Tag Archives: War Against Boys

News

New study: what choices should women make in order to achieve happiness?

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Marriage and family
Marriage and family

In preparation for this blog post, I read an article from a far-left source about the decline of women’s happiness.

Excerpt:

As women gain political, economic and social freedoms, one would expect that they should feel even more contented relative to men. But this isn’t so.

The “paradox of declining female happiness” was pointed out by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, who also happen to share a house and kids. They analyzed the happiness trends of US citizens between 1970 and 2005 and found a surprising result.

Stevenson and Wolfers discovered that American women rated their overall life satisfaction higher than men in the 1970s. Thereafter, women’s happiness scores decreased while men’s scores stayed roughly stable. By the 1990s, women were less happy than men. This relative unhappiness softened after the turn of the century, but men continue to enjoy a higher sense of subjective wellbeing that is at least as high — if not higher — than women’s.

Those 35 years saw advances in American women’s rights and financial power.

Let’s take a look at a recent study that the Daily Wire reported on, to see what really makes women happy:

Despite the onslaught of propaganda telling young girls otherwise, a recent research paper distilling data from over 30 European countries concluded that mothers find homemaking preferable to working full-time.

Doc. PhDr. Dana Hamplová, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Institute of Sociology, ASCR, and a current representative of the Czech Republic in the International Social Science Program, authored the paper. Addressing Betty Friedan’s narrative in the book The Feminine Mystique, which claims that women are happiest and most fulfilled at work, Hamplová “explores the link between employment and subjective well-being among mothers with children under 3 years of age,” reads the paper’s abstract.

“Analyzing multiple measures of subjective well-being, the paper shows that homemakers are generally happier than full-time workers,” the scientist found.

“Contrary to our expectations, homemaking was positively associated with happiness particularly among mothers who left higher quality employment for childcare. Though some variation across countries exists, it is not linked to the provision of formal childcare, duration of parental leave, or tax system,” Hamplová explains.

[…]”Thus, similarly to several other studies, the ESS [European Social Survey] data do not corroborate Betty Friedan’s idea that domesticity and housekeeping leaves women unhappy and unsatisfied,” she writes. “As all 12 measures of happiness/satisfaction point to the same direction, the conclusion that mothers with younger children tend to be better off if they are not engaged in paid employment seems to be robust.”

We’ve had lots of advancements in women’s power, often coming at the expense of men (i.e. – husband candidates). For example, anti-male schools staffed by feminist administrators and feminist teachers might be great for women, but they don’t produce high-earning men for women to marry. And when women vote to expand government, taxes must increase to pay for all the spending. This reduces even further the pool of men who can take on a wife and family shrinks even more because of the increased tax burden.

This article from the leftist The Atlantic explains:

In the view that has prevailed in American education over the past decade, boys are resented, both as the unfairly privileged sex and as obstacles on the path to gender justice for girls. This perspective is promoted in schools of education, and many a teacher now feels that girls need and deserve special indemnifying consideration.

[…]A review of the facts shows boys, not girls, on the weak side of an education gender gap. The typical boy is a year and a half behind the typical girl in reading and writing; he is less committed to school and less likely to go to college. In 1997 college full-time enrollments were 45 percent male and 55 percent female. The Department of Education predicts that the proportion of boys in college classes will continue to shrink.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education and from several recent university studies show that far from being shy and demoralized, today’s girls outshine boys. They get better grades. They have higher educational aspirations. They follow more-rigorous academic programs and participate in advanced-placement classes at higher rates. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, slightly more girls than boys enroll in high-level math and science courses. Girls, allegedly timorous and lacking in confidence, now outnumber boys in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and in debating clubs. Only in sports are boys ahead, and women’s groups are targeting the sports gap with a vengeance. Girls read more books. They outperform boys on tests for artistic and musical ability. More girls than boys study abroad. More join the Peace Corps. At the same time, more boys than girls are suspended from school. More are held back and more drop out. Boys are three times as likely to receive a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. More boys than girls are involved in crime, alcohol, and drugs. Girls attempt suicide more often than boys, but it is boys who more often succeed. In 1997, a typical year, 4,483 young people aged five to twenty-four committed suicide: 701 females and 3,782 males.

It’s important to note that women are not victims here, they are actually the ones who created the shortage of men who could earn enough money to support a family, and allow them to stay home with their children. Their “advancements in power” came at a cost: they undermined the system that produced men who were capable of handling the financial demands of a family where the wife can raise her own children.

