Ruth Institute Blog

by Anthony Esolen

I see a boy.

Luke is ten years old. He sports a cowlick across his forehead, and a bright smile.

Despite the birth of a child a thousand miles away with vestigial organs of the opposite sex, and despite genetic anomalies that blunt the edge of masculinity or femininity here or there, everyone is certain he is a boy. It took the doctor in the delivery room but a moment to declare, “It’s a boy!”

Luke is outdoors a lot, running after baseballs, footballs, and soccer balls. He has what Marilynne Robinson happily calls “skinny boy strength.” You can see it in the muscles of his chest. His voice is pitched high, but not really—as if a flute were played an octave low.

People who pretend not to know what a boy is will scoff, but he runs like a boy, he makes boyish jokes, he shoots toy guns like a boy, he horses around the yard with a boy’s abandon, and if he helps his mother bake cookies, he does that like a boy, too. It helps that he has a father, who was a boy once, and who still has a lot of the boy in him, as most fathers do.

Consider that boy, Luke.

Look at him through the eyes of his father: that is to say, with philosophical love.

He has the boy’s body that shadows forth the body of a man. He will have sturdy shoulders, and the swelling in his throat suggests the timbre of the man’s voice. He is going to be taller than the average woman.

Fallen creature that he is, Luke stretches to the limit of what his parents allow, but already he is taking into his heart the Rules his mother represents, Rules that make for decent life among other people from day to day, and the Law his father represents, moral truths that can no more change than can the polestar fall from the sky.

He is a boy: vir futurus, a going-to-be man. Meaning: He will join other men, brothers fighting to attain or defend the common good. Greater meaning: He is made for a self-giving that is categorically impossible among his male friends. He is made for a woman. It is the orientation of his body, in its sexual form. It is the orientation of his masculine being, developing in a natural and healthy way.

None of this should be controversial, no more than claiming that the noonday sky is blue. Should someone protest, “It isn’t so! I saw it green once, when a tornado was coming,” we’d look askance, and wonder whether he had lost the capacity for normal communication. A boy is not a girl. A boy grows up to be a man. A man marries a woman, for love and for a family: That goal is stamped upon his body. Even savages without a doctorate in philosophy can figure it out.

Consider Luke, the boy, through the eyes of his father. What does he see?

He sees the vir futurus. He also sees himself, and his own father, and his grandfathers. I’m not just talking about physical resemblance. They share the same sex: They share the same mode of relating to the future of their kind. They are not the bearers of children, but the begetters. They are not the field, but the sowers. They cannot know the body-from-body bond their wives know when they bear children. Theirs is an approach from outside; and they enjoy the strengths and suffer the shortcomings of the far-sightedness that that approach implies.

Every normal and healthy and responsible father wants this for his son. It’s not like wanting the boy to go to Princeton. Such things may happen or not, and are extrinsic to the boy’s nature. It’s rather like wanting that the boy should not suffer scurvy or rickets. The father wants Luke’s bones to grow straight. He wants his soul to grow straight, too.

So does his mother. She’s suspicious of women who like to keep their boys in diapers, as it were. So she nudges Luke toward her husband. She buys them the same kinds of clothes. She admires Luke’s skill in hitting a ball, or painting, or building a tepee—whatever he sets his heart upon.

She becomes to him the best of girls, even when he doesn’t know he likes girls yet. She never ceases to be his mother and to command his respect, but she will also claim his duty as her protector. If the groceries are heavy, she asks him to handle them, knowing that eventually he will overmatch her in strength. When that day comes she’ll boast about it to her friends.

Her love for him is necessarily a love for his nature as a boy. One cannot say, “I love my terrier Whitey, but I wish he wouldn’t wag his tail.” She wants him to grow up to be a man whom a good woman would marry. She cannot encourage that by personal example. She encourages it rather by showing the love of a woman for her husband, regardless of the sparks that attend every union of the sexes. And she encourages it by expectation. She calls him to manhood by letting him practice being the man: as a mother teaches her son to “lead” her in a formal dance.

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