The Boys Are Not All Right
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Worse, it's no longer OK to "be a man". You can posture all you want about "toxic masculinity" but physical aggression and ambition are intrinsic parts of the masculine psyche. We need to stop pretending that a man is just a woman with a penis and some cultural influences, and find healthy ways to express these traits.
> Many feel that the very qualities that used to define them — their strength, aggression and competitiveness — are no longer wanted or needed…
Makes the point but is subtle enough to avoid using hyperbole.
I didn't say that "many feel that" those qualities are no longer wanted or needed, I said that in modern 'western' civilisation they are explicitly disparaged.
And I wasn't saying that those qualities "used to define [males]", I was saying that they are inherent qualities of a male human, and that trying to redefine the social interpretation of masculinity is not going to change that.
> I said that in modern 'western' civilisation they are explicitly disparaged.
In parts, sure. In other parts. Not at all.
Anyone who feels that disparagement of traditionally (or genetically) masculine qualities is a universal in the west spends too much time in the wrong filter bubbles. Go watch some sports ball.
Please understand that I don't think it's a bad point either. I'm not disagreeing with the point. I'm saying your can have you point and make it more charitably, carefully and accurately.
I don't support these men who turn on their own biology, tearing down the buttresses of the masculine identity under the pretense that "it's too hard/confusing/challenging/whatever to be a man."
Nah. Sack up, get your life straight, take your licks, stand tall, and keep moving. Master your emotions and be aware of the interpersonal dynamics that impact you. Strengthen yourself in every sense of the word, minimize your use of porn and video games, and build a useful set of skills. Stay humble and let your work talk for you. I could write a list a mile long, and I think most guys can do the same. We have history books full of great men to study and emulate.
Some men are being co-opted to do the insidious dirty work of the anti-masculine feminism of our modern era, falling prey to doublespeak ("feminism" means "equality"), sexual manipulation, and the empty claim that something is wrong with being a man.
> toxic masculinity
There's nothing toxic about masculinity. Full stop.
I agree. the problem is how young boys direct those masculin traits. while former generations had a male rolemodel and ways to channel their masculin traits, i see those channeling effects fade. single parents, adhd and drugged kids, helicopter parents. Its like there is no easy way for a young child to explore and focus their personal traits. I see Men's sheds [0] as a reemergence of those channeling effects, and that is definitly a good thing. Their slogan is "Men don't talk face to face, they talk shoulder to shoulder", what i see as a direct opposite of the (what you call) anti-masculine feminist way of "talk about your feelings"
On the contrary, those like the author who argue that some kinds of masculinity are "toxic" are the ones attempting to impose such restraints upon men.
No, but there’s a whole lot toxic about toxic masculinity. There’s also nothing intrinsic about it: you can have an abundance of testosterone without having to be violent, emotionless, or sexually agressive. The issue is a social one, and the roided-out warrior/womanizer archetype is long overdue for retirement.
By the way, I am specifically responding to the argument concerning toxic masculinity. There’s nothing wrong with “being a man”, with providing for your family, with being responsible and reliable and strong. But that’s a separate current of masculinity, and one which would in fact be strengthened by the elimination of its toxic counterpart. (And even then, it’s not a kind of masculinity that every man is capable of acting out.)
Until you define this seemingly insidious term, there cannot be a substantive conversation about it.
I'm a man, and I know many other people who are men (I have male friends even), and yet I've never decided my identity is tied up in aggression or violence. Nor have I felt I am owed women (or I guess men assuming equivalent personality issues in gay men).
Aggression is highly linked to testosterone. Saying aggression is part of the masculine psyche is not some spurious claim, it is basic fact. And of course you left out "ambition".
> Seriously, w. t. f.
> my identity is [not] tied up in aggression
Huh. Maybe a bit of self-reflection might be called for?
(If it's not clear, your reactions sounds quite aggressive to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Anyway, aggression is not a bad thing per-se. In fact, most of what we call modern society was built upon channeling and harnessing that energy as ambition and in competitive endeavors.
> Nor have I felt I am owed women
Huh? Where did that come from?
The US murder rate hasn't increased significantly over the last twenty years, in fact, it's decreased.
