Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Boys' Medical And Emotional Health, or Skewed and Down the Drain

Here is a weird and depressing fact that I chanced upon recently.  Boys' medical and emotional health is f’d up, and the sad fact is that it has been f'd up for a long time.  And yet society said, "hey that's okay, boys will be boys."  For some twisted skewed form of illogic, this was seen as a good thing.

Now, instead of calling boys on this bullshyt, society now makes girls' medical and emotional health as f’d up as the boys.  They say "ohmigosh awesome girls are being empowered."

Why is this now the resort that “society” has taken?

Wouldn’t an alternate solution have been a much more healthy, morally responsible, socially responsible thing to do?  Instead of making girls as broken, damaged, emotionally stunted and shattered as boys have been, people should be saying, "Hang on a cotton-pickin’ minute."  We should be questioning the very concept that emotional abuse (or any kind of abuse) is okay.

Rather than knocking down girls a few pegs so that they are down in the gutter emotionally as boys are.  Why the hell is this okay??  Why is it okay for boys to be just as much victims of oppressive emotionally abusive men as women are, and to laud and applaud it?

Rather than lowering girls' life standards, and reducing their potential for actualization and self-realization to that lower level of boys, wouldn't the better course of action be uplifting and improving the lot in life for boys up to the healthy normal level that it used to be for girls??

Let us be totally, completely honest here.  I wish to address all the unflinching details of the true background, intentions.


Why do people think of girls as delicate pristine little angels up until the time they do something sexual with some guy?  Notice that on the contrary, people think it is "great" (well, in lower social circles, anyway) if a boy sleeps with lots of girls.  We need to ponder why this is.  How come no one thinks of a girl as "sullying" a guy?

I am not asking these questions rhetorically nor sarcastically.  Believe it or not, I truly am not revealing any latent slut-bitterness. 

I genuinely want to know.  I would like to investigate this from a psychological perspective.  I really want to get at the subconscious motives that underlie societal arrangements for so many different cultures around the globe.  It is time we offer acknowledgement of the full range of underlying motive.

The answer is a rather dark one.  Nobody dares utter this thought out loud.  But all the signs point to this proof positive.

People think boys cannot be corrupted -- because there is not a whole lot of goodness and pureness existing there to corrupt in the first place.

Nobody thinks boys were angels in the first place.  Nobody thinks boys are good, clean, moral, or disease-free.  People mostly think boys are "dirty" -- you know what I mean.


People think that boys’ souls are broken, damaged, shattered.  They think boys’ spirits are incomplete and deficient.  They think this hand that boys are dealt is the default setting with which they enter into existence is this universe.  People do not believe that boys were all that clean to begin with.

Why are male sluts hailed as being "big man on campus," ad nauseum?  It can only be because they think he is cleaning himself up.  By dint of association with more and more girls, he is making himself better.  They think that he is associating (in the grossest sense of the word) with more and more girls, so therefore his lot in life has only improved.

This is the only possible explanation I can come up with.  This is the only theory that answers all these puzzling social and psychological phenomena.  What else could it be?

This is degrading, demeaning, and dehumanizing -- to boys.  We should not be proud of this at all.  This is a sick warped way of viewing the world.

I observe how disturbed I am about this whole social and personal mess that is being lauded as "empowerment" and "liberation."  I recall how, growing up, I was taught that that sort of behavior is not okay.  As a girl, viewing myself or treating myself this way was unacceptable.  All us girls were raised to respect ourselves.

I also recall how even people that might not consider themselves feminists *still* wanted to ensure that girls do not ruin their lives by engaging in any sort of self-destructive behavior.  It seems that large portions of society are much more traumatized if a girl is given to casual, "loose" missives than if a boy succumbs to these actions.  That would include myself, unfortunately.

Maybe the *real* reason that I am not as troubled when boys engage in reckless behavior, casually disregarding their physical and medical health -- is that I do not feel that boys have a whole lot to corrupt in the first place.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment