Boy

A boy is a young male human, usually child or adolescent.

Boys always play better when they know the girls are watching. ~ Edgar Graham Gammon

A

School boys and discipline are almost by definition at odds with one another.
- William S. Abell, Fifty Years At Garrett Park, 1919-1969: A History of the New Georgetown Preparatory School (1970), p. 115

B

I'll tell you what would really age me fast: if I had a teenaged daughter. I don't think I could handle that. Because that would mean teenaged boys would be coming around to my house. "Hi, Mr. Barry!" they'd say, with their cheerful, innocent young voices. "We're here to have sex with your daughter!" No, of course they wouldn't come out and say that, but I know that's what they'd be thinking, because I was a teenaged boy once, and I was basically a walking hormone storm. I'm sure modern boys are no different. So if I had a teenaged daughter, and a boy came to my house, after somehow picking his way through the land mines in the lawn, I'd probably lunge through the screen door and strangle him right there ("Hi, Mr. Barry! Is Jennifer heAAAAAAAWWWWK"). You think I'm exaggerating, but I have male friends whose daughters are approaching puberty at speeds upwards of 700 miles per hour, and when you say the word "dating," my friends get a look in their eyes that makes Charles Manson look like Captain Kangaroo.
- Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990). New York: Crown Publishers, p. 63

So in some ways I'm relieved that I don't have daughters, although in other ways I envy people with daughters, because little girls tend to be thoughtful, whereas little boys tend to be- and I say this as a loving father who would not trade his son for anything in the world- jerks. I used to think this was society's fault. This was back in the idealistic sixties and seventies, when we Boomers had many excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children. Remember those days? Remember when we truly believed that if society treated boys and girls exactly the same, then they wouldn't be bound by sexual stereotypes, and the boys could grow up to be sensitive and the girls could grow up to be linebackers? Ha ha! Boy, were we ever idealistic! By which I mean "stupid." Because when we look at actual children, no matter how they are raised, we notice immediately that little girls are in fact smaller versions of human beings, whereas little boys are Pod People from the Planet Destructo. I don't think society has anything to do with this. I think that if you had two desert islands, and you put girl babies on one island and boy babies on another island, and they were somehow able to survive with no help from adult society, eventually the girls would cooperate in collecting pieces of driftwood and using them to build shelters, whereas the boys would pretend that driftwood pieces were guns. (Yes, I realize they'd have no way of knowing what guns were. This would not stop them.) Not only that, but even if the island had 176,000 pieces of driftwood on it, the boys would all end up violently arguing over one of them.
- Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990). New York: Crown Publishers, p. 63-64

I base my opinions on several years of working in an office located in a house with a large transient little-boy population. Individually they're okay, but if two of them get together, their combined IQ is halved, and if a third boy comes along it's halved again, and so on, so that if you have, say, six of them, you're talking about the destructive force of a tank commanded by the brainpower of a Labrador retriever. They communicate with each other by slamming doors. They have the attention span of gnats. "STOP SLAMMING THE DOORS!" I'll yell at them. "Okay!" they'll reply (SLAM). They are so busy running around and arguing and breaking things and strewing random objects over every square inch of floor that they barely have time to pee, and they definitely don't have time to aim. They just race into the bathroom, let loose in any old random direction, and then race out again, because by God there are doors to be slammed.
- Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990). New York: Crown Publishers, p. 64-65

