Tag Archives: Boys

Gilbert, Edmund Scientific, and the Post-War Flowering of American Techno-Industrial Virtuosity, A Pre-Enstupidation View, by Fred Reed

Posted on February 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

Once upon a time kids, particularly boys, played with microscopes and chemistry sets, not iPhones. A fabulous article from Fred Reed at unz.com:

It was 1953 in the white newly prosperous suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, just outside the Yankee Capital. I was eight, having been born, like so many of my small compatriots, nine months and fifteen minutes after our fathers got home from the war. These men, my father anyway, had spent years in the Pacific, being torpedoed at and watching Hellcat fighters screaming off wooden decks, and seeing ships sink. What they wanted now was lawn mowers, lawns, children, and a life as boring as possible. They got them.

We kids did not know that we were at the cusp of an explosion of technological mastery. We were, though. In addition to me there was Michel Duquez, dark-haired, raffish, and of Frog extraction, who would later die fighting for the French Foreign Legion in the Silent Quarter of Arabia. Or if he didn’t, he should have. And there was John Kaminski, or Mincemeat, blond and crewcut, who could spit out of the side of his mouth with casual aplomb the way Humphrey Bogart did, or would have if he had spit much.

American society on North Jefferson Street, and all the burbs for miles around, was everything that today would be thought intolerant or not very inclusive. There was no crime, diversity not yet having become our strength. When we rode our bikes under blue skies, I think the only kind we had then, to the shopping strip at Westover on Washington Boulevard, we could leave the bikes for hours on the sidewalk, or anywhere else, and they would be there when we came back. There were no transgenders. We were little boys and little girls. This seemed to work. For some reason now forgotten, for a year or so we referred disparagingly to each other as “queerbaits.” There were no queers to bait though, and anyway we didn’t know what one was.

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The Four Terrible Things That Are Destroying Boys In Our Culture, by Matt Walsh

Posted on April 15, 2018 | Leave a comment

It’s getting increasingly difficult for boys to emerge from childhood and become responsible men. From Matt Walsh at theburningplatform.com:

Our culture is very bad for boys. It’s bad for girls, too. It’s bad for everyone. But I think we fail to recognize and appreciate the unique struggles that boys face. Partly we fail to recognize it because we are too busy worrying about the Patriarchy’s persecution of women. Partly we fail to recognize it because, collectively, we just don’t care that much about boys. Partly we fail to recognize it because men are not as likely to talk about their own plight. And partly a man will not talk about it because everyone, even his fellow men, will only laugh at him and downplay the problem.

There are many factors at play, and they all lead to a pretty dire situation. Men are told about their privilege, but if you look at things honestly you will not see much evidence of this privilege. On the contrary, you will see several profound disadvantages suffered by men in general and boys in particular.

Here, I think, are the four biggest:

1) Our culture preys relentlessly on a boy’s weaknesses.

Let’s imagine the world the average 13-year-old boy inhabits. He has long since been exposed to hardcore pornography, and probably watches it regularly. Then puberty hits. His hormones are going haywire. His brain is hardwiring itself to focus obsessively on sex. He cannot really help it. He is now fertile, even as the girls his age, for the most part, are not. He feels the biological impulse to go out and find a sexual partner, though he does not understand this urge and his conception of human sexuality has been perverted and confused by the porn habit he developed in sixth grade.

The boy cannot escape sex. It is all over his computer. All over his phone. All over social media. All over the TV. All over the music he listens to. He goes to school and his female classmates are dressed like strippers. He goes anywhere and that’s how the women are dressed. It seems that everyone is doing everything they can to make a degenerate and a creep out of him, even as they demand that he control himself. We ask for self-discipline and self-control from the boy while providing him with no tools to develop them. Rather than tools, we give him temptation. Non-stop temptation, everywhere he goes, all day, every day, right at the moment when his brain is least capable of overcoming it.

To continue reading: The Four Terrible Things That Are Destroying Boys In Our Culture

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It’s Right and Necessary to Let Boys Be Boys, by David French

Posted on March 28, 2018 | 1 comment

Boys will be boys, and when you try to turn them into something else, especially if they don’t have adult male role models, they often end up pretty messed up adults themselves. From David French at nationalreview.com:

What Jordan Peterson understands and Swedish preschools do not

When you spend time with boys and girls, one of the first things you notice is that they’re generally profoundly different. I say generally, of course, because there are exceptions to every human behavioral rule. All girls aren’t the same. All boys aren’t the same. But there are general truths, and those who view the world with honest eyes can see them every day.

I sometimes think back to the week I spent a few years ago chaperoning my daughter’s eighth-grade class trip to Washington, D.C. It was like shepherding two different colonies of humans. There was the girl group — quiet, dutiful, occasionally tearful, but handling their drama via text message and social media. Then there was the boy group, best described as a rolling, nonstop low-level brawl. They were constantly pushing, grabbing, and mocking. One could often discern the best friendships by finding the guys who most aggressively attacked each other, verbally and physically.

The patterns — though less pronounced, since everything is less pronounced outside of middle school — persist throughout life. Boys are stronger than girls. They’re more physically active, less willing to sit still. They’re more aggressive. In many ways, their very nature rebels against the increasing emphasis on order and quiet in American schooling. There is less room for play. There is less room for conflict. There is less room for boys.

At this point, no serious person can argue that boys as a group aren’t facing profound challenges. No recitation of statistics about the composition of boardrooms or the ranks of computer programmers (representing high-achieving outliers) can change the fundamental fact that boys by the millions are falling behind. Boys by the millions are lost. They’re losing ground at school. They’re more than three times as likely to commit suicide. They’re more than twice as likely to die in an opioid overdose. They’re almost seven times as likely to be a victim of gun violence.

To continue reading: It’s Right and Necessary to Let Boys Be Boys

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