BOYS WILL BE MEN

The year was 2000.  Boys were in trouble.  There were disturbing statistics:  four boys were  diagnosed as emotionally disturbed for every one girl, six boys were diagnosed with attention deficit disorder for every one girl. Boys killed themselves five times more often than girls. Boys were four times more likely to drop out of high school than girls who also outnumbered them entering college. After fifteen years of focus on the experience of girls growing up in America, well described and documented in Mary Pipher’s best-selling book Reviving Ophelia, researchers and mental health professionals  and educators turned their attention toward boys. School shootings in 1998 and 1999 focused media attention on the work of two psychologists who give testimony in this program. William Pollack, director of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital and author of the best-selling book Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Manhood and Michael Thompson, co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. Dorothy Espelage, PhD, a researcher at the University of Illinois, focused on the phenomenon of bullying.  Michael Meade, author of Men and the Water of Life: Initiation and Tempering of Men, looked at male adolescence through the lens of rites passage and cultural and societal mores. In the film, the voices of Pollack, Thompson, Espelage, and Meade are interwoven with interviews with parents, teachers and the boys themselves.

How do boys become men? How do they learn courage, the difference between right and wrong, and the meaning of love? What hurts them, makes them violent, and sometimes kills them? In search of answers to these questions, Boys Will Be Men follows 20 boys on the south side of Chicago who undergo a rite of passage ritual led by Meade and learn to use poetry to express their hopes and fears of manhood.  The film also tells the story of five “out-of-control” boys who have been sent to an Outward Bound type wilderness intervention program in Southern Idaho.  As we follow their journey we get to know and care about each boy in his struggle to become a man.  The mentors who guide them are present with pragmatic, no-nonsense advice.

REVIEWS

In light of recent incidents of violence sweeping our nation involving young men from all walks of life, Boys Will Be Men illustrates the sometimes, ordinary, heroic and tragic aspects of being a male today. This video explores the nature of the beast within all of us but concentrates on everyday pressures of being male in American society today…. There are no catchall phrases here. Just young men attempting to fit in and become “somebody”. More often than not, they fail only to get up and try again. Through their personal interviews, parents, and teachers, the viewer gets to see cultural and societal mores as they relate to male adolescence and eventual adulthood. While the answers to “what hurts them, makes them violent, and sometimes kills them,” may seem subjective, Tom Weidlinger has produced a film that is both personal and universal. It is provocative and challenges the viewer to take a close look at contemporary masculinity in the United States and what we, collectively and individually must do to stop the destructive behavior that is sweeping across America killing the innocent and destroying the lives of our young men.

—LAROI LAWTON, MC JOURNAL – The Journal of Academic Media Librarianship

Highly Recommended

It’s not such an unusual request for a documentary filmmaker, but Tom Weidlinger wants dads to spend their Father’s Day watching television – to bond with their sons in front of the TV. His film, Boys Will Be Men, airs this Sunday on KQED/Channel 9. “It’s encouraging being a good father,” the Berkeley filmmaker says of the documentary, which explores the emotional lives of boys and offers answers to help adults understand the sometimes maddening behavior of their male offspring…

Boys Will be Men charts a course through the emotional maze of boyhood that will be instantly recognizable to many men: Boys are born expressive and emotional are taught to be stoic and insensitive. Boys who do show sensitivity and emotion are derided by their peers as weak or effeminate. Caught up in this “boy code,” boys feel they can’t talk about the emotions they are experiencing and often resort to lashing out violently. Boys Will Be Men illustrates an obvious but unspoken truth. “It was really kind of putting words to an experience that I’ve had, and I’ve seen other boys and men had, growing up, but we never ever talked about,” Weidlinger says.