It's hard to avoid falling into the stereotype-toy trap. When my son, Rob, was born, my philosophy was that he should have only politically correct, environmentally sound, gender-neutral toys, such as a spinning top carved out of nongendered wood or recycled tofu. Sincerely determined to purchase something along these lines when I went to the Toys "R" "A" Big Industry store, I am sincerely embarrassed to report that what I actually purchased was a radio-controlled tank. I couldn't help myself. This was a really neat tank. It had a working turret and real treads, so it could turn on a dime and climb right over various obstacles, such as books or pillows or my son, Rob, who, being a small infant with basically the same motor skills as a watermelon, was unable to operate this tank personally. So I had to operate it for him, which I did at every opportunity, because he seemed to enjoy it, as was indicated by the increase in his drool output.
This is also how I could tell that he liked the electric train. Thus we see that even sensitive and concerned parents such as myself can contribute to the guy-ization of a male infant. But I think it would happen anyway, because little boys just naturally seem to be crazy for power. For example, from early on, Rob loved big trucks. He loved them even before he could pronounce either "big" or "truck." When he saw a big truck, he'd say something that sounded like "bee fut." He said it a lot, because he was obsessed. He only had eyes for trucks. We'd be in midtown Manhattan shortly before Christmas, walking beneath spectacular skyscrapers, past delightful animated store-window displays, with music playing everywhere and Santa Claus clanging his bell on every corner, and Rob's attention would be totally focused on: a garbage truck.
"Bee fut!" he'd tell me, pointing at it. "Bee fut!" he'd inform random pedestrians. "Bee fut!" he'd state to the world in general, repeating it 1,753 times, in case any unfortunate person might be unaware of this amazing development. And I'd have to stand there in the cold for fifteen minutes, admiring this stinking, crud-encrusted hulk and agreeing over and over that, fut-wise, it was extremely bee.
- Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys: A Fairly Short Book (1995). New York: Random House, p. 45-46

So I suppose it was inevitable that Rob would be interested in power-and-dominance toys. But I want to stress, as a fundamentally nonviolent person who has never owned any form of weapon, that I did not buy him toy guns. I'm not saying he didn't have any toy guns; in fact, by the time he was four, he had enough toy guns to conquer a toy nation the size of France (Come to think of it, he probably could have conquered the real France). I don't know where they came from. They just appeared in my house, and in the houses of all my nonviolent, son-having friends. I think maybe the Gun Fairy finds out where little boys live and comes around at night, dressed in camouflage, scattering battery-operated Nuclear Death Rayguns everywhere. The TV cartoon shows aimed at little boys don't help, either. They're infested with characters who have biceps the size of prize-winning hogs and names like Commander Brock Gonad and His Hard Punchers of Justice.
- Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys: A Fairly Short Book (1995). New York: Random House, p. 46-47

My point here is that the toys marketed for boys, like the TV shows, tend to encourage the boys' already aggressive nature, which could be why boys spend so much time acting like what professional psychologists call "jerks." Or it could be that boys are born with some kind of jerk gene, and the toy and TV people are merely cashing in on this. Whatever the cause, I know I spent a lot of time envying the parents of girls. I'd see a table of little girls, and they'd be eating and talking, just like miniature humans. Whereas my son and his friends seemed to have some kind of nervous-system linkage between their mouths and their hands, so that they could not chew without punching. Eating with them was as relaxing as amateur eyeball surgery. "Stop punching," I'd say. They'd try to stop, sometimes succeeding for as long as .00014 seconds. Then the Punch Reflex would overwhelm their tiny mental circuits. "Stop punching!" I'd repeat. "We're not punching!" they'd say, punching. "YOU ARE TOO PUNCHING!!" I'd shout, spewing out pieces of semichewed hamburger. "I CAN SEE YOU PUNCHING!! AND STOP BLOWING BUBBLES IN YOUR MILKSHAKES!! AND STOP SQUIRTING THE KETCHUP PACKETS AT EACH OTHER!! JUST EAT!!" They'd look at me as though I were insane. Their feeling was, if you were only going to eat, what was the point of going to a restaurant?
Then I'd look over at the table of little girls, who'd be chatting and thoughtfully passing each other the napkins, and I would wonder how we ever permitted my gender to get control of, for example, the government.
- Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys: A Fairly Short Book (1995). New York: Random House, p. 52-53

I feel lucky to be raising a boy now, in this moment. Boys today are on their way to learning a lesson that my generation was never really taught: that every person gets to decide whether they want to be touched or not. A whole army of children across the country are now growing up hearing parents and teachers tell them, over and over, that their bodies are their own. Yes, that means society will hold my son accountable for his sexual behavior in a way that earlier generations never had to deal with. But I don't see that as a loss.
I hope that the growing concern about sexual violence will be accompanied by real change: recognition that our sons need better sex education, earlier, as well as frank conversations about porn, consent, and handling rejection. And I hope now that more people are questioning their assumptions about boys and pushing back against old-fashioned ideas about how we teach them to be men, our sons will have more latitude to explore who they want to be and what life they want to create.
- Emma Brown, To Raise a Boy: Classrooms, Locker Rooms, Bedrooms, and the Hidden Struggles of American Boyhood (2021). New York: One Signal Publishers, p. 240

