Weak?

The oldes trope for men and boys was the association of physical ill health with a loss of your masculine mojo which as a boy who has disabilities and who had periods of ill health growing up I am bound to say is a bit of a nonsense.

Your health depends on your physical fitness that as a boy you should be encouraged to build up and maintain but you can do little about innate health conditions only learn to master dealing with the consequences such as making up for lost time and looking after yourself through those periods.

Anyone that knows me soon realizes I've gumpton and balls.

New old you

The new but old go together with a modern bedroom with traditional wooden draws and desk to do your school homework on and space for your bags and wardrobe to keep your clothes all tidy ready for school and any social occassions you are expected to attend.

That mirrors how you dress which is less mid 2010's and more 1970's prep school avoiding that shift to long trousers all year that crept in even if you have a modern smartphone which in an age that doesn't feature the phone box as the place to ring your mates is a must and makes sending notes via text messaging a doddle.
 

School and boys

 

Around the early 1970's you tended to see a higher proportion of women teachers in school particulary Primary although when it came to Headship, Headmasters and deputies still were mainly male perhaps because of the assumption women couldn't "own" the same respect as men.

I first had a female Headmistress in my last years in high school which it had to be said felt very much a different experience not that I'm suggesting in any respect she wasn't up to it as on reflection she was excellent.

I think the problem area is when a high proportion of teaching staff are female boys feel their is no one who knows and understands what being a boy is like, what makes them "tick" and so acting up and the like increases apart from those boys who don't have good male role models at home being at risk of going down the wrong path.

Outdoor fun

 

When people think about boys at play they tend to think of things such as playing with objects such as model cars, aircraft or whole miniture worlds such as model railways often with others.

If that's not the case they are thinking of games either indoors ones such as board games and role playing games or outdoor games such as tag, cowboys and indians and as I did war games.

Thing is boys do play in other ways such as this boy who is drawing with chalk on the pavement which is something we tend to see more girls doing making the street scene far more interesting for children of all ages than what the groan ups put there.

That's the kind of thing I love too.

Seeing things in 3D

As we get into spring which takes me into spring cleaning I thought I'd look at things I recall from the past

One thing I remember having asa boy was a ViewMaster Viewer which used natural light to view still images that were mounted on a card wheel that rotated.

Technically speaking each frame used super 8 film with each image coming as a pair taken stereoscopically so when viewed through the viewer you had a three dimensional image.

There were may packs of images in set that covered disney films, cartoons, tv shows and cool scientific things like space.

I loved using mine and until around the 1990's it was still here living on the bottom shelf of the vegetable rack.

Ending the colour bar tyranny for boys

There was always this issue growing up around what colour tops boys could wear as it appeared some colours were seen as okay for boys such as red, blue, yellow or orange and others such as pink were not in any form.

This in 1972/3 would of been unthinkable.

A boy in pastel horizontal stripes and pink play shorts both specifically marked to and for boys in much the same way mens soccer teams do wear pink tops and shorts too.

I'm actually very glad todays boys and young men have a much wider range of colours they can wear without fear of ridicule, bullying or even assault and only wished we'd had that.

 

Options

There are other ways of being LB beyond the grey short trousers form of presentation and that includes wearing Kilts.

This does happen within scouting for instance such as in sessions, ceremonies and basically anything that's not climbing mountains.

It isn't unknown for some schools in Scotland to have kilt based uniforms and many weddings today not only have the groom in a kilt but all the boys whither playing roles such as page boys or not.

There's no reason why you shouldn't wear one with pride.