{"id":36142,"date":"2013-05-09T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T15:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=36142"},"modified":"2013-05-08T07:12:18","modified_gmt":"2013-05-08T12:12:18","slug":"call-a-truce-in-the-war-on-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=36142","title":{"rendered":"Call A Truce In The War On Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past 20 years, society’s largely made it illegal to just\u00a0be a boy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0As documented by Christine Hoff-Summers in her classic\u00a0The War On Boys<\/em>, “making boys more like girls” became a bit of a crusade in the educational academy during the 1990s and 2000s. \u00a0Recess – with all its ritualized rough and tumble – was curtailed, supervised, sometimes abolished. \u00a0Via means social, pedagogical and chemical, “educators” tried their darnedest to get boys to sit down, shut up, and get verbal.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I don’t know who the woman is who wrote this piece<\/a>; 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Force isn’t necessarily violence. \u00a0And not all violence is bad.<\/p>\n

And we have raised a generation kids that don’t know the difference. \u00a0And it’s our fault.<\/p>\n

And by “our fault”, I mean “all you feminists who banned boyhood’s fault”. \u00a0Just so we’re clear on that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past 20 years, society’s largely made it illegal to just\u00a0be 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-men-and-women"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36142"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36228,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36142\/revisions\/36228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}