We eat fresh tomatoes in January…

…and Jamaica has a bobsled team.

Why then, do I find it humorous that a Miami based hockey team is competing in the Stanley Cup final?

Just a thought.

The Feminized Male: Chapters 1-2

The first post in this series can be read here.

Sifting thought the ideas offered in The Feminized Male, one finds both insightful bits and cognitively dissonant bits, which is often the case when feminists hit on a truism without following it through to its logical conclusion due to their cognitive dissonance. There is also a sense in which the scholastic work involved here seems to be launched from a faulty premise, but it’s still early.

Chapter 1: Male Misfits

The quote I cited in the introductory post was from this chapter. The opening salvo is that boys are being vastly underserved by modern institutions, thus creating vast numbers of men who don’t fit in anywhere. The author makes a point of noting that increasing numbers of young men were protesting against the educational establishment, and rightly so. Those that weren’t protesting vocally, she asserts, were rebelling in more destructive ways. She pointed out the lopsided imbalance of behavioral issues between males and females using every available statistical metric (social and school problems, accidents, prison rates, etc.), and ended with my original quote [here expanded through the end of the chapter]:

More troubled by social roles and sex norms as well as genetics, modern men lead a rougher life than women. More is expected of them and their emotional outlets are more limited. They must fight – not cry, tremble, cream, or run. They must stay cool, take care of themselves, keep their own counsel. They are under more pressure and have fewer escape valves. Often institutions that rear them -especially home and school- do not help them become men, but on the contrary feminize them, keeping them dependents and minors.Thus many males are stunted in normal masculine growth and, rebelling against the conspiracy, become outsiders and misfits. For rebel and conformist alike, the stress finally shows itself in the male’s shorter lifespan- sixty-seven years against the female’s average of seventy-four.

Chapter 2: Masculinity and Its Adversaries

This chapter began with a very interesting quote, which piqued my curiosity immediately.

Look for a woman at the bottom of our troubles, the French say- cherchez la femme. Look even deeper, I say, and you will find a man. What my husband claims I am doing in this book is blaming men for putting women in a position where they can feminize young boys. He seems to think it’s a little funny that I should end an inquiry (as I shall) into the emasculation of men with a strongly feminist theme.

The Feminized Male, Sexton, p. 12

It’s not only funny, it’s predictable. Thankfully, I bought this little book used and not new. I’m sharing with you as I read, so there is still opportunity to be pleasantly surprised with gems of value. However, I approached this book with certain assumptions which are showing themselves erroneous. One expectation was that evidence of where we were headed was laid bare long before red pills, honey badgers,Warren Farrell’s Myth of Male Power, and even before Herb Goldberg. I fear we may another case of “right diagnosis, toxic prescription”.

To be fair, as is often the case with books such as these, there are several insightful turns and opportunities to think more deeply and nuanced thoughts about complex issues such as navigating a world with increasingly eroding sex distinctions. The very notion of “increasingly eroding sex distinctions” sounds quaint given the state of the post modern West, but we’re looking backward from the ashes, so the errors in logic are much easier for us to spot.

Despite my unease with the ending of this chapter, which basically lays out the same old tired feminist argument that men and women would both be better served if there were more women in traditionally male dominated fields, this bit of wisdom stood out:

A boy who follows female norms can confidently be termed less masculine than one who follows female norms. From evidence to be found in this volume and elsewhere, it appears that male norms stress values such as courage, inner direction, certain forms of aggression, autonomy, mastery, technological skill, group solidarity, adventure, and a considerable amount of toughness in mind and body.

The Feminized Male, Sexton, p. 15

After taking a short detour to offer requisite caveats (the author’s own father, for instance, was both a professional boxer and a man who enjoyed embroidery and poetry during his leisure), she notes:

As it is, I believe, the maleness in boys is being too constrained by schools and other restricting forces in the society.

ibid.

In the most politically incorrect yet insightful portion I have read so far, Sexton also takes time in chapter 2 to contrast feminized males versus “sissies” and both against homosexuals. The feminized male may or may not be a “sissy”, although many are, and the feminized male may or may not be homosexual. In her rubric, the entire concept of the feminized male is rooted in personality, assertiveness, and communication traits.

