Man Bashing, and what Men should do about it

cracking the boy code or cracking boys? Considering how poorly we are doing at transforming boys into men I think we know that it is the latter. It is absolutely time to pull the plug on these efforts to banish masculinity, at over feminizing boys. They don't respond well to this, which was easily predictable by anyone who knows what men are about.

I feel no need to attempt to confirm or deny your fervid imaginings.

That is an interesting opinion given all the data and expert opinion located in this thread. Are you delusional by chance?

Right, experts in this area, the ones who really study the problem, suggest that the "boys code", and rigid cultural notions of "masculinity" may be contributing to the problem of why males might be falling behind, and displaying problems, so you assume this is an effort to "over-feminize boys". Your solution? Give the boys an even bigger dose of your "masculinity" values. So, if you saw someone drowning, you'd naturally push his head under water, because that would help him learn how to swim, right?

Of course, Dr Pollack, who has studied this problem for 23 years, and actually been working with boys, doesn't know what he is talking about.


What are your credentials, Hawkeye? What's the basis for your assertion that the problem is "over feminization" of boys.

You do realize that you are, again, MALE BASHING! You are calling the younger generation of men and boys, sissy-boys and girlie men--because that's how you see their problems. That's a riot!

Forget that boys enter school with less developed verbal skills, and they are therefore less prepared to learn to read and write than the girls are, and that literacy is a major factor in academic success, and maybe dads should be reading to their sons, and reading with them, rather than tossing balls to them. Naw, that's not the problem. The problem, according to Macho Man, is their mommas turned them boys into sissy boys.

You haven't even told us what your idea of "masculinity" actually is and how you put it into practice in your own home with your own children. Come on, share your expertise with us. How does this "masculinity" stuff work when you actually put in into practice under your own roof? The world is waiting....

FF - It's pretty obvious. You've been posting to hawk long enough to gather the details.

It boils down to this: His wife is more experienced and successful than him.

Having children, he is threatened very much by the idea that he will be less important and influential in their upbringing and perhaps be less respected. This has over time cultivated a hypersensitivity about his manhood and role in the family, and a resentment for (or envy of) his wife. The hypersensitivity is something he isn't willing to confront with himself so he attributes his situation to a "feminization" of society so that he can spread his anxiety over the whole of men and attempt to make normal his emotions (without acknowledging them). The resentment of his wife is most likely due to the fact that in her military position she represents all the things he claims men are supposed to be. She is an authority, and is important. She has structure to her life and career. People must acknowledge her rank and power.

Sorry hawkeye, that's not very sensitive of me, but I'm calling like I see it. You want respect and authority, you won't get it by just being a man, and no woman has taken that from you. You want these things, you earn them. They won't come to you by complaining about what you are entitled by virtue of penis.

A
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Well put, failures art.

Hawkeye is desperately trying to gain some sense of personal power, and, at A2K, he tries to get it by sounding off in threads and putting down blacks, women, Muslims, other men,etc. all to make himself feel superior by having someone he can look down on, someone who can be the target of his contempt, a scapegoat for his feelings of bitterness and anger. Demeaning others with arrogance is the way he expresses his tough guy concept of "masculinity". And he really seems to have no clue why these tactics don't get him the respect he hungers for. In fact, they more often make him the butt of ridicule and insult--particularly from other men.

I don't doubt that Hawkeye might really be suffering underneath all the misogyny he spews forth, and, failures art, I think you've probably done a good job of explaining why he's suffering, in terms of the things Hawkeye has told us about his life. But Hawkeye isn't asking for help, as much as he might need it. He's the "man in crisis", but, instead of recognizing that, he mistakenly assumes all men are in this same condition. He insists that all men are being bashed and trampled by women. He blames women for making him, and all men, feel insignificant and inadequate. He feels that all men are the victims of some male-bashing feminist conspiracy, but only he has the amazing clarity of vision to see that.

Hawkeye is really the victim of his own warped notions of "masculinity", but he's too deluded to see that. That's why his solution to the problem is always the same--the women have to be slapped down, they have to be put back in their rightful place as subordinates, so he can again feel superior and powerful. Well, that's not going to work in the real world to address the problems of men, any more than it's likely to work in his own home with his own wife. Women are not going to return to being doormats.

Being equals means that men have to learn to live with the accomplishments of women, and even appreciate them, just as women have always appreciated the accomplishments of men and helped them to attain those. It's not a competition to see who can be the powerful top dog, because, in that view, someone will always be the loser. That's the main flaw in Hawkeye's notions of "masculinity"--it permits no true equality, it allows for no real cooperation to achieve mutually shared goals of men and women. It is at odds with everything that would make for successful satisfying relationships in both a marriage and the workplace.

