Are boys and men being set up for failure?

Views: 34479

Sabrina Almeida

It’s no longer a man’s world, according to Tucker Carlson. And he may be on to something big here!

The Fox News anchor recently launched “Men in America”, a series which looks at the changing gender dynamics. In the inaugural episode, Carlson unleashed a torrent of statistics of suicides, substance abuse, incarceration, marriages, the number of adult males living with their parents and biological changes—all of which support the theory that “men are failing in mind, body and spirit”. Don’t turn the page yet!

As Carlson pointed out, the seriousness of the problem lies in our unwillingness to accept that there is one.

As a mother of two young men, almost everything he said resonated with me. Over the years, I have often compared their initiative (or rather a lack of it) to girls of a similar age. The girls certainly seem to bring their A-game to every opportunity while the boys (mine at least) tend to be more laid back and willing to step aside.

While I initially attributed this to their laziness and immaturity, Carlson got me thinking in a whole different direction.

Is the empowerment of women causing us to push our boys off to the side?

Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist, cultural critic and professor at the University of Toronto, is of the opinion that schooling could be partly responsible for this new submissiveness in men. He says that the lack of competition (in schools) is detrimental to the male spirit. I agree!

I have witnessed the slow demise of the fighting spirit in my first-born after we moved from India to the West. From kindergarten to grade two (in the United States), his teachers promoted a collaborative rather than competitive attitude. He was discouraged from taking pride in his academic achievements in order to prevent less-accomplished classmates from “feeling bad”. In fact, he was told never to talk about it and use his talents to help the others instead. We never understood why both could not co-exist. After all each has its place and value.

On the baseball and soccer fields his coaches constantly reinforced the message that winning or losing didn’t count. It was all about having fun! (Another blow to competition!) Many of us parents felt it prevented the boys from doing their best.

Compare these messages to the ones we are trying to send little girls and young women… it is no surprise that they are more willing to fight for what they want than our boys.

Carlson also makes a reference to video game addiction among boys as being detrimental to their development. I am with him on this one too! Social skills, interpersonal relations and mental health suffer because of it.

A study by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto revealed that more than one in three students in Grades 7 to 12 reported experiencing high levels of psychological distress in 2015. That was up from nine per cent in 2007, when the video gaming problem was first monitored. CAMH also noted the problem was more prevalent among boys, with 20 per cent reporting symptoms, compared with five per cent of girls. You might compare this to girls’ usage of and dependence on social media. But from what I’ve seen its seems less harmful than living in the virtual world of video games.

Peterson believes that indoctrination in schools of gender equality and the association of masculinity with aggressiveness and violence has also caused boys to take a big step back.

Yes, it is troubling that feminism has become synonymous with male bashing… and the #MeToo movement hasn’t helped.

It shames all men.

While all the shootings in America cause us to focus on gun control, its worth nothing that troubled young men are at the centre of the problem. Perceived physical, mental and social deficiencies are a leading cause of male depression and isolation and the consequent aggressive or suicidal acts.

The fallout of teaching girls that they are more than equal seems to be our boys feeling inadequate and less confident of their gender and abilities.

The rising aggressiveness in women and mildness in men has caused a social imbalance of sorts.

An equal society should not favour any gender, race or creed. While there is good reason why women are being propelled forward, one must spare some thought for how overdoing it could impact the future generations of men. Lest there comes a time when boys feel inferior to their female siblings, classmates and coworkers. What will we do then? Reverse the cycle again?

The empowerment of women does not have to mean downgrading men. After all equality is all about giving each one its due and co-existing. It’s time to be sensitive and fair to both men and women. – CINEWS

Comments: 17

Leave a Reply to Logan Cancel Reply


  1. Well said, girls who may not want to pursue ‘aggressive character fields’ will also suffer from the idea that they are somehow ‘inferior’. People should be encouraged to pursue their innate and learned interests. As Dr Peterson says, competition doesn’t mean failing boys to learn good sportsmanship and fairness.

  2. In my case the most damaging thing to my life was how often the people around me would repeat to “do your best”. It’s like there’s an implicit expectation of failure. I can’t speak to others’ experiences, but I know that nobody ever felt like holding me to any sort of standards, and I feel it may be a cultural problem of the blue church’s desire to erode the very concept of standards. Rather than demanding excellence, we demand equity, and that seems wrong-headed at its root.

