The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future

[19 March 2009]

If men were a product, the marketplace is saying it’s outlived its shelf life. Author Guy Garcia considers how to reshape men to fit the modern world in The Decline of Men.

By Derek Beres

“I didn’t mean to write a negative book,” Guy Garcia tells me. “Because I’m not a negative person. The book was not meant to sound that way, even though I can see it being perceived as such.” It’s tough to imagine this was not his intention, given the title of his latest work, The Decline of Men. Yet given Garcia’s general positive outlook, not to mention the hopeful tidbits he concludes this book with, I wouldn’t call it negative, either. Even so, the path to uplifting one’s self often involves treacherous roads, and the author is not afraid to walk down those dark paths to shed some light on the situation.

His main concern is one of timing. The past few months have seen a cultural deflation in the masculinity of our times—the economic figureheads ruling over our financial and automobile industries, predominantly male, have all gone limp. Given how much the media is focused on the negative—not surprising, but the current deluge is truly special in terms of bleakness—sifting through the rubbish for something hopeful is challenging. Garcia doesn’t want to be pigeonholed into this trend, and given the strength of his fourth book, he’s not … if one can get past the title, and understand that a deeper truth waits.

cover art

The Decline of Men

Guy Garcia

(HarperCollins)

 Amazon

The book kicks off on a positive note, standing in Black Rock Desert at America’s premier mythological ritualistic gathering, Burning Man. The author is standing under a giant sign with the single word “TRUTH” erected in the middle of the playa in 2007. The moon is rising, Garcia is under the influence of 50,000 like-minded culture-benders seeking a community that can only exist miles from civilization in a wide open stretch of land that happens to be the victim of incessant, blaring sandstorms and, for one week every year, a few million tons of diesel and endless splays of fire conducted by an orchestra of the world’s most courageous spirits. It was here the book was solidified. The truth came forth.

Perhaps I feel invested in this scene because I was standing next to Garcia at the moment of conception, our clothing drenched in fine white dust, our minds affixed on the meaning of this ambiguous sign while men and women driving caterpillars and ducks drove by us, screaming whatever it is one screams in the midst of such a beautiful fury. And yet I feel invested for a far more personal reason, because this book is not just about me, it’s not even just about the people who share my gender. It’s a book that’s relevant to so many things it would be impossible to decipher it all in one simple review. It’s a book tailor-made for our times, a clarion call announcing the decline of men, and in that fateful process, the balancing of humanity. We will get to that point. First, some facts.

Women are being educated far more broadly and widely than men, predominantly of their own drives and ambition. Besides, on average, reading twice as many books, 53 percent of women in New York are college grads, while 38 percent of males claim the same. Over the past quarter-century, the number of female undergrads in the country has grown twice as fast as males. By 2006, there were over two million more women on all US college campuses than men, and the gap is widening. And the focus of their degrees has shifted—half of all business degrees are now handed to women, and they have made a serious impact in previously male-dominated fields, including biology, history, psychology, and social sciences.

And yet this is not the overall gist of the male decline—while that is catchy phrasing, it might be better put: the shifting of men. This is in no way a book about statistically comparing men and women, although that is involved. The general shift of American society, from business dealings to household dealings to political dealings, mimics those aforementioned college numbers; women are calling the shots in ways previously unavailable. Such trends shift cultural focus: who American are as individuals and communities. Garcia, a former Time magazine staff writer, stays on the pulse of what, exactly, that means. Recently he picked out an interesting trend in magazine publishing that sets the tone for his book, as he told me:

“There’s a huge shift in not only Time Inc.’s focus—and their audience, which is their revenue focus—but even the kinds of titles that seem to be moving the needles. More women are editors than ever before. I’d been noticing a general drift in the media towards things anti-male, like talking about the ‘man date,’ which was just two guys going out to dinner. And it thought, hmm, didn’t that just used to be two friends having dinner? There was this insinuation that something sketchy was going on. Men were being battered about not being sensitive enough, and yet when they deviated in the slightest way from this more traditional idea of masculinity, they were getting battered in a different way, often from the same women.”

