The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...

The Bully in the Mirror
books this fall is "Stiffed," an account of the "masculinity crisis," by Susan
Faludi, author of "Backlash."
Some academics claim to have seen the crisis coming for years. After the recent
outbreaks of school violence in Littleton, Jonesboro and Springfield, Pollack
said, "It's boys who are doing this, because of this code about what they can say
and can't say, how they feel about their body self, how they feel about their
self-image, how they feel about themselves in school." There's "no coincidence,"
he added, that boys are unleashing this violence in school.
You don't have to buy the alarmism implicit in Pollack's point to appreciate that
body-image concerns form part of a larger, more complex and in some ways
changeless ethos of male adolescence that would be trite and obvious if it weren't
so true: boys, like girls, are keenly aware of, and insecure about, their physical
appearance. Boys, unlike some girls, do not talk about it with their parents, other
adults or even among themselves, at least in part for fear of being perceived as
"sensitive," a code word for "weak." Indeed, they tease each other, on a scale
from casually nasty to obsessively cruel, about any perceived flaws, many of
which involve some physical difference -- size, shape, complexion, coordination
-- and since adolescent teasing begs for an audience, much of this physical
ridicule occurs in school. If you don't change the "culture of cruelty," as Kindlon
and Thompson put it in their book, you'll never defuse the self-consciousness
and concerns about body image in boys.
"When you go to ask men questions about psychological issues," Kindlon says,
"you've got two things going against you. One is emotional literacy. They're not
even in touch with their emotions, and they're doing things for reasons of which
they're not even aware. You're not getting the real story because they don't even
know the whole story. And even if they did, a lot of them would underrepresent
what the problem was, because you're not supposed to ask for help. If you can't
ask for directions when you're lost in a foreign city, how are you going to ask for
help about something that's really personal? Especially if you're an eighth
grader."
etting boys to talk about their bodies is not an easy thing to do, as I learned
when I met with several groups of teen-agers. On one occasion, six
middle-school boys and I sat around a table on a warm afternoon very
close to the end of the school year at a Manhattan public school in Chelsea. I
asked them to describe the feelings they have when they look at themselves
alone in the mirror, and for its sheer confused candor, it was tough to top the
remark of Mickey, a 13-year-old who begins the ninth grade in a public school
early next month.
"I don't know," he said at first. "I can't even tell what stage of puberty I'm in.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990822mag-boys-self-image.html (7 of 18) [8/22/1999 9:17:22 PM]