Real Boys

by William Pollack

  “What did you do?”

  “We split it, but I think she was expecting me to pay.”

  “Well,” said his father, “that doesn’t sound too weird.”

  “No, but then when I was driving her home we kind of ran out of conversation. I think she was expecting me to attack her sexually or something.”

  “Why did you think that?” his father asked.

  “I don’t know. The whole good-night-kiss thing, you know. But, sometimes I feel like touching a girl is illegal, if she doesn’t want you to. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to. So, then I started thinking that if I tried to kiss her she’d hit me with a sexual harassment suit.”

  “So, did you kiss her?”

  “No, I was so confused I couldn’t even figure if I really wanted to or not. So, I figured I’d better just say good night and drop her off. Now she probably thinks I’m a wimp, or that I don’t like her.” Mitchell sighed. “Now I think I understand how Bill Clinton feels.”

  Mitchell couldn’t figure out whether to play the strong, aggressive man and make a smooth move on the waiting girl, or whether he should be

  the egalitarian, gentle, sensitive man who waits. Perhaps most upsetting, he really didn’t know how he truly felt. Did he want to kiss her or not? Did he really like her or not?

  Mitchell was lucky, because his parents tried to help him with his problem.

  “You know,” his father told Mitchell, “my new manager at work is a woman. I had a similar problem with her when she first arrived. I didn’t know if I should hold open the door for her. I thought if I touched her on the shoulder she’d sue me. I didn’t know if I should ask her out for a beer. I didn’t tell her any jokes because I was afraid she might take them wrong. It took me a long time to figure these things out, and I’m still working on it.”

  When Jennifer heard about the date, she offered an idea. “Hey, Mitchell, maybe you could just ask Liz what she thinks. Ask her if you could pay for pizza. Ask her if you could kiss her. Talk to her. I’m pretty sure she’ll give you straight answers.”

  Bolstered by this guidance, Mitchell asked Liz on another date to a rock concert. He asked Liz whether he could treat her to the event, and she accepted enthusiastically. At the end of the evening, as the two pulled into her driveway, I am told, they had no trouble agreeing that a kiss would be acceptable.

  So, the good news is that when parents like Mitchell’s show they understand how hard it is for a boy to deal with the double standard, stay involved with him, convey their empathy in a loving, thoughtful way, they not only help their son handle his confusion but also bring the entire family closer together.

  WE JUST DON’T TALK ABOUT IT

  Mitchell was fortunate to have parents willing to tackle issues of sexuality. Many boys report that, by the onset of puberty, they have been taught little or nothing about masculinity, dating, sex, and sexuality. Even more distressing, they feel they have no one who can understand what’s happening to them and with whom they can discuss their feelings about the changes in their bodies. In one recent study, nearly half of adolescent boys ages fifteen to nineteen years old reported that they did not think that today’s average young person receives enough information about sex and reproduction.

  But lack of information about sex does not prevent teenagers from engaging in it. Recent research that incorporates data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the National Center for Health Statistics shows that the majority of adolescents begin having intercourse by their mid- to late teens. By age eighteen, 56 percent of young women and 73 percent of young men have had intercourse. (In the early 1970s, 35 percent of young women and 55 percent of young men reported having sex by the age of eighteen.) The percentage of those having intercourse increases from 9 percent for all twelve-year-olds to 70 percent of all eighteen-year-olds. The bottom line is that four out of five teens have intercourse during their teen years. Only one out of five decides to wait.

  But, even if parents are aware of these statistics, the knowledge doesn’t seem to motivate them into discussing sex and sexuality. Many boys report that they feel they have to handle alone the experiences of puberty and decisions about sex. “When I had my first wet dream” seventeen-year-old Chad says, “I had no idea what was going on. I thought I had wet my bed. It was a really strange feeling for me. I remember liking the dream, but I felt very embarrassed. I thought maybe I had some sort of psychological problem. And, who was I going to ask about it—my mother?”

  Sixteen-year-old Ramon told me this story: “When I moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic, I was thirteen years old. I came with my mother and my older sister—my dad died when I was six. I didn’t speak any English. When I first started touching myself, I wasn’t sure if it was OK. I thought maybe I was weird. I wasn’t even sure why it felt so good, or what would happen if I did it. There was nobody I could talk to about it. I didn’t speak English, I didn’t have any friends back then, and I wasn’t gonna talk to my mother or sister. It was really lonely and I was worried that something was wrong with me. I thought that it was wrong and might get me or my mother into trouble somehow. I just didn’t have a clue.”

  Sixteen-year-old Lionel told me: “Mom started working when I was about eight years old. She just wasn’t around, so I pretty much went through puberty on my own. I don’t spend much time with my parents, except sometimes at night or on the weekends. But it pretty much feels like they just talk to me when they want me to do something or are angry at me.”

  As these statements demonstrate, many boys feel that beginning at puberty and through the teen years, they don’t have the kind of relationship they once had—or wished they could have—with their parents. Many feel distant from their parents or feel that their parents are constantly angry at them. And most seem to feel uncomfortable talking to their parents about sex and sexuality.

