“It’s about remembering a time when danger wasn’t a dirty word. It’s safer to put a boy in front of a PlayStation for a while, but not in the long run. The irony of making boys’ lives too safe is that later they take worse risks on their own. You only have to push a baby boy hard on a swing and see his face light up. It’s not learned behavior — he’s hardwired to enjoy a little risk.”
The Iggulden’s book is a reaching back, yes — a cross (sort of) between William McKeever’s dour 1913 classic “Training the Boy” and (until recent dismal dilutions) the Boy Scout Handbook. Moral and ethical teaching combined with essential information and fascinating data, paeans to heroes (remember them?), and abundant how-to — how to do things that long have defined boys taking risks and being boys. Iggulden again:
“Boys are different from girls. Teaching them as though they are girls who don’t wash as much leads to their failure in school, causing trouble all the way. Boys don’t like group work. They do better on exams than they do in coursework, and they don’t like class discussion. In history lessons, they prefer stories of Rome and of courage to projects on the suffragettes. . . . The dark side of masculinity may involve gangs and aggression, but there’s another side — self-discipline, wry humor, and quiet determination.”
Feminists who would condition us all may argue that boys are doing no worse than before — it only seems that way because girls, liberated at last, are doing better; the real crisis facing boys, they say, is that they’re not enough like girls. Yet something is rendering boys enervated and effete; something is sapping their energy. Midge Decter notes a “shying away from their instinctive restlessness and competitiveness, and, with it, a fading of whatever happened to be the standards of gallantry.”
Maybe it’s the feminist revolution. Maybe it’s divorce and single(-mother) families. Maybe it’s our Spockian mores of child-rearing. Maybe it’s an outgrowth of the relativism that no longer finds innate goodness in America — and so worth defending, and its enemies worth fighting — and likewise no longer recognizes, or values, the goodness inhering in boys.
And so into a culture relentlessly finding the normal abnormal and exalting the abnormal as normal, the Igguldens ride “to free boys to be themselves again” and call upon boys to rally to their “dangerous” standard — a standard dangerous for declaring it’s OK to be a normal boy doing normal boy things.
Long may it wave.