This to me strikes me as the thing that might be the culprit. I can't count the amount of times I've heard men how much they would worry if they'd be getting a daughter. It seems as if many people think a girl has to be parented differently - probably more intensely - compared to a boy who can apparently be left to his own devices more often.
I'm speculating here of course.
It has nothing to do with thinking girls have to be parented differently and everything to do with knowing that most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection).
I worried (and still worry) about having to watch my daughter make terrible choices in men, while being utterly powerless to do anything to protect her.
I honestly wonder at this and prefer to not take a stance as I have too little information. Watching some reflections from transgender people after their transitions may help. I’ve heard female to male trans report society treating men with much less care. Meanwhile I imagine women get a lot more engagement from society than men.
Do you worry about your teenage sons acting this way?
With boys there’s a lot of effort into mitigating physical damage to themselves or physical and/or emotional damage they may cause to others. With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being.
I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons.
Suicide rates for 10-14 year olds are twice as high for boys than for girls, and for 15-24 year olds four times as high. I'm sure you are describing how parenting is done in general, but not spending as much time on the emotional well-being of boys doesn't seem to be a good strategy.
1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...
This is in part because males choose more effective suicide methods - they are approximately twice as likely to use firearms.
Statistically, if you are a parent with a child that is not emotionally OK, a son is more likely to kill himself, which is not reversible / recoverable. So at least while those stats remain true, the idea that girls need more emotional support is not backed up by the evidence I'm looking at.
Then of course there are things like treating him as normal multidimensional human as opposed to as emotionless competing machine as people in these HN theads write about boys. Like, the boys I know in real life are way more multifaceted people, they do have emotions and everything. They have relationship issues with regards to their friends. They do have to deal with bullying from their friends both physical and emotional. When young, they are not walking constantly fighting trouble people in this discussion describe. When teenagers, they are not only-cares-about sport and violent games kind of guys. Nor closes himself to his room and ignores the family which is actually supposed to be cool thing about boys kind of guys.
Reading gender sterotypes on HN about boys, one would believe it is impossible for boy to become artist, writer, scientist or philosopher. Except in real world, boys and men engage in all those. But really, median boy that live in my bubble is not destructive machine. There are few boys that do cause disproportional trouble, but majority of them are nice humans.
Back to girls, I would be careful to trust people who find all these attempts to "not be serious" at the time of trying. Majority of them is serious. People who act like they are not serious or just cry for attention that needs to be ignored are how girls dont get help they need.
Either way, clearly the boys need more intervention, in whatever form that takes.
Destruction is a normal part of adolescent behavior. I think many first time parents are just really surprised to see it manifest so strongly in their children, especially toddlers.
Most toddler destruction is cluelessness and the same toddler is sad and compassionate in other situations. Physically active toddler boys are noisy which is tiring, but they are also sweet and trying their best.
And all of that is irrelevant to effect from article, which manifest only in immigrant fathers and first born female child. And the effect is small.
So the divorce effect is likely way more about clash between cultural expectations of foreign born dads then about how horrible either boys or girls are.
I honestly can't come up with a reading of your comment that doesn't involve discounting the emotional needs of young boys.
I think a lot comes down to body image of females in society. Something as simple as the fact that females are expected to wear makeup and men do not I think can explain a lot. The vast number of activities that surround makeup create an unhealthy obsession with vanity. It’s the raw amount of time spent looking at one’s self and comparing against others. This then propagates throughout life and results in an unwinnable battle against ageing that only leads to unhappiness. A typical female social media stream contains a huge amount of beauty-related content of which a male’s does not.
There are just certain interests you have to have to blend into social groups that are dramatically different for men and women.
Although recently men are starting to become more vain and I hear a lot of marketing crap like “men should take more care looking after their skin/appearance” - the metrosexual thing - which I think is going down a bad path. We need less social pressures for young people...but of course there is a huge monetary incentive to get men hooked on skin care etc.
Men play sports, fight, kill each other and video games imitate life.
Social media is the women's version of video games, refined to weapons-grade purity.
I'm worried about this trend too. I saw an ad the other day that started with talking about how much time and effort women need to spend on beauty etc. My thought while watching this part was "This is horrible, we should encourage less of this."
But instead of this conclusion, the ad concluded with "If women have to put this much effort in, men should step up and start putting in more effort. Here's a product we make so men can put in more effort." I found it absurd!
I'm a woman. I didn't bend to social pressure until I actually had children. Once you have a child, the amount of crap society hangs on women and all the social pressure comes at you as a form of blackmail where the subtext is "And you and your child can both go die in a fire if you, little girlie, don't go along to get along."
