My problem with that argument is that education was coded masculine, mostly conducted by men, and mostly reserved for boys for millennia, and for virtually all of that time it had even more of the features that people now think are biased toward girls. Like, Elizabethan schoolboys sat on hard benches reading and translating Latin from dawn until dusk, and yes, it was enforced with corporal punishment and most of them hated it, but they still managed to do stuff that a lot of people believe today that boys are inherently unsuited to do. So I don’t really buy that there are specific modes of learning that are more natural to boys. I do agree the lack of male teachers, and role models in general, is a problem, although I have no idea what the solution should be, other than paying teachers more.
I don’t believe there’s a specific mode of learning that is more natural to boys. I suspect a lot of it has to do with how we socialize boys and girls and what expectations we place on them. But just like white teachers might be unconsciously biased in favor of white students, I can’t dismiss the possibility women might be unconsciously biased in favor of girls.
It is unfortunate, but I feel as though I need to add a disclaimer. In the not too distant past, so called men’s right advocates used the male inequality problem as a vector to attack women. I certainly don’t think women in education have deliberately created this problem, I’m not even sure if the way we education children even is biased in favor of girls, and I don’t want to go back to the “good old days” where we discouraged girls from certain subjects, but clearly there is a problem somewhere.
When you are used to being on top, equality feels like oppression.
I could certainly get behind DEI policies directed towards inclusion of men in career paths where they are under represented to the determent of society(e.g. Social work, elementary education) if for no other reason than to provide evidence against the notion the the purpose of DEI is to put down men.
Getting a little further out on a limb (into an area where I likely will be schooled by those who are much better informed than I) regarding Toxic Masculinity, I think the key is balance to move away from traditional gender roles by both sides towards a more constructive middle.
To that end you could argue that much of feminism was directed towards the elimination of “Toxic femininity” in which women were passive and subservient supplanting their needs to those of a dominant male. Through the feminist movement they have been able to move away from this towards a more assertive “I am woman hear me roar” masculine-like assertiveness while still remaining feminine. Similarly I believe that men can move away from a destructive need to be aggressive, and emotionally suppressed while still remaining masculine.
I didn’t like the article, and had a whole rebuttal in my head, but that’s pretty much it right there.
They don’t even need to be biased in favor of girls; the fact that for obvious reasons women understand girls better means that they’ll do better with girls than boys. And not just teachers.
One barrier to men entering the teaching profession at the elementary school level is the fear of being falsely accused of sexual molestation/assault. Here are links to two studies, the first from 2011 and the second from 2018.
Another is the perception that teaching at the elementary school level is not a “manly” occupation. Here is a link to a U.K. study from 2023.
https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.13145
When I was young, I had to explore options and choose the most viable one. Sometimes the right option was not obvious from the beginning stages but became visible years later. I think the men could occasionally go through their different options as I did.
The main challenge I faced was networking with people to get a decent opportunity. In fact, even though I’ve worked in a position I’ve found fulfilling for years, I still make a daily effort to interact with others in similar workplaces. Sometimes I even hang out with groups temporarily even though I don’t have anything in common but a good opportunity might develop usually incrementally and well unexpectedly too.
In sum, I think the people in the article could try to focus on what might work for them in terms of work and also in adapting to social expectations, whether from gender or some other attribute. I’ve personally evolved a little with intergender behaviors to be successful. It of course takes prodigious effort to do so.
I don’t mean this as a personal call-out, but this sort of oversimplified take is, at its core, no different than MAGA saying things like, “Ah, black people fail because they’re just lazy and criminal.” It’s precisely the kind of dismissive hand-wave that the article goes into great length to debunk.
As HL Mencken said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
This is part of the article which really turned me off:
The author goes on the say how the “separate but equal” Boy Scouting and Girl Scouts was the better solution.
The problem is that with the Scouting I was familiar with in the Mormon Church, there was no Girl Scouts and resources went overwhelming to the boys. While the boys went out and did lots of fun things, earned merit badges and went comping frequently, the girls got lessons on how losing their virginity was like making them as attractive as used chewing gum.
The church parted ways with Scouting back in 2020, and accounted for 20% of the total membership. That’s not an insignificant share. My understanding is that a lot of other troops were also sponsored by churches and I question the “separate but equal” status. Certainly, it would depend on the troop, but this article doesn’t address the this at all.
I only read the snippets from the original article, as quoted by the OP, but I immediately got a “Men are from Mars, Women from Venus” vibe. So boys need a role model that is a manly man with a stubble and a growly voice to grow up to become real men, lest they turn effeminate or…?
Hogwash.
I’m gonna put this in spoiler tag, since singing and dancing in a video might feel a bit weird in GD (It’s safe for work).
That is a man who is 100 per cent certain about his manliness. You may say that Dwayne Johnson, former wrestling super star and current movie star has it set. But how many movie stars will do what he does in that video. And it may be that he got as far as he has, due to a tremendous self esteem.
