Men are the perpetrators of the sexism that men experience!

The real perpetrators of the sexism that men experience are, without doubt, other men!

It is men who find gay men and gay marriage, especially of men, to be abhorrent, not women.
It is men who impose upon their own gender stereotypes linked to the pressure to conform, that warp the healthy attitudes of too many young boys, into attempting, often with tragic effects, to fit into those stereotypes. It starts when an older boy ridicules a younger one for "crying" and for "not being a man" no matter what pain the younger boy has just experiences. Even too many parents, fathers and mothers alike, err on the side of a stereotypical form of masculinity in their interactions with young sons. "Don't cry!" "Be a big boy and stop crying!"
And then, in the locker room at the schools, before and after gym classes, there is the predictable, even inevitable, public humiliation by some of the anatomy (specifically the size of the penis) of those young boys who are completely disarmed at the thought that there might even be a competition on such an issue, over which no one has a single ounce of influence. This kind of brutal humiliation is indelibly imprinted on the target's psyche, and decades later, it can be one of the most significant memories of those years. Many "targets" refuse to change their clothes for gym class, risking the punishment of the school rules and the instructor, in order to avoid the embarrassment of these bullying incidents.
And it is bullying, nothing more and nothing less!
And it is boys, often either supported by the teachers, or at best, ignored by the teachers who consider such hazing to be important to grow "strong men"....
There is some validity to some peer criticisms, even in humour, yet these valid occasions are out-numbered by those that cross a line between aggression/teasing and bullying.
If a young boy is not "athletic" he is often ridiculed as a nerd, a fairy, (one of the more frequent epithets!) or a "momma's boy"....especially if that boy displays either talent or interest in the arts. And it is boys primarily who are dishing out the venom. Whether from jealousy, or a feeling of inadequacy (because the stereotypical adolescent is not only not interested in the arts, but often shows no talent for its pursuit) this divide carries over into some demographics in adult life.
The "hockey crowd" (in Canada) is unlikely even to know if there is a good drama, or orchestral concert in the local theatre, let alone attend such an event. Likewise, the families of the dance, music, arts and artistic families are unlikely to dawn the threshold of the local hockey arena, unless there is a special event that includes their interests.
Within the sport of hockey, there is also a divide between those adults who support body-checking and the occasional fight, and those who reject both as unnecessary for the success of the game, at any level.
Cars carry much of the metaphoric value of "muscle" and "girlie" cars...as do movies...and the originators and perpetrators of these classifications are mostly men not women.
Even jobs are often categorized as "masculine" or "feminine" by men who are and have been for some time, in danger of losing their "muscle job" because many of those jobs have evaporated and fled to Asia, India, Bangladesh leaving a few construction jobs for men.
Professions are becoming dominated by women who now outnumber the men in most graduate schools. And of course, as men drop out of the competition in education, they also generate more reasons for not being hired, given the changes in the nature of the economy...from manufacturing to information systems
Hard power continues to dominate the military, as do male stereotypes of "real men" who do not do nuance as George W. Bush described himself.
If there is a conflict between the expectations of women in the workplace, male executives are afraid to find in favour of the male against the complaint of the woman, given the capacity of the women's movement to bind together in support of the woman. Conversely, men rarely, if ever, come to the aid and support of another male in a conflict situation, fearing their own security and reputations, given the dominance of the "women's ethic" and political movement.
If men are neither willing nor able to shed their narrow yet profound grasping of the "stereotypical male model" in favour of a multiple series of models of masculinity, then men will continue to slide down a scale that too often leads to drug and/or alcohol abuse, violence either of the street or the domestic variety, and even suicide.
Just this week, we learned that every day, in the U.S. there are 22 suicides among war veterans, and without having the numbers of male to female victims, there is clearly a male penchant and preference for declaring war in the first place, no matter what the situation. And that preference currently illustrates one of the main divides between the U.S. President who prefers to move cautiously in such complex emergencies as Syria, and Republican "hawks" like Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain, both of whom reject gun control legislation, and advocate more military intervention by the U.S. to demonstrate "strength" in Syria, in order to establish the U.S. supremacy in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war....another manifestation of the need for "masculinities of power and control" achieved through the power of the gun, the missile, the jet fighter and the aircraft carriers.
When schools and school systems fall into the trap of hiring female instructors and leaders almost exclusively, the fifty percent of the student population, the boys, will be warped into conformity with that female culture...and only male father, uncles, mentors and interested citizens can bring this imbalance to public attention.
Women who advocate for the job opportunities that women can effectively fill will not abandon their sisters in favour of a balanced hiring policy and practice.
However, just this year, the Toronto District School Board has announced that, in its hiring for the fall term, the top quality sought in prospective hires for the classroom is MALE!
That is a small sign that someone has noticed the disparity that has existed in too many school boards for too long, disadvantaging the male students who comprise half of the student bodies of all schools, except, of course those of exclusively female enrolments.
And then there is this piece from the recent edition of The Atlantic:

When Men Experience Sexism
There are some practices and policies that are unfair to men. But this fact should unite men with feminists, not drive them apart.
By Noah Berlatsky, The Atlantic, May 29, 2013
David Benatar, in his 2012 monograph The Second Sexism discusses a whole range of other ways in which men as men are disadvantaged. Men, for example, receive custody of children in only about 10 percent of divorce cases in the United States. Men also, as Benatar writes, are subject to "a long history of social and legal pressure...to fight in war" —pressures which women do not generally experience in the same way. Along the same lines, physical violence against men is often minimized or seen as normal. Benatar refers to the history of corporal punishment, which has much more often been inflicted on boys than girls. Society's scandalous tolerance of rape in prison seems like it is also related to a general indifference to, or even amusement at, sexual violence committed against men.
Perhaps most hideously, men through history have been subject to genocidal, or gendercidal, violence targeted at them specifically because they are men. Writers like Susan Brownmiller have over the last decades helped to show how mass rape and sexual violence against women are often a deliberate part of genocide; similarly, there has been increasing awareness in recent years of the gendercidal results of sex-selective abortion and infanticide in places like India and China. But the way gendercide can be directed against men is much less discussed. One of the worst recent examples of this was in the Balkans war, where, according to genocide researcher Adam Jones, " All of the largest atrocities... target[ed] males almost exclusively, and for the most part "battle-age" males. " Similarly, in Rwanda according to Judy El-Bushra (as quoted by Jones):
it was principally the men of the targeted populations who lost their lives or fled to other countries in fear. ... This targeting of men for slaughter was not confined to adults: boys were similarly decimated, raising the possibility that the demographic imbalance will continue for generations. Large numbers of women also lost their lives; however, mutilation and rape were the principal strategies used against women, and these did not necessarily result in death.
Many of these examples—particularly the points about custody inequities and conscription—are popular with men's rights activists. MRAs tend to deploy the arguments as evidence that men are oppressed by women and, especially, by feminists. Yet, what's striking about instances of sexism against men is how often the perpetrators are not women but other men. The gendercides in Serbia and Rwanda were committed against men, not by feminists, but by other men. Prison rape is, again, overwhelmingly committed by men against other men—with (often male) prison officials sitting by and shrugging. Conscription in the U.S. was implemented overwhelmingly by male civilian politicians and military authorities, not by women.
Even in cases where women clearly benefit from sexism, it's generally not the case that women, as a class, are the ones doing the discriminating. Neither alimony nor custody discussions are central to current feminist theory or current feminist pop cultural discussions. There is no ideological feminist commitment to either of these discussions in the way there is to, say, abortion rights, or workplace equity. On the contrary, the alimony and custody inequities we have at the moment seem mostly based, not on progressive feminism, but rather on the reactionary image of female domesticity that feminism has spent most of the last 60-odd years fighting against.
When men suffer from sexism, then, they do so in much the same way women do. That is, they suffer not because women rule the world and are targeting men, nor because feminism has somehow triumphed and brainwashed all of our elected officials (most of them still men) into ideological misandry. Rather, men suffer because of the same gender role stereotypes that hurt and restrict women—though men, being of a different gender, fall afoul of those stereotypes in different ways. Women are supposed to be passive and domestic and sexual—so their employment options and autonomy are restricted and they are fetishized and targeted for sexual assault and exploitation. Men are supposed to be active and violent—so their claims to domestic rights are denigrated and violence directed against them is shrugged off as natural or non-notable.
"For me," Heather McRobie wrote in an excellent 2008 article about genercide, "feminism has always been about how rigid gender roles harm everyone, albeit primarily women." Talking about sexism against men is often seen—by MRAs and feminists alike—as an attack on feminism. But it shouldn't be. Rather, recognizing how, say, stereotypical ideas about domesticity hurt men in custody disputes as well as women in the job market should be a spur to creating alliances, not fissures. Women have been fighting against sexism for a long time. If men can learn from them, it will be to everyone's benefit.

