Articles
Book Review
He'll Be Ok by Celia Lashlie
Nicholas Hansen, MHERC librarian, reviews Celia Lashlie's book He'll Be Ok: Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men.
For this book review I revisited Celia Lashlie’s 2005 book “He’ll be Ok”. I had read it when I was much younger; as a teenager I extensively read books aimed at parents with problem sons - the reason I leave to the psychologists. The book didn’t really impact me much at the time, so I wondered if, with the benefit of ten years of hindsight, it would affect me more.
The first thing that stands out when reading this book is the affection and tenderness with which Lashlie describes the young men who are her subjects. She talks about the “delight” she feels when talking to them and how the experience is to her “a glimpse of magic”. Even when they, for instance, kick and smack each other, or smash and knock over things carelessly, she kindly compares them to little boys in adult bodies. As a former corrections officer and prison manager, she clearly knows the difference between actual, serious violence and the often-intense play fighting young men are known to indulge in. This perspective, as well as an unflappable self-assurance, allows her to look beneath the machismo and insolence and derive some real insights into the teenage male condition.
Lashlie’s insight into young men is that their life is surprisingly complicated, despite the unsophisticated stereotype we’re familiar with. She explains that young men live in a kind of artificial reality formed out of social relationships with other young men. The communication that facilitates this world is mostly intuitive, expressed through body language or unspoken agreements, so much so that young men struggle to explain it; hence the stereotypical silence associated with young men.
This theory of male communication ran true for me; as an autistic teenager who was mostly oblivious to this secret language, it felt a lot of the time like I existed on the other side of a glass wall from my young male peers. I could watch, through the murky glass, but I was as separate from it as any exhibit piece on a shelf was from the living, breathing organisms outside. It was much easier to pick up on the social conventions and behaviour of women, who, as Lashlie points out, mostly delineateand communicate via talking, a language I was already fluent in and could learn. No such respite for male communication, understanding that only came long after high school.
Lashlie explains the turbulence and troubles that accompany young adolescence with her “bridge of adolescence” analogy. Boys start on the bridge that takes them from childhood to adulthood, below which the dangers of adolescence lurk. Parents, often their mothers, who Lashlie characterises as well-meaning but misguided in a lot of their actions towards their sons, instinctively try to follow them onto the bridge to protect them. The bridge is too narrow for them, but wide enough for lots of wandering, exploring, and learning that the young men need to do. Parents, therefore, are best suited to being the safety rails on the bridge, not interfering with the wandering, but being always there to provide stability, guidance, and structure.
As a teenager I certainly felt like I was veering between extremes of total terrifying freedom and suffocating mothering, but perhaps I would define my experience as less of a bridge and more of a mountain climb, where progress was a tiring chore and it was always easy, if not entirely comfortable or pleasant, to stop or retreat downwards to safety and security. I certainly never felt close to the edge of my particular bridge, but perhaps that only applies to the less timorous of my peers?
Lashlie’s compassion for her subjects is worthy of appreciation, she makes the perfect researcher and brings genuinely novel insights into their condition, perhaps too much so. You may notice the author’s defensiveness, seemingly writing to pre-empt accusations of being both misandry and antifeminism. Usually such equivocating undermines a book, and is tiresome besides, but in this instance, it reflected a cautious, methodical approach to the subject, which, given the often-intense discourse around young men in society, is much appreciated.
A common criticism of Lashlie from the feminist campis her encouragement of mothers to stop getting so involved in the lives of their sons and accept that there are some things for which men are better equipped. Perhaps certain ideas implicit in this framework are not so fixed, but there is some truth here. I, who struggled and do struggle at times with the behaviours and customs of young men, could never have understood them as well as I do now without her work. Likewise, I don’t believe that I could be as good an advocate as her for them. Hope for young men can only come from the support and guidance of Celia Lashlies of the world; teachers, role models, men and women who love and appreciate young men in all their impulsive, emotional, explosive exuberance.
Revisting this book was an interesting intellectual exercise for me to compare it to my own adolescence. If you have read this book and have your own opinions, agreeing or disagreeing with mine, I would love to hear them! And if this review made you want to borrow this book, I’d love to hear that as well. You can borrow the book from our library here and let me know how you found it by emailing me here.
This resource is available at the MHERC library. You can reserve it here or borrow it from our eLibrary here.