    1. “You’re doing great!” was the one that always got to me, particularly because it was always used when I was clearly doing absolutely terrible at something. Hell, I might’ve even preferred somebody call out instead “You suck!”, because personally (and I think it’s the same with a lot of guys), a bit of harshness just motivates me to do better. “You’re doing great” immediately kills my fighting spirit and, like as you said, nobody was actually holding me to any sort of standard, so why should I make any effort to be better? Even my worst is great, so I might as well just sit down and eat some ice cream.

  3. I agree that males are given fewer and fewer opportunities to compete with or against one another.
    And the promotion that the group should be rewarded at the expanse of the individual will only discourage hardworking males to aim for the average, instead of the best.
    While it would benefit everyone to have a harmonious balance between teamwork and personal excellence, the United-States’ leftist political views are gaining more and more ground in Europe, and especially in France.
    Nowadays, news outlets are writing that young boys should no longer care about their own struggles, and expectations, but should instead prioritize the feelings of young girls over their own.
    Telling them at the very young age that, no matter what they do, society won’t give a damn about their existence.
    A young boy getting punched by another child would be laughed at, while a girl receiving a slap for misbehaving would be pitied at. And in most cases, the person who gave the slap would be vilified, and seen as a monstrous being for daring to hit a girl.
    It’s just a constant rain of dilemmas pouring down on us:
    – Saying that males and females are equals, but then treating males more harshly then their female counterpart
    – Saying that females are being ignored, mistreated and abused, but then expecting males to confess after being falsely accused of a crime that never occurred.
    Sure, we need to have a discussion about how to tackle the issues presented to us, and try to fix those problems as best as we can.

    But after all these years of being shut down, silenced and ignored, why are we still viewed as the root of all problems ?

  4. Your thoughts are dead on. The stuff boys seem to be learning in school are then reinforced by TV commercials where men (mostly husband’s and father’s) are usually being depicted as the dimwits and fools, while the women are being shown as the wise and sensible ones.

  5. Although boys suffer the most, any child that dares express originality, drive or free thinking is now shamed and humiliated. This is why private schools are the future. Public schools are labs for radical leftists that want to usher in Mao 2.0. Parents need to vote with their feet.

  6. I think that males are flocking to video games because they are the last places males can act like men. Online games pitting player vs player is all about the competition and being the best. The reason they become deppressed is while a guy can achieve a sense of dominance or success in a video game, it doesn’t translate to the real world (in most cases). Therefore they are recieveing conflicting messages from their brain, one of sucess and competition from the video game and a sense of submission and weakness promoted by agents in real life.
    Therefore I feel video games are an unsustainable coping mechanisim males abuse (like alcohol) to attempt to regain some kind of control in their life. It’s not the video games that are the issue, it’s that video games are being used to replace the real world competition men need.

  7. I think I’ll leave my two cents here.

    I’m a man. I disagree that it’s the video games. (Video games can introduce someone to technology (programming), and the arts, many many things that are indeed practical) The real problem is the two tiered system of laws. Where we the common man follow the law, and our “betters”/ politicians don’t and usually get away with it. The same goes for women, they do an equal crime and get less of a sentence.

    I am in my 30s now. I went to high school, I dated women from then til my mid twenties, when I realized it must be rare to find women that can even be trusted. Couple that with the attitude towards men and I said “F” it and gave up the dating scene altogether. Why waste the time.

    As for opportunities, we have to make them ourselves, I was a “MGTOW” before that crap even existed, and those guys got it all wrong. Society itself is a vapid, festering cesspool of apathy and inaction. And when there is action it’s misdirected and divisive, rather than coming together to share ideas to solve problems. (As we can see with the clearly manipulated public and polarization of Right vs Left, Identity politics etc.). The vast majority can’t remember what happened a month ago, on both sides of the political spectrum. Also it would seem, people really don’t give a damn about mass surveillance, it would seem that all those who fought and died in the last World War died for nothing as consequence.