In staking out the boundaries of the boyhood dilemma, Boys Will Be Men relies heavily on the work of Michael Thompson, co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys and William Pollack, author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Manhood. The video then explores two approaches designed to open boys up to emotional growth. The first program take troubled boys into the Idaho wilderness on an Outward Bound-style experience. The second approach puts teen-age Chicago boys through a rite-of-passage performance incorporating poetry, storytelling and self-expression. The two experiences are very different but each sparks the kind of frank emotional dialogue that is all but missing from most boys’ lives…

Allan Gold, psychologist for the Reed Union School District in Tiburon, has seen the film and participated in a panel discussion at a San Francisco screening. Even in allegedly enlightened Marin, parents are still raising emotionally closed boys, Gold says. “I don’t think it’s dealt with it at all.” Many of the boys he sees have their lives over-programmed with activities with the quiet time for listening lost in a blitz of day planners and scheduling. “You get what I see as a culture of competition. That’s very Marin,” Gold says. Not enough is being done to reach out to boys on an emotional level, he explains. “Boys do have a very rich emotional life,” Gold say. “They struggle with a lot of issues. They need to be provided the places and the people to listen to them without judgment, to guide them and be kind of consultants to them without telling them what to do all the time.”… Films like Boys Will be Men are one part of the answer, Gold says. “This film will really help open up discussion…”

Weidlinger estimates there will be 50 PBS stations airing his Boys Will Be Men on Sunday. He can’t hope to spark a national movement but he sees the need for one. “I do think that the level of school violence is a kind of indicator that there are issues that are not being dealt with or they’re being dealt with in very one-dimensional ways,” Weidlinger says.

Fathers and boys have all experienced the feelings discussed in the film. Now they might have a way to talk about it. Even if it means sitting in front of the television.

—RICK POLITO,  MARIN INDEPENDENT JOURNAL

Some 500 parents and youth from Berkeley and beyond turned out for a screening of Boys Will Be Men, a film dealing with the difficulties of growing up male in America, at Longfellow Middle School auditorium Monday night.

The latest film by Berkeley filmmaker Tom Weidlinger, Boys Will Be Men, premiered in San Francisco two weeks ago. Monday night’s screening was organized by the Berkeley PTA Council in response to what PTA member Cynthia Papermaster called “the deep need and yearning in our community to deal with these issues.”

Papermaster said the prevalence of bullying, homophobia and outright violence at Berkeley schools has reached a level where parents are desperately seeking explanations and solutions such as the ones offered in the film. Boys Will be Men begins with experts describing how boys are often taught to be “tough” and to internalize emotions and feelings. The result, one expert argues, is that boys learn to express themselves by acting out rather than by verbalizing feelings as girls might do.

In a line that drew laughter from the audience, the experts say that boys spend their first years in school thinking to themselves “What is this place called school? It is a place run by women, for girls and boys are always getting into trouble.” The film visits a Berkeley elementary school teacher struggling to prevent hyperactive boys from becoming alienated at a school that seems designed for them to fail. Boys may have different needs than girls, but if they fail to keep up academically they risk developing an “achievement gap” that could haunt them for the rest of their lives, the teacher says.

Turning to adolescent boys — boys one expert describes as “tough, stoic and ready to fight at a moment’s notice” — the film follows a group of troubled teens through a wilderness program in Idaho. Working together to overcome a series of obstacles, the boys get a taste of pride and self-worth unlike anything they’ve experienced before.

Before the ever-present eye of the camera they can be seen withdrawing from their shells of cynicism, becoming increasingly comfortable with sharing their feelings. “It’s an emotional experience to see those boys be inspired; kids that potentially would have so much trouble,” said Berkeley parent Craig McCaleb after the screening.

The film offers “a wonderful explanation for how our little boys become the difficult teenagers they are,” said Berkeley parent Bill Tennant.

In 25 years of making films for public television, Weidlinger said he’s “never seen a more immediate and universally positive reaction to one of (his) films” than the reaction to Boys Will Be Men in recent weeks… Weidlinger said he hoped other communities would follow the Berkeley example and use the film to spark discussions and even reforms…

—BEN LUMPKIN, BERKELEY DAILY PLANET