Boys being boys

They're actually not that bad...

My grandmother had three sons (one of them my father) and said this was the way to go. “Girls scream too much,” she told my sister and me repeatedly when we were little. (To be fair, we were easily wound up and much too comfortable in her house.) “That’s why I only had sons.”

We were close enough with her that this kind of obnoxious comment made us more indignant and outraged than hurt. We argued with her, probably screaming a bit.

When I graduated from college, my older brother (who had not gone to college) recorded my graduation ceremony with a video camera that I’d gotten as a graduation present. When I showed the video to my grandmother, she couldn’t stop talking about how smart my brother was.

“He just took it right out the box and started it up?” she asked, incredulous. On her TV screen, I was walking across stage in my graduation cap and gown and shaking hands with the president of the college. “He was always so smart,” she went on. “He could figure out anything.” I finally turned off the video so she could tell me about the salt water aquarium he created one summer when he was eight or nine. Or was he just six? And how he used to be so charming to the guests in her bed and breakfast. They were always so impressed with his vocabulary, and so on.

I wasn’t as close with my other grandmother, and her praise of boys over girls (especially my brother’s accomplishments over mine) used to infuriate me. He was growing like a weed, she would gush to friends. (“I’m growing, too,” I’d protest—and get shushed.) It went on for years. In response to my grandmothers’ and seemingly everyone’s preference for boys, I adopted a reflexive pro-girl stance. Girls are cool! They can do anything boys can do—sometimes better!

Plus boys were the worst, right? They were always causing problems in class, they hated reading, and they came in from recess breathing hard with incomprehensible trails of sweat snaking down their dusty faces. Boys were gross and the only reason anyone would prefer a boy over girl was because of, as I eventually learned, the Patriarchy.

I soon discovered all kinds of horrifying and mostly true facts about how boys were treated versus how girls were—not so much the annoying facts of my experience, but real, historic, worldwide horrors. There were countless reasons to embrace my campaign to appreciate girls. I trumpeted this campaign for years, insisting, for example, that I loved my female bosses (true) and that friendships among women didn’t have to be catty and competitive (sometimes true). When I got pregnant with my first child, I desperately hoped for a girl. Because, ew, who would want a boy? I wasn’t the only one; I had friends who cried when they found out they were having a boy (especially if it was their second baby and they already had a boy). I felt sorry for my friends who had only boys.

A few things have led me to reconsider my anti-boy stance.

• Becoming a boy mom.

• Living on a farm.

• All the talk about toxic masculinity with no mentions of heroic masculinity.

• Reports about the declining status of men in the West.

It’s time to start plugging the boys.

Given the sinking status of boys and men, I’m now compelled to defend them the same way I once defended girls and women. (I’ll always stick up for the underdog.)

No one is more surprised than I am to discover that I think boys are amazing, and not just the ones who like doing girl things like reading or listening, but specifically because they are boys. Boys are cool not in spite of being boys but because of being boys. Their very boy-ness is spectacular.

It turns out it wasn’t just the Patriarchy that made traditional cultures love boys. Boys are actually extremely valuable. I have discovered this firsthand on my farm.

Not all boys, of course. There are always outliers. Some are lazy or dreamy or artsy. But the majority of boys fall into a general pattern. Here’s what I see:

• Boys like to work. Especially if there are two or more. If you have three boys, forget it, you could build a barn. You could move a mountain of manure. You could roll a giant hay bale across the pasture and back, just to see how fast it could be done. If you were an old tribal or agricultural family and you had six or seven boys? It’s not some underground deep state system that decided to call you rich. It was facts on the ground.

• Boys love to compete. If you have a task to be completed, and some boys on hand, here’s what you do: give them a challenge, set them against each other, or just open the stop watch on your phone. It will be done. “Here, boys, crumple up this newspaper and put it in the fire pit.” Immediately they are imitating basketball players, scoring goals, narrating the play, and trying to beat each other’s scores. They will turn the most menial task into a contest and at a certain age they’ll compete with themselves. Sometimes, when they “win”, even against themselves, they’ll put their arms up and do a little victory swagger or a make a raspy microphone breath.

• They love mechanical things. We have a bunny pen that lets us all sit inside and hang out with the bunnies. It’s made of metal wire and has a little door with an interesting latch. Many boys around two to four years old can’t get past this latch. Forget the cute bunny that they could hold on their laps; this right here is a complicated gate latch. Toddler boys will open and close it, observing how the door swings open and shuts again, as if it’s the most interesting thing they’ve ever seen. Perhaps there are little girls out there who would rather operate a gate latch than hold a bunny, but in many years of running my farm camp I have never met one. Not a single one. Even the gender-non-conforming girls, with short hair and dark gray jackets from the boys’ department who want to climb gates and touch the electric fence—even those girls would rather hold a bunny than examine a gate latch. The other day a five-year-old boy stood with his back to the pony we were brushing, examining a tape measure. I’ve never met a girl who would rather interact with a tape measure than a pony.

• They want to be heroes. Carole Hooven writes in her book T that around the world four-year-old boys play at being heroes.* I see this. Boys of all ages who come to my farm hear about a problem, and they want to fix it. But around four years old they are especially into it. Of course, four-year-olds are not logical or experienced, and they don’t understand money or cause-and-effect, so their ideas are terrible. I’ve seen complicated drawings of fox-killing machines and chicken-saving devices that cover the entire sky over the farm. I’ve heard about giant metal fences that go up past the tree tops and Elon Musk-level robot tractors that would cost a trillion dollars but would prevent any unnecessary deaths of my chickens. It doesn't matter. I love their heroic visions.

• They seek risk. The electric fence is mesmerizing to them, and they want to touch it. (Some girls want to do this, too.) When I had a dangerous ram in one pasture, it was common for boys to brighten up when they heard about it and beg to go in there. “Watch out for that mailbox,” I’ll say about an old mailbox that we use for little challenges in the riding ring. “It’s got bees in it.” This warning makes some boys run toward the mailbox. I sometimes give kids a bucket of feed and challenge them to get across the pasture with the sheep or goats on their heels. The animals really want the bucket. The terrified joy on the faces of the kids makes me think it’s a deeply essential experience. Some girls like to do this, but it’s mostly boys.

• They’re also sweet. In addition to everything I’ve just said, boys are also sweet and protective and like to feed bottles to lambs and say, “Aww, cute,” about baby animals.

They’re just incredibly cool, and I love boys. Recently a family visited our farm. They had two boys, and the mom was pregnant with a third—another boy. My eyes lit up when she told me this, because some of my favorite families have three boys. I can imagine the heartbreak of not having a daughter, but there’s something so special about a big family with all boys. You’ve got yourself a little nation. Get ready to build some bridges and move mountains.

Here’s a video of a boy happily outrunning our sheep. He doesn’t always get away from them, and that’s why he loves it. It’s an actual challenge with some real risk!

*If I recall correctly, I read this about 4-year-old boy heroes in T; but I can’t find my copy of the book to check.