Boys Just Wanna Have Guns
“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” – Anthony Burgess
By Jessica Greer
As the Trump administration turned a year old beside its diametrically opposed twin sister, the Women’s March Organization, the nation was able to reflect on the propulsion of our democracy.
Trump continues to mystify Ivy League educated political pundits while tweeting dictators from Mar-a-Lago.
Meantime, mainstream feminism took an ironic and unexpected turn, unleashing its fury on the swampiest of sewers: Hollywood.
The New Yorker published Ronan Farrow’s “From Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories” on October 10, 2017.
The article highlighted the alleged power abuse and sexual misconduct of one of Hollywood’s most influential producers.
Within the same month, the #metoo movement emerged, creating the hashtag to reflect the vastness of sexual assault as a social systemic problem.
The term was popularized as Weinstein’s high-profile women came forward, hashtagging their own horror stories from the casting couch (while, of course, omitting the net worth accumulated as complicit instruments of sexual exploitation – all in the name of women’s empowerment, up until they decided it was degrading).
But with this momentum to expose and liberate legitimate victims of sexual oppression came an opportunity for Gloria Steinem’s hollow manifesto to affix itself.
Many mainstream feminists began to blame these cultural woes on the acceptable masculine nature of American men.
Fast forward to February 2018, when another boy problem rears its ugly head.
On Valentine’s Day, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz bombards Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Florida, with an AR-15 assault rifle, killing 17.
In the hours following one of America’s worst school massacres, speculation began to emerge regarding warning signs in the shooter.
Almost magically, within a 24-hour timeframe, high school students organized protests, walkouts, and speeches as outrage over the lack of gun control policies, mental health support, and politically charged sentiment on both the right and the left began to flow on cue.
Americans began reducing the most complex social issues to the lowest common denominator in order to defend their staunch ideologies.
Some demanded an end to our Second Amendment while others accepted our state of chaos and suggested teachers be trained and armed.
The media reminisced on past school shootings at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and others. Celebrities trended: “thoughts & prayers policy & change.”
But it was only a matter of time before the critics went after the ultimate culprit in every scenario of violence: masculinity.
Reactions to the clearly male social issues in the United States continue to inspire a conversation which raises questions concerning the American boy crisis.
Are boys more dangerous than previously suspected?
Can we now all agree that our heritage of patriarchal power structures is detrimental to progress?
Can masculinity be cured?
One CNN article cited red flag behaviors in Cruz “as early as age 9, when he got in a rock-throwing fight with another boy.”
As absurd as this example may be, the plight of the boy still remains. Cruz did, in fact, grow to become angrier, more violent, and ultimately, a mass murderer.
As a public high school public teacher and the mother of two mischievously curious boys, I have to say, however, that I have personally seen an unnerving pattern in American education which increasingly contributes to the death of male curiosity, the rise of unmotivated boys, the ongoing lack of fathers, and an urgency to medicate boys into classroom submission.
The assault of the American boy has been underway since the birth of second wave feminism.
The agenda is to destroy the “cult of masculinity” and “compulsory heterosexuality” in order to feminize men into the perfect boyfriend, rather than harness the energy that forged the way to organize civilizations, create governments, industrialize, and globalize.
This is not to say that women have not played a role in the progress of humanity. But we cannot deny the domination of men along with the foundations they have laid for future generations.
Yet, in our current collective society we are experiencing a Clockwork Orange dystopian version of the male.
Anthony Burgess’ novel The Clockwork Orange is a dark tale of a society in which masculinity is so bored that it turns to violence and crime to satisfy its nature.
The main character, Alex, is eventually caught by police and brainwashed into being the Good Alex, but eventually he is triggered back into the Bad Alex.
The “clockwork orange” is a London phrase which means “having the appearance of an organism lovely with color and juice, but which is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or the Almighty State.”
Mary Shelley painted a similar picture in her novel Frankenstein, in which the mad scientist creates a monster he cannot control.
The thought that a state, an institution, or a even person can control and coerce humans to outsource their moral choice making without paying a natural price is the most arrogant of ideals.
The assault on the American boy has had a profoundly negative impact on our society.
In a 2015 article in Psychology Today, Dr. Marilyn Wedge states: “Boys are held back in school at twice the rate of girls. They get expelled from preschool five times more often than girls. And they are three times as likely to get labeled with ADHD as girls –13 percent of boys are diagnosed with ADHD versus 5 percent of girls. Boys are medicated for ADHD more than girls.”
Who has access to your boy even more than you do? Who is the trusted voice of reason when it comes to medicating boys?
The public school. From the youngest age of pre-schooling at 3 years old, you can bet on a school psychologist analyzing the impulsive and mischievous behaviors of your boy.
This pedagogical platform provides a space to exercise power over family.
I’m reminded of the famous Bible story of Moses being put in a small basket, floating down the Nile River as his mother saves his life from the murderous Egyptian decree to kill all Israelite boys (Exodus 1:15-22).
Matthew Henry describes the tactical use of Egyptian midwives as tools to murder Israelite boys at birth: “the midwives were appointed to be the executioners; for it was to make them not only bloody, but perfidious, and to oblige them to betray a trust, and to destroy those whom they undertook to save and help. Pharaoh’s project was secretly to engage the midwives to stifle the men-children as soon as they were born, and then to lay it upon the difficulty of the birth, or some mischance common in that case.”
Camille Paglia criticized this offensive in her comment that “natural, robust, assertive masculinity is defined as a disease from which society must be cured.”
Today’s public school system acts as the arms and legs of the current agenda which seeks to systematically quash the inborn male nature of boys and replace it with an acquiescent shell of a boy.
The side effects for many of the top five drugs prescribed for ADHD are depression, psychotic breakdowns, and aggression.
That means that what is being used as a replacement for discipline completely eliminates the opportunity for correction and training.
Boys are seeking to reclaim their stolen masculinity without fathers and without God, and it has become our social nightmare.
Originally, The Clockwork Orange story closed with Alex having his moment of metanoia (change of mind, spiritual conversion, also known as repentance). Acts 3:19 says: “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.”
Perhaps the greatest travesty connected with the charges against masculinity and the drugging of the American boy is the suppressing of his cognitive ability to repent.
Rather than demanding that the Bill of Rights be revised to operate in the favor of a dictatorship, or scrambling to arm our schools like prisons, we should be asking how the American boy and his masculinity can be cultivated and prepared to fervently pursue the next frontier.