He seems shy, but author and psychologist William Pollack has a potent message for a society that still insists boys be moulded into macho men
Last year, poking about at the American Psychological Association meeting in Boston, I was struck by how much of the buzz was about boys. What's going on with boys? Why are they running around shooting up their schools? Whither boys?
If boys was the buzz word, William Pollack was the buzz name, the Harvard psychologist whose 1998 book, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, had taken off like a rocket when the shooting began at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Suddenly, this obscure specialist in male psychology, who runs the Center for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital in Boston, was the expert du jour -- not only among his APA colleagues but among American parents and reporters. Dr. Pollack, Dr. Pollack! Whassup with boys?
Pollack had, if not an answer exactly, a fervent belief: Boys need to be allowed to express their emotions, not just their tough-guy anger, but their vulnerability and love. Boys need to be rescued from the hyper-masculine, all-action, no-talk Sly Stallone model of masculinity.
Pollack gamely repeated this over and over in hundreds of media interviews, until, by the time I caught up with him in Toronto this summer, his answers were polished to a shine. Too much so, in fact. Having reviewed his follow-up book, Real Boys' Voices, for this newspaper, I was puzzled by certain points, which were hardly clarified by smooth replies.
Pollack met me in an empty boardroom at his publisher's office, and entered with a shy smile. He is a slight, undemonstrative man whose gaze slides away when he talks. Actually, that's sort of an understatement. I felt like I was coincidentally in the same room with someone who was talking on the phone, he looked at me that rarely.
This was not a confrontational man, clearly, which may explain why he has such a horror of the Boy's Code, which requires young males to fight and jostle for status.
I asked him if his take on boys was informed by his own experience.
"Well," he said, staring at the carpet, "any psychologist who tells you that they're studying something as potent as feelings -- in this case boys' feelings, and boys who are struggling in a tough kind of world -- and says that that doesn't have to do with their past is fooling themselves."
So what kind of boyhood did you have?
"My own childhood wasn't one of Columbine," he said, "but it was one of being someone on the outside. I was more a quiet, thoughtful kind of child, so I didn't fit into a regular kind of crowd, although in those days, if you were smart, and read, there was still a place for you in boyhood. Now, it's absolutely uncool to be smart."
Pollack is 49, so he was talking about a '50s boyhood, when masculinity wasn't in the grips of an identity crisis; boys didn't have to prove they were boys.
"As the gender revolution has moved forward for women," Pollack said, "the pressure has been on men to redefine what masculinity is about. But nobody knows what a real boy is, just what he isn't, which is a girl. So how do you show that? By being more of a fighter and a bully, it becomes a negative cycle."
His own father was a businessman who "was home a fair amount, and a fairly emotional man for his time." Pollack was given a lot of support and security from both parents. When I asked him who his role models were, he immediately cited them.
"I think my mother and father were very important models. The caring way that my father could be more proactive and the nurturing way that my mother could be more caring became one model rather than separate. Coming from a Jewish-American tradition right after the Holocaust, my other role model was really an idea, the healing of the Earth, that Jews were chosen to try to bring healing and end suffering for everything."
If Pollack is now influencing the way American parents think about their sons (he has a 13-year-old daughter) it isn't because he suffered from an oppressively patriarchal boyhood. Perhaps he is simply an idealist. Or a feminist who realized at some point that feminism was being too harsh on his sex.
"Women have the right to be angry," he said, "and it may still be a man's world. But it's not a boy's world, and it never was one."
To garner attention for his cause, Pollack has been accused of overblowing the crisis in boys' lives, suggesting that they are all suffering enormously from the need to be tough and emotionally taciturn. I asked him about this.
"I always respond that when you see a doubling of suicide rates how can you overblow the emotional problem?" He conceded that even a doubled rate was still a small percentage of America's young men. "I don't think most boys would kill themselves, but what I found in interviewing boys is that the boy next door talked about the same kinds of issues with frightening intensity .. Boys are afraid of violence, they're afraid of being violent, and we have become afraid of boys."
His solution, as founding director of Real Boys Educational Programs, is to teach adults how to elicit "shame-free" candour in young men, to get them comfortable talking about their insecurities and allow them to show their caring side. His critics, principally Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, argue that this method is subtly coercive, and shows no respect for masculine styles of communication.
"They want to put boys back in the boy's corner," Pollack retorted, " and that is not the way the world is going."
Are there no masculine virtues then, I wondered.
"Well, I think the virtue of providing and protecting was, and is, a virtue of masculinity," he mused. "It was always a very important part of what a male role was. I think some aspects of heroism, which have to do with judiciously putting oneself at risk to help others, is a positive attribute. Some people attack me and say, 'You want to get rid of all that,' but absolutely not. I want to add to it."
What happens if boys in the next generation all succeed in renouncing the Lord of the Flies model in the playground, and adopt something more akin to group therapy, while girls continue to be nasty to one another?
"To some extent," he ventured, "feminism has been a struggle not just to let girls have the freedom to make choices, but the freedom to have the same choices that men have, which aren't so positive. To become an arrogant executive who drinks too much and has heart disease, or for girls to become a bully, is not necessarily a positive progression. And that's where the so-called new movement with boys and feminism has to come together to find the positive choices."
Suddenly, with his new-found fame, he's in a position to bring the movements together. I asked him how that felt.
"Working as a psychologist, you can only help so many people over a lifetime, and the thought of being able to have a positive effect from people reading my book, it's a very potent, personal feeling."
He reported this to the carpet. But that's all right, I heard him.