Thus, the seeds of his latest project were planted. Time Warner’s focus on People and InStyle, among others, clued Garcia to the fact that the general population was being socially educated in a much different manner than when he sat in those offices. If one of the world’s largest media entities was shifting its focus from international politics to Brangelina and Britney’s baldhead, what was that saying about the cultural awareness of America’s national consciousness? The companies go where the money goes; Garcia followed the trends, and found some startling information along the way.

The underlying foundation of this work is not boardroom stats or pop culture, however. It is the formation of identity, something equally affecting both genders. Forget the patriarchal hunter-gatherer motif—he writes, “It follows that women, who on the prehistoric savannah depended on building social networks and alliances with other males and females to ensure the well-being and protection of their children, would develop brains that are particularly well-suited for communication and empathic connection”—because we’ve moved into an age where the communication skills of the Age of Technology is more relevant than the muscle power of the Industrial Age. This, he says, is not anything new in our culture.

“Western culture, at its core, has either suppressed, denied, or turned on the feminine, i.e. Mother Nature,” he says, “Nature has been objectified far more widely, deeply, and profoundly than viewing women as sex factors. The male attitude looked at the earth as something that can be used, dominated, destroyed for profit. So I tap into this large, almost cosmological understanding that we have become detached from that, and maybe we’ve reached the end of that cycle. I have come across certain predications, as in the Inca prophecies, as this being a time for a return to the goddess.”

To drive this point home, he forwards me a link from the UK newspaper The Independent, titled “It’s Official: Men really are the weaker sex.”  Turns out that recent scientific research has showed that all male species—from caterpillars and elephants right down to Joe the Plumber—is being evolutionarily feminized, with smaller genitals, as well as suffering from irreversibly damaging effects that numerous pollutants have left on the potency and effectiveness of sperm. Our creations are writing us out of history, one emaciated sperm cell at a time!

This is big picture thinking, of course, and yet it affects our smallest and most subtle daily realities. The way of the world is the way of human beings, for we are part of the world, and the trends of the planet are our trends—interconnectedness, as many Asian philosophies have defined it. Garcia taps into this wisdom, calling out the shift in gender equality as really being a leveling of the playing field—a cosmological shifting by the heavy hand of Libra.

“As women have moved into every realm that used to be dominated by men,” he says, “this has brought a lot of tension in their relationships. If men were a product, the marketplace is saying it’s outlived its shelf life. The traditional version is not in demand, at least in the way it used to be, and those skills and attitudes are out of synch with the cultural, social, and economic reality of our times, and nothing has replaced it. As a result, what you see in the culture, men have retreated into the most visible, and extreme, and most reassuring modes of masculinity. So what you have is guys of every stripe and socio-economic and racial category, they bulk up, they become aggressive and predatory in their sexual relationships, they become homophobic—bulking up in every sense. It’s a coping mechanism for the sense that men have lost real power, direction, their will to succeed, their drive, their ambition, compared to both women and simply to themselves.”

How then do men, as Garcia puts it, turn “away from caricature and towards character?” How do we overcome our “obsession with externality”? one highlighted in ultimate death matches and extreme survival television, not to mention the recurrent echoes of the infamous Fight Club mentality—how do men move away from their masochistic trials of manhood—and emerge as an integral part of the society that they are a part of? Is this even possible?

Let’s return to the traditional image of the hunter-gatherer: man goes out, slays wild beast, and brings back food for village. Woman stays home, cleans the yard, bears children, and offers sex to strong male. Yet as Jared Diamond and others have shown, while males on the hunt offered big returns in terms of protein and sustenance, those results were few and far between; one big catch a month was often average.

