They Aren’t Dangerous if You Raise Them Right
Boys who can’t cry shoot bullets
As I’m sitting there watching this boy sob, I’m choking down my own tears because I see myself in this kid. I was once young, lost and unable to cry. This kid is almost bigger than I am. He’s handsome and confident. Before he got hurt he was the high school quarterback. Boys want to be him and girls want to be with him. But he’s in trouble and he’s quickly becoming just another statistic that represents boys who are failing out of school, becoming chronically addicted and on the verge of suicide. I’m pretty sure that I’m one of the only adults that is nice to this kid. It didn’t take much to get him to cry like a baby. Just a little bit of kindness, compassion and empathy.
Everybody hates him and tells him that he’s a fuck-up, he tells me. Even his own parents. I see this kid at the high school as part of school-based mental health initiative and many of the school staff apparently think it’s my job to chew him out even though they already do it almost on the daily. They tell me that he’s cocky, they tell me that he’s disrespectful and selfish. They tell me that he’s a punk, a criminal and a delinquent. But I see a kid who is compassionate and respectful. This respectful kid is the one that walks into my office because I treat him with respect and compassion. He lives up to the person that I see him as but that has always been my experience with people. Especially young people. They will act according to how I treat them. If I treat them like people, they act like people but if I treat them like monsters, they act like monsters.
Raising Pitbulls
In July of 2019, a six-year-old boy was viciously mauled by a pitbull somewhere in Texas. But this isn’t anything new. There are endless examples of Pitbulls ripping people to shreds going back several decades but the consensus among most people is that Pitbulls are good dogs. It’s not the dog but the owners that are the problem. It’s true, Pitbulls are good dogs. They are smart, they are loyal and they are kind. The problem is that certain types of people have turned certain Pitbulls into vicious monsters. If you buy a Pitbull, starve it and kick it the ribs at least once a day then you’re going to create a monster.
Boys are the same way. They aren’t born as monsters, it’s the starvation and the constant kicking in the ribs that turns them that way. Show me a boy who is aggressive and has violent episodes and I’ll show you a boy who came from a bad home environment. But it’s one thing to have a bad home environment, and it’s another thing to have society turn on you. In the wake of the back to back shootings that happened in El Paso Texas and Dayton Ohio in August of 2019, there was a lot of troubling rhetoric spreading online about boys being monsters.
I saw several social media posts that had gone viral where people were pushing the idea that each male is a walking murder, regardless of the age or even if they aren’t born yet. One Indiana nurse called for the murder of young white males and implored their mothers to take matters into their own hands. Show me someone who labels children as monsters and I will show you the real monster.
One feminist online stated that she had learned that she was pregnant with a baby boy and now wants to get an abortion because she states, she hates men and she hates masculinity. If she hates men and masculinity so much, why did she allow her girl parts get penetrated by it and how does she not know that when you get pregnant, you have a 50/50 chance of having a son? Honestly, what kind of monster labels their unborn child a monster?
And while we see bad people raising Pitbulls to be vicious monsters we can expect feminists to raise sons to be depressed, angry and self-loathing. No matter what you do, you’re monster. That’s the message and then, apparently, we’re supposed to act shocked and surprised when they live up to what they have already come to believe what they are.
Naturally, we blame the kid and not the people that raised it. The kid is born that way and so we have to get rid of the kids. Because that’s what sane, rational people do if they really want to make the world right. I’m being facetious here but it’s becoming profoundly troubling to see people take the same positions that have been taken with dogs. Instead of raising better dogs, we should just get rid of the dogs? We have to be better than this.
Slaying the Dragons
I am fortunate in that I had a relatively carefree childhood. I wasn’t abused or exposed to serious violence. I’m also extremely fortunate that I didn’t grow up in a world that hated me because I was born as a boy. Regardless of background or circumstance, I believe that all of us come to a crossroads in our life in which we have to recognize that we can never go back to our childish innocence.
