Over the past 20 years, society’s largely made it illegal to just be a boy.
For a while, it was an openly-held belief in educational-psychology circles that the niggling traits of typical boyhood – a penchant for rough play and exploratory violence, a disdain, at least through one developmental stage, for verbally-based social interaction (that’s what girls do) in favor of getting outside and mixing it up – were pathologies that needed to be cured, or at least harnessed. As documented by Christine Hoff-Summers in her classic The War On Boys, “making boys more like girls” became a bit of a crusade in the educational academy during the 1990s and 2000s. Recess – with all its ritualized rough and tumble – was curtailed, supervised, sometimes abolished. Via means social, pedagogical and chemical, “educators” tried their darnedest to get boys to sit down, shut up, and get verbal.
It’s led us to a generation of kids who’ve been medicated to a fine sheen, who remain in a state of suspended adolescence well into their thirties in many cases, and in the worst case who don’t know the limits of roughness and violence, since the rituals by which they used to learn how to process that testosterone – rough play, stylized roughhousing, the occasional fight that usually ended in friends staying friends who knew who not to mess with – have been scolded, punished and drugged out of existence.
I don’t know who the woman is who wrote this piece; she sounds like she could be any of a few thousand middle-aged moms in Edina alone, at least in the first couple of grafs.
So, I think that instead of teaching our kids NOT to be violent we need to teach them HOW and WHEN to be violent. We have so many stories of people standing around watching others getting assaulted or verbally attacked and we don’t know why. We have thousands of self-defense classes all over the country. We have anti-bullying programs that tell us to stop bullying but offer no concise steps telling us how. Honestly ask yourself, if you don’t know that you can physically defend yourself, would you really step in to verbally confront someone who is being physically and verbally threatening? I know I wouldn’t.
If we are to raise boys who are willing to step in when a girl is being attacked or fight back when a boy is being vicious, we are going to have to admit that we DO expect violence in some scenarios and teach them the fine lines to walk within. Why wait to learn self-defense as an adult? Why not let them learn it, as they are growing up, with the guidance of their parents? Maybe not all is violence is so bad after all.
Force isn’t necessarily violence. And not all violence is bad.
And we have raised a generation kids that don’t know the difference. And it’s our fault.
And by “our fault”, I mean “all you feminists who banned boyhood’s fault”. Just so we’re clear on that.
Ah yes, I love the pacifists. It reminds me of the old saying, “War never solved anything except slavery, fascism, genocide, oppression, and Communism.”
Violence has its place in the order of the world. It’s not the best solution, but sometimes its the only solution.
Nobody is waging war on boys – unlike the right wing culture war on women.
Schools have found that when they are safer places, including for boys, boys do better than under the hyper-masculinized pro-violence philosophy. Hypermasculinity is associated with patriarchal organizations – like some religious groups, as well as the mlitary, where that quality equates not only to violence and bullying, but also makes those organizations more prone to crimes of rape and molestation.
There is plenty of room for boys to be boys in school, without coercing them to be girls, under what the right wrongly categorizes as feminizing. You might want to rethink the meaning of feminine in an era where top gun women pilots fly combat missions and command entire air wings in our air force.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/10/female-fighter-pilot-breaks-gender-barriers/
Medicate, shame and indoctrinate the natural agressiveness out of a boy, and all the MMA classes in the world won’t help.
I know a few genuine badasses, and most of them never took a fighting lesson in their lives. In fact, the some of most fearless men I know are also the smallest. It’s true that some of these guys can go over the top at times, but in my experience, it’s easier to teach self control than it is to re-instill an agressiveness that isn’t there.
DG; stfu
Allow me to correct Mongrel Cur’s moronic babbling:
“You might want to rethink the meaning of feminine in an era where women allow a man to induce them to birth their babies into a toilet, fish them out and stab them in the neck with a pair of scissors.”
True.
Hey Dog! Go back into your kennel! You have been snorting coke again with your tired meme about the right wing war on women! You subservient liberat females like to be used as sex toys, political pawns and window dressing by your liberat boy friends and take 15 to 20% less pay to do it! Rock on, idiot!
“unlike the right wing culture war on women.”
“You might want to rethink the meaning of feminine in an era where top gun women pilots fly combat missions and command entire air wings in our air force.”
I’m just going to let those two completely contradictory statements sit there for awhile, hoping they ferment into a potent alcoholic beverage I can drink in the pursuit of dulling that crazy amount of stupidity.
The woman in the article had a point. The PiPress reported Thursday that a gang of 10 “yutes” attacked a woman at a Payne Avenue gas station, dragging her across the lot and beating her.
If I had been filling up with gas and noticed the “altercation,” what would be my legal obligation? Easy: to run away. Because that’s the law in Minnesota. The woman is not allowed to stand her ground to defend herself (Governor Dayton vetoed that bill) and I’m not allowed to do it for her.
Besides, if I were to intervene in a 10-on-1 beat-down, I’d want to even the odds a bit for my own protection but just imagine if a Downtrodden Minority Yute had chipped a nail because a middle-aged White man had interfered with his vibrant display of diverse culture . . . Jesse Jackson would already be here leading marches seeking burning at the stake.
“Hypermasculinity”? Wow. Dog Gone can’t make a comment here these days without making it clear she’s ten flavors of stupid.
Dog Gone has been on this “war on women” kick for a while now. I don’t get it, what’s left? There are more women than men in college, women now serve on the front lines in combat, there are women at Augusta Golf club, women practically run the entire government, at least at the consumer level (how many men work the counter at the DMV, for example?) and certainly they are over-represented in every HR and Diversity department of every private employer.
I know that as a White Man, I’m supposed to be Oppressing women but I’m finding opportunities harder to come by every day. Dog, can you give me some pointers? Areas where Right Wingers are oppressing women that perhaps I missed?