Glennon Doyle - Untamed

Five years ago, I was cleaning up the kitchen while CNN droned on. I walked over to flip the channel, but then I noticed a particular and disturbing pattern in the reporting.

The first story was about several white male government officials who had been caught lying and cheating to keep their power. The second story included footage of a police officer brutally beating an unarmed black teenager. Then these stories:

A fifteen-year-old school shooter who killed three classmates, one of whom was a girl who had rejected his advances.

Members of a lacrosse team had been charged with gang rape.

A college boy had been killed in a hazing incident.

A middle school gay boy had hung himself because of bullying at school.

A thirty-five-year-old decorated veteran had just “succumbed to PTSD.”

I stared openmouthed at the TV and thought:

Oh my God.

This is what it looks like for boys to try to comply with our culture’s directions.

They are not allowed to be whole, either.

Boys are in cages, too.

Boys who believe that real men are all-powerful will cheat and lie and steal to claim and keep power.

Boys who believe that girls exist to validate them will take a woman’s rejection as a personal affront to their masculinity.

Boys who believe that open, vulnerable connection between men is shameful will violently hate gay boys.

Boys who believe that men don’t cry will become men who rage.

Boys who learn that pain is weakness will die before they ask for help.

Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret.

Our men are caged, too. The parts of themselves they must hide to fit into those cages are the slices of their humanity that our culture has labeled “feminine”—traits like mercy, tenderness, softness, quietness, kindness, humility, uncertainty, empathy, connection. We tell them, “Don’t be these things, because these are feminine things to be. Be anything but feminine.”

The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits. There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. “Femininity” is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label “feminine.”

Gender is not wild, it’s prescribed. When we say, “Girls are nurturing and boys are ambitious. Girls are soft and boys are tough. Girls are emotional and boys are stoic,” we are not telling truths, we are sharing beliefs—beliefs that have become mandates. If these statements seem true, it’s because everyone has been so well programmed. Human qualities are not gendered. What is gendered is permission to express certain traits. Why? Why would our culture prescribe such strict gender roles? And why would it be so important for our culture to label all tenderness and mercy as feminine ?

Because disallowing the expression of these qualities is the way the status quo keeps its power. In a culture as imbalanced as ours—in which a few hoard billions while others starve, in which wars are fought for oil, in which children are shot and killed while gun manufacturers and politicians collect the blood money—mercy, humanity, and vulnerability cannot be tolerated. Mercy and empathy are great threats to an unjust society.

So how does power squash the expression of these traits? In a misogynistic culture, all that is needed is to label them feminine. Then we can forever discount them in women and forever shame them out of men. Ta-da: no more messy, world-changing tenderness to deal with. We can continue on without our shared humanity challenging the status quo in any way.

I stood and stared at the TV. I thought back on how I had prepared my girls from day one to fight for their humanity. I thought:

Fuck.

I have a son, too.

I do not recall rocking my son to sleep with stories about tender men. I do not remember pointing to men passing by: “I bet he’s a poet, a teacher, a devoted father.” When an adult mentioned my son’s sensitivity, I don’t remember saying, “Isn’t it great? His tenderness is his strength.” When he started school, I do not recall saying, “You can be quiet, sad, merciful, small, vulnerable, loving, and kind out there in the world. You can be unsure of yourself and still be a boy.” I do not remember saying to him, “Girls are not for conquering. They do not exist to play supporting roles in the stories of men. They exist all on their own.”

I want my son to keep his humanity. I want him to stay whole. I do not want him to become sick; I want him to be shrewd. I do not want him to surrender to cages he must slowly die inside or kill his way out of. I do not want him to become another unconscious brick that power uses to build fortresses around itself. I want him to know the true story, which is that he is free to be fully human, forever.

My son is an accomplished student-athlete. He takes tough classes, stays up all hours of the night studying, then wakes up early to go to practice. Until a few months ago, I used that as an excuse to let him slack off at home. I straightened his room for him while he was at school, I did his laundry, and I cleaned up the nightly mess he left out in the family room.

One evening, he asked to skip the dishes to go finish his homework. I let him go while Abby, the girls, and I finished up. That night in bed, Abby said, “Babe, I know it’s out of love, but you cater to Chase, and he takes advantage of it.”

I said, “That’s ridiculous!” and then I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling for an hour.

The next day I turned on the TV and saw a commercial about a couple who had just become parents. The young mother left the baby with his father to return to work for the first time. The camera followed the father around the house as their Alexa chirped constant reminders that the mother had programmed the night before: “Don’t forget music class at nine! Don’t forget lunch at noon, the bottle’s in the fridge! You’re doing a great job!” Viewers were meant to swoon at the sweetness.

All I could think was: Did this father just arrive on Earth? Is he new here? Why does he need minute-by-minute coaching in order to care for his baby? What did preparation for this day look like for this baby’s mother? In addition to getting ready to go back to work, this mama spent the previous night thinking through every minute of her husband’s next day. She anticipated each of his and his baby’s needs, and then she trained Alexa to hold the father’s hand all day so he did not have to think at all. But this father appeared to be a grown man who loved his son. There was no earthly reason why he would not be every bit as capable of caring for his son as his wife was. They were both new parents. How had one of them become so helpless?

Oh, I thought. OH.

The next day I left Chase a list of chores to do. He didn’t finish them. When I confronted him, he said, “I’m so sorry, Mom, I’ve got this big physics test tomorrow.”

I said, “No, I’m sorry, Chase. I’ve been sending you the wrong message. I have accidentally taught you that achieving out there is more important than serving your family in here. I’ve taught you that home is where you spend your leftover energy, out there is where you give your best. I need to course-correct by giving you this bottom line: I don’t give a rat’s ass how much respect you earn for yourself out in the world if you are not showing respect to the people inside your home. If you don’t get that right, nothing you do out there will matter much.”