[quote]lifter85 wrote:
i responded basically by saying that i believe boys need to get into a little bit of trouble, be aggressive, and sometimes get caught doing things, but instead of being punished, have a conversation with a strong morally upright man, letting them know that their curiosity and aggression was natural, but that a real man learns how to control that aggression and put it into use for the good (like a superhero). the problem today stems from boys being so dang confused as to what to do because they’re basically told that every natural instinct they have is from the devil, and it should be suppressed. this, along with no morally upright strong men to talk to, leads our boys to be dumbed down so to speak.
so, to sum up, am i wrong for stating what i did? it’s an education class full of girls so i’m sure i’ll be anihilated there, but whatever.[/quote]
You were right to speak up. Try this on for size. As I have written in a couple of other posts, we live in a service-oriented economy now. Older ideas of conformism, equality etc. are pretty much moot. In the Middle Ages, if you got out of line you were tarred and feathered then chased out of town to probably die in the country-side.
Now what happens? Not much. If people don’t like you, fuck 'em. You can still go shopping at the mall. We don’t have many physical threats (hungry lions) but mostly existential ones (“do people like me?”). The biggest problem is alienation in this society, not some oppressive conformism.
I’ll say it straight up. Being in academia, what I see overwhelmingly is that small-mindedness is now sacred. I mean that. Rather than treat men like humans it is fashionable to assume they are all knuckle-draggers (like Einstein, Shakespeare or Mozart, per chance?). This is an ideological statement, not a factual one.
The basis of all morality is putting the good of the group first and in particular, treating those less fortunate than oneself well. You want to piss them off? Next time someone says something about “men” replace “men” with “black men”. It will sound like the local KKK Grand Dragon just spoke. Hey, if it applies to men it applies to the Black ones too…
Pernicious myths
#1 Men don’t matter – women can do it all. When women talk of equality, they mean being president of IBM. They don’t mean going into the mines or becoming a trash collector. A service-based economy means that men are still doing a hugely disproportionate amount of the work, you just don’t see them.
#2 Men are aggressive. All animals are aggressive or the are out of the food chain. A large part of socialization for both sexes is to learn how to channel this into determination. Actually men are still getting this, albeit with a strong ideological slant. Women are getting less of this and it is now getting to be a common myth that they have to be “strong” – which normally boils down to having them pick fights and get away with it.
There has been a steep rise in female to female violence and I am afraid that “liberation” for women will just make them as thuggish as the men they so disdain.
#3 There is a war between the sexes. Not from our end, so quit pissing us off. I mean that. One list I am on had a woman post some simply mind-bogglingly bad analysis about tango, explaining that her highly questionable conclusions were justified because “the sexism is always there. You just have to find it.” I.e. let’s lie for a good cause and if you don’t like it, you just prove our point.
#4 Women have a primal knowledge they must tap into. Nope. A lot of explanations of why we need Women’s Studies boil down to saying that women don’t think like men, proceed largely intuitively and cannot be held to Western = patriarchal standards. In short, they make every argument that a good Victorian gentleman would give as to why women have no place outside the home. WTF? I mean seriously W - T - F?!
#5 Men are dying out. Oh brother. Some years back a study purporting this was written. Near as I can tell, it was to be a joke, but that really doesn’t matter anymore, since it has attained the status of myth. Supposedly evolution has weighed in on male-ness and in not so many years there will be no moare males on Earth. Now if nothing else, the timing of this is just too rich for words. Just as we have a social movement, Biology comes to the rescue?
#6 Women get paid a fraction of what men do. Bullshit. 100%, pure, unadulterated bullshit. In point of fact, the Federal Equal Wage Act of 1963 put and end to that and every employer must explain their payscales. The rub is that this fact – which was current in the early 1950’s, has been so recycled you can’t kill it.
One recent attempt to redo this at a hospital made it a point of pooling all salaries. So the nurses and cleaning ladies were pitted against the male doctors. Sure, there were pay inequities, but they were completely explainable by such trivialities as education and skill. When they compared by education, these discrepancies magically vanished. Oops.
Sorry. I just shouldn’t write these before breakfast.
And as always, I might just be full of shit…
– jj