Women, on the other hand, with their foraging and planting skills (agriculture has been around for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years; the romanticized “ten thousand” involves planting rows and rows of one crop), fed the village for the other 30 days. As stated, as we moved away from an industrial-based culture to a technologically driven one, muscle power gave way to the ability to talk to one another. He writes, “The classic male virtues—physical strength, aggression, self-sufficiency, resolve—that were so useful in agrarian and industrial societies, are increasingly out of date in a postmodern world where networking, cooperation, and communication are key.”

This cultural “manopause” does not mean that women are merely filling in the gaps. They are, by and large, forging new paths. Never before in (post-Columbus) American history has their been more single than married women. “Traditional” households, comprised of a heterosexual married couple with or without children, declined from 40 percent in 1970 to 23 percent in 2003.

This growing sense of independence has not always been for the best, however: in America, girls account for a quarter of all violent crimes committed by adolescents (including those with firearms), and in Britain and Scotland, violent crimes by females have increased by 50 percent over the past four years. And in our most recent war, the American government has deployed 160,000 women to Iraq and Afghanistan. In the first Gulf war, that number was 41,000; in Vietnam, 7,500.

Garcia speculates that all this helps to result in omerta, the male’s inability to discuss his feelings. Thus, it comes out in strange ways: the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported that of all breasts reduction surgeries in 2006, 70 percent were on boys aged 13 to 19. This helps to create “disidentification”, the coping device that “reduces the pain of failure by lowering the stakes of success.” Hence, the vicious cycle of uncertainty and confusion, which leads to aggression, confusion, and misogyny.

One example Garcia uses for this is the infamous Ken doll, who, he writes, “From the beginning, he had been an accessory.” Ouch. Yet, paraphrasing the sign in the desert, TRUE. And where is the hope in all this, that which we started this discussion with? It begins with transformation, or, in Garcia’s words, “those who put their bets on the ability of man- and womankind to transcend biological fate and reach for something higher.”

It begins with a psychological shift in who we are as a species, what are aims and goals are as a collective of societies and nations. Quoting David Loftus, “We were given language to describe strength in terms of physical achievement, victory in terms of sports and war, manhood in terms of violence; but we did not learn—nor did we often seek—a language to describe strength in terms of patience, victory in terms of conquering fear (of intimacy, for example), manhood in terms of loving a child, a sibling, a parent, a spouse.”

By openly discussing male vulnerability—something hard to come by in a culture where the male is often pointed out as the harbinger of the world’s ails, from corporate domination to single motherhood—Garcia wants to see an end to omerta, to open the podium for us of the Y chromosome to once and for all open our hearts.

In order to heal the “emotionally crippled young men,” adolescents and teens growing up in single parent homes, or those whose sense of self-worth is being defined through the illusions fostered by video games and underwear ads, we need to transcend the old images of the hunter-gatherer being the sole provider who, because of this icon, believes that he has an inborn right to dominance. That mythology is truly a myth.

Guy Garcia

Guy Garcia

No, better to replace it all with a sustainable mythology, those ecological and communal tales that were told to bring people together, not to elevate a certain few above their kin and kind. Part of it, Garcia concludes, is realizing both what we can achieve, and defining who we are not: “Men are not responsible for every single ill in the world. They are not contemptible, disposable, or unnecessary. The man-bashing and passive-aggressive rhetoric of the gender wars, which increasingly sounds like the worn-out polemics of a by-gone era, no longer defines the real struggle that females now face: how to lead America and the rest of the world to a revival of cooperation, responsibility, and hope.”

Ah, so there it is: hope. Pandora was nothing without it. Garcia’s meditation on the masculine is insightful and powerful, and comes at a necessary time. Even though the path it takes is often one through darkness—its Jackass-focused commentary and sweeping generalisms may at times infuriate the overly sensitive soul—there is light at the end of his tunnel. Like any match, though, it depends on what we do with it: whether we light the sky to burn the flames of ignorance, or simply see how long it will trail down the wick before scorching our skin.

