Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture

ALSO BY NIOBE WAY

Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

Growing Up Fast: Transitions to Early Adulthood of Inner-City Adolescent Mothers (coauthor)

Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers

Coedited by Niobe Way

The Crisis of Connection: Roots, Consequences, and Solutions

Adolescent Boys: Exploring Diverse Cultures of Boyhood

Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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Copyright © 2024 by Niobe Way

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Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection by Niobe Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Way, Niobe, 1963– author.

Title: Rebels with a cause: reimagining boys, ourselves, and our culture / Niobe Way.

Description: [New York]: Dutton, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024012610 (print) | LCCN 2024012611 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593184264 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593184271 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Boys—Psychology. | Boys—Mental health. | Masculinity. | Male friendship.

Classification: LCC HQ775 .W339 2024 (print) | LCC HQ775 (ebook) | DDC 649/.132—dc23/eng/20240419

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024012610

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024012611

Ebook ISBN 9780593184271

Cover design by Jason Booher

Book design by Daniel Brount, adapted for ebook by Molly Jeszke

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Please note that names and identifying details of some people mentioned in this book have been changed.

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Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Thin and Thick Stories

Part One: Boys’ Nature

1. Human Nature

2. Boys’ Friendships

3. The Story of Nick

Part Two: Boy Culture

4. Adherence

5. Resistance

6. The Story of Danny

Part Three: The Nature/Culture Clash

7. Suicide

8. Mass Violence

9. The Story of Troy

Part Four: Solutions

10. Joining Their Cause

11. Schools

12. Workplaces and Homes

The Story of Us

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

_148350561_

To the rebels and their cause

It isn’t the rebels who cause the troubles of the world, it’s the troubles that cause the rebels.

—Carl Oglesby

[1]

THIN AND THICK STORIES[1]

Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[2]

There is a scene in the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause[3] in which the protagonist, Jim Stark, is begging his father to allow him to go to the police station to report that a boy has died due to a dare gone wrong. His parents don’t want him to go because they know it will ruin his life if he reveals that he was part of this deadly game. With tears in his eyes, Jim shouts to his dad: "You are not listening to me!…I am involved! We are all involved. Mom, a boy—a kid—was killed tonight! [4] suggesting that there is collective blame to go around. The synopsis of the movie on the internet is: high school students who should lead idyllic lives in their stable, comfortable suburban families explode with violence that their parents cannot understand. According to Jim, however, the problem is not just the violence, about which his parents do not seem to care and for which they take no responsibility. It’s also that they believe he lives an idyllic" life and thus has no cause.

Listening to boys and young men in my research and in the schools in which I have worked mostly but not exclusively in the United States over the past four decades, I have come to understand the cause not only of this iconic rebel but also of all others like him. It is simple. They want us—the adults in the room—to listen, care, and take responsibility. They also want us to value friendships and recognize that these are key to their and our mental health. Not having friendships can even make them and us go wacko. In Jim’s case, his desperation to find a close friend leads him to engage in the risky behavior that results in the death of a peer. The fact that his parents do not understand why he is upset and do not want to help him deal responsibly with the devastating consequences of his actions lead him to erupt. His actions and subsequent anger stem not, however, from his hormones, having an adolescent or male brain, or simply being a bad person. They come from living in a culture that doesn’t listen, care, or take individual or collective responsibility.

Evidence of such a boy culture, one in which the goal is to have a lot of money so as to have a lot of toys, is seen in recent books such as The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and in the widely shared slogan Just Do It, which means do what you want and don’t think about how it may affect others. It is also a culture that doesn’t value friendships and tells thin stories about boys, men, humans, and our culture as reflected in our modern definitions of manhood, maturity, and success, with their emphasis on the stereotypically hard sides of ourselves and their mocking of our soft sides. One of the best-known of these types of stories is that bad behavior among boys and men is inevitable, as boys will be boys, suggesting that their actions reflect their biology rather than a culture that promotes violence or at least doesn’t do much to prevent it. The danger of this story is that if we think it’s biology, we don’t think we can change it, and thus we don’t try. But if we understand that their behavior is a product of a culture that values the so-called masculine sides of ourselves over the so-called feminine sides, we can prevent the violence that stems from such a culture by valuing both sides of our humanity and thus join the rebels whose cause is the focus of this book.

My aim in sharing what boys and young men have taught me about them and about us is to reveal the nature of their and our problems and the solutions. They teach us about who we are as humans and how the culture we have created for them gets in the way and leads to a crisis of connection, as suggested by rising rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide, as well as partisan divides, hate crimes, and mass violence. They also teach us about the solutions to the crisis that are rooted in our nature but that aren’t reflected in our culture. Not only do their thick stories open our eyes to see the elephant in the room, they also empower and humanize them and us, and repair our broken dignity, as argued by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, by reminding us that our future is not in the hands of fate or artificial intelligence but in us humans who already know naturally how to create a world in which we listen, care, and take individual and collective responsibility.

