Thoughts on paternity pt IV

Gender roles; reciprocal relationships; memories; Tom & Jerry

Gender roles

Henry Mance at the FT has a story on what it means to be a boy online in 2023. It discusses the media and influencers who shape boys’ conception of what it means to be a man, and how this has (or hasn’t) changed over time.

I find much to fault in the article: for one thing, it’s a personal take on the subject matter, backed up with anecdotal evidence. This is fine for a personal essay, but it’s hardly an objective answer to the question posed in the title. Much more importantly though, what bothers me most is the implicit acceptance of the ‘fact’ that there is or should be an answer to the question of what it means to be a boy or a man.

As a parent, I struggle with this concept, and I think it’s worth explaining why by taking this back to first principles. In the context in which ‘what does it mean to be a man’ is usually asked, the question refers to how men ought to behave. The question is valid only if it rests on two underlying assumptions: the first is that there is an ideal behaviour that men should exhibit, and the second is that this ideal is different to how women are expected to behave.

When we praise or criticise behaviours, we do so for one of two reasons. Some behaviours we praise or criticise because they are essential to our definition of morality and decency; others, because they conform to or contradict our (for lack of a better word) aesthetic preferences. For example: I teach my children not to lie, because in my view, honesty is a virtue that is inherently worth pursuing. I also teach them how to set a table in the way my parents taught me - for which I make no appeal to a moral code.

(Parenthesis one: ideals of morality are just as arbitrary as what I call aesthetic preferences

In the final analysis, it is true that no-one can prove their definition of morality is the truth. There are some moral systems that are better than others, in that they hold fewer internal contradictions; but, ultimately all philosophers’ mental gymnastics amount to ornate palaces built on pillars of sand: when you get to the bottom of any theory of ethics, you find an axiom that’s as arbitrary as any other.

However, this does not really affect my argument on gender roles, as we’ll see when I finally get to make it; the reason it doesn’t is that, despite the fact that morality is ultimately arbitrary, we do not treat it as such, and we give to what we consider to be matters of morality much heavier weight than to those we consider to merely pertain to aesthetics (unless you’re a hardcore aesthete).)

(Parenthesis two: many rules of etiquette and aesthetics are not as arbitrary as they first appear

On the flip side of the previous parenthesis, many rules of good behaviour pertaining to aesthetics as not as dismissible as a matter of superficial preference as they first appear. The objective of many rules of etiquette is not just to appear to behave in the prescribed ‘correct’ manner, but to show kindness and consideration to others.

However, the difference between judgements on morality and judgements on aesthetics is that the former are widely seen as universal, whereas aesthetics are (most people would admit) more context-/society-/culture-dependant. In the UK, it’s rude to spit in public because most people would be put out by it; so, when I tell my children not to do it, it’s not an arbitrary rule, but one meant to ensure they’re considerate of others. In China, spitting in public is common, and most people don’t have a problem with it.)

Now here’s the crux of the matter: as per my reasoning above, the ideal masculine behaviour whose existence is implied by the question ‘what does it mean to be a man’ must either rest on the grounds of morality, or aesthetic preference.

Do we accept that there is a different morality for men than for women? If not, then morality cannot be the source for our different expectations in behaviour. And I think most of us would dismiss the idea that there is a different morality for each sex or gender when the question is put as explicitly as this.

(I think that implicitly, many people might subscribe to the idea that, for instance, courage is a virtue for men but not for women; and of course, there are some people who’d explicitly state that there are different virtues for men than for women (or at least, that the virtues rank differently in importance for men than they do for women), and who might attempt to justify this on evolutionary grounds or whatever. But I can’t think of any such justification that is universal and holds water - and the issue I take with the question ‘what does it take to be a man’ is that it perpetuates, validates, and reinforces such weak arguments for different standards of morality in a sneaky, insidious, and unexamined manner.)

So then, we’re left with justifying that men ought to behave differently to women by appealing to aesthetics. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this - it’d be disingenuous for any of us to pretend that we don’t have preferences, and that we don’t try to impose them on our children. But we ought to be not just honest but candidly upfront about it.

