The Child In Distress

Parents and professionals who continue to fall prey to cheap tabloid journalism have learned nothing from the childhood tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." In the "child in distress" narrative perpetuated in our culture, children are constantly prey to whatever new scary apparition appears on the horizon, and everything must be sacrificed to keep them safe from the next "flying inevitable". One can scarcely go through ten minutes of media without being bombarded by a child in distress. This repetitive narrative of the child in distress, however, only drives the same psychological niche for adults as the "damsel in distress" once did for the chauvenist culture, and is just as flimsy a vehicle.

Being concerned about the actual hazards a child may immediately encounter is crucial to human survival, but we seem to think being afraid of the foretold but non-existent "wolves in the fold" has something to do with it as well. It doesn't. It's a justification we created for ourselves. In general, those who are in their own minds powerful like to perpetuate fantasies of their own usefulness, stemming from arrogance. It doesn't matter who that powerful source is or whether that usefulness is needed, natural, or man-made. For adults, that fantasy manifests itself when we make ourselves feel useful for slaying the demons in our own heads out to possess our children (which probably don't pose any immediate threat to justify such a reaction), regardless of whether such a crusade is actually useful. 

It is hardly a revelation, as Nietzsche and Rousseau described the arrogant fantasy of the powerful in terms of social class in the 19th century, and Mill and Wollstonecraft in terms of indefensible sexism in the 19th and 18th century respectively. But I equivocate it now toward all adults who still maintain this ideology of superiority over all age groups below them despite hundreds of years of evolution on the "dignity of difference" between class, race, and sex. Why the feminists in particular ignored the similarity between the "child" and "damsel" "distress narratives" when they hurled criticism at the old self-serving male fantasy only speaks volumes about the limits of feminist critique. After all, women are adults too, and are served by the repetition of the "child in distress" narrative just as much as men are, if not more.

Instead, the myth of some "age determinism" of superiority and inferiority continues without reproach, with the justification that children ought to aspire to the adult example and adults ought to aspire to the child's. It is just assumed, by adults first and then by children, that this is a beneficial co-dependence between the age groups and that it is necessary, but it is neither. It's not instinct. It's in fact a self-serving ideology on behalf of those who created it--the powerful, the adults. It is created out of adult-centric culture. 

It's easy to see how superiority theories like this breed only inter-group contempt. While aspiring to the adult example as they are expected, children are taught to despise their childish nature, and while aspiring to the child's "innocence" as they are expected, adults are taught to despise their "adultish" nature. Neither is expected to appreciate who and what they are at either end of the developmental timeline, and they take their induced self-loathing out on the other group, be them perceived as superior or inferior. Sentimental sloganeering is constantly depicting children as "wide eyed" and "innocent," and proposing that if only adults could be like that, all our world dilemmas could be solved. While this is hardly convincing, it is pervasive, because adults and children alike will naturally seek out the positive traits of the other for their own sake, and condemn the negative traits of their opponent for their opponent's sake.

So I don't like to ever say one group is better than another group, because typically the group that assumes it is better is only better because it alone set the standard by which "betterness" is tested. Adults have always been powerful. They've always set the standards by which betterness is tested, so by their might alone, they are superior. And what have they done with their power? They've declared that only they are capable of using the power they've granted to themselves, and they remind themselves of this by reproducing the child in distress narrative.

But does not assuming that children are capable threaten to become an even worse imposition on children than assuming that they are incapable? After all, children and adults are different, you say, and wouldn't imposing the adult world onto children be just as bad as imposing the will of adults over them onto them? That kind of thinking, while overtly condemning ageist imposition, further establishes systemic ageist inequality. It is like dropping a weight down on one of two otherwise "conceptually" equal scales. To justify legitimate differences, the two must be given two different narratives? That only works when you can be sure you're not inadvertently disenfranchising one's differences and advantaging the other's in your distress narrative. 