I’ll end this portion of my analysis with what I thought was another great point. Namely, that the push towards white collar desk jobs and away from physically demanding jobs for men has exacerbated this trend of men behaving in more feminized ways. She notes that the work men do has an affect on their overall personalities, and that this begins at younger and younger ages:

Office jobs and organizational life also frequently demand unmanly amounts of submission and inactivity; in this respect too, society feminizes men. Schools prepare these boys for these emasculating white collar jobs [she notes this most heavily a middle class phenomenon] by confining them to deodorized hothouses, rewarding the best desk-sitters, and, when not antagonizing them, converting the more restless males to the clerical way of life.

The Feminized Male, Sexton, page 18-19

This chapter had potential, but was ultimately ruined by Sexton’s irresistible urge to interject the necessary feminist dogma about how much better it would be for men and women alike if technological career spaces were more “humanized” by a greater presence of female workers. Perhaps she will address it as we continue to read, but it was not lost on me that she never considers that a certain amount of masculinizing women would be necessary to dramatically increase the numbers of women in particular career fields.

Until next time…

Introductory Post: The Feminized Male by Patricia Sexton

The Feminized Male: Classrooms, White Collars, and the Decline of Manliness, by Patricia Sexton. Originally published in 1969.

I recently, as I do often, contemplated the way my father -silent generation- reasoned and communicated. My husband reasons similarly, despite being in the latter half of our GenX cohort. I wonder at the trajectory of communication in general, but about the stark change in masculine communication in particular.

It’s not a perpetual item of thought, but every now and again I have a conversation, an experience or run across a piece of writing that reminds me that I am witnessing a real phenomena with real implications for the world we’re leaving to the generations coming behind us. That’s what happened when I picked up this little book last Friday at our local used bookstore and began reading. I also immediately realized that like Modern Romance, Mating in Captivity, and The Feminine Mystique, this is the sort of book that I’ll best digest if I take notes as I read, so I’ll go a step further and blog through it.

We’ll begin our jaunt through this modern academic classic later this week, but let’s begin with a quote which sets the tone for what I expect to find as we explore it together. I chose this one because it flies in the face of modern conventional wisdom, yet was penned back in 1969, when our social structure was one in which men wielded significantly more influence than women, although that is clearly changing:

More troubled by social roles and sex norms as well as genetics, modern men lead a rougher life than women. More is expected of them and their emotional outlets are more limited. They must fight – not cry, tremble, cream, or run. They must stay cool, take care of themselves, keep their own counsel. They are under more pressure and have fewer escape valves. Often institutions that rear them -especially home and school- o not help them become men, but on the contrary feminize them, keeping them dependents and minors.

Feminized Men, Sexton, page 10

It is my earnest desire to judge Mrs. Sexton’s work on its merits rather than slather my opinions all over it. However, from the moment I read the first chapter -and that is as far as I’ve read at this point- I knew immediately that the above sentiments could never be uttered in polite post modern company. She’d be run out of the party!

As a visionary whose largely anonymously blazed trail is now being settled by new thinkers and commentators, Patricia Sexton was both ahead of her time, and a woman of her time. You’ll see what I mean as we delve deeper.

I hope you’re willing to join me on this deep dive into Feminized Men: Classrooms, White Collars, and the Decline of Manliness.

The Co-opting of “Homeschooling”

Several months ago, The Practical Conservative wrote this:

Homeschooling is acceptable fringe. Homeschooling is an interesting case because it’s being successfully co-opted and drained of its fringeyness and, well, that’s another post for another day.

At the time, I was hoping she would elaborate further, but I have decided that there is truly no need for more commentary. I already knew what she was intimating but am now convinced. The homeschool “community” our family enlisted into back in the very early 2010s is no more. The vanguards of home education, families -mostly Christian but also irreligious- who stepped into uncharted waters in the 1980s and early 1990s, often with great opposition, were a very different breed than the families beginning to homeschool today.

As our homeschool journey has unfolded, we have developed a philosophy of education and parenting that aligns more closely with those pioneers than with the evolution and present philosophy of most contemporary home educating families. The ability to retain final authority over what and how our children learn, the importance of a Biblical worldview in every subject they are taught, and a firm resolve to keep the state, whether it’s material or its money, out of our homeschool has bound us to many families who were in the old guard.

