The problem with “making men out of boys".
Seeing children as “human becomings" rather than “human beings", and devaluing childness, is at the roots of child abuse.
My last article, “Heroes, fathers and sons” about neglected aspects of the effect of fathering on the socialization of children received much more attention than what I’m used to, considering my very first article did not exceed 40 reads, so I decided to write another article from a feminist and anti adultist perspective on the abuse of boys in particular. I’m interested in answering a question that I’ve seen very often, which is why institutions in general, and male institutions in particular, tend to be the breeding ground of so much child abuse. A lot of people have tried to answer it, and a frequent explanation is that any institution that puts men in a position of unchecked authority over children is bound to be exploited by sexual predators. This explanation has some truth to it, but purposefully avoids to dig deeper into the issue. It’s essentialist in nature, as it asserts that women are “natural carers” of children (ignoring, for example, that women are the vast majority of non sexual abusers of infants and younger children), and that children are vulnerable to abuse because of their nature, not because of the adultist society they live in. It also implies that if “predators" did not “exploit” institutions such as for example, the Boy Scouts (whose roots are inherently fascist and patriarchal), they would be good for the development of children, or better, for “making men out of boys". I think that at the root of the endemic abuse of boys in male institutions is exactly the idea that men need to be made out of boys. All children tend to believe that being older is better than being younger and age hierarchies among children reflect that (Passuth, 1987). But there is an important gendered dynamic at the root of a culture’s need to “turn” boys into men. No one talks of turning girls into women, and the reason is not just that generally female development has been considered less important, but that there is a patriarchal belief that there is greater continuity between girls and women than between men and boys. If women are somehow “like children”, then girls do not need elaborate rites of passage to attain womanhood, it’s just a natural consequence of puberty. But if women are somehow “like children", then boys must also be somehow “like women” (“Boys and women are for the most part
cattle of this color”, William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 3), but they must become men because being a woman and being a child is bad. How did boys become men, historically? More often than not, through abuse. Andrea Dworkin wrote “Older men hate boys because boys still have the smell of women on them”, and rites such as the Sambian male rite of passage are there to prove she was right. But we do not need to look at the brutality of similar rituals (Schlegel and Barry, 2017) when we have so many examples from the “developed” Western world. From 19th century British boarding schools to contemporary locker rooms, to environments that might appear innocent to us such as the Boy Scouts or summer camps (Paris,"camps were worlds of age hierarchy", p. 107), to the family itself, the most important institution of them all, male violence against boys, with the aim of “making men out of them", was and is endemic. When right wing men tell you that boys today are “too disrespectful” (read, not as subordinated to adult authority as they were fifty years ago when no one said that beating children was abuse) or “too soft" (read, ready to call out physical, psychological and sexual abuse against them), because they do not have a “strong male presence" (read, tyrant) in their life, they are demonstrating how even the smallest change in favour of child rights appears dramatical in the eyes of people whose entire sense of self comes from their “superior" gender identity as men, not small/not boy (Chodorow, 1998, Gardiner, 2002), an identity that needs constant reinforcing through the abuse and humiliation of those that are boy. “Just boys", “Nothing more than boys", after all, our language itself suggests that boys are lacking in something, that they are incomplete, not yet “real” people. Robert Bly, leader of the reactionary 90s “men’s movement", had too expressed a lot of anxiety about the changing roles of adults and children in society, he wrote: “Many fathers in the late 1950s gave up their traditional setting of limits…They children soon saw they had been put into power” (many children who grew up in the late 50s would beg to differ), he also wrote “Iron John", where he advocated for the male rite of passage. A material act that certifies the superiority of men over boys, and of course of men over women, as Bernard Sergent writes about Indo-European male initiation rites: “Prior to the initiation, the adolescent is necessarily, “by definition", a non-man, that is, he is supposed to be wanting in masculine nature. Now, the best way to encode this notion is to conceive the uninitiated male in feminine terms, to classify him with the women", today, the “boy crisis" presupposes that female educators’s methods are disadvantaging boys, because boys need the discipline of male educators, this rhetoric is at best sexist and adultist, and at worst, actually dangerous (reviving the pre Romantic conception of children as “corrupted creatures”, unsurprisingly it gained a lot of traction among Christians), in Italy, the country where I live in, a male kindergarten educator was absolved from charges of child abuse because his way of treating children was conceptualized simply as “the way men teach", he was later condemned, after an uproar. (https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.huffingtonpost.it/amp/entry/assolto-perche-maschio-cassazione-boccia-sentenza-e-condanna-maestro-per-maltrattamenti_it_616d2bfde4b0931431ff7e97/). More sinister of all, it attempts to claim this is what boys want, that after all children not only need to be treated badly, but want it as well. These assertion were debunked in Martin Ashley’s 2002 paper “ROLE MODELS, CLASSROOM LEADERSHIP AND THE GENDERED BATTLE FOR HEARTS AND MINDS", as it showed that: “For primary school boys, the most significant nurturant figure is the mother, and the second most significant, a peer of the same gender. No evidence was found to support the notion that boys would behave or perform better with male teachers. Most boys were marginally more comfortable with female teachers, readily identified good qualities of a teacher as irrelevant to gender, and were somewhat bemused by the suggestion that they might be a "problem" and in need of more men”. In that study, boys claimed male teachers were stricter and more disciplinarian (Es. “Men are too strict. They shout at you loads”), and that they preferred the methods employed by the “calmer" female teachers. They also claimed to feel insulted by the notion that they weren’t working enough, as they probably spend the majority of their time at school and are already learning to sacrifice pleasure in favour of academic achievement (as one must in a capitalist society): “I’ve heard that some people are saying girls do better than boys at school.” “They do? Please tell me who said that!” “Well…some people to do with the government…” “Tony Blair! Phah! Big deal!” “So it’s not right?” “No. I reckon it’s just cruel.”
