The battle for our boys’ minds did not arrive upon the backs of Bugattis, or in a puff of cigar smoke. No. We did not need to wait for the bombastic squarks of the world’s favourite ‘Alpha Male’, for our boys’ minds to be toyed with, and their heads turned. We’re long past that. The fingers have pointed at, and probed in the brains of boys; told who they are, and what they are destined to become, for decades now. Boys will become one thing: ‘Men.’ Men. A word not spoken, but spat. A word often suffixed by ‘toxic’, ‘entitled’, ‘violent, ‘dog’, or ‘trash’. The word so many love to hate. It’s hardly something to look forward to, or aspire to become. As for so many boys there are no positive male role models at all. Too many fatherless homes, and too few men in classrooms. There’s little to turn to on TV either, and whatever you do, do not turn on the news, or scroll through social media. Men are bad. And over the years, slowly, we’ve learnt to associate everything bad; all bad behaviours, traits, problems, or outcomes, with men too. Even absurd things that have nothing to do with men at all… are now their fault. Does it piss you off how people don’t recycle? Men. What about climate change? It was men. Too few pockets in your dress? Guess what, men took them. What about Brexit? Yeah, that was men too. Don’t ask questions, just think of something bad, now think of men. Do it again, and again, and again. This is how brainwashing works, it starts young, lasts a life time, and happens even without the help of Mr Tate. So is it time we all just stopped telling boys who they are, or what they’ll become? Is it too late to stop the twisted charities marching into our schools to ‘educate’ our boys, so they can perform the apologia of their gender too? Is it time we all stop projecting our own fragility, and ignorance onto innocent children, who are too young, and don’t deserve to be recruited by propagandists into a gender war? How do we let boys, really be boys? ~ [1] Images by Codioful, Dan Cristian Padure, Ian Dooley, Eduardo Barrios, Christopher Burns, Sebastian Mouilleau, from Unsplash.
2023-06-05