Boys are bad. Read it until you believe it. – A letter to the boys & young men of America. – J. Ishiro Finney
“Guns don’t kill people; men and boys kill people, experts say”
-USA TODAY“Michael Ian Black reacts to Florida shooting: Boys are broken”
-New York Daily News“How Gun Violence And Toxic Masculinity Are Linked, In 8 Tweets”
-The Huffington Post“Toxic white masculinity: The killer that haunts American life”
-Salon“Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us”
-The Boston Globe“Toxic Masculinity Is Killing Us”
-Harpers Bazaar“Don’t Blame Mental Illness for Mass Shootings; Blame Men”
-Politico
….
So here we are, coming close to fifty years of single mothers raising their boys as if they were animals. Two generations of young men raised to believe they’re broken, immoral, and dangerous. That their natural state, if left unchecked and unmedicated, is a sexual ticking time bomb of rape and abuse. Half a century of academia peddling a grim version of history that holds your gender personally responsible for all the wrongs ever to have happened in the world. And a press, that at this very moment, is blaming YOU for every school shooting to have ever occurred.
After all this, how could there not be a crisis of masculinity?
How could there not be? Could men possibly have any redeeming value?
Seems like a good time to plug Helen Smith’s book: Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters
I was surprised to read this part:
“As an aging Gen Xer watching this tragedy unfold, I can’t help but look back at my youth and realize we were the dry run for this “crisis of masculinity” as the media likes to call it. … Like you, I was taught male behavior was bad behavior. That I was broken and needed to be fixed. Drugs, therapy, mass socialization were required to save me from my most innate instincts——the need compete.
—the drive to create.
—the urge to protect.
—the desire for female affection.
Like you, I was told these instincts were not only wrong, but dangerous. That due to my Original Sin of being born a boy, I was destined to mature into a lustful monster and an oppressor of women. All this was burned into me before I even reached college, where campus policy actually assumed all men to be rapists waiting to happen.”
I’m an aging Gen-Xer myself, and I don’t remember any of this when I was going through school. I went to school in Boulder from 5th through 12th grade, and I went to CSU from ’88 through ’93. The only thing that remotely sounded like this to me was when I got to college, hearing through the campus newspaper (The Collegian) that women’s studies professors of the time were claiming “sex is rape” (of women). I had never heard something so dumb in my life, and I immediately brushed it off as the rantings of kooks. Heck, the women’s side of dorms were so “busy,” I used to sometimes hear women complain that they couldn’t get much sleep because of the noise next door. These were not rapes, and none of them would’ve thought they were. The whole concept of “mattress girl” was non-existent then, though it started coming to prominence in the late ’90s with men being accused of rape when they thought it was consensual.
Other than that, I didn’t hear about the “toxicity” of masculinity in school. It was around in the culture while I was growing up, kind of in the air. Some of my mom’s friends had an anti-male attitude, one she didn’t always appreciate. We used to sometimes hear female political pundits say, “We wouldn’t have any wars if women were in charge.” So, yeah, I heard this sort of thing for years, but it was occasional, and I certainly wasn’t force-fed it growing up. I thought that was only a trend of the last 20 years.