 
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Derek Beres is the author of five books, including Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music, an insightful gaze into the new world mythology being created by global electronica, and the novel, Mysterious Distance. His photojournalism has appeared in dozens of magazines, focused on the international music scene. He is also a NY-based yoga instructor, as well as DJ and producer in EarthRise SoundSystem.

Comments

I’m going to have to check this book out! “The Last American Man” by Elizabeth Gilbert is also a fantastic book that brings up the subject of how modern boys in America become men, looking at the traditional rituals that developed post-colonialization and now can no longer be fulfilled due to the increasingly overcrowded population.

Oh, and when I was reading the description of Burning Man, I was quite impressed with the accuracy. I thought that FINALLY…SOMEONE had actually done their research about the event before including it in an article. Next paragraph, it turns out that you are a Burner. Go figure. :)

Comment by Brendan from San Diego — April 6, 2009 @ 10:38 pm

Even if Males would like to change, society will not allow them.  Society will continue to heap aggression and neglect upon them to make them strong and fail in the information age. While at the same time all of the support and protection Females receive will continue to help them do well in the information age.

  While both boys and girls begin life equal, they are then raised from birth to be different.  The boys are treated not by accident to increasingly more aggressive treatment to make them tough.  They are not given as much mental, emotional, social support for fear of coddling them. Most importantly and not by accident but by intent, they are increasingly given love, honor, and respect, the essentials of self-worth, based on measures of achievement, power, status, etc.  This makes boys and later men much more competitive (by design) for this makes them try much harder in order to achieve those feelings of self-worth from peers and society. Those boys or men who do not measure up in some way will not only receive less honor and respect but will receive more aggression from society.  In the information age, all of those areas have led to a large decrease in academic learning and in turn ability to compete in the information age.  Women are surging ahead.

  Since girls and later women are not supposed to be strong this allows for much mental, emotional, social support from an early age along with much love honor and respect simply for being girls.  In the information age, this support not only allows girls to mature faster but to do better in academics. This support continues through adulthood and now is showing up in economic advantages for women.

  Today, the combined real effect of wives earning more; the media blitz against men in various ways (again, since Males are supposed to be strong that allows more types of aggression); and the very real problem with Males unable to compete and earn a living in the information age; is all working together to create some very hostile Males who are now losing big time, feelings of self-worth (love, honor, and respect) from society.  Many Males may either lose the ability to escape to the local bar or get a quick drug fix.  Also many hardworking, though industrial age Males who have not read the handwriting on the wall that the information age is becoming the more so the only game in town to earn a living are finding themselves helpless in supporting their families and now feel they are failures as men and deserving of more abuse from society. This then leads to more accumulated psychological suffering, lack of reflection time, and depleted feelings of self-worth.  This is making many, even formerly good hearted Males susceptible to a catharsis of violence.  Usually this will be taken out on those closest to them in their lives.

1.  I fear the use of Male classrooms with more discipline and more time on task will only lead to more stern and even more harsh treatment and more stereotyping of Males to perform more physical or menial labor to match the growing caste system being portrayed in the media against Males today.  These attempts to focus on genetics, learning differences, male role models, or cater to more activity or instruction are destined to failure.  The problem is sociological from day one.  It is differential treatment Males experience that is creating this problem. Please read Learning Theory and other related articles on this subject.
  Females are leaving the domestic role for information age skills and income.  The nineteenth century belief Females should be protected has created much protection and support for Females from day one.  Since Females are not required by society to be strong, it is considered proper to not only protect them but to also lavish much mental, emotional, social, academic, support, knowledge, and skills from day one.  This creates lower average stress and lots of supported skills that enable girls to really do well in the information age.  Girls are also given love, honor, respect, and support simply for being girls. This makes learning and development of skills and competing for jobs somewhat easier for they are given the essentials of self-worth simply for being girls.  All of this makes girls “very well prepared” to compete in the information age.  This support and protection continues even into adulthood.  Today this allows not only much economic advantage but also maintains the same protected freedoms of expression to give verbal, silent abuse, and hollow kindness to Males when they have some advantage (look at how the media allows this).
  Males and also Females (who tend to reflect for some reason their protected world upon Males) really do not understand how differential treatment from day one is providing Females with such an advantage that is creating the Growing international Male Crisis.
  Males are given love, honor, support, respect, care, etc. only on the condition of sufficient achievement, money, power, etc.  This is what makes Males very competitive; they are competing for feelings of self-worth as reflected upon them by society if they have sufficiency of those things.  When they are doing anything they are being weighed and given only the amount of love, honor, respect, and support commensurate with those achievements.  Those Males who do not have sufficiency are not only given less of those good things, they are given more aggression by society.  This creates a lot more pressure on Males to either succeed in academics, which is good; and if they cannot, then they will search out a more protected and supported area in which they will have some feeling of love, honor, and respect from their peer group. 

