The War Against Boys | Hacker News Reader

The War Against Boys

theatlantic.com

72 pointsvilda28 comments

I think this is still relevant. Society places a lot of pressure on boys to man up and win, and I think unfairly pushes males to hide their feelings.

Conversely, there's also the idea floated around that people who indulge in traditionally masculine things are dangerous idiots.

Dance or lift or do both: don't let anyone else decide what you can and can't do.

I do think men (at least in my generation; I'm 42) are expected to bury their emotions. Emotions are viewed as weakness. I think this is dangerous, and I've witnessed men such as my dad suffer through their problems in silence. It might be viewed as stoic, but I don't think it is healthy for the mind or a way to find happiness.

I'm there with you at 35, sir. My father too suffered through his emotions from his time in Vietnam, having to keep it all down. My girlfriend tells me the one differing factor between me and all of the other men she's dated is that I express my emotions, and I'm not afraid to talk about them. However she's warned me not to let that show around her father because he will react critically. It's healthy to open up and express emotions. It's a shame we're just now, with this youngest generation, beginning to truly realize that.

(The Atlantic May 2000 Issue)

Yes the reference to "the shooting at Columbine High last spring" confused me, then I noticed the date.

I came here to see whether there was an explanation of why it was being reposted. Maybe there are some predictions in it that have come true?

I was about to ask why an article from 16 years ago is being posted to the front page when there surely has been a newer and more academic analysis of the material available at some point within that decade and a half. When I say academic, I mean it in the sense of a "just the facts, ma'am" approach instead of one with a commentary attached, regardless of the alignment of the commentary.

I think that's because it's currently trending (in the "Most Popular" section) on The Atlantic website. I'm not sure why.

Meta:

Perhaps a hint could be added on HN's submission page about adding the year of publication in parentheses for older articles? That seems to be the custom.

I think this should be made explicit for articles that are not recent.

Agree - I read this and I thought, I have read this before.

It should; my fault. There's no way how to update it unless it gets moderator's attention.

I think it's interesting context to the continued rise of feminism today.

Flagged and dead, though. Doesn't fit the narrative.

I think it's telling that the article opens with girl empowerment as a segue into boys being kept down.

This isn't zero sum, people.

It is not and it should not be. Splitting co-ed classes into single-sex classes solves the issue. Same goes for teachers being mostly female - just hire male teachers for boy classes.

EDIT: solves the issue of same model of class education being forced onto both girls and boys.

Where did you hear this from?

They may have been referring to something like this:

http://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ednext20064_68....

The article doesn't open with "girl empowerment", it is contrasting two recent (at the time) events involving females and males to segue into the general spirit of how the author thinks males and females were perceived in society as of 2000, which is when the article was written.

Therefore, interpreting it as zero sum is simplistic and probably incorrect.

An interesting follow up, women continue to gain on men in college enrollment rates as of 2014: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/06/womens-colle...

What surprises me isn't that women improved, it's that black/white/asian men barely did.

[but even still, some of those numbers were abysmal...]

Why was this post flagged and deleted?

Because enough people didn't like it/are threatened by evidence going against the narrative.

Perhaps because the community felt it did not produce an intellectually interesting discussion and that the odds of it producing one were significantly lower than the odds of it producing an unproductive one.

+ As a news item: While the topic may be intellectually interesting, the Hacker News community probably doesn't bring much specific informed expertise to the topic and no person's experience is going to stand out as more relevant to the point that anyone changes their opinions...Peter Norvig's opinion is no more informed than Marrissa Meyer's.

+ As a topic inspiring discussion: much of the discussion wound up being meta-discussion about Hacker News, e.g. this thread. As this comment demonstrates, that is a topic that leads to rather dull discussions.

May of 2000. Not that anything has changed in American classrooms since then.

No, something has changed, there was this great campaign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_are_stupid,_throw_rocks_a...) in 2003.

Update: Oh, and because internet: /s

This seems like an issue that is easily susceptible to Simpsons paradox.

What happens if you also split by race or socioeconomic class?

Also, I think part of the issue is that it's difficult to measure what makes a successful high school (and there is no good proxy on a short feedback loop). Is it college admissions? Minimizing suicides (that seems important...)? Etc

It is good to see a well researched article. However, the article gets something fundamentally wrong that I strongly disagree with. The idea of equality (of outcome) is a misnomer vs equal opportunity. 10 people don't win a race at the same time. I deeply believe that boys develop language skills slower than girls, and conversely, boys embrace science more readily than girls, unless there is extreme interference (like today).

Where we get it wrong is our extreme prejudice based on gender and a belief in equal outcomes. The last few years in Australia have been particularly brutal. Our government heavily promoted a commercial with a 10 year old boy slamming a door as domestic violence, followed by "that's a boy thing". This was a calculated attack to demoralise half of Australia's population, with no intent of stopping domestic violence. In fact, I challenge anyone to look at gender generalisations in any media in Australia (Google male/female with year by year timeframes as an example), or even listen to Australia's own minister for Sex Discrimination who brazenly supports highly sexist statements in interviews when she is on TV. She's a lawyer and lawyers consider their words carefully - it speaks volumes of how bad we are that almost no one has condemned any of this. The prejudice is unprecedented in at least 50 years. Nothing comes close to being so aggressive as media and governments are today with respect to sexism.

I promised I would build evidence about sexism and how we are far more sexist than I've ever seen. So far, I've researched what I can of 1970 and part of 1971. I found one article calling for boys to deliver newspapers, that was all I recall that was obviously sexist (from memory). I took many photos of adverts, articles, especially education, sports, advertising and politics. I will publish my findings, but as I expect to be attacked relentlessly and viciously (aka Matt Taylor), I intend to be robust in my evidence and (temporarily) remain anonymous in doing so. I've also been writing articles to support photo evidence and to cite blatant lies in this decades long gender war.

I am glad to see articles like this being discussed, however, as the sexism has recently become far more aggressive and far more prevalent and directed at younger children (code.org and Science Week in Australia as two examples), I have little faith that most people are listening and/or care. When the topic posted hits most mainstream papers, I know the gender war is stopped (at least for a time).

If you are a decent human being, I emplore you to take a hard stance against feminism or any gender based movement.

Thank you to the poster of this article and to the author.

Shouldn't this have a (2000)?

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