那些我们没有教给男孩的事
What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human
RUTH WHIPPMAN
2021年8月9日
A while back, at the bookstore with my three sons, I started flicking through a kids’ magazine that had the kind of hyper-pink sparkly cover that screams: “Boys! Even glancing in this direction will threaten your masculinity!”
不久前，我和三个儿子在书店里浏览一本儿童杂志，封面是亮粉色的，闪闪发光，简直就像在喊：“男孩们！就算是往这个方向看上一眼，也会威胁你们的男子气概！”
In between the friendship-bracelet tutorials and the “What Type of Hamster Are You, Really?” quizzes, the magazine featured a story about a ’tween girl who had been invited to two birthday parties scheduled for the same time. Not wanting to disappoint either friend, she came up with an elaborate scheme to shuttle, unnoticed, between the parties, joining in the games at one before racing off to arrive just in time for the same games at the other, then repeating the sprint for cake at each house and so on. This was a tale of high-stakes emotional labor and I related to it strongly — if not the actual scenario itself, then at least the nerve-frazzling, people-pleasing compulsions driving it.
在友情手链制作教程和“你其实是哪种仓鼠？”的测试之间，杂志讲了一个十几岁的女孩受邀参加两个定在同一时间举行的生日派对的故事。她不想让任何一个朋友失望，于是想出了一个精心设计的方案，神不知鬼不觉地穿梭于两个派对之间，先参加一个派对的游戏，然后飞快地赶到另一个派对，正好赶上同样的游戏。然后在两个派对之间飞速吃蛋糕，如此反复。这是一个高风险的情感付出的故事，我对它有强烈的共鸣——就算不是对那个实际场景本身，至少也是对驱动着它的那种神经紧张、取悦他人的冲动。
This birthday party stressfest is a pretty standard-issue story for female childhood. The girls in my sons’ classes will likely have read or watched hundreds like it — stories framed around people, their friendships, relationships and emotions, their internal dramas and the competing emotional needs of others. These were my stories as a young girl, too — the movies and TV shows I watched, the books and comics I read, the narratives I internalized about what was important.
这个生日派对上的压力，是女性童年的一个相当标准的故事。我儿子班上的女孩们很可能读过或看过数百个这样的故事——围绕着人、她们的友谊、关系和情感、她们的内心戏以及与他人的情感需求的竞争。这些也是我儿时的故事——我看过的电影和电视节目，我读过的书和漫画，以及被我内化的关于什么事情最重要的叙事。
But reading the magazine now, as the mother of three boys, this type of people-driven story felt oddly alien. I realized that, despite my liberal vanities about raising my sons in a relatively gender-neutral way, they had most likely never read a story like this, let alone experienced a similar situation in real life. It turns out that there is a bizarre absence of fully realized human beings in my sons’ fictional worlds.
但现在，作为三个男孩的母亲，读这本杂志时，这种以他人为驱动力的故事让人感到奇怪的陌生。我意识到，尽管我以相对不分性别的方式抚养我的儿子们，并且对此抱有自由主义的虚荣心，但他们很可能从未读过这样的故事，更不用说在现实生活中经历类似的情况。事实证明，在我儿子的虚构世界里，奇异地缺席完全现实化的人类。
As male toddlers, they were quickly funneled into a vehicle-only narrative reality. Apparently, preschool masculinity norms stipulate that human dilemmas may be explored through the emotional lives of only bulldozers, fire trucks, busy backhoes and the occasional stegosaurus.
当男性蹒跚学步时，他们很快就被引导到一个只有汽车的叙事现实中。显然，学龄前的男性规范规定，人类的困境只能通过推土机、消防车、忙碌的挖土机的情感生活来探索，偶尔还会有剑龙。
As they aged out of the digger demographic, they transitioned seamlessly into one dominated by battles, fighting, heroes, villains and a whole lot of “saving the day.” Now, they are 10, 7 and 3, and virtually every story they read, TV show they watch or video game they play is essentially a story with two men (or male-identifying nonhuman creatures) pitted against each other in some form of combat, which inevitably ends with one crowned a hero and the other brutally defeated. This narrative world contains almost zero emotional complexity — no interiority, no negotiating or nurturing or friendship dilemmas or internal conflict. None of the mess of being a real human in constant relationship with other humans.
