Never
Grow Up

Surely you have heard the phrase. Is it merely a statement of the obvious? The phrase subliminally declares that boys are expected to behave differently. The details of exactly how differently boys were, and continue, to be expected to behave has been a socio-cultural conversation that has evolved enormously in recent history.

Looking specifically for modern western origins of masculine and juvenile behavior, one cannot overlook the historical context of rapid social change, mass-migrations, newly reformed institutions of education and governance, and an increasingly urban, industrialized economy. Historian Steven Mintz points out that "wrenching social and economic changes… the explosive growth of cities and industry, the rapid movement into the trans-Mississippi West, the sharp increase in foreign immigration… produced patterns of schooling, play and work that differed dramatically by class, ethnicity, gender, race and region."

Lest we forget: millions of lives lost in multiple world wars, the end of the frontier, and the expansion of civil rights, all of which had great impact on the life of young men. Throughout the 20th century, in the midst of so much change, young men faced ever-changing notions of what it meant to be an upright, contributing member of society.

Through the critical analysis of select literature, film, and historical sources, we can begin to gain a clearer picture of the obstacles young boys faced in reaching adulthood. Four works anchor this journey across the century, each a marker, each a warning.

James Barrie's Peter Pan offers one of literature's most enduring images of boyhood frozen in amber. In this tale, Wendy Darling dreams of a boy who whisks her away to Neverland, home to the Lost Boys, Indian tribes, and pirates. She is lured there because the boys need a mother. As she's grown older, she's also begun dreaming of love and adventure.

Through their first meeting, we see that Wendy is far more sexually aware than Peter. She offers him a kiss, then falls back on Victorian propriety and hands him a thimble instead. Peter's complete naivete of her advance speaks to a larger cultural reality: "At the beginning of the twentieth century, many children grew up in an environment of extreme sexual ignorance, superstition, and fear."

Peter has no interest in finding a mate. He wants someone to read bedtime stories. She falls for him. He will not, cannot, leave Neverland and grow up with her. In the end, Wendy grows up "a day quicker than the other girls," while Peter remains forever suspended between childish fantasy and an unclear picture of adulthood.

The Boy Scouts of America took a similarly evasive approach to sexuality. Their handbook offered boys this guidance on masturbation:

Boys were given almost no understanding of intimate situations, and embedded with fear, guilt, and shame for partaking in the most basic human experiences. Like Peter, dark about kisses, an entire generation of young men were left in the dark about themselves.

Where Peter Pan's era withheld knowledge through ignorance, the 1930s compounded it with shame. James T. Farrell's Young Lonigan gives us Studs, an Irish-Catholic boy in Chicago whose body is becoming something he doesn't understand, and whose church has only one answer for it.

In one pivotal episode, Studs is aroused after a late-night encounter with his sister. The aftermath is rendered in Farrell's unflinching prose, a boy alone in a bathroom, followed by frantic prayer, followed by a sleepless, terrified night.

Studs has a lot to learn, not only about how to express sexuality in a healthy manner, but that it's even okay to have natural urges. The institutional forces around him, church, family, neighborhood, offered no such reassurance.

What Peter Pan accomplished through innocence, Lonigan's world accomplished through condemnation. The result in both cases was the same: a young man cut off from his own interior life. Shame where self-knowledge should have been.

By mid-century, cultural values were shifting, if only slightly. Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause gives us Jim (James Dean) and his doomed attempt at fitting into post-war suburban masculinity. Jim's father is a pushover. His mother is volatile. His new classmates want to prove his cowardice before they've spoken ten words to him.

The film's central tragedy, though, isn't Jim's, it's Plato's. A boy with no parental oversight, a monthly check, and a lonely heart. Plato's sensitivity, his misplaced affection for Jim, his artistic nature, all treated as pathology. The film ends with him shot dead by police outside the Griffith Observatory.

The rugged, stoic post-war ethos worked as a social mask. For those who couldn't wear it, the Platos of the world, the consequence was isolation, instability, and in this telling, death.

The message to young men watching from the audience: conform or be Plato.

Holden Caulfield is haunted. His older brother is dead, he's just failed out of another prep school, and he's running away to New York City, the only place where the question of who you're supposed to be might get drowned out by the noise. He is deeply cynical of everything, except his younger sister Phoebe.

For Holden, sexuality is something he wants to explore but can't reconcile with the masculine gender norms being imposed on him. He rejects all that others take for granted.

In one of the novel's loneliest scenes, Holden hires a prostitute, and only wants to talk to her. She's completely baffled. She rips him off anyway.

His critique isn't targeted at one sex. It's aimed at the entire performance of heteronormative dating life, the phoniness of it, the way it asks young men to become dull and impenetrable in order to participate. For Caulfield, being a 20th century boy means adhering to strict masculine guidelines. And he entirely refuses.

In refusing, he ends up more alone than Studs, more lost than Peter, more alienated than Jim. But perhaps more honest than any of them.

On the surface, Peter Pan, Young Lonigan, Jim, and Holden Caulfield don't share much. Different eras, different cities, different circumstances. But the tendencies running through their stories, longing for acceptance, questioning authority, cultivating a defiant self-reliance, compose a recognizable portrait.

Each is a marker for the modern-day young man. Eventually, you must grow up and stop living in fantasy. You will have to fight for respect and honor from your peers. You will, at some point, have to reckon with your own sexuality, accept it, shape it, or reject it.

What the literature argues, collectively, is that the damage done to young men by silence, shame, rigid performance, and institutional neglect was not inevitable. It was chosen, by institutions, cultural norms, and the adults who built the world those boys inherited. Knowing that is the first step toward building something different.