But Hawkeye is too frightened to let go of his warped notion of "masculinity", or to even rethink or expand it, because he has nothing to replace it with. In his black and white world, if he isn't being "masculine" then he's in danger of being "feminine". It's as though the notion of "personhood", without being shackled by rigid, culturally defined and stereotyped gender roles, has never occurred to him. He does think he's entitled to more just because he has a penis. So, he feels like a failure, by his own defined out-moded standards of "masculinity", but he foolishly blames women for making him feel that way, without seeing it is own doing by clinging to essentially dysfunctional values.

I'm sure that there are many other angry, bitter men who think the way Hawkeye does, and it is unlikely that anything said here, or anywhere, will cause them to realize what they are actually doing to themselves. Their own internal rage erodes them more powerfully than anything a woman could ever do to them. So, they take to the internet to vent and rant and lick their wounds, and pretend to be activists for "mens rights". The truth is, people like Hawkeye don't give a damn about 'men's rights", they start threads like this one just to bitch about women. This becomes their "boys club".

It's really a shame that some of the significant men's issues never get aired because they get drowned out by misogyny. There are real problems that men have with custody, visitation, alimony, etc. that should be discussed and addressed. If boys and adolescent males are floundering in school, and limiting their future potential, because of problems with literacy, or teaching techniques not geared to their learning style, we should all be demanding some changes to rectify the situation. If boys and men are suffering from depression, and attempting suicide, because they cannot recognize their emotional pain, let alone find the words to express it, or ask for help in dealing with it, we have to find ways to facilitate their communication and express our empathy and get them help.

But it's people, like Hawkeye, and BillRM, with their one-sided, self-serving rants about men being victimized by women that drown out and obscure the real societal issues that men deal with, and the real causes of those problems, and that is more than a shame. These people are doing a terrible injustice to other men.

Have you made some major new inroads in remote psychoanalysis? Perhaps you don't think you are taking the specific judgements here a little too far. If so, perhaps it is you who has an odd appetite for imaginary personal power.

No, she is trying to drive mobbing, and at the very same time she tries to pretend that she is as pure as the driven snow. It is pretty disgusting, as is the support she gets for doing it. In this case silence is consent.

oh, boo hoo hoo

at this point in this discussion, there are no absolutes, everything you and others say is basically a crap shoot

Actually, I thought firefly wrote an excellent post. I don't know what Hawk's individual problems might be or be caused by, but I do see he doesn't listen, isn't willing to entertain a thought different from his own, and I find that extremely frustrating in a debate. He just shuts you down, whatever you might be saying, if it's not the rhetoric he's spouting. There's absolutely no chance for learning or discussing in this case.

And failures art was right, too, about the polarization comment - I don't feel my position is out in left field - I think I'm a pretty moderate, rational thinker.

Oh you said that so well and I think you speak for a lot of us!

i agree, and i wasn't trying to diminish anyones point with my post

hawkeye, seems to think that any point but his is wrong, and yet he seems to admit that even his points aren't gospel

hence, anything anyone says seems to be a crap shoot

i believe that hawk believes what he says, right or wrong (i happen to think he's wrong)

Quote from his article:

The "Gender Straitjacket" and the "Boy Code"

One important reason schools, teachers, and even parents miss the warning signs of boys' emotional and academic disconnection is that our society sends a strong message to boys: no matter how much they feel they are losing contact with teachers and parents and no matter how sad and confused they are becoming, a real boy must never show vulnerability: "the boy code."

As a society, we still expect boys to brave life's ups and downs independently, stoically cover their pain, and above all, avoid doing anything "unmanly" that might shame either themselves or their parents. These gender straitjackets push many boys to repress their yearnings for love and connection and build an invisible, impenetrable wall of toughness around them, constructing a false face of bravado —the mask of masculinity—to hide their all too human pain.

