
Training the Masculinity Out of Children - andrenth
http://quillette.com/2018/04/12/training-masculinity-children/
======
rubatuga
It's interesting to see the rebound in sociological thinking. I'm not well
versed in sociology by any measure, but the article seems to imply that the
strong form of social constructionism is common belief. I would say that most
people agree with the weak form of social constructionism, where facts can
coexist with social constructs. Furthermore, does anybody really believe that
sex differences don't exist? (other than a vocal minority)

~~~
krapp
People can believe that sex differences exist, while disagreeing with others
on how dominant their influence is, versus the social constructs. One obvious
example of this is arguments about the dearth of women in technical and
programming roles.

~~~
belorn
That "obvious example" has major issue when looking at the population as a
whole. If you took a random person on the street and asked what profession
they had then the chances are about 50% or higher that they are in a worse
gender segregation than technical and programming professions.

Consider this: only 12% of the employed people in Sweden work in a profession
which has equal or less gender segregation of 60%/40%. The remaining 88%, also
called the wast majority work in a place which is considered gender
segregated. technical and programming professions have around 70%-30% gender
segregation. They rank very average among all profession, with no distinctive
attribute in the area of gender segregation.

What does a average gender segregation for a specific profession say about sex
differences vs social constructs? Would not looking at those several
profession with 99% or higher gender segregation be more telling? For example,
what does the highest male gender segregated profession reported here in
Sweden, _brick layers_ , with a ration above 99% tell us about sex differences
vs social constructs?

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internetman55
I feel like another reason not teaching your children masculinity is bad cause
one parent can defect (prisoner's dilemma) by teaching his kid boxing and how
to use leadership skills to form a gang on the playground and then his kid can
just do whatever he wants

~~~
toomuchtodo
Indeed! I would never not teach my children (father of a boy and a girl) about
masculinity or the drive for power accumulation, only how to wield that power
in a just way. Good people _should_ have power.

There will always be power dynamics and struggles in human interactions. You
can’t ignore that and not properly equip your kids for those interactions,
otherwise you’re setting them up for social and career stagnation at best, and
abuse at the worst.

~~~
JamesLeonis
You want an utterly left-field answer? Minecraft [1].

> Seth Frey, a postdoctoral fellow in computational social science at
> Dartmouth College, has studied the behavior of thousands of youths on
> Minecraft servers, and he argues that their interactions are, essentially,
> teaching civic literacy. “You’ve got these kids, and they’re creating these
> worlds, and they think they’re just playing a game, but they have to solve
> some of the hardest problems facing humanity,” Frey says. “They have to
> solve the tragedy of the commons.” What’s more, they’re often anonymous
> teenagers who, studies suggest, are almost 90 percent male (online play
> attracts far fewer girls and women than single-­player mode). That makes
> them “what I like to think of as possibly the worst human beings around,”
> Frey adds, only half-­jokingly. “So this shouldn’t work. And the fact that
> this works is astonishing.”

> ...

> Three years ago, the public library in Darien, Conn., decided to host its
> own Minecraft server. To play, kids must acquire a library card. More than
> 900 kids have signed up, according to John Blyberg, the library’s assistant
> director for innovation and user experience. “The kids are really a
> community,” he told me. To prevent conflict, the library installed plug-ins
> that give players a chunk of land in the game that only they can access,
> unless they explicitly allow someone else to do so. Even so, conflict
> arises. “I’ll get a call saying, ‘This is Dasher80, and someone has come in
> and destroyed my house,’ ” Blyberg says. Sometimes library administrators
> will step in to adjudicate the dispute. But this is increasingly rare,
> Blyberg says. “Generally, the self-­governing takes over. I’ll log in, and
> there’ll be 10 or 15 messages, and it’ll start with, ‘So-and-so stole this,’
> and each message is more of this,” he says. “And at the end, it’ll be: ‘It’s
> O.K., we worked it out! Disregard this message!’ ”