C

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Better build schoolrooms for "the boy"
Than cells and gibbets for "the man."
- Eliza Cook, A Song for Ragged Schools (1853)

Mad about the boy,
It's pretty funny but I'm mad about the boy.
He has a gay appeal
That makes me feel
There may be something sad about the boy.
- Noël Coward, Mad about the Boy (1932)

D

You are a human boy, my young friend. A human boy.
O glorious to be a human boy!...
O running stream of sparkling joy
To be a soaring human boy!
- Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), Ch. 19.

E

The overall effect of Hitler Youth membership, some Social Democratic observers complained, was a ‘coarsening’ of the young. The suppression of any discussion or debate, the military discipline, the emphasis on physical prowess and competition, led boys to become violent and aggressive, especially towards young people who for whatever reason had not joined the Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth groups travelling by train amused themselves by insulting and threatening guards who failed to say ‘Hail, Hitler!’ every time they asked a passenger for his ticket.
- Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power 1933-1939 (2005), p. 280

F

G

Boys always play better when they know the girls are watching.
- Edgar Graham Gammon, 15th President of Hampdeny-Sydney College (1939-1955), in a writing in 1903, when he was a student at Hampden-Sydney in the Class of 1905. As quoted by John Luster Brinkley in On This Hill (1994), p. 431

Let us begin with a few simple, crucial, and apparently unmentionable facts about a typical high school classroom. First and most important, most of the boys and a good number of the girls are thinking about the opposite sex most of the time. If you do not believe this, you are a dreamer. The only thing about a classroom more important to adolescent boys than whether girls are present is whether or not it is on fire.
Advocates of coeducation will tell you that the boys are learning to regard the girls as "human beings" rather than as sexual objects. These are the kinds of people who imagine that most males anywhere, under any circumstances- short of affliction by senility, homosexuality, or Bella Abzug- ever refrain from regarding females as sexual objects. These are the "imaginative" types of people who run our schools. They tend to think that their sexual interest in budding adolescent girls is their own secret perversion. It happens to be shared by the boys in the school (as well as by all the other male teachers).
If the educator is particularly creative and imaginative, he will suppose that these young "human beings" are learning a lot about life in their work together. What in fact the boys are learning is that unless they are exceptionally "bright' and obedient, they will be exceeded in their studies by most of the girls. Unless you are imaginative, you will see that this is a further drag on their already faltering attention to Longfellow's Evangeline. Clearly in a losing game in masculine terms, the boys react in two ways: They put on a show for the girls and dominate the class anyway, or they drop out. Enough of them eventually drop out, in fact, to disguise the otherwise decided statistical superiority of female performance in school. But they do not drop out soon enough to suit educators for whom aggressive boys are the leading problem in every high school.
- George Gilder, Sexual Suicide (1973). New York: Quadrangle Books, p. 207-208

Adolescent boys are radically different from adolescent girls. The boys, for example, are at the pinnacle of sexual desire and aggressiveness. In school, what they chiefly need is male discipline and challenge, ideally without girls present to distract them. Girls, on the other hand, are less aggressive and sexually compulsive at this stage and are more willing to study without rigid policing and supervision. Thus a classroom that contains both boys and girls will hurt both. The boys will be excelled and demoralized by the girls; the girls will be distracted and demoralized by the boys. Both sexes will be damaged by the continuous policing that the rebellious and unsuccessful boys require.
There are benefits to coeducation, however. It allows our educational system to avoid "sexism," reduce costs, and get rid of rambunctious lower-class males. It conditions a good many boys to compete with women on female terms. The classroom successes of these "grinds" and "apple-polishers" are somewhat tarnished after school or in the men's room, when they are brutally harassed by gangs of unsuccessful male students. But what happens after school- or in the men's room, God forbid- is of little concern to the school management. The only after-school that interests them is college admissions.
- George Gilder, Sexual Suicide (1973). New York: Quadrangle Books, p. 208-209