We should be concerned with school shooters, of course, but taking them as a chance to generalize about most boys or even a small percentage of boys seems incorrect.
Oddly enough, Malcolm Gladwell has some trenchant comments on the dynamics behind school shootings and the role media and culture play in this.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-...
> but taking them as a chance to generalize about most boys or even a small percentage of boys seems incorrect.
This points was made in the article. The author points that that boys committing mass killing is extremely uncommon. That most are okay. That nearly all will turn out fine.
That doesn't seem to me to be the point.
> We should be concerned with school shooters, of course
That (it seems to me) is the author's point. That all of the mass killings are committed by men. And since we are concerned with school shootings, masculinity in the context of modernity is one topic worth discussing.
Yes, it's only one topic amongst many. This article isn't about those topics. It's about one of the many topics. We can discuss how the world is getting better all the time (a statement I agree with), in some other article.
Should that honestly surprise us? Most killings are done by men. This has been true since time immemorial, going back to the time when we first stepped out of Africa.
1. Male underachievement and lack of identity is happening elsewhere. Certainly in Canada. 2. Mass shootings are not happening everywhere
I think there is a much simpler explantion for male mass shooters: men commit vastly more crime. America has a cultural tendency for mass shooting crime, so it shouldn't be surprising men dominate that crime like they do the rest.
Maybe fixing male identity would do it, but that's far from a given, and given international experience it doesn't seem to be the direct cause. (Men committed most crime even when they were confident in their identity)
The more likely cause is the legal structure around gun ownership in the United States.
And what are your qualifications on the topic? What do you actually know about the laws starting at the founding and hitting the popular milestones of 1934, 1968, 1986, 1994, 2008, and 2010?
If someone doesn’t know why those years are significant but still has strong opinions on the topic... well, it’s just that the USA has been having this “conversation” for 200 years and these people are just new to it, being unaware of the facts is a bad position to start from.
See also reddit.com/r/iamverysmart
(a) the US has a 10x higher gun homicide rate and ~5x higher homicide rate than other comparable countries
(b) the big difference between the US and these countries is vastly higher gun ownership in the US
What could the relationship be between guns and deaths from guns?
Nope, too hard.
We have 10,000 homicdes with firearms in a country of 340,000,000 people and 400,000,000+ guns. More than 1/2 those homicides on minorities in cities that have stronger gun control. We have a drug problem not a gun problem. Remind me where drugs are legal, because if the argument that banning something makes it go away, drugs must be legal somewhere right?
No. It is a trivially verifiable fact. Which you don't deny, so why is it "laughable". Is 3+4 = 7 also "laughable"?
> Of course we do, we have more guns. This is ENTIRELY to be expected.
Again, you seem to be violently agreeing with me: more guns → more deaths.
> We have a drug problem not a gun problem.
That's an interesting non-sequitur, especially considering your statements above "of course we do [have more homicides], we have more guns". Guns and homicides are casually and statistically related.
> banning something makes it go away
So few words, so many mistakes:
- most of these countries do not "ban" guns. They just highly regulate them.
- no-one is trying to make guns "go away" or ban them entirely
- not all things are the same. Drugs are not the same as guns
- Australia, for example, changed their gun policy to be much more highly regulated and homicides dropped and mass shootings (previously ~1/year) disappeared
https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from...
Edit: Also, the president of Crime Prevention Research Center is John Lott, who's a known gun rights advocate. Your source does not seem to be very impartial.
Edit: with regards to the US being the market leader, politifact rated a similar comment by Obama mostly false.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/...
And they went on to say that a lot of the other countries that ranked highly were small countries that had a single attack. Statistics don't work well in that regime.
And of course, here's what politifact themselves commented later:
"June 22, 2015: We heard from several of you regarding Obama's use of the word "frequency," and that frequency could refer to the incidents of mass shootings, not deaths as we examined. Looking at Obama's claim by incident, the United States has a higher rate of incidents than Finland, Norway and Switzerland. We agree that there is no preferred comparison and each is valid, and we've changed some language in this article to reflect that. ... "
Would it be more reasonable to compare individual US states to individual European countries? If so, are we going to throw out outliers like Berveik and the Sandy Hook shooting? Because with that philosophy pretty soon there aren't any mass shootings anywhere.
