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It’s not a pretty picture. Philadelphia magazine offers a long detailed article about the state of today’s young men.
Many years ago an anti-drug ad campaign famously showed a picture of someone frying an egg. The tag line: Your brain on drugs.
You were supposed to conclude that on drugs, your brain was going to be fried and tasty.
Now, we see what happens to young men when their brains are fried in a therapy culture that actively promotes feminist gender bias.
It’s not a pretty picture.
Naturally, women are the first to complain. Having profited from a cultural revolution that diminished and demeaned men, young women are complaining that there are no men out there.
Sandy Hingston writes:
THE WOMEN ARE IRATE. The women are talking about men, young men, the men they’d like to date and marry, and are they ever pissed....
The women are a little bewildered. They’re good girls. They followed the script: did well in high school, got into college, worked hard there, got out, got jobs, started looking around for someone special to share life with, and …
These women followed the feminist script. They became what their feminist masters wanted them to become. They did not suspect that the feminist vision is a lie; it’s not about equalizing men and women; it’s about advancing women at the expense of men.
Feminism failed to understand that gender identity is developed “oppositionally.” Hingston explains it well and points out that women should feel complicit in dooming their own hopes:
The sad fact is, women may have doomed their own hopes by being so successful. Gender identity, sociologists say, is developed oppositionally. If boys see girls behaving in a certain way—working hard and excelling in school—they define masculinity in opposite terms: A real man doesn’t work hard at school or get good grades.
If girls are encouraged to be strong, tough, smart and in charge, boys will try to be weak and feeble and sensitive. They do not want to be like the girls.
In many American schools girls are encouraged, even exhorted to work hard and excel. Boys, however, are disparaged and demeaned, encouraged to sit down and shut up. After a while they discover that it is pointless to raise their hands. So they give up and become depressed.
I am happy to grant that these women are some of God’s most wondrous creations. After all, they are fully in touch with their feelings.
Yet, as they complain about the immaturity of young men they might ask themselves why they bow down to the female immaturity that is represented in the television series, Sex and the City.
Yes, the show was entertaining. But still, as I have mentioned before, it’s a show about forty-year-old teenagers.
First lesson, if women want men to act like men they should start by acting more like women.
I am not saying that women have to do so. They do not. They may freely choose to be completely self-sufficient, to the point where they merge in their persons both male and female roles.
If a woman makes this choice she has no business complaining that men are not man enough for her. She is simply living the consequences of her decisions.
Women who have followed the feminist script to perfection should realize that they have been disembarrassed of essential aspects of their womanhood.
If they are so self-sufficient, self-contained, independent, and autonomous… to the point where they do not need a man for anything but sex… they should not be surprised to discover that marriageable young men are only interested in sex.
If they have overcome the dreaded feminine mystique and categorically refuse to become homemakers, they should not complain if more and more young men graduate from college and move back in with one woman who really wants to take care of them: Mom.
Call it immature, if you like. It is immature. But still, for women to get angry and complain about a situation that they have been instrumental in creating is a bit too much.
In the past, Prof. Barry Schwartz explains, it was shameful to graduate from college and move back in with Mom. Yet, the therapy culture has taught people to overcome shame, to rebel against society’s expectations, to eschew responsibility, and to do their own thing.
And then there is the case of Connor. Connoor graduated from college and moved back home with his parents. He works part time as a blogger. Hingston asks: why doesn’t Connor does go out and get a job that would allow him to make a living, have a girlfriend, and move out of his parents’ house?
The answer: he refuses. He considers it beneath him. He has learned from the therapy culture to follow his bliss and his bliss is back in his childhood room, not in the hard, cold world of business.
When his father asks him what his plan is, he scoffs at the question. Plans are for the dinosaur generation. He has learned from the therapy culture that he should not do what he does not want to do. He says: “I wasn’t going to take something I didn’t want to do.”
It gets better. Hingston continues:
When Connor was still in school, sometimes he’d encounter friends of his parents who’d press their business cards on him: “They’d say, ‘I’m in insurance—call me when you get out of school.’” Connor threw the cards away. He says he’d rather wait tables for the rest of his life than work in sales. Besides, he has a buddy from college who’s made it in L.A., in films. The buddy’s success validates Connor’s approach to life: “You have to have faith in your intangible abilities.”