Educator John Holt, in Escape From Childhood, wrote on how the assumption of capability in children only opens the doors for those who can, and does nothing to impose on those who can't or won't, so long as the initiative is voluntarily entered into. Right now, children are automatically involuntarily entered into the narrative as pawns in the adult's innocence game, and are thus stripped of their dignity as women once were, and rendered involuntarily defenseless despite their abilities. What in the chauvinist narrative, as it existed, advantaged a woman's dignity? And if you can't answer, ask yourself, what in the adult narrative of the "child in distress," as it exists now, advantages children? The answer is nothing at worse, or a negligible advantage at best, as perhaps one could argue that the "child in distress" narrative "motivates" adults to care about children. But the assumption of their inability affects every child through repression by its involuntary imposition still, while the assumption of a child's potential only affects those who rise to the occasion through voluntary inclusion, and in doing such, is not repression.

Because the adult narrative often disenfranchises youth and solely advantages adults (as it exists for their benefit), it shouldn't be tolerated as the sole paradigm. The narrative should only be justified when the inequalities between the age groups, or gender groups, or race groups, don't "consistently" manifest themselves along traditional power differentials. If the child is "always" the disenfranchised one, the meek one, the one being saved, when positioned in the distress narrative, and the adult is always the one in control, always the one doing the saving, then it is unjust inequality being represented. Likewise it would also would be unjust inequality if, all things being equal, it was assumed that only black children did poorly in school and had to be rescued by whites, or if it was assumed that only women become jeopardized and need to be rescued by men.

Unjust inequality is the imbalance between groups that exists due to human assumption rather than natural occurrence. It is one thing for natural inequalities to present themselves--for a black child to do poorly, for a girl to do poorly, or for a child to be controlled by an adult--but if any of those are the only paradigm ever shown, then one group is being unfairly advantaged while another group is being disenfranchised consistently. Individual variation is a good measure of natural inequality. If individuals vary from person to person, then all are equally being served and all are varying in their response. If a whole swath of people aren't being served to begin with, then there is no variation, just one group advantaging while another group is disenfranchised. That is not an acceptable "difference."

But adults have more self control, you say, and better cognitive skills, and superior strength. Should not adults take the initiative to rescue the weaklings? Of course they should, but only because it is intuitive that those who are strong look out for and protect those who are weak, and not simply because they are adults. If a child or young person happens to be strong and capable enough to take the initiative, why deny them only for not being old enough? To continue to misrepresent strong and capable young people as meek and defenseless only implies that one favors infantilizing them, and all the repercussions that causes, over empowering them, and all the benefits of that.

After all, it's not about believing one group is better than another group, it's about recognizing the differences between the two and affording them respective to their individual ability. The weakness of the adult narrative is that it ignores the possibility that capability is a human trait that everyone possesses to some degree, and instead tries to claim "capability" as its own entirely, and therefore the term "humanity" as well. There is nothing wrong with an adult taking initiative for a child in distress, so long as we recognize that there's also nothing wrong with a child taking responsibility for another child in distress, or an adult in distress, if they are capable of doing so, and we should depict all scenarios accordingly.

The question becomes whether or not children benefit from the adult narrative of "the child in distress," or if they are just the recipients of neutral, natural circumstances. Perhaps adults are inspired in some way from the repetition of the narrative to nurture their children, but even still, this isn't a satisfactory motivation. The best display of the adult's weakness is their need to justify their position of unquestionable authority (their so-called "maturity") by fantasizing about distressed and endangered children. If adults were truly matured, they would feel the requirement and responsibility to nurture the young the young people's sake, without having to resort to storytelling cliches that serve only their personal sense of pride, and ego.

Men are Not Finished

Female chauvinists Hana Rosin and Dan Abrams were recently able to convince an audience that not only is the status and position of men and boys in relative decline, but that men and boys are "finished."  They represented and posed as the intellectual establishment backing the "For" position over the question "Are men finished?" and were able to win a historic percentage of converts in an Intelligence Squared debate. They carried the debate, based on polling done before and after.