Protesting Hockey Violence...someone is going to be killed!

With reports today of a Swiss hockey player permanently paralyzed as a result of a violent check into the corner boards in a playoff game, added to the many other violent incidents, including a knock-out punch thrown barely 26 seconds into the game last night between Toronto Maple Leafs and Ottawa Senators, leaving the rookie Senator unconscious on the ice, if it is not now time to ban such violence, deliberate, premeditated and dangerous as it is, from the game, when will it be time.
In 1976, the then Liberal government appointed former Cabinet Minister, Judy LaMarsh, to investigate violence in the National Hockey League, without any significant impact, either on the violence or on the government. Advertisers then, and presumably advertisers today, believe they can sell more of their product if violence is retained as an integral part of the game of hockey.
No matter what the opinion surveys say, no matter what the accountants say about increased revenue, on the part of the NHL, the individual teams, and the players, the game does not need, nor can it withstand the long-term impact of violence that will soon, as too many knowledgeable observers know and state, result in the death of a player as a direct result of the impact of some misguided act on the part of an opponent.
Hockey is an extremely fast-paced game with large, muscular men careening around the ice at break-neck speeds, on blades so sharp they would kill, if they happened to cut through an carotid artery. One player, a star defenceman from the Ottawa Senators, is already out for surgery to repair a sliced Achilles tendon, sliced on a check by the blade of an opponent's skate.
The puck bounces, careens off various body parts of all twelve players on the ice at any one time, off the boards, the goals posts, and the sticks of all players. Even the puck's unpredictable twists and turns, if received in the eye, for example, as in the case of Eric Stahl of the New York Rangers this week, could result in blindness. (Apparently, Stahl will recover, and will probably wear a complete face guard for the foreseeable future.)
As for the argument that instigating a fist-fight gets the team "going" or motivated, or brings "life" to the arena in an otherwise boring match...these arguments are both futile and irrelevant to the cause of protecting the health, limbs eyes and lives of the players.
Let's not wait until someone actually does die before making the necessary changes to the game....or will greed once again guide the decision to do nothing, and reinforce the status quo?

Reflections on "silly men"....then and now

And what’s truly interesting, maybe, is television’s elevation of immature, geeky, boy-men figures to stardom. Something is being nourished here – now the geekiest guys are presented to us as the coolest guys on TV. (from "Forget Jen and Anne. I want to talk about silly men" by John Doyle, Globe and Mail, March 3, 2013, excerpted below)

The definition of masculinity, or preferably masculinities, is a subject about which men seem to both obsess, and to deny their obsession. It may be good "ratings" to parade silly men in sit-coms, but it does little to enhance an already weakened archetype of moderation, maturity, subtle comedic self-directed jabs, and most of all "evolvment"...whatever that might mean in the second decade of the 21st century.
Women, the dominant force in most mixed conversations, merely in deference to the training and development of polite behaviour among men, that we defer to our women on the selection of topic, the selection of narratives of experiences to flesh out the discussion and the length of time dedicated to a single issue. That observation is not intended as sexist, given men's consciousness that our sensibilities on any subject might either bore or irritate our colleagues, since we are most comfortable among other men and feel less likely to cross socially accepted "lines" among our "kin".
Clowns, in literature, have been mostly men. For a long time, comics were men; men making fun of themselves has been a traditional way for men to relieve anxiety, at our own expense. And for most of us, it has usually worked. "I pay the barber to find it!" was one example from my bald father, of self-deprecating humor.
Rodney Dangerfield made a comedic career of self-directed lines depicting his "lack of respect".
Another successful American male comic, Foster Brooks, made us laugh for decades with his impersonation of the "classic drunk", as did Dean Martin parallel to his singing career. Jack Benny was the classic "cheapskate" on his own television show, while Red Skelton frequently portrayed characters that evoke both laughter and some pity, like Clem Kadiddlehopper. Roasting male actors and entertainers has been a staple in North American comedy for decades. Shakespeare uses the clown, and the inebriated male, to provide relief from the more serious scenes in his plays. So there is a long and honourable history to the male comic archetype, pointing much of his with at himself
More recently, male comics have pointed their wit at their partners, their children, their parents, and even their bosses, or their political leaders. Lewis Black does an incisive expose of George W. Bush as the most stupid president in history, once again a male comic eviscerating another male politician.
So there is a deep well of "silly men" from which to drink, for those interested in turning their creative imaginations to television drama of the money-making-success variety.
However, comic male entertainers differ from the narcissistic kind of Sheldon Cooper, in that they are not nearly as self-absorbed. Others do matter to most of the comics, whereas, for Sheldon, no one matters, not even his male cohorts on the show...only Sheldon and his intellectual physics.
The Berenstain Bears, too, books read to young children, had much fun at fathers' ineptitude. The butt of the joke is both a male tradition and a male archetype in literature.
In the early years of a young boy's life, inclusion in the group is defined by a form of "dissing" or "making fun of" by other boys...as a sign that he is noticed and that he can "take it" and "give it back" to demonstrate he is not a wimp. And when that "banter" begins within the group, it rarely stops, even years later.
Some three or four decades ago, at least, much of this "familiarity" for men, with men, by men changed, with the tidal wave of the feminist movement. We no longer knew what was expected, or how to behave or how to learn how to behave, or whether or not we even wanted to learn the new "sexual politics" which threw out old chest-nuts like the male calling the female for a date, opening the door for the females upon entering a building, or a vehicle, or holding the chair for the female on a dinner date, or asking for a "first kiss" or????
Many men simply retreated into the various forms of "mancave" that they created...hunt-camps, hockey teams and their parties, fishing trips, white-water rafting trips, African adventure trips, climbing excursions, biker-trips, and more recently, cycling clubs, running and tri-athletic clubs (often now of a co-ed variety) and the more cliche, the mancave in the former "recreation room" now that it is available after the kids have left home.
Add to this feminist tidal wave the internet forms of communication, the workplace reversals of gender roles, the education reversals of achievment in grad schools, and the seemingly conscious and deliberate silence of most men in any discussion about how men and women really do relate in the contemporary culture.
We have, in effect, turned the field over to our women colleagues, for them to set the rules and the expectations and the cultural norms... at our own, and their, peril.
We have abdicated, for the most part, into our private fettishes, as if in doing so, we can claim some semblance of control over our lives, and avoid how we have effectively and literally abandoned many of the opportunities to play an equal and effective role with our female partners.
Younger generations of men, however, are slowly grasping the brass ring back, not to dominate their female partners, but rather to respect, honour and even confront on occasion, a different point of view.
Younger generations of men, who have graduated from grad schools, and who have found their place in the world of work and community, have found a new energy and a new strength capable of sharing the silliness of the Sheldon Cooper's without feeling embarrassed by their stereotype.
Men making fools of themselves, embedded into our cultural imaginations, will merely find different and creative stages on which to enact the theme, hopefully, providing, in the meantime, role models of healthy, and open and evolving masculinities that deep the dissing and the jokes from becoming mean-spirited, whether directed at other males with different lifestyles or females whose contempt for the male species pours from their every breath.

Forget Jen and Anne. I want to talk about silly men
By John Doyle, Globe and Mail, March 3, 2013
....Late last week came reports that ABC, which broadcasts the Academy Awards, is already pushing for Jimmy Kimmel , who has a talk show on ABC, to host next year. This is just business. All about branding and promoting the network.
What’s interesting, maybe, is that Kimmel is not actually irritating. He’s cutting and agile in his sarcasm aimed at the entertainment racket. But he is outrageously adolescent. MacFarlane is kind of geeky too, and indeed famous as the creator of the sort of television that appeals to callow, childish men.
And what’s truly interesting, maybe, is television’s elevation of immature, geeky, boy-men figures to stardom. Something is being nourished here – now the geekiest guys are presented to us as the coolest guys on TV. Enough with Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence. Enough with the ladies. Let’s talk about some guys.
As an important for instance, take Jim Parsons, who plays the narcissistic, childish, uber-geek on Big Bang Theory. The magazine GQ, devoted to manliness, and photos of large-breasted actresses in their undergarments, features Parsons in its new issue. He gets a GQ makeover and presents a guide to loafers. The shoes, that is, not guys who loaf around devoted to not growing up. It seems he favours $420 loafers by Emporio Armani.
But check out the description of Parsons – “With his giant eyes, vulnerable face, and noodle-thin body, Jim Parsons at first looks harmless playing scientist Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. Then, on the show, he will say something like: ‘My father used to say a woman is like an egg-salad sandwich on a warm Texas day – full of eggs and only appealing for a short time.’ ”
Excuse me? Sheldon is a comic trope. That paragraph reads like a mash note to a teen idol.
As another for instance, I point to the character Schmidt on New Girl, who is by far the most interesting thing on the show. It is the ridiculousness of Schmidt (Max Greenfield) that makes the show watchable. (By the way, Schmidt and Sheldon/Jim Parsons seem to share a shoe thing. Schmidt has been known to declare, “Damn it! I can’t find my driving moccasins anywhere!” He also famously remarked, “Can someone please get my towel? It’s in my room next to my Irish walking cape.”) Last week’s episode of New Girl was actually an orgy of comic celebration of utterly hopeless men.
Schmidt decided to throw a party to celebrate 10 years of having the eternally depressed Nick (Jake Johnson) as a roommate. He went to elaborate lengths, staging a swanky party and at one point was unavailable for chatter because he was sending an angry e-mail to his florist.
It was very, very funny. But done with enormous affection for impossible men.
Both Sheldon and Schmidt are fascinating characters, and I really don’t know what’s going on with the elevation of such characters to the level they now occupy. Sheldon is the creation of two men – Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, who co-created Big Bang Theory. Schmidt is the creation of Liz Meriwether, who dreamed up New Girl. So it’s not a matter of such men being the emanations of a male or female imagination. It doesn’t matter, apparently.
Figuring this out is a lot more fun than squawking about Anne Hathaway being horrid or Jennifer Lawrence being nice. And in the meantime, I need to buy some shoes. Which I really shouldn’t do. You see, recently I happened upon a certain store in my neighbourhood and noticed it was clearing out the men’s shoe department. So I went in and bought six pairs. Yes, six. What fun that was.

It will take a whole country to raise the next generation of male children

The Toronto District School Board is taking a predictable but misguided approach to redressing the gender and ethnic imbalances amongst its teachers: affirmative action. “The first round of TDSB interviews will be granted to teachers candidates that meet one or more of the following criteria in addition to being an outstanding teacher: Male, racial minority, French, Music, Aboriginal,” reads a memo obtained by The Globe and Mail. From "National Post Editorial Board: Fight the stigma against male teachers" National Post Editorial, February 20, 2013, below)
Here is a problem that cannot be addressed or solved by a single policy approach, whether that approach is "affirmative action" or pay incentives, or bonus contracts for male teachers.
And the problem also cannot be reduced to the question of "social stigma" and "risk management"....it is much deeper and more complex than any of these, and all of these together.
Society has "dumbed-down" on men for decades. Television portrays male stereotypes as much worse than those portrayed in childrens' books as fumbling fools. (The Berenstain Bears, for example!) Many schools type them as angry, testosterone-inflated, gay-bashing, often bullying, easily bored and even more easily trouble-making creatures whose numbers top the lists of:

• school discipline and detention assignments
• ADHD diagnoses, even those by unqualified diagnosticians
• low grades
• lack of interest and apathy in class
• drop-outs
• use of and potential dependence on drugs and alcohol
• entanglements with the law
• membership in gangs
• gun violence
• high unemployment

Add to this, the nearly complete take-over of the elementary and secondary school culture by women faculty, administration and support staff, whereby the school culture cannot but be dominated by women's attitudes, expectations, rules and regs., tone of voice, and the general ethos of successful women, without a corresponding and balancing ethos of healthy, successful, ambitious, insightful and creative male role models.
The differences between male students and female students, in terms of how they learn, how they process information, how they interact with authority, how their bodies comport with long lessons, followed by 'seat-work' followed by a move to the next classroom....these factors are literally not included in the formal education of most faculties of education...and they need to be.
One of the most significant features of a young male's formation is that much of it comes from the attitudes of other males, older, and significant in the lives of those younger. And that "incubation" does not come from words, but from observing attitudes, especially the attitude to anything smacking of the feminine. Men, beginning with young boys, must separate from first their mothers, and then from the female cohort, or they believe they must, in order to develop their masculine character. It can almost be considered an act of "tribal ritual" and one that neither the society generally, nor the schools more particularly, honours, either formally or informally.
Conversely, young girls move closer to their mothers, their female peers and their female role models, without paying nearly as much attention to what the males in their lives are either doing or fostering.
Schools need, and parents must demand, an equal representation of male instructors, administrators, support staff in all schools, both elementary and secondary, because it is the parents, after all, who pay the taxes and cast the ballots that elect members of boards of education. Men, too, might begin considering offering their names as candidates for local school boards, if for no other reason than to bring some male presence to these debates.
Parents of male children, across the country, need to listen to the clarion call for balance between male and female educators in our schools, and we must begin with conferences, research papers, doctoral theses, and political debates that focus on the issue of male education in Canada.
And before another generation of male students is lost in the forest of the dark and sloping tunnel of avoidance, we  must begin to address this issue.
It will take a whole town, or a whole village, or a whole city and certainly a whole province and a whole country to raise the next generation of male children.