Install self esteem in boys and girls is key. And it doesn’t matter if that gets done by a woman or a man.
As a side note:
This whole thing is very hetero normative. Is the burly, manly man going to be a good role model for someone who’s is realizing he’s gay, Is having a female role model better for a teenage homosexual boy? That’s quite a slippery slope.
Except that gender seems to be baked into human nature. (Has there ever been a human society in which gender didn’t play a significant role?) I don’t think you can “just get rid of gender”; or if you could, people would no longer “be themselves.”
I’m quoting this post mainly to illustrate my personal example. My father was an elementary school teacher, so I grew up with plenty of men in my life who were teachers, at all levels. My father, his friends, uncles, the fathers of my friends, and so on. I had two older cousins in particular who I was eager to learn from. They taught me things like how to play chess, how to do algebra, and a love of cool cars.
On the other hand, none of these men ever taught me a lesson on “how to be a man as opposed to a woman”. The lessons were all about how to be a man as opposed to a boy. I didn’t need any lessons in the former, and I suspect a large majority of boys are similar in that respect.
Something along those lines is basically the top rated comment of any article in the New York Times about any sort of problem men or boys are having. It’s already a reductive and thought terminating cliche and is often used in situations that make no sense. For example, a couple months ago there was an article about basically “Do we start formal education too young these days with kindergarten and is it hurting boys more than girls?” and the sheer vitriol by a number of commenters to literal children was amazing. Like a five year old boy has any privilege or power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/upshot/boys-kindergarten-redshirting.html
I am skeptical of the author’s assertion that some special solution is needed for men and boys relative to women and girls rather than, say, improving society as a whole. To use just one example, the problem with stagnating working class men’s wages isn’t something to be solved by specifically advancing working class men or their sons in our society, but by advancing the working class as a whole in our society.
This article, like too many others of its ilk, seems half a paragraph away from typifying a certain political cartoon I have seen making the rounds lately:
Just replace “foreigner” with “woman”, and you’ve got it.
The problem is American society used to be extremely sexist and racist. And now we’re only partly sexist and racist. And people have two different views of this change.
Let’s say that being a white man used to put you fifty steps ahead of everyone who wasn’t a white man. Growing movements towards equality have changed this and brought other people forward and now being a white man only puts you five steps ahead of everyone who isn’t a white man.
To some white men, this looks like a major setback. They’ve seen their advantage significantly decline. They lost forty-five steps of advantage and are clinging to the remaining five steps. They want sympathy for how their position is worse than it was.
Other people who are not white men don’t see the situation this way. They look at the fact that white men still have a five step advantage over them. They don’t see any reason to give white men sympathy when white men are still ahead of everyone else. They feel that we should be working on getting rid of those remaining five steps of special advantage.
I think this is only part of the story, and the smaller part at that. As the above illustration shows, the bigger problem isn’t that working class white men are now only five (maybe 10 at this point as compared to the before times) steps ahead of say, a Black man. The problem is that the working class white man is now 10,000 steps behind the wealthy white man when they were only 1,000 or 2,000 steps behind the wealthy white man back in the day. Yet they consider those 5 or 10 steps they have on the Black man as being more important than the 10,000 steps (and falling further each day) they give to the wealthy white man. That’s the root of the problem, and why I have less sympathy for their plight than compared to minorities. The various minorities don’t have the power to fix their lack of privilege on their own. The poor / working class white men do have that power, they just refuse to wield it.
QFT.
Men and women have always been different, and will always be different. It is nature, and it is hardwired into us. Conducting experiments and advocating for changes that pretend our differences are solely due to environmental or societal forces will inevitably result in short-lived results, and frustrated participants. Even today it would appear many (most?) heterosexual women desire a man who is a provider and protector, while men tend to value a woman’s virtue over her career ambitions and educational attainment. (Sorry, no cite. Just my observations.)
Exactly. These lessons (on how to be a man as opposed to being a woman) aren’t things that need to be taught. How to be a man vs. a boy / a woman vs. a girl? Yes, that needs to be taught. How to be a non-toxic man vs. a toxic man? Yes, that also needs to be taught. But the differences in gender? Not so much.
@FlikTheBlue MVP in the thread
Over 25 years ago Susan Faludi published Stiffed, about how men were being conned into following traditional manhood while being screwed out of the traditional rewards (loyal sports fans, industrial workers - all just suckers) by the emerging economic system. In a follow up to her earlier book Backlash, the legerdemain employed by the con artists in both books was “blame feminism.”
On top of that, she wrote about how men were forced into new areas of demeaning roles previously imposed mainly on women. She followed the empty life of a male porn star as one example. This purely decorative male would also be featured in Fight Club,” although National Lampoon had already identified it back in the disco era as the “flaming shitheel.”