Fairly frequently, we have our brains picked by parents of younger children who cannot afford full-time private school tuition, but are looking for a way out of the government schools. Most are not particularly interested in the grind of being the primary drivers of their kids’ education. To be fair I started out, and remained for many years, a reluctant home educator. I strongly relate to these parents. When you’ve never done it, there is an unshakable fear that you’re going to do it all wrong and ruin your kids’ education, so you search for ways to delegate as much as possible.

The one thing that stopped me from relying heavily on external support during our early homeschool years was the fact that there were simply not many options our my area when we started out. Additionally, I didn’t know anyone else who was homeschooling at the time. My community of moms were all utilizing the public schools, just as we did with our older kids. There were a few cooperative groups which provided enrichment and social opportunities, but the heavy lifting of what to teach, and how to teach it to our children, was left mainly to us.

Five years into it, a world of options opened up. As we learned about the assortment of affordable programs, we quickly began to avail ourselves of those opportunities. At that time, however, there was still a very large commitment required on our part.This included volunteering as teachers, playground supervisors, field trip chaperones, etc. It was simply not possible to disengage from the dailyness of homeschooling simply because we had a small support network.

Things have changed rapidly over the past few years, as there are now many options for homeschool families which look a lot like school. Many still require quite a lot of heavy lifting on the part of parents, but a few do not; or at least it seems that way on the surface. There is no such thing as a free lunch. No one is going to properly educate your kids for $1.50. Unfortunately, many parents aren’t invested enough in the homeschool effort to appreciate what this means.

This unfortunate development in the trajectory of home education is only set to become worse as red states begin to enact “the funds follow the child” legislation. These laws make it easier for parents desperately searching for options outside the government system to afford alternative educational options for their children. The upsides of this are readily apparent. Anything that breaks the stranglehold of the government education monopoly is a positive good. Local schools have ceased to reflect public sentiment, and as such are no longer “public” institutions. As they transform into workshops for churning out loyal leftist soldiers in the culture war, undermining these schools, and depleting them of recruits, is a necessary and welcome strategy.

The downside to this is that many parents who are unfamiliar with the true aims of homeschooling (the aims of the OG secular as well as religious homeschoolers), are engaging in a practice that is wholly unmoored from any of the original three rails of educational choice. Before, there was public education (now more properly identified as government indoctrination), private education, and home education. There are now new, uncharted terrains which don’t fit neatly into any of these categories. The first is virtual education using the government curriculum and staff for dissemination. Despite the presence of a full time virtual teacher employed through the government system, many people label this option “homeschooling” based solely upon the premise that the education is being received primarily in the home.

The second is hybrid education, which is most easily defined as a more complicated and academically targeted version of the old fashioned homeschool co-op. In the old fashioned co-op, families met once a week, moms did all of the teaching, and the courses/activities were often viewed as enrichment rather than meeting state education requirements, which was still mostly handled through the families at home.

The new, hybrid school version often consists of paid teachers and students meeting at least twice a week. It’s much more expensive than the old fashioned co-op, but much less expensive than a full time private school. The courses can and do check off the required state boxes. However, there is one big exception in this model when compared to the others. Despite the regular classroom environment, families who utilize this option are still technically considered homeschooling families because we have the responsibility of educating our children the other three days of the week.

The problem with this new paradigm is that every family whose children are at home most days of the week is being lumped into the category of a “homeschool family”. This means that, since 2020, millions more homeschool families have been added to the ranks of homeschoolers even though they possess none of the passion, purpose, and understanding of the fact that homeschooling is defined largely by the omission of government influence on the children’s educations.

I’m not sure how this movement into the mainstream from the “acceptable fringe” is going to affect future generations of homeschoolers. Since our youngest child only has 3 years of high school remaining, I am tempted to put my head down, finish it out, and not care. However, I actually care a great deal, and I want future generations of American families to enjoy the educational liberty and parental authority that my husband and I have been able to exercise in the lives of our kids.

Something tells me that they will not, because it’s a thing they will have never known.

LGB Without The TQ

Over the past few months, I have noticed a number of conservative groups embrace the saying “LGB without the TQ,”1 but this is not a consistent conservative position, and its certainly not a biblical position. With this has come the acceptance of groups like Gays Against Groomers and the Log Cabin Republicans, but these organizations […]

LGB Without The TQ