Coeducation also allows educators to avoid the problem of finding new ways to meet the sexual identity crises of most schoolboys. As Patricia Cayo Sexton has elaborately documented, it is the most "feminine" boys, by every index, who tend to excel in school. Obedient and submissive in the classroom, their aggressions emerge fitfully in other areas. They raise hell on college campuses, for example. Otherwise they masturbate incessantly, worry about it even more than about their grades, and generally turn their energies inward where they can cause serious distortions of character. Homosexuality and violence are frequent outlets, drugs a frequent pallative. But they do do well in school.
Surprisingly to imaginative educators, these types have less trouble in all-male institutions. Contrary to the widespread notion, homosexuality is evident neither at prep schools nor at parochial schools. Boys with masculinity problems are reinforced by an all-male environment, while less competent though virile students are not so estranged from education by their failures. Competition with females is destructive to males in any arena, but nowhere is it so damaging as among impressionable adolescents preoccupied with their intense but inchoate sexuality.
- George Gilder, Sexual Suicide (1973). New York: Quadrangle Books, p. 209

As Anita and I travel about the country, we can't help but believe the sexes are getting closer together. There's not as much difference between boys and girls as there used to be. Many young men today seem to have abandoned the male role. They refuse to be heads of households. I don't think a serious young woman should marry someone like that because I don't think she's going to change him. It's frightening. I don't know if physical appearance or mode of attire or these things make the difference, but it seems guys are more docile. They're almost feminine in manner and dress, and their attitudes toward girls are very lackadaisical and ungallant.
- Bob Green, Bless This House (1972) by Anita Bryant and Bob Green. Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell Company, p. 141-142

A good many girls these days assume the male role and call boys for dates. I have a nagging feeling that boys are going to get less and less interested in girls as a result. The intrigue is going. If a girl wants to put herself on an equal plane with the boy, she's going to find herself less and less in demand. It used to be that if guys wanted to date a sharp girl they had to polish the car and fix themselves up- and compete. If they don't have to do that, they're going to lose interest. Maybe girls phone boys from necessity. Maybe the boys don't have that get-up-and-go- that desire. I see an extreme lack of desire in young men today.
- Bob Green, Bless This House (1972) by Anita Bryant and Bob Green. Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell Company, p. 142

H

Huc venite iuvenes ut exeatis viri
"Come Here As Youths So You may Leave As Men"
- Motto of Hampden-Sydney College

Boys everywhere are quick to recognize and respect any kind of talent in each other, and one of Will Rogers' best talents was talking.
- Harold Keith, Will Rogers, A Boy's Life (Norman: Levite of Apache, 1991), revised 1991 republication of 1937 original, p. 100

When boys go first to bed,
They step into their voluntary graves.
- George Herbert, Mortification (1633)

Virginibus puerisque canto.
- I sing for maidens and boys.
- Horace, Odes, Book III, ode i, line 4.

When you can't do anything else to a boy, you can make him wash his face.
- E. W. Howe‎, Travel Letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913), p. 120

I

J

K

Without plenty of sleep, at least three hours of it before midnight if possible, no boy is going to go far in athletics.
Overstraining is simply trying to do too much. A boy's constitution will not stand nearly as much physical effort as a man's in spite of the fact that a boy's competitive spirit flares just as brightly. No boy under sixteens should attempt to run farther than one mile or compete in more than two hard races in one meet. Younger boys do not have to go through the rigid training program intercollegiate athletes undertake because a boy's muscles are naturally more supple and his body in better general physical condition, thanks to the surprising amount of out-of-door walking, running, jumping, swimming, pulling, pushing and stooping boys do every day. Boys under sixteen should concentrate on acquiring form in their events rather than gaining razor-edge physical trim. A short period of special drill and speed sharpening is all they need before a meet.
- Harold Keith, Sports and Games (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1941), p. 241

In the old days, an announcement by a boy that he wanted to try out for a distance event on his school track team brought a gasp of horror from his parents and his friends. But Tom Jones, veteran cross-country coach at the University of Wisconsin, recently announced that only one man had died of the ninety-two Wisconsin runners who had lettered at the four-to-five mile distance since 1905, and that one was killed in an automobile accident! In 1910 an old-fashioned doctor advised Clarence DeMar, the marathon runner, that he would die from heart trouble if he kept on running. Two years later the doctor himself died from a heart attack and today DeMar, over fifty years of age, is still alive and healthy and running marathons. So any normal boy can expect to improve his health by running. It is important, however, to undergo at first a careful physical examination, and then not to overstrain after he has started running.
- Harold Keith, Sports and Games (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1941), p. 242

