Paul Mitchell
Monday, 7 April 2025
A downy covering of blond hair now on his shins, my youngest son is growing up. He’s trying to push back his bedtime and, when it’s my turn to try to get him down for the night, I opt for a strict routine. I lie next to him and read from a Specky Magee book he’s already read (he likes the voices I put on), then pray with him. The latter involves what he calls our ‘normal prayer’, a ritual that has me gently touching his stomach, chest, arms, legs, lips and head, and announcing how each of these might be used for God’s glory. Then comes our ‘special prayer’, largely me speaking aloud the good things I hope life will hold for him. I usually close proceedings by saying, ‘Goodnight, beautiful boy.’
One night recently, instead of saying goodnight back, he admonished me: ‘Boys can’t be beautiful!’ I shouldn’t have been surprised at his remark. He is, after all, growing up; fairytales are no longer his books of choice, and he’s putting Santa’s purported ability to visit several billion homes in one night through his burgeoning math skills. ‘Yes, they can be beautiful. Inside and out.’
He didn’t reply so perhaps my answer satisfied him. But his silence might also have said, Are you crazy, Dad?
Between birth and about three years old, while they’re mewling on bunny rugs and crawling for soft toys, it’s socially acceptable to dub boys ‘beautiful’. Then it all changes soon after school starts; if parents, relatives and friends still describe boys as beautiful, it generally isn’t in their earshot. Boys might get embarrassed: I’m not beautiful! I’m … I’m …
… on his way to being a tween, then a teenager and young adult.
Our boys might grow up, but the idea of themselves as beautiful, if they ever had it, goes down, into the depths of their souls and psyche. Even in this gender-enlightened age, our boys keep getting the strong message from peers and other parts of our culture that inner and outer beauty is feminine. And feminine is still too often associated with weakness. Boys can’t show themselves as vulnerable or in need of emotional comfort. They hear that they need to be strong. Toughen up, princess!
Still, their beauty won’t disappear. It can’t. Because it’s from God, the one who made them, the one who wants that beauty to be revealed to the world.
At least some of people’s unwillingness to dub boys of a certain age ‘beautiful’ is no doubt a result of not wanting to appear connected with the scourge of paedophilia.
While that is unfortunate-and may mean even parents are unwilling to describe their young sons as beautiful it doesn’t have to mean avoiding thinking that they’re beautiful, and treating them that way.
We want men whose masculinity ensures they treat women with respect and kindness, while understanding that women and men are inherently equal. But, attempts by corporations like Gillette aside, it remains less acceptable for males to treat other males gently and kindly than it is acceptable for women to so treat them. Because boys are not taught to honour themselves, their bodies, emotions and spirits. They’re not taught that they’re beautiful, inside and out.
Psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan is the author of a seminal book on emotional health, Healing through the dark emotions. She argues that western culture largely refuses to accept the wisdom that can be gained by living through-instead of subjugating-three big and so- called ‘dark’ emotions: grief, despair and fear. ‘A culture that insists on labelling suffering as pathology’, she writes, ‘that is ashamed of suffering as a sign of failure or inadequacy, a culture bent on the quick fix for emotional pain, inevitably ends up denying both the social and spiritual dimensions of our sorrows.’
Of those three big, dark emotions, fear is arguably the one that boys (and men) are taught has no place in their masculine identities. To show fear is to appear weak.
But, according to Greenspan, denial of fear is the root of many serious psychological issues. ‘When we don’t know the contours of our fear, when we can’t experience it authentically or speak about it openly, we are more likely to be afflicted with anxieties and phobias, panic, obsessive-compulsion, psychosomatic ills, and all kinds of controlling, destructive and violent behaviours.’
The last three on Greenspan’s list, especially, read as a check-list for the behaviours inherent in what has been described as ‘toxic masculinity’. I’ve come to realise that if I want my son to avoid this and retain his sense of being beautiful-and to grow into a beautiful man-I have to help him express and live with fear, not encourage him to deny it or simply ‘manfully’ conquer it.
It’s not a stretch to believe, either, that Christianity has had an impact upon men seeing fear as something to deny. After all, Jesus spends a lot of time reportedly telling believers to ‘fear not’. But he doesn’t say there’s nothing to fear. Only that he has overcome the worst the world can do to us. And Jesus had no problem expressing his own fear, namely in the Garden of Gethsemane as he sweated blood fearing his execution, nor did he struggle to express his grief and despair.
My son is scared of storms, spiders, bullies, aggressive dogs and being away from his parents for more than two nights. The change in him when I’ve told him his fear is normal and okay has been phenomenal. He’s gained peace of mind when I’ve told him that what’s happening in his body, the tears, the tremors, the clenching in his stomach, is natural and okay, too.
He’s beginning to accept fear as part of life, not something to shun but something he can learn from as he listens to what his body and mind are telling him. Fear doesn’t feel beautiful, but accepting it will mean he’s less likely to grow ugly inside and act out destructively.
Recently, I overheard a conversation he instigated with three boys, one the same age as him and two who were older. He asked them, ‘Are you guys scared of anything?’ The other boys froze. What should they say? If they admitted to being fearful, wasn’t that going against some unwritten rule? After a while the eldest said he was scared of a particular breed of dog. His relief at having got it out was palpable, and it released the rest of the boys to confess that, yes, they were scared of some things, too.
The truth and freedom. Helping boys admit their fear and teaching them to live with it is only one way to help them stay beautiful and grow into beautiful men. But in a culture decrying the toxic masculinity crisis, it’s a simple approach that might have a long-term impact on making our world a place where women feel safe- because men feel safe in themselves.
Paul Mitchell is a Melbourne-based writer. His latest book is a novel, We. Are. Family (MidnightSun Publishing).
Image credit: Father and Son. Creative Commons.
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