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Boys and Girls
I raised five sons, and two things I tried to convey to them as they grew up were that it’s easier to destroy than to create, and that it’s easier to be great than to be good.
The first point is pretty obvious. Boys want to have an impact on the world. More than girls, boys feel a need to impose their will on nature, on the environment, and on the people around them. In young men, that’s expressed as a desire to build things, break things, dam up streams, and cut down trees. As they grow older, that desire to affect the world becomes a wish to scrawl graffiti over it, knock it down, shoot it, or otherwise bend it to their will.
My late wife once approached me after she’d read a book by James Dobson on the topic of raising young men. She was skeptical of a claim Dobson made: that young men often thought of blowing things up. I answered “Honey, I often think of blowing things up. Not a month goes by when I don’t imagine launching a grenade into that old barn at the edge of our pasture.” Which was true. She said that she was surrounded by aliens, and started to cry. And I understood why she did.
Boys want to have an impact on the world. Once upon a time, not that long ago, they’d have been able to set off on their own by the time they were fifteen. They could fish, build a hut, find a wife: when one’s entire youth was spent in vocational training, being an adult was pretty easy.
Today young men need educations, credentials, and a bunch of skills that have nothing to do with surviving and a lot to do with getting along, with getting permissions and identification and jumping through all the hoops that adults have to jump through just to rent a home and drive a car and have a bank account. Their bodies are ready at fifteen, ready to change and populate the world. But modernity demands another ten years from them — ten years of yearning and frustration and banking the embers of youthful passion and the need to change the world around them.
It’s no wonder that they feel the tug of mischief and destruction. That’s a way to change the world that doesn’t require the world’s permission, that doesn’t require you to tick all the boxes before you can make a difference. I get it. I watched my boys go through it, and I think I understood their frustration. I’d felt it too, once upon a time. Some days I still feel it.
When you want to change the world and you know you can’t, when you know that the world is too complicated and you’re just not ready to go out and make a serious contribution, it’s tempting to pursue something nihilist but consequential. I think that’s a lot of what we’ve seen in the past year or two, in the riots and the protests and the seemingly senseless destruction. I think that’s a lot of what we see in our inner cities today. Young men want to matter, and it’s hard to matter, now, when you’re a young man. Violence is easy; creating something is hard.
My guys behaved themselves and are fine men today. I’m proud of them. But I know it wasn’t easy, for them or, some days, for me.
It’s different for young women. For young women, creation is actually easier than destruction. Girls can create the most precious and valuable thing in our universe with almost no planning or forethought: in fact, they have to be cautioned not to create it, and society throws up elaborate systems to help them avoid performing the one act of creation which women are uniquely gifted to perform.
And today, in a truly tragic example of good intentions gone wrong, the great creative act of womanhood is marginalized and devalued, as women are reinvented as inferior men, expected to live down to the level of their male counterparts, and told to sacrifice that which has always made women worth placing on a pedestal and shrouding with honor.
There is no greater act of creation than birthing and raising another human being. That needs to be said more often.
That other thing, about it being easier to be great than to be good, was more nuanced. It’s tempting to dream of changing the world, of doing something great and important. It’s harder to live each day as we should, to consistently do the small things that, in summation, make up most of our lives — the little acts of integrity, of responsibility, of service, of kindness, and of sacrifice that leave a lasting mark. There’s an interval, when young men are young men, when we imagine doing great things — and would like to ignore those more prosaic and quotidian obligations.
Dostoevsky addressed this more deeply in the character of Raskolnikov, but it’s a challenge for many enthusiastic young men who are eager to make their mark on the world. Dream big and ignore the small stuff. A lot of us who imagined we’d write novels fall victim to that, I think.
Published in General
That’s why there are, and should be, more men than women in the military. Want to blow up stuff? Join the Army.
How does this explain what seems to me, at least, to be a preponderance of women – including young women – “at the front lines” of destructive groups such as BLM?
That’s the point: they’ve been told that the glory of womanhood doesn’t matter — worse, that it’s trivial and beneath them. And so they’re left with nothing but to compete with men in the business of having a lesser impact on the world than that which was every woman’s birthright.
Nor more terrible act of creation.
Something seems really messed up about our system of education. Does it really have to be so miserable? I can empathize with the nihilism that drives men and women (but mostly men) to violent riots. I can’t fully understand how they took the few extra steps to so actively make the world worse but if everything around is meaningless it follows that you would devalue preservation.
When a statement like this is rendered, it helps if you explain why it is thought to be the case.
I don’t think it is the case but I also don’t know what is there to support your point.
Really good and thoughtful post. I particularly loved this turn of phrase.
This is very true, and both sexes have trouble with it (even if the types of “greatness” each pursues might be different).
A really great post! It reminds us why the loss of “vocational training” is so consequential in the larger society. That loss occurs because it has been devalued. And yet it remains at the heart of independence. We trade independence for relative ease and then bitch about having to wait for the service provider. We overlook how we have created more vulnerability and sources of frustration. I am no Luddite, but we have lost an important balance. Replacing hand held devices for hammers and wrenches is not a good thing.
