Research Shows Boys Not Ignored Despite Beliefs To The Contrary

May 13, 2004

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Boys and their issues are hot property, despite a recent rash of criticism from pop psychologists and talk show hosts saying that male problems are ignored, says a University of Florida researcher and the author of a new book about the changing notions of boys’ behavior.

“We’re a nation that is preoccupied with boyhood,” said Kenneth Kidd, a UF English professor and author of the new book “Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale,” published this month by the University of Minnesota Press. “One of the great damning critiques of American literature is that it is essentially a literature for boys,” said Kidd, who was inspired to research the book by his experiences growing up in a family that ran summer camps, one for boys and another for girls.

The problem may be one more of perception than reality, he said. Experts who complain boys’ problems are passed over are largely reacting to the attention girls are finally getting in recent best-selling books delving into eating disorders, body image and other predominantly female issues, he said.

“Some of these boys books say over and over again that feminism has led us astray and our focus on girls has led us to ignore the problems of boys,” Kidd said. “But actually there’s a long history of commentary on boyhood.”

Literature is one form of “boyology,” a term coined in 1916 by YMCA leader Henry William Gibson to refer to professional writing about the biological and social development of boys, Kidd said. Many of the great American classics, notably Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” are stories about boys and their buddies on the run from civilization, Kidd said.

While the first boyologists were closely affiliated with character-building agencies, such as boy scouting and the YMCA, today’s versions are likely to instead be psychologists in private practice, which reflects the growing national trend of people becoming increasingly interested in self-awareness and other psychological issues, he said.

Americans have long turned to literature for confirmation of certain kinds of behavior, most notably the “wildness” of boys as seen in such characters as Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Peck’s Bad Boy, Kidd said. Often this represents a mingling of the qualities of both the savage child, as illustrated by the protagonist Mowgli in “The Jungle Book,” and the American bad boy who, like Finn, is a little clueless but resourceful and able to land on his feet, Kidd said.

“Gently delinquent, this wild boy may be a little more likely to carry out pranks, torment a younger sister or, in extreme cases, torture animals,” he said.

One good example of the merging of these two qualities is the main character, Max, in Maurice Sendak’s 1963 picture book “Where the Wild Things Are,” Kidd said. As a fitting touch, because many famous “wild boys” in literature have been feral and specifically wolf-boys, Max dons a wolf suit, runs amok and takes part in a wild rumpus in his escapade, which is probably a dream or daydream, and then returns to find his supper hot and still waiting for him, he said.

“When the book first came out, it was censored because people thought it was too violent, whereas now people see it as a masterpiece of a great psychological story about how even young children who are really irritated at their parents can still be mad and loved by their parents in return, even if they’ve had a bad day,” he said. “One of the arguments of the book is that the ‘wild boy’ gets remade into the normal everyday American boy.”

Americans are ambivalent about wildness, Kidd said. On the one hand, they expect it in boys, considering certain behaviors to be the stuff of biology, but they are horrified by other forms of wildness, especially violence, which they regard as aberrant or pathological, he said.

The “wild boy” trope has been merged with the idea of the normal boy, but at the same time, wildness can’t be contained and keeps popping up in different forms; the boyology books both acknowledge wildness, and try to manage it or channel it in culturally sanctioned ways, he said.

Some contemporary examples of boy fiction include “Boys Will Be,” in which popular young adult author Bruce Brooks gives his opinions about boys’ virtues and problems, and “Boyhood: Growing Up Male,” a collection of personal stories edited by Franklin Abbott, both written in 1993, Kidd said.

Based on his research, Kidd believes Americans fixate on boys because they associate them with our national character. “America still sees itself as a boy, as a rebel with a kind of youthful innocence,” he said. “This kind of attitude authorizes a certain recklessness – gives us license to act irresponsibly.”

Although many Americans may view their country as this sort of off-the-cuff Huck Finn, that image is out of touch with the kind of culture it has become and in many ways never was, he said.

“We’ve had wave after wave of immigration,” he said. “America has long been an incredibly diverse nation religiously and culturally and yet there is still kind of a national mythology about this sort of cherubic American boy who unwittingly gets himself into trouble.”

Richard Flynn, the editor of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, said Kidd’s book is a groundbreaking work in children’s cultural studies. “This study is destined to be a classic in the field,” he said. “Combining thorough and impeccable historical scholarship with judicious interpretation, Kidd makes a highly significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship about the construction of childhood, and he does it was sensitivity, style and panache.”