That is ridiculous. And contrary to actual occurrences. Not only are boys not encouraged to fight and express violence, caregiver take extra care to suppress these tendencies, often with severe sanction or perhaps more wisely through guidance. Aggression, rule breaking and fighting in young males as an analogy is seen like a cold is in human health, something which will happen, so don’t panic about it, but is not a desirable state of affairs and needs to dealt with when it occurs/avoded.
Pretty much all programs aimed at young boys are designed to get them to control these impulses, from sports, to scouting. If these were “expected” as you state, then people would simply let it flourish.
No.There is one cohort which society rewards for defying convention and that is young to early middle age men. Perhaps not coincidentally, they are also the most expendable cohort in society. For a significant proportion of this cohort,while the risks are high, so is the reward. For women of the same age, the rewards for taking a risk are less and the potential adverse outcomes probably don’t make it worth it.
I’m not going to quibble whether it’s limited to this cohort as you say. Because this happens to be the exact same cohort which does most of the “bad things” that the OP is focused on. So even if you’re correct, it’s a moot point for this thread.
Actually, the line between the two things can be fairly blurry. As Richard Branson’s Headmaster once told him “You will either go to prison or become a millionaire"
No offense taken, but there was a bit more to my point than we need men to invent (and also construct) things. The point was that overall the world has benefitted more by the positive things men have done than by the negative ones. It’s true that mass shooters, airplane hijackers, transexual and homosexual aggressors and wife beaters are almost always men, but in the grand scheme of things their percentage as a percentage of men on the whole is probably insignificant.
In other words, there are approximately 3.5 billion men in the world right now, and of those how many would you say are mass shooters, beaters of transexuals, etc. A very small percentage I would imagine, and whatever wrongdoing they’re involved in is localized and insignificant to all but their immediate victims. And yet how many people are living in large and small cities built by men, occupying buildings put up by men, traveling in cars made by men on roads built by men, and being healed of or treated for ailments and disease because of research and equipment and knowledge developed by men? And how many are good and loving and supportive husbands and fathers who devote much of their lives to the comfort and well-being of their wives and children?
None of this is to say that the violent or stupid things men do because of testosterone or some other motivator is okay and should be accepted and overlooked because it’s obvious that they shouldn’t. But I think it’s important to keep things in perspective and not condemn men as whole as behaving in negative ways that in reality apply to only a few.
I don’t know… I think a lot of what you say backs up Maggie’s point. We expect boys to play football, not girls. It’s violent, but not inappropriately violent. And we don’t ask boys to learn needlepoint do we? No, that’s a girl’s activity. Boys are violent, we all know that, so they shouldn’t sit inside and talk about their feelings. They should be outside practicing aggression. They just shouldn’t be too violent.
And when you get a boy who is totally nonviolent? Maybe he’s gay. And weak. Too intellectual. Definitely a flawed moral character.
As always, I’m impressed with your perspective on things. I’d never encountered this way of looking at it. It makes a lot of sense. As a teacher, it gives me a lot to think about in terms of how I teach and interact with kids. Thanks.
BTW, what do you think is the source of this dichotomy? Is this the way parents and teachers thought, who imposed it on the children? Did the children draw these conclusions themselves (and in response to their own feelings and urges, or to the reaction adults had to them)? Or was it, like a lot of gender role stuff, largely absorbed passively by everyone from the culture at large, even when parents and teachers may have consciously tried to counter it?
Men go to more extremes than women. Nature takes more chances with a male embryo then a female embryo. It tries something, some variation. If it doesn’t work, the chance of continuing that particular male line went from 0,5 to 0. Not a great difference, as during history, half of men did not live long enough to see progeny anyway. But if your variation DOES work, Nature might have created a Djenghis Khan and have hundreds of progeny. Nature takes less risks with a female embryo. Good is good enough. Extreme variations in the traits of a woman will not mean more reproductive success.
Actually women kill their own children at similar rates to men (I think it’s about the same or slightly lower) but 80% of children killed by non-parents are killed by men.