Fact is: the us has 10x the gun deaths and 4-6x the homicides compared to other modern industrialized democracies.
Regardless of your attempts at spin.
You may have some valid points regarding gun deaths and homicide rates, but that's not what this discussion was about.
According to most other stats, the US has more "school shootings" than most of the rest of the world combined, see for example https://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-...
Also, the gun homicide rate is around 10x that of other rich industrial nations. If you think that there's a substitution effect you're right: if all homicides regardless of weapon are taken into account the ratio drops to around 4-5x.
If you'd like, we could compare European Nations to individual US states. But then if you get to discount Breveik in Norway, Connecticut gets to discount Sandy Hook.
> The more likely cause is the legal structure around gun ownership in the United States.
Gun ownership may be an enabler in mass shootings, but I don't believe it's the cause. Merely having a gun doesn't automatically make you a mass murderer. There are other underlying issues there. Not that that means the U.S. shouldn't do something about the legal structure around gun ownership. It's probably going to be much much harder to actually address the underlying cause.
Sorry, that’s a fallacy I can’t get behind.
Obviously people don't go on sprees merely because they have a weapon. But they need gun access in order to commit a mass shooting.
I do agree there might well be some additional cause. I think if you flooded Canada with guns you would see more mass shootings, but perhaps not as much. The US does have an overall higher crime rate, after all. And mass shootings do occur elsewhere, though the US is consistently high up per capita.
There's no easy fix. It's the result of a combination of economics, culture, power structures, and parental disinterest in the lives of their young adults.
Hints for any struggling young men reading this: starting strength and whole foods (not the store). Get fit and life gets better. Rebel against conformity by becoming the best human you can be.
In the whole of human history, every thriving culture had a dedicated male right of passage where a boy becomes a man... every culture except one... ours.
While not mainstream, a few newer practices in the vein of cultural biohacking exist as nascent replacements for right-of-passage ceremonies. The ones I've come across are somewhat underground or at least offline. They're not a secret, they're just currently weird in the same way Steve Jobs using meditation for productivity was unorthodox a few decades ago.
While it's easy to downplay the role of right-of-passage ceremonies as archaic, their existence served a necessary function. It's where a boy gained his confidence and understanding in his role in the community. A time where he stood up as a man to face his peers and elders. An expression at the core of human experience: claiming individual identity within a group.
The need for these ceremonies has not gone away. We just now see the aftermath of what happens when our culture no longer serves the needs of the individual, opting instead to serve the crowd. With men causing most of the newsworthy problems these days, perhaps the culture is not optimal for adapting biologically and socially male tendencies into our present reality.
I've had a chance to attend a few different right-of-passage ceremonies. It's hard to explain how powerful an intentionally crafted ceremony can be in transforming someone until you've seen it first hand. It's nearly impossible to describe.
The only reason I didn't become a school shooter is because I literally did not know how to get a gun. I didn't live in a community where there was any kind of gun culture. That's all. If I would have had access to a gun I would have tried to kill them. Because they were, to any point of rationality, on a direct course to killing me. I felt like it was me or them.
I am the school shooter poster child for gun control. Because I couldn't get a gun, I survived my ordeal and became a productive member of society. We need common sense gun control.
you got issues, mate. maybe talk to someone?
> We need common sense gun control.
like what? anything short of repealing the 2A makes no sense to me frankly. Perhaps it's time to just repeal it and possibly confiscate guns across the board.
Isn't it good that you didn't have access to guns? So why not just repeal the 2A?
Teaching gun culture and demanding gun safes (like it's done around here) would probably be a safer and more efficient route.
That can be done and the 2A can also be repealed (gun ownership doesnt need to be a "right"). Why not do both?
If it wasn't a right then it would suddenly be worthless in many districts.
Here's some middle ground:
Mandatory training. Around here it is provided by hunters organizations, often at cost price.
Background checks by police + recommendation by hunter organization or the equivalent of NRA.
I'm sure what's left of the government will act in the best interest of the entire country.
And surely all the guns will just cease to exist after our right to legally bear them is repealed. Gangsters, teenage boys, drug dealers, they will all happily turn in their guns and promise not to get any more.
Please, talk to someone (like a consuelor or a therapist) and work it out.
