[DISCUSSION] Weekly Discussion Wednesday - "Boys and men have been told from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, to prove that they are men"
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This is a textbook example of “Men as a threat” and stereotyping, and is why a lot of boys and men feel lost. You can’t find your place in society if society rejects you as a threat.
People are, once again, portraying boys and men as a broken by design and pile on the blame rather than helping them grow.
Boys and men aren’t monsters programmed to strike, and they will naturally resent being called such.
You will also immediately lose them as a target audience, and shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve pushed them into the arms of toxic influencers.
It would be unthinkable to make such a sweeping statement about any other group today.
I think you’ve seriously misunderstood the author’s intentions. She’s calling for sympathy for men. Specifically she’s trying to explain the violent nature of patriarchal masculinity as a result of the gendered expectations we place on men and boys. Think about expectations to protect a female partner in a mugging or similarly confrontational situation. Those are the sort of experiences that she’s referencing. The argument then is that because we place these situational requirements on even the most violence-averse men, we should have greater empathy for the fact that men as a whole have internalized this notion of violence as necessity in a lot of situations. My reason for posting it here was primarily so that folks could discuss their own experiences with these sorts of harmful gendered expectations.
People are, once again, portraying boys and men as a broken by design and pile on the blame rather than helping them grow.
Really, it’s a condemnation of society for breaking boys and men. The passage preserves the opportunity for wholesomeness by having men reject the programs of violence.