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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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> What sorts of institutions offer “second fathers” to young men now? Must it be institutionalized? Can't this be encouraged without some one-sized-fits-all framework? I learned from a lot of guys in church related groups, yet with so much garbage messaging it made me hate myself. Also encountered some very good guys in school, forums, and LAN gaming, and without the religious strings attached.

Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior.”

Institutions encourage “second fatherhood” as a means of passing in the patterns of behavior.

That behavior might be killing opposing militaries, educating future generations, or religious worship.

So I think there’s a strong obvious link between institutions and second fathers.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#212
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#213

This plays out at all levels. I felt extremely insulted just a few days ago when my youngest’s preschool held a gathering to celebrate their “graduation” to pre-school. At least 4 times mothers were called on to step forward— once to have a song sung to them, another to receive a flower, etc. Fathers were not mentioned at all. This prompted me to look around, get a rough sense of the distribution… Counting the kids &…

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 attit…

I don't wanna get into a whole thing, but if you stop to think for maybe 10 seconds, you'd realize that the problems women face (physically, socially, economically ,etc) are incomparably worse than what men face. - How about the fact that in some countries women can't even show their hair, have the right to drive or vote? - How about the fact that women are several times more likely to be sexually assaulted? - How ab…

> are incomparably worse than what men face.

Hummm well i guess i am taking the bait.

> How about the fact that in some countries women can't even show their hair, have the right to drive or vote?

I don't want to diminish the experience of people in other countries. But comparing acros so many different variable muddy the water. If you gonna bring up women in muslim/arab countries (many of which support the hijab btw), then i will raise you the men currently dying in ukraine and what ever war you want to talk about.

Let's focus on the average experience in the US... where we have both enough information and cultural understanding to make good commentary.

> - How about the fact that women are several times more likely to be sexually assaulted?

Something, something prison... And what about the other kind of assaults... like say murder ?

> How about the fact that women have to worry about potential unwanted pregnancy?

Touche on this one. Also i would say that women have more control on when/if they want to be parent as opposed to men. And the 18 year child support can be brutal. (Did you know that child support can't be discharged in bankruptcy court ?)

> How about the fact that abortion laws are being repealed across the United States?

Agree that a travesty.

> How about the glass ceiling and the fact that women are paid less for the same jobs across many industries?

Yeah this one is a rabit hole. But comparing modern data, and normalizing this is much less pronouced. How about the missing men in univestity etc... etc...

> That's not to say that men don't have their own challenges as well, but it's borderline delusional if you think that men and women face the same level of challenges.

This must be an american thing, the weird need to diminish or reduce the experience of a certain group. Life sucks, and sucks for a lot of people accros so many different variable.

I understand the concept that some issue might be more pressing , but to call someone delusional simply for asking the question is not helful at all...

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misandry is normalized in society. Whenever you encounter a baseless attack on men just reverse the roles and you'll realize that there'd be pitchforks for treating women as anything other than paragons of virtue. Entire entertainment genres are built around portraying men as inept fools who can be looked down upon by the opposite sex. Seinfeld is one of the few sitcoms where a female character is as flawed as the me…

> Seinfeld is one of the few sitcoms where a female character is as flawed as the men. You couldn't even do that show today. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Succession? Yellow Jackets? The Righteous Gemstones? Beef? White Lotus? House of The Dragon? You could argue about percentages but it is in fact extremely easy to do a show with flawed female characters today.

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#216
post #44

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.

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,…

You wrote:

>> Previous generations succumbed badly to gender essentialism... and as ever, left a mess for the next generations.

Perhaps previous generations--thousands of them? millions?--realized there's more to gender than blank-slate social constructionism. And the mess is self-created by a younger generation wanting to rebel for want of anything else to rebel against?

See how easy it is to apply ageism in the other direction? /s

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#217
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people do mean it though edit: radicalism is a real thing

> People will say "yes, but it doesn't mean literally kill all men", and of course it doesn't. As an honest question: why “of course it doesn’t”?

Because both sexes are required for the species to survive. Killing all men would mean the end of all women too.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#218
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. ... > toxic masculinity Maybe we could make progress by tabooing words that frame being male as a bad thing?

The term "toxic masculinity" doesn't imply that masculinity is inherently toxic any more than the term "burnt toast" implies that toast is inherently burnt. Toxic masculinity refers specifically to expressing and enforcing masculinity in a way that's harmful (to men as well as women). Teaching boys to epxress masculinity through strength, assertiveness, self-reliance, etc. is totally healthy in moderation. Teaching b…

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#219

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 heard people of any sex say that phrase plenty of times but that’s hardly the quintessential case of male “oppression”, if you can call it that. The scenario described in the article makes more sense, is more common, and has more serious consequences—-ignoring the feeling of boys precisely because they are culturally being forced into a certain toxic mode of masculinity—-and even then, I don’t see why you need to pitch this problem against women as if it’s supposed to be a battle for which gender has experienced oppression worse and historically so. The way that Americans have begun to frame their discussions around gender politics has honestly just gotten derailed and even more stupid since around 2016 or so.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#220

We don't need a critical theory of boyhood, we just need to stop institutionally empowering people who hate their dads. I know many good men, and the defining characteristic of every single one of them is that regardless of who their father was, they accept him, and by extension they accept themselves. If you are still mad at him or have contempt for him, I recommend considering how it's manifesting in your beliefs a…

Err… what? So people with abusive or absent dads should just forgive and love them?

Forgiveness is all about detachment. Forgiveness is not only good for the forgiven, it is good for you, too. If you let hate fester in you, it will incline you toward wrath. Hate the sin and not the sinner. Love and pray for your enemy.

Now, that doesn't mean you should just act as if nothing happened. Actions have consequences, and those consequences should be determined by the gravity of the actions.

"Abuse" is a vague term and often people mean very different things by it. Some people call their father throwing a fit of anger or cussing their kids out about something every now and then "abuse". And then other people use the same term to refer to really diabolical stuff, like child-buggering. With the less serious and more understandable stuff, you should also take into consideration what your father was going through at the time, and how that might have influenced his actions and his judgment. When I got older and began to understand what my father has had to deal with (including me lol), it really made me not care at all about some of the rough-ups we had. So I mean whether or not you should want to patch up the relationship with your father should really be determined by the character of the abuse, the extent of it, the circumstances, et cetera. This should also determine what exactly "patching up" that relationship means - like what kinds of boundaries you set, and so on.

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