Growing up I didn’t think much about whether I was receiving preferential treatment due to my gender. Looking back, maybe I was. It’s hard to say. I always worked and studied and got good grades. I remember school being a little tougher for my brother. Our parents treated us pretty much the same when it came to school, but not when it came to chores around the house. My chores were things like helping with dishes and laundry. My brother took out the garbage and worked on the yard. It all seemed pretty normal to me. But I grew up with a mom and a dad, when feminism was relatively new, but already old. Too many kids don’t have the simple luxury of a mother and a father these days. Many don’t have any male role models at all, except for maybe the ones they find on TV. Could that be the reason we’re seeing a rise in mass murders committed by young men? It’s certainly a plausible theory.
Start with suicide. Each mass murder is also a suicide. Boys and girls at age 9 are almost equally likely to commit suicide; by age 14, boys are twice as likely; by 19, four times; by 24, more than five times. The more a boy absorbs the male role and male hormones, the more he commits suicide.
No manly model
For boys, the road to successful manhood has crumbled. In many boys’ journey from a fatherless family to an almost all-female staff elementary school such as Sandy Hook, there is no constructive male role model.
Adam Lanza is reported to have gone downhill when divorce separated him from his dad. Children of divorce without enough father contact are prone to have poor social skills; to struggle with the five D’s (depression, drugs, drinking, discipline and delinquency); be suicidal; be less able to concentrate; and to be aggressive but not assertive. Perhaps most important, these boys are less empathetic.
And just while their bodies are telling them that girls are the most important things in the world, these boys are locked into failure. Boys with a “failure to launch” are invisible to most girls. With poor social skills, the boys feel anger at their fear of being rejected and self-loathing at their inability to compete. They “end” this fear of rejection by typing “free video porn” into Google and working through the quarter-billion options. Online “success” increases the pain of real world failure.
Read the whole thing. The author suggests a White House Council on Men and Boys, similar to the one President Obama created for girls in 2009. I’m sure the radical feminists would disagree, but as a woman and a mother of two boys, I believe our society has made great strides when it comes to equality for women, and we really need to stop this war on boys. There’s been a great focus on raising strong women, but our boys are going to grow into men one way or the other. What kind of men do we want to raise?
I don’t mean to dump on single moms here, especially those who are in that situation due to tragedy or for other reasons out of their control. But in those cases (and all cases) it’s probably important to reach out to male family members and close friends to mentor the sons, as well as the daughters. So many radical feminists have gone out of their way to vilify men, it’s just sad. And it could be deadly.
Via Instapundit
@lonelycon Psychology shows that 2 out of 3 people R 1 series of events away from snapping. Divorce is one event. Good article, objective.
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…couple this with the story on inflated self-esteem and narcissism–notice that mass killers are typically white males from at least middle class families? It’s like when they finally come up against that wall and are told “no, you can’t have what you want just because you want it and no, you are not so special” they explode. Washington would do well to focus on mental illness–including the massive numbers of people out there raised to believe that the world is theirs for the asking, not the work–than further restricting our rights to protect ourselves against them.
Fathers teach us things mothers cannot, and vice versa. Every well adjusted individual needs both parents, pc crap aside. And both parents need to be involved in raising this person, rather than pushing it off on a school or a nanny. If you don’t want to put time into your kid, get a cat.