Look at this study of how women have voted to expand government and therefore raise taxes on working men for social programs that replace husbands:

This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross‐sectional time‐series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.

Bigger government means higher taxes means men earn less money, after taxes. How are you supposed to keep your wife home to watch over the little ones when taxes are higher? You can’t.

News

Boys underperform at school because feminists block attempts to help them

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College graduation rates for men and women
College graduation rates for men and women (Source: Brookings Institute)

Britain is a country that is absolutely dominated by radical feminists. And it affects everything from their collectivist views on economic policy, to their pro-criminal views in the justice system, to their open-borders views on immigration, their preference for government-run healthcare, their hatred of self-defense, and so on. So, I wouldn’t expect to see an article about the plight of boys in a feminist society published in a British newspaper.

Nevertheless, here is an article from the UK Telegraph that explains how the public schools are handling the problem of underperforming boys.

It says:

Britain’s education system is failing to tackle the “astonishing” underperformance of boys as feminists have made the topic “taboo”, the former head of the university admissions service has warned.

Mary Curnock Cook, who was chief executive of Ucas until last year, said the fact that boys are falling behind in education is a national scandal – yet it is such an “unfashionable” topic to discuss that it has become “normalised”.

Girls outperform boys in all aspects of education, from primary school to GCSEs and A-level results. Last year, 57 per cent of women went to university compared to 43 per cent of men, a gap that has widened significantly over the last decade.

[…]Ms Curnock Cook said that the debate about gender equality tends to be dominated by issues such as the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling.

“But those are work issues, not education issues,” she said. “Quite often initiatives to support men do meet derision from feminists.”

When attempts are made to address men’s issues, they are ridiculed and are met with the “wrath” of feminist and gender equality groups, she said.

Last month the only university in the UK with a men’s officer scrapped the role after the candidate withdrew due to “harassment”.

But, it’s happening in America as well.

An article from 2013 appeared in the far-left The Atlantic. It explains how the school system punishes boys and favors girls – from kindergarten to the workplace, where women receive affirmative action preferences.

Excerpt:

Boys in all ethnic groups and social classes are far less likely than their sisters to feel connected to school, to earn good grades, or to have high academic aspirations. A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research documents a remarkable trend among high-achieving students: In the 1980s, nearly the same number of top male and female high school students said they planned to pursue a postgraduate degree (13 percent of boys and 15 percent of girls). By the 2000s, 27 percent of girls expressed that ambition, compared with 16 percent of boys. During the same period, the gap between girls and boys earning mostly A’s nearly doubled—from three to five percentage points.

This gap in education engagement has dire economic consequences for boys. A 2011 Brookings Institution report quantifies the economic decline of the median male: For men ages 25 to 64 with no high school diploma, median annual earnings have declined 66 percent since 1969; for men with only a high school diploma, wages declined by 47 percent. Millions of male workers, say the Brookings authors, have been “unhitched from the engine of growth.”  The College Board delivered this disturbing message in a 2011 report about Hispanic and African-American boys and young adults: “Nearly half of young men of color age 15 to 24 who graduate from high school will end up unemployed, incarcerated or dead.” Working-class white boys are faring only slightly better. When economist Andrew Sum and his colleagues at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University examined gender disparities in the Boston Public Schools, they found that for the class of 2007, among blacks and Hispanics, there were 186 females for every 100 males attending a four-year college or university. For white students: 153 females to every 100 males.

Just like in the UK, American feminists oppose doing anything to help boys:

In the U.S., a powerful network of women’s groups works ceaselessly to protect and promote what it sees as female interest. But there is no counterpart working for boys—they are on their own.

Previously, I blogged about a study showing that female teachers grade boys lower than girls.

It’s important for parents to understand that the problem of boys underperforming in school and work is not caused by boys. It’s not with video games, it’s not with sports, or anything else that anti-male people might blame. The problem with boys not learning and boys not working is caused by an education system dominated by anti-male feminists who systematically discriminate against boys, making it harder for them to learn the skills they need to find work.

