outgrown savagery. I quit the soccer team. I rally for nuclear disarmament. I adopt the prevailing feminist spellings (“women” becomes “womyn”). But when my girlfriend makes an offhand joke questioning my manhood, I punch a hole in her bedroom wall.
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I’m in Miami Beach, working for another newspaper. I make a right turn onto a main road, and within a few hundred yards a gold sports coupe cuts me off. I honk at the driver because I’m not going to let some dick do that to me. The driver responds by slamming on his brakes so that I’m forced to slam on my brakes. Then he does it again.
My fists twitch and flex. I’m like a Catholic kid frisking myself for that forbidden rush of adrenaline.
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When we come to a red light, the guy glares at me in his rearview mirror, and I glare back. Then he gets out of his car—we’re in the middle of a busy street—and marches back to my car. He’s screaming about how I cut him off, evidently before he cut me off. I roll down my window, meaning to tell him, basically, Okay, calm down. I apologize. But before I can say anything, the world swings out of focus, and then I’m staring at my car’s grubby carpet beneath the passenger seat, where, curiously, my glasses are lying. It takes a second to dawn on me: I’ve just been punched. Hard.
The guy hurries back to his car, jumps in, and burns rubber around the corner. Blood is tickling my cheek, from where the rim of my glasses cut into my skin. I pull up at the nearest shop, a pharmacy, and ask if they have ice. The girl at the register stares at me with her mouth open. I am bleeding onto the floor. “This guy sucker punched me,” I say. “Right in the middle of traffic. Can you believe that?”
I tell my friends that the cut on my face is from basketball. But I know the truth. I’m lucky the guy didn’t drag me out of my car, didn’t have a weapon, didn’t turn me into the sort of violent headline I might read about in the Metro section while imagining the victim as a pathetic wimp.
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My wife is downstairs with our daughter. I can hear them playing with the new paint set. I’m upstairs working on my novel. Except half the time, I’m not writing at all. I’m trolling YouTube for old boxing matches, street brawls, ultimate fighting—the pornography of the bullied. I watch these scenes with a scalding, masturbatory shame. My fists twitch and flex. I’m like a Catholic kid frisking myself for that forbidden rush of adrenaline.
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Or maybe I’m in my car, immersed in the molten wrath of Boston traffic. This is where I indulge my other secret vice: talk radio. Limbaugh. Hannity. Savage—our maestros of rage, each a Joe McCarthy Mini-Me. Grievance is their siren’s call. “You are all victims!” they sing. “Are you going to let these [fill in the blank] kick us around? Fight back!”
These guys represent everything I despise. They’re vampires of the soul, feeding on the psychic damage of their congregations. And yet listening to them is a kind of seduction. It’s like tuning in to an emotional oldies station. The louder they wail, the deeper I descend into that primordial realm where nobody ever admits he’s wrong or uncertain or frightened, where sadism is the chosen means of eradicating shame. Welcome to masculinity stunted at age five.
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So now you know why I feared having a son, and why, when I gaze down at my newborn boy sleeping—he is three days old as I write this—I am sometimes filled with dread. I offer no happy ending here, no eleventh-hour homily about the rescuing powers of forgiveness. A quick look at the state of the world should dispel such mush. All I can say is that I’ll do my best with the love I have. I’ll hope my boy becomes someone different from his father, braver in the right ways, less frightened. This, it seems to me, is the only reasonable hope fathers can offer their sons.
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Thanks for your emotional honesty. Learning humility comes in may different packages and lessons. All of us are capable of fear and bravery. As you raise that son of yours be sure to help him distinguish between violence and power.
It seems to me that the author is writing from his own life experiences. This does not appear to be a research paper with all sorts of facts and quotations. We could each write the same type of story about our own personal experiences. I enjoy TGMP because people seem to be authentic and brave. Often a subject is brought up that I know many people have thought about but few have openly discussed. I have not found it to be a man bashing project at all. I sent the book to a friend for his 50th birthday and I… Read more »
Pardon me for sounding rusty but this is my first time commenting here. I would like to offer an opinion towards the author of this piece and the book itself. I am a male and was a victim of bullying. Not just by boys and men. Women and girls also joined in on the torment. Especially in high school where two girls in particular, popular and snarky ones, instigated much of the ridicule and insults. There was one other I had a crush on, became friends with, and she betrayed me then had her boyfriend threaten me with physical violence… Read more »
To the author: Thank you for pouring your heart out. It was really eye-opening to see your perspective grow from childhood until now, and it was brave to write in detail about the experiences and emotional responses you’ve had to them.
“thoughtful”
But where is the evidence of thoughtfulness? It is simply the same ol’ “all men are evil” “all men are horrible” “all women are saintly”, etc. There is no thought, it’s just parroting the anti-male party line.
If there were genuinely any thought involved, one might think about how women today are praised and celebrated for “kicking butt” and being “bad ass,” or using their fists. The more violent a woman is, the more she is praised and celebrated and pointed to as a good role model for girls. How about putting some thought into that?
