Boys Keep Swinging — David Bowie
#365Songs: April 14th
I grew up in a Friday Nights Lights kind of town, the sort of place where football players rested easily atop the social hierarchy.
I did not play football. Not because I wasn’t athletic — I played most other sports — but because I wasn’t that masculine. I shied away from aggression, never wrestled in the lawn, avoided fist fights. I skipped the post-game showers, escaped the locker room as fast as possible, and usually walked away the moment boys became boys.
I was around for long enough to know what it means for boys to be boys — even though I preferred being the boy amongst a group of girls being girls. That never changed much over the years. It’s an energy thing, I guess.
But there’s more to it than that.
I was in a fraternity for the first two and half years of college, a fact I don’t often share about myself. It was so out of character, to situate myself in such a masculine space where displays of masculine behavior aren’t just toxic, they’re dangerous. I was hazed, hard, and hazed back to share that inexplicable right of passage with others. I sat in rooms where men objectified women, where graphic stories were shared, and saw a few too many things I wish I could go back and more forcefully stop. I even walked into a few spaces where my timing was just right, likely disrupting a situation that most definitely would’ve ended poorly — and in some cases, illegally.
Heaven loves ya
The clouds part for ya
Nothing stands in your way
When you’re a boy
Heaven loves ya
The clouds part for ya
Nothing stands in your way
When you’re a boy
Clothes always fit ya
Life is a pop of the cherry
There are many good men in this world, one who raised me and many whom I call friends, and countless others who inspire me daily. Sometimes I need to check myself when I rant about masculinity, which is often. Toxicity is not within us all, and not all of us perpetuate it. But we are raised in a culture that prioritizes masculinity, that celebrates behaviors that hold everyone else back. It’s pervasive in culture, in the pissing wars between political leaders, in company C-suites where if they’re there at all women go unheard or spoken over, on competitive youth teams where the worst behaviors often rise to the top.
The thing is, boys do in fact cry. And when they can’t cry out loud, on the outside and in public, for fear of not being man enough, they hold it in. It doesn’t go away, it just festers and becomes something else, an expression far less cathartic and productive. Eventually, withheld emotion turns into anger, rage, deperate power plays.
It’s been almost eight years since Trump was caught saying “grab ’em by the pussy,” a phrase far too many men snickered at and far too many women in Friday Night Lights sort-of-towns shrugged off as “locker room talk.” Problem is, it’s not just talk, it’s power, and when we give carte blanche to those behaviors we legitimize the action itself.
Men learn these behaviors in those “locker rooms,” fraternity houses, and private spaces, and then those same men create the next hierarchies. They later define and govern the laws. And then they pass that power from generation to generation. For every Donald Trump, there is a Donald Trump Jr.
Toxic men don’t care about abortion or trans women winning a competitive sport, they care about protecting a binary gender that protects and seals their power. Often, in the name of religious texts written thousands of years ago because if God said it, then it’s true.
When you’re a boy
When you’re a boy
You can wear a uniform
When you’re a boy
Other boys check you out
You get a girl
These are your favorite things
When you’re a boy
Boys
Boys
Boys keep swinging
Boys always work it out
And that’s the thing about football. It’s a sport made for and played by boys — aside from the very, very rare story of a female kicker. The culture of the sport is the mirror for all the other power structures. Where boys push one another around while coaches use war metaphors to bloody up the battlefield. So when you grow up in a Friday Night Lights town, you’re raised by a place that expects you to be a certain type of boy. And when you’re not that type of boy, you either mask yourself and join in, hide if you can, or feel the brunt of the bullying that all-too-often goes ignored. I masked to avoid the bullying, and hid to find spaces in which I could be more of myself.
Uncage the colors
Unfurl the flag
Luck just kissed you hello
When you’re a boy
They’ll never clone ya
You’re always first on the line
When you’re a boy
When you’re a boy
You can buy a home of your own
When you’re a boy
Learn to drive and everything
You’ll get your share
When you’re a boy
I didn’t expect Trump to be elected in 2016 — very few people did. But as my fellow Californians thought it impossible for anyone to accept him, I knew better. I grew up where Trumpian behavior is the dominant gene. He reminded them that everything they’ve lost is someone else’s fault, that the system was rigged against them. They saw a fellow bully, and heard him say what they wanted to hear for so long. This was a man who could save their fleeting power. This was a man who understood, who identified their common enemies, who tackled his opponents with intent to wound them, and then laughed about it afterwards. A MAGA rally is nothing more than a boy’s locker room, with a few women hovering around to cheer them on at their own expense.
Boys
Boys
Boys keep swinging
Boys always work it out
I should mention David Bowie, as this is a music post. Bowie was the master of gender bending, of blurring lines, a binary-shattering performance artist who never shied away from challenging all of us to see things a different way. He was a master of drag, of androgynous expression, of making those locker room boys really uncomfortable. It’s no wonder those boys, and men, are so uncomfortable. There’s a drag queen buried within every boy, a curiosity to express differently, to feel things, to explore and express and understand things about themselves that have been demonized by a patriarchal culture too afraid to look at itself in the mirror.
These men aren’t afraid of grooming, or Drag Queen Story Hour, or getting propositioned in a mixed-gender restroom, they’re just afraid of revealing how they really feel.