The problem isn’t going to be fixed by airhead feminist pastors and other male “leaders” telling boys to “man up”. The problem is going to be fixed when parents realize that radical feminism is hostile to boys, and that institutions that are dominated by radical feminism are damaging to boys. I have a Jewish friend named Ari who homeschools all his children. He spends a lot of time and effort on this. He told me that sending boys to public schools is child abuse. I used to laugh at him when he said that. What a funny exaggeration, I thought. Now I’m not so sure he was joking.

News

Conservative mothers reflect on what frivolous accusations mean for their son’s futures

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Boys are enrolling in university at a much lower rate than girls
Boys are enrolling in university at a much lower rate than girls

Yesterday, I blogged about Megan Fox, a conservative mother of a son, who had some advice for young men who want to make a difference. She advised them to treat women and sex in accordance with Christian values, to document situations that could be misconstrued later, to live their lives as if they would one day be in a position of influence, and to remember that women “lie and scheme”, especially young, unmarried women.

I noticed that she linked to another article on PJ Media, by another mother of two boys named Sarah Hoyt. Sarah’s article is called “When Every Boy Is Guilty, Every Girl Becomes a Monster”.

She writes:

Let me tell you about my experience with Colorado Springs area public schools while raising two boys:

In Manitou Springs, in first grade, my older son started making poems to girls.

[…]I got a phone call saying he was sexually harassing a girl. Since at 6 he didn’t know how to spell “harassment” and would be uncertain on the meaning of “sexual” (both boys were far less curious than I was at their ages) I begged leave to differ, marched down to the school like the wrath of mom and demanded proof. At which point I was given a very bad, rather innocent poem. I mean the boy didn’t even say he wanted to kiss her. Just that she was pretty and her eyes were like stars.

Writing poems to a girl is harassment, because the boy is 6 years old.

But that’s not all, there’s more:

Next came elementary school in Colorado Springs. Younger son (slower developing than his brother, and at that time completely unaware of the difference in “vive la difference.”) was in third grade.

[…]Apparently, my son had a little friend who happened to be a girl. He was trying to get her attention so they could play the “space game”… There were other kids in the way, and she couldn’t hear him shout. So he reached – through the other kids – and touched her three times.

At which point, all hell broke loose.

Apparently a playground guard thought this girl was “very pretty” and “all the little boys were interested in her” (yes, third grade. Is anyone else getting a creepy vibe?), so when younger son touched her “on the butt” (playground guard’s version) the playground guard KNEW what she had to do.

She descended upon the kids, whisked the little girl to counseling and the little boy to the principal’s office to be threatened with suspension and the police.

I asked my son, right there, in front of all of them, what he’d confessed to.

He said they’d told him touching someone on the butt was sexual harassment so he’d confessed to that.

The child had no idea what sexual harassment even was, but the female playground guard was sure that’s what he had done.  Public schools are 80%+ female teachers and administrators, most of whom have non-STEM degrees and little to no private sector work experience. Are you really going to hand your boys to them? You better come up with a better plan than that if you want your boys to have an influence.

Here’s another article from The Federalist, written by Melissa Danford, a homeschooling mother of four boys.

She writes:

I cannot accept a world in which my sons will be raised under the tyranny of a lawless, vindictive society that wants to subdue and oppress men in the name of equality for women. It’s time to take a stand. Mammas, we have to fight for our men, because they are in danger. My father is, my husband is, and my sons are. Your father is, your husband is, and your sons are. This madness will consume them all.

It would be nice if her views were widespread, but they are not. The Wall Street Journal reports on a recent poll:

By 3 percentage points, men want Republicans rather than Democrats to control Congress, 47% to 44%. Women, by contrast, favor Democratic control by 25 percentage points — 58% to 33%. Among white voters, the gender disparity was the largest since 2008.

I blogged previously about how 77% of young, unmarried women supported Barack Obama in 2008. Women support abortion, gay marriage, and big government in larger numbers than men.

Why do young, unmarried women favor big government? In my experience young, unmarried women struggle with moral rules. They feel that they are exempt from cause and effect, because they are special. They want to do whatever they feel like doing “in the moment”, e.g. – getting drunk and having premarital sex with hot bad boys for fun. And they don’t want to be judged for it, or lose out on anything good further down the road. This attitude leads them to vote for a big government that will pay for their mistakes, and give them life outcomes equal to the married women who made wiser decisions. Unfortunately for men, we are seeing right now what happens when Democrats are put into positions of power by the votes of these young, unmarried women. Conservative Christian young men hoping to have an influence will always have to be watching their backs for their next accuser.