Dishonoring and Disrespecting Young Boys

Imagine experiencing part of your body being cut off in the first hours or days of life when you were expecting the kind of nurturing care experienced in the womb. What would your reaction be? Rage at the violation. Panic—where’s mom? Fear—life is a horror. Betrayal—my nurturers hurt me.

What will you do in reaction to the violation? Try to avoid ever feeling such helpless violating pain again. Or if you do, you feel you deserve it and you likely pass it on to others—the victim-perpetrator syndrome (Lash, 2006). And how do you escape the pain? You dissociate from feeling your body, withdraw from relations, distrust the world, and/or learn to dominate others so they cannot dominate you. Voila, the seeds of toxic masculinity and misogyny.

As Bessel van der Kolk pointed out in his book, The Body Keeps the Score, and Babette Rothschild in her book, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment, early trauma is not forgotten but carried forward in the body. In her book, BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, Ruth Whippman reviews the many ways boys are not nurtured, noting how many men feel like they always have to be “on guard.”

In the USA, many boys are circumcised at birth or shortly after, not for religious reasons but for hospital profit. Most parents are not fully informed (nor are medical personnel) about the long term harms that come from infant circumcision—physically and psychologically. With hospital infant circumcision, male infants are strapped down, sexually stimulated while horrible pain is inflicted. Do you think there is a link to sadomasochism practices later? Or pleasure in violence? The only way to guarantee no pain is with anesthesia, but that is rare (and dangerous). Overall, circumcised boys tend to be more sensitive to pain.

See the film American Circumcision for physiological details and presentation of both sides of the infant circumcision issue. And see below for links to posts on the effects and dangers of infant circumcision.

[I feel for any readers who have experienced the aforementioned violation. See below for blog posts with helpful resources.]

Infant circumcision was initiated among the ancient Hebrews as a little snip to indicate membership in the tribe and draw some blood (a common ritual in patriarchal societies in an attempt to take the power of blood away from women who cycle and gestate life with it). A little snip was enough until the year 140 CE when Hebrew patriarchs were disturbed at how young men would pull down the foreskin to look more like the athletes from other countries they competed against (naked). The patriarchs decided to make that impossible, advocating the removal of all the foreskin, a sexually damaging practice. Many Jewish parents today instead use a brit shalom, a non-cutting ceremony, to welcome their sons into the community.

Okay, but let’s assume no circumcision. Why are uncircumcised boys also at a disadvantage?

In the previous post, I pointed out boys’ greater need for the evolved nest, also for longer, because of slower maturity, less built-in resilience, and more susceptibility to stress. The first six years of life is when the evolved nest is most vital for boys. This is the time also when parents need the support of patient, sensitive, compassionate alloparents who are willing to cooperate in providing the evolved nest. If not, boys may be at a disadvantage for life. Sending boys to day care is particularly detrimental to them (Schore, 2017)

Families who give birth to a girl first and then have a boy may wonder what is wrong with their boy. He is so clingy! Not only do girls have more built-in resilience and mature more quickly than boys, they pick up on social signals more easily. In comparison, boys will likely come across as more immature and needy, for longer. Yet parents who have adopted implicit toxic masculinity norms may expect boys to be more resilient than girls and give them less nurturing. They expect boys to ‘man-up’ from a young age. This can undermine a male’s development for the long term.

Remember, the first six years of life are the most important years of life. It is the period when the brain and body are setting the parameters and thresholds for multiple physiological and psychological systems—stress response, vagus nerve, immune system, attachment system—and how they will function for life (barring therapeutic intervention), influencing sociality and morality (Narvaez, 2014).

Even after age six, boys are not getting what they need in most households and neighborhoods. Richard Reeves, author of Of Men and Boys, advocates that boys be redshirted for school, meaning they should not attend first grade until age 7 or so because of their slower maturation. Evolved Nest Theory suggests that families should select the more holistic approaches to education, like Montessori, Waldorf, or Reggio Emiliana schools if they can, or unschooling—where the interests of the child reign supreme and interference is minimal. Ideally, all children spend most of their time before age twelve in free play with multiple aged mates outdoors in complex environments.

What happens when you are undercared for, when the evolved nest is not provided? Physiological systems will be dysregulated in one or more ways. Excessive distress sows ongoing inflammation which is associated with numerous health problems. Your stress load may be perpetually high, making additional stress unbearable, leading to acting out. Your innate, pre-human survival systems likely will dominate your psyche, orienting you to dominance-submission relationships. You’ll be reactive to threat and perceive threat. Without intervention, you may look for encouragement of the violent, hostile feelings you have from unnested early life.

