It’s a snark, it’s a meme – putting your big boy pants on. But there was an actual time when the first pair of pants (that’s trousers, for our UK readers) was a milestone in a boy’s life. A party would be held for the young man at his “breeching” ceremony, where family and friends would fill the young man’s pockets with coins (which he may or may not have been able to keep, depending on the circumstance).
From the 16th century up to the early 1900s, boys and girls in Britain and its colonies dressed largely similarly, according to Atlas Obscura. Standard toddler garb was “long dresses that extended beyond their feet, like modern Christening robes, before graduating to shorter dresses”, which were passed down to younger siblings. Perhaps due to the labor intensive process of washing clothes, little children wore gowns since they are more likely to have those little accidents.
Donning britches gave a boy access to a wider world; climbing and running but also gentlemanly activities. His hair might be cut for the first time and if he was of a wealthy enough family, he may be turned over to a tutor. His father would teach him to ride and hunt, but “as soon as they were breeched, their mothers began to spend less time with them…His sisters remained confined in dresses, which inhibited their movements and kept them closer to the house. Though he did not leave home straight away, a boy who had been breeched had effectively left the domestic sphere of women.” Breeching was also an acknowledgement that this son had survived infancy, as so many did not.
There is even a breeching story within the tragic tale of the Titanic. Alfred Rush, who celebrated his birthday the night the ship sank received his first pair of trousers that day. Loading the lifeboats that dreadful night was a muddled affair, with “the officer in charge of the lifeboats on the port side operat[ing] a 'women and children first' policy, but his starboard equivalent opt[ing] for 'women and children only'.” Master Rush could reasonably have gotten into a boat and away to safety but announced to the crew that he was “staying with the men”, ultimately dying with them in the icy water.
Although it was only one stop on the journey to becoming a man, being allowed to wear pants seems to be a tad less intense than some other cultural coming-of-age rituals for males. Some are pretty brutal – jumping bulls, wearing a gauntlet full of bitey ants, solitary wilderness wanderings, throwing yourself off heights or killing helots, to name a few. Fighting, hunting, adventure quests and all the rest, rites of passage are often assumed to be attached to primitive cultures, vestiges of violent times, when surviving required more work than it does today. However, some careful observers of our society say we have not done away with rituals; they just look a little different now. While there aren’t a lot a lot of places for initiation activities in the suburbs, writer Johan Kurtz argues that at least one rite of passage still exists – university education.
At his Substack, Kurtz points out the commonalities between ancient rites and the process of completing a college degree. Participation in college life separates the student from his family and imparts to him new knowledge. On account of that separation and mastery of knowledge, he is deemed a member of the elite. Though many now acknowledge that degrees are often not worth the debt incurred to attain them, Kurtz believes the unconscious understanding of college as a rite of passage is the reason students continue to apply. It is seen as a path to adulthood. “Without participation in the ritual of education, the worldview and machinations of the ruling class are impenetrable, and the individual feels without agency.” In an interview last month, Kurtz says the power of university education to confer adulthood on our kids is one we ignore at our own peril. It is not that we should send all our children to trade schools or the like, but that we need to be intentional about guiding our children to adulthood. We can do that, he says, by devising better rituals.
Girls have a more obvious transition to adulthood than boys, so I will put that to one side for now. No doubt girls can benefit from things which affirms they have become women in the eyes of their community. However, if my reading is right, it seems a lot of men say they would have benefited from a definite “welcome to adulthood” sign. Indeed, it has been argued that boys need more of a push than girls to step towards maturity. Men in ancient cultures assumed particular responsibilities and also attained privileges when they came of age. Today, as Pastor Fisk once pointed out, we struggle with the opposite: our society expects nothing of men. The best they can do is keep quiet and ensure they ally themselves with the approved protected groups.
Searching on the internet, I found a few fathers who have set up their own versions of rites of passage for their sons – inviting trusted men to gather and offer guidance, gifting him with a weapon or taking a trip into the wild together; things that will teach him independence, give him purpose and instill a sense of responsibility. Pastor Fisk also suggested sons need to break away from their mother’s care. Writing at Art of Manliness, Brett and Kate McKay put it this way:
From time immemorial, boys have felt the tension between two impulses: One, the desire to stay in the safety and comfort of the domestic sphere, taken care of by their mother and free from difficult and dangerous responsibilities; the other, the desire to take risks, to explore, to win honor, to adventure — to take a place in the world of men.
Fathers are well suited to getting their sons out of their rooms and placing them in situations where they “feel comfortable taking risks, relish being independent, and are able to focus less on themselves and genuinely care for others.” The McKays suggest fathers should try to integrate their sons into their own activities – work assignments or charity projects, where possible – as well as outdoor activities. Men’s clubs can also be a great avenue for organizing men for a collective purpose, with young men side-by-side with older ones. Maybe the simplest way to say it is that in raising sons, good fathers are aiming to make themselves obsolete.
But there is a more understated mark of manhood which should be the goal of every rite of passage, that is, emotional self-control. Currently, there are many forces determined to keep young men fearful, angry, indecisive and childish; I am certainly not the first to notice that the dominant mood in our current age is decidedly anti-men. More than that, it is feminizing, typified most in “wokeness”. Media, education and now criminal justice, politics and everything else have co-opted a “remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.”
Unchecked privileging of female ways of thinking has resulted in the pitting of equity against merit, inflated victimhood against justice, inclusion against excellence, emotional displays against truth and a coddling infrastructure that shuts down anything deemed unsafe. Perhaps there is not such a straight line between a toxic version of femininity and wokeness as I have painted – I believe godly women have an important role to play in fighting the spirit of the age. But men can drink, vote, marry, take out a mortgage, drive a car, grow a beard, change a tire or shoot a gun, yet if they remain without self-control, especially emotionally, they are just LARPing. As Dr Koontz pointed out in yesterday’s A Brief History of Power podcast, a man in control of himself is not easily manipulated by those who seek to enslave and use others for their own ends. He is bound to no one but those he serves.
The church still has some of the best preserved rites of passage, including baptism and confirmation. It is one of the only places where people of all ages, all walks of life gather, called by Jesus to be salt and light in this world but also to teach and admonish each other. The world will seek to mold our sons into its image, but we have all we need give opportunities for them to learn courage, responsibility, discipline and sacrifice.
“Likewise, exhort the young men to be sober-minded, in all things showing yourself to be a pattern of good works; in doctrine showing integrity, reverence, incorruptibility, sound speech that cannot be condemned, that one who is an opponent may be ashamed, having nothing evil to say of you… For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works.” Titus 2