National Post Editorial Board: Fight the stigma against male teachers
Editorial, National Post, February 20, 2013
The Toronto District School Board is taking a predictable but misguided approach to redressing the gender and ethnic imbalances amongst its teachers: affirmative action. “The first round of TDSB interviews will be granted to teachers candidates that meet one or more of the following criteria in addition to being an outstanding teacher: Male, racial minority, French, Music, Aboriginal,” reads a memo obtained by The Globe and Mail.
The superficial goal is admirable: Broadly speaking, a public education system ought to reflect the pupils, and the broader society, that it serves. And the TDSB, operating in one of the world’s most multicultural cities, lags behind. The board’s 2007 staff census found visible minority teachers, particularly East and South Asians, underrepresented compared to the city’s population — though their numbers are rising rapidly.
When it comes to male teachers, however, the numbers are not encouraging. In 2007, 67.7% of full-time TDSB teachers with six-to-10 years of experience were women; among those with five or fewer years, it was 72.3%. Nationwide figures tell a similar story: Just over a quarter of Canadian teachers are men, and they are even scarcer at the elementary level than at the secondary level. Nor do enrolment figures at teachers’ colleges suggest the problem will solve itself. Two years ago, just 14% of Nipissing University’s student teachers enrolled in the primary-junior division were male.
Of course, it is true that students of all kinds can flourish under teachers of all kinds, and it is important that they do. But children learn differently, and the more diverse the teaching staff, the more different approaches and attitudes will be brought to the classroom — and the better the chance any individual struggling student will be inspired. Studies suggest male teachers can be especially good role models for struggling male students, particularly those living without other male role models, who might otherwise come to see education as mainly a feminine pursuit. And Canada’s male students are indeed struggling, on many levels, compared to their female peers: in engagement and enjoyment, in literacy scores, in drop-out rates.
It would be one thing if the decline in interest among men in the teaching profession were a natural process. But clearly one culprit is an unnatural stigma against men taking a professional interest in children, especially young children. (As of 2007 there was a single male kindergarten teacher in the Niagara Catholic District School Board, which is responsible for nearly 15,000 elementary students.) The rarer such teachers become, the more this stigma will be enforced.
A 2010 study by professors at Nipissing, published in the McGill Journal of Education, found 13% (albeit of a small sample) of teachers had faced down false accusations of inappropriate contact with their students. “For male teachers, false accusations were a reality many had come to accept as a hazard of the profession, often accompanied by a sense of constant worry that infringed on their ability and willingness to respond as they naturally might to situations that present themselves every day in their classrooms,” the authors wrote. “This weariness restricted the male teacher’s ability to act in ways that they otherwise more naturally might; ways in which their female colleagues were free to act without suspicion.”
This is intolerable, and it is utterly pointless: Incidents of sexual abuse by teachers are vanishingly rare amongst teachers of both sexes. It makes about as much sense to view all teachers born on Tuesdays with suspicion as all men. Teachers and their unions, administrators, school boards, academics, parents and politicians should be fighting this stigma with the same ferocity that polite Canadian society directs at other forms of prejudice. Affirmative action puts the cart before the horse.
And affirmative action is inescapably unfair, no matter what group it benefits. Government entities inevitably deny it — the policy is “absolutely not to the exclusion of other groups,” a TDSB spokesman told the Globe — but it is literally impossible to give preference to a certain group without disadvantaging all others. The intended effect here is to ensure that all other things being equal, a black male teacher gets the job over a white female teacher. That’s discrimination, and if it happened in the other direction Canadians would howl in protest.
Canadian public schools should hire the best candidates for their jobs, just as every other government department should. In the meantime, they should get to work on what ought to be a huge priority: Making the education system more friendly to male students and male teachers alike.



.

Research: Failure, disappointment necessary for student development

But while more and more people are talking about embracing failure, the status quo has a powerful hold on the institutions charged with educating North American children, experts say. There’s a double standard in the messaging around screw-ups that can confuse students who look to their parents and teachers for guidance and validation, said Susan Einhorn, the Montreal-based executive director of the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation.

“There’s a mixed message that goes out: Students are told it’s OK to make mistakes, we’ll learn from our mistakes,” she said “And yet most kids are celebrated for their high correctness, perfection on a test, their high scores. That’s what’s celebrated.” (from "In praise of failure: The key ingredient to children’s success, experts say, is not success" By Sarah Boesveld, National Post, February 2, 2013, below)
There is a moral value in direct conflict with a learning value here.
We want perfectly moral childen, young people on whom we can count for living lives of moral and ethical purity, because our religious orientation is so virulently and vehemently opposed to what it sees as sin, evil, and all the other forms of moral turpitude. We organize their schedules as if they were in boot-camp for becoming CEO's, executives in white collar professions, even at six and seven years of age. We demand their perfect performance on all school activities, especially those generating a "foot print" of history and tradition like the proverbial report card, the science fair, the debating competition, the music festival, and, of course, the class play.
And, above all, we never want to hear the door-bell, or phone call from the 'authorities' signalling some behaviour that does not completely and perfectly conform to the law, the community standards, the culture, and especially the religious institution to which "our" family belongs.
Young children, however, are unable to discern our different motives expressed in our expression of different moral expectations from our willingness to accept the learning maxim that trial and error are the best teachers for the development of children willing and able to meet failure, disappointment and even trauma.
In fact, we have not evolved on the need for trial and error, and its implications for educating our children. However, we are usually less upset by a mark of 70% on a math exam than on a call from the police informing us that our child has stolen from the local WalMart.
Learning to trust our children, however, in both learning and "life" situations, is not exactly a lesson many adults/parents have completed. And the short answer to "why?" is that they (we) have not come to the position of full trust of anyone, including themselves. And if we have to protect other adults from their "tragedies" we will certainly adopt that position with our children.
We are a co-dependent and patronizing society, based on two conflicting values: our own moral superiority and the moral inferiority of others. Some even stretch that equation to the intellectual acomplishment scale: our's versus that of others. Too many males, especially, (but a rapidly growing number of females too!) look for and find too many occasions by which to compete, successfully (placing themselves above others) or unsuccessfully (by seeing themselves as less than others) on too many scales of value.
Read a resume, listen to a professional athlete, read a eulogy, read a biography of an aspiring political leader....they are all replete with self-praise for personal accomplishments....They are rarely exposed by their opposites, like the comments of San Francicso 49ers'quarterback, Colin Kaeperlink following the Super Bowl, when he uttered these words, "I made too many mistakes for us to win!"
Those of us for whom failure has been an essential ingredient to our personal, intellectual and emotional, not to mention spiritual, development, know that our resume will not 'cut it' when there are Rhodes Scholars in the competitions, or when there are provincial athletic champions competing for college teams. Parading our perfection, as one observer of the young daughters of a professional mother colleague put it, does no justice to those perfect daughters, their mother, or the culture of the community in which they are being raised as "role models". We all know that their lives are merely "undisclosed" to the community in which such observations are made. We also know that the failure to disclose emerges from a family culture in which both children and parent are protecting each other from the truth. The children believe that the mother cannot "handle" the truth and the mother believes that, in order to be an acceptable mother, she does not point to any "cracks" in the perfect image of the daughters, in line with the mother, below, who plagarizes to make her child's school performance more perfect.
With the continuing growth of the religious manichean world view, dividing all experience into "good" versus "evil" we will see even more slippage, both conscious and unconscious, into the maelstrom of confusion, in our vain attempt to manage the complexities of our worlds, including our schools, our communities, our towns and villages, and even into our larger institutions like universities and corporations.
Just today, one of the failures of our self-sabotage through our pursuit of perfection, is on the front pages of our national papers, disclosing too many failures in the preparation, distribution and administration of chemotherapy treatment for cancer patients in Canada. Of course, we all want a policy of "zero tolerance" of such errors as putting the wrong chemical mix in the bag, the wrong name on the bag, the wrong opening on the valve that permits the mix to flow, too quickly or too slowly. However, how we work toward such an end result really matters. What are the rewards and punishments for those working as laboratory asssistants, for the pharmacists, for the administering nurses? What are the working conditions in which all participants work? To which extent are these people under duress, under threat, under healthy supervision and monitoring? To what extent are they the product of a system that will tolerate no errors, as part of the culture that sabotages their daily accomplishments. I'll bet that the culture is characterized with more punishments than positive rewards, with more lack of trust than shared responsibility, with less social, political and fiscal support than would generate better results... and yet, we will hold the individuals "responsibile" whose errors can be pinned on their names, reputations and careers, just as they were in the celebrated case of the Sick Children's Hospital nurse, Susan Nelles, when the babies died, several years ago. After undergoing extreme stress to herself and her family, she was ultimately exonerated. It was, however, our need for both perfection, and an equally powerful need for a culprit in the tragedy that generated the drama of inflicting punishment. Organizations, unfortunately, are not held to the same level of account and responsibility, as are individuals, perhaps because they are less "impotent" and much better financed, including much better insured than most individuals.
When the culture learns that individually and collectively we all have a plank in our eye, we will be willing and able to treat the speck in the eye of the other more patiently, with more compassion, with greater trust and will more resilience as we all begin to experience a new level of acceptance, as individuals who authentically want to do a good job and whose liklihood to accomplish a better level of performance rises with our acceptance both by ourselves and by our culture. Here is another example of how we are so intimately connected....in our mutual inter-dependence, sometimes for our learning, sometimes for our growth, and finally often for our very lives.
Teachers, parents, educators...and all of us would do well to drop some of our fear that the other needs our protection (patronizing as it usually is) and as the bishop who delivered the homily on a Friday afternoon to the private boys school said, to the surprise of his adolescent audience prepared to be utterly bored, "Mind your own business!" and then sat down.

