Tag Archives: Anti-Male

News

Study of elementary school children finds entrenched discrimination against boys

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The study is here (PDF), and Susan Walsh writes about the study on her blog. (H/T Stuart Schneiderman)

Excerpt:

A new study of nearly 6,000 elementary school children has found that boys are discriminated against beginning in kindergarten. Christopher Cornwell, an economics professor at the University of Georgia, says that ”gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls.”

Despite having higher scores on standardized tests, boys get lower grades than girls. Why? Because teachers are basing grades at least partly on classroom behavior, and the standards are very much geared to female norms.

[…]Here’s what the disparity looks like for kindergarten boys:

Std. Deviation Test Scores Grades
Reading -.017 -.27
Math +.02 -.15
Science +.035 -.14

(Note: Values are approx., gauged visually from study graphic.)

Another interesting finding was that boys who adhere to female norms on non-cognitive skills were not penalized. Effectively, the more female behavior was rewarded with a grade “bonus” for males.

The implications of this are obvious. Masculinity, even normal maleness, is being punished in schools from a very young age. Only the most female-acting boys are rewarded with a fair assessment.

I found this story on Stuart Schnederman’s blog, and this is what he had to say about it:

The results demonstrated that schoolteachers are prejudiced against boys. When teachers do not just grade on performance, but include a number of intangible qualities that girls are more likely to possess, they are acting as bigots.

I recommend that everyone pick up a copy of “The War Against Boys” by AEI scholar Christina Hoff Sommers to learn more about this anti-male discrimination problem.

I see a lot of people raving at men to “man up” these days. Many of those people are pastors who remain ignorant about the real, systemic causes of male underachievement. Even very obvious factors – like the dominance of female teachers and administrators in schools – are ignored by the blame-men crowd. Boys generally learn better when they learn from male teachers in all-male classrooms. But unfortunately for boys, there are people who don’t want to do what works for men, especially when it doesn’t fit with feminist ideology.

Polemics

Matt Walsh: boys are experiencing at least as many challenges as girls

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Matt Walsh is annoyed that the problems of our young men are being minimized by a feminist culture.

Excerpt: (links removed)

Boys — particularly boys in public school – are most assuredly NOT encouraged to be opinionated, assertive, loud, boisterous, or confident. Do you know what happens to boys like that?

We punish them.

We label them.

We medicate them.

Their opinions and their personalities aren’t just discouraged – they’re chemically obliterated.

According to the CDC, more than 20 percent of 14-year-old boys have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lifetime. Twenty percent.

Boys are 125 percent more likely to be stuck with the ADHD label than girls, and 127 percent more likely to be medicated for it.

I suppose we can chalk this up to a mental disorder that mysteriously discriminates based on sex, or we could contemplate the possibility that we have turned boyhood into a disease. Overall, young males are almost twice as likely to be deemed “learning disabled.” Could boys really be this inherently flawed, or is the system itself flawed?

Whether or not a boy manages to exhibit the “correct” personality traits and narrowly avoid a psychiatric diagnosis, he has a much greater chance of being expelled or suspended from school. In fact, boys make up about 70 percent of the suspensions from grades K – 12. They’re also five times more likely to be expelled from pre-school.

And it’s not just that young males tend to “misbehave” more; it’s that we’ve defined “misbehavior” in a way that unfairly targets them. The news is rife with stories of kids suspended or expelled or arrested for making a pretend gun with their fingers, or a Poptart, or a keychain, or a pencil.

These are healthy and normal games of imagination and fantasy — games that boys, not girls, usually play — and we’ve literally made a criminal matter out of it.

Boys are frequently kicked out of school and sent hurtling on a path towards delinquency and failure, even for minor instances of physical aggression. Does it make sense to treat a kid like a dangerous psychopath just because he got into a minor shoving match or — horror of horrors — a fist fight? This is how boys often express their aggression. Girls express it in more damaging and traumatizing ways. They spread gossip and rumors, they shun and ostracize other girls, and these acts can reverberate through a child’s life much further and deeper than getting pushed into a locker or punched in the nose.

But typical male aggression leads to expulsion, while typical female aggression usually leads to, at most, a stern lecture from the guidance counselor. To make matters worse, we’ve banned and outlawed the healthier outlets for a boy’s energy and rambunctiousness. Schools have increasingly prohibited tag, and kickball, and dodgeball , and football.