So by contending that "men are finished," these two and their recent converts must either be in favor of blatant and unapologetic sexism, OR are willing to personally foot the bill to give the "weaker" side (men) more special protections and affirmative actions that "stronger" females apparently have no need for (by their own arguments). By contending that "men are finished," these self-avowed "feminists" are either dismantling the house of gender equality which has been decades in the painstaking build, OR they are simply trying to advocate for redistributing resources toward the weaker side (men) in order to achieve equality. By contending that "men are finished," our "intellectual establishment" here is either smugly giving up on boys and condemning them to lives of assured and self-prophetic under-performance and hopelessness, OR they are expressing a need to shift our resources and attention back to the "weaker class" (boys) and away from the class (girls) that doesn't appear to "need" so much attention anymore (by their own statements).

The point being, they can not have it both ways. They can not be in favor of gender equality and profess that men are finished, because to do such either solidifies them as personal advocates for promoting the interests of the "neediest" (boys and men) over that of the "well off" (girls and women), OR it solidifies them as sexist bigots, gleefully cheering on the disenchantment of a whole class of people, including every child born male who under-performs. Either they can try to humanize themselves by saying that the down-and-out men deserve "more" (which is not very feminist), or they can solidify their reputation as female chauvinists and gleefully cheer on the evisceration of all things male. There is no in between.

They may in their own mind believe that either of those positions empowers women, or that all they are doing is expressing an inevitability and simply siding with the winners, but they can also still believe they are decent people too. Neither of their beliefs make either statement true. There is a thousand mile difference between saying there are more women in college, and saying that men are an "endangered species"--whether tongue and cheek or not. Men are not a "species." Homo Sapiens is a species. It would seem people of such intellectual or academic esteem should know that. And yet, there is no surprise that Dan Abrams doesn't.

There is a thousand mile difference between talking about trends, and making bold-faced assertions about a group of people having become "finished." The former is a rational, concerned approach, seeking remedies to a real-world social ill, while the later is merely a contention toward a finality--it is a way of saying that solutions are not needed, because the problem has ceased to be a problem. In real terms, saying "boys and men need help" assumes that challenges need to be met with solutions. Saying "boys and men are finished" denies that the problem is a problem, and in so doing, denies the possibility for there ever being solutions.

One wouldn't say "this patient is finished," when all the patient needs is some active treatment to regain their health. One wouldn't condemn a student with a learning disability by calling him "finished," unless one is callous or cruel, and the same should go for those who use that terminology to talk about the well-being of men and boys. An appropriate argument could be worded "the social place of men is evolving," and be perfectly within the boundaries of reality, but no, they choose to focus on "finished," which means there is no evolution, just a dead end and a hopeless future. But let us cut to the main issue---this term "finished" is not meant to rebuild men, nor empower women, it is simply used to weaken the already weakened social resolve (of both genders), by those who have fetishized male social evisceration and humiliation. In any case, gender equality is as removed from Rosin's and Abram's minds as common decency.

Let them and their followers chase after their personal fetishes and "mother complexes" all they want, but leave the future of our boys to people with a sense of decency, please.

Affectionate Men

This is a culture that honors work over family, so it is no surprise that the struggle to gain women equal standing with men in the workplace and therefore in society in general, has been generally promoted. It is also no surprise that the struggle to gain men equal standing with woman over the family, the children, has never taken root. This work based culture seems to want nothing to do with raising its own children. The majority of men are pushed away from the care of children, and just as many seem more preoccupied with the workforce, with careers. With the arrival of feminism, it was finally declared that women sought the same. For both, having and raising children has become just a side project on a path toward personal fulfillment within the work place--something you have to do just to stay in keeping with social expectations.

These expectations have done nothing to raise us out of the sexist, 1940's culture that permeates family law in the United States. It has even been conveniently overlooked by the feminist movement itself--once again, because it doesn't concern the workplace. Family law arises from the belief that men are breadwinners and women are housewives and child caretakers. This is how a man and woman can divorce, and along with fifty percent of the marriage effects, the woman is typically granted the children, child support, and alimony. Many fathers who have weathered divorce have been brought into extreme poverty and even bankrupcy and homelessness as they've watched the mothers of their children reap the rewards of 1940's sexism in a modern equal opportunity culture. This is especially true if the man was not indeed the true breadwinner.

