The Masculinity Myths

Believers in Christian manhood and womanhood would like us all to believe that there is something about masculinity as it is lived out in America that is crucial to Christianity. What it means to be masculine, however, varies from culture to culture, and has no business being inserted into Christian theology. There are three major myths about boys in our culture that are so imbedded that most of us don’t realise they should even be questioned.

Myth #1: Boys Will Be Boys
Scientific studies show (including studies done by Dr William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998), pp. 52-77), that boys are not prisoners of their biology. Just because they have testosterone, it does not follow automatically that behavior is predetermined, that because of their hormones, insensitivity, risk-taking, aggression and violence must automatically follow. “The great danger,” according to Dr. Pollack, “in subscribing to [this] myth is that it tends to make people assume that they have less power to affect a boy’s personality, behavior, or emotional development than in fact they do.” Surely it must relieve any Christian couple with a son that boys’ behavior is shaped more by their loved ones than by nature.

Myth #2: Boys Should Be Boys
This myth says that boys must fulfill the stereotype of the testosterone-saturated dominant, macho male who is always tough, demands respect, and never acts “like a girl.” If he acts outside this Boy Code or in any way behaves in a way that is not considered “manly,” he will meet incredibly strong resistence from society — including whisperings, stares, verbal humiliation, physical attacks, shaming behaviors, or quiet redirection by physical force. This makes it difficult for any boy who is interested in things other than sports, computers and hard, physical labor — things like literature, music, art, drama, cooking or any intellectual pursuits that take fine gradations of understanding. In many quarters, showing too much interest in school itself will reap severe attacks upon boys. These stereotypical behaviors should certainly disturb Christians, since attending church is hardly a macho thing to do either. Therapists’ offices are full of men who tell stories of stereotypical attacks against them as boys when they showed interest in a subject that was not “OK” or who threw a ball “like a girl.” It’s no wonder that boys toughen themselves up into little men and cut themselves off from their feelings. The reduced capability of boys and men to do anything sensitive at all, like care and love, has got to have devastating effects upon marriages and upon the process of becoming mature Christians.

Myth #3: Boys Are Toxic
The third myth follows on the other two saying that boys are dangerous by nature, psychologically unaware and emotionally unsocialized. So some parents send their daughters to single-sex schools and their sons to coed schools for the “civilizing influence” of the girls there. A seven-year-old boy who impulsively plants a kiss on a somewhat reluctant girl is branded a “sexual delinquent and suspended from school. A fifth-grade boy coming directly from a ’sex education’ class jokes with a girl that her sagging belt looks like a penis and gets accused of ’sexual harassment.’ …Ask why we have confused boys’ childish exploratory play with adult predatory behavior…. Such views must be seen as discriminatory to boys” [Pollack, pp. 62-3] and yet similar behavior by girls is not.

It has been my experience that the societal institution that is the most ferocious and insistent on reinforcing these gender stereotypes (with a thought-out philosophy and structured behavioral social code) is the church. This is the exact body that should be the most morally in tune and not conformed to the pattern of this world (see Romans 12:2). And yet the church traditionalists keep on insisting that the heavy responsibility for church and family are solely his and not hers, that “headship” demands it no matter what his or her skill sets are, and that the gender stereotypes are crucial to maintain whether it decreases intimacy and happiness in church and family or not. We end up with women who are demeaned and put down and men who are isolated in corners with even more feelings they’re not allowed to express.