Abstract
Five experts, Niobe Way, C.J. Pascoe, Mark McCormack, Amy Schalet, and Freeden Ouer shed light on the everyday lives of teenage boys and their relationships.
Keywords
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Boys are interesting creatures in the American public imagination. They start off all “slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails”—cute!— but then they hit puberty and become lazy, sexual, carefree, violent, detached, and irresponsible. They become scary. We fear teenage boys, in part because they are in-between—neither children, nor adults—and they seem to be beyond our control.
We’re not only afraid of what they are now, we’re also afraid of what they will become. Boys require special attention in school, many argue, because they’re not performing as well as girls at all levels of schooling. What kind of a world will we have when these underperforming boys become underperforming men? Some, like journalist Hanna Rosin, have already passed judgment and declared “The End of Men.” She finds that women now wear the pants in the American postindustrial, knowledge-based economy. While the trend is in that direction, it is not yet actually the case, as sociologist Philip Cohen has pointed out in the Atlantic Monthly and on his blog, Family Inequality. But facts have a way of getting lost in the face of interesting-sounding arguments, even when they’re not true.
In this Viewpoints, we’ve gathered five experts who’ve spent a great deal of time interviewing and studying teenage boys’ relationships, often with surprising results that debunk conventional wisdom. Niobe Way finds that boys, counter to stereotypes, want and need close friendships, but may avoid shows of intimacy because of pressures not to be “girly” or “gay.” C.J. Pascoe notes how similar pressures lead to bullying behavior. She argues that bullying that appears homophobic is actually targeted at not-masculine-enough boys, and, interestingly, plays an important role in heterosexual boys’ friendships. In contrast to Way and Pascoe, Mark McCormack finds British boys to be emotionally healthy and engaging in deep friendshipties. He attributes these expressions of intimacy to the relatively lower rates of homophobia in Britain, as compared with the United States where similar behavior would earn boys the label of fag. Amy Schalet offers a comparative focus on the sexual and romantic socialization of boys in the United States and the Netherlands. She finds that Dutch culture supports youthful romance and sex as healthy and something to be celebrated, whereas American culture treats sex among teens as inappropriate. Lastly, Freeden Oeur looks at relationships among poor black teenage boys in an all-black high school where black adult administrators consciously cultivate a sense of manhood based on work and fatherhood.