It's About the Start, Not the End

It's where we come from not where we're going to.

I opened my assumptions last week with the idea that manhood is a thing, but then immediately struggled to describe what that thing is. As I look back on it, it’s a bit like saying, “We’re going to take a trip!” and getting everyone all excited, but then not having any idea where we’re going.

Closing my last post I suggested that the boyhood to manhood framework might hold the key to a positive vision for manhood in the 21st Century and beyond, but the approach still needed a shift. So let me toss out an idea.

What if manhood isn’t about something defined that we become, but the journey from boyhood (being born male) to a healthy self-determined adulthood?

What All Males Have In Common

How did I land here? Well, what is the one thing we all have in common? We entered this world defined by our genitals.

What are the top two questions people ask pregnant women? When are you due and do you know if it a boy or a girl?

I have a 17-year-old. When the conversation of kids comes up and I mention I have a teenager at home, what’s the first question? Do you have a boy or girl? When I answer, the next question almost always involves sports or cars. I’ll let you sort out my answer to the question.

The point is that gender is almost always the starting point and with that starting point comes a load of assumptions about who we are, what we like, and what we might want to do with our lives. This is especially true when we are kids, although it somewhat holds true as adults (someone did recently start with a question about which team I root for rather than what I do for work).

Some of us fit in well with those assumptions, or at least some of them. Others of us, not so much. Our fitting or not fitting in has a serious impact on our psyches, impacting our understanding of who we are and whether or not we belong. It also shapes how the world treats us. For good or for ill, the answer to, “It is a boy or a girl?” has a huge impact on the rest of our lives.

This makes the real challenge is navigating through boyhood to a healthy self-determined adulthood.

More Than a Construct

Now at this point some might suggest I’m falling into the “it’s all about nurture” and “gender is just a social construct” camp. But that’s not the case.

As I pointed out in my last post, there’s some very good evidence that there are tangible differences between most boys and most girls, and to ignore those differences hurts boys and girls on the journey to a healthy adulthood.

For more on this, see the book, “Why Gender Matters” where Leonard Sax points out the things that get in the way of boys liking art or Jane Austen, and also things that tend to keep girls out of STEM fields (like the order of topics in a physics curriculum). These are examples I love because the difference shape how we connect to something rather than being determinative of what we connect to.

What I am saying is that navigating those boyhood realities (an interplay of nature, nurture, and cultural context) on the way to a healthy self-determined adulthood, one that embodies a healthy interplay of masculine and feminine traits, is what manhood is all about.