In short: what do I tell my son ‘what does it mean to be a man’? Nothing - the question does not arise, just as I don’t tell my daughter what it means to be a woman. I try to tell them both what it means to be a good person, which is the same for the two of them. There are implicit differences in the way I raise them, which are because of their genders, but (I think) they are restricted to their clothes (not their toys or books). I buy dresses for my daughter and not for my son; when my son asks to wear his sister’s dresses, I tell him I am not crazy about the idea - but I won’t stop him from doing so: since my preference for men to dress in what I consider to be the standard dress code (which is not only different to women’s, but different to what most other men wear these days (in fact, I object way more strenuously and absolutely to my son’s dressing with the wrong level of formality for an occasion than to his dressing in girls’ clothes)) is less strong than his desire to wear a dress, I let it go.

(Of course, things aren’t always as clear cut as this. As the two parentheses above suggest, things like manners and morality aren’t always neatly demarcated: most of us agree that kindness is a virtue, and that an aspect of kindness is not causing unnecessary grief or consternation. So, should one temper one’s preferences, even deeply personal ones such as style, to avoid giving offence? The answer isn’t always clear, but only a fanatic would say it should always be ‘no’. And so, for example, I wouldn’t let my son wear a dress to a funeral in (more conservative) Greece.)

Reciprocal relationships

Our society considers reciprocal relationships to be the norm: non-reciprocated feelings (or intensity of feelings) are seen as tragic or comedic - recall, for example, Kristin Scott Thomas’s character’s unrequited love in Four Weddings and a Funeral, or Barney’s insistence that he and Ted are best friends in How I Met Your Mother.

The typical relationship between parents and their children is interesting because it starts as a reciprocal one: my children are the people I love the most in the world, and for the time being, the feeling is reciprocated in its intensity. However, if I do a good job as a parent, my children will remain the most important people in my life, but I will not be theirs: they will fall in love, hopefully have children of their own, and my wife and I will be secondary characters in their lives.

It is a strange thought, this: to know that success in something you do means that you will end up loving someone more than they love you. My mother told me recently, how you feel about your children is how I feel about you; and it just hit me what that must be like. It sometimes happens, for example, that my parents will call me at a time when I have to deal with kids’ dinner or bath or bedtime, so I tell them I can’t talk and quickly hang up - and then I think about how it must feel to want to talk to the person you care the most about and, not only they don’t have the time, but they casually dismiss the request. And the cat’s in the cradle…

(Of course, things aren’t as tragic as this last paragraph makes them seem - if you do a good job as a parent, your kids will want to spend time with you as adults. But it is true and bittersweet that children outgrow their love for their parents, whereas the inverse does not happen.)

Memories

Another strange thought: my children are very young - my son’s five and my daughter’s three - but they are fully-formed individuals. I do not mean by this that their characters are set and will not change over time, but that they have distinct personalities, and complex thoughts, and difficult feelings, and hopes and fears, and plans, and things they look forward to, and basically they have identities just as any adult does.

What’s mind-blowing about this is that I (and I guess most people?) see memory and identify as almost inseparably-linked, yet my children will retain few, if any, memories from this age.

My kids will not remember our flat, which has been their first home; the parks we go to will fade from their memories, as will their best friends from nursery; they have favourite toys and foods that they’ll forget; they use their own idiomatic expressions and they have distinctive turns of phrase or intonation that will change. I have an extremely strong bond with them, yet if anything happens to me, at best they’ll retain scattered, faded images of me and of my interactions and games with them.

So then, what are we to conclude from this? That memory and identity are entirely separable? That there is a ship-of-Theseus thing going on where a person retains their identify even as all their memories are replaced? That memory is in fact part of identify, because a memory may have shaped behaviour that remains even after the memory has faded? I don’t know. I am sure (in fact I know, I faintly (speaking of fading memories) recall a lecturer at university talking about this) there are entire branches of philosophy dealing with this; if philosophy is the practice of asking big questions without ever coming up with conclusive answers, then having children should earn their parents a BA at minimum.

Tom & Jerry

If you’re like me, you may want to relive your childhood through your children, and buy entire seasons of Tom & Jerry on Amazon. Do not do that! The VHS tapes our parents bought for us in the nineties may have included episodes from the 50s, but there had been some serious curation going on.

Here’s how an early T&J episode opens:

Yep, that’s Tom sitting on a train track, waiting to be hit by a train; he’s depressed because he’s been jilted by his girlfriend. In case you think things turn around, here’s how the episode ends:

Yep, Jerry joins him after he suffers the same fate. It’s not an isolated incident. Early episodes are incredibly bleak - so make sure you review them before you subject your children to them! I’m not one to advocate coddling your kids, and not bringing up difficult conversations, but Jesus Christ.