What we have are little boys who are given drugs so that they sit quietly like the little girls in the classroom. Then we rob them of recess when some of their energy might be worn off and tell them to sit quietly a little longer and complain why they cannot be as cooperative as the girls. These boys learn to defer to girls and give up competition in order to take on supportive roles. They are no longer all that useful since girls can do whatever they want and boys just get in the way of the girls who know what they want and go after their goals and dreams. Follow the path down the road a few years and you find that boys have forgotten how to compete and left the honors stage at high school graduation to females, dropped out of college, and left the graduate programs more and more to women. Even reproduction no longer needs a man to participate except as a sperm donor -- which has become a typical term for what we once called a dad. Watch any major news program and you find that more and more of the anchors and reporters are women. This is not about balance but about a genuine disdain for masculinity. The men are there for comic relief and to be supportive of the female leads or they are there to show that there are some men who not toxic and more friendly to women. We celebrate the first woman to do this or that but have we considered that we have not simply opened the door to the best and most qualified person but set the stage for a future in which men are not invited unless they are emasculated men? The media know where culture is headed and are in front of the curve instead of being behind it.
Gender dysphoria and the rapid advance of transgender from the fringes to the center of things is a consequence of how uncomfortable our culture is with masculinity. Parents seem more and more hesitant to guide their children and instead seem to look for signs of confusion in their children, especially male children. It is as if we have decided that masculinity is a disease to be treated. Feminists long complained about the way we groomed our women to need men and now find themselves at a time when they might want to give men a second look but have trouble finding men who are not simply large boys. So now we have men who think that they are women, that their biology is at war with their hearts, and, though we cannot really define what a woman is, we know that being a man is not anything all that good. Is it no wonder that our children are confused? Is it no wonder that a psychological disorder is now being proclaimed as the ultimate courage -- to look at your body and say this is not who I am? At the same time, we have opened up to women all the traditional roles assigned to men -- including mortal combat. We want our women to be strong and our men to be weak. And then we say we have a problem with boys. Boys are not causing the problem but suffering because of it. Before you rush to judge me, I am not at all suggesting that it is the masculine nature to bully or dominate or that these things should be overlooked for the sake of boys being boys. What I am saying is that the deck is stacked against our boys and stacked against our boys becoming men and against our men growing up into the role and place God prepared for them.
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This is a broad topic that has impacted our society for some forty years now and several points are relevant. At the root of the change from “it’s a man’s world” to “the war on boys” is the need for opportunity for all. In the past, for example, Norwegian immigrants could settle in northern Minnesota on homesteads and create a life where men and women could work a farm, marry, and raise children to do the same. Perhaps if you had a few bookish sons they might go on to become Lutheran school teachers or pastors and be important role models for boys. If you had a few talented ambitious sons, they might go to college and enter local government or medicine or business.
At some point these opportunities fill up. The farmland is all taken. The local school jobs and business jobs are full. So move on. Go west young man. But this young man has some disadvantages. First, he lacks the social network needed for success elsewhere. Second, he is competing against everyone else for fewer and fewer opportunities. A man’s value in a business environment comes after age thirty, whereas a woman’s value begins a decade earlier. And so we create the idea that everyone must go to college, learn a specialized job, and then the degree will open the opportunities for all. But if everyone gets a degree, you still have gender differences in opportunities because there is no shortage of candidates. And young men will lose out again.
So what do men do? School teaching and pastoring do not pay enough to be realistic options anymore. Immigration increasingly supplies workers for IT and low skilled jobs. Women thrive in the fields of law, nursing, real estate, sales, marketing, and middle management. Men are left on the periphery, unseen in the military or trades. This is not to say that men from affluent families don’t have successful careers because of their connections. But for the common man these opportunities do not exist. Downsizing, multitasking, and outsourcing are all buzzwords that mean limiting opportunity for the purpose of maximizing profit, the continuing expansion of which is necessary for continually increasing the investment capital of the wealthy. And the gap between the affluent and everyone else is growing.
Video games and everything else is a sideshow. Everyone has their distractions. But women have become in a generation privileged over men earlier on in most high paying fields. This then dictates the culture. Contemporary worship is in fact a byproduct of feminine culture. I would also argue that fussiness over liturgical worship is also a product of feminine culture.
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