Boys should not be afraid that running will give them a weak heart or shorten their lives. Statistics prove that longevity has favored the athlete.
- Harold Keith, Sports and Games (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1941), p. 241

Boys everywhere are quick to recognize and respect any kind of talent in each other, and one of Will Rogers' best talents was talking.
- Harold Keith, Will Rogers, A Boy's Life (Norman: Levite of Apache, 1991), p. 100

Gender: The social characteristic that we are taught to align with our prescribed sex (i.e., the belief that boys are aggressive.
- Michael Kimmel and The Stony Book Sexualities Research Group (editors), Sexualities: Identities, Behaviors, and Society (2004), 2nd Edition (2015), p. 681

L

As for gender, the abstinence-only curricula continue to exhibit what Michelle Fine described a decade ago: the peer doing the pressuring is male; the refuser-delayer is female. Some mainstream publishers set out to fix this in the 1990s. "Reducing the Risk," for instance, employs a novel approach: it names one of its fictional couples Lee and Lee, who evince no obvious gender traits and take turns aggressing and thwarting aggression. In Lee and Lee, the ideology of chastity has trumped women's liberation. Now, boys are expected to desire as little as girls.
- Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002), Judith Levine, forward by Joycelyn Elders, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN 0816640068 p. 93 [1]

In school, perhaps more than at home (which is why parents are sometimes appalled when they catch their kids unawares among their friends), both masculinity and femininity are narrow balancing beams, easy to tumble off. Girls must appear amenable to sex but not too amenable. If a girl is standoffish or proud, she is a "bitch." But if she talks too dirty or behaves too lasciviously, she's a "slut" or a "ho." A boy who does the latter is admired as a "player." If he does the latter toward girls, that is. Because if a boy is shy or insufficiently enthusiastic about, say, discussing the size of a classmate's breasts, he can find himself ostracized as a "faggot." Masculinity is policed chiefly by boys against other boys, and homophobia is its billy club.
- Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002), Judith Levine, forward by Joycelyn Elders, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN 0816640068 p. 155-156 [2]

The Australian sociologist Bob Connell has pointed out that masculine and feminine styles differ from school to school and among social classes, races or ethnic groups. Michael Reichert, a Pennsylvania sociologist whose work on boys has taken him to both Philadelphia housing projects and to an elite suburban boys' prep school, noted, for instance, that a working-class boy might assert his dominance by beating up another kid, whereas an upper-class boy would do the deed verbally, with sarcasm (verbal "dissing," of course, is a high art of hip-hop as well.)
- Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002), Judith Levine, forward by Joycelyn Elders, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN 0816640068 p. 156 [3]

Teens even tend to stick to gender roles when they dissemble about sex. "Three times more junior high school boys than girls say they have had sex, at an earlier age and with more partners. What does this mean?" asked sociologist Mike Males. "Are a few girls really getting around? Are boys having sex with aliens? Each other?" (In his incredulity that the last could happen, Males isn't unlike the kids he's talking about.) Another study found that when kids lied, boys tended to state falsely that they had had sex, whereas girls said they were virgins.
- Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002), Judith Levine, forward by Joycelyn Elders, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN 0816640068 p. 156-157 [4]

M

Boys believe nothing can hurt them, his doubt whispered. Grown men know better.
- George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings, Theon (I)—Theon Greyjoy

What boy does not wish to find secret powers hidden in himself?
- George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings, Bran (IV)–Maester Luwin

