On Raising Sons
The lawsuit arrived in the mail like any other bill. My mother opened the envelope at the kitchen table. It was a weekday. Her husband was at the office. Her sons were at school. It took a couple of paragraphs for reality to set in. She was being sued for $20,000,000 by a man she’d never met. The offense? My mother had invited a woman to appear with her on the Phil Donahue Show. In front of millions of Americans the woman had recounted a harrowing story of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband. The husband had responded by filing a lawsuit against my mother, the Donahue Show and the network that aired the interview, ABC.
The year was 1983. My mother, Louise Armstrong, was a writer. In 1979 she had published the first speakout on incest called Kiss Daddy Goodnight. That was the year I turned 12. In the months leading up to publication, our apartment was visited regularly by incest survivors who had come to tell stories of abuse at the hands of male relatives. And though the details were shielded from me at the time, the discussions about gender and power were not. My mother’s declaration in the book — that if it’s a crime to do it to the neighbor’s kid, it should be a crime to do it to your own — was a provocative idea in 1979, where old assumptions about women and children as property still prevailed. Who was this woman, who had never gone to college, a writer with no “expertise,” other than her talent, her experience and her sensibility, to break this silence? When she’d shopped the book, my mother had received mostly rejections. One editor told her the subject was fascinating, but too rare to make for a mass market book.
It was the next book, The Home Front: Notes from the Family War Zone, a treatise on domestic violence, that triggered the invitation by Donahue. To illustrate her point, my mother invited one of her subjects to join her on the show. A few weeks later they were both rewarded with a lawsuit.
When I was a boy my mother had a mantra. She would tell me make sure you have friends who are girls before you have girlfriends. In fifth grade, when I fell in love with Susie Ort and gifted her some of my mother’s jewelry as testament to my devotion (and my poverty), my mother took me out for ice cream. What are you doing? she asked. I’m in love, I told her. Patiently, she explained that Susie did not return my feelings, and that my pre-teen emotions, no matter how intense, didn’t give me the right to force my love upon her.
Today, as we face a wave of angry young men resentful of rejection, forcing their will on the world in spasms of violence, the question of how we raise our sons has never felt more important. My own son will turn seven in November. When he plays with his older sister I remind him to respect her body, to listen to her words, to understand that no means no. Privilege is often invisible to those who have it. My son doesn’t yet understand that as a smart, handsome, outgoing, economically privileged white male, his right to have an opinion will never be questioned. How can he know this unless we teach him? Unless we open his eyes to the fact that his path through life, though not assured, will never be hindered by bias? That when he raises his hand, he will be called on and his answers will be given weight and credence. To make him recognize that — unlike his sister — his journey to define himself as an individual and forge his place in this world will unfold without barriers.
My daughter, now eleven, cannot expect the same privilege. This too my wife and I must teach my son. That despite all the progress of the last hundred years his sister will come of age in a world where the safety of her body will always be in question, and her right to control what happens to it remains in legal jeopardy.
A driver honked at my wife last week for stopping at a pedestrian crosswalk. When she said “Don’t be an asshole,” he followed her into a parking lot and confronted her as she got out of her car. He was in his early twenties, and twice her size. “I’m not an asshole!” he yelled at her. “I’m the nicest guy you’ll ever meet!”
Who does this remind us of? We’re living in a moment where men have never felt so victimized, despite their continuing majorities in government and business leadership. Think of Brett Kavanaugh lashing out at his accusers during his recent Supreme Court nomination hearing. How dare these women accuse him of assault, when he was guilty of nothing more than being a typical American boy who liked beer? His sense of entitlement was startling, the indignation that his future could be undermined by the words of a woman.
In the days that followed I couldn’t help but think of the man who had sued my mother. A man who had beaten his wife for years, and saw not his own failings or culpability but only the crimes of women speaking out about something that was meant to be silent.
From her writing and her actions, my mother taught me that women’s stories have power, but that their right to tell those stories is not guaranteed. She and my father raised me in New York’s West Village, among feminist writers like Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller and Florence Rush. It was from their company, and later their writing (and, of course, from my father) that I learned how to be a man. Have friends who are girls before you have girlfriends. It is deceptively simple advice, and yet within these words lay the crux of history’s misogyny trap. See women as human beings, my mother was saying, whose thoughts and feelings matter, before you sexualize them. Understand that they are not objects of desire to be coveted and controlled, for we cannot demean someone we respect.
To be given an advantage one should be required to recognize it as an advantage. My mother knew this. She understood that her power to change the world lay not just in the words she wrote, but in the fact that she had born sons who could be taught to be men of a different kind. Society could be reshaped, she realized, not just in the streets, but at home in the way we raise our boys.
Today, every time my son stamps his foot and makes demands, what I hear is “I like beer,” and I shudder. Every time a young, disaffected man opens fire in a crowd, all I can see are the toxic consequences of ‘boys will be boys.’ How can I ensure my son learns the lessons I was taught? That he understands his wants are not needs. That he recognizes that the words of others are of equal importance to his own, and that though his feelings may seem urgent and important in the moment, they do not outweigh the feelings of others, or justify the forcing of those feelings onto the unwilling. There is no greater responsibility I feel as a father.
In 1983, my mother was sued for $20,000,000 and, though the First Amendment eventually prevailed and the case was dismissed, I’ll never forget her face the day I came home from school and found her at the kitchen table staring at the mail. This is what courage looks like. It is a woman without a college degree trying to force the world to concede that the personal is political. A woman who could not be silenced, no matter the cost. And it is from her example that I will teach my son how to be a man.
— Noah Hawley
