Boys Aren't Raised to Be Men. They're Raised Not to Be Girls.

What if everything we taught boys about becoming men began with teaching them that being like a woman was something to avoid?

I heard Jameela Jamil say something recently that stopped me completely yesterday. She said:

“Boys aren’t raised to be men, they are simply raised not to be girls.”

That sentence has been sitting with me because the more I think about it the more I realise that she’s identified something we’ve been doing for generations without ever really naming it.

I have a son and a daughter and I also have the discomfort of being able to look back at the boy I was and the man I became as a result of what I was taught growing up in the 1970s and 80s in northern England.

I was taught not to cry like a girl, don’t be such a girl, not to throw like a girl, just man up and grow a pair and there was nothing subtle about any of it. The message was explicit and absolute: whatever you do and under no circumstances must you ever become like a girl because becoming like a girl takes you further away from the man you’re supposed to grow up to and aspire to become.

Here’s what I know about that now: boys aren’t less emotional than girls. Boys learn very early that many of the emotions we experience aren’t acceptable to show. Sadness, fear, uncertainty, asking for help, vulnerability, insecurity, needing reassurance, handling rejection, feeling hurt or crying were all there, it was just that we learned they shouldn’t be.

When an adult tells a little boy that “boys don’t cry”, the crying doesn’t stop because the sadness hasn’t disappeared. When we tell him to “man up” because he’s frightened, the fear doesn’t disappear. He just learns not to show it and develops unhealthy coping methods that generally revolve around suppression.

When his first girlfriend rejects him and his mates tell him to get over it, the rejection still hurts. He’s still feeling every one of those completely natural emotions, only now he’s also learning that he shouldn’t be and that if he does, everyone will think there’s something wrong with him.

So he suppresses it, he bottles it, he pushes it down and makes sure nobody else can ever see it…and we call that strength. We call remarkably emotionless men strong, consistent, a safe pair of hands and leaders, all complimentary and all reinforcing the very behaviours that so often restrict emotional development.

We haven’t taught him how not to feel the emotion because that is impossible and the fact that he continues to feel it is all the evidence we should ever need that these emotions are completely natural.

What we’ve actually taught him is that he shouldn’t feel these emotions whilst doing nothing to teach him how to understand, experience and express them safely.

The emotions remain but now he believes he’s wrong for feeling them. He feels frightened but believes he shouldn’t be. He feels hurt but believes showing hurt makes him weak. He feels insecure but has been taught that a man should be confident. He feels rejected but has no idea what to do with the pain.

That isn’t teaching emotional regulation, it’s teaching emotional dysregulation and it’s being created right in front of us, so we should hardly be surprised when some of those boys grow into men who have absolutely no idea what to do with powerful emotions when they arrive.

I know this because I became one of those men. I could suppress or bottle any emotion instantly whilst appearing to remain calm and centred to anyone watching. I was completely incapable of identifying what was actually going on inside me at the time because I would never spend enough time in the uncomfortable emotion to do so.

I didn’t recognise myself as frightened, insecure, ashamed or vulnerable because those weren’t emotions I had learned how to understand, identify or own. Instead I would become angry, defensive, certain, frustrated or controlling. I could withdraw, project and become distant, could appear aloof and arrogant and at times like I didn’t care, even though none of those things would have been true at the time.

I needed to prove I was right and make whatever I was feeling somebody else’s fault. It took me years to understand what was actually sitting underneath those behaviours and by then the women I loved had experienced the consequences of me not knowing.

All of which brings me back to Jameela because something else I came across recently suddenly made what she was saying land considerably harder.

There’s a piece by the brilliant Harry Kloser-Pitcher, who goes by @shesnotcrazyseries on Instagram, that talks about what a woman’s body actually goes through during childbirth. The pain index that scientists created to measure the scale of pain different operations and injuries have, puts breaking 20 bones all at once at 43. At around 45, the human body is designed to lose consciousness to protect itself.

Childbirth comes in at 57. Her body should shut down yet it doesn’t. She stays conscious and she keeps pushing.

Then the baby comes and her hormones drop by 90% within 72 hours. That’s the biggest hormonal crash a human body survives. To put it in context, for a man to lose that much testosterone at our normal rate would take about 180 years. She experiences that in three days. Then she doesn’t sleep a full night for at least eight months. Eight months of no sleep, feeding the baby every two hours, day and night, from a body that’s torn and leaking and running on a fraction of its chemistry whilst also rebuilding her entire sense of who she is.

A woman will do this on average more than twice during her lifetime, which means she knows exactly what it involves and chooses to do the whole thing again, yet we call women ‘the weaker sex’ somehow.

That was when something else in what Jameela was saying started to land with me because women have lived under patriarchy for somewhere between six and ten thousand years and as she so eloquently puts it; “if they haven’t submitted by now they’re probably not going to”.

Women have been denied education, denied the vote, prevented from owning property, prevented from earning their own money, denied control over their own bodies, married off as children and silenced when they became inconvenient. Yet they kept pushing.

Jameela’s argument is that there is fear behind this suppression and I think she’s right, which rather begs the question that if women really are the ‘weaker sex’:

Why have men spent thousands of years putting so much effort into controlling them?

Why prevent somebody from being educated if you aren’t frightened of what she might do with that education? Why prevent her voting if her voice doesn’t matter? Why prevent her earning and controlling her own money if her independence isn’t threatening? Why silence older women with experience and influence if what they have to say has no power?

We don’t spend thousands of years suppressing something because we believe it is powerless. We suppress it because we fear what might happen if we don’t.

What I hadn’t connected until now is that these aren’t really two different ideas at all. “Women are the weaker sex” and “Don’t be such a girl” are two of the most common phrases I’ve heard throughout my life and indeed said for much of it. One tells us what women supposedly are and the other takes exactly that belief and teaches boys what men must never become.

The damage travels in both directions because girls grow up hearing that being female means being lesser whilst boys grow up hearing that anything associated with girls takes them further away from the man they’re expected to become.

We even managed to carry it into sex. For generations a girl’s virginity was something precious she protected and eventually gave to the right man while boys were encouraged to lose theirs and gained status amongst other boys by doing so. She gives her body and he gets kudos for doing so, she loses something and he gains something. Then we wonder where male sexual entitlement starts.

What I keep coming back to though, because this is where I start to see the real consequence of all of this, is what we teach girls about keeping themselves safe around boys and men. We teach them where to put their keys between their fingers, how to hold their drinks, where not to walk, how to get out of a grip, how to recognise controlling behaviour, how to say no safely, how to leave safely and what to do if a man attacks them and then we call all of that keeping girls safe.

Half a century later we’re still teaching another generation of girls how to protect themselves from or fight off men. Yet where is the equivalent urgency around teaching boys how to handle rejection, jealousy, anger, entitlement, insecurity and hearing no? Where are the conversations about consent, control, intimidation and what happens when their difficult feelings start becoming somebody else’s problem?

At what point do we decide that teaching girls increasingly sophisticated ways to protect themselves from male behaviour isn’t remotely enough? Fifty years after my generation of girls were taught how to protect themselves from boys, we’re teaching their daughters how to protect themselves from our sons.

Surely keeping girls safe has to include raising boys they don’t need protecting from in the first place?

We’ve spent generations doing something else that strikes me as particularly destructive. We’ve taught women how to manage male discomfort rather than teaching men how to actually recognise it, experience it, be safe in it and express it safely. Rejection, embarrassment, being wrong, hearing no, being challenged, feeling insecure or not getting what you want are not emergencies and none of them require a woman to make herself smaller, quieter or more accommodating so that we don’t have to feel them.

Learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings isn’t something women need to do for us. It’s part of becoming an emotionally grown man and there is an extraordinary irony in the fact that we’ve spent generations calling women the emotional sex whilst simultaneously expecting them to become experts at managing the emotions men were taught not to recognise in themselves.

