However, boys typically resist the voice of caution and reasonableness and are constrained to rebel against it. Boys leave their mothers to become men, and in the process of leaving, gather their resentment around them like armor, fashioning a shield against further cautionary tales and the intrusion of intimacy. Intimacy is dangerous, after all, because the nature of intimate conversation is the revelation of one's deepest, most tender, heartfelt secrets. Boys need mothers, but they also need to guard themselves against mothers, and they must eventually, decisively, sever the connection between the lactating breast and their adult status. Mothers, on the other hand, are too busy securing the environment, grounding their children, to play.
Boys can play because mothers caution, reprimand, investigate and demand to be informed of plans.
Mothers nag and boys resist and resent. Boys can play precisely because mothers nag. While mothers are vigilant boys play with other boys and sometimes with girls their own age. I, for one, am very sensitive to this play of words in the space in which grown men play. According to the poststucturalist theorists that have informed my own feminist critique, Michel Foucault and Chris Weedon, play is anything but playful, if as the conversation develops, the feminine voice which grounds and secures this space is socially educated into vigilant attendance on the rituals of masculine enjoyment.