Malala Yousafzai

"I don't mind if I have to sit on the floor at school. All I want is education. And I'm afraid of no one." --Malala Yousafzai

In taking someone's life, a bullet also attempts to kill their conviction, but only succeeds when they're not in possession of the truth. 

Get well soon Malala. 

Gendered Corruption

If indeed we believe that culture corrupts our kids, why does the biggest, most evil influence always lay at the feet of what we find unacceptable? Would not acceptable things, such as free market consumerism, also be corrupting them? Is corruption only tolerable when a child is corrupted by something we like, or does a child truly cease being corrupted by certain things, and where is that line drawn?

We wonder why the path to manhood is fraught with so much difficulty and lack of assurance. Parents fret about the outcomes for their sons. Surely it wouldn't have anything to do with how men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the standard for manhood, would it? We've left boys of the world at the hands of a commercial culture that would sooner take him by the hand, cut a fart in his face, physically abuse him and verbally demean him and tell him to "tough it," sell him beer and breasts to weaken his resistance and thoroughly derail his ambitions by calling him "simple-minded," teach him to value his life by the number of sperm he can eventually squeeze out of himself, and be there for him to provide an array of products intended only to help him achieve that most carnal goal before he's to slip into domestic "uselessness" to have all his manufactured desires catered to on call. "Men are stupid" indeed.

We wonder why girls are so depressed or sell themselves short despite our best efforts to lift them up. Parents fret about the outcomes for their daughters. Surely it's not because men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the new standard for womanhood, is it? We've all left girls in the hands of a so-called "empowering" commercial culture that would sooner take a girl by the hand, tell her she's smarter and better, inflate her self worth to unattainable heights, starve her of encountering any real adversity to her confidence or resistance, spoil her into submission so that she may become reliant on an array of beauty and "self-care" products to maintain that weakened state, and then tell her a superficial relationship in the service of a carnally-minded "useless man-child" with children in tow is all she needs to be happy. "Am I right fellas?" indeed.

"Why?" is not a good question to ask. "Isn't it obvious?" is a better one. If you wouldn't leave your child in the hands of someone you don't trust, who is only going to preach distortion and trickery, why would you leave your child in the hands of western culture? In twenty years the children we fret about today will be what we consider normal, well adjusted adults, most of them at least--adjusted in the sense that they've just spent their last twenty years being adjusted, by passing through the corruptible influence of culture in all its forms, positive and negative, and normal because they are still breathing at the other end of it.

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.

No Muddied Angels

Nietzsche famously wrote, "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not of truth." Children are no exception. Adults throw an interpretation at childhood, and it becomes a cultural standard by virtue of their power. Adults create the terminology we use to think about the position of childhood in society, and those terms inevitably find their way from the realm of ideas (taken as truth) to practice in real life. The powerful look at the powerless as innately inferior, deserving of their status, even by genetic argument, but also fool around with this notion of the noble savage, whereby those that are powerless, innately inferior, are put on the pedestal of righteousness simply because of their righteousness. This is often referred to as the "white man's burden."

As anyone can see, this ideology is so pervasive it has been enmeshed in the terminology of racism and racial prejudice for centuries, but it also lends its support to the arguments of ageism as it has always done. Nowhere does the adult interpretation of childhood rear it's ugly head as forceful and destructive as it does with the paradigm that childhood exudes natural purity. In the modern age, children have become deified as noble savages. Ignorance is their grace, it's the halo affixed upon their anointed heads, and to do anything to cast away that ignorance is to pull the child down to hell from their hearth upon the clouded realm. Ignorance preserves their subservience, and such is the motivation for maintaining it, for infanillizing their activities and restricting their natural inquisitiveness.

Every breath is sacred, as a byproduct of their angelic grace, when breath is nothing but a bodily function. If we are going to anoint a bodily function simply because it originates from a pure body, there is then no reason to not anoint their other excretions. A hole is a hole. Their anus is as sacred as their mouth, their breaths as gracefully angelic as their farts. Both preserve the organism, after all. Both perform a necessary function to keep the child functioning, but why one is anointed and another ignored, even shunned, has only everything to do with human preference, by interpretation, and serves to exemplify the fickle creation that humans begin to play with when they ascribe purity to human flesh. There are no muddied angels.

Ignorance in relation to the so-called adult standard should not be celebrated, the child's knowledge relative to itself should. Children are not an exception to this game of interpretation either, as their ascriptions and summations of adults are often faulty and inconclusive. A pure mind does not make faulty interpretations of others, and certainly not ones that threaten their relationships with others.

As girls are more prone to make judgments about people, girls invent many interpretations about adults they interact with on a daily basis, and just like adults, some may be perceptive and others may be just as much a product of ignorance as adults. Boys don't tend to make subjective judgments, as they aren't as aware of what they are projecting, never mind contemplating how others are receiving those projections. Girls have considerable power to create interpretations, just as adults, and the reason girl interpretations even prevail as truth has more to do with the degree to which the girl is anointed by adult interpretation (even beyond the boy), and is certainly no matter of truth.

Girls are Spirit, Boys are Flesh

Just as children are subject to age-based projections and constructs, they are also subject to gender-based ones. Even in this age of gender equality, post-feminism, and ever-shifting ping-pong of eduction focus between boys and girls over the years, girls are still flowers and boys are still slugs. These gender representations don't mirror any biological fact or necessity for either gender, particularly at the pre-developed childhood stage of life. And yet they persist.

Physically, pre-pubertal boys and girls are similar in their bodily structure. Secondary sex characteristics develop later along predetermined hormonal pathways, but in any case, these facts alone do not automatically dictate that girls and boys be ascribed the social characteristics they absorb. Sex-typing a child is not a bad thing, the masculine and feminine traits are expressed along a continuum for either male and female children, in their natural temperaments, so long as the actual sex of the child has little baring on the role they assume. Male and female are biological assignments, "boyishness" and "girlishness" are not. Here's a little overview of some general constructs normally ascribed to kids of either sex:

Girls and boys inhabit the free spirit lifestyle, it's just that adults have posited the girl to the heavens and the boy to the earth. The girl inhabits air and water, her mental focus is inward (on the body such as it's exterior) but her physical focus is outward (on the play world such as it's interior mechanisms and friendships). A creature of great intelligence and willpower, but full of inhibitions, she's expected to be more male than male. On the other hand, the boy inhabits fire and dirt, his mental focus is outward (on the play world such as it's exterior spaces and opportunities), but his physical focus is inward (on the body such as it's internal functions). A creature of great willpower and boldness, but lacking intelligence, he's expected to be more male than female.

Surely, adults have fashioned a pretty fanciful set of ideas surrounding the archetype of the modern child. Unfortunately, it's no different than the old ones. In the modern world, female is the new male, and male the old male. We teach our children that new male is the standard because we believe the old male is tough enough to withstand what the new male can't (supposedly). So in effect, the old sexism has replaced itself under the guise of "girl power" without its male equivalent, the pedestal has changed and girls are still sitting on it. By saying "boys are stupid," we coddle girls and demean boys.

But regardless of what complicated cosmology is in place at a specific time to support the ever-changing positions of boys and girls relative to each other, male and female will always be nothing more than biological alternatives. Adults only view gender equality truly applicable to themselves, and at least are provided escape. The truth of the matter is, even if they work to manually enforce equality among the younger set, the kids will always be held captive to the adult's internal sex prejudices.