« Previous · Home · Next »
Rallying Boys to a Dangerous Standard of Normalcy
By John
Ross Mackenzie, a good Virginia man, hit a real homer this week.
In the words of the always perceptive Midge Decter (author of, for instance, “The Liberated Woman & Other Americans”): Infantilized, deprived (“despite the ease” into which they are born), and “standing at the tail-end of a veritable whirlwind of anti-male sentiment that has been sweeping through the country for decades,” American boys “have been left with scarcely any good way either to be wholly themselves or to be assured they are indeed on the way to becoming men.”So onto this tortured landscape, as a partial remedy for (Decter’s words) this suppression of “the natural condition of boys,” principal author Conn Iggulden and his brother Hal have dropped “The Dangerous Book for Boys.”
Why that most interesting word in the title — “dangerous”? If girls are task-completers, boys are risk-takers. Conn Iggulden:
“It’s about remembering a time when danger wasn’t a dirty word. It’s safer to put a boy in front of a PlayStation for a while, but not in the long run. The irony of making boys’ lives too safe is that later they take worse risks on their own. You only have to push a baby boy hard on a swing and see his face light up. It’s not learned behavior — he’s hardwired to enjoy a little risk.”
.......
Maybe it’s the feminist revolution. Maybe it’s divorce and single(-mother) families. Maybe it’s our Spockian mores of child-rearing. Maybe it’s an outgrowth of the relativism that no longer finds innate goodness in America — and so worth defending, and its enemies worth fighting — and likewise no longer recognizes, or values, the goodness inhering in boys.
And so into a culture relentlessly finding the normal abnormal and exalting the abnormal as normal, the Igguldens ride “to free boys to be themselves again” and call upon boys to rally to their “dangerous” standard — a standard dangerous for declaring it’s OK to be a normal boy doing normal boy things. Long may it wave.
Long has this been a pet peeve of mind. You hear about this new age neutering all the time in the news. Every time you read about a school banning tag or dodgeball, or a 3rd grader being expelled for sexual harassment because he pinched a girl's butt, or a kid being suspended for drawing picture of a firearm (I would've never made it through elementary school.... for all of the above, methinks).... it's the end result of the gender neutralization of the American boy.
I'm eternally grateful that this crap didn't become fashionable until recently. I grew up in a neighborhood where there were 9 boys within 2 grades of me. We experimented with fireworks, conquered the woods behind our houses, built secret forts and bike ramps, explored the neighborhood sewer system (you heard me), and staged all day battles with self-fashioned weapons. Sometimes we passed the afternoon just knocking the shit out of each other with sticks. We wrestled, scuffled, tussled, boxed, and fought. That's just the natural order of things.
Today... sigh. Different story. I can't help but to think that Mackenzie is on to something when he hints that boys aren't allowed to be boys anymore. Anti-war groups protest "war toys." The Boy Scouts can't figure out how to pull young men away from their Xboxes. Schools violently punish traditional "boys will be boys" behavior, while parents neutralize rowdiness with Ritalin.
I like to think that the enormous success of The Dangerous Book for Boys is some sort of societal rebellion against overly aggressive PC warriors. You should read the Amazon interview with the Iggulden brothers. It's so delightfully politically incorrect, I want to buy the book based on their ideology alone:
Amazon.com: You made some changes for the U.S. edition, and I for one am sorry that you have removed the section on conkers, if only because it's such a lovely and mysterious word. What are (or what is) conkers?Iggulden: Horse chestnuts strung on a shoelace and knocked against one another until they shatter. In the entire history of the world, no one has ever been hurt by a conker, but it's still been banned by some British schools, just in case. Another school banned paper airplanes. Honestly, it's enough to make you weep, if I did that sort of thing, which I try not to. Reading Jane Austen is still allowed, however.
Amazon.com: What knowledge did you decide was important to add for American boys? I notice in both editions you have an excellent and useful section on table football, as played with coins. Is paper football strictly an American pastime? I'm not sure I could have gotten through the fourth grade without it.
Iggulden: I like knowing the details of battles, so Gettysburg and the Alamo had to go in, along with the Gettysburg address, stickball, state capitals, U.S. mountains, American trees, insects, U.S. historical timelines, and a lot of others. Navajo code talkers of WWII is a great chapter. It probably helps that I am a huge fan of America. It was only while rewriting for the U.S. that I realized how many positive references there already are. You have NASA and NASA trumps almost anything.
As for paper football, ever since I thought of putting the book together, people keep saying things like "You have rockets in there, yes? Everyone loves rockets!" Paper football is the first American one, but there will be many others. No book in the world is long enough to put them all in--unless we do a sequel, of course.
Buy The Dangerous Book for Boys.
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://op-for.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1345
Comments
My son received that book for his birthday last summer...along with a .22 rifle.
He will be ready.
Now days if you act like a boy, they jack you up on ridillin.(spell)
I find it amusing to hear women say that they know what it is like to be a young boy.lol
I bought a copy for another Marine with three (3) sons, since mine is yet too small to enjoy it. It's outstanding, full of nifty advice. Highly recommended.
I will have to add this to the library. I did many of the fun things John describes too. What concerns me is we came up with all those games and adventures on our own, but now, it seems, a book is needed to inspire.
To the parents out there - have things gotten that bad???
I'm sure I'd be jailed today. Making volcanos with sugar and saltpeter and lighting them, shooting at frogs with pea shooters, setting fire to a hollow tree, falling in the creek, falling through the ice into the creek...
Kids today have more toys, but I had more fun.
We played with BB guns and slingshots. A SWAT team would be called today if that was seen!
MarkD your right, we had more fun.
Microwaving and freezing GI Joes & Cobras while having the lugar pistol look alike known as Megatron in my hand, I'm surely on the list for trial at the Hague. Adults can't have a beer anymore with coworkers without being scrutinized. Only an ice cream party. Amazing.
I got the Daring Book for Girls because my daughter needs it desperately.
I roughhouse with my son (who is 18 months old) every chance I get. I just bought him a toy lightsaber and we were having epic battles this weekend. His needs are already all scabbed up from falling down... I think we're off to a good start. Maybe I should get the book, just to have it around.
I'd like to read it myself...
You might also read "Wild At Heart" by John Eldredge. Same point of view. He said the question is often asked, "what happened to all the men?" He says in reply, "society turned them into women". It's also a good read.
Recently all the nephews were over with my grandson, began punching each other for fun, One came up and hollered that the other had hit him. I responded with Hell, hit them back and was banned from being around the boys for promoting behavior that would get the kids locked up come school time.
Once they all surrounded me and one called the other a motherhumper I said Boys, Boys don't say motherhumper were your Mom's can hear cause Uncle Barry will get the blame, say "Melon farmer" they all grinned and began jumping up and down screaming at the top of their lungs, "MOTHERHUMPER, MOTHERHUMPER! I get no respect.
Post a comment
Potential comment conditions listed here. Oh, and you may use basic HTML for formatting.
My husband bought this book for our 12 year old son. I don't think he fully appreciates it just yet, but he reads it. We constantly combat the over mothering he gets from his mom (he lives with us part time) and have to encourage him to get dirty and take risks, like it's okay to fall off his bike. I think he's afraid of going home with skinned knees and getting hell for it, but we strongly believe that boys need to be boys.