Quote:
I spent years teaching girls to be brave, not perfect. But I barely considered how we need to teach boys to be soft, not just stoic. To connect, not control. To imagine a version of manhood where strength requires empathy, vulnerability, and care.
While we were pushing our girls forward, we were leaving our boys behind. And now, they're struggling.
Boys and men are less likely to turn to their communities for social connection and support. Less likely to go to college. More likely to die by suicide or overdose. Too often, instead of being met with care, they've been manipulated and handed division. Not just by podcast bros, but by a government that's actively stoking the divide for their own political gain.
...
And while we've been distracted, our boys have been searching for connection and finding it in the worst places. Small men with loud voices who hold court over internet echo chambers, like Andrew Tate, offer them simplistic answers for all of their complicated fears and insecurities. Man up. Toughen up. Win at all costs. And those answers are harming boys and men. We failed to offer them belonging, so they're grappling for control.
This would all be funny if it weren't so tone deaf...
Boys weren't being left behind, they were being actively pushed out of the way. Even worse, they were being shamed and told they were the source of all the world's problems. There is no shortage of feminists, especially in academia, who continue to push the idea of "toxic masculinity" and that men and boys are irredeemable, violent misogynists who need be fixed by women. Even in this essay, we hear about how boys and men need to be taught and shaped into the feminist idea of what manhood is, as if women know more about being a man than men. We hear about how instead of being met with care, young men face manipulation.
But what does this author think she's advocating for two paragraphs before? "We need to teach them..." What she really means is, "They don't face
the right kind of manipulation."
And it's not the ***holes like Andrew Tate who have been telling young men to man up, toughen up, and win at all costs; It's the feminists. Bring up things like social disconnection, lower college graduation rates, or higher suicide and overdose rates in any feminist setting and you're immediately labeled a misogynistic incel who's trying to minimize and repress women. These are men's problems and men just need to deal with them themselves because women have enough to worry about. So what if women are given more opportunity and support? Men should just work harder and do more. That's the general feminist attitude. It's not one of distraction, but outright derision. It's not that feminism has been too focused on girls, it's that it has turned into outright disdain and hatred for masculinity. It isn't ignoring young men so much as it is telling them to GTFO and getting upset when they do. No one should be surprised when young men turn to ***holes like Andrew Tate who say, "**** women. They don't give a **** about you, so why give a **** about them? There's nothing wrong with you. Be selfish, take whatever you want, and don't care what anyone else thinks."
It should come as no shock that telling an entire generation of young men that they're lesser and need to take a backseat and suffer in silence will drive them to resentment and a rejection of everything they see as feminism. The Andrew Tates of the world don't exist as a consequence of
men, but of
women. Women created the completely unrealistic and toxic girl boss trope as an example for young girls to aspire to (looking at you especially, Disney). Inevitably young men would eventually find its equally unrealistic and toxic male doppelganger. . So women unwittingly created their worst nightmares, pushed a generation of men towards them, and now cry about the results. Unsurprisingly, they won't want to take an ounce of responsibility for any of this. Feminism treats men and boys with dismissiveness at best and hostility and derision at worst, but it's the fault of men and boys for mirroring that same attitude back at women. It's the fault of the new bogeyman du jour, "the manosphere."
Some will say, "But she's taking responsibility right here!" but she's not. Instead of recognizing and acknowledging the underlying problem of how young men are demonized and have been the subject of decades of feminist derision and division, she begins and ends with the notion that boys are an inherent problem and a project and answering to be worked on. It's not enough to acknowledge the problems that young men face, taking responsibility requires acknowledging womens' roles in creating and fostering those problems. She talks about boys needing to be taught, "to connect, not control," as if they're broken and that control, not connection, is their natural tendency, but she's doing it in the context of advocating for control, not connection. Boys need to have manhood explained to them by women, not treated as equals and listened to. Far from taking responsibility, this piece is a condescending self-contradiction that says, "Our ideas aren't bad, we just haven't practiced them hard enough."