Society generally treats mothers and their children as a package deal. Mothers tend to get custody. A woman can end up pregnant from a one-night stand and have her life irrevocably changed and the father may never know a child existed.
Men bitch about having to pay alimony and child support and how unfair that is if they are no longer getting to sleep with the woman and have her pick up after him and getting to enjoy the company of the children and it gets glossed over that both having kids and the threat of potentially having kids undermines female income on a regular basis. If nothing else, women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development, either without thinking about it (because it is just a social norm rooted in history) or because if you are woman and not an idiot, it is always at the back of your mind that an unintended pregnancy with unexpected health impacts (or resulting in a special-needs child) can derail your career in a way that it typically doesn't do to a male career.
This is an actual biological difference between cis women and cis men: cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot. It has profound impacts on many social things in ways that most people either don't readily see or don't want to admit because it's scary, I guess.
Additionally, this is a very anecdotal example which doesn't explain why reports are found as early as prepubescent girls. Reports stating girls on average do indeed feel more pressure from social media than boys do.
Isn't the effect that one would use to support this, the same effect one sees if instead "women prefer to look after their children than immediately return to full-time work after child-birth"?
It seems that in Western democracies often women may [amongst other options] choose their own career vs. support a husband to enable greater closeness with children. Men seldom have that option.
Aside: "> and have her pick up after him": Father's who get no veto on abortion, or pregnancy get to live with the mother's choice. Sure, they share responsibility for the pregnancy too, but twisting that situation to (what appears to be your contention, paraphrased) 'men bear a grudge against alimony because they can't enslave women for menial work' is going to need some hard proof if you're going to convince me that this isn't unwarranted sexism. I think you'll find men "bitch" about it because they're denied any say but are expected to pay because "a man's role is to work".
No. Well before there are children, women will fairly often do things like follow her husband or boyfriend to a new city when he gets a job offer there. When a person moves to a new city because they got a job offer there, they tend to be getting a promotion and a pay raise.
When a person moves to a new city to follow someone else and then start their own job hunt, they tend to be hurting their career and will typically get a less prestigious job with less pay than what they left. Do that sort of thing often enough along gendered lines and the cumulative effect is pretty harsh.
(what appears to be your contention, paraphrased) 'men bear a grudge against alimony because they can't enslave women for menial work'
Please don't do this. It's hard enough to participate here as a woman without someone intentionally twisting my comment in such an ugly manner.
It takes two people to create a baby. There is a long human history of placing various expectations on both men and women to account for that reality. The expectations related to that are long and varied and tend to be gendered, such as expecting women to be virgins on the wedding night but not expecting the same of men.
The reason for expecting virginity for girls is it's a form of birth control and it's the only one that's really reliable and it wasn't that long ago it was the only one a lot of people really had ready access to.
One college, I think in the UK somewhere, used to give scholarships to "virgin girls" and their test historically was "a girl who had never been pregnant." They had to update their criteria at some point.
The last time I saw data on it, a "normal, healthy fertile woman" was defined as a woman who would get pregnant within a year if she was sexually active and not using protection.
Someone asked explicitly for "a personal perspective" and I gave some of that. The degree to which I am being given crap for having done that is quite aggravating.
You don't have to care what a woman thinks, but I give a woman's take here from time to time simply because this is an overwhelmingly male space and I post as openly female. Sometimes, that goes okay. Sometimes, it's appreciated and respected, but it's never an easy thing to do and it always opens me up to being given a ridiculous amount of crap for making a good faith statement.
It never matters how carefully I word it, someone will inevitably have a problem with a woman daring to give the female side of the equation here.
It always sucks when a baby is conceived that wasn't actively and intentionally wanted and planned by both parties. This is part of why there is so much societal baggage concerning human sexual stuff and why the entire world wants to be judgy about things like how many people you sleep with, did you do it before marriage, is it a serious relationship or a casual one and on and on and on.
That's not because women are awful bitches to men and it's not because men are awful bastards to women. It's because when 1 + 1 suddenly and unexpectedly = 3, that impacts many lives, not just the two poor fools who bumped uglies one night without thinking too much about it (as just one scenario -- I'm well aware there can be others).
I'm already finding this discussion amazingly tiresome on a day when I already feel incredibly raw about men being assholes to me, so I think I probably need to walk away. It's really, really hard to constantly be expected to be the one who worries about the feelings of nine zillion men on this forum while it sometimes seems like not a single soul gives a damn about me, my feelings, my life, my welfare -- anything.
So if people want to just downvote my comments to hell and then have some giant pile on of ugly takes outright twisting my words, I guess y'all can have at it. Because nearly twelve years of posting here in good faith under incredibly difficult circumstances seems to have made not a damn bit of difference in how my words get interpreted here. I can still count on getting openly hated on for simply being a woman who dares to open my damn mouth.
