This morning I am still thinking about being positive, but I actually mean to do it.

As soon as I posted yesterday and then  went back to read it a little later, I realized that despite saying at the outset that I was going to be positive, most of yesterday’s post was negative. Either it was things we need to stop; or it was, once again, simple criticism. But as Ned Flanders said to Homer, “It’s easy to criticize, Homer,” (to which Homer replied, “Fun, too!”), and I should stop taking the easy way. Well, not stop, necessarily, but make an effort to do the right thing instead of the easy, fun thing. At least some of the time.

So what positive things can we do to make boys less suckish?  We can expand their options, starting when they are very young, and try to steer them in directions according to their interests and abilities, rather than their gender or with an eye to their future. For instance, when buying boys presents, get them an Easy Bake Oven along with the football. Buy them Legos, and also buy them stuffed animals. (I’m aware that these present examples are archaic, and I couldn’t care less. Substitute in whatever you want from the world of Pokemon or whatever.) Enroll them in dance class, and in music lessons with non-manly instruments: flute and violin and the French horn (Somewhere there’s a buff, tattooed flautist slowly twisting her flute into a knot and dreaming of doing the same to my neck. [Just out of curiosity: did you read that pronoun as I wrote it, or did you substitute a male one in there?] But I am speaking of traditional gender stereotypes in order to encourage defiance of them; I think that “manly” instruments according to the prejudice are the rock band instruments, drums and guitar and bass, maybe saxophone and trumpet. Orchestrals are welcome to tell me I’m wrong.) Get them into knitting and quilting and gardening, grow their hair long, let them help Mom on the weekends instead of Dad.

That’s a big one, I think. Encourage boys to spend more time with girls. One of the things that has made me a better man is that my best friend and strongest influence is my wife, whom I’ve known since I was 20; also, my profession is populated  predominantly by women, and so most of my work friends are female. I think it helped also that I was a Mama’s boy, my mother’s favorite son, and that my very best friend as a lad was a girl, with whom I used to play imagination games with our stuffed animals and her little woodland creature figurines. Man, those things were cute.

I think that most of the traditional competitive activities are fine if the competition is dialed down about thirty-four notches. Football is a fun game when it’s pickup tag/flag football, the kind of game where every side scores a touchdown every play. Same with most team sports. The problem comes when there is a focus on winning and losing: when the point is fun, or even when the point is to compete with one’s self and try to do better than one did the day before, then I think sports can be a fun physical activity, even a valuable one. This generally means that team sports are less positive than individual sports, because in team sports, while there is the cooperation and camaraderie of the team, those teams always turn on the weakest link, the one kid who dropped the ball and cost them the game, just like Jack’s hunters turned on Simon, and then on Piggy. More importantly, the team sports focus on wins and losses: and that means that anything  that gets a win is good. When one focuses on improving, then the sport tends to promote good habits, rather than an anything-goes mentality.

Let’s see, what else? I think reading is a key. A large part of toxic masculinity is a focus on self and a lack of empathy for others, and reading builds empathy and tends to downplay the value of selfishness, especially if one reads tragedies or stories with a tragic hero, because at least half of the time, the protagonist’s tragic flaw is arrogance or egotism or both. Watching hero after hero go down in flames that he set himself has a sobering effect on the male ego, I think. Reading is also quiet and intellectual, and therefore antithetical to the activities approved under the Toxic Masculinity seal. And if we can also remove the gendering stereotypes of books, that would be great, too; some of my favorite books are romances, and books by female authors or about female characters or traditionally female roles and situations — or all of the above.

Okay, one controversial one, and then I’ll call it a day. I think that dating and romance should wait until after the first towering inferno of adolescence has passed. One of the things that makes teenaged boys awful, in my opinion, is the terrible tyranny of the penis. It may be an exaggeration to say that everything that teenaged boys do is intended to get them laid — but it may not. The old trope about boys thinking about sex every seven second is, if anything, an underestimate. This monomania leads to all kinds of terrible treatment of girls by boys — and also of boys by boys, especially in our world of suppressed homoeroticism. It also leads to competition between boys for the affections of those they desire; and boys quickly learn, if they don’t already know from sports or the kind of friendly bullying that boys do to each other, that the easiest way to get ahead of your rivals is not to be better than them, but rather to make them look worse. That’s one of the reasons why boys are so quick to embarrass and shame each other, and do things that make other boys look bad, especially in front of girls. I don’t know if it is possible to stop boys and girls from dating until they’re around 18 or so, but it would surely be helpful, especially if we could encourage them to be friends instead. Maybe if we put a focus on friendly activities instead of dating activities in high school: like maybe the prom? Shouldn’t be about bringing a date? Just a thought.

That does lead me to an interesting thought about changing porn, both how we view it and what the standards should be for pornographic content; maybe if it was more acceptable and had better intentions behind it, it wouldn’t be so very encouraging of violence and objectification.

But I think that topic is not one I want to get into.

I guess I’ll just leave it with this: we should encourage boys to hug. Handshakes are lame. High fives, especially intricate ones, are cool; but you know what’s a far, far better way to greet your friends and to show your affection for one another? A good, genuine hug.

Here’s one from me to you.