Being that I’m a fair bit younger and from a more “liberal” background, grew up in Sweden during the 90s and 00s which is when feminism as a “thing” hit it’s apex. After that it has been steadily declining in popularity. What feminism in Sweden means is a bit difficult to explain. It is very much focused on getting women into the work force, financially and legally independent and access to childcare, reproductive rights and maternity/paternity leave. As such a lot of the messaging that men have to be the head of the family etc were a lot more subtle than the constant barrages from her own childhood.

Of course, a lot of the professions of feminism were just skin deep and the movement was already running out of steam. But the role of the man as the obvious head of the household was already well eroded. When I went to church the trendy thing for priests was to alternate between she and he for God. But one of the big issues that eventually sank the movement was the inability to move on from separatist second wave feminism, it never really dealt with the imperialist or white supremacist part nor provided a convincing answer for what a healthy masculinity was supposed to be other than slogans like “a real man cares about their child”. If you are interested in learning more about the history of political feminism in Sweden, Yvonne Hirdman wrote a book titled “What is to be done” (Vad bör göras? : Jämställdhet och politik under femtio år) which chronicles the history between the 60’s to the 10’s, but I don’t think it is available in English. I disagree with a lot of the conclusions but it is an interesting view if you’re interested in gender history. With all that said, lets move on from this tangent.

I was raised by a single mother who very much is a feminist and wanted both me and my brother to be comfortable in showing our emotions. I assume that she had a lot similar experiences to the story of Terrence Real describes. We were very much schooled into patriarchal norms by our peers. Sadly, mom didn’t really have any good answers for what we should do when the wheels of me and my older brother hit the road of society.

Moving on to chapter 3, I was very much schooled into patriarchal thinking by my peers, and also by myself. The early part of the chapter reminds me of how mum told me about how when I was a baby I was always smiling and laughing. As a young boy I was also very cheery and outgoing, if a bit strange. Once I started seeing how my brother got shunned and how sad that made mom I had it in my head that I had to be “normal” so that I wouldn’t cause a fuss. This involved, and still involves, a lot of shame and internalized anger. I had some very rudimentary feminist theory under my belt during my adolescence (separatist second wave, having had access to something like this book would likely have helped a lot), so I never blamed women or feminism for my problems to fit in, but myself for failing and other boys and men for setting the rules. I had a lot of dissonance between forcing myself to be normal and fit in with the normal boys (did sports etc) in order to seem well adjusted while secretly blaming my own maleness and others of my gender for feeling like shit and being unable to truly fit in.

Little boys are the only males in our culture who are allowed to be fully, wholly in touch with their feelings, allowed moments when they can express without shame their desire to love and be loved. If they are very, very lucky, they are able to remain connected to their inner selves or some part of their inner selves before they enter a patriarchal school system where rigid sex roles will be enforced by peers as rigorously as they are in any adult male prison. Those rare boys who happen to live in antipatriarchal homes learn early to lead a double life: at home they can feel and express and be; outside the home they must conform to the role of patriarchal boy.

I can recognize the double life, but I would also smothered my emotions at home. I would act out as the happy and always jovial son to my mother so she wouldn’t worry about me. She had enough to deal with between work/studies, money problems and my brother who was constantly depressed. Every now and then when mom would attend me during school or sports she would often get aghast at the kind of treatment I had to deal with. This was a further reason for me to hide away what was happening. The only real positive reinforcement I got for a masculine attribute was my ‘stoicism’. I had my football coaches specifically tell me that my role in the team was to be the one that the other boys got to “mess with” as I could take it. So I did take it, but I won’t go into details. Talking about it with mum as an adult she was shocked at what was actually going on and wishes that she could have done more to help. A kind of interesting tangent is that by the time I was reading Harry Potter, which was when I was 8, I never once identified with Harry Potter. The one I identified with was Ron Weasley, which probably says a whole lot about my self esteem. That is a constant in when I’ve read/seen a lot of fiction, I don’t identify as the main character but instead as the lesser, the sidekick.

The thing I really don’t recognize myself in is the urge to connect to your father. Maybe it is because I didn’t see him much and he was always emotionally abscent, but it felt like somewhere I had to be out of duty more than out of care. The hope of fatherly love was never truly on the table in my experience, we would get abandoned from our loving home to go off and spend a weekend with someone that didn’t really care about us. If it wasn’t for my younger half brother I would probably have insisted to stop going there around age 10-11, but I kept going to see him.