As always, I’m impressed with your perspective on things. I’d never encountered this way of looking at it. It makes a lot of sense. As a teacher, it gives me a lot to think about in terms of how I teach and interact with kids. Thanks.
BTW, what do you think is the source of this dichotomy? Is this the way parents and teachers thought, who imposed it on the children? Did the children draw these conclusions themselves (and in response to their own feelings and urges, or to the reaction adults had to them)? Or was it, like a lot of gender role stuff, largely absorbed passively by everyone from the culture at large, even when parents and teachers may have consciously tried to counter it?
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Thanks
The source or origin of this is something I have notions and ideas about but they’re all interwoven with theories about the origins of patriarchy.
• Think of the girls as having been “sold a bill of goods”, promised (in essence) that if they comport themselves responsibly, they will be viewed as responsible, trusted with responsibilities and, by implication, will be allowed fuller participation in society than those who do not do this successfully. That doesn’t happen, or not very much. What happens is that their obedient and cooperative way of interacting with the social structures around them (like school etc) is convenient, and the girls can be used (given responsibilities) but they don’t get vested with much meaningful authority.
• Think of the children in general as children would consider their own situation. Children often find schools, churches, and other institutions to be oppressive, to be places where they don’t get to do as they please but instead are subjected to a lot of things involuntarily. Some of that is probably intrinsic and inevitable (you can’t entirely liberate children from adult authority, not without the risk of four-year-olds playing in the street and getting hit by cars etc), but the degree to which we disempower children is obvious (to children) as bullshit. The boys are typically NOT being sold that same bill of goods; they get the stick, not the carrot. So that foments rebellion.
• There is a mixed attitude towards rebellious disobedient boy-children, and it becomes more so as they get older. There is real disapproval for their disruptiveness, destructiveness, noise and violence, but there is also a substantial amount of semi-grudging approval and admiration because the rebellious boy is seen as asserting himself.
• Boys like me — nice boys, girlish boys —were also substantially buying into the girls’ “bill of good” deal. To be quite honest, we wanted social power and fell into this trap, thinking that by being well-behaved and good citizens we would be the social leaders as adults. Feminine boys can be sort of snobby about ourselves as moral standouts, good people. We make fine ministers, we do. We get less recognition than the girls when we’re young (because, being male, we are widely perceived as being good out of fear of consequences, as discussed above). When we get older, some of us are (or remain) resentful of girls and women and we can be some really misogynistic shits instead of continuing to feel like we’re in the same boat with the girlfolks.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I identify very much with the things you’ve written here and in other threads about being a “good” boy as a child. I never considered myself feminine or girly, though as I got older I sometimes judged myself negatively as being unmasculine. I also found myself as a child in elementary school feeling more kinship with the well-behaved girls than the rebellious and rambunctious boys. And yes, I was definitely a snob about it. I even went to school to become a minister, though my skeptical and rationalist nature eventually won out. Fortunately I’ve avoided the misogyny trap you mentioned, though I can’t say I feel the same kinship for women (“we’re in the same boat”) that you do or that I did before puberty.
It’s interesting to me that for you, this seems to have become a large part of your identity and how you see yourself, whereas for me, it’s something that, while I’ve been aware of it, never seemed that important. I think (IIRC) that you’ve described the bullying you endured as much worse than what I went through, so it seems possible that had something to do with it, but I do wonder how much of it external vs internal. Would I have been you if I’d grown up in your place? Would you have been me in my place? We can never really know.
The statistic I read stated that when “one” parent of a child was responsible for their death, it was committed by the woman 71% of the time. My point not being that women were more violent than men in this regard, but rather an imbalance of power will favor the stronger one to commit the violence.
When my hormones go out of wack, I am much more likely to make bad choices. Why? Because my emotions tend to get more intense. I get more easily frustrated by simple tasks. I’m more irritable. I’m more sensitive to everything.
My crappy moods then in turn affect my decision-making and the kinds of choices I make. Whereas normally I might not even think about honking my horn at the driver who cuts me off, when I’m feeling “hormonal” it’s a natural reaction. I can normally shrug off negative comments thrown my way. But when I’m PMSing, I’m liable to threaten the person who attempts to bully me with serious physical harm. And I have done this, much to my after-the-fact embarrassment.