Of course if these people are claiming that boys are failing to “become men" because of feminism and child rights, they must also claim that men “today" are too boyish. The success of books like “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys”, demonstrates that. As Germaine Greer wrote, “In no human society is someone who considers himself a man happy to be treated as a boy", males’s castration anxiety, literally the fear of remaining boys, of being negated puberty, or of returning boys, of shrinking, is at the root of a lot of male violence in general, and a lot of male violence against boys in particular. Mavor’s “Reading Boyishly", tackling “effeminophobia", makes this uncontestable assertion “In the body of a growing or grown male, “boyishness” is always already feminine". I want to make the radical assertion that “There is nothing glorious about being a man, just as there is nothing shameful in being (or having been, or never having been) a boy” (https://novaramedia.com/2017/05/28/what-is-effeminacy-and-how-can-we-celebrate-it/), again I’ll reference Mavor, who has been of great inspiration for me: “Puerile, a depreciative term meaning merely boyish. But, for me, the merely blossoms as full, fulfilling full-mouthed, full hearted, fulgurant and fulgent, without shame". Greer too wondered if there is a possibility that men might be the “incomplete ones", rather than the other way around. The Italian homosexual activist Mario Mieli, author of “Towards A Gay Communism" (“Elementi di Critica Omosessuale”), saw the adult masculine man, rather than the adult boyish/effeminate man, as the “mutilated", “castrated one", he calls the process of making “men out of boys”, educastration, the polymorphously perverse androgynous boy is stripped of his ability to identify with both Mother and Father, and to desire both Mother and Father, so that he can become, in the words of Valerie Solanas, “the all-American ideal—the well-behaved heterosexual dullard”. Recognizing the value of boyishness does not mean reviving the Victorian cult of the child (Kincaid, 1992) or the boy redeemer of men (Nelson, 1991), reviving George Arthur from “Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857)” or Cedric Errol from “Little Lord Fauntleroy” (1886), or to adopt the tendency of many contemporary movies of placing the responsibility of saving men or the entire humanity on the shoulders of children (See “The Saviors and the Saved: Masculine Redemption in Contemporary Films” in Masculinity, ed. Peter Lehman, for an examination of how the figure of the little boy came to replace the figure of the woman as the one “redeeming a bad man"), it means doing away with the man/boy dichotomy that subordinates boys to men and “puerility" to “virility". It means doing away with telling children who are expressing their emotions, even in moments when adults would prefer they shut up, “you’re acting like a baby”, doing away with older boys claiming they should have privilege over younger boys “because I’m older”, doing away with a culture that encourages “men” to distance themselves from boys as much as possible while women and children pay the price, doing away with the fear of “coddling mothers” and with a world where children need to be “hardened" trough abuse for the fault of being children. It means that men should stop telling each other to “man up" and try, at least once, to “boy down", and see the world trough the eyes of the children they terrorized for centuries, maybe then the battle for youth liberation won’t be called “childish”, when we will center the voices “of little boys coming to manhood amid the omnipresent threat of male violence and sexual violation where survival requires “toughening up” fast” (Cramer, 2020). But to accomplish that, men need to reexamine critically their own childhoods, to stop fearing the act of looking back at when they were “numbered among the women", abandon “it never did me any harm" culture, recognize their “male role models" as the abusers they were and most critically of all renounce the privilege they have over boys and women. The answer to the question “Why is abuse so common in institutions that are supposed to make men out of boys?” is in the question itself.