Bullies do exist. Sometimes, they teach you something, and sometimes they're just bullies. (I'm not excusing their behavior).
This is such an odd statement. The time is past, the actions have occurred; they cannot be redone. All that remains are your memories and emotions, which can be changed.
Everyone is different and no two people handle a situation in the same way.
Its too bad that you were unable to get good advice and/or consolation at the time. But maybe, with some counseling, or discussion with friends, you can revisit this bad experience and others and change how you feel about them and yourself.
Get ready for a civil war then, because the US country side will not let the cities get their guns.
Some even seems to take pride in how they can't even talk reasonably to their relatives once a year.
People notice this and might not be very keen on cooperating with people who despise them.
Also maybe they've read history and knows what happens to unpopular unarmed people.
I get it though. My folks are from a village in India. We sometimes get shit on by city folks too. Some country folks like guns. But its not a "right".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_Unit...
If its not a right, then the government can pass much stronger gun laws, including confiscations, etc. But still allows good citizens to own guns for hunting and stuff. Maybe even limit the number of guns per person, control the type of gun, etc. Just give enough so that country folks are happy with simple hunting rifles and cant do much damage.
The semantics are important because it illuminates the philosophy of rights and the Constitution, and perhaps that illumination may help you to understand how many people see it differently.
Right now they cannot because the constitution doesn't allow it. If you repeal 2A, then they (Congress) will be able to do much more about guns.
The Constitution is written from the opposite direction, that all power lies in the people and the Constitution is the mechanism by which we grant limited authority to the government. In fact, this was a big part of the debate around passing the Bill of Rights in the first place, that it would confuse this issue. Repealing the 1st Amendment would not remove our right to free speech. It would simply remove the codification of that right and we would revert to natural law which still would include free speech. In order for the government to infringe on our natural right to free speech we the people would have to pass an amendment explicitly granting the government the authority to do so. The same of course applies to the 2A.
This is essentially the philosophy of the founders and the limited government crowd you're going to be arguing against if you want to regulate guns.
I'm hoping that you'll see that this isn't just a semantic difference in the mechanism by which you might accomplish gun restrictions, but a deeper difference in the belief system around the philosophy of law. I'm not trying to change your mind about the 2A here, but to help you relate to the small government crowd with the way you talk about the law. You're not trying to revert a power granted to us by the government, you're trying to subvert natural law.
We have given up our natural right to kill another person. I am suggesting we should give up our natrual right to bear arms.
The idea with natural rights has always been that we have unlimited rights (and actually enumerating them can be problematic) but we give some up to live in a society where we can pursue life liberty and happiness.
I am saying Americans via their representatives should give up their right to bear arms, remove it from being enumerated, and then allow strong legislation that outlaws weapons just like we have done with murder. If an amendment is needed then so be it "Congress HAS the right to strictly control guns in order to protect life".
Does that make sense?
Yes, they are.
> The founders believed rights were natural.
They may have had a moral belief that certain rights were natural, and that may have been the basis for them incorporating the rights into the Constitution, but moral beliefs are not the same thing as material facts.
"We the people of the United States... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America"
All powers, including the power to establish the Constitution in the first place, are derived from the people.
Section 8 explicitly lays out which powers we the people are granting to the government: borrow money, regulate commerce with foreign nations, establish a post office, etc.
If powers are not explicitly granted to the government, it doesn't have them.
A little nitpicking: in US it is actually a right.
It might seem weird for the rest of us but then again in their defense they never had a Srebrenica, an Auswich, a Rwanda in the last century so I guess it can be seen as an insurance:
They're paying a few lives every year to protect against genocides.
(And to be perfectly clear: I don't want that system here where I live, I just try to understand their situation.)
I see what you are getting at. But honestly, if the gov wants to do a genocide, they have tanks and bombers to do it. No AR15 will help against that anyway.
To control a population you need boots on the ground.
Unfortunately, many in the country seem to feel that America is White and Christian, and that’s just not a viewpoint that can be easily reconciled with more cosmopolitan city folks.
you are right. Maybe I should have mentioned. My intention was not to single out anyone but to talk to the people who actually attend HN.
No, the school/community he was at had issues. They didn't take bullying seriously, did nothing to prevent it and did nothing to punish it when it went too far.