  Since our society is still following even in the information age, the belief Males should be strong, it still allows much aggression from an early age upon Males to make them tough.  It also holds that Males should not be given mental/emotional/social/academic support, love, kindness, and care for fear of coddling the Male.  This is so the Male can become a good little soldier to defend family and country.  The problem with this idea is that it creates high average stress that impedes learning and creates along it more tension that leads more activity in Males and far less attention to mental/emotional development.  This is why girls appear to mature faster, for Males are not given the same mental/emotional/social supports.  This higher average stress and lack of supports accumulate to create a large deficit in learning for Males. 

  Now in the information age, Males are competing with Females who have been well supported from day one and Males are beginning fall behind big time, especially from women in their 20’s and early 30’s. 
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN0334472920070803

  Men are not only losing jobs, they are losing out on feelings of self-worth, namely love, honor, and respect from society.  It is plainly spelled out in the media that when Males appear weak, it is okay to give them more verbal aggression, more abuse, and more neglect.  Since Men have been brainwashed to believe they are better (perhaps deserving of more harsh treatment and neglect) they are now finding out that in real life such treatment is somehow helping women to succeed above them.  Given the horrible myth of fixed intelligences taught in our society or simply working harder, many men are falsely believing they are less intelligent and/or not working hard enough.  Given this false information, they may truly feel threatened by those women who are succeeding while they are not.  Society itself and its media are now working against the Male to place Male’s into perceived positions of being more suitable for menial labor and for Females to be placed into more white collar, management positions.  The Male is now facing much more abuse on the job.  Many low paid jobs are also riddled with much abuse, intimidation, and constant berating by managers over them.  In more cases, women managers are the ones doing this.  Yes, in society men who take jobs in lower more menial positions are given more abuse.  It seems women working those jobs are somewhat more protected by society from this abuse.  Many men are opting out of the workforce to protect their mental/emotional health, which they feel is more important to them than a paycheck.