    I have lots of ideas that could benefit the world. I don’t “step aside” because I lack competition and drive. I play the long game to build up capital and create companies that can actually make a change. Without having to be beholden to investors or in debt.
    I am not going to give them away for free though, there was a time when I was a person who might have. But honestly why would society deserve those things?

    People (Men) like myself are indeed “stepping aside”. We will let those of you who think you know better crash and burn, because obviously, it’s the only way the majority is going to wake up and smell the roses. It may seem like we are “stepping aside” because we lack ethics, duty, ambition and drive. On the contrary, we just don’t give a sh t about what this feminized Post National State and Globalist “Village” this Nation and this World has become. People like myself are tired of telling everyone “I told you so’. We’re tired of being the voice of reason, and like the faithless women of my past, we simply don’t care anymore, and will let the rest of you wallow in your own self destruction. This post is probably all over the place and disjointed, oh well, you get the picture. Gotta run! have things to learn and do.

  8. I believe, as a white female working in the business sector, that this is simply the breakdown of the traditional family. A Man (Father), Woman (Mother) and children (either male or female). Once this progression has begun (already begun), the family unit will be without their traditional income maker, (Father) with less means of economic stability. This in turn, will lead individuals to be more and more dependent on the Government, and exactly how they want it! Sad……

  9. “Lest there come a time when boys feel inferior to their female siblings, classmates and coworkers….”

    We are already there. My six-year-old son came home from class one day and asked me, “Why are boys always the bad ones?” I asked what he meant, and he said that in any story the bad guy is always a boy, and that girls were generally the good ones. This really irritates me, but there is zero chance of persuading his female teacher to go easy on the male-bashing.

    I don’t think the result of all this is that men are avoiding competition. I think the result is that they are avoiding any situation in which they might have to compete with a female. After #MeToo, there are now many reports of male employees refusing to be alone with female colleagues, and some corporations are banning one-on-one male-female meetings. Boys who become obsessed with video games are, in their own way, retreating into a basically all-male world in which they can be competitive.


    This completely mischaracterizes the findings of the study, which showed that while more boys are dealing with problem gaming issues, more girls report psychological distress.

    You’re also committing the post hoc fallacy – assuming that it’s problem gaming that is causing high levels of psychological distress. The study’s authors themselves say that they don’t yet know that the cause is. In all likelihood, there is no single cause.

    This article is full of bad reasoning.

    1. As a boy and as a man, one of the things you learn is that nobody cares about your psychological distress, and asking people for help burdens them.

      Boys don’t cry. Men don’t ask for help. They don’t report distress. It’s not a successful strategy.

      For girls and women, it appears to be a different story. If a girl or a woman is distressed, everyone is concerned. She must be helped.

      So a greater frequency of reporting distress among girls compared to boys may not be proof of more actual distress.

  11. This problem will get worse and worse until we finally acknowledge that we have more empathy for women than for men, and stop lying.

    It’s the lying, pretending that we want equality when what we want is for women to be treated better than men, that makes us prisoners.

    Ask somebody about whether men and women should be treated equally and they’ll say yes. Then give them any example of any scenario and they’ll try to justify treating women better than men.

    Tying ourselves in knots trying to maintain two incompatible positions – just to avoid being called a sexist – means we can’t think clearly or speak honestly about the problem.

    If we look at how people in western countries behave and ignore what they say, the position of women compared to men looks a lot like a caste system with one group highly privileged and protected and the other regarded as those whose suffering is unimportant.

    Consider violence as an example. A man may not hit a woman, even in self-defense. We justify this by saying that women are weaker.

    But if a man is attacked by a weaker man, he can hit back. Some women are stronger than some men, but the rules do not change for those cases.

    This rule: I can hit you (and everybody laughs and cheers) but you cannot hit me back (because everybody would become outraged and would attack you) demonstrates a higher and a lower caste.

    And in fact, all of the rules relating men and women in the west are like this. A woman can destroy a man’s livelihood with an accusation, whether true or false, and our sympathy when that happens lies with the woman. The man has no comparable power to make society condemn and punish the woman.

    But we lie. We say that men have all the power. We say that all discrimination is against women, even as we ourselves discriminate in favour of women whenever we get the chance.

    The situation will get worse, the male suicides will continue to increase, women will grow more hateful and accusatory, until we decide to speak the truth, even though that will not be popular.