In praise of failure: The key ingredient to children’s success, experts say, is not success
By Sarah Boesveld, National Post, February 2, 2013
Emily Martell was born to be Rizzo. So badly did the Grade 4 student want the role of the sassiest Pink Lady in her school’s production of Grease that she marched into the audition in a short brown wig and silky pink jacket and told the panel as much.
“She was so good and I was so proud of her and thought ‘She’s going to get this part,’” her mother, Ali Martell, said.
She didn’t get it, and saw the defeat as a crushing failure — one so traumatic she seriously considered abandoning her passion for school plays.
Ms. Martell could have easily confronted the casting director and demanded he right this wrong — she wouldn’t be the first to do so at their Thornhill, Ont., school. Instead, she let Emily think about the “failure” — and make her own decision.
“She stewed on it for a day and a half, then came back to us and said ‘I never want to quit, I love drama. I didn’t get the part I wanted but I’m going to be the best Jan ever,’” she said of the secondary Pink Lady role her now Grade 6 daughter was offered instead. “She figured it out on her own.”
In letting her daughter work it out alone, Ms. Martell’s hit upon something a growing group of educators and thinkers are pushing parents to be better at, something far more crucial to children’s success in a world that increasingly values resiliency and innovation: Actually letting them fail.
The most recent plea for the embrace of failure came this week from a New Hampshire middle school teacher, Jessica Lahey, who recalled talking with a student’s mother about her daughter’s blatant plagiarism. The mother vehemently defended her daughter’s innocence until the truth came out: Mom was the plagiarist.
Ms. Lahey’s piece, published on The Atlantic’s website, stirred a lot of discussion and spurred bloggers to echo the desire to see failure as more of a key to success than a roadblock. In How Children Succeed, published last fall, Canadian journalist Paul Tough said failure is one of the biggest character builders for children — and if kids of privilege have never experienced setbacks, they’ve never learned to persevere. In early 2012, a London, U.K., girls’ school held ‘Failure Week’ in which these highly accomplished girls were challenged to join an extra-curricular outside their wheelhouse, raise their hand when they weren’t sure they had the right answer.
But while more and more people are talking about embracing failure, the status quo has a powerful hold on the institutions charged with educating North American children, experts say. There’s a double standard in the messaging around screw-ups that can confuse students who look to their parents and teachers for guidance and validation, said Susan Einhorn, the Montreal-based executive director of the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation.
“There’s a mixed message that goes out: Students are told it’s OK to make mistakes, we’ll learn from our mistakes,” she said “And yet most kids are celebrated for their high correctness, perfection on a test, their high scores. That’s what’s celebrated.”
The process of getting to the success — the stops and starts, the failed experiments — doesn’t get any recognition in our culture, said Ms. Einhorn, whose organization helps equip students around the world (including Canada) with laptops, and helps schools revamp their approach to teaching in a digital age.
“The whole idea of failure being OK, that’s still a fairly new concept because it’s not just a matter of changing the language in schools, it’s a matter of changing the acceptance from the community and external culture and parents.”
Today’s parents are not dealing with failure at all, and they’re applying huge pressure on teachers and schools to raise grades to levels not deserved, said Hara Estroff Marano, the editor-at-large of Psychology Today and author of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting. “It used to be you did something and you took your lumps. You got an F in something and it was ‘OK what are you going to do to improve your grade?’” she said. “Now, you don’t give that F.”
It’s the kind of culture Edmonton physics teacher Lynden Dorval was resisting when he made headlines last year for giving zeros to students who didn’t live up to the academic standard, rather than follow the board mandated “formative assessment” process that asks teachers to evaluate through ongoing reviews instead.
Ms. Estroff Marano hears a whole lot about innovation in the business world, but that discussion isn’t happening in schools largely because it’s too scary to have.
“I think there’s a lot of talk about risk-taking, making mistakes, but in practice there’s no tolerance for it at the times and places people can best learn it, because it’s a lesson best learned early so you know ‘Hey, I can come back from that, I can pick myself up, dust myself off and do just fine,’” she said.
In his recent book Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, education advocate Tony Wagner cites a 2011 survey by General Electric of 1,000 senior executives in 12 countries that found 95% feel innovation is the answer to a more competitive economy. Eighty-eight percent said they believe innovation will be the number one creator of new jobs in their respective countries. Mr. Wagner interviewed parents of innovators and found they let their children try many different things, which helped them find their passion, but some parents may be hesitant to take that gamble.
“Parents recognize the world is far more competitive than the world they grew up in — they’re terrified, they’re very frightened,” Mr. Wagner said. “We’re seeing, in a sense, the results of a generation of fear-driven parenting and that draws parents to want to go in the opposite direction, of trying to protect their kids, of trying to ensure they have every opportunity to be successful, defined conventionally in terms of getting into a so-called good school.”
But true innovation demands risk-taking, he said, and children can only do that when they’re trusted to make their own decisions. And there are some Canadian schools — largely independent ones — that consider it a key piece of learning.
At the Calgary Science School, the conventional model — which Mr. Wagner says was designed to raise unthinking employees, not innovators — is thrown out the window. Students learn through inquiry, trying to find solutions to real-world problems that perplex even the teachers, said Dan McWilliam, its coordinator of professional development and collaboration. Instead of seeing a setback as defeat, students at the 15-year-old charter school are taught to work through it.
This task can be tough for gifted students, who arrive at another Calgary school, Westmount Charter School, with book smarts and an apparent inability to deal with failure. Built on the research of Dalhousie professor Michael Ungar — a leading expert in resiliency — the school designed a program to deal with this: A “mobile classroom” takes Grade 7 students outside on bicycles where they learn math by studying gear ratios and social studies by following the rules of the road.
“You’d be surprised at how many of them can’t ride a bike,” said Chris Hooper, an assistant principal. “It’s creating an environment where a lot of incidental decisions just need to be made that involve a lot of cooperation and collaboration. They’re learning without knowing it.”
Despite some parents’ initial skepticism of the program’s educational value (how does bike riding constitute learning?), they’re usually pleased with the end result, he said. But over on the public school side, teachers like Andrew Campbell and Ms. Lahey are still fighting the “constant battle” of seeing students hand in projects clearly crafted by their parents. Mr. Campbell, who teaches Grades 4 and 5 at Major Ballachey Public School in Brantford, Ont., wrote a blog post for the Canadian Education Association website in December on the need for innovation in schools. He says it’s hard for parents to think of their kids’ failures as learning opportunities if schools shy away from risk-taking because they want to continue their records of doing well on provincial standardized testing, and fare well in ranking reports such as those from the Fraser Institute.
“We need to hold them to high standards, and that’s counter to the idea we have that failure is OK, resilience is important, perseverance is important,” he said. Requiring a school to meet fixed benchmarks in a fixed time frame, he said, doesn’t jive with the way students best learn critical thinking and problem solving skills — through trial and error.
As she reflects on the response to her article, Ms. Lahey hopes more parents will realize the importance of failure for their kids. But she sympathizes with their resistance.
“I’m a mom, and my heart aches when I see my children suffer. I want to rescue,” she wrote in an email to the National Post. “What’s important, however, is to tamp that down with the understanding that I am a much better mother if I acknowledge their power in the situation. Every time I take over, every time I intervene, I am telling my child that I don’t trust them…. In the end, I don’t save them. I weaken them.”

