Assaulting our Boys: The Campaign to Demonize Masculinity

How schools, media, and politics are working to marginalize masculinity

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It has become increasingly clear that there is an assault on masculinity.  The assault is more than the sum of toxic terms and ideological narratives aimed at undermining a particular sex. The actions are exercised in policy exploitations that clearly violate equal protections and undermine the ability of boys and men to contribute fully to society. 

Men and women who attempt to encourage the rights of boys and men are often silenced and labeled.  People like Robert Bly (recently deceased), Warren Farrell, Erin Pizzey, Heather Mac Donald, Michael Thompson, Christina Hoff Sommers, Marc Angelucci (murdered), and Casey Jaye span a significant range of people from diverse backgrounds and generational gaps. All aiming to present data honestly and protect men and women equally.  The oldest in the group would have been growing up listening to the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1940 while the youngest would have been listening to NSYNC in 2000; yet, they are bound by a genuine compassion for boys and men and do so with the full knowledge of the measurable outcomes that demonstrate an ever-widening Male Gender-Gap in a number of areas and its impact on our culture.  From education to death, there is a boy crisis, and these people and so many others are keenly aware that speaking up jeopardizes their careers.

Those supporting boys and men have become persona non grata in the halls of the political, academic, and media institutions that chose a conscripted, ideological narrative as profound as any goose-stepping militant looking to tear down patriarchal structures.  In colleges across the country, post modernism, deconstructionism, Marxism, and new historicism became entrenched in the most elite and even most frivolous schools across the country and now harbor a new identity politic dedicated to undermining the hopes of the greatest civil rights leaders who dreamed of a nation where the content of one’s character would win out over the color of one’s skin and nature of one’s sex. In the world of academia, identity is in and character is out.

At the identity politics core is an oppressor narrative that blames men for nearly all the world’s ills but few of its salvations.  The once cherished equality feminism so many admired has evolved into a third and fourth wave feminism dedicated to an oppressor narrative at the expense of the fair and equal protections of boys and men guaranteed under the constitution.  As special interest gained footholds and money flowed, equality was replaced with equity of outcome.    

Entire institutions of education, healthcare, and welfare have been created to promote the best outcomes for girls and women even as empirical evidence shows boys and men are falling further behind in far too many measurable outcomes.  All one needs to do is look at the diseases of despair, a term few Americans openly discuss, to understand the plague of suicide, opioid, and alcohol deaths that haunt the fathers and mothers of America’s sons.  In the last 10 years alone, nearly 900,000 males have lost their lives to homicide, suicide, and unintentional drug poisonings.  But rarely do we talk about such things with the same humanity and care as we do the Violence Against Women act or abortion rights. To put it bluntly. We just don’t give a rat’s arse about men, and it’s intentional. 

Every parent should look strongly to politicians who advocate for their sons, husbands, grandsons, and boyfriends.  Few if any policy makers have the courage to address, openly, anything related to boys and men unless it involves black boys, a population long overdue for a cultural reset and a desperate need for male role models and massive educational reform focused on improving reading skills.

For those who think the murder of George Floyd in 2020 represented a cultural reset, it’s certainly untrue.  More has been done to advocate for women and girls in the wake of George Floyd’s death than for boys and men, just look at the White House Gender Policy Council, Title IX, the Office of Women’s Health, and other policy actions and agencies that purposefully ignore boys and men. 

Our nation is not simply facing a black male problem; it is facing a male problem.  Few Americans know Tony Timpa, a white Texas native, who died in 2016 in the very same manner as George Floyd. 

Although so many presented Floyd’s death as a systemic police problem, few prepared to see it as a rogue officer who didn’t handle the situation properly and was convicted of murder and sentenced accordingly. 

It was easy to blame it on an imaginary patriarchal, police structure instead of looking at the underlying causes of the tragic murder of George Floyd and death of Tony Timpa.  It was easier to blame it on the man instead of looking at the reasons Floyd and Timpa ended up in those places in the final moments of their lives.  As tragic as the deaths of Floyd and Timpa were, they are anomalies and studies on deaths at the hands of law enforcement overwhelmingly bear it out.  A police officer is far more likely to be killed than an innocent person is to be killed by a police officer. And those killed by law-enforcement are overwhelmingly armed or attacking an officer. (Male police officers account for 95% of officers fatally killed). Despite these realities, more deaths would occur as defund the police policies took hold and wreaked havoc across the country.