The boy code is communicated through such phrases as "Stand on your own two feet," "Be a little man," "Don't be a mamma's boy," "Big boys don't cry." Such messages begin around the ages of four and five and are reinforced in adolescence. Because we diminish the expression of boys' genuine emotional voices, too many boys believe they are failing to achieve what has become a truly impossible test of masculinity. Since the expression of their natural love and empathy violate such a restrictive code of masculinity and, indeed, are considered feminine, boys are prodded into a homophobic stance, with softness considered acting "gay," their worst fear; and angry emotions accompanied by "bullying" actions may be their only means to express their feelings and still protect their fragile sense of remaining a "real boy."
~~~~~~~~~

That does not sound like over-mothering and over-feminizing to me. Sounds like, as FIREFLY SAID, the over-masculinity aspect is the fault.

Hawkeye, do you actually READ and UNDERSTAND every word? If so, how you could you have gotten it so backwards? Do you not get it, even yet?

Not at all. I've taken it all directly from the many, many, many posts Hawkeye has made spouting forth his ideas on "masculinity", male/female relationships, "feminists", Muslims, blacks, women, sex, rape, male victimization, etc. Hawkeye hasn't been a bit shy about sharing his ideas, theories, values, and philosophies, and he's also shared his anger, arrogance and contempt for numerous groups of people. His own need for power, generally expressed by putting others down, boasting of how he is "winning" the debate, speaking of his needs for "conquests" of women, or by advocating that people, like women, be put "back in their place", so that proper masculine dominance can be regained, is very evident from the explicit content of his posts--almost irregardless of the specific topic--and it doesn't take a Freud to figure that out. And he's clearly not a happy camper, so something in his view of the grand scheme of things doesn't seem to be working well for him.

Truthfully, Hawkeye should be flattered that I not only read what he's written, I remember a great deal of it.

And, in the context of this particular thread, Hawkeye's particular notions of "masculinity", and his view of why boys and young men are falling behind academically, appears to be very much at odds with what are widely accepted as the causes of the problem by the people in the field who have actually studied it. Hawkeye cuts off discussion of objective issues of the topic of why boys are floundering academically by calling other posters ignorant of the problem, disregarding what have been identified as salient causes of the problem, like literacy and the boy code, by the experts, and returning to his anti-female rant, by again dogmatically asserting the problem is "over feminization" of these males.

Hawkeye brings the topic back to himself--and his particular views about "masculinity"--rather than anything that actually has to do with the educational situation of boys, or how to address a very real problem that is affecting real children in a negative way. So we wind up talking about Hawkeye. It's hard not to conclude that it's attention Hawkeye is after.

And that same sort of thing goes on in thread after thread that he posts in.

He's not actually interested in discussing anything. His mind is already made up. If you don't agree with him you are either ignorant, out of touch with reality, an asshole, or a liar. He pretends a concern for social issues affecting men, but doesn't really want to discuss any specific male oriented issues, like those touched on in this thread, because all he really wants is to do is whine about women and harp on the need for men to regain power and express their "masculinity"--and he insults any male poster who doesn't agree with him about that. So much for his regard for other men. He starts a thread on "man bashing", and he's the one doing all the bashing of men.

With Hawkeye, it's a constant argument, rather than a discussion, and an argument with an extremely limited and narrow focus, and an argument that's often more unpleasant than it's worth. He doesn't seem to know the difference between a discussion and an argument.

I'm interested in issues affecting men. I don't want to see males short changed or unfairly treated in any way. But I think it's impossible to have a serious, reasoned, thoughtful discussion about those things--in this thread anyway. Hawkeye will never let it get off the ground.

My my that is a problem is it not!!!!!!!

My wife is also far more successful then I am in life but she had been kind enough not to force me to address her as doctor due to her PHD.

And she only had force me to buy one Who Who volume with her name in it.

I will say this after having a career with eight hundred people directly under her she does indeed know how to write a clear action plan for me however her preformed reviews can be on the hard side.

So it is the fault of both Hawkeye and my wives that we are the way we are?

The only problem with that theory is that even before I was lucky enough to had met my wife over CIS network in 1985 I was the same lovable fellow you have come to know.

LOL

Well, no one ever thought you were the brains in the family.

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the traditional "masculine code" that appears to be the subject of some of this discussion. Certainly it is no more confining or harmful than the equally rigid social code for women. Indeed a case can be made for the proposition that young women have even more obsessions about reaching unattainable levels of female perfection than do the boys who are the subject of this discussion.

I grew up in an all male world; boys schools, Annapolis; naval aviation (no girls in those days), and only began encountering women in professional situations after I started a second career. However, there were plenty of strong female figures in my family, as were the nuns who taught me in grade school. The transition was no big deal, though I make no attempts at achieving political correctitude and do enjoy needling the occasional fiercely feminist employees.

It's better to relax, take people as they are and avoid overanalyzing the thing.

Hell, I even like Mame, though she can be a bit of a ball buster.