There is a tendency among some academics to prescribe individual solutions to systemic problems, when those problems are men’s problems. For example, Diprete and Buchman, sociologists, in chapter 6 of the book “The Rise of Women: the growing gender gap in education and what it means for American schools.” Write that boys get worse grades than girls because they have lower emotional attachment to school than girls do because male adolescent role models like Batman and James Bond don’t emphasize academic success, which fosters an adolescent male culture that is oppositional to school. The solutions that they propose in the conclusion to the chapter is for parents to provide their sons with information about the relationship between academic success and financial success and provide them with emotional rewards for academic success and for fathers to role model good study habits and ways of achieving financial success and masculinity through academic success to their sons. Andrew Reiner, who teaches men’s studies at Towson university in Maryland, says that men don’t go to other men for emotional support because male heroes in popular culture don’t do that. But that causes mental health problems for men. So he prescribes men to discuss what about masculinity to change with their male friends and for men to write about the emotions they experienced in the past, along with other recommendations for men. https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-be-a-man-who-has-inner-strength-and-emotional-resilience But what is missing from both accounts, is addressing the source of the problem. If the problem is the role models that boys and men see in the media don’t exhibit the behaviors that are necessary for them to thrive, then the solution is to change those role models. Telling individual men and families to change is just passing the buck. Those role models did not always exist. Someone created them on purpose. They can be changed. Is there something obvious that I am missing? Is it just impossible to make healthy and positive male role models profitable in fiction?
@Sewblon Honestly, all of that reads like hocus pocus wishful think the problems away.
There is zero evidence for this role model argument, and it’s frankly ridiculous. First because there are tons of role models of all kinds for boys. That’s one terrain where we are vastly advantaged. The vast majority of great historical figures and fictionnal or religious heroes are men. Charles Darwin, Jesus Christ, Socrates, Indiana Jones and Sheldon Cooper for example are all male heroes telling us about emotionnal intelligence and scholarly achievements. The reduction of our cultural environment to batman and iron man is almost comically ignorant.
Second because it doesn’t matter much. Children are raised by living humans, not by comic books and TV, and that’s where their socialisation and image of self come from. Your emotionnal management is mostly set before age 3, long before pop culture starts playing a significant role. Your view on academia will be influenced by your parents and teachers, not saturday morning cartoons with laser-shooting dinosaurs.
The obsession over models of representation is a gender studies/radical feminist/postmodern notion. They have never bothered to test wether it actually does what they say it does (They never do). What that way of thinking does however is easily sweep problems away by telling people: change you conscience you will change your life. It’s not much different from spiritual gurus’ law of attraction bullshit.
What we do know from actual science is that parents and teachers (and especially mothers and female teachers) enforce strict gender roles in what is valued and how emotions are dealt with. But dealing with that would imply taking a look in the mirror and take accountability, the post-marxist’s cryptonite (oh look a pop culture reference, I must be emotionnaly illiterate).
Edited for spelling.