I opined on this before, and I still get a lot of hits from google where mothers are either searching for ways to “feminize their girls” or for “boys to be less feminine”. I can understand their disappointment when their search takes them to an article about how boys are slowly being cultivated into the modern feminist vision of gender neutrality. A million years of homo sapiens sapiens evolution be damned. Boys will not be boys any longer. After all, boys have been known to have a long history of roughhousing in school, bullying, teasing girls, getting dirty, and playing games deemed inappropriate for today’s modern rights-disabled children. Games like “tag”, or touch football, or hand ball, or snow ball fights have all been replaced by games which don’t involve physical contact of any kind. We’ve ensured that the days of “playing doctor” are long gone, and instead children can be suspended from school for “sexual harassment”. Witness the insanity of our modern gender neutral social construct in all it’s glory when my son was suspended from school last month when he kissed another girl on the lips. I mean, he is all of six years of age, and should understand the complex social dynamics which exist between males and females, and respect the independence of their physical air space.
But the battle against insanity is not being lost without a fight. MacLeans Magazine has an interesting article about “How to fix boys”, and emancipate them from the joyless and uncreative worlds of our post-independent-thought era. The outcry about girls being held back by an inherently misogynistic school system has ceased, and there is a new cry going up to help little boys:
Hence, the new buzz: there’s a crisis among boys. Like many proponents of this viewpoint, Leonard Sax argues that boys are less resilient and more prone to school failure than ever before. Sax, a family physician and research psychologist in Maryland, believes a combination of social and biological factors has created a toxic environment for boys. The result, he argues in Boys Adrift, is a generation of slackers and underachievers, so lacking in motivation that they barely notice, much less care about, their own failure to launch. Sax, who has been visiting schools in Ontario this week to speak to parents and faculty about gender differences in learning, spoke to Maclean’s about the trouble with boys.
The problems with our school system are rooted in a fallacious belief that children are gender neutral before puberty, and thus the school system believes it is able to foster an institution which treats all children as though they are behaviourally equal. The evidence is seen throughout kindergartens all over North America. The boys typically underperform early in life because they are unable to contain their usual boisterous and exuberant selves, leading teachers and aides to point to girls as the role models of behaviour. This behaviour is strictly enforced and “corrected” by reinforcing discipline, until the boy capitulates to an unnatural performance.
Psychologists now believe that letting boys play with guns and swords, contrary to popular modernist belief, may actually provide immense benefits to children. This is because the removal of the swords and guns are based on a fallacious belief that they lead to an acceptable view of violence to resolve problems, without evidence to back up these assertions. This leads to schools which endorse things which girls naturally enjoy playing, while banning play which boys find entertaining, and stifling their creativity. Hockey, football, tag, climbing, and wrestling are all viewed as inappropriate for schools, and yet it may prove that these are essential parts of the human experience we are denying to males. The result is an increasingly apathetic, increasingly neutered form of male which is more prone to failure, more prone to pornography, and more reticent to engage in traditional male prowess than ever before. This is because the very essence of man is being denied to males at the youngest ages, and cultivated while they are growing up. Instead of respecting women, many men grow up with a fear of disapproval for acting like a man, meaning we have a generation which is more inept at gender roles which men typically filled than ever before. Just ask the newest generation of young men to name a set of tools, fix something around the house, or do some manual labour. They would be far more likely to be proficient with a computer, have a secret pornographic collection, and harbour an animosity for traditional male roles in favour of that which has been cultivated by society.
Male-dominated society, indeed.
[Cross-posted to Kats 'n Dawgs]
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