Two pieces on the same subject, both by women. One of them is by Shireen Qudosi, who works on counter-extremism projects and thus naturally connects the issue to that of the mass killing problem. Some of you mentioned lack of fathers in the comments to that post, so here's some additional support for your ideas. (Here's more.)
The second is from Belinda Brown in the UK. I'm not very convinced by some of her evidence about the difference between boys and girls -- if girls 'don't want any conflict' and 'try to be equals' and 'forget who won' in conflicts between themselves, I've never noticed it, but I have noticed girls forming intense friendships that fall apart and never recover over internal conflicts. I've also noticed girls forming larger cliques with rigid hierarchies. Although actually her structure is ambiguous enough that I'm not sure if she means 'girls' or 'female chimpanzees' in that section, so perhaps it holds for chimps. In any case, her real topic is boys, and what she says there is more interesting.
Both of the pieces reference mythic-language books about the meaning of manhood, both of which have the word "Warrior" in the title. My sense is that it is society's attempts to get rid of the warrior aspects that is causing a lot of the problems for boys and men; perhaps it lies at the back of the whole of the problem.
6 comments:
"Joyce Benenson, a Professor of Psychology at Emanuel College, Boston, has been studying children’s interactions since she was 19. In her wonderful book Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes,she shows through a wide range of experiments, how even as babies, boys are attracted toward groups, whereas girls will home in on the individual."
I haven't reviewed her research, but from my anecdotal experience this isn't true at all. It might be more accurate to say that boys are more attracted to *formal* groups (Boy Scouts, an athletic team, the US Marines, etc) which have a purpose, whereas girls are more attracted to informal groups where the purpose is the group interaction itself.
Qudosi's top/bottom run quote of "It’s got to be hard being a man today. Your entire identity is systematically being scrubbed from existence..." starts out well enough, but she keeps trying to understand men through theoretical lenses instead of providing her son a man. She also is trying to define what a man provides and needs without understanding men. Words are insufficient to actions, to attitude, to the father figure that personally gives identify and security. To include her. Women with good men have different lives and priorities then those without. But this also mean some of her "freedom" is curtailed and might include some emotional burden she ranks as of value. Some of the very behaviors she decries as misogynistic (I am your husband, not the government) and homophobic (Sodomy ain't the way to grow up, son) may be exactly the things she and her son needs.
Brown is more research and organized observations. Again it seems to me she is trying to understand men theoretically as specimens and historic behavior objects. She see's that boys rough house, but seems to decry that we do that as adults too, sometimes seriously as we sort out who is the boss. Current culture says this violence is always bad. As I get older I'm not convinced of this.
The weak, women, and children are prey to predatory men. The "patriarchy" is the act of the warrior/defender protecting their own in formative groups unto governments.
I would say that Warrior/defender is a causality of a prey culture trying to remove the predator culture through shame culture. I suspect this is failing because the ones that can't be shamed will not stop, and the prey take it out on the warrior/defenders who do care about the rules and are not a threat to society no matter their strength. The loss of the warrior/defender then emboldens the predators. It's probably not coincidental that this is the gun control debate at a higher level.
-STC Michael
The "present" father provided genes of a guy willing to commit to his children. The "absent father provided genes of a guy not willing to do that.
The exceptions are numerous, certainly: soldiers or firemen who became absent for unmistakably masculine reasons; pathological mothers who kept decent fathers away from their children; fathers seeking a new life in harsh places intending to send for family once established, just for openers. Still, the overall numbers are in favor of my simplification above. And as near as we can tell with limited data, the children track the absent father's genes more than their environment.
I know people grow weary of AVI always popping in with this point, but I see nearly all studies of behavior overlooking this possibility. Especially to those of you who say "I think it's both genetics and environment." Fine. Then why do your studies keep only looking only at environmental factors?
We prefer cultural and behavioral explanations. I don't know if that is all cultures, or just ones related to ours. But we cannot keep allowing those to be our defaults. In every question and study, ask yourself "what is the genetic inheritance of the person we are studying? How closely does the result track that?" Because I do that automatically now, I frequently find myself saying "Genetics could be all of this."
We prefer cultural and behavioral explanations. I don't know if that is all cultures, or just ones related to ours. But we cannot keep allowing those to be our defaults. In every question and study, ask yourself "what is the genetic inheritance of the person we are studying? How closely does the result track that?" Because I do that automatically now, I frequently find myself saying "Genetics could be all of this."
For however little it may be worth, I think you raise a great point here.
Mothers also pass genes to their children. Often, women who gravitate to unreliable men had unreliable fathers (whose genes they pass to their children). While I'm not quite willing to say it's *all* genetics, it seems quite reasonable that genetics contributes to a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
AVI, epigenetics is when scientists realize how much they don't understand about junk DNA and sequence markers.
Genetics confuses the average Man and the average Man needs scientists to tell them what to pray and think about. In the past, Margaret Sanger and others have used genetics to portray a kind of totalitarian utopia.
Sin passes from the father to the son, for up to 4 generations. DNA sequences are activated or made dormant by close proximity to other bio fields from 0-8.
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