Stunted Masculinities...quo vadis?

Maher new rule- masculinity brave sports guns

By Al Smith, Literate Owl blog, January 26, 2013
While popular culture continues to tell us woman are oppressed it is males I see floundering with their roles and sexual identity. Now I’m not disregarding horrors like rape or domestic violence, nor issues like equity or fair pay but I believe that gender bias is largely a myth driven by media embedded too deep in a politically greedy white male Washington DC. In my world, the only place women are under represented is political office. From my armchair, I see a culture of men ( and boys ) quite unwell and acting out with dysfunctional behaviour and following questionable values. Bill Maher is an entertainer but his monologue raises some questions about many of my male counterparts.
By Bill Maher, on Literate Owl blog by Al Smith, January 26, 2013
And I think it’s because a lot of men today just aren’t feeling all that… useful. They did in the days of hunter-gatherers, but in today’s society, women do the hunting and the gathering — it’s called shopping. And the men, for most of us, the most masculine thing we do all day is pee standing up.
And that’s why we wind up idolizing other men who do the masculine things we’re not doing: football players, soldiers, action stars who solve every problem with violence, tough guys who start wars for no reason, generals who conquer rag-tag armies from third world countries. These are the vessels of our outsourced masculinity.
Why do men collect guns? You know, former Georgia Senator Zell Miller once said, “I’ve got more guns than I need, but not as many as I want.” Well, the Pentagon is just Zell Miller on a larger scale with shoes on. It has more guns than it needs, but not as many as it wants.
And I know some of you out there are saying, oh, that’s some liberal bullshit right there, calling guns a replacement for testosterone. But if that’s not true, how come as a man gets older, his gun always get bigger?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDA9vEjeABA&sns=tw
Living vicariously through the "action figures" in sports, movies, the military, all in a blind "outsourcing" of our masculinity, has merit as a perspective. Living vicariously has always had its own tragic pitfalls, mostly found in an emptiness similar to the hunger experienced after eating Chinese food. Often, too it is the feelings and the full experience of powerlesness that drives us to suck life energy from others who, they believe, are living a real, authentic, full and fulfilling life.
In the historic 'run' to this epiphany, men have disdained opportunities to experience life differently.
Conquering the competition, extrinsically, has relevance only for those whose testosterone levels require a physical release, in adolescence, early adulthood and perhaps even up to forty-something.
However, as Carl Jung reminds us, human life takes a different turn sometime near the mid-forties, and many of us turn from extrinsic rewards and pursuits to the intrinsic variety, looking inward, reflecting on the meaning and purpose of our existence, 'becoming something like more spiritual' (to use today's parlance) and less interested in the acquisition of symbols of success and power 'over'.
In the course of that development, males often find themselves searching for words to describe, and thereby help them to accept and to uncover, the pain they have been avoiding for the first four-plus decades of their lives.
It was words in their English classes that sounded, at fifteen to most of them, like so much "BS" or, put another way, "too effeminate" for my taste. Shakespeare often drove male adolescents crazy with his verdant text filled to the brim with metaphors, similes, personifications, pathetic fallacies, ironies and dramatic ironies...just to mention a few of the "extravagant overblown" exposures of human emotions...like jealousy, the pursuit of power, the tragedy of hubris, mistaken identity and character foils to entertain and, if necessary, to teach....Milton, too, with his copious pages of pounding yet balanced political rhetoric breathing hot from the mouths of Beelzebub, and the host of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost seemed, to the mechanical, or even scientific and especially pragmatic adolescent, more than a little melodramatic.
And, being male, one wanted to avoid melodrama like the bubonic plague, given its obvious affinity with the female gender.
So, avoiding the devices associated with melodrama, including the words that served as its vehicle, and the exploration of the inner emotions they revealed, and the discoveries of personal responsibility that accompany all voyages into the "heart and the soul" including the forgiveness of those whose overt abuse of each of us somehow, on reflection perhaps over many replays, began to disclose the "part we played in the tragedy," a disclosure that can come only to those patient and courageous and vulnerable enough to believe that the mining of those moments, left silent like the bear in his winter cave, for decades, is truly a journey into a new conscious awareness of how things too painful or too complicated to face are really the nuggets of new life that bring meaning to the last three or four decades one breathes.
Countries, too, just like individuals, and families and communities, have the opportunity to discover their own "shadow" in the repressed tragedies of their collective experiences, should they find the courage and the vocabulary and the perspective and the quiet time to "mine" those moments, lying silent just waiting for their 'spring'(ing) to light.
However, a permanent adolescence will cling tighter and tighter to the extrinsic symbols of power like guns, and sports and military uniforms, and executive offices and BMW's and private jets in a desperate and extended pursuit of approval, acceptance and the pride/hubris of status, in a world addicted to the make-up that permits the permanent avoidance of both truth and vulnerability.
Men, especially, are so deeply embedded in a self-sabotaging culture of masculinities that reduces us to the contemptible "gayness" of the artist, or the even more contemptible "arrogance" of the action figures, in a bi-polar and hypermanic and tragic pursuit of our own emptiness.
Unless and until we discover the garden of multicoloured and nuanced floral arrangements that are already planted and waiting only for our discovery, in novels, biographies, poems, lyrics, movies and plays, and in art galleries, dance recitals, symphony concerts and individual music and art lessons, men will continue their stoic and axelithymic ("no words for feelings") path of self-destruction.
There are those, many of them men, who live by the adage, "what I do matters more than what I say" as if silence and a stunted vocabulary were innate to the male gender. Cutting the larynx/brain off from the oxygen of words, especially those words that express how we feel in all of its nuances, will only exacerbate our experience of powerlessness and generate an even more desperate pursuit of the hollow symbols of hard power...after all, isn't that hard, orgasmic power the core definition of masculinity?
Oh, only in the world of make-believe, you say?
Pity, and here I thought it was the brass ring to which every man both aspired, and once found, clung to desperately, hoping never to be found out as human, weak, vulnerable and still admirable.
Reclaiming our authentic masculinities, including a rich and nuanced vocabulary of colours to paint the canvas of our inner experiences, including our feelings, will significantly reduce our dependence on the acquisition of hard power in all of its many forms, and demonstrate both to ourselves and to our partners, that in weakness and in vulnerability and in deep reflection we can find the full value, meaning and purpose of our existence. And, then we will be able and willing to thank people like Bill Maher and Al Smith for their courageous and cogent nudges.

