Breaking the Boy Code

How do you stop a man from being violent? How do you stop the college student who’s taking things to far, or that guy at the bar who won’t back down, or the dad whose words are fists? On one hand these are complex issues and the answer is not one thing, but at the same time all of these men have one thing in common. Boyhood. So how do you stop a man from being violent? You talk to him when he’s a boy.

At first glance, the context of this podcast is ending violence against women and girls. In order to effectively confront patterns of male violence, we need to look deeper at the ways that masculinity is constructed, enacted and resisted by boys and men. In a word, patriarchy.

Patriarchy also has negative effects on boys and men. Boys are dropping out of high school twice as much as girls. Using drugs and alcohol more frequently and more heavily. Dying by suicide four times as often. Men are committing 98% of shootings in the United States, and filling 93% of the prison population.

The premise of this podcast is that boys have inner lives—personal, emotional experiences that are often hidden from view. And if we can better understand and support those inner lives, we can better protect them and the people around them. Each episode will centre on a single boy, describing an experience within that inner life—anxiety, grief, depression, bullying—and will interweave his story with the perspectives of experts and leaders in progressive masculinity.

Coming monthly.

SOURCES

JR Thorpe, Gender Stereotypes Put More Pressure On Boys Than Girls, and The Consequences Can Be Really Toxic →

Rachel Brandt, 4 Ways the ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ Attitude Harms the Men in Our Lives →

Michael Reichert and Sharon Ravitch, ‘Defying Normative Male Identities: The Transgressive Possibilities of Jewish Boyhood,’ Youth & Society →

CONNECT

Breaking the Boy Code is part of the NGM Podcast Network. Next Gen Men is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging boys and men in the movement for gender justice. Learn more about our efforts and how you can support us at nextgenmen.ca. Reach out at [email protected] or on social media.

@boypodcast on Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo
@nextgenmen on Instagram and LinkedIn

With the debate about gay rights in the national media last year, homophobia became the mainstay of school hallways in Mumbai. Ash faced this every day with the unplaceable ache of being a closeted gay Hindu boy. “Even though they’re not talking to me,” he said on the podcast, “I feel what they say.” So each day he sidestepped one-sided debates that drove homophobic language through his skin, and gradually his helplessness translated to anger.

“It was enraging to not be able to stand up for myself. That’s one of the things that got to me the most. Because it would be odd for a straight kid to stand up for gay rights. If you take even a slightly pro-gay stance people are definitely going to start questioning you. I can’t risk that. But I can’t just stand and watch them spew homophobia. So what the hell do I do?”

Indian society upholds what Sikata Banerjee calls masculine Hinduism in Mumbai and what Aakriti Kohli calls Sikh martial masculinity in Punjab. Meanwhile Ash is caught on the frontlines, the victim of both the unrelenting pressure and cruel manifestation of a masculine narrative long defined by invulnerability and the domination of others.

The irony is that we can follow this thread from modern India to the perceived crisis of masculinity in the British Empire and the consequent rise of muscular Christianity in 19th-century North America. We are inherently part of the construction of boyhood masculinity as it has been for a hundred years.

Which means we are part of its redefinition.

Continue reading on Medium

FURTHER READING

I’m going to be sharing more about Love and how to support him through his refugee claim process soon. In the meantime, reach out on social media if you’re interested in learning how to support him.

SOURCES

Sikata Banerjee, Make me a man!: Masculinity, Hinduism, and nationalism in India →

Sikata Banerjee, The Quest for Manhood: Masculine Hinduism and Nation in Bengal →

Sanjay Srivastava, The making of toxic Hindu masculinity →

Aakriti Kohli, Militarization of Sikh Masculinity →

Rohini Nilekani, Boys can’t be boys. Here’s how to fix India’s toxic masculinity problem →

Amanda Keddie, Little Boys: tomorrow’s macho lads →

CONNECT

Breaking the Boy Code is part of the NGM Podcast Network. Next Gen Men is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging boys and men in the movement for gender justice. Learn more about our efforts and how you can support us at nextgenmen.ca. Reach out at [email protected] or on social media.<...

January 29, 2017 saw the worst mass murder in a house of worship in Canadian history: the Québec City mosque shooting in which six Muslim worshippers were killed and 19 injured.

Rehan was ten. “I remember when it happened,” he said on the podcast. “That night, I actually started crying because I was like, ‘What if that ever happened to me?’”

Islamophobia is on the rise in Canada. It’s perhaps most visible in the forms of explicit violence such as the massacre in Québec City, but it also manifests in schoolyard jokes and whitewashed media. Girls having their hjiabs torn off; refugees being told to leave. A kid like Rehan who can describe racism as easily as his evening prayers.

Violence doesn’t end just because you cross a border. And just because we can point to a historical event and say that it was an example of Islamophobia doesn’t mean that it’s not still happening now. It is still happening. We need to talk about it.