Of course, the plight of the American male is far more serious and tragic than a ruined recess.

Feeling abandoned, angry, hateful, and confused, guys are about 4 times more likely to kill themselves than girls. It’s true that females attempt suicide at a higher rate, but males are at an exponentially greater risk of completing the horrible deed.

And the story doesn’t end there. While (if) these boys grow into men, it is much more probable that they will become alcoholics and drug addicts.

Everyone knows that men are infinitely more likely to go to prison, but did you know they even receive longer sentences for the same crimes? Indeed, women convicted on the same charges are twice as likely to avoid incarceration altogether.

Is this what you call “male privilege”?

Privileged to be drugged as a child, expelled from school as a teenager, and incarcerated as an adult? Privileged to bad grades, a psychiatric diagnosis, and an early death?

I have blogged about some of the things he mentioned in the post, like the gun play and the longer prison sentences.  But I think the post as a whole is very useful for people who think that young men are doing fine, and we need to keep focusing on young women. We need to focus more on young men, because in general, they really are falling behind, and they are not going to be able to fulfill the expectations that society places on them unless we identify the root causes for their decline.

News

UK woman stops man from seeing their daughter for 12 YEARS

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Dina sent me this trouble article from the UK Daily Mail, that serves as a warning to men about getting involved with the wrong woman in a feminist welfare state.

Excerpt:

A father yesterday spoke of his anguish over an extraordinary £100,000 12-year court battle for the right to see his daughter.

The man, described as ‘irreproachable’ by a senior judge, has endured years of legal fighting with his ex-partner, who has refused to allow  contact between him and their 14-year-old daughter.

Incredibly, the family courts have made 82 orders that he be allowed to see the girl, known only as M. But none was enforced by a system which senior judges agreed had ‘failed the whole family’.

[…]The Court of Appeal three months ago ordered that the case be resolved, saying the teenager’s childhood had been ‘irredeemably marred’ by years of litigation.

Lord Justice McFarlane, presenting a written judgment, said the mother had ‘doggedly refused to allow M to develop and maintain a relationship with her father without any good reason’.

He quoted the findings of a child psychiatrist, who said: ‘The mother appears to want an unhealthy exclusive relationship with M. The mother hides her opposition to contact behind her daughter’s stated “wishes and feelings”.’

But the father, a 61-year-old professional who cannot be named, has now been told the legal process faces more months of delays as the family courts seek expert advice.

[…]The father – who, unlike the child’s mother, cannot claim legal aid – estimates he has spent more than £100,000 in legal costs trying to see his daughter.

He said: ‘It is financially penalistic, as a private individual, to fight for your rights through the family courts.’

I can’t imagine what that would be like. I put a lot of effort into my mentoring relationships. My only pet lives with my parents, and I try to see him on Skype every night. He can’t be moved, because he is so old. I can’t imagine what I would do if the mother of my children took the children away from me. I’m not surprised at all that this man spent six figures trying to get access to parent his daughter. And I don’t need to tell you that intentionally depriving a child of a relationship with her father is nothing less than child abuse. Yet that’s what the system allows.

Now just to get this out of the way, I fully blame the man for this. There are plenty of clues in the article about bad decisions he made in choosing that woman. A smart man doesn’t choose a woman who thinks that cohabitation is OK, and that having an out-of-wedlock child is OK. And when you take 10 years of a woman’s life and then don’t commit, she will do anything and everything she can to get revenge on you.

Men seem to be woefully oblivious to these laws affect them until it’s too late. Maybe we need to be a bit more aware and politically engaged to keep these things from happening to us? These anti-male courts didn’t come out of nowhere. The UK is well-known for its anti-male government. A lot of men voted the Labour Party and Harriet Harman into power. A lot of men voted for EHRCs, too. We need to be smarter when it’s election time, and vote for smaller government, lower taxes, and less regulation. That’s the only way to stop the state from doing this.

For young men, I recommend that you read Stephen Baskerville’s “Taken Into Custody” before you get married. Find out from research what a woman does that makes her more likely to divorce you, and avoid those things. Some women have seen what the state does to men, or they’ve read about it, and they mind even have taken action to oppose it. That’s the kind of woman you’re looking for. The ones who don’t blame men for everything, but who are aware of the situation that men are facing under these laws and policies and are determined to act against it with their marriage and family.