You guys have your guy thing,” my sister often says, “I’m always
out of it.” She means that, in our male-heavy family—four boys and
lonely her— the men tend to stick together. Not that there was much
choice. My father’s sister also had four boys and one girl. My
sister had a boy and a girl, while my oldest brother started fast
out of the gate with two boys before propitiating the gods with a
girl. It was assumed that, when the rest of us got around to the
procreation business, we would keep the home team stocked with
talent.
As I watch my 16-month-old daughter toddle around the close
spaces of our old house, it’s easy to forget that before she showed
up, my image of being a father had always involved a boy. Now I
cannot imagine it. I wouldn’t trade her for a battalion of stomping
sons.
Not long before her birth, I heard that my younger brother’s
wife was pregnant—with a girl. “Two girls in a row,” my sister
said. She didn’t figure this. A few months after that little girl
arrived, another brother told me his news. You guessed it: wife
pregnant. You guessed again: a girl. Now my parents have more
female grandchildren than male, and every member of the men’s club
will spend the rest of his days raising girls.
“It’s a great time to have girls,” I heard often after my
daughter’s birth. “Look at all the changes in society.” That’s
true. We’ve all lived through a social revolution perhaps more
transformative than the civil rights movement. Career choices for
women, women outpacing men on many educational measures, women in
sports and business and medicine and politics, women mixing it up
with men on the Sunday talk shows. If it weren’t for the Democratic
Party’s weird primary system, we’d have a woman president. Of
course, the new opportunities come with challenges. It’s more
complicated raising girls than in earlier times, when certain
expectations tended to bound the limits of aspiration and
propriety. With Girls Gone Wild, reality TV, college
spring break culture, and the remorseless pornification of everyday
life, fathers like me won’t have trouble finding things to worry
about. And I’ll have to be civil to the boys and men she brings
home while searching their souls for shallowness and corruption
(okay, that problem is timeless).
But consider the boys’ plight. It’s pretty much the girls’ in
reverse. The cultural assumptions have not been capsized entirely;
in fact, expectations of male behavior, even chivalry, are perhaps
stronger than ever for being so contingent and concealed. Still,
few would say it’s a “great time to be a boy.” Schools have long
tilted curricula toward more feminine pursuits; the merest
playground scuffle invokes disciplinary action and even the threat
of expulsion; and the culture often characterizes men as either
“wimps or barbarians,” as Terrence O. Moore put it a few years ago
(he forgot flat-out idiots). In the black community, boys are the
very embodiment of “at risk,” with a 70 percent illegitimacy rate
and fatherlessness a deadly, if quiet, assault, killing less like a
bombing raid than a nuclear winter. Some are hopeful that President
Obama can make headway on that problem. He’s spoken to black
audiences on the importance of fatherhood, and by all indications
he’s a good exemplar. But then, he’s also created a superfluous
White House Council on Women and Girls. Of course, he has
daughters, too, as did his two predecessors.
Everywhere I look these days, I see daughters. Just the past
week, a friend e-mailed to tell me that his wife was pregnant with
their first child—a girl, of course. “After a second’s
disappointment, I am perhaps more excited now than if it were a
boy,” he wrote. Given what I know about these things, it was likely
longer than a second, but he’ll understand soon enough the joy of
daughters.
“Besides,” I told him, “look on the bright side: Now we won’t
have to teach boys how to be men.” He laughed, but I probably
wasn’t joking.
