The boys of summer camp
DISNEY HONCHO Michael Eisner has frequently attributed his success to lessons he learned as a boy at Vermont's Camp Keewaydin. Alas, the publication of his inspirational memoir "Camp" was put on hold last month not long after Disney's board forced Eisner to resign as chairman. Still, those interested in a more scholarly analysis of summer camp, scouting, and other forms of "boy work" can pick up University of Florida professor Kenneth B. Kidd's "Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale," published this month by the University of Minnesota, instead. Kidd, who teaches English at the University's Gainesville campus, talked with Ideas via e-mail about the wildness of boys, the origins of Scouting, and his own summer camp days in Texas.
IDEAS: What do you mean by "boyology" and the "feral tale"?
KIDD: In the early 20th century, self-professed "boyologists" began writing prescriptive manuals challenging what has been called domestic ideology -- expert advice offered by women about, among other things, raising boys. One of the better-known recent boyologists, ironically, is a woman, Christina Hoff Sommers, who claims that feminism harms young men by attempting to "rescue" them from their masculinity. I also use "boyology" to describe descriptive writing on boyhood, from Mark Twain to Robert Bly. What I call the "feral tale" is another form of discourse about young men, one derived from raised-by-wolves folklore. Kipling's novels "Kim" and the "Jungle Books," for example, are feral tales that dramatize but also advise us how to manage the supposed wildness of boys.
IDEAS: The original 1908 edition of Robert Baden-Powell's "Scouting for Boys" was recently reissued by Oxford University Press. One gets the impression that the founder of Scouting borrowed motifs from Kipling in order to address his own worries about the decline of masculinity.
KIDD: Like such influential handbooks as "Boyology, or Boy Analysis" (1916) by YMCA leader Henry William Gibson, Baden-Powell's manual was deeply concerned with the sissification of white, middle-class boys. Discourses of boyology and the feral tale would intersect in such American institutions as Scouting and summer camps, whose activities tend to reinforce the usual idea that real men are rugged and outdoorsy, while simultaneously promising to transform our wolf-boys into respectable citizens. Today's boyologists, like Michael Gurian, bestselling author of "The Wonder of Boys," continue to make similar claims.
IDEAS: In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts of America have a constitutional right to exclude gays. Why are the Boy Scouts so worried about homosexuality?
KIDD: Heterosexual manhood is a precarious construct, which helps explain why people are so anxious about it. The problem with "boy work" institutions is they both demand homosocial bonding and fear any sexual or erotic component to that bonding, which makes them a bit schizophrenic. Scouting especially is panicked about anything that looks deviant in terms of sexuality or gender. The Boy Scouts' ideal of American manhood ought to be far more diverse.
IDEAS: Your grandparents ran a camp for boys in central Texas. What did you learn about "boy work" from your own experiences there?
KIDD: I have many happy memories of Friday Mountain, and believe that summer camp can be a positive experience for many boys. But camps are often elitist institutions, recruiting primarily upper-middle-class boys who happen to be white -- in that area, not much has changed since Baden-Powell's time. Also, I began to realize as a teenager that I was gay, and figured out that sexual identity and gender identity were policed at summer camp just as they were at school and elsewhere. I'm sure that my academic interest in boyology grew out of my early awareness of the weirdness and complexity of summer camp.