  But I believe the gulf that develops between the adolescent boy and his parents, the difficulties they have talking about sex, and the frustrations that lead the boy to perceive his parents as being distant and angry, have little to do with what parents actually want in their relationships with their sons. As one father said to me about his adolescent son, “I’d do just about anything to feel close to him again. I don’t know what happened to us. Between everything that’s gone on for him at school and with some of his friends, we just don’t seem able to connect anymore.”

  It doesn’t have to be this way. I have found that parents and sons can have open discussions about sex and experience the kind of parent-child closeness for which they all continue to yearn if they acknowledge that they are interdependent. They need and want to be individuals but they don’t need to separate from each other. The truth is that an adolescent boy still needs his parents and his parents still need him. If each can learn to understand the other’s needs for freedom without disconnection, I believe that much of the silence around sex could be replaced with lively dialogue and much of the pain and isolation felt by our boys who are about to become men could be significantly reduced.

  WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DON’T TALK ABOUT IT:

  THE SPECTER OF DRUGS

  When we don’t talk about the issues that are bothering our teenage boys, when we force them to separate rather than supporting them as they learn to individuate, they may retreat behind the mask so completely and consistently that it becomes hardened and fixed in place. They may, in fact, find themselves unable to remove the mask, and—just as Mitchell couldn’t determine how he really felt about Liz—they may lose touch with their own genuine feelings.

  The mask makes it difficult for parents and sons to talk openly about sex and sexuality; what’s worse, as we’ll see, it may make a boy more likely to take risks with alcohol and drugs. And because the mask makes it appear that everything is fine, it may prevent parents from seeing (or accepting) that a boy is in fact already taking those risks. But whether parents see it or not, many teenagers are involved with drugs. According to the

  rece
nt National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health—a large-scale nationwide demographic study of adolescents’ physical and mental health—in addition to the over 25 percent of adolescents who are current cigarette users, nearly 10 percent of students report that they drink alcohol at least one day a week and nearly 18 percent say they drink more than once a month. While over a quarter of the adolescent students in this study reported having smoked marijuana at least once, more than 12 percent said they smoked it at least once during the previous month.

  In studies that look at what teenagers say other teenagers are doing with drugs, the statistics are even more disturbing. For instance in a 1997 study conducted for the Commission on Substance Abuse Among America’s Adolescents by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, 56 percent of teenagers said they knew someone who used cocaine, heroin, or LSD (up from 39 percent in 1996). Among the twelve-year-olds involved in this study, 23.5 percent of them said they knew friends or fellow students who had used these hard drugs.

  Other statistics reported in connection with this major study include the fact that among eighth-graders, heroin use doubled from 1991 to 1996. Also among eighth-graders, binge drinking (i.e., drinking continuously to get drunk) went from 12.8 percent in 1992 to 15.6 percent in 1996. The study noted too that teenagers who smoke, drink, or use marijuana—the so-called gateway drugs—are seventeen times more likely to move on to harder, more dangerous drugs, and stressed that boys, taken alone, are twenty-nine times more likely to move on to such substances (whereas girls are eleven times more likely).

  Many boys use drugs and alcohol simply to numb the pain of their emotions—the disconnection they feel from their parents, their low self-esteem, their problems at school, with peers, or with their budding sexuality. Some boys turn to drugs like marijuana or cocaine in a vain attempt to ease the pain of being an adolescent, to escape its perils and confusions, to help them slip off the mask and rebel against society’s old Boy Code rules about how boys should be and about what is or isn’t “masculine.” Relying on this ungenuine, drug-induced sense of emotional safety, they feel more comfortable revealing what they are truly experiencing inside, especially the love, affection, and need for connection they feel for others. I love you, man!

  The problem, of course, is that drugs and alcohol present only short-term and illusory relief from a boy’s worries and cares. When the intoxication

  wears off, the boy retreats behind the mask, the straitjacket tightens, and he begins to repress his true self once again. And now he’s added dependence on substances in order to feel real. Drug and alcohol solve none of the root problems and bring with them a whole raft of new difficulties and risks: inability to function academically, depression, low self-esteem, being shunned by nondrinking peers, injuries and accidents, dropping out of school, and more.

  A DISCONNECTION FOR THE PARENTS

  For parents and caregivers, dealing with the mask is tough enough; when the boy turns to drugs and alcohol to help him remove it, the relationship becomes even more challenging. Parents are often taken by surprise when the boy who used to be so open and willing to talk seems to have disappeared. Many parents tell me they feel disconnected from and rejected by their sons or confused by a boy’s outward rigidity or irreverence. “He’s acting like such a macho little idiot, never talking to me anymore about anything that matters,” one parent said, referring to her sixteen-year-old son, “I just feel like telling him ‘You used to be so nice and now you’ve become a big block of ice. Why don’t you just snap out of it and get real!’ ”

  Or as another parent put it: “Every afternoon, my boy comes home, throws his stuff in his room, and then heads off to hang out with his friends at a local park. I really suspect he’s doing drugs. Sometimes when he comes home, he looks really tired and rushes off to be alone in his room. But given how distant and angry he seems these days, it doesn’t seem worth it to say anything because he’ll probably just get even madder and storm off by himself.”

