The Gathering Resistance to the Stigmatisation of Masculinity. By Hannah Gal.
There is now a growing international movement of men and women dedicated to resisting the anti-masculinity narrative. YouTube channels and podcasts for men and boys such as Order Of Man and The Art Of Manliness boast massive followings and provide a formidable global support network, while prominent dissident academic figures like Camille Paglia have called for greater acceptance of masculinity within society.
Male students are suing their universities for anti-male discrimination, while a growing number of men express their discontent about unfairness in the workplace as women are prioritised in the name of satisfying equality quotas.
Inevitably, parents have become prominent players in this effort. Stories have emerged of parents’ angry letters to schools and petitions. Some have resolved to remove their children from school altogether. Homeschooling is experiencing a steady rise, reaching a staggering 11 percent in the US, and concerned parents have begun to establish action groups such as Parents Defending Education and Bettina Arndt’s Mothers Of Sons initiative.
Dedicated channels have been set up so that individuals can report incidents of boys being shamed at school. These clashes between parents and the educational establishment are no longer relegated to the fringe. When parents discover, for instance, that a school is making their sons face their female peers and apologise on behalf of their sex for crimes of which they are personally innocent, they are understandably angry and are finding ways to express their anger in various online and media fora. In this way, awareness of the systematic stigmatization of masculinity is growing.
This attack on masculinity is not new, but its impact is now facing renewed scrutiny as boys fall behind girls at school, young men drop out of university at an alarming rate, life expectancy for men falls, and suicide remains the number one killer of men under the age of 45. Statistics released yearly paint a grim picture of men’s hidden reality — the Men and Boys Coalition reports that 86 percent of rough sleepers in England are male, as are 95 percent of prisoners, and over two-thirds of murder victims.
“Worldwide, boys are 50 percent less likely than girls to meet basic proficiency in reading, math, and science,” write Warren Farrell and John Gray in The Boy Crisis. “…ADHD is on the rise and as boys become young men, their suicide rates go from equal to girls to six times that of young women … boys are growing up with less-involved fathers and are more likely to drop out of school, drink, do drugs, become delinquent and end up in prison.” Perhaps most devastating is the theory that boys are experiencing a “purpose void,” which leaves them “feeling alienated, withdrawn and addicted to immediate gratification.” …
Over the past few decades, the teaching profession has become increasingly gender-imbalanced — 75.8 percent of teachers in the UK and 75 percent of teachers in the US are female. … The issue arises when normal male traits are disparaged. In schools, rough-and-tumble is discouraged in favour of nurturing and compassion — there is little room for the kind of boyish exploration and adventure celebrated in Ken Jolivet’s Brilliant Bob books. In today’s schools, wrote David French in the National Review, “we love the Earth, we don’t conquer it.” This general sentiment is shared by Christina Hoff Sommers, who argued in a short video for Prager University, that “being a normal boy is a serious liability in today’s classroom.”
Little patience exists for the kind of male disorganisation and restlessness that just two decades ago would have been understood as a normal part of growing up. Quoting psychologist Michael Thompson, Sommers concludes, “girl behaviour is the gold standard in schools, boys are treated like defective girls.”
Look who gets the treatment and become second-class people: First Christians, then males, now whites. Who’s next, heterosexuals?