I’ve watched this happen repeatedly. Highly capable, emotionally intelligent women who have become extraordinarily skilled at understanding, managing, soothing, explaining and adapting around male behaviour whilst slowly disappearing inside the process themselves. Women who can articulate every unhealthy dynamic in extraordinary detail and yet still feel emotionally responsible for fixing, carrying or redeeming the very men who are hurting or limiting them.

The tragedy is the number of women who have spent years directing those extraordinary gifts towards managing fragile and insecure men rather than themselves, their ideas, their ambitions and everything else they might have done with all that energy. Imagine what we might have gained if all of that intelligence, perception, awareness, brilliance and emotional capacity had been available to women themselves rather than so much of it being required simply to navigate the men around them.

Now, I’ve written before that I don’t believe we’re experiencing a gender war because women gaining freedom, independence and confidence and saying “I’m not accepting this anymore” is not an attack on men.

Losing the freedom to control somebody isn’t being done to. Being controlled is.

The same applies here because women gaining power and freedom doesn’t weaken men. Boys learning to understand and express their emotions doesn’t weaken masculinity. Men learning from qualities historically associated with women doesn’t make us less male and women don’t become more brilliant by demonstrating that they can do everything men can do.

I look at my son and daughter and I know we’ve been asking the wrong question. It isn’t which of them is stronger, it’s what becomes possible when neither of them needs the other to be smaller or weaker and when they both support, enable and celebrate the others’ success.

For generations we’ve behaved as though one of us needed to be less so the other could be more. It undoubtedly made life easier for generations of men but it was also an extraordinary waste of half the human race and it hasn’t exactly done wonders for the half supposedly benefiting from it either.

In many ways the Patriarchy has operated as though 1 + 0 = 1. Men were the whole and women were expected to become whatever was required around us; supportive enough, accommodating enough, quiet enough or small enough not to threaten the equation. We didn’t add what women brought to what men brought and ask what might become possible together, we simply made men the benchmark and then measured women by how successfully they could operate within a world largely designed around us.

Perhaps that’s the greatest waste of all because I equally don’t believe equality was ever supposed to mean turning 1 + 0 into 1 + 1 = 2 but then carrying on exactly as before. For me, the opportunity is what happens when two whole people, with different strengths, perspectives, experiences and ways of seeing the world, genuinely amplify what the other brings because then we can achieve 1 + 1 = 11, which always looks so much more impactful when written rather than spoken, it is the Art of the Possible!

I don’t want my daughter growing up believing she can be as good as a man. What an incredibly limiting ambition to give a woman.

I want her to discover everything she is capable of being, including qualities, strengths and ways of seeing and experiencing the world that generations of male dominated societies have undervalued precisely because they weren’t male.

Neither do I want my son growing up believing that becoming a man requires him to distance himself from anything associated with women. I don’t want him to believe that crying makes him weak, vulnerability makes him less masculine, asking for help means he’s failing, being frightened is shameful or being compared to a woman is an insult. I want him to become a secure man who can experience the full range of being human and still know absolutely that he is a man.

This is where I believe we’ve got this so badly wrong. We taught boys that women were weaker and then used women as the example of everything they must avoid becoming in order to grow into strong men. We taught boys to suppress the very emotions they needed to understand in order to become emotionally secure men and then taught girls how to recognise, manage and protect themselves from what some of those boys became.

Fifty years later we’re still doing it.

We’re still teaching girls how to protect their drinks rather than putting the same energy into teaching boys why consent matters. We’re still teaching girls how to leave safely rather than teaching boys that rejection isn’t humiliation. We’re still teaching women how to soften difficult conversations rather than teaching men how to hear uncomfortable truths and we’re still telling boys not to behave like girls whilst wondering why some of those boys eventually grow into men who experience women as something beneath them, something to control, something to compete with or something that threatens who they believe themselves to be.

I don’t want either of my children growing up inside that lie.

It’s time we stopped raising boys not to be girls and started raising them to become secure, emotionally intelligent men whilst allowing girls to become everything women were always capable of becoming.

Neither needs to lose for the other to win and neither needs to become smaller for the other to grow and so then…

1 + 1 = 11.