The defund the police movement has certainly contributed to an increase in homicide deaths.  Males represented 80% and 81% of homicide deaths in 2019 and 2020 respectively.  While male and female homicide deaths increased from 2019 to 2020, male homicide deaths increased 24% and female homicide deaths increased 16% from 2019 to 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Nearly 20,000 men were victims of homicide in 2020.  Although some attention is paid to the increase in homicides, few if any stories clearly stipulate that 81% of homicide deaths are male and a national concern. 

So much of the conversation in the academy is about race and patriarchy when the underlying problems tearing at the social fabric is an overwhelming lack of empathy and policy action on behalf of males. There is a lack of a social urgency to incorporate masculinity into the wider body of our culture and a potential reason males are finding less and less interest in higher learning and becoming increasingly uncomfortable in K-12 education. 

Go to any state in the country and you will see that boys of all races are behind their female counterparts of the same race in literacy and meeting college readiness standards. 

Instead, boys are being fed a narrative that is incredibly harmful. And at its core is the unsubstantiated premise that men are the problem and part of an oppressor class aimed at cultural destruction.       

In August of 2021, I spoke with a friend whose 14-year-old boy sat in a high school English class in California and listened to his teacher deny sex as a biological reality and address America as a country built on patriarchal privilege.  America is inherently flawed and white males are the problem.  That motif would be a guiding principle throughout the course.  

The teacher seemed aligned with a cursory reading of Robin DiAngelo, identity politics, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that pitted an ideological belief system against a 14-year-old boy.  The student certainly could not defend himself against an onslaught of ideological prescripts, but his mother and father let the school board and principal know what was happening.  I shudder to think of what would happen to a boy in such a situation without parents to love, support, and guide him.  They brought the wrath of equal justice upon the school and the school learned quickly to back-peddle. The school system, however, has fully embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion models with no sound basis in statistical reality. The massive social campaign to demonize masculinity, particularly white masculinity, took a cultural foothold and placed it on the proverbial neck of our children in the form of identity politics instead of improved reading scores. While no one was looking, our nation faced a 13% increase in suicide deaths of boys 10-14 years of age.

A few months earlier, I ran into a local school board member and her young adult child. Both were infatuated with the terms white privilege, implicit bias, toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and the inability of boys to get in touch with their feelings as the root cause of so many of our social ills.  Neither had extensive knowledge in the ways boys and girls express themselves differently. When the mother asked if I was still on the kick about boys and their problems, I addressed it head on and didn’t shy away.

They couldn’t possibly see the vast empires of social policies and political institutions working to protect the interests of our daughters while violating the equal protections of our sons.  The board member seemed completely unaware of the statistical analysis in her own school district that showed all boys of all races were doing worse than their female counterparts of the same race in reading and meeting college readiness standards unearthed by the Global Initiative for Boys and Men. It couldn’t possibly be that boys and girls learn differently; something rooted in grounded science. One teacher personally shared her concern with me regarding the decrease in the number of male, white students taking advanced placement courses in her district. Several parents shared with me the challenges of their sons and the anxiety they faced during COVIC lockdowns.

Despite the evidence that boys are behind in meeting college readiness standards and literacy skills as well as greater instances of receiving mood altering medications, school boards continue to push a diversity, equity, and inclusion campaign that completely ignores essential data on boys and men while violating equal protections. Districts are pushing millions of dollars into implicit bias, equity, and other unprovable ideological precepts that do nothing to address reading skills, math skills, and mental health. Phonics is out while grading equity and mood altering medications are in.

The fact that school board members and politicians cannot have a sustained conversation on boys as a collective entity for fear of retribution, while spending millions of taxpayer dollars on unproven diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, speaks to their inability to ensure equal protections by encouraging science-based practices and social policies grounded in equality.

There is a long systemic line in our government agencies, policy action, educational system, and mainstream media the has lead to a displacement of men and the nuclear family. Agencies and activists operate under the guise of inclusiveness and equity, but its results reveal poor educational outcomes, homelessness, drug addiction, and death for our nation’s sons.

There is a reckoning coming and it must begin by arming our boys and girls against ideological narratives that promote identity politics and alienate people from one another.

In many ways, the assault on masculinity is a systemic disinformation campaign. It is a war on masculinity and the collective, social good.

Author Recommendation: If you are interested in sharing your story, please contact me at seank@gibm.us.