Boys Need Stories, Too 

As I recently argued, we can help young women flourish in our intellectually and spiritually impoverished culture by sharing good stories. Wholesome yet emotionally engaging, non-didactic, popular stories—such as Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and more—are, I contended, the key to forming female minds and hearts capable of resisting the devolution of today’s TikTok-saturated popular culture.  

But what about boys? Don’t they also need to be bolstered in virtue and values? And aren’t wholesome stories an equally central part of male formation to that end? 

Yes and no. Yes, boys can benefit greatly from formative stories; below, I will discuss several that I have shared, and will continue to share, with my own sons. But no, boys don’t need stories in quite the same way that girls do. Partly, this is because the philosophy, statistics, and arguments that the young British writer Freya India has rightly accused conservatives of relying upon without due regard for women’s feelings do seem to appeal in more visceral and abiding ways to many men. And partly it’s because the subtle yet holistic emotional formation that many girls are disposed to get secondarily from stories comes to most boys primarily through lived interactions with others. Perhaps this is why I often ponder, as a mother of four sons, how the broader environment and culture matter, perhaps counterintuitively, even more for sons than for daughters.  

Boys Do Need Stories 

That said, I am eager to submit this rather idiosyncratic (and, clearly, non-exhaustive) list of five stories that can capture boys’ interest in the ways and to the ends that might aid their character development.  

The Lion King 

The Lion King is best understood as an argument against pursuing purposeless pleasure and for burdening oneself for the good of others. After a dual guilt trip (first from his prospective love interest and then from the spirit of his deceased father), the protagonist and future king, Simba—who has been living the responsibility-free, “Hakunah Matata” lifestyle—is compelled to return to Pride Rock, wrest control from his evil uncle, and bring the kingdom back to its former glory. This fundamentally conservative call to restoration and responsibility employs the old trope of male maturation in pursuit of worthy female regard. This is an erstwhile social reality that we have, if young men’s present malaise is any indication, discarded at our peril—and one well worth reintroducing to boys’ consciousness. 

A Christmas Carol 

A Christmas Carol startles young readers, listeners, and viewers into gratitude for what they have and the moral imperative of sharing it with those who have less. The principal lesson is, of course, about the perils of material greed. But there is also a more subtle thread in the story, about the spiritual generosity that the affable Fred shows to his miserable Uncle Scrooge. In an era when cutting off contact with family and friends who do not share one’s worldview is ever more common, A Christmas Carol offers an alternative to the assumption that life is too short for engaging with anyone who is not fully like-minded or like-hearted. Fred continues to invite Scrooge to his home out of charity, in the best sense of the word. He does not have much money, but he has a great deal of joy that no brusque commentary from his dour uncle can shake; and he means to share it. The countercultural lesson: genuine happiness doesn’t come from implacable boundaries with less well-formed souls. On the contrary, it is a choice one makes amid ample opportunities to choose otherwise and a countercultural way for men to show strength: choosing the virtuous way instead of an easier alternative.  

True Grit 

There is a controversial-because-it’s-true, humorous meme that sometimes makes the rounds on social media. “Toxic masculinity: The bad guy with the gun. Heroic masculinity: The good guy with the gun who stops him.” Perhaps no cultural artifact makes this foundational point as insightfully as the original film adaptation of True Grit with John Wayne. While many (if not most) “boy stories” involve bad guys, good guys, and the ultimate triumph of the latter over the former by means of force, True Grit deals effectively with some of the complications at the heart of this kind of cowboy justice. First, there is an ongoing conflict between the good guy who wants to follow the letter of the law and the good guy who wants to make the rules as he goes along because he recognizes that vigilantism is the only way to stop the bad guys in an otherwise ungoverned landscape. Each is right sometimes and wrong other times, in accordance with the complicated truth.  

Second, one of the story’s two primary heroes is female. The teenage Maddie Ross is no damsel in distress, but she is a vigilante in her own right. True, Maddie isn’t strong enough to hold her oversized pistol steady when she attempts to shoot the unrepentant criminal who killed her father and others. But she is steady in her desire to bring him to justice, and rightly so. When boys hear about “girl power,” too often it is in reference to someone whose delicate sensibilities are unequal to the recognition that violence and criminality are perennial realities that demand uniform and coercive reaction in the pursuit of order. Better that the phrase “girl power” should conjure Maddie Ross, so that the trendy version rightly appears to be counterfeit. Boys and girls alike should expect and admire grit in women as well as in men. 

