Malinda Lo
Blog
Nov 12, 2012
YA Fiction and the Many Possibilities of Manhood
Iconic YA boyhood
I’ve been thinking about Mesle’s essay for several days now, and trying to consider it in the context of the broader discourse about YA, which includes Meghan Cox Gurdon’s infamous Wall Street Journal essay on “dark YA” as well as countless ruminations on “boy books” (pro, against, whether they exist at all).
In the LARB essay, Mesle writes:
“Why is it that in YA literature — a genre generated entirely to describe the transition to adulthood — there is so much fear and ambivalence surrounding manhood? When I read contemporary young adult novels, I see them asking over and over again a fascinating question, a question both for boys and for the stories describing them: are there any good men? And how can a boy become a good man, if he doesn’t know what that would mean?”
Although Mesle’s essay purports to be interrogating the changing nature of manhood as expressed in contemporary YA fiction, it also slips very easily into the mainstream discourse on YA, which is much more about adult anxiety over contemporary adolescence2 than it is about the YA texts themselves.
In the recent past, this adult anxiety over adolescence has been expressed by critiquing other forms of popular culture: video games, rock music, television and movies. These critiques all tended to focus on controlling the adolescent experience. Rock music is too sexy so teens shouldn’t watch Elvis gyrating! Video games turn teenagers into murderers so they shouldn’t be allowed to play them! TV is too crass and it turns girls into sluts so they shouldn’t be allowed to watch it!
Lady Gaga in drag as Jo Calderone on the cover of Japanese Vogue
Human beings are notoriously resistant to change, so it’s not surprising that as gender — something that was long believed to be completely stable — changes, there is such widespread anxiety about it. Narratives about adolescence lend themselves particularly well to drawing out this anxiety. During adolescence, teens not only have to deal with the de-stabilizing, often alienating confusion of understanding their own changing bodies, they have to deal with cultural and familial pressures about “manhood” and “womanhood.”
Basically, much of the discourse on YA reveals a deep-seated and widespread anxiety on the part of adults about gender as it is experienced in adolescence and by adolescents. This is totally fascinating to me, and it is at the crux of Mesle’s essay.
Mesle writes: “I actually believe in manhood as something that’s real, that’s inherently different than womanhood, and that is, potentially, awesome.” She goes on to clarify: “I realize this argument might be a little surprising for someone like me to make — that is, someone schooled in the kind of gender theory that makes it difficult to treat something like ‘manhood’ as a thing, rather than a construction, an idea, and, even, a bad and dangerous idea.”
I might be misunderstanding her, but after several reads of this essay, I think Mesle is arguing that “manhood” is not socially constructed. I think Mesle is saying that “manhood” is “real” and “a thing” — meaning, it is something like an immutable identity.
While this may be something that is arguable in literary theory3, my first reaction was … wait. “Manhood” is absolutely constructed. “Manhood” varies depending on culture. What it means to be a man in the contemporary United States is different from what it means in, say, Mexico. But it doesn’t vary only according to culture; it varies within culture according to class and race. It even varies according to time periods. There is no one constant definition of “manhood,” and there never was. “Manhood” is always and has always been contingent.
What’s interesting and wonderful in contemporary YA — across genres, from realistic to fantasy and sci-fi — is that “manhood”4 reveals its contingency so clearly. And I don’t think this should be surprising. Male characters in today’s YA novels are in the midst of their transition from boyhood to manhood, and these characters are being written in a world that has been transformed in many ways by feminism.
Mesle herself notes, “What feminism has made possible is an ability to have hope for new ways of integrating gender into the world.” To which I say: Yes! Exactly. It’s this possibility that is incorporated into much of today’s YA fiction.
And yet Mesle somewhat paradoxically expresses what I interpret as nostalgia for a particularly American vision of manhood, rooted in the white upper class of the nineteenth century. That’s fine, as far as personal preference goes. But I find a desire to return to that kind of manhood to be incredibly limiting.
Today’s boys — in the real world and in YA novels — are coming of age in a world in which they thankfully have the option to be more than only one kind of man. I’m going to bet that even in the nineteenth century, not all boys wanted to grow up to become “moral, leading men” — nor could they. Morality and leadership were constrained by race and class.
I know that many people find the idea of a world in which gender is flexible to be frightening. It does indeed destabilize a lot of things that we may have been taught when we grew up. In a world with so much change going on — environmentally, politically, culturally — I’m not surprised that many people might be nostalgic for a vanished past of strong men who became honorable leaders. I just hope that people can remember that this vanished past was largely mythical, and it was firmly based on inequality.
Race and class have not been erased today, but they are more fluid than they were in the nineteenth century. That means that manhood, too, is more fluid today, and I believe that is far from frightening. It’s liberating.
Three YA books about boys becoming men that I highly recommend: “White Cat” by Holly Black, “Struts and Frets” by Jon Skovron, and “I Hunt Killers” by Barry Lyga
Finally, a word about my own situation and potential biases. I write young adult fiction, and all of my books so far have had queer girls as main characters. It might seem completely irrelevant for me to have an opinion on manhood, but I see manhood as inextricably entwined with womanhood. I want more flexibility all around. All of my books have included male characters, several of them teens who are figuring out how to become men. Like Mesle, I too believe that manhood could be “potentially, awesome.” I just think that it’s more awesome when there’s more than one kind of manhood possible.
- Let me say here: I don’t know if Mesle wrote the title to her essay. I don’t think her essay is about “the end of boys” at all, but “the end of nineteenth-century notions of manhood within certain contemporary YA texts.” [↩]
- Particularly white, middle-class, American adolescence [↩]
- And honestly I don’t know; I was not an English major. [↩]
- And womanhood, but I’m focusing on Mesle’s essay here. [↩]
Very nicely done I thought.
” ‘Manhood’is absolutely constructed.”
Yep, ditto ‘Womanhood’ (and don’t get me started on the related clouds of social constructions including ‘Motherhood’ & ‘Fatherhood’.
I especially appreciate your observations about how fluid these are culturally including the shifting intersections of class, race, sexual orientations, religion (or lack thereof), age, “able bodiedness”, and social constructions of desirability.
Thank you for a thoughtful essay. I hadn’t read Sarah Mesle’s article until I saw it referenced on your site, but I have to agree whole-heartedly with her.
I have a 15 year old son and I disagree that manhood is purely a cultural construct. The changes a young man experiences between ages 11-16 are enormously profound. Somewhere around age 13, you wake up and your son just isn’t the same kid he was the day before. Call it puberty or a massive influx of testosterone, whatever, a boy changes. It’s more than just his voice, a moustache and his shoe size (8 to 13 in seven months). There are marked personality changes – more aggression, some insecurity and a simultaneous need for independence and approval. It’s an awkward, difficult/wonderful time and the role of a parent is to guide him through it in a positive way.
I realize young women also go through this, but my son’s female friends aren’t changing in the same way or at the same rate (much faster, it seems). That’s not saying the transformation from girl to woman isn’t every bit as profound. Just that my son and his male friends have different challenges.
“Manhood” is a real concept to my son, although he’s never used that descriptor. As you suggest, it’s possible that if we were a Mexican family his role models would be different. I have no basis for comparison. But I suspect some of what my son feels is universal to boys everywhere. I think any parent of any culture can relate to the way a teenage boy idolizes his older male peers.
While I believe feminist ideals should be taught to both girls and boys, I’m wary of feminists defining manhood. It seems to me that in the effort to promote young women (which I support 100%), sometimes young men are… I hesitate to use the word ‘emasculated’, because it’s so loaded, but there it is. There’s a defensiveness somewhere… an idea that men are threatening to feminism so boys have to be curbed or rendered less aggressive.
Perhaps this is due to our historically male dominated society and the repression of women’s rights. But I don’t believe manhood and feminism need to be mutually exclusive and I can’t allow my son to be curbed. His strength and aggression needs a healthy outlet. As his parent, I have to make sure his adventures lead him in the right direction – to sportsmanship, charity and healthy living.
Yes, there may be more than one definition of manhood, but “manning up” (accepting responsibility for oneself and one’s actions) is a traditional marker that shouldn’t be discarded because gender roles are more fluid in our enlightened age.
Ultimately, my son’s journey of discovery is his to make. I can only hope he embraces his potential and is the best kind of man he can be. And he never lets anyone else define him.
Baka Karasu — Thanks for pointing out and naming all those intersectionalities!
Nichole — Thanks for your comment. I think it’s interesting that in these discussions, it takes about 1 second for someone to bring in personal experience. The problem is, personal experience is just that: personal. Your personal experience is accurate for you, but I guarantee you someone else has had a completely opposite personal experience. How do you square those two? The only way for such diverging experiences to be possible is to allow that “manhood,” as a concept, is socially constructed. I’m not talking about biology here; I’m not talking about chromosomes and hormones (that’s a different issue!). I’m talking about the idea of what makes a man.
Additionally, I think it’s interesting that you say that manhood “is a traditional marker that shouldn’t be discarded because gender roles are more fluid in our enlightened age.” I haven’t been saying it should be discarded, at all. I’m saying that feminism allows more than one kind of manhood to exist: including the traditional kind you favor.
Thanks for bringing the discussion into the context of perennial fears about adolescence. I hadn’t thought of that before, but it makes perfect sense to me.
The medium for the fear, rock and roll, video games, books, may change but the object of the fear hasn’t for a long time. (BTW does it excite other people that BOOKS are the latest incarnation? Again, of course, since novels have always been considered bad for young people, particularly.)
When I got towards the end of your post, I wondered if this yearning for “traditional” manhood is not also linked to traditional, cultural ideas of saviors/leaders. The celebrity model of leadership, if you will, rather than the more collective reality that is messy and hard to grapple with. People lament, “If only we had another Martin Luther King!” and “Who is going to take the mantle of feminist leadership after Gloria Steinem?” Mesle’s essay seems to be saying a similar thing, “We need some strong men to save boys (and the rest of us too)” rather than all of us working to help each other.
Of course both these things are a way of looking at the world through a culturally constructed understanding that obscures/distorts the messy, complicated reality of life.
