The New Gender Gap

DanTheMan

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_21/b3834001_mz001.htm

SAVE THE MALES!!! lol

StinkyPantz

Dan, I almost posted this link. I was going to call it "Girls Rule, Boys Drool"

teenyuck

So when will we be paid equally? We are kicking ass everywhere except the bank...

DanTheMan

OK you feminazis! LOL

I found the article to be quite sad, actually.

...Hug a girl, and he could be labeled a "toucher" and swiftly suspended -- a result of what some say is an increasingly anti-boy culture that pathologizes their behavior.

If he falls behind, he's apt to be shipped off to special ed, where he'll find that more than 70% of his classmates are also boys. Squirm, clown, or interrupt, and he is four times as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. That often leads to being forced to take Ritalin or risk being expelled, sent to special ed, or having parents accused of negligence. One study of public schools in Fairfax County, Va., found that more than 20% of upper-middle-class white boys were taking Ritalin-like drugs by fifth grade.

...And while the girls are busy working on sweeping the honor roll at graduation, a boy is more likely to be bulking up in the weight room to enhance his steroid-fed Adonis complex, playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on his PlayStation2, or downloading rapper 50 Cent on his iPod. All the while, he's 30% more likely to drop out, 85% more likely to commit murder, and four to six times more likely to kill himself, with boy suicides tripling since 1970. "We get a bad rap," says Steven Covington, a sophomore at Ottumwa High School in Ottumwa, Iowa. "Society says we can't be trusted."

..."No one wants to speak out on behalf of boys," says Andrew Sum, director of the Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies. As a social-policy or educational issue, "it's near nonexistent."

...And while boys may act out with their fists, girls, given their superior verbal skills, often do so with their mouths in the form of vicious gossip and female bullying. "They yell and cuss," says 15-year-old Keith Gates, an Ottumwa student. "But we always get in trouble. They never do."

Some believe boys are responding to cultural signals -- downsized dads cast adrift in the New Economy, a dumb-and-dumber dude culture that demeans academic achievement, and the glamorization of all things gangster that makes school seem so uncool. What can compare with the allure of a gun-wielding, model-dating hip hopper?

Some boy champions go so far as to contend that schools have become boy-bashing laboratories. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, says the AAUW report, coupled with zero-tolerance sexual harassment laws, have hijacked schools by overly feminizing classrooms and attempting to engineer androgyny.

There's a simple solution - seperate gender schools or at least classrooms.

I have an eighteen year old daughter, who I enrolled in college yesterday. And based on the kinds of guys I see coming around, she will steam-roll right over them in the coming years. I blame it on the lack of good stable male role models. When I went to her school open houses, (all of them from pre-k to her senior year), only five of six other parents were ever there, and they were parents of her girlfriends. The fathers of these boys needed to set the example. They have failed miserably.

Even with the J-duds, the lack of good male role models is shameful! The J-dud Masters turn them into hairless, whimps pretending to be in charge. The Elders wives rule their husbands in most cases. Many of these men use their wives to help them do their administrative work. Even though they are told not to. The men are in contact with their superiors above them in the food chain, but the wives are in contact with the locals the next step down. And these men defer to their wives advise on the social scene.

The boys today lack a solid foundation to build self-respect. I have a friend who's daughters boyfriend lives at her home. He is 30 years old and can not understand why I have no respect for him. And his father has no problem and sees no shame in his grown son living at his girlfriends mothers house. They are clueless! Maverick

Realist

The senior class president? A girl. The vice-president? Girl. Head of student government? Girl. Captain of the math team, chief of the yearbook, and editor of the newspaper? Girls.

no wonder the world is going down fast!

teenyuck

There's a simple solution - seperate gender schools or at least classrooms.

That might help, I agree.
Maverick has it right. The lack of a strong father can really cause problems for a young boy.
BTW, Feminazi is really a negative term that has no place in this type of discussion. Girls are finally living up to their potential for the first time in history...we should be happy that women are enjoying the success men have.

expatbrit

overly feminizing classrooms and attempting to engineer androgyny.

Yeah what is it with all the effeminate young males these days? Seems like they have all been turned into androgynes (is that a word?), mincing around and talking with that effeminate lisp. Methinks that there's a little too much of this politically correct getting-in-touch-with-your-feelings bollocks going on!

Expatbrit (can't turn off the highlighting class)

Aztec

Reading that article made me both happy for my sex and sad for my son. He absolutely hates school and he's only in the first grade. I think seperate gender schools would be an excellant idea. Boys and girls do not think or learn the same way and it's time to recognize and celebrate the differances, NOT try to force them to assimilate. ~Aztec

DanTheMan

Teenyuck,

I tried to use it jokingly, but I recognize that it's a pretty loaded label - I won't use it again. Sorry if I offended!

Aztec,

My point exactly. I do think that in today's PC school culture, femininity is idealized, and masculinity is pathologized. Time to seperate the sexes in the classroom, and quit "engineering androgyny".

When I was in elementary school in the late 70's/early 80's, fistfights were a fairly common occurrence between boys. I was in a few myself. Of course we got in trouble, got whacked on the arse by the principal. But usually when 2 guys get in a fight, afterwards they avoid each other and the anger subsides (and I think girls are quite different in this regard, a feud between girls seems to never end). I actually became friendly in middle school and high school with guys I had tussled with in earlier grades. Now with the zero tolerance policies, you have all this anger build and build then all of the sudden you have a Columbine on your hands.

The New Gender Gap

Share this