Sadly for all of us, our culture does little to encourage boys to become great men. Television depicts men as stupid, or as sex addicts, and almost always intellectually and emotionally shallow. Men don't seem to care about these depictions, merely laughing them off. But I care about them, because our sons need good role models and given the amount of time boys spend with electronic media they need good role models on television. And of course, there is a bigger cultural fallout from the depreciation of masculinity and fatherhood, which is lower marriage rates, higher divorce rates, and the reality that many boys grow up in fatherless homes.
This is a national tragedy, because boys need healthy encouragement from their fathers more than they need it from anyone else. In a boy's eyes, his father's words are sacred. They hold enormous power. His words can crush a boy or piece him back together after a fall. If a father is not there at all, there is a huge void in a boy's life- and as the depressing statistics remind us, boys who grow up without fathers are at a dramatically greater risk of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, and ending up in prison.
Encouragement from a father changes a boy's life. His words can ignite furious passion in a boy that will help him achieve any goal he sets out to accomplish. To a son, a dad's words are the final truth. If they are positive, a boy feels that he cannot be beaten; if they are negative, however, a son feels that he could never win. If you are a son reading this, you know exactly what I mean.
- Meg Meeker, Boys Should Be Boys (2008), 2009 Ballentine Books paperback edition. New York: Ballentine Books, p. 92-93

Every boy needs schooling in virtues in order to become a great man. And any parent can school him because at the heart of virtue is masculine intuition. Parents don't have to construct the virtues and then pour then into the heart of their son. The virtues are there, but in small fragments that must be cleaned, shaped, and polished. The great burden for parents is finding time. Haste is the enemy of virtue, because it gives us no time to discuss, think, wonder, or pray; it forces us to push our boys to perform when we should be working with them. Give time back to your son. Give him time to dream. Encourage him to question and to think. Boys must have time to think upon virtues before they embrace them. Otherwise, virtues become nothing more than a disposable outer layer of clothing. A man can put them on or off, depending on his mood. But real virtues are not so disposable- they become part of the boy.
- Meg Meeker, Boys Should Be Boys (2008), 2009 Ballentine Books paperback edition. New York: Ballentine Books, p. 204-205

Boys will search for virtue, just as they will search for truth and self-worth, because in the heart of a developing boy is the desire to know the truth, to know what is good, and to know that he has some reason to do the right thing. This is why boys are famous for setting out rules, standards of conduct for themselves. They derive their moral code from those they admire (usually their parents). Once a boy sets out his rules, he holds them as the best and highest way a boy (himself) should behave. If a boy succeeds in following his code of conduct, he's able to respect himself, and he believes others will respect him as well. Respect and honor are important to boys (and men).
At the top of most lists of good behavior is honesty. Boys are keenly attuned to honesty in those around them. And they feel it immediately when people around them sway from it. If a boy has a strong conscience, his eyebrows, nostrils, hairline, and mouth will all betray him if he tries to lie, because he will know he is breaking the code of conduct. Boys consider honesty a masculine quality, so to betray it is to be less of a man. Heroes, in a boy's eyes, are deserving of honor because they stand for what is right and just, and what is right and just is honesty. Living honestly feels better to boys than living with deception, even if that deception is meant to get them what they want. Boys like feeling strong and courageous, and telling the truth demands strength and honesty. Lying feels grungy. Lying makes boys fearful because they know it is a weakness. The liar is someone who is afraid of the truth.
This is why boys are so open to being trained to tell the truth. They know that if you teach them to be truth tellers, you're teaching them to be strong. They know good boys, internally strong boys, tell the truth; wishy-washy boys lie. No one needs to tell them this; they know it.
So in teaching honesty you have a ready audience. Don't blow it by encouraging your son to tell white lies- even if they're well intentioned. Young boys think in black-and-white terms. A statement is either true or it is false. The younger the boy, the less gray he feels in his thinking. When a parent coaxes him to tell "white lies" he is confused. The term is an oxymoron. In order to accommodate his parents' wishes, he puts lies into the pool of acceptable speech. Beginning such ambiguous training so early on in life leads boys down a slippery path.
- Meg Meeker, Boys Should Be Boys (2008), 2009 Ballentine Books paperback edition. New York: Ballentine Books, p. 205-206

N

No one has the right to make a boy learn Latin, because learning is a matter for individual choice; but if in a Latin class, a boy fools all the time, the class should throw him out, because he interferes with the freedom of others.
- A. S. Neill, Summerhill (1960)

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
- Isaac Newton, just before his death, as quoted in The Annual Review, and History of Literature for 1806, Vol. V (1807), Ch. 14, Art. XIV (Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton by Edmund Turnor), p. 471