随着年龄增长，他们逐渐脱离了挖掘机群体，无缝过渡到一个由战斗、对打、英雄、恶棍和一大堆“拯救世界”的人所主导的群体。现在他们分别是10岁、 七岁和三岁，他们所读的每一个故事、所看的电视节目或所玩的电子游戏，基本上都是两个男人（或具有男性特征的非人类生物）在某种形式的战斗中相互对峙的故事，最后不可避免地以一个人成为英雄，另一个人被残酷地击败而告终。这个叙事世界中几乎没有情感的复杂性——没有内在性，没有磋商，没有养育，没有友谊的困境或内部冲突。没有作为一个真正的人和其他人保持稳定关系的那种混乱。
An exception to the “no real humans” rule: The small subgenre of realistic fiction aimed at elementary and middle schoolboys is actually wildly popular. Jeff Kinney’s beloved “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, for example, has sold more than 250 million copies while the middle school graphic novel series “Big Nate” has sold over 20 million. My sons and their friends gobble up these books, hungry for something that reflects their own lives. They gain a lot from them too — a jumping off point to think about their own real-world challenges and relationships, and a way to open up discussions about the emotional dilemmas they face.
“没有真实人类”这个规则也有例外：以中小学生为对象的现实主义小说这个小分支实际上非常受欢迎。例如，杰夫·金尼(Jeff Kinney)深受喜爱的《小屁孩日记》(Diary of a Wimpy Kid)系列销量超过2.5亿册，而中学漫画系列《大内特》(Big Nate)销量超过2000万册。我的儿子们和他们的朋友们狼吞虎咽地读着这些书，渴望得到反映他们自己生活的东西。他们也从中获益良多——这是他们思考自己在现实世界中的挑战和人际关系的起点，也是开启讨论他们所面临的情感困境的一种方式。
But the main characters in this genre tend to be slightly depressing antiheroes, middle school nihilists who are almost defiantly mediocre. Their driving narrative motivation is often a kind of contempt — for school, teachers, annoying siblings and nagging parents. This background sense of grievance can sometimes be casually misogynistic, in the “stupid, dumb girls” vein. Although later examples of these books have dialed this back, if we follow these characters’ trajectory of resentment and self-loathing to its most extreme conclusion, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine one of them in 10 years’ time, trolling feminists online from his parents’ basement.
但是这个类型中的主角往往是一些令人沮丧的反英雄人物，中学里那些表现出挑衅性的平庸的虚无主义者。他们的叙述动机往往是一种蔑视——对学校、老师、烦人的兄弟姐妹和唠叨的父母。这种背景意义上的不满有时可以是不经意间的女性厌恶，潜藏在“愚蠢、无聊的女孩”的线索中。虽然这些书后来的一些例子已经把这一点调节回来了，但如果我们顺着这些人物的怨恨和自我厌恶的轨迹走到最极端的地步，不难想象他们中的某个人会在十年后，在父母的地下室里挑衅网上的女权主义者。
The lack of positive people-focused stories for boys has consequences both for them and girls. In the narratives they consume, as well as the broader cultural landscape in which they operate, girls get a huge head start on relational skills, in the day-to-day thorniness and complexity of emotional life. Story by story, girls are getting the message that other people’s feelings are their concern and their responsibility. Boys are learning that these things have nothing to do with them.
对于男孩来说，缺乏积极的关注他人的故事，这对他们和女孩们都有影响。在女孩们消费的叙事中，以及她们所处的更广阔的文化景观中，女孩们在人际关系技能上，在日常的棘手和复杂的情感生活中，获得了巨大的领先优势。一个故事接一个故事，女孩们得到了这样的信息：别人的感受是她们所关心的，是她们的责任。男孩们渐渐学到的则是，这些事与他们无关。
We have barely even registered this lack of an emotional and relational education as a worrying loss for boys. We tend to dismiss and trivialize teenage girls’ preoccupation with the intricacies of relationships as “girl-drama.” But as Niobe Way, a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of “Deep Secrets, Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection,” says, “When we devalue things associated with femininity — such as emotions and relationships — boys miss out.”
我们几乎没有意识到这种情感和关系教育的缺失对男孩来说是一种令人担忧的损失。我们倾向于将少女对错综复杂的人际关系的关注视为“女孩的作”，并轻视和淡化它。但正如纽约大学心理学教授、《深藏的秘密、男孩的友谊和联系的危机》(Deep Secrets, Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection)一书的作者尼奥比·韦(Niobe Wa)所说，“当我们贬低情感和人际关系等女性特质相关的东西时，男孩就错过了它们。”
The imbalance doesn’t just put exhausting pressure on girls and women to bear the social and emotional load of life — to remember the birthdays and wipe the tears and understand that Grandma’s increasingly aggressive eyebrow twitch means that she needs to be separated from Aunt Susan — it harms boys and men, too. They are missing out on internalizing concepts and learning skills crucial to a connected, moral, psychologically healthy life.
