Tim Winton #

As Tim Winton notes: Children are born wild. Society’s primary function is to socialise them into consensual productive citizens by properly training teachers, police, prison officers and social workers. Otherwise children turn into feral creatures, monsters or savages. They’re trained into it. Because of neglect or indulgence. And when we meet them in the street, and have them in our classrooms, and haul them into the courts, we recoil from them in horror and disgust. Our detention centres and jails are heaving with them. If we don’t deal with root causes, band-aid solutions of more law enforcement will not solve our problems.

About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny.

For what a mystery a boy is. Even to a grown man. Perhaps especially to a grown man. And how easy it is to forget what beautiful creatures they are. There’s so much about them and in them that’s lovely. Graceful. Dreamy. Vulnerable. Qualities we either don’t notice, or simply blind ourselves to. You see, there’s great native tenderness in children. In boys, as much as in girls. But so often I see boys having the tenderness shamed out of them.

Boys and young men are so routinely expected to betray their better natures, to smother their consciences, to renounce the best of themselves and submit to something low and mean. As if there’s only one way of being a bloke, one valid interpretation of the part, the role, if you like. There’s a constant pressure to enlist, to pull on the uniform of misogyny and join the Shithead Army that enforces and polices sexism.

And it grieves me to say it’s not just men pressing those kids into service.

What I’ve come to notice is that all these kids are rehearsing and projecting. Trying it on. Rehearsing their masculinity. Projecting their experimental versions of it. And wordlessly looking for cues the whole time. Not just from each other, but from older people around them, especially the men. Which can be heartbreaking to witness, to tell you the truth. Because the feedback they get is so damn unhelpful. If it’s well-meant it’s often feeble and half-hearted. Because good men don’t always stick their necks out and make an effort.

A man in manacles doesn’t fully understand the threat he poses to others. Even as he’s raging against his bonds. Especially as he’s raging against his bonds. When you’re bred for mastery, when you’re trained to endure and fight and suppress empathy, how do you find your way in a world that cannot be mastered? How do you live a life in which all of us must eventually surrender and come to terms?

Too many men are blunt instruments. Otherwise known, I guess, as tools. Because of poor training, they’re simply not fit for purpose. Because life is not a race, it’s not a game, and it’s not a fight.

But before any of that is possible we need to attend to them. Yes, boys need their unexamined privilege curtailed. Just as they need certain proscribed privileges and behaviours made available to them. But the first step is to notice them. To find them worthy of our interest. As subjects, not objects. How else can we hope to take responsibility for them? And it’s men who need to step up and finally take their full share of that responsibility.

The above are excerpts of excerpts from a speech about his new book The Shepherd’s Hut, the author says it is men who need to step up and liberate boys from the race, the game, the fight

Mon 9 Apr 2018 12.15 The Guardian

Australian author Tim Winton argues that misogyny, like racism, is one of the great engines of intergenerational trauma.

Judy Blume #

One of the great truisms and paradoxes of the Judy Blume phenomenon is that, for millions of fans, her books performed the role of parents—helping guide kids through coming-of-age milestones like periods, erections, and masturbation—while giving parents and kids the freedom to avoid discussing those things. Her books are wise but not preachy, light on their feet, easy to digest. Reading one a little too early isn’t going to mess anyone up. It’s more likely to give you clues to the human mystery—which will, in turn, help you decode your future.”

Joshua Coleman - The Atlantic: #

Coleman argues that daughters tend to receive higher levels of affection and patience at home than sons. But the sons might need it more.

Coleman maintains that the notion emanating from the “manosphere” and social-media influencers who preach that physical strength and emotional stoicism represent the pinnacle of manliness.

A study found that mothers and fathers spent more time telling stories, singing, and reading to young daughters compared with sons, from babyhood leading up to preschool.

Ruth Whippman finds “not just that boys are more aggressive or rambunctious or anything else particularly ‘boyish,’ - “They are also—by almost every measure—more sensitive, fragile, and emotionally vulnerable.”

Sebastian Kraemer, wrote that “even from conception, before social effects come into play, males are more vulnerable than females.”

From a physiological perspective, Kraemer wrote, boys are born about a month behind girls developmentally. They also tend to be less proficient at regulating their emotions and more affected when things go wrong—and things go wrong, in part, when parents feel overwhelmed by boys’ behavior, or when they neglect, intentionally or not, sons’ need for affection and attention.

The sociologist Alicia M. Walker, the author of Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation, and Infidelity, observed:

“The enduring belief that boys are somehow diminished or emasculated by tenderness, compassion, or emotional nurturance is rooted in traditional gender expectations that demand stoicism from men.”