[1]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-
ge...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-
generation.html)

~~~
teddyh
In 2010, there was a camp for gifted children (up to 18, but mostly around
about 10) in Sweden. (This story is from a book about gifted children.) The
camp had a BYOC computer room, and at one time, the kids in there were mostly
playing Minecraft, with one parent keeping watch. There was a rule against
killing other players and destroying other people’s constructions, but then it
happened that one kid poured lava and destroyed someone else’s stuff. The
parent keeping watch thought that this would lead to fighting, ejection and
subsequent banning of the offending party, but he chose to stay in the
background and silently observe the kids instead of intervening directly.
Instead of fighting, the kids self-organized a parliament and debated the pros
and cons against “cheating”, decided unanimously _not_ to cheat, and continued
to build things together. The parent was flabbergasted and later remarked that
few adults would have done what these kids did.

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kobiguru
Masculinity is a need for survival in difficult conditions. When going gets
tough masculine characteristics will be the ones that can make you work
through them.

I am always told about this toxic masculinity but no one ever clearly defined
it. Always got some anecdotal answer to what they are trying to do.

I think boys are to guided to becoming men, men who can be followed. Men like
Gandhi, or king Jr, or Mandela. If not for their belief and masculinity they
would not be revered so many people. Masculinity is not a vice, toxic or
otherwise, it is a necessity for survival.

~~~
nils-m-holm
> Masculinity is a need for survival in difficult conditions.

Yes, but it is a problem in good conditions, because it takes precedence over
traits like empathy, prudence, and thoughtfulness.

Anecdote: I have been in professional settings where I saw a problem, but
nobody would listen and my arguments were countered with aggression and ad-
hominem. When the projects finally imploded, I was told I should have made my
point more strongly.

However, aggression and thoughtfulness are like the end-points of a slider:
the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. If I had focused on
being aggressive, I would not have had the resources to locate said problems.

If competence and critical thinking actually had any value, we would have
solved longevity and faster-than-light long ago, but we prefer to pound our
chests like gorillas in suits.

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jochung
There is a noticeable gap in all this chatter about toxic masculinity. We're
told that it's adolescent and immature male behavior, the worst of a roomful
of teenage boys.

Ok.

So let's look at what the worst teenage girls get up to...

\- Queen Bee'ing and passive aggressive social dominance games.

\- Whisper campaigns, slut shaming and going behind people's backs.

\- Crab bucket mentality, obsession over relative status and appearances.

\- Recruiting authority figures to whitewash cry-bullying and enact revenge.

Now, does that remind you of anything that's been happening on the internet in
recent years? Consider this: the supposed plague of online harassment aimed at
women, typified by anonymous sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica and
Kiwifarms... Does that sound like something angry teenage boys would do, or
angry teenage girls?

The toxic femininity was coming from inside the house all along. And the fact
that those two words are never uttered together by supposed gender specialists
ought to tell you something too.

~~~
oldandtired
Agreed, there is toxic behaviour from both male and female. What is not
recognised is that this behaviour has been around for millenia. Male and
female are quite different, even if there is a crossover of interests. The
worst characteristics of humanity are shown by both male and female. I have
seen mothers train their sons to be the worst of men and I have seen fathers
train their daughters to the worst of women. I have seen both mothers and
fathers train their sons and daughters to be the best they can be without the
sons losing their masculinity nor the daughters their femininity.

How males look at a situation is often quite different to how females look at
the same situation. The problem here is not they they see it differently but
that there is this thing in our society today that says the male outlook is
wrong.

To see something in a different light means that it is possible to see a
bigger picture here. I have worked in many different environments where there
have been varying ratios of male to female. The environments that operated
best took notice of the inputs from all involved.

The tasks and interests that each of us has and does do not define how
masculine or feminine we may be. Being masculine as a male or feminine as a
female does not dictate the kinds of activities you do.

Too often today, men are automatically seen as dangerous even when coming to
the defence of children that are in distress. It is usually assumed that the
distress of the child or young person has been caused by the male coming to
help. This says more about the symptomatic problems in today's society that a
male cannot come to the defence of children and young people.

We have lost so much in trying to remove male masculinity. The number of times
I have heard women of all ages complain about where the men have gone and yet
they do not see that the removal of masculinity of males is a result of what
they are calling for.

Men and women are not equivalent. They are the two sides of a stable complete
society. Both are required and both are necessary for a society to function
properly. When dominance by one at the expense of the other only leads to
trouble. Each provides what the other doesn't have and only as a unit do we
see a completeness that is truly profound.

We have societies in which a donkey is more important than a female and
injustice runs rife through such. We have societies where the males are
considered to be the worst of the worst, lower than the wild beasts of the
field and injustice runs rife through such. When the preciousness of both male
and female is highlighted then we see justice.

