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Well, childhood-development geniuses, it’s 40 years into your project to turn boys into girls. How’s that working out for you?
“Great! Let’s double down!” reply self-proclaimed “experts” like Rosalind Wiseman, the vapid creator of the “Mean Girls” meme (in her 2002 book “Queen Bees and Wannabes”) who has turned her guns (sorry, her magical glowing beams of understanding and love) on boys in her new follow-up “Masterminds & Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World.”
A better title would have been “Batman in Love,” because that’s a great example from the book of the absurd nature of Wiseman’s determination to reconceptualize boyhood to make it less alien to her, i.e., less masculine.
Early in the book, Wiseman advises parents that, when driving around a vanload of surging, joshing, insult-swapping teen males who call each other offensive names, you should immediately pull over and admonish the lot of them with a dose of sudden-onset sensitivity training about the unacceptability of politically-incorrect terms (even if it’s not your son who uttered the offending words!).
She doesn’t have the imagination to recognize that three certain consequences of her actions will be a) her son will try to prevent her from ever having a similar opportunity to embarrass him in front of friends again; b) her son will avoid speaking frankly to her for fear of having to endure another lecture; and c) all the boys will continue to use offensive language among themselves anyway because boys really don’t care what moms think is “appropriate language.”
The catastrophic, boyhood-scarring scenario above comes in a chapter titled, “Why Doesn’t Batman Ever Smile?” which supposes that boys take part in strange, antisocial, mock-violent activities (previously known as “playing”) because their idols are fierce, unsmiling badasses instead of unctuous, socially well-adjusted girl-men.
Wiseman believes parents, insidiously playing along with that notably hyper-manly culture you see all around you in this Marine Corps-like outfit we call the contemporary United States, are to blame for boys having a disquieting affinity for masculine behavior.
As a corrective, she suggests that parents ask their rambunctious, superhero-loving sons to “imagine what this Batman looks like when he’s incredibly happy and excited. Imagine him in love.” (Love that “this Batman,” to distinguish him from other Batmen).
This is exactly the way to talk to your boys if you want them to think they’re adopted, or to suspect you of suffering from an undiagnosed concussion, or to run away to join the nearest roving band of feral backwoods bow hunters at the earliest opportunity.
Wiseman typifies the passive-aggressive half of the campaign to feminize boys. She agitates for changing the basic wiring of boy brains with a wide range of nagging tactics, therapeutic language, and big pink puffballs of understanding.
The militant wing, the enforcer side, is run by the zero-tolerance Playtime Police. As “The War on Boys” author Christina Hoff Sommers pointed out in Time magazine last week, schools have recently suspended 7-year-old boys or sent them home from school for nibbling a Pop-Tart into a gun shape, or throwing an imaginary grenade, or pointing and “shooting” a pencil as if it were a gun.
This comes in supposed response to hysteria over mass shootings, but in 2011 only 1% of students ages 12 to 18 reported a violent victimization at school. For serious violence, the figure is one-tenth of 1%. And the connection between violent games and actual violence is all but nonexistent (only 1% of play-acted attacks grow into actual assaults).
Mass shootings are just a pretext for the gynocracy of principals, administrators and teachers to try to remake boys in their own image. Which is exactly what they’ve been doing since roughly 1972, when, amid the feminist movement and the immense influence of the Ms. Foundation’s “Free to Be . . . You and Me,” the album/book/TV show/classroom propaganda tool, boy behavior began to be seen as a problem to be managed.
Feeling increasingly unwelcome in school, boys tune out and drop out. As Wiseman, to her credit, has noticed, three out of five bachelor’s degrees are being awarded to women, there are nine boys in prison for every girl, and five times as many teen boys as girls commit suicide.
Yet Wiseman derides masculine values like independence, strength, and, yes, the desire to be funny (she and other boyphobics fail to see that much of what alarms them is harmless shtick) with the acronym ALMB, for “Acting Like a Man Box.” The bars of this supposed psychological cellblock must, she believes, be knocked down.
No. What boys need are male role models, unashamed of being men, who can teach them why masculinity is not a prison.
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com