Review of "Boy Talk" by Mary Polce-Lynch
Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 19 Apr 2006 18:24:00 GMT
What if you were told:
- In order for girls to be complete humans, they need to be as good at sports as boys.
- The main reason girls don’t play sports is that “Girl Rules” looks down on girls that play sports.
- In order for girls to be good at sports, women just need to encourage them and play sports too.
You would probably disagree with most of these points. Yet May Polce-Lynch makes similar claims in her book Boy Talk regarding boys and their emotions. Her main points are:
- In order for boys to be complete humans, they need to be as good at expressing their emotions as girls.
- The main reason that boys don’t express their emotions is that boy’s “Pack Rules” looks down on boy that express their emotions.
- In order for boys to be good at expressing their emotions, men just need to encourage them and express their emotions too.
However, being a man, I just don’t buy this. Just like girl’s bodies are not as strong as boy’s bodies, boy’s capacity to understand and express emotions is not as good due to the wiring of their brains. I think most men understand this intuitively, but for scientific proof, see The Minds of Boys by Michael Gurian.
Secondly, while “Pack Rules” are certainly present and a factor, it more likely boy’s limited emotionally expression that creates these rules, rather than the “Pack Rules” creating boy’s limited emotional expression.
Lastly, while it is great for men to help boys express their emotions, most men are not very good at this either, so it is like the blind leading the blind.
Ironically, the case studies that Polce-Lynch uses in this book only serve to refute her own assumptions since even though all the boys made progress, none of them ever got close to her ideal emotional expressiveness.
Now if we can get by these flawed assumptions, Polce-Lynch does make some valid points like:
- Boys have a hard time expressing their emotions so they often come out “sideways” as in anger, depression or in other harmful ways.
- In order to prevent this, boys need to understand their emotions and be able to express them in better ways.
- We can help boys by talking with them about their emotions and in showing ours in healthy ways.
However, since boy’s brains don’t have the same capability as girl’s brains in dealing with emotions, it is not going to be enough to talk about emotions and model them. It will take much harder and longer work, and we shouldn’t expect them to ever reach the same expressiveness as girls. And since men are going to have much more influence on boys regarding this than women, it is going to be like the blind leading the blind since most men don’t understand their emotions well either.
This is why I think Boy Talk is a worthwhile read but falls short of its potential. As the father of a stoic 10-year old, I agreed with her that it is helpful for boys to learn to understand and express emotions better. But I wanted more advice on how to do this. I would love to see a follow-up book, written from a man’s point of view, which gives more realistic and practical advice for helping boys to understand and deal with their emotions, while respecting that boys are inherently different from girls.