Regardless, all this stems from a pervasive and destructive cultural belief that men can not and should not be affectionate with children, and certainly are not equipped to be sole caretakers of them. As the old adage goes, we're fast becoming a culture that fears it may never cross a bridge designed by a woman, but couldn't care less if its children are raised by a man. Stereotypes, comedic tropes, and sexist cliches reinforce prejudice and embolden standards. Men who express any affection in public toward children, even fathers toward their own children, are often mistaken to be pedophiles, to be deviants. They are often ridiculed openly and harassed rather than celebrated.

The problem is not feminists, who have conveniently overlooked matters of family law and long ago demeaned and diminished the importance of raising children. The problem is not with men, who have been belittled from birth against showing affection toward anyone, and certainly not toward children, until they accepted this without complaint. The problem is with the underlying culture that does not allow men to complain about their diminished importance within the family, within childcare, as the feminists did about their status in the general workforce. Society looks up to work, it looks down on child raising. If a group of men come out and declare that they want to be taken seriously as child caretakers, it becomes a comedic trope at best rather than a genuine statement of desire. Why should a group of men who are not being discriminated against in the glorious and glamorous workforce want to do something as demeaning in the eyes of the culture as raise and nurture children? Society can not grapple with this concept.

Most men aren't like me. Most men don't place a high value on parenting either, as culture has dictated, so it's only the disaffected men (those who have been spit through family court) that complain. Many men will be reluctant to demand equal rights under family law because doing so makes them appear effeminate. What was a strength among the women's movement--the calculating, un-feeling, career-minded, self-fulfilled, self-dependent ideal woman of the future--becomes the unraveling of the men's movement--the nurturing, loving, reliable, educational, invested, selfless ideal male child caretaker of the future. It's seen as a sign of weakness to devote oneself to the ones society generally demeans anyways. The women's movement goes with the flow of western civilization (self-fulfillment, making money, children as a means to an ends...etc.) while the men's movement resists it (self-fulfillment in the fulfillment of a child's needs, children as a ends in and of themselves). There's no money in staying home and taking care of the kids, so western culture has no use for this new breed of man, and roots for his demise.

Feminists may have overlooked the affectionate man, male chauvinism may have tried to keep them down, culture may be trying to do away with them like shedding a malignancy, but the one group that needs the affection of a man is the only group we care about--the children, the boys and girls. In the end, raising them up is its own vindication where all else has failed them. If society wants nothing to do with the demeaning aspects of raising a child, then it's high time someone steps up to do the most important job of them all. Automation will erode the glorious western workforce, but children are always going to need affection.

Girls are the Future?

The economic superstructure has a dwindling need for boys. They are a shrinking market, and therefore an economically undervalued group. Besides video games and certain toys, there are increasingly fewer things that are marketed explicitly "for boys," since to do so would be to displace girls who might be interested in those markets. But have the markets reached this conclusion out of shifting attitudes about "girl power," or have they done so for economical reasons? That is to say, in girls marketers have a base that includes what continues to be the traditional girl media (the color pink), but also other varieties of "girl expression," and girls are therefore expected to be more active "buyers" across these multiple markets as a result. Boys have been shown to be a limited, almost niche market, so companies often don't see the reason to put up the money to cater to them specifically. Anything they do market with boys in mind must also consider possible girl buying power.

This is because girls are also both more likely and more encouraged to branch outside the narrow range of media designed for traditional girlhood. Products and companies originally steeped in selling to the traditional boyhood interests are finding that their limited target is vestigial, as they could just as well survive off the varied interests of their counterparts (who they value more due to the socially perceived penchant for materialism). Thus, if girls could be said to be the future, we know what gave them such a distinction -- the free hand of the market has thrown them into the social limelight, despite that cumbersome "stuffy-old" equality standard.

