Asymmetric Books and Literature

In Anchorman,The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the very funny Will Ferrell movie from 2004, Veronica Corningstone vies to become San Diego’s first female news anchor. Dismissive and bemused at first, her male co-workers scramble to derail her promotion until, having been continually bested by Ms. Cornerstone’s superior reporting skills, they cede their own dominance of the news room to the sexually integrated future. The victories of Ms. Corningstone and her successors are, in 2007, so complete that few could imagine any people having opposed them in the first place, accounting, no doubt, for the inherent humor of the situation.

Yet few social movements assault societal convention without encountering some resistance. Sometimes, the defeat is complete as in the example above and the combatants move on to struggle over new territory. Every now and again, however, the besieged manage a counterattack. Thus, Promise Keepers maneuver to attack the marginalization of the father and husband. Tinker Bell stickers on the back of minivans fight the move, now mostly routed, towards female masculinization. Bridezillas boldly proclaim that weddings are important.

Although still too close to call, the feminized man and the dangerless society are two developments that suddenly find themselves battling a stiff insurgency. The feminized man gained ground against their hirsute cousins throughout the second half of the twentieth century, reaching their farthest advance when Ricky Martin's frosty hair intersected with the metrosexual phenomenon. Spike TV, exxxtreme sports, the heroes of 9/11, and the realization by most that a society can't cruise into utopia without encountering some ruffians along the way have each sniped at the flank of the femiman columns.

Related to the first, the dangerless society, distinctive for its inclination towards protecting people from climbing ladders, jumping on trampolines, eating hamburgers, going broke, and working machinery has so far steamrolled a disoriented and unfocused opposition, but people like Mark Steyn in his latest book, America Alone, have begun constructing a coherent enough argument in favor of the moral character that develops from fending for oneself, if not danger in and of itself, to possibly slow the powerful nannies and their attorney mercenaries who wish to pull every bootstrap in America.

A side effect of these two trends has been what Christina Hoff Summers calls the “war on boys,” a crusade against those rough barbarians whose disposition for adventure sometimes results in scraped knees, assertive students, and hurt feelings. According to Summers, professional educators have essentially diagnosed boyhood as a social disorder and have proceeded to implement strategies to curb the impulses that first grade teachers find disruptive, but that a nation finds indispensable when it needs to invent, explore, and fight.

One can reasonably speculate that women account for two thirds of all entering freshmen in colleges, for example, because everything from the way schools teach math to the Oprah Book of the Month Club-inspired stories in the literature books have been designed to be as appealing to boys as the latest issue of Teen Beat.

Compound this with the fact that divorce and the Maxim culture deprive many boys of their fathers and you can imagine the extent of the problem.

When my family arrived from Los Angeles to see their dad graduate from Army Engineering School in Ft. Leonard Wood, MO, I took them to the book store to find them an alternative to cable television.

By and by, I happened upon an attractive hard-bound book called The Dangerous Book for Boys (DBB) by Conn and Hal Iggulden. I purchased it after thumbing through the book for a couple of minutes, and subsequent readings have made DBB my preferred light reading. Not only is DBB fun, but as it may prove itself an effective second wave to Bennett’s Book of Virtues in the war against the anti-boy education bureaucracy, I now consider DBB’s purchase by parents of boys to be somewhat of a civic duty.

Basically, DBB distills a certain kind of boyhood experience now out of reach for the reasons discussed above, as well as politically neutral factors such as increased urbanization, and assembles them in one volume.

The Igguldens don’t divide the nicely illustrated DBB into themes titled “sports” or “history,” but opt instead to intersperse topics in a seemingly random manner so that a page teaching basic Navajo code-talking is beside one on how to make a water bomb. One can divide the entries by purpose, however. DBB entries include encyclopedia-like references like the aforementioned Navajo code; lessons on basic school skills like grammar and arithmetic; history readings; advice for boys; and How-tos on building things and playing games.

So, DBB functions as a sort of almanac or textbook when it teaches boys how to fish, build tree houses, fold paper airplanes, and hunt. It dips into science, biology, how to navigate using the stars, and, of course, dinosaurs and bugs, as well as provide lists of things every educated person once knew 60 years ago like the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The history readings focus on great men and war, two subjects painted with only the broadest strokes in today’s school textbooks. Here, we get diagrams explaining Napoleon’s Waterloo strategy. The heroes aren’t blabberers, victims, or impeders of robber barons; they’re doers and scrappers like Robert Scott, arctic explorer, and RAF Nazi fighter Douglass Bader.

Like the C.B. Colby books of my youth, DBB offers histories of artillery and other practical items.

DBB gives solid advice unlikely to be dispensed by the school psychologist. In regards to the fairer sex, boys should impress girls by playing sports, listening, and keeping clean. Boys shouldn’t tell too many jokes or buy flowers. And, for goodness sakes, they shouldn’t, under any circumstances, sign valentine cards with their name.

The book also has a healthy dose of fun stuff to do that doesn’t require batteries like chess, marbles, stickball, and some paper and pen games for those moments in between classes.

DBB resembles its spiritual predecessor, the Book of Virtues, in that it features stories and poems with currently under-emphasized or ridiculed themes like bravery (in the traditional sense of word; i.e, calling the ACLU to sue the school because the principal told you to remove your Buck Fush t-shirt is not brave), honor, duty, etc; and by authors unjustly ignored by modern curricula like Shakespeare or denigrated outright like Rudyard Kipling.

Finally, the whole book can be summed up by three dangerous pages. One is a list of essential boy gear that includes such items guaranteed to get you expelled like a Swiss Army Knife, compass, handkerchief, box of matches, shooter (marble), needle and thread (for sewing up injured animals), pencil and paper, flashlight, band-aids, and fishhooks (all for about $60.00 at the PX). the other page shows the proper way to hunt (with a gun, no less) and cook a rabbit.

If the previous paragraph strikes you as cool, purchase this book.

The Dangerous Book for Boys by Hal Iggulden

The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers

The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories by William J. Bennett

Frogmen Training, Equipment and Operations of Our Na by C.B. Colby

Anchorman - The Legend Of Ron Burgundy (Unrated Widescreen Edition)

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn