Cowboys (Or: Learning To Be A Man, part 1)

"Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they become its advocates."
- Charles Dickens

I wish someone told me I didn’t have to be a cowboy.

At church some months ago, during a discussion about gender, a middle-aged man gruffly said, “I wish someone told me I didn’t have to be a cowboy.” I don’t want to read too much into what he meant by this statement, but I haven’t been able to get the sentiment out of my mind. It represents a thought that can and should be echoed by so many boys and men; by those who were supposed to be cowboys, but turned out not to be, or by those who became cowboys only to discover they no longer wanted to be, by those who have discovered the emptiness of the masculine baggage we’ve been handed. I wish someone told me I didn’t have to be a cowboy. I want to write those words in ash and tears on the altars of our churches, on the hearths of our homes, and on the gates of our schoolyards.

I grew up in the South, in the land of football and cheerleaders, of debutantes and good old boys, of macho men and dainty women. Women have a place (the dirty secret: so do men). I remember Texas in the 1980s, a time of blue eye shadow and platinum hair for my mother, a thick mustache and a police uniform for my father. I was dressed in cowboy boots from time immemorial (though I always managed to pull them off so I could run around barefoot in the warm Texas dirt).

Dad, you see, was (and is) a lover of John Wayne and all things War and Western. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. They Died with their Boots On. Gunga Din. Ft. Apache. McClintock. Bridge on the River Kwai. He refused to watch Rock Hudson movies, though I could never understand why. (I finally understood when I learned that Rock Hudson had died of AIDS; or was the problem not so much the AIDS as the penetration that preceded infection?). Though he also enjoyed the occasional Cary Grant romantic comedy, or even one of Jimmy Stewart’s weepy performances, Dad typically stuck with guns and horses, tanks and valor, cowboys and Indians and women waiting for their soldiers to come home.

I started playing football when I was six, baseball when I was five (I would eventually play football until I was sixteen and baseball until 17. Not a short run.). I wasn’t bad at either sport, and I could have been considered an above average first baseman. My father, like many fathers, seemed noticeably more proud when I scored the winning run than he was when I received perfect scores on my report card. And I think he was proudest when I shot and killed my first deer at the age of 7. Violence and victory and tackles and touchdowns were ways to prove my worth as a boy, it seemed.

Being a boy in my family, and in most other families I encountered, meant certain things. Don’t cry. Play rough. Win. Fight dirty if necessary, but never run away. Don’t hug too much, especially not another man. Above all: don’t cry. Oh, yes, and: don’t cry. I learned these lessons over and over. Sometimes I was taught subtly: I was rewarded for good grades with a fishing pole or a new bat; I received more than one gun as a gift. Other times, the training was more, shall we say, overt.

I have focused on my father, but he was only one of my trainers. I remember a day my mother took me to the dentist. One of the perks of visiting Dr. Connor was that, after the cleaning, I could pick out any toothbrush I wanted (not a small deal to a young child). At the end of this particular visit, I picked out a pink toothbrush, which prompted the following discussion with my mother:

“Boys don’t use pink.”
“Why?”
“They just don’t. Pink is for girls. Do you want blue?”
“No, I don’t like blue.” (I did, in fact, like blue, but I couldn’t pick the same color as my little brother.)
“Take green then. Your father will be upset if you bring home a pink toothbrush.”

So, pink was out. And so (I would later learn) were flowers, dolls, all things that sparkle, long hair, boy bands, doing the dishes, and cooking. And let’s not forget crying.

Gender, it seemed, made a lot of difference. Though he loved us all, I had a different kind of value to my father than did my sister and younger brother, or so he told me. I couldn’t understand what difference it made that I was his firstborn son; I was, after all, the middle child – he had a daughter before me and another son (whose age was so close to my own that we were practically raised as twins during our younger years).

I was also learning that gender made a lot of difference in church. Only men preach. Only men make decisions. Only men pray (They told us that women pray too, they just do it silently. I couldn't be sure at first.). I, as a male, would one day be expected to protect, to teach, to pray, to preach, to lead. My sister, for her part, would learn to follow, to submit. We would both learn that the husband was the head of the wife. We each had our burden. I would learn to pray and be strong; she would learn to cook and to mother.

Typical of my Texas fundamentalist upbringing, the Bible played an important role as I learned “what it means to be a man.” The first chapters of Genesis taught me that Adam was formed first, and then Eve formed from him. Paul reminded me that this order of creation meant that the husband was the head of the wife, just as Christ was the head of the Church. Women were to be silent. You know the rest, especially if you were raised in a Church of Christ.

********

Much of what I have described above is often seen (perhaps rightly) through the lens of the ‘subjugation of women’ in the culture of the American South and in Churches of Christ. But that is not what I want to focus on. Though the treatment of our daughters is shameful, I want, instead, to focus on the way our boys are trained to be men. I was taught that I had more value than my sister, both at home and at Church (I after all, could pray in front of the congregation and at the dinner table; she could not). This elevated place in the church and the home, though, relied in large part on my ability to swing a stick in a baseball game, tackle a foe in a football game, injure someone in a fistfight, to hide my emotions, to be hard and unyielding. I had value only as long as I eliminated everything Soft about me. If I didn’t fit the mold (if I wasn’t a Man) then, since I wasn’t a woman, I had no place in either the home or the church. My place in the world and in the church depended on my decision to buy into the violent and kyriarchal training of my youth.

Maybe my focus is off; maybe I should focus on the way my sister was treated. But I will leave that to the feminists among us, and I will wish them luck. I want now only to make this point: someone should have told me, just once, that I didn’t have to be a cowboy. Someone should have told me that I didn’t have to be ashamed that I didn’t fit the mold. Someone should have told me that it was acceptable to just be, well, me. No one ever did, especially not at church.

We need to train our boys what it really means to be a man. We need to teach them that violence is bad, not good, and that domination is to be avoided, not lauded. We need to teach them that there is neither male nor female in Christ. We need to teach them to learn from the women in their lives. We need to tell them it is not shameful to cry, that it is not shameful to express love and affection for those around them, that intimacy (whether sexual or not) is a gift from Above. We are failing our sons by trying to make them something they don’t have to be. We do it everyday at home and at school. And, saddest of all, we do it every Sunday at Church.