Last month when Target simply removed gender-based labels from the toy section, you would have thought they tore down the Berlin Wall considering all the media coverage and praise.

But is the reality of the contemporary boyhood experience being ignored?

It has long been understood that there exists a distinction between the roles that are deemed acceptable for men and women.

These roles, unfortunately set by societal standards, have proven to dictate many outcomes in human life.

Whether it be what career path is chosen by an individual or what leisure activities one partakes in, the implications of gender are hard to exaggerate yet often easily ignored.

Particularly existing in the backdrop of social science focus is the masculine experience.

While women’s studies and the very real struggle of women reaching equality receives a considerably large amount of consideration in academia and the media, the less apparent struggles of men and their coping with these struggles falls into obscurity.

Webster’s Dictionary defines masculine as, “having qualities appropriate to or usually associated with a man.”

This accepted idea of masculinity in today’s culture encompasses a narrow range of qualities, actions, and activities while denouncing an infinitely broader range of human behavior.

A troubling shift occurred sometime ago in American culture that negates the positive factors of traditional masculinity, such as strength, honor, and resilience by creating a masculinity based more so on the absence of what are considered feminine traits like compassion, understanding, and caring.

One needs to look no further than the statistics on the role of males in violent crime to understand that men are struggling in the United States, and the violent, tough persona that is reinforced for boys and men by society is a major influence on this increasingly relevant issue.

The fact that eighty five percent of all murders and ninety percent of all assaults are committed by men cannot be simply attributed to a biological predisposition to violence or be swept away by saying “boys will be boys.”

In fact, it may very well be this “boys will be boys” mentality that is perpetuating such violence as slowly, over time, aggression has become a more normative male experience rather than deviant behavior.

Research has suggested that male infants are more emotionally expressive than female infants, however, as the children reach elementary school there is a marked decrease in a boy’s tendency to articulate hurt or distress.

Why?

One factor in this decline of emotionality in boys is the effect that shaming has on a child. Young boys learn from adults, and also peers reaffirming lessons from adults, to be ashamed of certain feelings that are associated with weakness such as vulnerability and fear

As researcher Jackson Katz has pointed out, this shaming method is enforced many ways, both subtly and overtly. And, in either case, this method is used to keep boys and young men in a “box of masculinity” that only tolerates behaviors that coincide with accepted gender roles.

When a boy deviates from his gender role, attempts to step outside of the box, he is met with shame in its most devastating fashion, a shame that mocks one’s masculinity by insisting the boy is feminine.

Schoolyard reticule points out this femininity with insults such as pansy, sissy, wuss, mama’s boy, and worse; insults that attack one’s masculine credibility and effectively shame the boy or adolescent back into his box.

Ken Corbert perhaps best illustrated the strife brought on by such ridicule in his book, “Boyhoods” as he discussed, “Pain… is the social pain of punishment, humiliation, and shame, pain that is seen as coming from outside social forces… the pain and shame felt by the feminine boy in the face of social force.”

This statement has been backed by research finding that boys (in comparison to girls) are discouraged from, and even punished by, adults for engaging in behavior deviant from their gender stereotyped role.

This occurs earlier and more severely for boys, creating a nervousness that simply prompts the boys to maintain a masculine demeanor and garner the social rewards rather than behave in a cross gender manner and be ostracized or punished.

Noticing they are “boxed in” these boys search for socially acceptable ways to demonstrate these feelings and emotions and have found that most times violence and aggression are modes to both vent their frustrations and draw attention to themselves, even if the attention does not address the underlying issue.

This aggression is seen as a better alternative than emoting as it seems to fit the traits of what men are supposed to be and are socialized to think is masculine.

The research indicates that in American society, a girl being a “tomboy” is better off than a boy behaving in a stereotypically “girly” fashion. So are we ignoring the problems boys face?

Does removing gender labels from toys help if the underlying societal forces are still in tact?