An interesting new book by Niobe Way, Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture, examines what’s troubling boys. Way is a psychology professor at New York University and director of the Ph.D. program in developmental psychology.
Rebels with a Cause is a book that will probably get criticized by conservatives, and indeed there are ideas here that deserve challenging. The book too often parrots the modern leftist line that gender is a social construct and that capitalism is an evil that drives men to competitiveness, when in fact men are just competitive and like to own cool stuff by nature.
Yet Rebels with a Cause also contains wisdom about helping boys in a culture that has become hostile and frightening to them. Way presents many of her arguments with deliberation and care and makes points that fair-minded people would consider cogent.
To simplify the data and philosophy: boys not only have a “hard” side that likes sports, trucks, and toughness, but a “soft” side that appreciates the arts, tenderness, and introspection. In the past several decades, the separation between these two sides has grown wider, leaving boys lonely, anxious, and unsure of who or what they are. They are taught to conquer, make money, and not feel too much. There is nothing wrong with this, as drive and stoicism have their honor, but it leaves out half of the male psyche. Boys need to nourish all of their aspects, including their softer side.
Way uses the terms “thin story” and “thick story” to describe how boys (and girls) are depicted as opposed to how they really are. A thin story describes a boy as interested in football, cars, sex, and the drive up the career ladder. That story is not false. Yet the “thick story” fleshes this thin story out to include an appreciation for art, a knowledge of poetry and jazz, kindness, genuine self-giving love for his wife, and the ability to articulate the signals of the subconscious. Thin and thick stories don’t eliminate each other, but form an integrated, well-adjusted person.
In fact, men and women used to more easily be their full selves. A fascinating finding that Way reports is that researcher Lloyd Lueptow found that students in the 1990s were “significantly more likely to report gender differences than those in the early 1970s, especially when it came to qualities such as ‘sympathetic,’ ‘talkative,’ ‘friendly,’ and ‘affectionate,’ which were seen as typical of women; whereas qualities such as ‘aggressive,’ ‘self-confident,’ ‘decisiveness,’ and ’adventurous’ were seen as typical of men.”
This finding is obvious to people who were children, teenagers, and young adults in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Even going to Catholic schools at the time, it was obvious that boys and girls, while having immutable biological characteristics, also had a lot of crossover in their personalities. There were girls who were funny, athletic, reticent, and tough, and boys who were poetic, artistic, sensitive, and gentle. Such children were not immediately categorized as gay — never mind transgender.
Today, more people want to straightjacket boys and girls into narrow gender archetypes, to trap them in a “thin” story rather than a “thick” one that represents them in full. Conservative commentators declare that men like to race cars and chop wood and that women want to have babies and stay at home (ironically, many of the pundits who say this are men who are keyboard warriors who have never played sports themselves). Liberals counter that gender is a social construct — yes, Way defends this dumb argument in Rebels with a Cause — and that there is no such thing as male or female. (That is, unless you are transgender, in which case femininity and masculinity are realities that each sex can slip into.)
The truth is that male and female are realities, but within those realities there is a universe of thoughts and feelings. Rebels with a Cause made me think of one of the most well-adjusted men I ever met, a polymath explorer and adventurer named Luis Marden.
Marden worked for National Geographic. I met him in the 1980s. Born in 1913, he was a pioneer of underwater photography and spoke five languages. His house, on the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia, was custom built for him by Frank Lloyd Wright. Marden found the wreck of the Bounty and dove with Jaques Cousteau. He always wore a Brooks Brothers suit, a “shirt of sea island cotton” as his 2003 obituary put it, and a silk tie.
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At age 70, Marden did a story on ultralights, small airplanes, and flew one around his house in Virginia. I was a teenager when I met him through my father, and to this day I remember him vividly. Marden struck me as powerfully masculine, and that meant all of his aspects. He was learned, erudite, gentle, and well-read, yet also fierce and fearless about his wife and the world, which fascinated him and called him to adventure. He would have thought conservatives beating their chests about chopping wood ridiculous and liberals preaching that there is no gender insane. Luis Marden was a man in full.
America is not producing such men anymore. And neither liberals nor conservatives are offering the right solutions.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.