Dads are critical to development of boys and girls

Traditional dads more likely to raise ‘girlie girls,' says UBC researcher

How fathers act at home appears to shape daughters’ career ambitions
By Randy Shore, Vancouver Sun, in Ottawa Citizen, January 28, 2013
Dads who avoid washing the dishes and doing the laundry at home tend to raise “girlie girls,” daughters who prefer dolls and aspire to be housewives, new research reveals.
Daughters are more likely to believe they can grow up to work outside the home if their fathers have egalitarian attitudes about child care, cooking and cleaning the house and actually take on those jobs, said University of B.C. psychologist Toni Schmader, who presented her findings at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology last week.
“You have to talk the talk and walk the walk when it comes to gender stereotypes,” said Schmader. “And what dad says and does matters.”
Rather than emulating the behaviour of fathers who are focused on paid work, girls appear to align their attitudes about male and female gender roles to “complement” their father’s behaviour, Schmader said.
“Girls may be looking at their father not as a model for who they could be, but as a model for who they could be with [as a spouse],” Schmader said.
Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Traditional+dads+more+likely+raise+girlie+girls+says/7880401/story.html#ixzz2JIQYcO5h
Here we read that how Dad's behave matters to the perceptions of their daughters.
In other research, we learn that boys learn the "dominance" model of masculinities from a culture "dominated by male bullies" who shame their young boys into "manly" attitudes, behaviours and beliefs.
And one of the weapons those "dominating males" use in their undeclared warfare is ridicule, and the comparison they use is "girlie" whenever they witness or hear about a male exhibiting attitudes commonly associated with empathy, compassion, and "failure to stand up for yourself" as in the exhortation, "Hit him back when he hits you, so he will learn his lesson!"....
In both cases, the description of the negative, "girlie" is applied both to young girls who choose to play with barbies, and young boys who exhibit attitudes, actions and beliefs that run "counter" to a stereotype of healthy masculinity.
If ever we are to begin to transform the culture in which young boys are raised, we are going to have to confront the masculine culture that abhors anything smacking of "weakness" (physical, emotional, or mental) that it witnesses in young male children.
And only men are eligible as agents applying for that role.
Women need not apply! It is, after all, women who oversubscribe to the notion of telling their young boys, when injured or bullied, "Don't cry! Be a man!" in some kind of knee-jerk response to what they believe all men want to both hear and to witness in their offspring. And, when the father discovers his son has been bullied, he immediately directs his son to "go after the xxx-xx-x-xxxxx!"
In the last few decades, female identity has dominated the North American culture, premised on the notion that too many women are not earning wages for similar and identical work as their male peers.
Identity, however, has so many nuanced aspects, which include, of course, the rate of pay of men and women.
However, masculine identity, equally if not more complex, than that of females, merits at least equal time, attention, dollars and public debate as that dedicated to the healthy growth and development of women.
Young men compromise, too often, in order to comply with what they consider "binding rules" of what a healthy male looks like, does, thinks and believes. And both their mothers and their fathers, with differing words and looks, perhaps, but nevertheless both consciously and unconsciously, induce, embed, indoctrinate and acculturate their young boys into a pressurized kind of confusion.
In order to be a healthy male, both experience and research tell us, that support for authentic feelings expressed when felt, and supported by both parents, is conducive to the development of a healthy young man.
However, too many fathers, uncles, grandfathers and community leaders (male) suffer from something new to the vocabulary of studies in masculinities: "alexithymic," (stoic) literally "no words for feelings"
And, of course, unfortunately, they pass their condition on to their male children. Harry Brod, in the introduction to Brothers Keepers, New Perspectives on Jewish Masculinity, writes these words:
..."restrictive emotionality is one of the hallmarks, and one of the most damaging outcomes, of traditional masculinity, signifying a "not feminine" constraint that boys enforce mercilessly on each other throughout boyhood's playgrounds, school hallways, and locker rooms. Males adhere to this crippling standard to such an extent that they are typified as stoic or "alexithymic," literally "no words for feelings" (Levant, 1995) Lane and Pollerman (2002) have identified opportunities to encode emotional experiences with language, in actual communication, as fundamental to the development of emotional intelligence. In their view, alexithymia represents "a developmental deficit consisting of a relative absence of emotional experience" (Land and Pollerman, p. 284*) so that children fail to develop nuanced awareness of, or vocabulary for, their feelings. In this sense, boys' normative deprivation in the realm of emotional communication may be the most costly outcome of the dominant masculine paradigm.
*(Lane, R.D. & Pollerman, B.Z. (2002). Complexity of emotional representations. In L.F. Barrett & P. Salovey (eds.) The wisdom of feelings (pp.271-296). New York: Guilford Press

Male culture and models of dominance trump didactic curricula for boys: researchers

There is much work being done about the nature of masculinities; in fact, the research is starting to shape not a mere trickle of a stream, but the full flow of a substantial river.
Here are some notes from one of the essays in a new book entitled, Brothers Keepers, New Perspectives on Jewish Masculinities. The writers of the essay, Michael C. Reichert and Sharon M. Ravitch are conducting a review of the literature.
Methods and perspectives developed within men's studies--what Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) characterize as "ethnographic realism"--offered helpful tools and perspectives with which to explore boys' actual experience of boyhood. To grasp the actual nature of boys' lives and the day-to-day nature of their opportunities and pressures, researchers now understood that the masculine dimension of their experiences had to be discerned:the peer pressure and incitements, institutional norms, rewards and recognitional systems, family and school tacit man-making curricula, and structured world of opportunity as it is typically offered to boys. For too long, gendered developmental paths for boys had been imperceptible.
These tools and perspectives encouraged "voice centered" methodologies in work with boys, which have helped researchers to hear boys' stories about the costs of the masculine identity process. In particular, a worrisome picture of the restrictive force of the dominant form of masculinity has emerged: "It is exclusive, anxiety-provoking, internal and hierarchically differentiated, brutal and violent." (Donaldson, 1985, p.646) Our own and a great deal of other research on boys' lives has established that boys' encounters with this dominant form of masculinity are unavoidable and often painful (Connell, n1989; Martino, 1999,2008; Reichert, 2001; Reichert and Kuriloff, 2003: Reichert, Stoudy & Kuriloff, 2006, Stoudt, 2006).This dominant form of masculinity and its ideals are promoted through valorization and institutionalized endorsement--accompanied by potent reward and recognitional systems--and are enforced by violence, bullying, and even ongoing threat. For a boy not to make some accommodation or show at least public complicity with the privileged identity invites substantial reaction, usually in the form of admonishment, exclusion and peer policing. Ultimately, most boys and men square themselves with society's central ideas about manhood as much to realize their benefits, especially in terms of recognition and reward--the patriarchal dividend--as to avoid the punishments meted out to dissenters (Connell, 1995, p.79)
In many key developmental areas boys' accommodation to this masculine ideal reveals its distorting effect. For example, in terms of basic health outcomes, Waldron (1976),the U.S. Preventive Services Task Froce (1996), and Courtnay (2003) all found that boys' choices and lifestyle practices imperil them at far greater rates than those of females. Broks and Silverstein (1995), Pleck, Sonenstein, and Ku (1994) and Pleck (1995) determined that the greater the boy's conformity to narrow ideas about masculinity, the more likely he is to take risks related to alcohol use, drunk driving, and drug abuse. Similarly, in relation to mental health outcomes, O'Neil, Good and Holmes (1995) compiled stunning testimony over many years to the detrimental effects--in terms of self-esteem, depression, anxiety violence, and relationship success--of restrictive masculine norms. These damaging contrainsts take effect quite early in boys' lives, according to the work of Chu (2000), who studied elementary-age boys and found them to be sensitive to the cultural demands of masculinity, making deliberate compromises in personal authenticity to avoid going against the grain of masculine norms. The author felt that compromises were forced on her research subjects by the tacit and ever-present masculine pressures of school and community life, resulting in a loss of both voice and opportunity. Finally, and perhaps most problematic for societies, a strong relationship exists between these same male norms and uncivil behavior. Boys far more commonly than girls engage in behaviors that increase the risk of disease, injury, and death to themselves and others; they carry weapons more often, engage in pohysiucal fights more often, wear their seat belts less often, drive drunk more frequently, have more sexual partners as we as more unprotected sex, and use alcohol or drugs more often before sex (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006).(p.19-20)
Programs in schools and religious institutions that attempt to teach and inculcate healthy and positive traits in males, whether based on values or on skills come up against the acculturation of these young men.
Schools have struggled with their historic, embedded, "hidden" masculinity curricula, discovering that boys are learning from their experience of near-Darwinian school cultures much more effectively than they learn from any didactic programs (Berkowitz, 2002; Conell, 1996; Reichert, 2001; Reichert & Hawley, 2006; Swain, 2005). Poor school achievement, disciplinary problems, overdiagnosis and over -referral to special educational services, athletic over-injury, bullying, peer harassment, and school violence are some of the issues that raise concerns about the effectiveness of schooling for boys. Religions and cultures across society struggle with boys. Put simply, male adolescents in every religion included in a recent large study showed up less often and dropped out more dramatically (Smith & Denton, 2005)

US20 something's make dating obsolete...tragically

The End of Courtship

By Alex Williams, New York Times, January 11, 2013
Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, instant messages and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend.
“The new date is ‘hanging out,’ ” said Denise Hewett, 24, an associate television producer in Manhattan, who is currently developing a show about this frustrating new romantic landscape. As one male friend recently told her: “I don’t like to take girls out. I like to have them join in on what I’m doing — going to an event, a concert.” ...
Blame the much-documented rise of the “hookup culture” among young people, characterized by spontaneous, commitment-free (and often, alcohol-fueled) romantic flings. Many students today have never been on a traditional date, said Donna Freitas, who has taught religion and gender studies at Boston University and Hofstra and is the author of the forthcoming book, “The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.”
Hookups may be fine for college students, but what about after, when they start to build an adult life? The problem is that “young people today don’t know how to get out of hookup culture,” Ms. Freitas said. In interviews with students, many graduating seniors did not know the first thing about the basic mechanics of a traditional date. “They’re wondering, ‘If you like someone, how would you walk up to them? What would you say? What words would you use?’ ” Ms. Freitas said....
Relationship experts point to technology as another factor in the upending of dating culture.
Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of “asynchronous communication,” as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it’s more like dropping a line in the water and hoping for a nibble.
“I’ve seen men put more effort into finding a movie to watch on Netflix Instant than composing a coherent message to ask a woman out,” said Anna Goldfarb, 34, an author and blogger in Moorestown, N.J. A typical, annoying query is the last-minute: “Is anything fun going on tonight?” More annoying still are the men who simply ping, “Hey” or “ ’sup.”
“What does he think I’m doing?” she said. “I’m going to my friend’s house to drink cheap white wine and watch episodes of ‘Dance Moms’ on demand.”
Online dating services, which have gained mainstream acceptance, reinforce the hyper-casual approach by greatly expanding the number of potential dates. Faced with a never-ending stream of singles to choose from, many feel a sense of “FOMO” (fear of missing out), so they opt for a speed-dating approach — cycle through lots of suitors quickly.
That also means that suitors need to keep dates cheap and casual. A fancy dinner? You’re lucky to get a drink.
“It’s like online job applications, you can target many people simultaneously — it’s like darts on a dart board, eventually one will stick,” said Joshua Sky, 26, a branding coordinator in Manhattan, describing the attitudes of many singles in their 20s. The mass-mailer approach necessitates “cost-cutting, going to bars, meeting for coffee the first time,” he added, “because you only want to invest in a mate you’re going to get more out of.”

If we needed more evidence that we live in a transactional culture, here is a truckload.
"Asynchronous communications" remove most of the risk, both of the person wishing to invite another out, and of the recipient of such an invite. Neither has to "commit" even so much as a couple of hours of conversation face-to-face over a table in a restaurant, for example. As one young woman quoted later in the Williams piece puts it to this effect, I will not accept an invitation, unless he is prepared to make a formal request, a formal commitment and a formal expression of interest in spending time with me.
Economic insecurity, job security, hook-up's in college, and of course, the ubiquitous twitter, facebook etc....rationalizes a refusal to "relate"....and if this is a twenty-something phenomenon, one hopes that, if and when this generation finally decides to "commit" to a life partner, they will find either the appropriate dating service, or a mutual friend who takes the stop of making the introductions.
Trawling for a nibble on a fishing line, when one hopes to land another human being to spend quality time with is about as realistic as planting a quarter in the backyard and expecting a tree of gold leaves that can be converted to gold bars to blossom on that spot. It's never going to happen.
And the men who are participating in this charade are insulting their own confidence and capacity to relate, and the women whose company they seek. To be sure, there will be awkward moments, awkward expressions, and even awkward and inexplicable emotions and that is an important part of the getting-to-know both the self and the other that is essential preparation for a life with a partner.
Refusing to risk those awkward moments is to refuse to risk making mistakes, mistakes that could and would serve as a kind of informal learning curve for these young men.
And women, too, will not escape similar awkward moments should they dip their "toes" into the water of one-to-one conversation, as a integral component in their maturing.
And where are the parents?
Have they left the playing field exclusively to these young men and women whose canvas is still uncluttered with the colours of embarrassment, vulnerability, intimacy and rejection in a private and potentially life-giving and/or crushing experience.

Unlikely New Year's Wishes

Seems some pipe-dream wishes might be in order on this, the last day of 2012, for the upcoming 2013!

So here goes:
I wish that Gary Bettman would find a nursing home, plant himself deeply and permanently in one of its suites and leave the administration of the NHL to someone who really knows the purpose, meaning and promise of the game of hockey...and it is not "just about the money"!!

I wish that David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times, would receive an invitation from Barack Obama, to conduct a three-day seminar, with weekly follow-ups for one full year, with the president, the four leaders of Congress and all of their spouses, on the long-term health of the United States, including the need to build trust between and among all political leaders, as a model of leadership for the rest of Congress, the states and even for the rest of the world.

I wish that Ban Ki Moon would host a visioning conference, for leaders from the 190 countries who are members of the United Nations, on how to re-structure the UN to better meet the complex and overlapping issues of the world's poverty, disease, terrorism, religious extremes, the environment, and the world's impending food shortages...with a view to specific actions being promised and committed by all participants, in the model of the Clinton Global Initiative, with a firm date for public reporting in one, five, ten and twenty years, so the world can once again have confidence that leaders are interested in more than their careers.

I wish that every newspaper in Canada, the United States and Great Britain, France, Germany, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, India, Pakistan, China would send fully trained reporters to all world capitals, and begin reporting every day from their perspectives, in digital format that would be accessible to all intenet subscribers...so that we could easily and readily begin to comprehend the facts and the multiple perspectives in a world increasingly complex and inter-dependent.

I wish that Mayor Bloomberg would host an assault weapons amnesty/buy-back in New York city, and encourage all mayors across the United States to do a similar event, with full public disclosure on the recovery of these weapons, their melt-down and the significance of the move.

I wish that all elementary and secondary teachers would be required, prior to certification, to spend a minimum of two semesters in courses designed to discover the history, motivations, learning needs and potential of all male students whom they will face in their classrooms. This initiative would also require the public advertisement from all faculties of education, in all media outlets, as a way to encourage the recruitment of an army of committed male educators to enter the schools, classrooms, principals offices, and administration offices.

I wish that all universities in North America and in Europe would develop and institute courses in male studies, as a complement and a supplement to the multiple female studies courses and departments that have already been established.

I wish that all national and city editors of all daily newspapers would pay more attention to the arts communities in their coverage areas, with a view to reviewing the events offered not merely the dates and times, so that we begin to develop a balance between the deadening parade of economic information with the important creative and prophetic voices in every community.

I wish that all countries and their leaders would learn that an open internet accessible to all, freely, is in the best interests of a global community, through sponsorsed on-line learning opportunities, and that censorship be exercised only on those sites promoting violence, hatred, abuse and political unrest.

I wish that all christian church leaders would re-think all of their institutional claims to be the "only" or the "best" or the "first" or the "primary" faith, in an overt initiative to remove much of the marketing/evangelizing from their self-promotion efforts and begin to lead creative projects that help to integrate all human vulnerabilities into their perspectives...in the manner of a Jedd Apatow in movies.

I wish that all television commercials would declare a war on dumb men and women, in an effort to talk "up" to an educated and enlightened audience, and eliminate all references to comedic insults to their competitors, and to individual human beings.

I wish that Aaron Sorkin would write a docu-drama series about the complexities of religious organizations, the abuse of power by those organizations, and the potential of those organizations to open the eyes, hearts, minds and spirits of people, without infantilizing those people.

I wish that Stephen Harper would call a meeting of all Canadian political leaders, with all First Nations chiefs and leaders, and re-think and re-work the relationship between First Nations people and the rest of the country, using the perspectives, recommendations and urgings of the aboriginal communities.

Happy New Year!