Thanks for another important article.
May I suggest as addition to your writing, “The War against Boys”:
The War Against Boys — The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2000/05 › the-war-aga…
May 1, 2000 — The War Against Boys. This we think we know: American schools favor boys and grind down girls. The truth is the very opposite. By virtually every measure, girls are thriving in school; it is boys who are the second sex Christina Hoff Sommers May 2000 Issue.
Further, as second and third and fourth additions, the scholastically sound studies on misandry, written by well creditalled feminists Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson:
Spreading misandry
Legalizing misandry
Sanctifying misandry
Unfortunately, no one heeded their decade-plus warnings, warnings which run in the face of the current war against the ‘patriarchy’, and so we will continue to have wounded boys becoming even more wounded men.
Maybe a meme which has to be better circulated is to ask this question about our early origins:
“When the bear approached the mouth of the cave, who rushed forward to protect the children, those women pregnant or those elders beyond fighting ability?”
Marley, in Canada, the stats on boys and men being legally punished more harshly than girls for the same crimes are unequal: (only 22% of women charged with violent crime receive guilty sentences and incarceration versus 39% for men). see: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article/00001-eng.htm
In the US, a “2015 study from the University of Michigan Law School found that when such decisions are taken into account, sentences for men are on average 63 percent longer than sentences for women.”
And I have written before that the suicide stats for men and boys on both sides of our border remain 4 times higher than in women and girls, and that hasn’t changed in decades. If the situation were reversed, well you can imagine the outcry.
Indeed, the Washington Post highlighted a recent study on Black children which found that in “… 2017, research by Bridge and colleagues found that among children, ages 5 to 11, and young adolescents, ages 12 to 14, those who took their own lives were more likely to be male, African American and dealing with stressful relationships at home or with friends.”
Your call to pay attention to the discrepancies in the public and private nurturing of boys is well overdue.
Boys need to be initiated into manhood by their masculine elders, a failure to do so means that they will initiate each other, ofter through violence or risk taking, and that is one dangerous paradigm that even Robert Bly tried to draw our attention to way back when he penned “Iron John” in 1990!
However, as an aside, with so many black men disproportionately incarcerated in the US, there would naturally be a tragic lack of fathers or mentors in young boys’ lives to help them transition from boys into men.
So, release those men from prison for especially non-violent or drug-related crimes, and start the healing. Otherwise, another generation of wounded men will continue to hurt people or kill themselves or others.
Thanks again.