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It certainly is a big factor. I still wonder about the general effect of TV. My younger brothers grew up with TV, and dad was around, but one wonders about the competition from the television. I got to watch the Little Rascals and Marx Brothers ONCE A WEEK. it was a treat. One could read, or go outside and build a tree fort. But it is difficult to see any obvious effect of TV that is not swamped by personality differences. A lady programmer at work brought her son in and he was playing with the internet, so I wonder how it affects their lives – since I was thirty something before the TRS-80. What I do know is that there was not enough information, and then there was a firehose of information. One weird effect was that back in the old days – only irish catholics got to heaven, but this did not sit well with the kids in class. I wonder if some teachers have thoughts on how classes have changed over this transition period. Divorce did affect me and a number of friends. There was an article by Charles Eisenstein on alternet “everything we tell ourselves about America and the world is wrong.”. He grew up in the seventies – a TV kid. He does the same sort of handwringing as my younger brothers. My attitude is that Americans got their act together, what the heck is his problem ? And they did not have shrinks, tv, computers, pills and whatnot. Some twit might say it was culturally homogenous – really ? my grandmother was from Czechoslovakia, was fed up with Albany and went to Vermont. Our high school had 3000 kids from all over. There was little social disintegration in spite of that, until about 1967, when it began to make a noticable appearance.
But that is subtle stuff compared to what I was reading at The Blue Review website – an essay by a mom with a son from Hell who threatened her with a knife, and later threatened to jump out of the car and commit suicide. She had to collect and hide all the sharp objects in the house. My mother had a sticker on the refrigerator about insanity being genetic – parents get it from children. No Kidding.
But Sandy Hook provides few clues about any of this. No mother to ask. No computer drive – he smashed it, or someone did, as some writer mentioned, one should be very careful about assumptions. It seems implausible that he would go to that length if all it contained was commercially available games. So either this sprang from his own brain, or in communication with others. I have noticed that there are people who use the mentally ill for their own predatory purposes – ‘push a button’ and get a response. The lack of clues is very disturbing. Responsible adults don’t even want kids running amok with slingshots, never mind real weapons. For a while the implicit social contract was that rifles had a legit place in hunting, but military stuff was uncalled for. Keys were left in the car. Doors were not locked. It was a statement that this is a decent and civilized place, and around here at least, handguns were frowned upon. In the midwest things are different. The earlier policy of the NRA reflected the idea of this implicit social contract. Then Clinton and Cuomo went after the Second Amendment. There is an important side issue. About this time, Yeltsin opened the secret Soviet Archives, and together with Venona it became all too clear that there were people in the State Dept and Treasury Dept who were loyal to, and working for, Josef Stalin. We had knockdown evidence. Hmmm. If we disarm, it creates a huge power vacuum. I wonder if anybody would take advantage of that. Need I ask ? Consequently a lot of folks joined the NRA and urged a more edgy message, in case anyone gets any funny ideas. And it was just before the Gulf War, which was also an edgy situation, if some unanticipated things happened involving silkworm missiles or nerve gas, and we might end up with a 1973 style oil embargo crisis, when the economy was tied up in little tiny knots, and people were getting at the end of their rope. Sobering stuff. Thank goodness there were no such surprises. Waco was also sobering. It is easy enough to make the message stronger – since the Second Amendment was never about hunting or skeet, or even personal protection, which was always assumed anyway. It is about the security of freedom. And it is a Right, not a privilege. And Americans have been doing this for 400 years. It is deep in the fabric of this country. The whole idea of guns being ‘unnecessary’ is a recent post ww2 phenomenon largely in suburbia. Before that was Annie Oakley. What makes it complicated is that America is complicated. There are N differing customs and traditions, which makes it impossible to have a one-size-fits-all approach that responsible adults can agree on. The articles in the Economist or DailyKos and others, calling for complete confiscation, are thus sophomoric fantasies. Anybody who reads up on the Prohibition Era would know that. And that was just alcohol. The Bill of Rights does not specifically mention Beer, and look at what happened. Politicians should study that, and look before they leap. The rest of the country is definitely not like NYC – where most of the populus did not grow up in Vermont or Maine or Iowa – where the Sullivan Law would have the same approval rating as Prohibition. When the demagogues stop messing with the Constitution, things will settle down. And if they start messing with it, things will heat up. It is really quite straightforward.
Anyway, the Juvenile Delinquents at Alternet do NOT get to define the terms of the debate. They are ‘hippies gone wild’.
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