It's the same here in Norway, a couple of kids committed suicide because of bullying, that got a lot of media coverage, but the situation doesn't seem to have changed. Politicians are still arguing about "what to do with bullies" and how to force them to change schools.
... And since Norway is unaccustomed to violence, I thought for long for myself that nothing's going to change until some bullied kid decides to take other's lives instead of his/her own.
but that definitely has left some psychological issues in him/her and so its definitely worth talking to someone, a professional, about this. People with suicidal / homicidal tendencies should definitely seek out help.
You don’t trust yourself and can not trust others. I wish this was uncommon, but it’s not.
I guess I wonder what you think two weeks of formal firearm training in academy does to police to grant them magical self control?
I don't have any problem with the idea that folks don't need semi automatic assault rifles. But that is mostly not the framing I am hearing when gun control is mentioned and it appalls me to hear the argument you are making that someone victimized like you were should simply be deprived of a means to fight back and that is something good.
I am incredibly uncomfortable with the argument you are making. My dad was career military and I grew up with guns in the house. Having guns does not cause people to go postal. We need to stop being okay with a culture that routinely gives people a reason to go postal.
That doesn't happen overnight because of a single ugly incident. It is the outgrowth of years of things going wrong. And we should not be okay with that and taking the position that bullying is fine as long as the victim can't get an assault rifle.
why not start with eliminating the means of going "postal"? Why even have a "right" to AR15s or any guns at all.
One of the problems with the focus on gun control is that the shooters were typically bullied. So when you say:
You don't try to preach civilisation to your attacker, you block the person attacking you first,
You are very selectively deciding who the victim is here and you are also being a hypocrite. Your approach is actually very in line with that of the people who go postal because they have concluded there is no peaceful answer and they just need to pit a stop to their bullies.
I see this as incredibly problematic and as turning a blind eye to the real problem. I have every reason to believe that the focus on gun control actually undermines the pursuit of a real remedy. Because it says what was done to the shooter that made them go postal is fine. In fact, it tends to become a justification after the fact for the bullying because the media and the world at large talk about it like it is just this one mentally unstable guy who behaved really badly.
I get attacked for wanting to talk about the root cause here. I get decried as being a sympathizer with the shooter.
So when we focus on gun control is The Answer, we don't stop and question that narrative. In fact, we validate it.
In the far east, when governments forbade peasants from owning weapons, the invented martial arts to turn their hands, feet and farm implements into deadly force. If you don't remedy the root cause, the bullied kids who want revenge will just need to get more creative. This can be worse.
One of the reasons it can be worse: the handling of these cases sends a message to all the other bullied misfits that after society has spent years failing to protect you from torture, we are going to make you out to be the bad guy and send you to prison. So it just spreads the idea that you are fucked anyway and no one will ever care about your side of things and there is no hope for you, so you might as well take out as many as you can as the only message you can send the world that bullying the misfits is not okay and if you choose to be a bully you better watch your back.
The focus on gun control here is a focus on the wrong thing. It is a position of the beatings shall continue until morale improves.
I have already said I am not for letting people have assault weapons. But both replies to my comment ignored that fact to argue with me. Most of the discussion I am seeing about gun control is de facto going a lot further than addressing assault weapons. I am seeing zero discussion about "What the hell went wrong in this kid's life that it got to this point?" The president and media are both characterizing him as a disturbed nutcase.
I raised two difficult children. One has most of the personality traits of your typical serial killer. The other has a violent temper. Neither has assaulted anyone, in part because I pulled them out of a horrifying school system full of bullies and asshole teachers and administrators who did not care and I homeschooled. Watching my son come home from school in tears every day while the system did nothing to help was not acceptable to me.
So I have firsthand experience with how you prevent an outcome like this. And it starts by expecting civilized treatment of the difficult kids.
My oldest was having fantasies of driving a tank through the school when I pulled him out, a thing I only learned years later. His father had the keys to a military motor pool full of Bradley fighting vehicles. I am sure that for an angry adolescent, that would have been close enough to a tank to satisfy him.
