LISTEN TO THE PLUGGED IN SHOW, EPISODE 203
It’s been a long time since we’ve been told that little boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dogs’ tails. (Who even knows what a snip is?)
So what are boys made of these days? Entertainment, that’s what.
Oh, sure, maybe biologically that’s not true. But entertainment, pop culture and technology play a huge role in how boys are shaped mentally, emotionally and even spiritually. What do those influences look like? How can we guard against their problems? And how can parents use those influences in more positive ways?
Our podcast panel of parents—Bob Hoose, Kristin Smith and Jonathan McKee—join host Adam Holz to discuss these and other related issues. It promises to be a robust, rollicking conversation, because I know our experts won’t just male it in. (Get it. Mail? Never mind.)
And while we’re on the subject of influence, we transport our conversation to Hyrule and dig deeply into its spiritual underworld. That’s right: We’re tackling the Legend of Zelda video game franchise, from its ancient beginnings (in 1986) to its modern open-world incarnations, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Kennedy Unthank has unpacked the franchise’s surprisingly deep, murky spirituality in a couple of recent blogs (found here and here), and he explains what he found.
But we don’t want to hog the conversation. After you listen to us, why don’t you talk a while? Reach out via Instagram and Facebook. Write us an email at [email protected]. Or leave us a voice message, too, by going to The Plugged In Show homepage.
And, of course, join us for The Plugged In Show Aftercast, every Friday at 4 p.m. Mountain Time, on Instagram! It’s a grand old time. And we promise not to get snippy.
3 Responses
The best thing to do as a parent to help your sons and daughters navigate the messages pop culture is sending is introduce your son to a relationship with Jesus Christ
-That still leads to a wide potential variance in theology. There are plenty of people who claim to love Jesus Christ but don’t treat any number of various groups of people (women, ethnic minorities, poor people) in identical ways to one another.
Theology, and what people are learning in church, also positively or negatively affects boys and girls. Too many preachers, with welcome exceptions, are telling boys to pursue ‘strength’ (which will likely become more and more obsolete in the robotic age if a capacity for physical labor is what’s supposed to set us as men apart) and making excuses for when boys — and even adult men — exercise un-Godly conduct. I’m more concerned about what a young child, especially a young boy, is learning from the pulpit (especially when it’s misogynistic, because too much of that defends itself by appealing to power dynamics) than what they’re “learning” from fictional entertainment. Children aren’t totally incapable of separating reality from fantasy, but too many churches teach unhealthy messages and then discourage questions or criticism about the same.
-I gave you guys good hints, and also IMDB exists, so I figured you’d be able to find the answer easily.
I felt like you guys were a little harsh on the culture aspect when it comes to the boys and girls thing. I think that most of the time people in the culture would characterize things as that they are eliminating “artificial limits”; limits invented by humans. Like, just as an example, in the distant past women couldn’t be doctors or go to medical school. Seems like that’s a limit that *needed* to be eliminated. But the key is knowing what limits are just arbitrary constructs invented by people, and what limits are absolute and moral, from God’s scripture.
The thing with positive masculinity vs “toxic” masculinity is tricky. Heard a speaker once complain that its hard to come up with traits of masculinity that are distinct from femininity, and also good, but it seems like often the issue is it seems like masculinity is so often defined in opposition to femininity, or in a way that implies a hierarchy of sorts. Like if you say “men are protectors” you then have to ask “who do men protect?”, and if you say Men are protectors does that mean Women don’t protect. Or if you say “men are leaders”, does that mean women are only followers. Can go the opposite way when you are talking about femeninity too. Whenever you say something like “Men are X”, you are sort of at the same time saying something about what women are too. James Dobson himself once said something to the effect that “women are fascinated by the things of men, but men are repulsed by the things of women”, and said it in a way that implied he viewed that as natural or even good, but doesn’t really seem healthy to me that men should be “repulsed” by femininity or association with it. The whole “Fragile Masculinity” thing. Another scholar I once read, (forget who) compared and contrasted Masculinity and Femininity and made the point that culturally we treat masculinity as something you “earn” (i.e. you “become” a man; see all the various cultures that have manhood/coming of age rituals) and also something you can “lose”, whereas we often treat femininity as something girls and women just have, naturally, as intrinsic in them. And that at the heart a lot of the negative “toxic” masculinity that is talked about in culture has its roots in men’s fears of losing their masculinity, or not being thought of as “masculine enough”. That culture sees masculinity too much as “performative” and that actually hurts men and boys who can’t embody the ideals.
A while ago in a podcast our pastor said something along the lines of “young boys today don’t know where to look to figure out how to be men”. Maybe it tells you something about me and how I approach all this gender stuff, but my honest though on that was “what’s to figure out”? I sometimes really don’t understand why it’s even an issue. If some guy told me “I don’t know how to be a man”, I would be like “but you know how to be YOU”, that’s a man. You are a man. You were born male, so you are a man when you grow up. Sometimes it seems like we make it more complicated than it needs to be.
lol, big Zelda fan here, look forward to reading the blog in depth. But I would say I think characterizing what you describe as “works based theology” is a stretch, because typically in those games its not about salvation, and where the character’s soul will ultimately go, its part of the quest ^^. Maybe it would be more akin to those instances in the Bible where God gave people specific instructions in various situations, like when he told Gideon exactly what to do to win the battle against his enemies. And now this response has become entirely too long. wonder if anyone will read it ^_^.