Posted on 07/09/2005 5:35:25 PM PDT by NYer
Phyllis Schlafly, one of my "heroines" gets it RIGHT all the time. Instead, the idiot feminists want to listen to a pathetic figure like Gloria Steinem.
The feminization of men is one of the most insidious cancers on the character of our society, in my opinion. And I am not talking about men crying or showing their emotions.
I am talking about men being discouraged from acting in ways that are natural for them.
If it weren't so tragic it would be hysterically funny that people have to state the obvious "Men and women are different..."
I am so lucky I went to grade school before they gave drugs for "Attention Deficit Disorder."
In Kindergarten, I spent half the day ignoring the teacher and looking at the clock. I was just fascinated by numbers and liked to think about them a lot. I also could barely hold a crayon and couldn't write letters with any legibility. My teacher got very concerned. Fortunately, they didn't prescribe drugs back then.
Anyway, I thought about numbers a lot. The next year when I was six, I walked into my father's office and said "Daddy, I discovered something. If you take the square of any number and add that number again and the next number , you get the square of the next number." (For you math geeks, that's (x+1)(squared)=x(squared)+2x+1, although I didn't know the algebra.)
My early achievements in math didn't lead to me becoming the next Einstein, but so what? I loved talking about math with my father, and I think calming drugs might have taken the edge on the part of my brain that let me think about numbers. It would have been a much less happy childhood had they drugged me.
Anyway, I eventually got to the point where I adapted enough to pay attention to teachers, and grew up to be a somewhat-absent minded guy with mediocre but legible handwriting who has made a reasonably good living in math-related areas. How would drugs at that age have let me or anyone around me lead a happier life?
Apparently, the PC crowd would prefer it if everyone were asexual so no one would feel 'different'.
I'm a man and I'm proud to be different from the opposite sex. At the same time, I wouldn't want to live in a world without them.
I think it has led to a lot more passive-aggressive personality problems too. Passive-aggressive men are real jerks. Especially towards women.
bump
There is an all girls school in the next town, but our daughter just wasn't interested. She never liked the girls in her class; didn't have anything in common with them. Also, this particular school is full of snobs; even the girls who attend it comment about it. So we homeschool our daughter, and she's enjoying classes at the Community college much more than she would have being cooped up all day with a bunch of snotty girls.
That doesn't explain, however, why the greatest writers (and artists, and musicians) have been almost exclusively men. Men are much more romantic than women. They tend to daydream and fantasize, while women remain largely pragmatic in their view of things.
I have a theory that because so many boys play and master computer games their brains actually adapt to visual style learning. Most school learning in the early years is auditory. You are supposed to listen to the teacher. But boys usually learn by seeing and touching. They are active learners. Unfortunately as the article pointed at this too often leads teachers to suspect ADD in boys.
Also the schools need to bring back recess. It is essential to brain development in areas of creativity and problem solving to have play time. Think about it. What animals play? The ones we think of as being smart for animals. Recess is also very important to socialization.
Maybe some day the experts will catch on to some home truths.
I knew it wasn't me! It was my teacher's fault!
In a situation of finite resources, where you can't be good at everything, it makes sense for guys brains to be optimized for being good at the things that guys are supposed to do, and girls brains are optimized for what girls are supposed to do.
Take spatial skills. A hunting party is commonly going to range over a wide area. Being able to keep straight where you are in relation to the base camp, and how to optimally position group members in order to cut off escape routes for what you're hunting, are obvious survival skills
Big Ole Bookmark
The War Against Boys, How Misguided feminism is harming our young Men Dr.Christina Hoff Sommers
ping
"Boys are also more attracted to violence and conflict"
Doesmt someone here at FR have an icon for something like the stating of the obvious award?
Of course your kidding? You don't really feel that way about your body? If you aren't kidding yo need some serious counseling and help.
BUMP
Even though I am not a man, I have what many consider to be a masculine mind. My thought process is more logical than emotional, my interest in things spurred by the logical and mechanical progression than by the creative, and I excelled at sciences while in school. In high school, my aptitude tests ranked me in the 99 percentile for spacial relation, cause/effect, and other metacognitive abilities necessary for a mechanical or civil engineer. I do not find this surprising, as I come from a long line of engineers.