To me, there is nothing hypothetical about what I am saying. We rise up as a nation and decide the bullying must stop or we continue to see variations on these incidents. If you take the guns and don't stop the torture of the misfit kids, then all you have done is change the mechanism by which they go postal and the conversation becomes "how do we stop the bombs/tanks/whatever?"
My example was intended to illustrate that discussion can only come when active, physical violence ceases.
And I am telling you the active physical violence precedes these incidents and I want that to stop. Characterizing the shooting as the entirety of the violence is part of the problem.
That's not what I said or even implied. Of course we need to foster an environment that prevents bullying in the first place too. Doesn't mean we don't need common sense gun control like every other democracy has done that doesn't have the sort of problems with gun violence we have.
Furthermore, this constant barrage of specious anecdata of "I grew up with guns and there were no problems" flies in the face of what we know about households with guns statistically. You're far, far, far more likely to be killed with your own gun than to defend yourself lethally with it.
To quote Archie Bunker: "Would you be happier if they were pushed out of windows?"
Murder predated the existence of guns. Locking up all guns won't make murder stop.
At what point do we address the roots of such problems?
"For every man chopping at the roots of evil, there are a thousand chopping at the branches."
Statistics don't support what you're saying:
https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from...
nickbauman says>"You're far, far, far more likely to be killed with your own gun than to defend yourself lethally with it."
The chance that you need to shoot someone to defend yourself, your family or your property or someone else's property is thankfully minuscule. And it is true that owning a weapon of any kind increases the risk of misuse (hence the need for proper education). But how about cases where a weapon was used to defend oneself or break off the attack?
Statistics aren't collected on such encounters.
These school shooters aren't targeting their tormentors. This most recent shooting involved a 19-year-old former student.
The Sandy Hook shooter killed defenseless elementary schoolers.
> toxic masculinity
What exactly does this mean? Seems like an attack on masculinity as a whole, because it's a poorly defined pejorative that focuses on men.
The point is to assert that these behaviors are both optional and destructive to teach to just one sex. A constructive human ideal should be taught to everyone, ignoring sex like one would ignore race or shoe size or other physical property.
If you can't see through the rhetorical bent of the term "toxic masculinity," then I will try to show you how I see it. To argue that this isn't an attack on masculinity, let's replace the noun only. It's like saying "toxic communism" but arguing that the phrase is not an attack on communism.
Are you saying there is a special, clearly defined sort of masculinity that is toxic, yet extricable from masculinity itself? That's a tall order.
I mean, whether or not the lines can be cleanly drawn, there is quite obviously a divide. Think humble family man vs. aggressive jock. (Or, if you’re Christian, Jesus is a perfect example of non-toxic masculinity.) Unfortunately, we often seem to glorify the toxic kind in our media: warriors, gangsters, womanizers. Also, there are plenty of cultures around the world that do masculinity very differently than we in the West — and it has little to do with relative levels of testosterone.
I think it’s also disingenuous to say that toxic masculinity poorly defined. It’s not a buzzword, but an entire subfield of sociology that has years of research behind it.
nickbauman>"Because they were, to any point of rationality, on a direct course to killing me. I felt like it was me or them."
"To any point of rationality"?? "...me or them"??
Well, you're alive, aren't you? The idea that you thought of killing/shooting someone indicates that you were socially isolated to an extreme degree. Where were your parents, your brothers and sisters, your friends? Did you have any?
And now you're still angry and, sadly, screwed up. Your anger toward your old bullies has been redirected toward responsible gun owners. Now you'll punish those old bullies by supporting "common sense gun control".
Like you, I was mercilessly bullied for years - up until fifth grade. At some point while being beaten by one of the larger ones, something snapped inside my mind, and I ended up chasing him down and slamming his face into the basketball court until teachers pulled me off.
I was never bullied again. All because I finally exercised what all boys need to exercise: raw aggression in defense of person. It is the only language bullies ever understand.
Did you know that you're twice as likely to live in a single family household in the USA than Canada? That might be part of the reason why Canada doesn't have school shootings and we do.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-inequality-we-do...
Is this really the big issue? It seems the current "model" of masculinity while recently undergoing heavy debate has historically been pretty consistent.
If it was a serious issue that men couldn't cry a few times a day it should have been an issue throughout history?
Has it not been an issue throughout history? Honest question.
