Wednesday, October 18, 2017

No place for boys. . .

or at least no officially sanctioned ones, anyway.  There will still be groups of boys organized without girls, probably largely self organized, and that's a problem.

The Third Liberty Load was a World War One era liberty loan drive.  Nearly every single thing about this poster would be regarded as abhorrent by our social guardians today.
The Boy Scouts of America's board of directors has unanimously agreed to welcome girls into the Cub Scout program and to forge a path for older girls to pursue and earn the highest rank of Eagle Scout, the organization said Wednesday.
And why?

Well, because boys will be boys, and we can't have that.

There's basically a war on masculinity going on in this country and in Western society as a whole, waged by social theorists and backed and staffed by members of my profession, lawyers, whose allegiance is principally to the theory that everything presents a good cause of action.  And its destroying things.  I'd say that at some point it becomes dangerous, but we've passed that point long ago.  It needs to stop, and in a major way, but nobody has the guts to really take it on.

And this is an example of this.

I've posted on the Boy Scouts fairly recently.  In that item I went into the history of the Boy Scouts and how they came about. As noted in that post, the Boy Scouts were an expression of the "Muscular Christianity" movement, a movement principally focused in Protestant Faiths (the Catholic and Orthodox branches of Christianity already had a strong masculine expression at the time).  The Boy Scouts specifically came about as Lord Baden Powell was getting concerned that British youth was exhibiting all the foundation of a mass of boiled noodles and looking rather pathetic in comparison to their equivalents in Africa who had been raised in a heartier more outdoorsy fashion.

That was, of course, because those Boer youth in Africa had been raised in a very outdoors fashion and the English were by that time largely urban, just as Americans are today.  But that concern existed even at that time in the United States and not without good reason.

And underlying theme of the early Boy Scouts was to instill Christian virtues in boys.  At a time in which a lot of children started working in their early teens there was reason to be concerned.  Looking back, its fairly amazing the extent to which American youth of that era did largely stick to the values they had been exposed to early on, as the pressure in the opposite direction was enormous.  I know, for example, that my grandfather was a loyal Catholic his whole life and that he was good friends with the Monsignor who was at the local parish.  He'd left home at age 13 and worked first in San Francisco.  How much strength of character must have that taken (and how adult were 13 year olds at that time)?

But that wasn't true of everyone.

 
Boy's scouting. . . but not in a good way.  Coal thieves, 1917.

One of the tragedies of the very recent modern world and a major problem for European society (of which we are part) has been the acceptance that there is such a thing as the feminine and denial that there is such a think as the masculine.  Both exist by nature, but modern social theorist abhor that fact.  This has meant, over time, that anything that is either masculine by social construction, or even more disturbingly by nature, has been attacked and has to be dismantled.  This has given is a bizarre world where female athletics must be protected, in that fashion, under Title IX while at the same time sports that are fairly naturally male (and which revert that at the professional level) must be open to any girl foolish and reckless enough to subject themselves to them.  Combat, the unfortunate occupation of men since the dawn of time, now must be open to women too, even though anyone even remotely familiar with what that means should be horrified.  And no male organization can stands.

Critics might reply that female ones are likewise open to men, but for the most part, men and boys want nothing to do with them. Yes, the Girl Scouts are open to boys but generally most boys would not want to join it, and those who do are likely unusual or have parents who are rather unusual.  Usually in their teens the attention of males starts focusing on females, but not in the sense that most teenage men want to hang out in a large group of teenage girls and attempt to engage them on that level.  Even as adults most men do not like being the only man in a group of women as the talk and interactions will rapidly become gender unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and uninteresting (let alone exceedingly complicated. . . the relationship between women, by nature, is subject to a set of seemingly genetically foreordained rules that no man understands or wants to understand).

In the real world, the world where young men form gangs by nature and where the attention of young men is naturally outdoors (as it naturally is for older men as well), and where the influences on the school yard and locker room are often highly immoral, having an organization dedicated to boys alone, lead by virtuous men, and with a focus on nature, would be a good thing.

But now, the societal Nazis have taken one of the few ones that existed down, to the loss of us all.  Can a feminist BDM be far behind?

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Lest anyone wonder, as I've noted before, yes I was a Cub Scout, but I was only a Boy Scout for about 2.5 seconds.  Even in my day, which is now long ago, the Boy Scouts weren't what they once were, at least in my experience.  But they were boys.

Anyhow,. my comments here aren't due to any residual nostalgia for my days in Scouting. Frankly, I wasn't terribly impressed back then. But I also recognize that my experiences are just mine.  And I also feel that boys ought to have some place that they can seek to develop as men, without having to have the constant influence of the better half.  They'll get plenty of that elsewhere.  Having a few places they can go with just men and boys isn't too much to ask.

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