  As natural as it may be sometimes to feel like giving up and just let a boy do as he pleases, it simply doesn’t work. In my years of counseling adolescent boys and their parents, I’ve learned that it’s always better to be there, to say to your son—as Abraham did—“Here I am!” As parents, we simply must hang in there for our sons, because the risks involved in giving up are too great: we may be forced to deal with drugs, depression, AIDS, violence, and all the rest. It’s critical that we let our boys know that as much as we respect their need to individuate, they will always be welcome at home; that as much as they may want to wear a mask of protection in the outside world, they can take it off at home or in other safe spaces.

  We must let our sons know that we will be there, and we’ll always do our best to provide a place they can return to for love, warmth, and reconnection. We have to help them understand that it is only through the potency of connection—and certainly not drugs or alcohol—that the adolescent years can become a time when a solid self takes shape and when the real boy starts to become a real and successful man.

  As Robert Frost understood so well, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”

  THE PEER PRESSURE COOKER

  Even when parents encourage a boy in his fight to individuate, his peers may not be so supportive. When he first begins to spend time with his peers, the adolescent boy may feel he’s entered a whole new universe with its own rules and language.

  “When I got to middle school,” one boy explained, “everything changed. Kids I used to be friends with who were just nice guys suddenly started acting cool. By seventh grade, a few of them started to drink and smoke. They were totally different from when I knew them in elementary school. You knew that if you didn’t act the same way, you’d be an outcast from that group.” Or as another boy put it, “Once you’re thirteen or older, you can’t be the same person at school as you are at home. It’s not considered ‘cool.’ ” Their peers will also reproach or reject them if boys act in ways that appear feminine or that could possibly suggest homosexuality. As a result, boys begin to harden themselves and to avoid any person or situation that might bring them shame.

  Perhaps an adolescent boy suffers his greatest humiliation when he violates the Boy Code. As fifteen-year-old Ken explains: “I think there is a ‘thing,’ that boys should be tough and mean; and I think that is a little ridiculous because some people are tough, but some people aren’t. There are girls that are tough; and just because you are a boy doesn’t mean that you have to be the strongest kid in the world or the tough guy.” Or, as fourteen-year-old Ian expressed it, “You’ve gotta really keep your guard up. If you don’t, the guys will call you a dork and tell people that you’re not cool.”

  This code to be cool can also push younger adolescents into dangerous and self-destructive behavior. One boy explained: “At parties I’ve seen the cool kids try to influence the other kids to drink. They say that if those kids don’t drink, then they can’t hang out with them.”

  One of the saddest consequences of the Boy Code is the creation of such pressure on a boy to mask his true identity that he loses touch with who he is and what really brings him joy in life. To ensure that he’ll be seen as cool, the boy may avoid acting in certain ways, expressing certain emotions, or engaging in certain activities that aren’t deemed appropriate anymore. In other words, by purposely changing his behavior to avoid the embarrassment of violating the Boy Code, he completely sacrifices his genuine self.

  “My sister and I used to have jump-rope contests,” says twelve-year-old Stewart, “but then I started to get teased and stopped. It wasn’t worth it anymore.”

  Fifteen-year-old Lionel told me: “I used to talk a lot—you know, about whatever was happening, whatever I was doing. But at school now, if you talk too much, people tell you to shut up. Like the guys who act tough and don’t say much are the ones the girls all go for. So now at school I try not to say much. At home, I talk my b
rother’s ear off.”

  “I think it was when I turned eleven,” seventeen-year-old Jake recalled. “Guys just started ranking on each other and picking on the little ones. If you wore some stupid shirt, that was it—everybody would try to do you in. My dad works at a newspaper, so he would always encourage me to keep a journal at home, sort of like a diary. I liked it, because I would write about people and stuff that happened and how I really felt about it. But when things started changing at school, I stopped writing in my journal. I was afraid someone might find it and then I’d be in real trouble!”

  During adolescence, Boy Code rules are strictly enforced and the division between those who fit the mold and those who don’t can be extremely rigid. Not only can it make the boy disconnect from his genuine self, but it can actually undermine and even destroy his closest friendships.

  MATT AND ZACHARY: A FRIENDSHIP BROKEN BY THE CODE

  Matt Green, an articulate fifteen-year-old, told me a particularly poignant story about how the Boy Code can push boys apart.

  In elementary and junior high school, Zachary Miller was Matt’s best friend. When they entered high school, Matt and Zachary began to drift away from each other.

  “Zachary does theater and likes to dress in weird clothes,” Matt explained. “He couldn’t care less about sports. He doesn’t watch TV. He doesn’t date girls or go to dances. All that might be OK, but he’s really sensitive about everything. When kids give him grief, he doesn’t know how to respond. He gets flustered and mad. I like him a lot, but a lot of kids think he’s a fag and couldn’t believe I would hang out with him.”

  Matt found it tough to keep his other friends and stay associated with Zachary. “I think I could have stuck with him if he had dealt with the flack better. But, one day, he went to the teacher when some kids stole his hat and wouldn’t give it back. He should have laughed it off, or punched somebody, or done something for himself. But he turned red and walked away.”