On the contrary to the egalitarian pleas, we routinely observe that it's far more edgy, fun, and (as we shall observe) sexy, to be girl-centric (at least, that's how the market would have it). Girl empowerment these days is a reflection of a newly spawned cultural standard born from an economic landscape that the stewards of culture (advertisers and products) are betting fortunes on. It doesn't really matter whether girls are indeed the future so long as they believe the line enough to dip their hands into whatever market is trying to pep them up for their purchase power. Likewise, if today's boys are to play second-fiddle in the future, such will have been accomplished because pockets were lined from their systematic devaluation today across all media. Why else would children's media extol the benefits of being a "good, clean, fashionable, trendy, diverse, intelligent, sporty, and empowered" girl, over being one of those "lazy, stupid, smelly, disgusting, hyper, non-fashionable, old-fashioned, slimy snip and snail" boys? That is, unless they weren't trying to cater to that sex's ego.

These so-called new gender expectations are not so new after all though. In fact, they represent the same mechanism of thought that has always existed -- that being, coddle the girls, make sure they are greeted with nothing but positivity and encouragement because they can't handle real criticism, and belittle the boys, because doing so makes them strong, and they can just weather any storm. Despite this, the feminist reaction to this social phenomenon has been mixed, with the extremes under the belief that society has finally "arrived" on the route to economically induced "payback" that the new generation should be forced to foot the bill for, and the wide majority taking a more moderate approach -- stressing individual need over coddling anyone, but generally being unconcerned. It is no question where their bias lies, along with their credibility, as whenever girls are being devalued in this culture, we certainly do hear about it and all of its injustice. Then again, there should be no question what side a feminist will take -- it is in their name.

Regardless, research has been on a crusade lately to confirm these new social expectations created by the stewards of culture, and so in the past 30 years, we've learned nothing else except how much more capable our daughters are -- to the point where it can hardly be called noteworthy anymore. Girls are smarter than boys, they get better grades at everything, have faster skill development, mature faster, have better sensory ability, have better life outcomes, go to college at greater frequencies, make for happier parents, work harder, make better friends, and almost any other trait you can imagine. All has been carefully researched, and so there are simply less and less reasons to conclude anything other than the fact that female children are superior creatures to male children. Indeed, parents, teachers, professionals, and ultimately, the market itself, have begun towing this conclusion, encouraging girls to be all they can be knowing of course that they really can be anything. Boys on the other hand can only be "boys." In the war between being anything and being a boy, girls rule.

It has become new, exciting, and sexy to assert girl superlatives as the norm, and relegate boys to the has-been pile. Now society roots for the girl to triumph, yes, but gives her the most praise and accolade when her triumph is seen as an usurpation, the overtaking of the male establishment, which is unfortunate for the "run-of-the-mill" triumphing girl that gets ignored. Society wants to prove to itself, even if it knows it to be wrong, that girls deserve not only to be triumphant, but more "importantly," to lay waste to their increasingly de-humanized and "unnecessary" alternatives. We get off on the spectacle of strong girl, insist she become that spectacle to our own enjoyment, using a boy as little more than a catalyst, a punching bag to pair off her achievements, but then fail to actually support her once she outgrows the bracket. It no longer feels all that sexy once those "meek little kiddies" who might have been swayed by "girl power" have grown up and have minds of their own, so we move on to the next group of offspring. The one thing nobody is willing to admit in all of this, is that everybody is getting off on the same sexual kink. That's all it is.

In the pursuit of this pleasure, we have piped up the girl's self-assurance in childhood to the point of anxiety and burnout by adolescence (they can not remain the perfect, all-important child forever), and sidelined the boy's enthusiasm to be the embarrassing joke it is until we are sure he has internalized it forever. The less important child has an ego to save against the onslaught. But the grand social experiment to degrade boys (and promote girl power on the side) has only succeeded as far as it has been paid for. The science about the sheer multiplicity of girl superlatives remains convincing, but if the goal is having girls on top of the perennial pyramid and truly ruling the world, more work has yet to be done. It feels good so far, but the climax is still coming.