Continue reading on Medium

FURTHER READING

Fatmeh mentioned the Centre for Race and Culture and recommended their publication Race and Respect as a resource for teachers seeking to teach students about active citizenship and inclusive communities.

SOURCES

Jasmin Zine, Islamophobia and hate crimes continue to rise in Canada →

Joanna Schroeder, Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons. →

CONNECT

Breaking the Boy Code is part of the NGM Podcast Network. Next Gen Men is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging boys and men in the movement for gender justice. Learn more about our efforts and how you can support us at nextgenmen.ca. Reach out at [email protected] or on social media.

@boypodcast on Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo
@nextgenmen on Instagram and LinkedIn

Chad’s first experience with hazing was on his first night back at summer camp. Older boys grabbed him and his friends and told them to strip to their underwear. He tried to refuse but had to fight his way out of their grip, then left the cabin to the sound of the senior campers yelling, “Don’t be like him!”

Chad told a counsellor what had happened, but it wasn’t easy. “You don’t want to be a snitch,” he said on the podcast. “What’s holding you back is fear.” The risk of angering older peers in the moment and being ostracized from the group afterwards makes boys hesitate to speak out, and then the pressure to fit into a narrative of dominance and invulnerability compels them to bury their feelings deep inside.

If incidents of hazing could be said to have one thing in common, it’s silence. More than half of all boys experience hazing before they leave high school, but according to research, 92% of students will not report any kind of hazing to an adult. To put it bluntly, boys aren’t talking about hazing—at least not with experienced role models and mentors who could help them end ongoing cycles of violence.

It’s time we changed that.

Continue reading on Medium

FURTHER READING

Clementine Ford recently published Boys Will Be Boys and is a bit of a firebrand on Twitter or Instagram. You can support her work on Patreon.

Visit Werklund School’s Masculinities Studies webpage to learn more about Michael Kehler’s work and feminism-based gender research in Canada.

SOURCES

Clementine Ford, Macho ‘pranks’ and the devastating cost of male emotional repression →

Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys →

Phil Christman, What Is It Like to Be a Man? →

Cavetown, Boys Will Be Bugs →

CONNECT

Breaking the Boy Code is part of the NGM Podcast Network. Next Gen Men is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging boys and men in the movement for gender justice. Learn more about our efforts and how you can support us at nextgenmen.ca. Reach out at [email protected] or on social media.

@boypodcast on Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo
@nextgenmen on Instagram and LinkedIn

Stress wound its way into Michael’s life throughout his preteen years, growing in size until it overwhelmed him in his first year of high school. “It took over my life,” he told me. “I’d come home and do four hours of homework. This took a toll on my social life, and my physical health. I began to develop an eating disorder, which I still have to battle to this day. I lost a lot of weight. I became more of an unhappy person. I wasn’t fun to be around. I didn’t enjoy being around other people. I just felt like my life was a mess.”

“It was painful, to see my life almost crumbling. Because of schoolwork, or my friends, or just something that was stressing me out so much I couldn’t be who I wanted to be. It was really just—it’s painful to think about now, it was painful to go through then. I’m still going through it.”

Things came to a head when Michael broke his leg and missed several weeks of school. He did his best to keep up with schoolwork in his absence, but the pressure he felt when he returned to school started building up. “I felt like I wasn’t strong, like I was a failure,” he told me, “and because of that I lost a lot of self-esteem.” His mind felt scattered and unable to focus. More and more work accumulated.

Michael came home from school one day and went straight to his room. He didn’t leave all evening. He didn’t sleep all night. Emotions flowed out of him as he yelled at himself, cried, and realized he’d been holding back his feelings for years.

“After that,” he said, “I knew I had to change something.”

Continue reading on Medium

FURTHER READING

As well as being a middle school counsellor, Phyllis Fagell is a writer and columnist in The Washington Post. Check out her blog and follow her on Facebook or Twitter.

You can support Damion Cooper’s program for boys and young men in Baltimore on the Project Pneuma website. If you want to learn more about the statistics I cited in the episode, visit The Baltimore Sun’s Baltimore Homicides webpage.

SOURCES

William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood →

Niobe Way and Jessica Cressen, ‘It Might Be Nice to Be a Girl...Then You Wouldn’t Have to Be Emotionless:’ Boys’ Resistance to Norms of Masculinity During Adolescence →

Andrew Reiner, Boy Talk: Breaking Masculine Stereotypes →

Wide Angle Youth Productions, Project Pneuma →

Luke Broadwater, From anger to forgiveness: How one man’s shooting led to a new program for Baltimore boys →

CONNECT

Breaking the Boy Code is part of the NGM Podcast Network. Next Gen Men is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging boys and men in the movement for gender justice. Learn more about our efforts and how you can support us at nextgenmen.ca. Reach out at [email protected] or on social media.

@boypodcast on Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo
@nextgenmen on Instagram and LinkedIn