Boys will be boys

Boys Alone in less than one day

"Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman."

Margaret Fuller

"To know love, men must be able to let go of the will to dominate... Masses of men haven't even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving." bell hooks

What does it mean to be a man or a woman? Is gender binary or a range of masculine and feminine energy? The term "Alpha male" is bandied about in political discourse now, and as a man I wonder what it all means. As someone who attended an all-male school after growing up in an all-female household, I still marvel at how gender keeps coming up as a point of debate.

I recently heard about a fascinating documentary done in the UK in 2002 called "Boys and Girls Alone." In an experiment, a group of 10 boys about age 10 are set up in a fully-stocked home with no adult supervision for five days. There are cameramen who are instructed to not interact with the children unless a safety situation arises, but other than that the ten boys, who were strangers at the beginning, are set loose to see how they will behave. The experiment was then repeated with 10 girls of the same age with the same conditions. The differences in the documentary are startling.

The boys in the documentary almost immediately trashed the house they were inhabiting. They ate junk food, painted on the walls, rode bicycles indoors, and left garbage everywhere while they played and tested their limits for five straight days.

The girls, on the other hand, appeared to create a functioning society. They had chore rosters, cooked healthier meals, and organized a fashion show and talent show. They painted on the walls, but using their names or pictures of flowers. There was bullying and cliques, but otherwise they seemed take much better care of each other, both physically and emotionally.

     The documentary is almost like watching Lord of the Flies but with two genders. It was controversial at the time, but parents agreed to it and watched remotely. It has never been repeated, though we can see the results of all-male or all-female groups all the time in real life.

Yin and Yang are Eastern principles of the duality of masculine or feminine energies. Those energies are present in everybody- biological male or female, though they predominate and are encouraged in the two genders. There are some who see gender as only an absolute, but it appears to be more of a continuum, determined by both genetics and environment.

I think about all this as I keep hearing about the crisis in manliness and how men are lonelier and more lost than ever. I keep hearing about alpha and beta males, high and low testosterone, and how being gay is returning to the ultimate insult one man can give to another.

As women have risen from subservient status to self-determining, men have struggled for decades as to how to process it. What does it mean to be a "real" man today? To be a father? Are we still the breadwinners?

The rise of social media has had a profound affect on men and their perceptions. Men now spend more time alone- either online or playing fantasy video games. They are retreating from reality, and women are instead going to college at a higher rate and networking with each other.

There's something called the manosphere, where men congregate online and fantasize about how life should be and how things would be great if everything went their way. Things like dating, which is risky, or sharing emotions, which is scary, are ignored as young men join in a circle jerk of self-pity and bitterness. I fear for these young men that they will never know love or acceptance.

Social media can bring out the worst in men. It's competitive algorithms encourage outrageous behavior and attention-getting misogyny, racism, and antisemitism. Men are great at getting angry and upset, which is one reason most of the wars and violent actions can be traced back to men getting worked up about some wrong-doing somewhere.

I hope that these young men find their way out of the wilderness and discover what it truly means to be a human- male or female. Yin and Yang can also be expressed as fire and water. Masculine energy is the fire- too much of it and everything burns. Feminine energy is more like water- it softens and nourishes everything, but too much and we all drown. We need a balance.

Men- like it or not, we need women. Not just for sex and procreation, though that's important. We need them to balance out our worst urges. And even more importantly, we need the feminine energy hiding inside every man to be accepted and not macho-shamed out of existence. It's okay to be vulnerable once in a while, but be aware that many women don't want to see us be TOO vulnerable. Men, like women, need safe spaces where they won't be judged.

Women need to cultivate their Yang energy and not be afraid to release the fire once in a while, but that's for another essay.

Bottom line: life is all about balance. Too much of one thing and you end up with a trashed house full of junk food and boisterous ten year old boys.