The State of Boys and Girls
Once upon a time I was a boy. This, on the surface, is a simple statement of biological fact, but if eight decades on this earth have taught me anything, it’s that a quest to understand the perplexities of life require surfaces to be peeled back, scraped away, penetrated beyond the facets that create incomplete and often artificial reflections of the world.
Boys will become men. Or most will, as long as the concept of gender fluidity remains on the margins and conservative panic over transgenderism doesn’t evolve into ever-more draconian laws that criminalize any deviation, physical or otherwise, from one’s sex at birth. And while women, in many societies, have made strides in gaining parity with men in positions of power and influence, the fact of being a man confers a privileged status seen in the lopsided percentages of males to females in corporate boardrooms, legislative bodies, and occupations that promise the greatest wealth and highest status. According to a “Gender Parity Index” published by RepresentWomen, a non-partisan organization that works to increase female participation in government, women currently hold just thirty percent of elective offices nationwide. I never heard anything about this disparity when I was a boy, although I learned at a relatively early age that the world’s population is almost evenly split between male and female. The biological process that deemed me and my brother to be a boys and my sister a girl remained opaque, however, until my parents handed me a book that explained all matters related to sex and procreation, both practical and scientific. It was one of the few things in that book I didn’t already know.
When I went to college in the Sixties, the issue of gender equality was becoming a subject of vigorous campus debate, but it didn’t take a personal turn until after graduation, when my then-wife gave birth to a baby girl. Like many young people, we considered ourselves more enlightened in social and political matters than members of our parents’ generation, and we vowed to raise our daughter to resist the retrograde view that her gender determined her destiny. This was easier said than done, of course. Early in kindergarten, she came home upset because boys had forbidden her from joining in a game because she was a girl. We warned her against paying attention to such views clearly handed down by parents or other adults even though we lived in a politically liberal community. You can do whatever you want. You can be whatever you want to be. At the same time, I’d tell myself that these declarations would soon enough run up against the zombie-like grip of a patriarchal system—even in the 21st century there would be male voices—and some female as well—trying to convince her that her place was in the home, cooking and laundering and changing diapers. If that proved to be what she wanted, fine. I would respect and support her choices as long they were freely made and not imposed by obeisance to paternalistic dogma.
This leads me to Boys State and Girls State, two documentary films my wife and I watched last week on Apple+ TV. We hadn’t heard anything about the films, just stumbled upon them after watching the first episode of the latest season of Slow Horses. The films’ titles are taken from annual programs run by the American Legion and the American Legion Auxiliary, respectively, that aim to teach select groups of high school students the nuts and bolts of politics and government. Annual, weeklong gatherings in all fifty states feature mock campaigns for public office, elections, judicial and legislative proceedings, and various social activities. The two films, shot in a vérité style, follow Texas boys and Missouri girls as they develop party platforms; elect senators, representatives, attorney generals, judges, and governors; and perform functions of those offices in a mostly, though not always, high-minded manner. After watching the cynical, wisecracking characters of Slow Horses, the general aura of sincerity and purpose came as something of a shock.
I consulted the American Legion website and its auxiliary counterpart, where I learned that Boys State and Girls State participants are chosen on the basis of strong leadership skills and a high degree of character, qualities I conspicuously lacked when I was in high school in the Fifties. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of any schoolmates who exemplified such excellence, although my high school was small, with fewer than a hundred students. Early in Girls State, a girl with long blonde hair and a gleaming smile rattles off a long list of her academic and social activities, and while I was ready to forgive this performative self-regard as a youthful foible, I couldn’t help remembering the annoyance I felt with the very existence of anyone who broadcast their perfect scores on quizzes and A’s on report cards. It wasn’t that I was especially modest, or that a high grade never appeared beside my name, but I was leaning into a reputation among teachers and the principal as a troublemaker, and tried to avoid anything that smacked of being a high achiever, a status that implied the currying of teachers’ favor and carried the threat of being saddled with the dreaded epithet of “brown-noser.”
In the films, the dozen or so girls and boys who become the main subjects of the camera’s focus appear, unsurprisingly, to be nothing if not high achievers. They are also articulate, and for the most part, thoughtful. And strikingly ambitious. Winning an election is treated with the utmost seriousness. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t go into details, but it’s obvious that these teenagers who have all completed their junior years of high school aren’t accustomed to losing. In fact, I might be at worst bemused and at best encouraged by these displays of public purpose if not for the fact that the ethos of winning-at-all-costs that has permeated our political landscape seemed to have also invaded these faux exercises of civic responsibility. What can we post on Instagram that will make our opponent look like an idiot, no matter how far out of context it’s taken. How can we exploit something obviously said or done in jest? How can we play on the most dominant human emotion, which is fear? And so on.
To be fair, the idea that keeping your opponent out of office justifies almost anything is a much more prominent feature of Boys State than Girls State, although I don’t know how my view of either was tilted by selective shooting and editing. With some exceptions, though, the girls seemed less prone to goofing off, more committed to delving into issues and taking on the knotty problem of trying to find common ground among people with widely differing views. That could have had something to do with the fact that the boys mostly espoused conservative opinions, while the majority of the girls appeared to lean toward liberal positions. But in my experience women are more willing than men to seek compromise, more inclined to resolve conflicts through non-aggressive means, more interested in human welfare than in always projecting strength and power.
The campaigns for the office of governor drew the most attention from participants and the filmmakers. Guns and abortion were apparently the biggest issues for the boys, as they likely are for many of their parents and other adults in their Texas communities. Several advocated for a ban on abortion without exceptions, with one calling for expanded programs for adoption and another for a law that would penalize rapists with life sentences and castration. That, apparently, would satisfy anyone who might object to forcing a woman to carry a rapist’s child to term. There were pro-life girls as well, but they appeared to be outnumbered, and the winning gubernatorial candidate delivered a passionate speech urging girls to demand their rightful place in all segments of society. And the candidate who preceded her in addressing the assembled girls spoke forcefully about the need for gun control, abortion rights, environmental protection, and equal pay for equal work.
I may have already broken my promise not to introduce spoilers, so I’ll just say that I found these two documentaries heartwarming and appalling and several things in between. As a parent and grandparent and great-grandparent, and just as importantly, as a citizen whose participation in public affairs as a voter and sometime campaign volunteer is coming to a close, I’m hoping that our schools will produce new leaders who can reverse our downward spiral into toxic partisanship and come together to address issues like inequality and poverty and militarism and environmental degradation that threaten the stability of our nation and the world. I think I saw a few in those films, both boys and girls, who could fit that job description.
If not, I’m afraid we may be doomed.