In the background, a fiery explosion launches chunks of building debris through the air and towards the city street. In the foreground, a broad-shouldered Christian Bale, clad in a black, body-contouring Batsuit, strides away from the destruction, fists clenched, stone-faced and nonchalant.
The movie poster for The Dark Knight Rises is pinned up inside a multipurpose room at Parkgate library and, upon seeing it, 30 preteen boys erupt into excited cheers and chatter, no doubt causing patrons on the opposite side of the building to look up from their silent reading.
IGuy workshop facilitator Andrew Shopland, 26, stands next to the rousing poster and waits for quiet. His young charges are seated in a circle, each wearing a stick-on nametag. In one corner of the room is a pile of skateboards, kick scooters and backpacks. It's a sunny pro-D day and commanding the undivided attention of this group doesn't come easy.
"It sounds like you guys are familiar with this guy," Shopland says, gesturing towards his teaching aid. "What are some of the things we see in this poster that tell us about how a guy is supposed to be?" A dozen hands shoot up. "He's strong." "He's confident." "He's got a sixpack of abs." "I think he's 32 or something."
Shopland considers each response equally, repeating the words out loud so everyone can hear.
"Did you guys know that Batman didn't always look like this?" he asks, to some surprise. "When I was a kid, I watched reruns on Saturday mornings of the 1960s TV show Batman, and he looked like this."
He unfurls a second poster, this one depicting a much earlier incarnation of the Caped Crusader. It's animated, brightly coloured and reflects the campy nature of the Adam West series.
"What's changed?" Up go the hands. "He has a cuter belt." "He looks more pretty in that picture." "He's wearing way tighter tights."
By tracking the evolution of one superhero over the decades, Shopland illustrates how the message being sent to young boys, in terms of how they should look and act, has also evolved. He explains to the group that the Dark Knight image is digitally enhanced and, in preparation for his role, Christian Bale employed an arsenal of personal trainers and dieticians to get him into peak condition. For average guys, Shopland says, failing to meet unrealistic body image expectations can lead to disappointment and low self-esteem.
So far, Shopland is the sole facilitator of iGuy, a new empowerment workshop for boys aged nine to 12 designed to prepare them for their teen years. The program was created by Saleema Noon Sexual Health Educators and is based on iGirl, an empowerment workshop for girls that Noon, a former North Vancouver resident and Handsworth secondary alumnus, founded 15 years ago. The very first iGirl session took place in the summer of 1999 in West Vancouver and has been in high demand ever since.
"The No. 1 question I've had from parents over the years is, 'What about our boys?'" she says.
Noon isn't surprised at the momentum iGuy has gained since its launch in January. While teaching sexual health in B.C. schools, she has witnessed boys struggling with gender expectations the same way girls do. While girls are socialized to be passive, she says, boys learn to keep their emotions bottled up and solve problems using aggression.
"Over the years, I've really seen boys being limited by those gender stereotypes."
Noon says iGuy is the first program of its kind in B.C. and fills a gap in support for boys.
"The mission is really to help boys to feel comfortable in their own skin, to be able to cope with life in a healthy way, to provide them with the skills and the information they need to navigate their teen years, to help them understand that it's OK to ask for help and to rely on others for support, and to encourage them to be good role models."
IGuy is available as a two-hour or fivehour workshop, both of which incorporate frank discussion, role-play exercises and games. Because the program is still in its infancy, it is currently offered on an invitationonly basis through a school or parent advisory committee.
In both iGirl and iGuy, participants are asked to think of a "blue box" and a "pink box" as symbols of masculinity and femininity. Time and again, Noon hears the same adjectives
tossed into the blue box: tough, macho, stoic, cool, popular, strong.
"The idea is not to make boys less masculine or reject their masculinity," she explains of the program, "we just want to encourage them to be more themselves regardless of what that blue box tells them."
At Parkgate library, Shopland - dressed casually in shorts, high-top sneakers and a tank top - explains to the boys how hobbies, fashions and even emotions get lumped into the two boxes.