Comment by ann duckworth from Jacksnville — June 25, 2009 @ 4:28 pm

This is a response to the comment by Ann Duckworth.
I strongly disagree with your assessment of the current societal situation of men, Ms. Duckworth.  While I applaud your efforts to express support for men’s difficulties in various areas of this culture, I feel that your blanket statement about women being the gender that receives consistent unwavering support from all of society is incorrect and misleading.  Your expression about how men have a harder time making a living in this information age—-being the only game in town is certainly true, with the exception that this reality applies to women as well.  The many women, who for various reasons/circumstances, just as men, did not have the advantage of getting a college degree, have just as hard of a time feeling respected and earning a living.  There certainly are movements in our society which have for a good while now, made efforts to bring to light how girls have needed more support in feeling confident about their ability to learn and achieve—and also have formed organizations on behalf of this need, such as Girls, Inc.  These efforts were made in response to how girls for generations were being made to feel that any achievement on their part would be seen as “upstaging men”, and very unattractive to men—-obviously messages that were very negative, and frowned upon by society.  In addition to this, have you forgotten about organizations such as the Boy Scouts, and Boy’s clubs of America, which have served the self esteem and sense of place of boys for generations?  I was a girl scout, and guess what we were assigned for activities to earn badges?  cooking and sewing.  This took place in the 70’s—after the women’s movement was supposed to have helped to send messages to girls that we could contribute to society in ways that went beyond keeping house.  Regarding your statement that women working menial jobs are more protected from contemptuous abuse due to these lowly stations in society, than men are—-I have to again disagree.  I’ve never seen a women in a menial position who was not regarded as an easy target for humiliation and unkind treatment—as a matter of fact, I find that in many cases, men in these positions are actually the ones who are better treated.  Not only this, but there are countless areas of the job sector where ONLY MEN, will be able to have a decent shot at a good job, without a college degree—-such as auto mechanic work.  Have you known anyone at all who has a women mechanic?  Or a welder or an electrician?  I believe that we need to collectively, make efforts to help society see that showing support to BOTH GENDERS, with an emphasis on how making efforts to encourage boys to be raised with regard for the humanness of inevitable emotions, and that encouraging ALL EMOTIONS for boys will serve society and families of our boys well, and will be the turning point for a healthy society.  It is certainly true that boys have been shortchanged in this area—of being allowed free expression of sadness and fear—just as girls have been forbidden expression of anger and disagreement for many generations.  I feel that the bad behavior that we are seeing in both genders is not about how each is being raised, but due to the apathy of parents and society in general to object to the explosion of outrageous behavior in the media (another subject in itself).  The fact that girls are expressing violence and other negative behaviors in record numbers points to a cause other than differences in the manner of raising the genders.

Comment by Elizabeth Smith from New England — January 12, 2010 @ 2:50 pm

response to the comment by Ann Duckworth.
I strongly disagree with your assessment of the current societal situation of men, Ms. Duckworth.  While I applaud your efforts to express support for men’s difficulties in various areas of this culture, I feel that your blanket statement about women being the gender that receives consistent unwavering support from all of society is incorrect and misleading.

—My point was that society in general does provide for protection for Females due to the still present nineteenth century belief Females should be protected The part about all of society was not my statement, but society in general.  Also since Females are not required to strong this also allows then, more mental, emotional, social, verbal interaction and support as opposed to Males not so for fear of coddling.  This is true for society in general.


  Your expression about how men have a harder time making a living in this information age—-being the only game in town is certainly true, with the exception that this reality applies to women as well.  The many women, who for various reasons/circumstances, just as men, did not have the advantage of getting a college degree, have just as hard of a time feeling respected and earning a living.

—women are getting ahead by 100,000 more college entries each year.  The point was there is some differential treatment involved that is causing this problem.  Also in terms of earning a living and supporting a family, while many women may not have jobs, they are not looked down upon or treated more harshly society.  That is not allowed by society.  Presently men are falling behind both in college and also most of unemployment is affecting men. When men lose jobs and ability to support families and themselves, they are given more ridicule and more neglect.  This is allowed by society as men must be strong and allowed more disrespect by society.  With more need for information age skills this differential treatment from early in life will continue to change the makeup of gender in the workplace.


  These efforts were made in response to how girls for generations were being made to feel that any achievement on their part would be seen as “upstaging men”, and very unattractive to men—-obviously messages that were very negative, and frowned upon by society.

—I disagree with any act to downplay the success of women when accusing women of upstaging men.  This is wrong to do. What we should do is begin looking at how differential treatment and its variables are creating vast differences in education by gender so we can use those variables as tools to help all students, boys and girls improve their abilities and information age skills.


  In addition to this, have you forgotten about organizations such as the Boy Scouts, and Boy’s clubs of America, which have served the self esteem and sense of place of boys for generations?

I have always seen any organization that serves to help raise esteem through such accomplishments as very short term. Today such organizations have no real value due to not looking at helping students improve mental/emotional stability and in turn, better develop the information age skills we need today.  We need to help provide all students with cognitive tools as a stop-gap to help improve mental/emotional stability to learn to compete in the information age until we can get parents and others in society to begin treating all persons more correctly.  Presently the nineteenth century differential treatment is hurt mental/emotional growth of Males much more.