Instead of assuming that women are the only ones who get “hormonal”, I think we should start assuming that men do too. And not only that, perhaps we should start wondering if “bad-behaving males” could benefit from hormone therapy. (Taking the birth control pill has really helped me to be a happier, easier-going person).
“It’s choices” is oversimplistic tripe. An individual has only as many choices as his cognition serves up. Since an individual’s cognition is largely a function of their biology, then separating genes from “choices” doesn’t make any sense.
Yes, Camille Pagila is hard lo listen to. But Christina Hoff Sommers says the exact things you do, and provides, I think, a strong validation. There are many talks by her on this subject.
Interestingly, I just recently blogged about that very thing.
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Not too long ago on Facebook, in response to a post about whether other genderqueer folks in the group have moments of self-doubt and a sense of being an imposter who doesn’t really (always) feel the way they’ve described themself, I posted that I’ve been all over the map between “I’m sure all males experience themselves as inaccurately & inadequately described by the sexist reductionistic descriptions, I’m just more vocal about it” through “I am definitely more like a girl than I am like the other boys, so that’s one more difference in addition to being left-handed and having eyes of two different colors” all the way to “I am a girl; this is a really fundamental part of my identity and explains my life far better than any other thing, I am Different with a capital D and this is the Difference”.
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A series of events in college when I was 20 going on 21, mostly having to do with sexual orientation, brought it to a head for me, more than the childhood harassment you asked about.
For years I’d known I was attracted to girls, and that certainly gave me a lot in common with other males. But things kept not working out (cue up the “Nice Boys” theme music here, complete with some resentful sourness). Still a virgin at 20 and facing a lot of assumptions about my sexual orientation. Mostly tolerantly warm assumptions, not hostile ones.
I came to realize that
• I was having a difficult time of it being a functioning heterosexual guy because I didn’t tend to do the things you’re supposed to do & expected to do to make things happen; and
• The more I felt pressured by my situation to behave more that way, the more I realized I didn’t want to, that wasn’t me. And the people who were making those fairly friendly tolerant assumptions about my sexuality? Because of my personality and behavior. As Amateur Barbariansaid very recently in a concurrent thread, feminine guys are assumed to be gay. And I realized that in every way except wanting to get up close and personal with male bodies, they were right about me. I was different, just as different as gay guys.
• But it was something else. More like transsexuals (I read about them and got excited about what I was reading, but I didn’t feel like my BODY was wrong)
I think our experiences shape us, and then we bring who we are into the next context which in turn shapes what kind of experienced we’re going to have.
I don’t get to see and recognize and connect with very many male folks who say “oh me too, you sound like me”, so I really appreciate you saying so. I’m used to being an outlier but it’s nice to not always be such a total Martian if you know what I mean.
Now, slow down there a moment! I didn’t say anything about “should”. That’s the way we are, and we are that way because of how we evolved, and we evolved as we did because of the conditions we’ve lived under. You can maybe say that, under the conditions we did most of our evolving under, that that’s the way we “should have” been (at least, it’s something that worked).
But conditions nowadays are not the same as they were for most of our evolution. There are very, very few truly risky jobs any more, and those that are don’t need very many people filling them. We have the luxury now of considering neither gender expendable, and once you put the genders on equal footing in terms of value in that way, there are a lot of other gender distinctions that become irrelevant. So, yes, there are more men driven to be senators and stars and Nobel laureates, but maybe there should be equal numbers of women.
Having personally witnessed innumerable times the effect testosterone has on transgender men, it’s really prima facie obvious to me why physically aggressive actions are much more the domain of men. The aggressiveness, the fighting, the one-upmanship, the surge in libido…yeah, it’s all there.
And how do you manage that? And if individuals are what is considered the fundamental unit of society why do or should we care about group outcomes? I get no benefit from another male taking a particular job. Matter of fact we are competing for that job and resources and mates etc.
