What will boys be?

I woke up on Monday to a slogan stamped upon my city: plastered on posters and billboards, buildings and bus stops, are the words “boys will be…what we teach them to be”. 

This, of course, is a city-wide rebuttal to the notion that ‘boys will be boys’, right? A term that we have so commonly used to imply that there’s a kind of inevitability to their behaviour. I think I’m right in observing that this term has mostly been used in a soft and whimsical kind of manner – when boys leave dirty mugs in their room, when they kick a football through a window, when they wriggle out of their mum’s hug…insert harmless stereotype of your choice here…

But in recent years, this phrase has more harmfully been used to shrug off the responsibility that we have for the rise in male violence, toxic masculinity, male suicide rates and so much more. When it comes to those things, a ‘boys will be boys’ kind of thinking simply will not do. And this week, the city of Bristol has reminded me so. 

A culture in panic mode

We’re constantly faced with the fact that men are becoming more of a danger; that’s just fact. 

So, we’re being confronted with this reality – and we’re panicking. We’re desperately trying to work out why this is happening. Is it innate? Is it taught? Is it down to the fatherlessness crisis? Is it the Andrew Tate-effect? Is it social media? The school system? Donald Trump? All of the above? None of the above? And on it goes… 

Bristol, it appears, has its answer. And, for the most part, I like it. I don’t think their slogan is wrong, I just think it’s incomplete. This is where Christian feminism comes into play – and where I humbly suggest that it has more to offer than the purely secular version of feminism. 

The Bible has the answers

I recorded an episode of the Woman Alive podcast earlier this year – alongside the wonderful Michelle Tant and the ever-excellent Tola-Doll Fisher. The episode was entitled: ‘Women are cursed’. I know – it was quite the topic. We delved into the biblical world of Eden, peering in right when it was all crumbling apart and we pondered whether, according to the biblical story, women were cursed as a result of everything that went wrong in that Garden. 

You should really go and listen to the episode, because I’m not going to get into the specifics here. Nevertheless, here’s the gist of what I said, and what I would want to scribble on the bottom of those billboards: we live in the consequences of our own brokenness, our own ‘breaking-things-ness’. There is a deep and undeniable fracture between men and women, and my Christian faith leads me by the hand all the way back to Genesis to fully make sense of why that is.

An integral aspect of the world that God created, before it was shattered and scarred, was harmony: harmony with ourselves, with the natural world and with God – first and foremost. That harmony was also what tied Adam and Eve/men and women together. That was the design, that was the intention. That was God’s blueprint. It was only when de-creation started to break in, kicking off with that pesky fruit, that all harmony was broken. It’s there, in black and white: “To the woman he said…Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). Now, that ‘desire’ isn’t sexual or romantic, it’s a desire to be in control. So, what God’s pointing out is: friction, struggle and hierarchy.  

God is calling that desire a bad thing. It’s a symptom of de-creation. I value that Genesis does this, that it acknowledges the painful hand we’ve been dealt and are, ourselves, still dealing. It points right at our propensity to mightily screw things up, and offers an explanation. 

It’s both spiritual and societal 

There’s a spiritual dimension to the violence we see men perpetrating, and this is it – we’re hurt people who hurt people, wounded people who are wounding people. There are both societal and spiritual forces at play here. So here is my addition to the slogan:

“Boys will be…what we teach them to be…and what de-creation explains them to be.” 

Now, hear me out. This isn’t a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card for us. Quite the contrary. Following Jesus’ example, we’re supposed to be small working models of new creation – fighting de-creation wherever we spot it – and that includes male violence. You know one of the markers of new creation? You’ve got it, harmony among the sexes. So that would mean an end to male violence, an end to toxic patriarchy, an end to male suicide rates sky-rocketing. One day, it will be full and complete, but, for now, we’re called to live in a way that points in that direction, fighting for re-creation even in the midst of de-creation.   

“Boys will (now and eventually) be…exactly what God intended them to be.” 

But I guess Bristol’s slogan will do.