I was a girl scout, and guess what we were assigned for activities to earn badges?  cooking and sewing.  This took place in the 70’s—after the women’s movement was supposed to have helped to send messages to girls that we could contribute to society in ways that went beyond keeping house.

—-This was all a part of the leftover belief systems of a society that was still coming out of the old industrial period.  Then there was a belief of complimentary relationships.  As we entered the information age, the differential treatment designed to make Males strong was really working negative to information age needs.  Let us not punish young Male children today for feelings of feminine depravity from information age skills then.


  Regarding your statement that women working menial jobs are more protected from contemptuous abuse due to these lowly stations in society, than men are—-I have to again disagree.  I’ve never seen a women in a menial position who was not regarded as an easy target for humiliation and unkind treatment—as a matter of fact, I find that in many cases, men in these positions are actually the ones who are better treated.

Years ago yes.  Today, in many places, the law and support of women is very strong. There is also now, a trend of more Females in management and more support of Female employees.  There is no such support base for Males.  The trend today is much more suspicious of Males.  There also now much more stereotyping of Males as less competent and more qualified for harder work. Due to society beliefs regarding protection, much more law, societal, and media support, this has created much differential treatment in both verbal abuse, job duties, and push for more output. This is simply a fact of life today.


  Not only this, but there are countless areas of the job sector where ONLY MEN, will be able to have a decent shot at a good job, without a college degree—-such as auto mechanic work.  Have you known anyone at all who has a women mechanic?  Or a welder or an electrician?

Yes, there are jobs such as this, but in the information age, the vast “majority of jobs” will come from information age skills.  There are more women in medical school, more in business administration, etc.  These numbers will continue to climb for women.  The white collar world is becoming the much more dominant in need and those jobs will go to those who have information age skills.  Here, due to still present differential treatment, men will lose out as a group in competition for “most of those white collar jobs.


I believe that we need to collectively, make efforts to help society see that showing support to BOTH GENDERS, with an emphasis on how making efforts to encourage boys to be raised with regard for the humanness of inevitable emotions, and that encouraging ALL EMOTIONS for boys will serve society and families of our boys well, and will be the turning point for a healthy society. 

—This wonderful but this freeness of emotion in boys will only come when boys are treated from a young age with the same care, support, protection from aggression, along with the same positive mental/emotional/social/verbal interaction the little girls receive.  You see boys are developmentally lagging, not due to genetics but to differential treatment.  The higher average stress created by this treatment also creates impedance to learning and higher muscle tension that hurt handwriting and motivation to write.

It is certainly true that boys have been shortchanged in this area—of being allowed free expression of sadness and fear—just as girls have been forbidden expression of anger and disagreement for many generations.

This lack of emotion is not taught but is due to much aggression allowed upon Males as early as a year old.  Any weakness allows more aggression toward them.  Young Males also develop the defensive cushion or ego as way to help ward off more aggression.  Girls in some small higher circles were not allowed to vent anger among so-called respectable society, but such freedom of expression to give verbal abuse has always been allowed with impunity for the vast majority.
 
I feel that the bad behavior that we are seeing in both genders is not about how each is being raised, but due to the apathy of parents and society in general to object to the explosion of outrageous behavior in the media (another subject in itself).  The fact that girls are expressing violence and other negative behaviors in record numbers points to a cause other than differences in the manner of raising the genders.

- - Girls may be showing more violence than they did in the past due to freedom of expression, stress, and lack of morality shown in society that enables more bad behavior.  However, This is not the case for most girls today.  They are very upbeat about school, learning, and going to college.  It is the boys by a much larger margin who are losing hope and beginning to act out and even drop out at 80% of the total dropouts.

Comment by ann duckworth from Jacksonville — January 12, 2010 @ 5:07 pm

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