Hypothesis: Men have always been able to "take their frustration out" on women (sexually or otherwise). Now that women are becoming less tolerant of that dynamic, it's affecting men in unforeseen ways.
* Not "The War on Boys", it's the "The War Against Boys", my bad.
TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge
Man, Interrupted (Why Young Men are Struggling & What We Can Do About It): https://www.amazon.com/Man-Interrupted-Young-Struggling-Abou...
Unfortunately your role as a defender of others probably won't be fulfilling unless you join the armed forces or a gang. Because you probably live in a an ugly car-choked suburban dystopia with douchebags all around, meaning you have no place to care about and no one worth defending. Not that they were in any danger anyway, in their SUV tank on the way to the mall. But that's why people join the armed forces or gangs. They're the only things left.
I don't have time right now to treat this topic properly. And I kind of think more talking-about-it might not be the answer anyway.
EDIT: Or the police force, put that in there too.
American men and boys are really denied any kind of culture or identity because of political correctness.
I can go to a Dewali celebration, and it's obvious the people there have a cultural identity. But try making an American version of that, and it will either be drained of any real culture or come across as intolerant or at least unaccomodating.
The male identity issue is just a part of the larger cultural identity issue.
Aside: I think "guy" is one of the worst examples. Ambiguous about gender and adulthood at the same time. What an identity-killer.
I haven't seen michael ian black perform or on tv in many years, but if "isn't it funny what a vicious and petty jerk I am" still makes up a majority of his act/screen persona, maybe he can start by changing that.
> help [boys] navigate toward a full expression of their gender
> outdated model of masculinity
What kind of framing of the problem is this? There is no such salvageable thing as any objective "womanhood" or "the male gender" or "masculinity". We have biological sex and we have a power dynamic of which roles and socialized behaviors are the main properties. Take away men's social power structure of over women, and "womanhood" "gender" "masculinity" refer to nothing, or very clinical medical things.
Who has gotten past the first within the scientific community? Until they appear, I'll assume the less extraordinary claim that gendered behaviors are socialized
I was watching cartoons recently with my little boy and was amazed at the focus that some put on emotions and how to react to them. That some have a discussion over stress or impulsive behaviors. I did not remember such discussion in my childhood cartoons. I was surprised (and slightly ashamed) to actually learn some stuff from these.
A few points:
1. The article starts off with putting down the behavior of other men. As if it was a weakness to have difficulty in expressing a displeasure. "The way to emasculate a man is to..." I wasn't as much about, lets help the person to realize this, as much as it was to embarass. (No wonder men can't be vulenerable)
2. It goes on to claim that men and only men were the problem with the violence. It didn't go on to complex situations where they may be doing it over jealously, competition for women, as the result of (Elliot Rodgers and his "women" problem), or even persuaded by women. If you're going to talk about a loopsided amount of violence by men, it may be helpful to seperate the violence by proxy. I would suggest bringing up actual crime data that goes indepth about these situations as a counter point. Brief massacures are nothing new, but they are something to consider solving. --- Mr. Black should have made a trueful effort in suggesting that we should be more concerned about the development, and socialization of boys to men.
3. The Boys vs Girls arguement in schools: If you really want to be truthful, explain where it came and how it came to be. Go on and explain how the AAUW influenced schools with faulty data to change how education was done. Explain how there is a lack of male teachers in the classrooms. (And why male teachers are by far kicked out of the schools) There have been studies (I don't have them on hand) that suggest gender seperated schools. I'm all for that.
4. "Toxic masculanity"- Again, he's trying to frame traits that are common in males, and in the presence of testotrone in a negative light. He even goes as far as to claim that "it's a model for behavior". It's not. I would suggestion how the environment attempts to surpress these traits and refuses to allow for it to be expressed completely. I.e.: boys rough housing, supression of anger, supression of male bonding, and suppression of independence (helicopter parents, sociality expectations/impressions etc)
5. Soy boys- lol. In a way I would agree with them, on the metalevel where they would claim that you are betraying your own biological configuration. (In the whole article he keeps tring to maintain a frame that masculine traits are bad) However, they're bully's and they say it because they know that they can get to you. (In a masculine world, those bully's would be beaten as that it's asocial behavior)
6. Binding the male development to feminism. Sigh. Can men ever not be compared to women? This is incredibly tiring.
Actually, there is a very easy answer and precisely why men join armed forces, or a biker's club / gang / ISIS: power. [and to follow up on this, the same "will to power" that our societies have deprived them of.]
