Letters to the Editor
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Boys at a disadvantage?
No matter how boys fare in school, they come out ahead in life when they grow up.
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"They'll come out ahead in life"
Really? You know that to be true 20, 40, or 60 years from now? No, you don't. In fact I'd say quite the opposite is true given this mentality that alot of you fucking people seem to be stuck in that time just stands still and doesn't change. It's quite apparent right now that women in my generation and the one behind me will be ahead of the males at the end of their lives. Every other article on Broadsheet is about how women are surpassing men in many different facets of life, that's only going to continue, and here you are saying the opposite. I'm sorry you're a victim of a narrow world, but the girls behind you have many more options ahead of them, especially when the older generations begin to die off and take their prejudices with them. Your world and their world are vastly different because you are part of a transition phase, and they too will be part of a transition phase for the girls behind them who will inherit a different world.
The same applies for boys except the boys are being told "Fuck your problems, you have it easy." No, they don't. The men in your world do. Have some fucking foresight and stop punishing the next generation of boys for "crimes" which they haven't committed, and more than likely won't with the way things are going. It's getting better for future generations of women every day, don't leave the boys behind simply because of your prejudices.
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Take your own "fucking" advice....
"It's quite apparent right now that women in my generation and the one behind me will be ahead of the males at the end of their lives."
....and stop trying to turn your dubious observations into fact. No, it is not "quite apparent" at all that women blah, blah, blah. While there may be individual concerns that the relevant folks should address, there is no War on Boys and "Boys concerns". The notion that simply because women are doing better than they have in the past means that boys/men are being minimized or punished is plainly stupid. As was said before, it's not a zero sum game.
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It's just funny that lack of money and power can ONLY apparerently be a problem when it's women who don't have them
and that the excitement of comtemplating a world of househunsbands is causing some feminists to sound like they"re channelling the authors of some paen to domesticisty circa 1900
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Its not a war on boys - but the Rights war on public education
If you have kids in the public schools now, the first thing you note is all the things they don't have, that they had when you were a kid. And why don't they have all the things you had in school as a kid??? Lack of funding, so instead of addressing this, people try to destroy the public schools even more, at this rate - religiously run private schools will be the majority option for folks --- now that is my personal pet peeve , but how does this attach on public schools look like a war on boys.
Learning styles, modern public schools often don't have PE , don't have band, don't have sports or any activates due to lack of funding, but also
due to teaching to the test --- ie teacher pay is based on test scores of their kids, doesn't matter if junior is being abused, didn't eat breakfast, never does homework, it is the teachers fault and if she wants to get paid those test scores better be good, and of course the teacher student ratio is probably double what you remember when you were a kid.
So what does this new environment of no sports/ no PE , shorter recesses,
and tons more homework and studying then you ever did - do to boys??? There is your answer. Can the teachers change this- no , can the schools change this - no - because they are mandated by tons of stupid laws that you the voter have passed over the years to improve the schools - you wanted higher test scores, you got them, you wanted them to have higher test scores, while spending less money on the schools, you got it.... apparently the change in the environment doesn't bother girls so much, but it seems to impact the boys. This is self inflicted by the right wing school reforms, of testing and school vouchers and less money for schools. Which is funny, since as a group with a strong world view of how men should be in society, they are the ones making it hard for the next generation of men to live up to their image of them.
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This is highly ironic.
It reminds me of all the "real american" rural recipients of of a disproportionate share of agriculture, resource, infrastructure govt. subsidies being the big boosters of the "free market" and "self sufficiency" while decrying the decadent urbanites when in reality it is the liberal cities partipation in the global economy that is paying for it all.
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War or no war
neither Pollitt nor anyone else cares to explain just why the precipitous drop in male college enrollment has occurred. In this day when we are supposed to think that males and females should have equal opportunities, why doesn't the 57%/43% split interest anyone irrespective of who gets married and who doesn't? Of course it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that this culture has devoted so much of the last 40 years to denigrating men, right? And the fact that that denigration has often been to the effect that men are stupid brutes couldn't possibly explain the radical decrease in the number of men attending college. Oh no, of course not.
Katha Pollitt is a smart person. That's why it's so interesting when she misses the obvious. It's also yet another reason why many of us former feminists have concluded that feminism is not now and never has been about equality of the sexes. If it were, people like Pollitt would bemoan low male enrollment as loudly as they did the low female enrollment of the past. That they don't is hard to overlook, but easy to understand.
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To Sara Robinson
A few obvious points: So what makes your brother's job as a heavy equipment operator a "man's job?" Why don't you learn how to operate heavy equipment and go out and do that work? I guarantee you can do it. Of course the reason you don't do that is because it's not intersting or rewarding work, at least not to you, right? So you've chosen not to. But women can and do do that work. The fact that women generally don't tend to train themselves for or seek that type of work is their own business, but it scarcely means that women are debarred from doing it.
And you don't say what your work is. Do only women do your job? Or do men do it as well? If so, how is the fact that your brother's job pays more sexist?
Another thing about heavy equipment operating. It's on-again/off-again work. When your brother's part of the job is over, he's laid off, right? So how much does he make in a year compared to you who work full-time?
And of course there are many jobs that ought to pay better and many that shouldn't pay as well as they do. Should a banker make more than a teacher? A priest? A social worker? The fact that this culture has some weird priorities is not sexist, it's just weird.