这种不平衡不仅仅给女孩和女人带来疲惫的压力，让她们承担生活中的社会和情感负担——记住生日，擦拭眼泪，明白奶奶越来越剧烈的眉毛抽动意味着需要把她跟苏珊姨妈分开——它也对男孩和男人造成了伤害。他们错过了内化概念和学习技能的机会，这些技能对一种与他人联系的、道德的、心理健康的生活至关重要。
Probably because of this difference in socialization, boys score lower than girls of the same age on virtually all measures of empathy and social skills, a gap that grows throughout childhood and adolescence. This has implications across the board. Among first graders, social emotional ability, including the skills to form and maintain friendships, is a greater predictor of academic success than either family background or cognitive skills. Boys are now lagging behind girls academically at every grade level through college, so providing them with a more nuanced and people-focused emotional world — in what they read and watch, and in the conversations we have with them — might go some way toward closing that gap.
可能因为在社会化方面的这种差异，男孩在几乎所有关于移情和社会技能的衡量标准上都比同龄女孩得分低，这种差距在整个童年和青春期不断扩大。这对整个社会都有影响。在一年级学生中，社交情感能力（包括建立和维持友谊的能力）比家庭背景或认知能力更能预测学业成功。现在，在整个大学的各个年级，男孩在学业上都落后于女孩，因此，在他们阅读和观看的内容中，在我们与他们的对话中，为他们提供一个更加细致入微、以他人为中心的情感世界，可能会在某种程度上缩小这一差距。
The impact on boys’ mental health is also likely to be significant. From a young age, girls’ friendships tend to be more intimate, deeper and more emotionally focused, providing a support structure that is often sorely lacking for boys. According to the American Psychological Association, this lack of support, and the masculinity norms that underpin it, can contribute to a range of serious mental health problems. Adolescent boys are also at almost twice the risk for death by suicide as girls — so this is an urgent problem.
这对男孩的心理健康也可能产生重大影响。从很小的时候起，女孩的友谊往往更亲密、更深厚、更注重情感，这提供了一种支持结构，而这往往是男孩严重缺乏的。根据美国心理协会(American Psychological Association)的说法，这种缺乏支持，以及支撑着这种情况的男性规范，可能会导致一系列严重的心理健康问题。青春期男孩的自杀风险几乎是女孩的两倍，所以这是一个紧迫的问题。
We talk about toxic masculinity as an extreme scenario — the #metoo monster, the school shooter — but it is more like a spectrum. We have normalized a kind of workaday sub-toxic masculinity, which is as much about what we don’t expose boys to as what we do.
我们把有毒的男子气概作为一种极端的情景来谈论——“#我也是”(#MeToo)怪物、校园枪击事件——但它更像是一个光谱。我们已经将一种日常的亚毒性男子气概常态化了，这是源于我们让他们接触到的东西，也源于我们没让他们接触到的东西。
The stories we tell become our emotional blueprints, what we come to expect of ourselves and others and how we engage with our lives. And in the vast majority of situations we are likely to encounter in the course of a lifetime, there is no hero or villain, no death and no glory, but rather just a bunch of needy humans kvetching over who said what. Understanding how to navigate that with grace and skill is the beating heart of human connection.
我们讲述的故事成为了我们的情感蓝图，成为我们对自己和他人的期望，成为我们参与生活的方式。在我们一生中可能遇到的绝大多数情况下，没有英雄或恶棍，没有死亡或荣耀，只有一群有需要的人抱怨谁说了什么。理解如何优雅和巧妙地驾驭它，是人际关系跳动的心脏。
So let’s work toward a brave new world, in which a boy can proudly shuttle between two birthday parties, sweating with compulsive people-pleasing. Let’s give boys some girl drama, teach them the dark arts of emotional labor and likability. We might all be healthier for it.
因此，让我们朝着一个新世界努力吧，在这个新世界里，一个男孩可以自豪地穿梭于两个生日派对之间，为强迫症般的取悦他人而流汗。给男生们来点女生的喜剧，教给他们情感劳动和讨好他人的黑暗艺术。我们都可能会因此更健康。