CONNOR'S A CLASSIC ALL-AMERICAN GUY, CIRCA 2012. He’s also a prime example of the attributes that experts say are crippling him and his peers. He hasn’t proven particularly successful, yet he’s absolutely sure he will be successful. He’s got more than enough self-esteem. And he’s living with his mom.
This is what happens when the educational establishment detaches self-esteem from actual achievement. You create a generation of young people who get trapped in their self-illusions.
Worse yet, many of these young men have simply been, almost literally, emasculated. One- third of young men experience erective dysfunction and 20% of young men are “sub-fertile,” meaning that they have “low sperm count and quality.”
How do the experts propose to solve the problem? They recommend that we, as a culture, find a new definition for manliness.
Would you be surprised to learn that the experts are befuddled by this question.
This is the best that Hingston can do: “[Leonard] Sax, meanwhile, offers a shorthand definition of masculinity that seems pretty bulletproof: Real men stand up for the weak and disempowered.”
Bulletproof?
It’s fatuous nonsense. Sax proposes care and compassion. Does he not know that care and compassion are not masculine values? Sax seems to think that real men are real liberals, their hearts brimming with empathy.
Doesn’t he know that real men compete, sometimes with real bullets? And that when real men compete in real arenas those who suffer from too much empathy lose out, because empathy is not a manly virtue.
How and Hingston have overlooked the virtues of competitive striving in the life’s arena because they live in a culture that has not only made manliness difficult to achieve. It has made it unthinkable.
7 comments:
Speaking of equality here is an interest discussion regarding Sandra Fluke.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/021820.html
P. D. James, "Shroud for a Nightingale":
"Dalgliesh thought that Sister Gearing was one of those women who, when alone with a man, consider it their duty to devote themselves entirely to his comfort and the flattering of his ego. This may arouse fury in other less dedicated women, but it is unreasonable to expect a man to object."
Thank you... I like P.D. James, and I love a good dose of humor...
There is a part of me that feels no sorrow for women in this case. They sat through elementary school, junior high school, high school and now college and saw the way young men were being treated. Did it not occur to them that eventually the men who could have been their mates were being systematically discriminated against? Did they not see the damage that the schools were doing to boys or were they just so self centered that it did not occur to them what the ramifications were to female dominated schools?
Did it not occur to them that most of the people being drugged were young boys" Did they not see teachers bringing sexual harassment charges agains't 5 and 6 year old boys? How blind does one have to be to know that what affects the well being of young men is eventually going to affect the well being of young women?
Did young women and girls actually think the were smarter than young boys? One creates their own bed and should not complain when things don't go their way.
Other than whining about what young women are not getting one might be interested in what they are going to do about it.
I do agree with you... in part because these women profited from the circumstances. The other part is that their parents seem to have bought into the program... without thinking about it... even when it worked to the detriment of their own sons.
Stuart,
The fact that many parents allow this to happens to their boys should not surprise you. A few years ago, I believe in England, they did an experiment with women and children. They wanted to see if there was a difference in treatment between girls and boys by women.
The babies were dressed in colors and styles typically denoting the sex of the baby. The sex of the baby was not told to the women involved. All they had was visual clues.
The supposed girl babies got more attention, were talked and played with more and treated better than the boys. I would suggest that if one did the same experiment here one would get the same result.
Another question, when one sees family pictures take a look at the placement of male verses female children. The same will hold true in many school pictures taken throughout a child's growth. There are a lot of visual clues that denote what this society really thinks of boys.
I must admit that I truly marvel at times when I see mothers who really know how to be mothers to young boys. Since I live in an area where we get large numbers of families vacationing I get to notice family interactions a lot.
Business is not for everyone. Why should one assume that business is the only way? Women became so successful at school and forced their way into higher positions of power since the 1960s precisely because they had been excluded from those roles, sat down together and WROTE OUT what they as a group had to do in order to change their position in society. Read some social history; they called these meetings "consciousness raising groups". You're right though that the boys have been slacking in school (much to the dismay of guys like me who enjoyed school), but maybe then writing is exactly what they need to do in order grow and find their place in the world as a group, just like women did almost three generations ago. They definitely need to do something as a group because every boss I've ever had has spoken directly to women and their needs as a result of the constant, intergenerational bullying women have done to make institutions respond to them specifically.
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