"Guys are supposed to get angry, but girls are allowed to be sad," he says. When asked if girls get angry and guys get sad, the boys respond with a collective "yes."
"We know that there's stuff in both boxes that we need. We need our emotions," Shopland says. Rather than do away with the two boxes, he encourages the room to pick and choose what they want from each one. "Figure out who you are and what you need and then rock that."
In North America, gender role expectations are placed on children at a young age and can influence the way kids feel about themselves and interact with the world, according to Devon Greyson, an instructor in the women's and gender studies program at Capilano University.
"The same baby might be called pretty if we think it's a girl, or strong if we think it's a boy, for example," Greyson says, explaining that there is a trend to gender babies earlier and earlier. Toy companies increasingly market separate lines to boys and girls and it's become a fad for expectant parents to hold a celebration after getting the results of a sexdetermination ultrasound, Greyson says.
"They might have a party to reveal, basically, the genitals of their unborn child, which doesn't really say anything about the baby-to-be's gender, but allows family and friends to start placing gender role expectation on what is essentially an unborn fetus."
It's not until a little bit later that kids begin to adopt their own understanding of gender.
"Experts tend to think that children typically start developing their internal sense of gender identity, which is a combination of their biology and their social environment, at around two to three years of age."
Growing up influenced by pre-determined definitions of what it means to be a boy or a girl can be a negative experience for some kids, Greyson says.
"Many children are what we might call gender creative, meaning that they identify or express their genders in ways that don't conform to that typical boy-girl dichotomy. .. Our gender role expectations can sometimes lead to a lack of affirmation for those gender-creative kids."
Moving into adolescence, she continues, these same stereotypes can limit what boys and girls feel like they can do in the world. For example, girls may believe they are naturally bad at math while boys may feel pressured to act aggressively. Greyson says boys also face an expectation to always want sex and to comply with "compulsory heterosexuality" - a term coined by feminist writer Adrienne Rich.
"Even in places like Vancouver that are fairly accepting of LGBT rights, we still see pressure on boys growing up to show their heterosexuality, often through sexual advances on girls."
In addition to tackling these gender stereotypes, the iGuy curriculum is designed to teach boys how to express their feelings, resolve conflict respectfully and have healthy relationships. The workshop also takes on an issue that didn't exist among previous generations of youth - Internet safety. Cyberbullying and sexting are part of the moderntechnology lexicon, a language all too familiar to today's youth. Meanwhile, the ease of surfing the net means children will likely encounter pornography at some point, whether deliberately or by accident.
"We don't want to be judgmental about it," Noon says. "We tell them when they're 18 they can decide whether they want to watch pornography and that's their choice as adults, but what we want them to know now is that it's not real and what they see in pornography doesn't reflect a typical healthy sexual relationship, and also what they see in pornography doesn't reflect a typical woman's body."
The online safety segment of the workshop also encourages the use of good judgment when texting or using mobile messaging applications like Snapchat.
"Just like we're teaching girls not to post naked pictures of themselves online, we need to teach boys not to pass them on," Noon says.
For the most part, preteen boys are already well aware of the issues up for discussion at iGuy. But there is a discrepancy between what children know and what they do - a reality that suggests old ideas are still deeply ingrained in our culture, Shopland says. For example, his workshop attendees know it's OK for boys to wear pink, and yet boys continue to be bullied for wearing pink. At the same time, the boys understand it's not acceptable to be homophobic, and yet the phrase "that's so gay" is still thrown around as a schoolyard insult.
To have an adult take on a big brother role, acknowledge these realities and allow boys to talk about them outside the typical school setting is something Shopland is excited about.
"I think people are ready to start having a conversation about an expanded gender role for guys now, where we've been having that conversation about girls and women for a bit longer."
Looking back on his own youth, Shopland says it would have been nice to hear some of the positive messages of selfacceptance he now imparts on others.
"I got there eventually," he says. "Middle school was not a lot of fun for me, but being given really explicit permission to figure out who I am and then celebrate, that would have been pretty amazing."