You may be obsessed with what you didn’t get when you needed it:

·       Autonomy (freedom!) and power over others to do what you want

·       Breast suckling (know any adult men obsessed with women’s breasts?)

·       Affectionate touch (there are over 80,000 pet dogs in the USA and over 60,000 cats)

·       Self-directed play (aggressive instead of cooperative because you never properly learned the latter)

·       Nature control instead of Nature connection (smash those ants!)

To paraphrase an African adage, if the fire in the belly of a boy is not nurtured to fuel the hearth of the community, the boy’s fire will destroy the community, just to feel the warmth. Unless there are transforming experiences later, early trauma and toxic stress will lead, psychologically, to stiff mindedness, an inflexibility that manifests in taking up a siloed pathway through life, narrowly focused, controllable, unthreatening to the insecure self. Getting and maintaining a high status can be somewhat reassuring. In the world today, in nearly every walk of life, many undercared for men fight each other for dominance.

Therapists tell me that women complain that the men in their lives act like children who want a mother. Undercared for men go to their partners as little boys who want their partners to nurture them like an always-present, always-forgiving mother, to make up for what they missed. Evolved Nest Theory would surmise that they are clingy, including to their partner’s breasts, because of early undercare. They are stuck with unfulfilled, developmentally-scheduled needs.

Gender Differences

Though there are many more chromosomal combinations that people are born with than XX and XY, the setup of these normative types can be disrupted. Prenatal stress and teratogens (chemicals harmful to fetuses like plastics, herbicides and pesticides—ubiquitous in food and water now) can affect gender development. We’ve known for decades that endocrine disrupters like BPA plastic can make boys more feminine and girls more masculine. Other changes may not show up until puberty, when the body makes decisions about its sexuality based on fetal experience. Sometimes gonadal changes go in the opposite direction of those at birth. In childhood and adolescence, a person may shift genders physiologically or psychologically. It’s complicated. All the pollutants in our food, air, water are increasing the rainbow of gender possibilities.  But this then is again worse for those labeled male at birth. Transgender women are the most discriminated against, the most harmed, especially if they are black.

Michael Meade, noted in an interview in The Sun,

“There’s a fire in all people, but especially in young men, that can burn toward dominance, brutality, an excess of competition, and destruction. But when it’s engaged and welcomed and appreciated, it becomes part of the heat in the hearth of the community. The same fire that can brutally kill can also lead a young man to courageously risk his own life to save other people. Rage and outrage are the same essential energy that makes art and beauty” (p. 46, The Sun, March 2020).

Just think, if we could respect the whole body of boys, honoring each one’s unique gifts, we could shape that wonderful male energy for the good of each community, especially the planetary community. We could more easily meet the mega crises of today, crises that were largely fostered by child miscare into a ‘burn the community’ energy.

Posts on Infant Circumcision

Myths About Circumcision You Probably Believe

More Circumcision Myths You May Believe: Hygiene and STDs 

Circumcision: Social, Sexual, Psychological Realities

Circumcision’s Psychological Damage

Circumcision Ethics and Economics 

Pro-Circumcision Culturally Biased, Not Scientific

Practical Tips for Men Distressed by Their Circumcision

What Is the Greatest Danger for an Uncircumcised Boy?

Doctor Ignorance of Male Anatomy Harms Boys

References

Knight, C. (1991). Blood relations; Menstruation and the origins of culture. Yale University Press.

Lash, J.L. (2006). Not in his image: Gnostic vision, sacred ecology and the future of belief.   Chelsea Green.

Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schneider, J. E., Brozek, J. M., & Keen-Rhinehart, E. (2014). Our stolen figures: The interface of sexual differentiation, endocrine disruptors, maternal programming, and energy balance. Hormones and Behavior, 66(1), 104–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2014.03.011

Rothschild, B. (2000). The body remembers: The psychophysiology of trauma and trauma treatment. New York: W.W. Norton.

Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score. New York: Penguin.

Varticovski L, Stavreva DA, McGowan A, Raziuddin R, Hager GL. Endocrine disruptors of sex hormone activities. Mol Cell Endocrinol. 2022 Jan 1;539:111415. doi: 10.1016/j.mce.2021.111415.