1.

From the time I was a child, I have had a type of double consciousness and thus have understood that there are at least two stories to everything and everyone. The first story, the one that most people share, is considered common knowledge. The second story, the one less often shared, is more difficult to hear given the volume of the first one. We need to listen more closely and with curiosity to hear the second story. We can think of the first story as analogous to a tree as a young child would draw it: with roots, a trunk, branches, and leaves. It’s not necessarily false, but it represents nothing more than the image of a tree. The second story reflects more than just its image. It considers where the tree grows, how it nourishes other trees around it, what types of diseases kill it, and why trees are necessary for human survival. I have always been fascinated by why we are more likely to tell the first type of story rather than the second.

Thin stories, or the first type, are not inert. Rather, they work as culturally dominant forces determining how we live, think, feel, and behave. They provide the model by which we raise and educate our children; treat one another; and act at home, in school, and in the workplace. They determine what our goals and aspirations are, and how we interact with technology and the natural world around us. They form our ideas about what it means to be a boy, a girl, a man, a woman, an adult, and a human and what it means to develop over time.

Those of us living in Western society have been telling thin stories for centuries, guided by the philosophies of Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau. These stories split reason from emotion, give human capacities and desires a gender in their references to man, make culture into nature, and have no heart.[5] In these distinctly European stories told by white and economically privileged men, the men are separated from the women and children, thinking is separated from feeling, the self from the other, the mind from the body, and nature from culture. They are more than just separated, however; they are also placed on a hierarchy. Men (especially those who are white, rich, and straight) and their so-called masculine qualities are placed at the top, while women and children (especially those of color and those who are from poor and working-class communities) and their so-called feminine qualities are put at the bottom. Evidence of the hierarchy of human qualities is in our definitions of manhood, maturity, success, modernity, and even science, with its privileging of our hard qualities and capacities such as stoicism, independence, assertiveness, thinking, and crunching numbers over the soft ones such as vulnerability, dependency, sensitivity, feeling, and the analyses of words and language. The mainstream definitions of manhood, maturity, and success are premised on the capacity for self-sufficiency and independence and don’t include the ability to be interdependent or to sustain mutually supportive relationships in which no one gets sacrificed over another person. The open expression of vulnerability and sensitivity, especially by boys and men, is considered not only lame but also immature, girlie, and gay, which is an insult in a culture that places girls, women, and gay people at the bottom of the hierarchy. Similarly, modernity and science emphasize money over people or numbers over words, with the soft qualities on the bottom being considered traditional and thus inconsistent with advancement or not based on a rigorous scientific method and thus not science.

We know these ideologically driven stories about humans and human qualities are problematic because they often contradict how we really think and feel, especially when we are young; but we share them as we grow older out of fear that we won’t be able to get or stay at the top of the hierarchy of humans if we don’t believe in them and act accordingly. We also fear we will be even more alone than we are if we are stuck at or demoted to the bottom. With much help from our family, friends, colleagues, and the media, we convince ourselves, especially those who identify as male, that if we emphasize the hard parts of ourselves and diminish or outright deny the soft parts, we will ultimately attain what we want in life and our children will, too. While it rarely turns out that way, our fear of being or staying at the bottom drives us to believe in stories that we know are not true.

Our culture, with its privileging of all people and things considered hard over those deemed soft, is reflective of a boy culture that doesn’t actually characterize boys, as will be evident throughout this book, but is a caricature, or a stereotype, of a boy. It is also not a man culture, however, as it is immature in its privileging of the me over the we, retribution over restoration, money over people, and having fun over taking responsibility. Such a culture reifies itself and thus is perceived to be the natural order rather than the cultural disorder of things. It determines how we treat ourselves and one another, and even how we understand our own problems and go about trying to solve them. We see our mental health crisis, for example, as being about the individual—thus offering therapy and medication to those who suffer—rather than also about a culture that is depressing, anxiety-provoking, and lonely to live in, to which the appropriate response would be changing the culture so that it aligns better with our human needs and our social nature.[6]

I am not claiming—nor are the boys and young men I include in this book—that the hierarchy of humanness and human qualities should be flipped so that those at the bottom would be on top and those on top would be put at the bottom. Men and adults are as human as women and children. Stoicism and vulnerability are equally worthy of celebration; without vulnerability, we would have a hard time connecting to others, and without stoicism, we would have a hard time supporting others. Feeling is an important human skill, but so, too, is thinking. According to Antonio Damasio, a world-renowned neuroscientist, only patients who have suffered severe brain trauma can think without feeling. In addition, friendships are as important as romantic relationships, and research suggests that they are, in fact, even more important for our health and well-being.[7] No humans, human qualities, or relationships should be sacrificed in the name of exhibiting maturity, becoming a man, or being successful. It is the sacrificing of one type of human, one type of relationship, and one side of ourselves over the other that leads to our crisis of connection. The solution to the crisis, therefore, is to create a culture that disrupts rather than flips the hierarchies so that no one ends up at the top or the bottom, but all are seen as equally human, with both sides of their humanity equally valued.

