Manhood

The young males held an image of girls that was distinctly two-sided. Boys knew that they preferred the company of other boys, contrasting their own rough play with the gentler pastimes of girls. The opposite sex, they felt, was timid and dull. A girl spent her day in that world of good be-havior where dirt and noise were not allowed and where—given middle-class tastes of the time—the sun rarely shone." The most serious damage to a boy's image of girls probably stemmed from the fact that he had re-cently escaped from that domestic world himself. Boys, after all, spent the first few years of their lives entirely in women's world, closely supervised and dressed in the same clothes as girls. If boys' feelings about girls con-tained a great measure of scorn, it was a scorn they felt for an old and frus-trating identity that they had finally and gleefully shed. Girls were the ob-jects of ill feeling that they had done little to create. It did not matter to the boys that girls had roused their scorn unwit-tingly. The boys delighted in the opportunity to attack them. Young Francis Parkman made an electric machine that could give a shock to a whole row of girls at school. More often, boys launched sudden attacks of slapping and scratching. Even more frequently, they pelted girls with mud balls, snowballs, chestnuts, and whatever other small-but-annoying objects came to hand.'
The girls, especially when treated as an undefined herd of gentle, frilly things, made a handy screen on which a boy could project many hostile feelings. In one quick attack, a boy could take vengeance on an earlier identity, express his disdain for the clean politeness of domestic-ity, and vent his scorn for the restraint of impulse that home and women represented. The cruelty of boys to girls was in certain ways similar to their cruelty toward small animals. Both categories of victim appeared to boys as frail, defenseless creatures, and both were targets unlikely to fight back. In either case, boys were conducting an exercise in power by taking advantage of a situation which they could easily dominate. There is yet another dimension of meaning to the petty violence that boys inflicted on girls. Since boys used rough physical contact to com-municate fondness as well as dislike, their attacks on girls signified not only hostility but also its opposite, affection. If pelting another boy with stones could be an expression of regard, a similar assault could transmit the same sort of message from boy to girl. Or at least in the mind of the boy it could. The idea that girls might experience petty attacks in a dif-ferent way either did not occur to boys or else did not deter them from launching their assaults. The records of nineteenth-century life indicate that boys' emotions about girls often combined fascinated attraction with the disdain that we have already explored.'4 When a boy was "stuck on" a girl, he might do little more than exchange glances and giggles. A more adventurous fel-low might carry a girl's books home from school or exchange tokens of affection. Older boys liked to find clever ways to send notes to their cho-sen ones during class time at school, and a few even wrote valentine messages to their sweethearts. While these desultory affairs rarely pre-occupied the boys, they do indicate a capacity for tender affection to-ward girls that was totally at odds with the rough, boisterous surface of the youthful male personality. The same boyish interest in the opposite sex showed through in other, more generalized ways. In the classroom, boys liked to pull pranks that would attract the girls' attention and make them laugh. They were also capable of minor acts of gallantry such as breaking a pencil in half to share with a needy girl or refusing to squirt girls who happened into the midst of a water fight (an odd point of chivalry on the part of boys who liked to splatter young females with mud balls).'5 In sum, boys made it clear that they found girls admirable and attractive, even though they displayed an equally genuine sense of scorn and suspicion toward fe-males. The positive feelings that girls aroused—feelings that the boys seemed to find mysterious and unsettling—may have added a special
passion to the boys' feelings of disdain, and thus lent particular vigor to their playful attacks. In all of this, there is little to indicate that boys were paying attention to specific qualities of individual girls. Young females served as nearly blank screens where boys focused positive as well as negative feelings about the opposite sex. The screen was not perfectly blank, of course; boys looked at girls and saw gentler, quieter people than themselves, people enmeshed in a domestic world and dressed in gowns and curls. These few broad cues were enough to elicit a confusing combination of disdain and reverence that was rooted in boys' early life experience. One common theme that did link these ambivalent feelings was a wish to dominate, either through physical aggression or through the protective gestures of gallantry. The desire to dominate, together with the boyish ambivalence toward girls, formed an important emotional legacy that boys brought with them to the more focused relationships with girls that would come in their late teens.
The "Effects of 'Cupid's Darts'
In the world of nineteenth-century childhood, boys and girls assumed that a young male "liked best to be with boys" and "would a great deal rather play with a boy than [a girl] at recess."Th Then, at about the mid-teens, boys took a new and serious interest in girls. Not coincidentally, this was the age at which puberty arrived in the nineteenth century. Boys were conscious of the changing forces that drove their interest. One Massachusetts youth of seventeen or eighteen asked a friend, "At our age when our affections are strongest is it to be supposed that we should not have someone on whom our affections are fixed?"
( kisses distributed with more or less partiality according to the rules of the play; but thank Heaven, there was no fiddler." This may seem like an odd way to improve on the "sins" of con-tredanse, but the folks in Massachusetts did not see it that way: "Kissing was a sign of peace, and was not at all like taking hold of hands and skip-ping about to the scraping of a wicked fiddle)
 he began to be conscious that now he was passing to a new sphere, where the girls are supreme and superior and he began to feel for the first time that he was an awkward boy.23
As a boy crossed the threshold into this new arena of feeling and ex-perience, he dimly realized that he was passing back into women's world. His sense of mastery slipped away from him when impulses he could not deny drove him into a social realm he could not understand. The experi-ence of boy culture left a youth unprepared to grapple with this loss of his sense of mastery and control. At this dramatic juncture in life, all but the most isolated youths turned to their male friends for help and support. The attempt to under-stand women became a shared obsession, and the pursuit of them be-came a shared crisis. In boardinghouse bedrooms, on long walks home from parties, and in letters, young men traded intensely in the feelings and details of their relationships with women.