I am the only girl in my family and have three brothers. The essential truths of your post were clear to me for as long as I can remember. My brothers are good men but they like to blow things up. They did as boys and they still do. I remember a group of us were walking along the beach and we came across an elaborate sand castle. The females were standing around admiring it; the males started lobbing rocks to knock it down. I was in graduate school and I remember saying: now there ladies is the essential difference between men and women.
I remember also when I was setting up my condo that I was trying to run power from inside of a closet to outside. I had wended the extension cord over the door frame with some sort of adhesive to a lamp. My brother visited, took one look at it, bought a drill and just punched through the wall. I admitted it had never even occurred to me.
I have thought many times that removing shop class from school was one of the worse things we did to our kids, especially boys. They need to get out that aggression, both destroy and build.
There was just one girl in my high school wargaming club. I ended up marrying her because I knew she understood what made boys tick. She proved a wonderful mother to our three sons. She understood and tolerated the male need to create and destroy – and fostered it on occasion.
This is a serious matter especially for parents. Maybe this is even a positive point for the reduction in numbers resulting from many women choosing other options. I’m not aware of the numbers of men versus women who are gone as a result of the epidemic of drug overdoses but I can guess.
I dont recall the exact numbers off the top of my head but during this “lockdown” mode of the past year and half the sucide rate for teen boys has risen just slightly while the rate for girls has increased by several times
“Boys want to have an impact on the world. More than girls, boys feel a need to impose their will on nature, on the environment, and on the people around them.” I’m not sure about the ‘people around them’ part of that. Girls definitely often want people around them (both males and other females) to do things they want done…indeed, perhaps ‘imposing one’s will on nature’ is, for girls, more often accomplished indirectly, via influencing other people.
There’s just way too much self-loathing in our world today. Women are trained to dislike themselves so much that they want to emulate men. I look at some of these young beautiful women and think it sad that they don’t realize how lucky they are being women. Sometimes I want to ask them why they hate themselves so much. But that would be too intrusive.
I remember that great line from, I think, My Big Fat Greek Wedding (or whatever it was called): “Yes, my husband is the head of the family. But I am the neck.”
Another thing I taught my sons: “It’s harder to clean up someone else’s mess than it is for you to do it right yourself the first time.”
This applies doubly to relationships.
Well, whatdyaknow. According to Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Russian Old Believers were called Raskolniki.
Edit: Oops. Apparently I replaced the comment I was replying to instead of replying to it. Oh, well.
Another malign influence on boys is Feminism, and I think that’s one big reason for all the male drug overdoses. For decades now, Feminists have communicated that men are mostly useless twits, and that women can and should run the world. They denigrate men at every opportunity, and design TV commercials that state right out that men are stupid and they need women to run their lives and households. How could any male go through life with these insults and not feel discouraged? It’s the men’s jobs that have mostly been shipped overseas, and the women’s that stay. And it’s women who are still treated like they have been discriminated against and need propping up.
I was trying to explain this concept to someone wrt boys and video games.
We have destroyed the venues for boys to explore this balance for a great number of kids (rural kids excepted) and so video games fills that empty space of adventure, exploration, building AND destroying, and protecting.
That’s why I have a Marine. Supervised blowing up of things is very therapeutic.
Is that what the Suffragettes believed too?
I don’t know what they believed, beyond the idea that women should have equal political rights. I would be surprised if many of them believed that men and women were essentially the same.
There was always a streak of radicalism within the suffragettes. They were also upper class activists so they might have been that insane.
Well, men and women are essentially the same. But they are not identically the same. It’s the differences that make life so interesting.
All murderers starting from Cain emerged from a mother. All suffering comes from Eve. I can’t remember if it was the Akkadians or the Hittites but one of the first human civilizations had capital punishment for homosexual acts in order to encourage women to make more soldiers. I find such a law barbaric and cruel but I understand its Hobbesian logic.
And yet they were “up in arms” anyway, even before women were being told that their traditional roles were unimportant.
I would argue that men and women are essentially different. But there’s enough vagueness in the word “essentially” to permit various interpretations.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. Feel free to expand on it. I don’t believe that women were, by demanding the right to vote, necessarily denying the essential differences between men and women. Rather, it’s the denigration and rejection of motherhood that does that.
Well our perspectives are pretty different, but I’m not the only one on Ricochet (I’ve seen comments from others, and I don’t think they were just being sarcastic or whatever) who figures that women voting was one of the early indicators of the decline of… Western Civilization? American civilization for sure… and so to my eyes the suffragettes don’t represent a significantly different cultural aspect than the women I often see at the front of BLM marches. Even if they don’t understand it themselves (“the poor dears…”) that would be a form of destruction that women aren’t supposed to be part of, and the Suffragettes doing it means that it didn’t require the prior devaluation of their traditional roles the way their BLM support could be (at least partly) explained now.
Mrs. Tabby and I have known several mothers (mostly women who did not themselves have brothers) who, upon having two or more sons, felt somewhat like this – they thought their sons were some different species.