Dave Barry on Boy

“I base my opinions on several years of working in an office located in a house with a large transient little-boy population. Individually they're okay, but if two of them get together, their combined IQ is halved, and if a third boy comes along it's halved again, and so on, so that if you have, say, six of them, you're talking about the destructive force of a tank commanded by the brainpower of a Labrador retriever. They communicate with each other by slamming doors. They have the attention span of gnats. "STOP SLAMMING THE DOORS!" I'll yell at them. "Okay!" they'll reply (SLAM). They are so busy running around and arguing and breaking things and strewing random objects over every square inch of floor that they barely have time to pee, and they definitely don't have time to aim. They just race into the bathroom, let loose in any old random direction, and then race out again, because by God there are doors to be slammed.”

“So I suppose it was inevitable that Rob would be interested in power-and-dominance toys. But I want to stress, as a fundamentally nonviolent person who has never owned any form of weapon, that I did not buy him toy guns. I'm not saying he didn't have any toy guns; in fact, by the time he was four, he had enough toy guns to conquer a toy nation the size of France (Come to think of it, he probably could have conquered the real France). I don't know where they came from. They just appeared in my house, and in the houses of all my nonviolent, son-having friends. I think maybe the Gun Fairy finds out where little boys live and comes around at night, dressed in camouflage, scattering battery-operated Nuclear Death Rayguns everywhere. The TV cartoon shows aimed at little boys don't help, either. They're infested with characters who have biceps the size of prize-winning hogs and names like Commander Brock Gonad and His Hard Punchers of Justice.”

“I'll tell you what would really age me fast: if I had a teenaged daughter. I don't think I could handle that. Because that would mean teenaged boys would be coming around to my house. "Hi, Mr. Barry!" they'd say, with their cheerful, innocent young voices. "We're here to have sex with your daughter!" No, of course they wouldn't come out and say that, but I know that's what they'd be thinking, because I was a teenaged boy once, and I was basically a walking hormone storm. I'm sure modern boys are no different. So if I had a teenaged daughter, and a boy came to my house, after somehow picking his way through the land mines in the lawn, I'd probably lunge through the screen door and strangle him right there ("Hi, Mr. Barry! Is Jennifer heAAAAAAAWWWWK"). You think I'm exaggerating, but I have male friends whose daughters are approaching puberty at speeds upwards of 700 miles per hour, and when you say the word "dating," my friends get a look in their eyes that makes Charles Manson look like Captain Kangaroo.”

“My point here is that the toys marketed for boys, like the TV shows, tend to encourage the boys' already aggressive nature, which could be why boys spend so much time acting like what professional psychologists call "jerks." Or it could be that boys are born with some kind of jerk gene, and the toy and TV people are merely cashing in on this. Whatever the cause, I know I spent a lot of time envying the parents of girls. I'd see a table of little girls, and they'd be eating and talking, just like miniature humans. Whereas my son and his friends seemed to have some kind of nervous-system linkage between their mouths and their hands, so that they could not chew without punching. Eating with them was as relaxing as amateur eyeball surgery. "Stop punching," I'd say. They'd try to stop, sometimes succeeding for as long as .00014 seconds. Then the Punch Reflex would overwhelm their tiny mental circuits. "Stop punching!" I'd repeat. "We're not punching!" they'd say, punching. "YOU ARE TOO PUNCHING!!" I'd shout, spewing out pieces of semichewed hamburger. "I CAN SEE YOU PUNCHING!! AND STOP BLOWING BUBBLES IN YOUR MILKSHAKES!! AND STOP SQUIRTING THE KETCHUP PACKETS AT EACH OTHER!! JUST EAT!!" They'd look at me as though I were insane. Their feeling was, if you were only going to eat, what was the point of going to a restaurant? Then I'd look over at the table of little girls, who'd be chatting and thoughtfully passing each other the napkins, and I would wonder how we ever permitted my gender to get control of, for example, the government.”

“So in some ways I'm relieved that I don't have daughters, although in other ways I envy people with daughters, because little girls tend to be thoughtful, whereas little boys tend to be- and I say this as a loving father who would not trade his son for anything in the world- jerks. I used to think this was society's fault. This was back in the idealistic sixties and seventies, when we Boomers had many excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children. Remember those days? Remember when we truly believed that if society treated boys and girls exactly the same, then they wouldn't be bound by sexual stereotypes, and the boys could grow up to be sensitive and the girls could grow up to be linebackers? Ha ha! Boy, were we ever idealistic! By which I mean "stupid." Because when we look at actual children, no matter how they are raised, we notice immediately that little girls are in fact smaller versions of human beings, whereas little boys are Pod People from the Planet Destructo. I don't think society has anything to do with this. I think that if you had two desert islands, and you put girl babies on one island and boy babies on another island, and they were somehow able to survive with no help from adult society, eventually the girls would cooperate in collecting pieces of driftwood and using them to build shelters, whereas the boys would pretend that driftwood pieces were guns. (Yes, I realize they'd have no way of knowing what guns were. This would not stop them.) Not only that, but even if the island had 176,000 pieces of driftwood on it, the boys would all end up violently arguing over one of them.”

“It's hard to avoid falling into the stereotype-toy trap. When my son, Rob, was born, my philosophy was that he should have only politically correct, environmentally sound, gender-neutral toys, such as a spinning top carved out of nongendered wood or recycled tofu. Sincerely determined to purchase something along these lines when I went to the Toys "R" "A" Big Industry store, I am sincerely embarrassed to report that what I actually purchased was a radio-controlled tank. I couldn't help myself. This was a really neat tank. It had a working turret and real treads, so it could turn on a dime and climb right over various obstacles, such as books or pillows or my son, Rob, who, being a small infant with basically the same motor skills as a watermelon, was unable to operate this tank personally. So I had to operate it for him, which I did at every opportunity, because he seemed to enjoy it, as was indicated by the increase in his drool output. This is also how I could tell that he liked the electric train. Thus we see that even sensitive and concerned parents such as myself can contribute to the guy-ization of a male infant. But I think it would happen anyway, because little boys just naturally seem to be crazy for power. For example, from early on, Rob loved big trucks. He loved them even before he could pronounce either "big" or "truck." When he saw a big truck, he'd say something that sounded like "bee fut." He said it a lot, because he was obsessed. He only had eyes for trucks. We'd be in midtown Manhattan shortly before Christmas, walking beneath spectacular skyscrapers, past delightful animated store-window displays, with music playing everywhere and Santa Claus clanging his bell on every corner, and Rob's attention would be totally focused on: a garbage truck. "Bee fut!" he'd tell me, pointing at it. "Bee fut!" he'd inform random pedestrians. "Bee fut!" he'd state to the world in general, repeating it 1,753 times, in case any unfortunate person might be unaware of this amazing development. And I'd have to stand there in the cold for fifteen minutes, admiring this stinking, crud-encrusted hulk and agreeing over and over that, fut-wise, it was extremely bee.”