Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Salvo - Girly Men: The Media's Attack on Masculinity

I find it interesting that the only people who seem to be concerned with the "war on masculinity" are those on the political right. I don't quite want to use the same terms they use, since I think the notion of war only applies to the most radical of radical feminists - those who think that men are a waste of oxygen.

There is however, a less direct and therefore more troublesome assault being waged on masculinity from a variety of sources - industrial (xenoestrogens, as discussed here recently), media (most men are portrayed on TV as idiots or brutes), and political (women still have more power in legal disputes than men).

Even education is biased against boys in many ways - if boys are too boyish, they much have ADHD. We want our young men to be more like young women in many ways, rather than teaching them a more evolved masculinity, we rob them of being masculine at all.

The political left is often complicit in this, even if its unintentional. So that leaves the political right, as is evident in this post from Salvo Magazine. They are biased, but they are more than a little correct in their positions.

Girly Men:

The Media's Attack on Masculinity

by S. T. Karnick

The tendency of the nation’s schools to suppress boys’ natural way of seeing and doing things, brilliantly documented by Christina Hoff-Sommers in her 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, is becoming increasingly evident in the culture.

According to Hoff-Sommers, programs in America’s public schools are set up to obliterate all that is masculine and establish femininity as the human norm:

This book tells the story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy male children. It is a story of how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world. No one denies that boys’ aggressive tendencies must be checked and channeled in constructive ways. Boys need discipline, respect, and moral guidance. Boys need love and tolerant understanding. They do not need to be pathologized.

Hoff-Sommers goes on to note that "it’s a bad time to be a boy in America. . . . Routinely regarded as protosexists, potential harassers and perpetuators of gender inequity, boys live under a cloud of censure." The school curricula, she observes, are skewed toward girls’ strengths and away from those of boys. That’s why classes emphasize word problems in math class and writing essays in science class, for example.

Boys mistreated by our educational system must advance into society and try to become men, having been taught to disrespect masculinity and suppress it in themselves. One obvious coping mechanism is for males to act more sensitively, making a determined effort to "share their feelings" and be less aggressive and competitive.

Read the whole article.


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