Leadership, like gender, race and class, is, as you say, more fluid today, and I agree that “that is far from frightening. It’s liberating.” Leadership is no longer so linked to white male models or to individuals or to white men saving the rest of us.
I hope my response wasn’t too long or too much off topic.
I can’t agree with you more about anxiety over the fluidity of gender driving responses like Mesle’s. Certainly similar positions have cropped up about a wide variety of societal shifts – women’s rights, civil rights, the growth of technology. There’s always a dichotomy, an antagonism, between those who accept these shifts as inevitable and those who seek to maintain the status quo. What concerns me most about Mesle’s position, and others like her, is (and you’ve already mentioned it) the desire to embrace this patriarchal vision of “manhood” as the provenance of a certain kind of man – white and wealthy – whereas I believe that “manhood”, such as it is, can take on innumerable forms. To use a gendered concept with such a static definition to argue against a whole genre of fiction seems misguided, anyway. Plus, Mesle’s argument also negates the influence of women on boys, which I find completely unacceptable. Anyway, I’ll stop rambling now.
Malinda & Nichole,
I would add to my prior rant/list of potential intersecting factors, at least one more: the ‘meatspace’ biological aspect of who we are.
I think it is unwise to entirely ignore that part of our reality is the result of a VERY long evolutionary process that includes the ongoing replication of some genes and memes (and not others) and how that replication impacts mate selection and concepts of gender (among other messy human processes).
The key here in my opinion is how much to weight the biological influences Vs the cultural ones given that the boundaries between the two (beware of binaries
are blurred and overlapping. A college psych major may be taught that it’s 80/20 biology/culture. A college soc major may be taught the reverse (or if you’re a women’s studies major, maybe 99/1 culture/biology 
I side with those who argue that humans are primarily highly adaptable cultural beings whose biological reality perhaps sets some default tendencies, but whose cultural norms and social constructions can and do far outweigh biological influences, even, perhaps especially, regarding gender roles.
In my opinion, YA (and other media ‘consumed’ by people young and otherwise) could best empower its readers by encouraging them to learn how to detect the social construction processes they are subject to and all too often unthinking replicators of. To respond to them wisely, you first have to be able to detect them in real time.
All social constructions one interacts with are in part yes or no questions. Will you accept and perpetuate this meme/norm/social construction, or will you challenge/reject it and refuse to replicate it? To answer the question, you first have to understand that it is a question and that you are an empowered part of the ongoing process of “culturing” and of defining what is “normal”.
Hi Baka,
Thanks for replying to me. I appreciate it, and I thought your post was interesting, but I have to confess… I really don’t understand your point of view. Please don’t take that personally. I just don’t know what you’re talking about.
For me, personally, I think it’s important that I only speak for myself and from my experience (kind of like how relationship counselors say to speak from the “I” perspective when arguing with your significant other).
I’m not qualified to express opinions about other people and their lives but I do feel qualified to speak from the perspective of a parent. I’ve gone enough rounds in that ring, and consulted with enough other parents to say that the most important thing we can do is help kids develop confidence. Parents can only keep them safe for so long. Nobody wants to see a kid throw himself off a bridge because he doesn’t have a core belief in himself as worthwhile, and he lets someone else devalue him so completely. And yeah, now I’m speaking for other parents, but nobody I know wants to be in the shoes of that tragic young man’s parents.
Thus, we discuss manhood, and womanhood and what it means. Because yes, times are changing, but a young man’s desire to find his place in the world is not new.
I don’t believe we have enough strong, positive, male role models in young adult media. Pop culture is saturated with really bad examples of manhood. There are way too many irresponsible, self-absorbed narcissists on reality TV and I don’t want my kid absorbing that. Maybe I’m showing my prejudices here, but I don’t believe pop culture is concerned with the well-being of children. Pop culture is concerned with selling jeans, or sneakers, or soda pop.
So I’d prefer my kid read than watch TV. He might not want to, but he got bored after I broke the TV. Ooops.
I would like to see more modern books targeted towards young men, dealing with a young man’s internal struggle. For example, we read Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. The main character – Nailer – was great.
Nichole, I think what Baka Karasu is saying (and I apologize if I’m getting this wrong! It was complicated) is that it’s important for people to learn media literacy. In other words, learn how to interpret the media that is presented to the masses. It’s sort of like learning to tell what’s bullshit in a political ad. It’s also imporant to learn how to tell what’s bullshit in portrayals of men or women in movies and TV and books.
So, as a parent, what you could do is teach your kids how to dig into media representations of boys and girls, how to question what the media presents as “normal.” Because a lot of what we think of as “normal” is based in very old sexist and racist beliefs that I hope are being overturned these days.
And I agree about Ship Breaker — that’s a great book!
Time warped response:
Thanks for the interpretation Malinda. You definitely ‘got’ the main point I was trying to share: it’s important to be able to read social norming as you interact with it in order to decide whether to accept it or not (both in ‘media’ and via personal interactions).
Sadly, if my writing needs interpretation and explanation, it’s probably just not very well written. My apologies!
~Evan