O

P

Q

R

To date, there are still very few published discussions of young boys' constructions of masculinity that unpack the heteronormativity in which it is produced. While some of the primary-school studies have explored how homophobic cultures operate to marginalize boys who are alternatively masculine and thus "feminized" and "homosexualized" via various forms of name-calling (Thorne 1993; Boldt 1996; Redman 1996; Renold 2002b, 2004), very little research attention has focused on the diversity and ambiguity of boys' heterosexual cultures.
- Emma Renold, "Primary School 'Studs': (De)constructing Young Boys' Heterosexual Masculinities", reprinted from Men and Masculinities, Volume 9, Number 3 (2007), 275-297 in Sexualities: Identities, Behaviors, and Society (2004), 2nd Edition (2015) by Michael Kimmel and The Stony Book Sexualities Research Group (editors), p. 79

Tuke's repeated portrayal of boys and male adolescents provokes challenging questions about the depiction, exhibition and reception of the body- especially the young body- both then and now. Imagine the artist out on his boat in Falmouth harbour painting his nude boy-models, perhaps in preparation for Bathers (1888-9), a picture that reappears as a point of interest throughout this book. Consider this in a twenty-first-century context and you might start to ask some questions. Firstly, where are their life jackets? You might also question the relationship between artist and model. Is he supposed to be responsible for them? Do their parents know? Attitudes toward the care and safeguarding of people, children and adolescents in particular, have fundamentally shifted since Tuke's day. I do not mean to suggest that Tuke's models were unsafe or uncared for (interviews in the Reminiscences are to the contrary) but that societal codes of behavior have changed considerably, not least in relation to nude sea-bathing, which was becoming increasingly contentious even within Tuke's lifetime. The boundaries between what is considered innocent, acceptable, erotic or even sexually explicit- in terms of behavior, language, or imagery- have shifted considerably over time, and Tuke's art draws attention to some of those historical changes.
- Cicely Robinson (editor), Henry Scott Tuke, p. 14

Famously, the models all said in later life that Tuke never exploited them or made untoward suggestions; unlike his friend Charles Masson Fox, Tyke was never accused of sexual impropriety in his relations with boys and young men.
- Cicely Robinson, Henry Scott Tuke, p. 131

Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty; they should be made to feel that nothing gives one human being rights over another, and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love.
- Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
- Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order (1932), p. 31

S

Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games.
- Robert Falcon Scott, last letter to his wife, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition, Vol. I (1913), Ch. 20

As one Tatler critic recognized when praising Henry Scott Tuke as par excellence the painter of youth," the depiction of naked youths bathing or sitting on Cornish beaches looking contemplatively out to sea played an important part in Tuke's artistic success. However, these paintings elicited a range of different readings and conflicting interpretations from Tuke's viewers, some of which detected a sexualised approach on the artist's approach to the unclothed adolescent male body, while many others did not.
- Andrew Stephenson (contributing author), Henry Scott Tuke (New Haven: Yale University Press) by Cicely Robinson (editor), p. 75

Examining the physical attributes, poses, and symbolism of the naked youths that modelled for Tuke and were depicted in his key works, I argue that certain iconographic references and pictorial correspondences were familiar to some of Tuke's viewers. This would have been due to their knowledge of classical precedents for representing the youthful male nude and through their exposure to erotic photographic images of naked youths in the open air that encouraged them to infer sexual intent. Yet for other audiences, these sexualised associatins remained elusive, as they approached the subject of youthful male nudes in landscape settings differently through the conventions of English pastoralism or by seeing the work as making reference to an updated visual language of neoclassicism gaining currency and critical support in British art from the 1860s onwards.
- Andrew Stephenson (contributing author), Henry Scott Tuke (New Haven: Yale University Press) by Cicely Robinson (editor), p. 75

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The senshi are very sexy, and boys like it. In Japan, moreover, boys are quite weak and they search for a strong partner. They want to be dominated, and the senshi are ready to do it.
Maybe what a lot of authors don't understand is the masochistic component of boys. They write love stories that are now outdated.

Naoko Takeuchi [5]

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O formose puer, nimium ne crede colori.
- O charming boy, trust not too much in thy beauty.
- Virgil, Eclogues (37 BC), Book II, line 17.

Macte nova virtute, puer, sic itur ad astra.
- Blessings on your young courage, boy; that's the way to the stars.
- Virgil, Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book IX, line 641.

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