What is the Purpose of Boy Culture?

6/6/2016

Girly culture -- pink, princess, sexually precocious -- has been studied extensively. Right now I am at work on a piece that examines boy culture, specifically the norms and expectations that shape boys from infancy to adolescence. I am working my way through the academic literature, especially the works of Michael Kimmel, but I have a question for the men in my audience.

This is very much a draft.
Let's assume that boys AND girls are influenced by girly culture, and girls AND boys are shaped by masculine culture. I want to look at this from the boys' point of view. Girly culture has a purpose for boys, and it the same as insect repellent. A firm knowledge of girly culture is required for boys to avoid being contaminated by femininity or anything associated with women and girls. If all we need to protect the fragile masculinity of boys is a visual culture that signifies GIRL so clearly that no child under the age of six months will ever mistake one for the other. What then, is the purpose of boy culture?

Z Shihab

6/6/2016 06:58:16 pm

There are a few *functions* that boy culture serves, and I think people who embrace and enforce American gender identity uncritically might consider these to be purposes, with ends (goals). Among these are the preservation of what they believe to be 'the natural order,' promotion of sexual reproduction later in their lives, the retention, reinforcement, and expansion of heritable power structures (including an inclination toward violence or the credible threat of violence), and a strong repulsion to homoerotic or homosexual urges. Like all pervasive cultural memes and ideas, there is some element of self-perpetuation and self-reference involved; the ideas become so ingrained that the notion that they should be preserved *itself* becomes part of the culture (not just the boy culture per se, but the preservation of it).

There is another thing to consider: the functions this phenomenon serves now might be very different than the function it may have served 200 years ago. I don't mean to imply that there has been an unbroken chain of masculine identity throughout history, but there are some patterns that may have tended to be revisited often.

Biological differences that are now irrelevant because of technology (I'm thinking here of things like muscle mass in males and the ability to bear children in females) lent themselves to a division of labor that clearly(?) made most men more suited for warfare than their female contemporaries. Along with that comes the fact that females can (generally) only bear one child every year or so, whereas men can father hundreds of children. When there is a shortage of males due to war or other violent conflict, this fact can become important for the ends of reproduction and all of the other functions I mentioned above.

But these things don't matter anymore, at least not as they may have mattered to our great great grandparents. Overall, I consider the imposition of boy culture on modern boys to be a relic of a time long gone. To the extent that it discourages the authentic expression of boys' own self-expressed identities, I find it immoral and oppressive.

Encouragingly, I also think it is on its way out, if slowly. In my life so far I have already seen a drastic change on the degree of imposition of boy culture, at least in the places I have lived, in American East and West coast cities. It's not gone, surely. But I think it's morphing, and waning.

6/7/2016 10:04:43 am

Thanks, Z. The mechanisms of cultural learning and cultural change are still pretty much a mystery to me, even after all these years. It is very helpful to have some "insider" takes on this. Stay tuned; I will post my own ruminations within a week. Right now I am working on an article about blue for boys, and this is part of it. It's been clear for me for some time that pink and blue are not just opposite equivalents, functionally. So I have substituted "girly culture" and "boy culture" for them, functionally. I think there is probably a better term for "boy culture", though.

6/9/2016 10:13:11 pm

Here are some ideas to consider as substitutes for "boy culture:

machismo training
nascent masculinities
normative masculinity
masculine gender indoctrination
sensitivity shaming
homophobia writ large
emotional [self-]censorship in boys

Or some more metaphorical names:
'Boys don't cry' culture
'Fight Club' culture

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What is the Purpose of Boy Culture?

Jo Paoletti

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What is the Purpose of Boy Culture?﻿

Jo Paoletti

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What is the Purpose of Boy Culture?