And vice-versa, do you feel there's some sexually skewed pressure here? Sadly for me I was the one who got a job first, so I won the chance to be stuck in a little box every day, yay!
> expecting women to be virgins on the wedding night but not expecting the same of men //
In the UK I think if you interviewed 10000 people you might get one that thinks that; honestly I've heard a lot of strange views but never anyone expressing virginity as a virtue only for women, it's always been for both sexes. I've no idea what you're leading towards or where you're getting this idea (assuming we're still talking Western Democracies)?
> It never matters how carefully I word it //
I hesitated to post that because you're one of the first people with a gendered name I've noticed, I don't notice many but overwhelmingly they're asexual names (temporal, rsync, whatever) and I've found your comments high value and definitely adding to the site in general. But, what did you mean there then, I couldn't work out a way in which it wasn't a terrible caricature.
You're complaining here about mistreatment, but you're dishing it too. You don't have to care about anyone's feelings to present your perspective - I don't know if you're getting downvoted, but ultimately it's fake internet points. Make your point ... but if you do it in a way that denigrates every divorced male then I think you've got to expect push-back.
> I can still count on getting openly hated on //
Disagreement ain't hate. I appreciate your posts, doesn't mean I don't disagree with some of their content.
The only reason you see it this way is because of your previous point regarding women and children being a "package deal". There are societal expectations of men who have children.
>women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development
This is like saying "men tend to support their wives children at the expense of their own children". It's specialization and symbiosis. Women can benefit from "supporting" their husband's career. Ideally people support EACHOTHER in a relationship, and that includes tradeoffs in many areas of life, financial/career/societal/emotional/children.
>cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot
What a revelation. You're right, if only men could wrap their mind around this one then they might be able to fix all the issues that they maliciously create. /sarcasm
That's maybe half a step away from a personal attack. That's not "my opinion." That's how society tends to treat things and that observation is based on lots of reading of stuff with solid studies behind it.
This is like saying "men tend to support their wives children at the expense of their own children".
No, it's not. Not at all. For one thing, two people can be married and have their own children separately from a previous relationship.
if only men could wrap their mind around this one then they might be able to fix all the issues that they maliciously create.
Give me a break. This is not a position I am a proponent of. I rarely talk about the so-called "patriarchy." I do not advocate an idea that sexism is rooted in men being intentionally malicious assholes and I don't think I ever have.
This is not a good faith engagement of the point at all.
The fact that women can have babies tends to impact the lives of all women, whether they want babies or not. They get a lot of social expectations hung on them that are rooted in the idea of father as breadwinner and mother as full-time parent in part because that's a model that is more reliable than mother as breadwinner and father as full-time parent.
By reliable, I mean it tends to withstand things going wrong that you can statistically bet on happening in some percentage of cases. Pregnancy can really seriously impact a woman's body and health in a way that becoming a father doesn't do to a man's body.
As just one really minor example, she can be incontinent for a time after the birth and need to account for that, which is tougher to deal with if you have a paid job than if you are a homemaker.
I've already seen the tables turn. Parents with teenage daughters describe things that make me shudder. At least I now have the wisdom to not judge the parents.
It seems to me that the worst bullying behaviour that I hear in my social circle is perpetuated by teenage girls towards other teenage girls.
However what I see with a lot of the parents of other girls (compared to boys) is that they caution the girls a lot more and then they say my girls are so self-confident and "brave".
That is not to say that there is no difference between girls and boys, but you there are also huge variations between individuals as well, the way my two daughters are in their "wildness" is so different you would not guess they are siblings.
"Indian-born mothers living in Canada with two children had 138 boys for every 100 girls"
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-...
These preferences are lasting into the second-generations, with no indication that even at the third and later generations these preferences are lost:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggest...
Immigration to North America from India should restrict the number of males allowed, to balance the trend of sex-selective abortion in those communities, and to increase the 'value' of females - since they will have an easier chance of migrating.
That's likely an unintended side effect of the change in western attitudes on integration, going from "conform" to "melting pot" and now to "cultural stew". The pressure to adapt to the new country's values is less than it used to be while it is also encouraged for cultural communities to form and persist. Beyond that, the revolution in cheap global communications likely as plays a role, as cultural values can be reinforced in the new country from the source country. It may be that the only way to change the attitudes towards gender in the Canadian-Indian community will be to change those attitudes in India itself. That of course gets us into the messy territory of cultural imperialism.
Taking issues with a lot of things that are clearly unfair. She does more sport then boy and have good grades, but somehow she is lazy because she did not went biking over weekend.