A Guy Thing...

I have a son. He, along with my daughter, is the center of my life.

How much the center are they? Well, y'know how Lileks goes on and on about Gnat? Well, picture that, only for a total of 22 kid-years (32 if you count the stepson).

That's a lot of centering, no?

I'm not so worried about my daughter. She's 12, and she takes after me, especially in terms of the stubbornness of rthe Scando-Scottish heritage we visibly and temperamentally share. She's like a little pit-bull. She'll do fine in this world - especially because, while the world is a tough place for a girl, I doubt there's ever been a better time to be a woman on this planet in terms of things that really matter, things like liberty and economic options and being able to follow one's dream (shut up about partial-birth abortion, already).

It's my son I worry about the most. He turned 11 last week. Soon comes the hormonal jungle of the teenage years. I've been through them before - I have a stepson from my ex-wife's first marriage (Note to Montel Williams' producers: I should be available for a day around mid-month). And it's lousy time to be a boy.

This is not a whine. Yeah, it's a wierd time to be a male of any age, but if you basically agree that all of humankind is created equal, then there's really not much about women's equality that fazes you. I've worked for female bosses as well as male - and both genders have equal claim on boundless idiocy and stupendous genius.

But it's different for boys these days. It's kind of scary. It should scare all of us.

A while ago - sometime after I got out of high school, and before I started raising kids in 1990 - the educational-industrial complex decided that "boyish" behavior was a bad thing. You've heard the horror stories; huge portions of what used to be called "normal boyhood behavior" has been declared politically incorrect by a feminized Educational-Industrial Complex.

Christina Hoff Summers first gave voice to the backlash, with her classic "The War Against Boys", a book you need to find and read and act on, if you value the sanity of your male children.

In a Boston Glob editorial, Ms. Hoff Summers summed up the way the world is turning:

The young boys are casualties of a movement that scapegoats men and boys and seeks to protect women and girls from what Gloria Steinem calls the ``jockocracy.'' Such feminists as Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem believe that ours is a sexist society that wages an ``undeclared war against women'' (Susan Faludi's subtitle to ``Backlash''). Such feminists think most adult males are incorrigibly sexist and that boys must be retrained - the earlier the better.

Nan Stein, a director at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, refers to boys who chase girls in the playground and flip their skirts as ``perpetrators'' and ``gender terrorists.'' Sue Satell, a sex equity expert in Minnesota, justifies strong harassment policies for children as young as 5 because ``serial killers tell interviewers they started sexually harassing at age 10 and got away with it.''

While the boys need reeducation, the girls need all the help they can get to survive in the ``patriarchy.'' Consider the girls-only holiday ``Take Our Daughters to Work Day,'' an annual event organized and run by the Ms. Foundation.

Reacting to growing protests over the boys' exclusion, the Ms. people decided to initiate ``Son's Day,'' an annual holiday for boys. Among the suggested activities for ``Son's Day'' are:

Take your son to an event that focuses on ... ending men's violence against women. Call the Family Violence Prevention fund at 800 END-ABUSE for information.

Make sure your son is involved in preparing the family for the work and school week ahead. This means: helping lay out clothes for siblings [and] making lunches ...''

In short, this punitive little holiday was contrived by women who are convinced that what our male children need most is indoctrination.

And assuming a boy survives this treatment after seeing his natural internal tendencies - competition, contact, rough play - are being nearly criminalized (from his four-foot-tall perspective), what does he have to look forward to?

A society where men are neutered and infantilized, where fatherhood is denigrated, where the value of everything he is programmed to be is rejected by the people who, after his parents, he spends the most time with - his teachers, his school system, and the media from which he probably gets his impressions of the world outside his family.

Marshall Poe sums it up:

From kindergarten on, the education system rewards self-control, obedience, and concentration?qualities that, any teacher can tell you, are much more common among girls than boys, particularly at young ages. Boys fidget, fool around, fight, and worse. Thirty years ago teachers may have accommodated and managed this behavior, in part by devoting more attention to boys than to girls. But as girls have come to attract equal attention, as an inability to sit still has been medicalized, and as the options for curbing student misbehavior have been ever more curtailed, boys may have suffered. Boys make up three quarters of all children categorized as learning disabled today, and they are put in special education at a much higher rate (special education is often misused as a place to stick "problem kids," and children seldom switch from there to the college track). Shorter recess times, less physical education, and more time spent on rote learning (in order to meet testing standards) may have exacerbated the problems that boys tend to experience in the classroom. It is no wonder, then, that many boys disengage academically. Boys are also subject to a range of extrinsic factors that hinder their academic performance and pull them out of school at greater rates than girls. First among these is the labor market. Young men, with or without high school diplomas, earn more than young women, so they are more likely to see work as an alternative to school. Employment gives many men immediate monetary gratification along with relief from the drudgery of the classroom.

And it works in a vicious cycle; as boys make up a smaller and smaller percentage of college students, they'll become a smaller percentage of teachers (among other things) and the professors that create them. The school system will become more and more feminized, and boys will become more and more marginalized.

The result? Kim DuToit thinks American society is getting wussified. Terrence Moore of the Claremont Institute thinks it's because men don't act like guys in 1930's movies.

Me? I think it's insane that our society that knows - knows - that it's wrong to make a gay kid suppress his or her true personality, does exactly that for half of the population.

Posted by Mitch at February 13, 2004 05:00 AM