Training the Masculinity Out of Children | Hacker News Reader

Training the Masculinity Out of Children

quillette.com

41 pointsandrenth19 comments

It's interesting to see the rebound in sociological thinking. I'm not well versed in sociology by any measure, but the article seems to imply that the strong form of social constructionism is common belief. I would say that most people agree with the weak form of social constructionism, where facts can coexist with social constructs. Furthermore, does anybody really believe that sex differences don't exist? (other than a vocal minority)

People can believe that sex differences exist, while disagreeing with others on how dominant their influence is, versus the social constructs. One obvious example of this is arguments about the dearth of women in technical and programming roles.

That "obvious example" has major issue when looking at the population as a whole. If you took a random person on the street and asked what profession they had then the chances are about 50% or higher that they are in a worse gender segregation than technical and programming professions.

Consider this: only 12% of the employed people in Sweden work in a profession which has equal or less gender segregation of 60%/40%. The remaining 88%, also called the wast majority work in a place which is considered gender segregated. technical and programming professions have around 70%-30% gender segregation. They rank very average among all profession, with no distinctive attribute in the area of gender segregation.

What does a average gender segregation for a specific profession say about sex differences vs social constructs? Would not looking at those several profession with 99% or higher gender segregation be more telling? For example, what does the highest male gender segregated profession reported here in Sweden, brick layers, with a ration above 99% tell us about sex differences vs social constructs?

I feel like another reason not teaching your children masculinity is bad cause one parent can defect (prisoner's dilemma) by teaching his kid boxing and how to use leadership skills to form a gang on the playground and then his kid can just do whatever he wants

Indeed! I would never not teach my children (father of a boy and a girl) about masculinity or the drive for power accumulation, only how to wield that power in a just way. Good people should have power.

There will always be power dynamics and struggles in human interactions. You can’t ignore that and not properly equip your kids for those interactions, otherwise you’re setting them up for social and career stagnation at best, and abuse at the worst.

> You can’t ignore that and not properly equip your kids for those interactions

I agree. Big question: what are the best methods for doing so?

Teaching leadership, humility, empathy, and critical reasoning. Can’t say for sure, my kids aren’t old enough for me to put it into practice yet. With that said, I’ve had enough practical experience in the workplace to have a rough foundation for how to and not to acquire power and lead.

You want an utterly left-field answer? Minecraft [1].

> Seth Frey, a postdoctoral fellow in computational social science at Dartmouth College, has studied the behavior of thousands of youths on Minecraft servers, and he argues that their interactions are, essentially, teaching civic literacy. “You’ve got these kids, and they’re creating these worlds, and they think they’re just playing a game, but they have to solve some of the hardest problems facing humanity,” Frey says. “They have to solve the tragedy of the commons.” What’s more, they’re often anonymous teenagers who, studies suggest, are almost 90 percent male (online play attracts far fewer girls and women than single-player mode). That makes them “what I like to think of as possibly the worst human beings around,” Frey adds, only half-jokingly. “So this shouldn’t work. And the fact that this works is astonishing.”

> ...

> Three years ago, the public library in Darien, Conn., decided to host its own Minecraft server. To play, kids must acquire a library card. More than 900 kids have signed up, according to John Blyberg, the library’s assistant director for innovation and user experience. “The kids are really a community,” he told me. To prevent conflict, the library installed plug-ins that give players a chunk of land in the game that only they can access, unless they explicitly allow someone else to do so. Even so, conflict arises. “I’ll get a call saying, ‘This is Dasher80, and someone has come in and destroyed my house,’ ” Blyberg says. Sometimes library administrators will step in to adjudicate the dispute. But this is increasingly rare, Blyberg says. “Generally, the self-governing takes over. I’ll log in, and there’ll be 10 or 15 messages, and it’ll start with, ‘So-and-so stole this,’ and each message is more of this,” he says. “And at the end, it’ll be: ‘It’s O.K., we worked it out! Disregard this message!’ ”

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-ge...

Sounds like Ender’s Game for social skills :) love it!

In 2010, there was a camp for gifted children (up to 18, but mostly around about 10) in Sweden. (This story is from a book about gifted children.) The camp had a BYOC computer room, and at one time, the kids in there were mostly playing Minecraft, with one parent keeping watch. There was a rule against killing other players and destroying other people’s constructions, but then it happened that one kid poured lava and destroyed someone else’s stuff. The parent keeping watch thought that this would lead to fighting, ejection and subsequent banning of the offending party, but he chose to stay in the background and silently observe the kids instead of intervening directly. Instead of fighting, the kids self-organized a parliament and debated the pros and cons against “cheating”, decided unanimously not to cheat, and continued to build things together. The parent was flabbergasted and later remarked that few adults would have done what these kids did.

