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Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#111

Post by Viliam1234 »

GolfPopper wrote: post #84
red_admiral wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baden-Powell famously said "A boy is not a sitting-down animal." One might dislike a lot of other things about the man, but he got this one right.

I am not a behavioral psychologist, but both the above posters' comments seem more appropriate as a general critique of America's factory schooling model than how it treats young males specifically. I have a niece and nephew who are being home-schooled (both testing in the top 10% of their respective peer before and after moving to home schooling). While their home schooling encompasses quite a bit more, they cover t…

The factory schooling is not an exclusively American thing. But I agree that sitting the whole day is not necessary to getting education. You can also discuss things while walking outside, or allow kids to walk from desk to desk and observe what their classmates are doing.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#112

Post by lovemenot »

akomtu wrote: post #90
caditinpiscinam wrote: post #29

As a black guy I don't remember a friend ever saying "black people suck" to my face. But I've heard people I'm close with, both women and men, say that "men suck" countless times. I think a lot of people who don't see themselves as "biased" still carry a lot of bias when it comes to gender, and it has an impact.

[flagged]

No need to posit a conspiracy. Why not just refute those premises you disagree with?

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#113

Post by veave »

davidguetta wrote: post #108
hkt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. When my kid was young and I was out with him the other parents (invariably women) treated me as an oddity and assumed I would be incompetent. Yet, many don't like the fact they're saddled with the majority of childrearing. Dating is much the same: the majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity. This gets better as one gets older,…

> majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity This is so insane. Anyone who's been enough a player of the dating game and treed to optimise your strategy known you will end up becoming or (in my case) pretending to be "toxic masculinity" because it work so much more on girls.

Gee, it's almost as if women were biologically programmed to like powerful men and "toxic masculinity" was just an invention to denigrate men for being men.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#114

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

rubicon33 wrote: post #25
rich_sasha wrote: post #12

My impression is, men are stuck in a world where they are told not to be men. Toxic masculinity is perhaps a thing, but boys are told endlessly how they shouldn't behave and how their nature is flawed. Girls on the other hand, all is well.

I think it actually is far deeper than that. I believe our entire school system is setup to offer success to women, and failure to boys. Take as one point the fact that boys brains develop slower and later into life than women. Should then boys be competing against women of the same age given what we know? Take as another point the decline in physical activity in schools and the reduction is recess time. Does this ne…

> I believe our entire school system is setup to offer success to women, and failure to boys.

And that's why most entrepreneurs/successful people are men. System was rough to them since the start, putting them down during every occasion and most boys have learnt how to stand up back on their feet again since early age. The system offered them failure and gave them resiliency.

Girls were carried around and when real life come around and they fall down, they now have no idea how to get back up.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#115

Post by gemstones »

Timon3 wrote: post #71
tivert wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Girls on the other hand, all is well. > This is also far from the case. Yes, all is not well with girls, but I don't think they have to deal with an analog of the condemnation of "toxic masculinity" and messages that "their nature is flawed." I believe their problems are frequently blamed on external actors (e.g. beauty magazines, social media, etc).

I think you're gravely misunderstanding the concept of toxic masculinity. It's good that we condemn it, because it directly hurts boys . Toxic masculinity isn't a description of masculinity itself, it's about parts of the social image of masculinity that are toxic. Stuff like "boys shouldn't cry" or "boys should suck up their problems and not talk about them". You don't improve boys' emotional needs by resuming this…

If you want a term to be used the right way, it helps to pick a term that won’t be immediately confused to mean something else.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#116

Post by api »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #114
rubicon33 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it actually is far deeper than that. I believe our entire school system is setup to offer success to women, and failure to boys. Take as one point the fact that boys brains develop slower and later into life than women. Should then boys be competing against women of the same age given what we know? Take as another point the decline in physical activity in schools and the reduction is recess time. Does this ne…

> I believe our entire school system is setup to offer success to women, and failure to boys. And that's why most entrepreneurs/successful people are men. System was rough to them since the start, putting them down during every occasion and most boys have learnt how to stand up back on their feet again since early age. The system offered them failure and gave them resiliency. Girls were carried around and when real l…

I can’t tell if this is a troll or serious.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#117

Post by Gibbon1 »

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #29

As a black guy I don't remember a friend ever saying "black people suck" to my face. But I've heard people I'm close with, both women and men, say that "men suck" countless times. I think a lot of people who don't see themselves as "biased" still carry a lot of bias when it comes to gender, and it has an impact.