The love of language can be viewed as a science. I was interested in the proper use of words, their origin and transitional meanings, their placement in a sentence and its impact on the "mental movie." Without consciously recognizing it, I studied the written word for structure, the narrative voice used to convey the story, the development of the characters, and the logical progression of events.
This love of language invariably leads many to examine how others use it to convey their thoughts, which can quickly blossom into a love of literature in general.
While I do not presume to place myself in their category by any means, great writers have all of these things. There is a cadence to their stories, a sometimes painfully slow development of their characters that is nonetheless worth the pain, and a logical construct of the plotline.
This is not to say that great writers choose a formula for their works, but instead their writing style is a formulation of these things. BIG DIFFERENCE.
If we examine Hawthorne's "The Scarlett Letter," for example, an often overlooked aspect of this book is the changing narrative perspective. The book rotates its focal point by three - first the "townspeople," then Hester, then the immediate circle around Hester, back to the "townspeople," repeat the cycle.
This construct was necessary for Hawthorne to explain the full impact of Hester's actions not just on herself but on those around her. In less logical hands, it would have been a silly romance novel. While I have no proof, I believe this construct was intuitive at first, and then a progressively logical outgrowth as the story unfolded.
In Melville's "Moby Dick," considered by many as a masterpeice in literature, each chapter is a short-story within itself, plumbing the topic at hand with a consistent narrative voice, but a differing tone to convey the underlying sentiment. At the same time, each slowly advances the overall story.
If you have ever pulled back from a book and said, "WTF?" at an odd plot twist, silly surprise, out-of-character action by one of the key players, or other event that seemed implausible or ridiculous, you are in the hands of a skilled (but still novice) writer.
If you have ever pulled back from a book and said, "My God!", you are in the hands of a master.
Despite garnering over 45% of the market share, I cannot stomach the vast majority of dreck masquarading as "romance novels." They are silly, inconsistent bits of fluff. Conversely, I am quite drawn to romantic storylines woven by men, as they tend to be neither silly nor inconsistent.
If you look at science fiction, fantasy, or horror writers, where the reader is asked to suspend reality for the purposes of accepting the parameters of the story, there are typically boundaries (written or implied). Great writers will create masterpieces within these boundaries, novices will set up boundaries and then break them for convenience. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of great sci-fi/fantasy/horror writers are men, because they do not break their boundaries.
While not detracting from the achievements of many accomplished female writers, I hope that the above helps to clarify why men would be drawn to the science of language, the love of literature, and ultimately pen the majority of the world's great masterpeices.
All that bra snapping in high school was merely an interest in applied physics.
You are what would be classified as a "divergent thinker."
The vast majority of people are convergent thinkers, meaning that they use the sum total of their knowledge to arrive at a singular conclusion. Schools are geared towards convergent thinkers, even our test structures focus on this metacognitive thought process.
Divergent thinkers (estimated 3% of the population), however, start at a particular point and move outwards. Instead of focusing their knowledge to come to a conclusion, they use their knowledge to examine the possibilities.
Some of the world's greatest minds are divergent thinkers (Einstein, for example). Nowadays, these children are labeled ADD or ADHD and drugged.
I kept insisting to my girlfriend that her son was a divergent thinker. He asked a thousand questions, always wanted to know "why," always followed a question with a question. This child is exceptionally bright and easily bored.
Exasperating, heck yes! But instead of trying to find an open school environment where he would thrive (I warned her that a typical classroom environment would stifle him), she chose a strict Catholic school first (which was a miserable experience for everyone) and now public school (more misery for everyone), and her son is medicated.
This is not to suggest that all divergent thinkers are brilliant and all convergent thinkers are not. You can find genuis in both groups, and average or below average in both. Still, we need to recognize that it's not only gender and age that impact learning, the metacognitive channels can be different, as well.
I think that many of the characteristics this doctor is ascribing to gender-based differences are more properly attributed to personality types as defined by the Briggs-Meyer personality test. It is true that some personality traits manifest more often in one gender than the other--for instance, more women are touchy-feely types than men--but there is no trait that is strictly gender-specific.
I do not act very "female", and most of the traits this doctor attributes to boys would have described me pretty well when I was a kid.
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