Les Misérables 

The twin temptations of our culture, for well-meaning men (more on those who are less than well-meaning next), are revolutionary mercy that devolves into anarchy and necessary justice that results in tyranny. Readers (try an abridged version or even the picture book) and viewers (the 2012 musical isn’t bad, Russell Crowe’s singing as Javert notwithstanding) of Victor Hugo’s epic tale about a turbulent period in nineteenth-century France understand that these are also the twin temptations of every political moment—especially for relatively young and healthy men. Les Misérables unsparingly portrays the unintentional, classist cruelty of mercy without order as well as the righteous, oppressive cruelty of justice without compassion. Only Jean Valjean, the redeemed sinner who labors on behalf of others, understands and embodies the reality that mercy and justice must work in tandem for the greater good. Valjean is a unique Christ figure whose tremendous physical strength and Robin Hood–esque wit give self-sacrifice an incomparably valiant valence.  

The Passion  

No, I don’t (necessarily) mean Mel Gibson’s 2004 epic (though that is excellent). I mean, more broadly, the biblical tale of Christ’s suffering and death on the Cross, which has been told and retold for every age level and in every artistic medium. To Christians, of course, Christ’s crucifixion is inextricable from his divinity. Yet his persistence, resolve, and conviction—his endurance of ridicule, humiliation, and even ultimate injustice in the service of others—also make faithful suffering aspirational and heroic. This is why there is no greater bulwark against the selfish belligerence of the performatively macho, post-Christian “manosphere” than formative, holistic catechesis in either the Judaism Christ practiced or the Christianity he inspired. Absent civilizing religiosity, nature reasserts itself; and nature, particularly among males, is not entirely or even mostly benevolent. Indeed, the liberal secularists who lament the rightward drift of today’s young men need to wrap their minds around a fundamental reality that they may find uncomfortable: religiosity’s primary function as far as men were concerned was never to socially construct violence and misogyny, but to curb natural violence and misogyny by calling men to something higher.  

This brings me to my caveat about the nuanced importance of stories for boys: what boys need most of all is stories of their own. 

Boys Need More Than Stories 

If you spend a great deal of time around boys, as I do, you will notice something about their conversation: they almost never tell other people’s stories. They recount others’ past athletic feats and predict their future performances; they reenact funny scenes from both movies and real life. But they don’t analyze relational and personal situations en masse in the way that girls tend to do from a very young age. Obviously, there are many exceptions (my second-born is one). But, generally speaking, it seems uncontroversial to note that most males are less invested in and curious about the stories of others than are most females. Maybe that’s because, as studies of personality consistently show, men tend to focus on things while women tend to focus on people. Maybe it’s because, generally speaking, boys are less capacious and mature than girls of a similar age.  

Many girls seem to build up stores of personal, relational, and interpersonal knowledge through osmosis and observation. This has a negative side, of course: girls tend to be more susceptible than boys to the social contagions and ill effects on mental health that are endemic to social media. The positive side, however, is that virtuous counterprogramming can therefore do girls a great deal of good without necessarily being reflected in the broader culture. The goal of introducing wholesome content is to make at least some portion of girls’ observational knowledge positive rather than deleterious—that is, to give Louisa May Alcott more brain space and the latest TikTok influencer less. For many girls, consistent inculcation in better stories alone might, at least to some extent, fortify more traditional values and enable acting upon them.  

Boys, by contrast, ultimately seem to benefit less from rumination and more from repetition. As most societies have always understood, habituation in virtue is the greater part of males’ positive formation. So, while stories are important, they cannot operate as helpfully in a vacuum for boys as they might for girls. Indeed, reading about a hero’s feats in a book, watching good triumph over evil on screen, hearing snippets of conversations that highlight Dad’s strength, smarts, or valor—these are almost counterproductive if a boy is not simultaneously oriented toward opportunities to publicly demonstrate strength, smarts, and valor of his own.  

Thus, by far the most fruitfully formational stories for boys tend to be ones in which they are the conquering protagonists. When female formation falters, it’s often because girls are, quite competently, imbibing the wrong relational norms without any counterweight. Meanwhile, when male formation falters, it’s often because boys are missing sufficient opportunities to develop any relational competence at all; many familial and educational contexts for male development today either fail to effectuate boys’ positive formation or actively inculcate their negative formation. And, of course, these two phenomena reinforce one another. 

Just as girls need early and consistent exposure to instructive stories about others, boys need early and consistent circumstances in which to respond  to the challenging stimuli of interpersonal, academic, and athletic interaction with others: winning and losing; succeeding and failing; being hit, criticized, praised, and depended on; being scared, excited, sad, and angry; and more. When male formation is successful, boys are crafting the ongoing narrative of their own growth in virtue by responding ever more appropriately to these situations in accordance with values that they can often imbibe just as easily (or, more easily) from philosophical, didactic, or data-driven prose as they can from stories. Given Freya India’s accurate characterization of the Right’s overreliance on these more clinical kinds of arguments to substantiate a traditional worldview, it is no wonder that the gender gap in politics continues to grow.  

So, yes, it’s important for boys to read stories filled with virtue. My sons do; and truly, nothing delights me more. Nevertheless, there is not—in literature or in life—the well-formed male equivalent of an Anne of Green Gables or a Jo March. Those girls live to read. For boys, it works best the other way around.  

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