How boy culture gets injected into our psyches is through thin stories, with one of the most insidious being about gender differences. The story goes something like this: Boys and men roam the earth with little to no feelings of vulnerability, at least in comparison to girls and women. Driven mostly by their desire for sex and money, they don’t want or need emotional intimacy or deep connection, especially with other boys or men, or at least less so than with girls and women; are less emotionally sensitive or astute than girls and women; and certainly are more rational and intelligent, especially in the areas of math and science. They want independence, autonomy, and freedom above everything else. Teenage boys are "rebels without a cause, making trouble just because they are stuck in their emotional and social immaturity. If they are acting like a girl, they are not a man, and most certainly not a straight one. And finally, they are naturally interested, or at least should be, in the hard professions—for example, investment banking and anything connected to STEM fields—and are naturally not cut out to do the softer" careers such as teaching or caring for others.

Girls and women, in contrast, roam the earth with few thoughts, except perhaps those related to makeup, fashion, food, boyfriends, husbands, and children. They have little to no sexual desire, or at least less than boys and men; want nothing but emotional intimacy, especially with boys and men; compete with other girls and women; are untrustworthy; and most of all want to get married and have children and don’t value their intellectual sides as much as boys and men do. If they are intelligent, it is simply in the areas of emotions and relationships, both considered less impressive than the real intelligence evident in the STEM fields. If they want power and don’t want children and/or marriage, they are acting like a man or a bitch and thus are not really women at all—or at least not very nice ones. Teenage girls are considered queen bees or wannabes, and thus their rebellious attitudes are often seen as evidence of their immaturity. And just as boys and men are not made for soft professions, girls and women are assumed not to be made for the hard ones, especially those that involve crunching a lot of numbers. The assumptions that males and females come from different planets and thus have more differences than similarities and that our gender stereotypical behavior (and yes, many of us do act like stereotypes) reflects biological facts rather than cultural fiction are all part of the ideology of boy culture.

The hard data suggest that gender and sex (the chromosomal type) are not the same thing. A study by Bobbi J. Carothers and Harry T. Reis of more than 13,000 individuals[8] finds that men and women do not fall into different groups: Thus, contrary to the assertions of pop psychology…it is untrue that men and women think about their relationships in qualitatively different ways. Lise Eliot, a social neuroscientist, has written Pink Brain, Blue Brain, a book about how infant brains are so malleable that what begin as small differences at birth become amplified over time, as parents and teachers—and the culture at large—unwittingly reinforce gender stereotypes. [9] Revealing how cultural beliefs and practices create gender differences, she states:

Boys and girls are identified in utero and the nurseries painted to match months before birth. From girls’ preschool ballet lessons and makeovers to boys’ peewee football, hockey, and baseball league, our world is in many ways more gender divided than ever…The more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies and start attributing every skill or deficit to innate sex differences…Even teachers are now preaching the gospel of sex differences, goaded by bad in-service seminars, by so-called brain-based learning theories…And fueling it further is the massive pink-versus-blue marketing of dolls with ever thinner waists and action figures with ever broader shoulders. While some parents still fight valiantly to avoid stereotyping, the larger culture has embraced it with a vengeance.[10]

If you think these gender stereotypes are outdated, log on to the internet, check out Netflix and TikTok, read postings on Instagram, or walk into any toy or clothing store or bookshop and you will see ample evidence of gender stereotypes that don’t sound much different from those prevalent when my eighty-year-old parents were young. Products now appear to be driven by such stereotypes even more than before, with a pink tax on products aimed at girls and women, which means that these products cost more than the exact same ones for boys and men.[11] Minda Belete, a student who investigated this topic for his senior thesis at NYU Abu Dhabi, told me: It’s expensive to be on the bottom of the hierarchy.

The data also suggest an intensification of gender stereotypes over time. Sociologist Lloyd Lueptow found that students in the 1990s were significantly more likely to report greater differences than those in the 1970s, especially when it came to qualities such as sympathetic, talkative, friendly, and affectionate, which were seen as typical of women; whereas qualities such as aggressive, self-confident, decisive, and adventurous were seen as typical of men.[12] In Pink Brain, Blue Brain, Eliot states that while the data have indicated consistently that there are more differences among males or among females than between the two sexes, our gender stereotyping appears to have only gotten worse. She blames this pattern on difference equality, which is the belief that the qualities associated with Mars (masculinity) or Venus (femininity) are equal in value and should be nurtured only according to the planet to which one belongs. Following this line of argument, writers such as Michael Gurian, Leonard Sax, and Simon Baron-Cohen proselytize on the essential sex differences and ignore the hard data that suggest otherwise.

One can also hear evidence of the widespread belief in gender stereotypes in the stories told by our colleagues, friends, and family members, with boys and men being described as emotional idiots compared to girls and women, and girls and women as untrustworthy or needy compared to boys and men. My female students apologize for speaking in class and taking up too much space or don’t speak at all. Then there is the conflation of stereotypically feminine behavior with being a transgender female or gay, such as the story about the woman who told her partner that he must be a trans woman given that he is so emotional and sensitive, or the one about the nephew who must be gay because he gets his feelings hurt easily and values his male friendships. We are so stuck in our stereotypes that we think that a dean at a university who chooses to paint her office pink is being a feminist rather than just painting her office in the color that she thinks would be nice with her furniture. Even the Oscar-nominated movie Close, which is about the friendship between two thirteen-year-old boys, is interpreted as a gay relationship drama rather than as a tale about how boys desire close male friendships and what the consequences are of not having them. While we think we have progressed in terms of our gender stereotypes, we haven’t; and in fact, we may even be going backward.

I asked a classroom of forty undergraduates in the fall semester of 2022 to write down the words that they associate with masculinity. They wrote down tough, stoic, intelligent, strong, independent, rational, logical, hard worker, productive, determined, ambitious, confident, competitive, toxic, unemotional, dominant, aggressive, and warlike. When they were asked to write down words associated with femininity, they wrote kind, gentle, family-oriented, pretty, caring, sensitive, emotional, lazy, weak, materialistic, and calculating. Although both sets of words included negative and positive connotations, the masculine words were more likely to be positive, with only eleven of the fifty-two (21 percent) words suggesting a negative quality, whereas eleven of the thirty-eight (29 percent) feminine words had negative connotations. Our thin stories about the social construct of gender appear to be getting even thinner, and the explicit hierarchy in them remains firm.

In a recent article in The Guardian, a journalist explores why he and his male peers have such a hard time developing close male friendships. He initially entertains my empirically grounded thesis, quoting me directly, that such difficulty is a product of a boy culture that pathologizes such relationships for boys and men. Then he switches to what he perceives to be the more valid reason, which is that men are biologically wired not to want emotionally intimate friendships. He quotes the godfather of friendship research, Dr. Robin Dunbar, who argues that men don’t become less likely to have intimate friendships; they are born that way…[Dunbar says,] ‘What’s become very clear in the last decade…is the completely different way the social world of men and women works.’ [13]

A journalist for The New York Times also sided recently with this naturalized argument in an article about why marriage is becoming less attractive for heterosexual women.[14] She explains that the reason such women are having such a hard time finding emotionally sensitive partners is that men are limited in their ability to be emotionally expressive and some do not naturally have the emotional sensitivity necessary for romantic relationships with women. Not only are these views inconsistent with my data and data collected over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, but they confound what may be true within a particular cultural and historical context with what is biological. Had the journalists and the scholars looked at friendship in and outside of the United States over the past few centuries, they would have seen that the desire for intimate friendships, including those between two people of the same sex, and the capacity to be emotionally sensitive are not reflective of a gender or sexual identity. These are simply human desires, capacities, and needs.

The persistence of our gender stereotypes and hierarchies is also found in a recent United Nations survey, which indicated that nine out of ten people have a bias against women, believing them to be less competent than men and, according to some 25 percent of the respondents, deserving of being beaten. [15] Additional evidence of our male biases intensifying can be found in data that indicate that there are significantly more biological females identifying as male these days than vice versa. Only a decade ago, the opposite was true. In a society that increasingly idealizes all things deemed male and masculine and mocks most if not all things deemed female and feminine, these trends are not surprising.

While the possibility of alternative gender pronouns or having a nonbinary gender identity has made us believe that we have moved past old-fashioned gender binaries, stereotypes, and hierarchies, it appears to be having the unintended consequence of reifying them for those who reject such gender fluidity. Those who don’t identify as they, and in some cases are even irritated by those who do, appear to be more rigidly aligned to the gender binary of he or she than ever before. By focusing on changing pronouns as the only solution to the rigidity of our social constructs of gender, we are not addressing why some of us want to challenge the gender binary in the first place. Maia Kobabe, the author of Gender Queer, one of the most frequently banned books in the United States, describes not wanting to engage in stereotypically gendered behavior as one of the reasons for rejecting the she