“It is simply the same ol’ “all men are evil” “all men are horrible” “all women are saintly”, etc.”
No, this is different. This is a parent who finds the masulinity of boy children so incurably tainted that there is no possibility to ever love the child.
A profound example of the power of feminist hate to corrupt even the most sacred love of a parent for a child.
If masculinity, as defined by you, is abrasive and bullying, then this author has every right to hate it. I would hate masculinity, too, if it were so concretely defined by barbaric behavior.
Once again, the good men project lives up to it’s true title: The Hate Men Project
These words by Lu Fong are the most hate-filled that I have ever read. Much more so than anything written in the days of fascism. The person who wrote these lines of hate is so poisoned by feminism that he believes that masculinity is an incurable disease that afflicts every man as either a passive “victim of violence” or a contagious “perpetrator of violence.” This article is the culmination of the feminist war of anti-boy hatred. A father who is so consumed by hostility towards his own masculinity that he cannot find love in his heart for his own son.… Read more »
The majority of the humiliation and violence experienced by boys is perpetrated by adults and/or institutions. Usually, feminist teachers are the primary agents of this abuse, although they are not alone. School nurses abusing boys who refuse to act like girls by pumping them full of addictive psychotropic drugs are a close second.
The bullying of the playground is just a dress rehearsal for what will happen to boys when they stand in front of a police officer or walk into a court room.
We live in a world which feeds off of hostility against boys.
This is very thoughtful…but in the end, it’s all part of growing up. There is NO child that grows up in a perfect world, untouched by bullies or the pressure from what is expected of their “gender role.” This is true for both males and females…no gender has it worse, it’s just different. That’s why the human species favors a family unit, to protect and guide children through difficult periods and keep them safe from harm.
I was the bullied. I don’t dread at all that my 20 month old son will grow up. Maybe I can offer a perspective unique to my situation. I believe the bullied – even through all the heartache – come out better anyway. I’m kind, understanding, open-minded. Do you think the bullies turn out that way? No! I think they are the drivers of the muscle cars who feel they need to come beat the other guy up in a busy intersection. There’s the real pinhead! Screw them. We, the bullied, have our own wonderful lives to live… and it… Read more »
You’re worried about your SON being bullied? From what I’ve seen & heard, girls have the market cornered on bullying. I’m curious, why all the apprehension about your son & not your daughter?
Girls snark other girls. Boys are still bullying each other with fists though. Not much has changed with that.
I’m a woman. I’ve fought both men and women. A man will fight you, real fighting and then you either go your separate ways or you go have a beer. Fight is over. Fighting women or girls…they want to damage you, either physically or psychologically (preferably both) and permanently. And it’s for infinity. There’s no end. That’s just my experience. I’m not saying each side doesn’t have their exceptions, but IMO a fight with a guy is less dangerous and more fair. If you gave me the choice to fight a woman of equal skill and weight or a man… Read more »
Yeah, and I think you’re nuts. I’m not that big but I’ve not met a woman who can take me yet.
And but it being ‘over’ do you mean ‘dead’? Because most murder victims are men, and most of those men were murdered by other men who clearly a.) had guns or b.) were their physical superior and KO’d them to death.
They haven’t killed me yet. In fact, the closest I came was a woman who tried to stab me. Not a man. You’re assuming I’m some weakling woman who knows nothing, which says a lot about you, not me. If I’ve fought many men, and yes, some twice my size, obviously I do have some knowledge about fighting. I am not going to get into a dick measuring contest so you can feel that you are physically superior to some woman on the internet you don’t even know. I honestly don’t care that YOU haven’t met a woman that can… Read more »
If you think no woman ever killed herself over the verbal abuse of men, you are sorely mistaken.
I’d reckon more men have killed themselves over the verbal abuse of women. Male suicide is four times female suicide. At primary (elementary) school I found the girls bullying more hurtful than the boys.
But females attempt suicide more than males. Of course, more males are “successful” at committing suicide than females because they choose more dangerous methods.
http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html
That’s because female just want attention. In the end they really don’t want to die, they just want to say that they are depressed. Even when blood are tickling down from the cut of her wrist, she still hopes that someone will find and save her. They still believe it will be alright and has the will to live. But men, they are so depressed that they lost all hope in this world. They believe even if he shouted that he’s depressed, no one will care. He has no purpose in life, no direction. No future. What’s the point of… Read more »
I have three daughters, all much loved. If I had three boys, things would be no different. I can’t imagine how the author has arrived at his morbid dread of having a son or why he thinks so poorly of masculinity. My guess would be that he was raised by a radical feminist, or certainly brainwashed by them. To not rejoice in having a new son, how sad is that? If the TGMP book is going to be full of male hating stories like this, it won’t be much of a book, just a collection of propaganda for feminists, designed… Read more »