I remember wanting to be in a gang when I was 15 years old but I grew out of it.
You would never expect someone from the upper class for instance to join a street gang and rare for people from the middle class in general.
You might think it is childish, but if it's presented to you as the ticket to success in your otherwise unsuccessfull world, why would it be childish?
The conclusion from that is that it can be rational to want to join a gang when in a situation where larger forms of political or military organization are undesirable or ineffective, and particularly when they're suppressed or are active adversaries.
I don't pretend to have all the answers but I'm pretty sure one answer does not fit every single individual in finding their motive to do or not do any one thing. We all need the humility to note that what I think I may do in a certain set of circumstances is not what another person might do, they may well just be better than I am, for example.
What I will say is that in this topic there is fear (and rightly so). This fear will bring out the salespeople who may even believe 100% in the ideas they're pushing. So we should be mindful of that as we listen to it all.
https://books.google.be/books?id=XYAFC3vmPmcC&dq=%22will+to+...
A young killer supplants "his lost, confused, and unstable self-image with an actively nihilistic will to power." (A reference to Nietzschean nihilism)
Is this possibly also how normal teens become political science students?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_sh...
There was even a pop song written about the incident.
And more recently, Tafsheen Malik, shot up a San Bernadino workplace along with her husband.
And a woman along with her husband went on a shooting rampage in Vegas in 2014. http://abcnews.go.com/US/las-vegas-cop-killers-husband-wife-...
Women were persons of interest in the most recent Vegas shooting, and the wife of the Pulse gunman was arrested in connection with the murders (http://abcnews.go.com/US/wife-pulse-nightclub-gunman-omar-ma...).
Women can and do pick up guns and murder.
All arrested people aren't violent criminals in the United States. Maybe in Saudi Arabia?
It seems that as usual boys just do more. Win more. Fail more. Fail more spectacularly. Etc.
One could argue that it is the abundance of guns thats the issue. Why not consider repealing the 2nd Amendment? Do something like what Australia did. 2nd Amendment seems to be too masculine anyway.
> It’s no longer enough to “be a man” — we no longer even know what that means.
"Toxic masculinity" is a phrase that seems to be thrown around a bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_masculinity). And it seems to be mostly applied to western (white) men. I would argue that western white males are more 'broken' compared to other males.
> Too many boys are trapped in the same suffocating, outdated model of masculinity, where manhood is measured in strength, where there is no way to be vulnerable without being emasculated, where manliness is about having power over others.
Possibly. As the author says, the lack of focus on men / boys hasn't given them a fresh way of channeling their masculinity in the 21st century.
> I would like men to use feminism as an inspiration, in the same way that feminists used the civil rights movement as theirs.
Not sure how he means it.
(Western) men are having less sex, watching more porn. The testosterone levels have plummeted. Special programs are being held for females, LGBT, etc but not for men due to unquantifiable broad points about "history of patriarchy" and "white male privilege". More broadly, the Y chromosome is kinda fizzling out (at least according to some studies, I've seen other studies that claim thats not the case). Western men are facing shortening life expectancies, high suicide rates, depression, etc. There is a complete lack of social fabric. Nothing unites them anymore (no military, religion, honor, purpose).
But isn't this the world that many intellectuals are looking for? Don't we want to remove western male dominance? Don't we want people to control their sexual promiscuity? Don't we all agree that patriarchy is bad so we have to destroy it? And that white men have had a historical advantage that should be taken away?
I was always under the impression that the thing that makes western society great is that everyone is supposed to be equal. So why tolerate excessive masculinity from western males?
Edit: case in point, this article has been insta-flagged from the front page. Shows you how much even HN cares about boys/men. And maybe that's good, western males apparently have a lot of privilege anyway.
What makes the Western societies great revolve more around "equality of opportunity" than "equality of outcome", which, if I'm not mistaken, you seem to imply.
So west definitely seems to be quite heavy on outcomes. But maybe this is just semantics?