The article suggests we as a society need to recognize the difference between masculinity, which can be perfectly healthy, and toxic masculinity. Forming a violence gang would seem to be an example of the latter and not the former.

Among my relatives are police officers, military veterans, and prison guards...

Those groups theoretically exist within the bounds of the law, which should separate them from someone "forming a gang" and using violence to "do whatever they want." The difference between masculinity and toxic masculinity in those cases is a lack of empathy and a lack of respect for societal boundaries or rules of engagement.

You can form a gang capable of violence without being violent !

In my experience you'd call that something like a neighborhood watch or even a militia. Like during the LA riots, the Korean shop owners banded together to keep their property from getting looted.

Masculinity is a need for survival in difficult conditions. When going gets tough masculine characteristics will be the ones that can make you work through them.

I am always told about this toxic masculinity but no one ever clearly defined it. Always got some anecdotal answer to what they are trying to do.

I think boys are to guided to becoming men, men who can be followed. Men like Gandhi, or king Jr, or Mandela. If not for their belief and masculinity they would not be revered so many people. Masculinity is not a vice, toxic or otherwise, it is a necessity for survival.

> Masculinity is a need for survival in difficult conditions.

Yes, but it is a problem in good conditions, because it takes precedence over traits like empathy, prudence, and thoughtfulness.

Anecdote: I have been in professional settings where I saw a problem, but nobody would listen and my arguments were countered with aggression and ad-hominem. When the projects finally imploded, I was told I should have made my point more strongly.

However, aggression and thoughtfulness are like the end-points of a slider: the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. If I had focused on being aggressive, I would not have had the resources to locate said problems.

If competence and critical thinking actually had any value, we would have solved longevity and faster-than-light long ago, but we prefer to pound our chests like gorillas in suits.

There is a noticeable gap in all this chatter about toxic masculinity. We're told that it's adolescent and immature male behavior, the worst of a roomful of teenage boys.

Ok.

So let's look at what the worst teenage girls get up to...

- Queen Bee'ing and passive aggressive social dominance games.

- Whisper campaigns, slut shaming and going behind people's backs.

- Crab bucket mentality, obsession over relative status and appearances.

- Recruiting authority figures to whitewash cry-bullying and enact revenge.

Now, does that remind you of anything that's been happening on the internet in recent years? Consider this: the supposed plague of online harassment aimed at women, typified by anonymous sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica and Kiwifarms... Does that sound like something angry teenage boys would do, or angry teenage girls?

The toxic femininity was coming from inside the house all along. And the fact that those two words are never uttered together by supposed gender specialists ought to tell you something too.

Agreed, there is toxic behaviour from both male and female. What is not recognised is that this behaviour has been around for millenia. Male and female are quite different, even if there is a crossover of interests. The worst characteristics of humanity are shown by both male and female. I have seen mothers train their sons to be the worst of men and I have seen fathers train their daughters to the worst of women. I have seen both mothers and fathers train their sons and daughters to be the best they can be without the sons losing their masculinity nor the daughters their femininity.

How males look at a situation is often quite different to how females look at the same situation. The problem here is not they they see it differently but that there is this thing in our society today that says the male outlook is wrong.

To see something in a different light means that it is possible to see a bigger picture here. I have worked in many different environments where there have been varying ratios of male to female. The environments that operated best took notice of the inputs from all involved.

The tasks and interests that each of us has and does do not define how masculine or feminine we may be. Being masculine as a male or feminine as a female does not dictate the kinds of activities you do.

Too often today, men are automatically seen as dangerous even when coming to the defence of children that are in distress. It is usually assumed that the distress of the child or young person has been caused by the male coming to help. This says more about the symptomatic problems in today's society that a male cannot come to the defence of children and young people.

We have lost so much in trying to remove male masculinity. The number of times I have heard women of all ages complain about where the men have gone and yet they do not see that the removal of masculinity of males is a result of what they are calling for.

Men and women are not equivalent. They are the two sides of a stable complete society. Both are required and both are necessary for a society to function properly. When dominance by one at the expense of the other only leads to trouble. Each provides what the other doesn't have and only as a unit do we see a completeness that is truly profound.

We have societies in which a donkey is more important than a female and injustice runs rife through such. We have societies where the males are considered to be the worst of the worst, lower than the wild beasts of the field and injustice runs rife through such. When the preciousness of both male and female is highlighted then we see justice.

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