When Boys Aren't Allowed to Be (Updated and Bumped)

The basic philosophy of feminism is not to support what is unique to women, but to instead tear down men, while forcing its twisted view of masculinity onto women. Feminism seeks to force women to be men, and men to be women.

A couple articles mentioned by Glenn Reynolds on the War on Men.

Sarah Hoyt muses on what happens to boys when you force them to be girls:

... when it comes to the relationship between men and women, it is marked by the fact that they outweigh us, out-lift us and out-run us.  We can outlast them both in effort and in longevity, for what consolation that’s worth.  BUT physically they’re stronger than us, even at the same size.  (I had a moment of shock when my then 11 year old son, who was still shorter and slimmer than I, could easily lift 100 pounds in a dead lift which I couldn’t do.) 

This means in interactions between men and women – as adults and partners – men must modulate their strength and women must find non-physical ways of projecting theirs.  We see women doing this as far back as pre-history.  The wise counselor.  The advisor.  It’s in all our legends and quite a few of our histories.  The man goes home and consults with his wife. 

I’d say our “civilization” – our road to being human – started when hominid males decided to court women rather than simply overpowering them. 

... But… women don’t understand this. 

... there is a group of women, we’ll call them “the sob sisters” who are really really dumb about this.  They either view men as a sort of hairier woman with a penis, or they wish he were so.  ... 

... They don’t understand that the decision to court rather than rape is built in very deeply in a man’s psyche, layered by thousands of years of evolution and – yes – sexual conditioning.  It is a gentleness born of strength.  Men who know themselves to be stronger than any woman they want, discipline themselves to go slowly, to court her.
Even in the most primitive tribes, rituals are instituted to bend men into this civilized mold.  Because when the mold is broken, the result is that men abuse women, women abuse children, and the world goes to hell. 

The sob sisters don’t get this.  They are gentle because they’re weak and this forces them into being gentle.  Hell hath no fury and ability to oppress as one of these weak, die-away sisters given some power, but every woman here will know what I’m talking about, because sooner or later you find yourself fin a group where one of these has got the bit between their teeth.  Their power is mostly gossip and back stabbing and unbelievable psychological abuse, but they use it to the hilt. 

Which is why they think that if men aren’t using their superior strength, it must be because they’re weak, and the “solution” to society (they nurse in their black little hearts the hope of not just making women equal but reversing society and having women do all the masculine jobs and men do the feminine ones.  It’s nuttiness) is to raise men to be weak and not to know their own strength.  Hence the entire “rise of the sensitive male.”
The problem is this – you don’t reverse evolution in two generations. ... 

... yes, boys can be taught to act weak and much like the sob sisters.  The problem is they aren’t.  Not even when they’re raised to act that way. 

The end result is that they don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it. 

Men who have only been taught to “act sensitive” but have no other discipline, no other moral, no other idea of what it means to be a man, will in fact hoist the pirate flag.
Whenever a memoir surfaces from the sixties, the thing that always strikes me is how these men who were considered champions of women were in fact nasty little petulant creatures, taking advantage as much as possible.  Say, the story of Ayers raping a girl and then making her sleep with someone she had no interest in, by bullying her with the idea that not to do so would be unenlightened. 

I often think that the people now controlling education were women who went through this, and therefore want to stop boys from being… well boys.  But what they’re doing in fact is creating more sociopathic males who will act as you want them to, but will take as much advantage as possible.

 Turning to a more specific example, is this interview at the National Review with Christina Hoff Sommers, who comments about how our education system is stacked against boys:

But boys and young men have been massively neglected. Women in the U.S. today earn 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 52 percent of doctorates. When an education-policy analyst looked at current trends in higher education he quipped, only half in jest, “The last male will graduate from college in 2068.” 

Let’s face it, boys are different from girls. As a group, boys are noisy, rowdy, and hard to manage. Many are messy and disorganized, and won’t sit still. They tend to like action, risk, and competition. When researchers asked a sample of boys why they did not spend a lot of time talking about their problems, most of them said it was “weird” and a waste of time. 

Today’s classrooms tend to be feelings-centered, risk-averse, competition-free, and sedentary. As early as pre-school and kindergarten, boys can be punished for behaving like boys. The characteristic play of young males is “rough-and-tumble” play. There is no known society where little boys fail to evince this behavior (girls do it too, but far less). In many schools, rough –and-tumble play is no longer tolerated. Well-meaning but intolerant adults are insisting “tug of war” be changed to “tug of peace”; games such as tag are being replaced with “circle of friends” — in which no one is ever out. Boys as young as five or six can be suspended for playing cops and robbers. Our schools have become hostile environments for most boys.

She also notes that it is unlikely that Congress would do anything to rectify the situation, such as some other countries have begun to do:

A “Success for Boys” campaign would face furious opposition in the U.S. Congress. Legislators would receive an avalanche of protesting faxes, e-mails, petitions, and phone calls from women’s groups accusing them of taking part in a “backlash” maneuver against women and girls.

And so the house of cards will tumble down.

Updated Sept. 9, 2013: An article discussing MSNBC's attack dogs criticizing Ms. Sommers, and an article Ms. Sommers published at the Atlantic.

(h/t Instapundit).