Just like unplugging from the matrix, we can never go back. The harshness of reality is a dark road and one that none of us are denied from seeing. All of us are confronted with the existential reality of human suffering whether from our own experience or the experience of someone else. Empathy is a two-way road, one lane leads to heaven and the other leading to hell. We don’t just see the pain and suffering that happens to others, our ability to experience empathy causes us to feel it.
As a result, we become jaded and cynical. The world and the people in it are ugly and horrible. Anger and hatred develop. As boys, we want to be heroes. We want to rescue and save but too often we become lost down dark paths and in our desires to become a hero we often become the villain. Without someone to show us the way, we become lost on divergent paths.
At some point in our lives, we have to decide if we are going to face our inner demons and conquer them and become a hero or if we are going to succumb to them and become the monster. I can say this for sure; if we do not slay our inner dragons they will inevitably control us. When that happens, nothing good is likely to happen.
Males and females face different kinds of inner demons but we have them all the same. As a male, I can tell you, there is a staggering contrast between my inner demons and the person that I have grown to be. My empathy and my compassion burn strong because I had parents that nurtured that within me and modelled that behavior for me. There’s no denying that I could have grown into an entirely different person. My demons were dark and they were strong but I was able to confront them and slay those dragons.
It’s one thing to face the inner dragons on your own and it’s another thing, as a young boy, to be told that you were born as a monster. That you are a walking pile of garbage who cannot be redeemed. Feminists continue to push the story that males are born as monsters. They are violent and oppressive by nature, they cannot help themselves. They treat boys like they are a scourge and then become angry when those boys act out. They don’t have positive adult males in their lives teaching them how to redirect their shadow into strength and courage instead of hatred and malice.
Feminists have demonized our spaces, where we temper each other and hold each other accountable, calling it discrimination and then we wonder why boys lack integrity. Boys have been dispersed and isolated. Their outlets have been destroyed, their books have been burned. Boys who can’t cry shoot bullets.
They Aren’t the Monsters
In the world of male philosophy, there’s the belief that you’re never truly a man until you have made the mental and emotional commencement. Girls are considered women when they reach certain ages or they reach a certain physical maturity. Not males. They are still boys until they mentally and emotionally grow up.
Western cultures have lost the time-honored traditions of bringing boys into manhood through rites of passage; a formal ritual that helps boys slay their inner dragons. When boys go through a rite of passage, they face their dragons, peaceful, hardened warriors standing behind them. They have been taught and mentored. Even though they are afraid, they know what to do and when they are successful in their quest to slay the dragon, literal, metaphorical or both, they commence forward and welcomed into the group as an equal.
Women can’t teach boys how to slay their dragons. Women can’t help boys walk through the rites of passage. Strong males have become so sparse and rare and effective means to find them has become damn near impossible. We can’t mentor our boys, care for them, teach them and then graduate them into what it means to truly be a man anymore. It has become nearly impossible. And then we expect them to behave well? They aren’t the monsters, we are.
What Boys Need
Hopefully, it already goes without saying that boys need to be cared about, mentored and taught. They also need to be given the tools and support to slay their inner dragons. They have to undertake their own heroes journey in which they face despair and darkness, exercise courage and win the fight. We need to help them do this instead of shoving them out to sea alone in a canoe that has been set on fire.
Boys need fellowship and brotherhood. They need to be treated as though they are a diamond in the rough instead of being treated with these zero-tolerance policies that are currently beating them down and causing them to give up. Boys need to temper their anger and learn to be composed and stoic. They need to have a little bit of danger in their lives and they need to learn to face it with courage before they seek that danger in perilous ways.
Most importantly we need to stop and I seriously mean stop putting them down and telling them to get their shit together. Believe me, they hear it. Instead, we need to see the good in them. Forgive them of their mistakes. We need to see the greatness in them instead of using their flaws as brushes for painting broad strokes.