I've come around to replace 'insert group name' with the word Jews and see how it sounds.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#118

Post by pyuser583 »

underlipton wrote: post #92
jl6 wrote: post #11

> New research shows that when fathers are present and emotionally invested in children’s lives, they are more likely to develop a stronger sense of self-worth and excel in everything from school to relationships. Regardless of the debate on how tough (or not) love should be, the absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful that we should be trying to address.

Without evidence, I'll suggest that this is an oversimplification. In a model where boys require masculine modeling from older, adult figures, "absent fathers" are most an issue when a boy's regularly-accessible social unit has been whittled down to the nuclear family. That seems to be a crisis in-and-of-itself. When I look at socially-successful men, they often have had multiple older men in their lives to model the…

It isn’t either/or. It’s cumulative.

Joseph Campbell emphasized the idea of the “second father.” A mentor who takes a young man further than his father can.

A father has to love you, but the second fathers love has to be earned. Think NCOs in the military, coaches, sensais in martial arts.

We aren’t just missing fathers, we’re missing second fathers.

Not many people would describe a gunny sergeant, or football coach, or the guy who runs the local Karate America as a second father.

If you include foremen, clergy, and union bosses as second fathers, a man living in 1960 could expect to spend his entire life under the tutelage of second fathers.

Traditionally masculine institutions like the military, workplace, and churches have renounced their “second family” status, and tried desperately to feminize to appeal to women.

What sorts of institutions offer “second fathers” to young men now? Predatory ones, like far-right groups. And some sports.

Edit: there are plenty of institutions that market themselves as second families - tech companies for example. But they tend to eschew masculine gender roles.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#119

Post by Panzer04 »

klik99 wrote: post #85
caditinpiscinam wrote: post #29

As a black guy I don't remember a friend ever saying "black people suck" to my face. But I've heard people I'm close with, both women and men, say that "men suck" countless times. I think a lot of people who don't see themselves as "biased" still carry a lot of bias when it comes to gender, and it has an impact.

Yeah exactly. I let this kind of thing slide because obviously the problems facing minorities/women as groups are far worse than the problems facing men as a group, but just shifting the conversation from "I think group A of people is the problem" to "I think group B of people is the problem" is creating downstream problems. And there are very real issues facing men - suicide rates are dramatic enough to indicate tha…

What makes you say the problems facing people other than man are far worse? I'm genuinely curious, because often conversation around these topics will go along the lines of "well, women have to worry about getting beaten up" (or (sexually) assaulted, etc), but men have problems too!

The above attitude I feel like minimises men's problems - the implicit assumption is that everyone else has it worse, whether that attitude was intended or not.

I've done literally no research into the problems these groups face comparatively, but I find it interesting that above case is usually assumed.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#120

Post by hellotomyrars »

joemazerino wrote: post #20

The reality of the world dictates that men require a smidgen of "toxic masculinity" to power through. Try telling a sewer cleaner to feel more, or share his feelings. He instead should embolden himself and power through it.

I’ve been knee deep in everything people flush down a toilet and more fixing a broke sewage lift station. I deal with human bodily fluids in my work all the time, as do many women in the same field (medical) Shit and piss and puke and pus.

That doesn’t mean I’m a robot without feeling. Doing your job isn’t “toxically masculine”.

Growing up I was raised in all the bullshit about not crying or never appearing “weak”. It turns out bottling all your emotions isn’t a super healthy thing. Even worse when you don’t gain the meaningful perspective of understanding the implications of them because you’re conditioned to pretend to ignore them.

Men are emotional creatures whether some of them want to admit it or not because they’re human.

Cleaning human shit for a living or part of your living doesn’t change that no matter who you are.

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