The Brutality of Male Socialization
Studies have found that little boys display lesser capabilities at calisthenic activities such as skipping and jumping rope. These findings are part of a broader trend of boys seeming to be worse at coordinated, bodily aware activities. These findings are often explained away by the fact that girls mature faster, even though these findings are done in children who have not yet gone through puberty (a further observation could be made about why girls reach puberty faster, but let’s leave that for now.) Researchers seem to take this as a normal fact of life, yet another example of everyday gender differences.
Skipping, commonly associated with a happy and carefree mood, is very rarely displayed by anyone as they get older. This is a lamentable outcome of our pathological tendency to regulate our bodily behavior. Take some other examples and see if you could picture an average boy or a girl (or a group of them) doing these: group singing, dancing (in Western cultures), and ring around the Rosie. Even better, please think of the coordinative hand games children play with each other and compare them to competitive sports like football. See some patterns? bodily aware, expressive, and cooperative activities are associated with girls.
When assessing gender differences, many people like to point to childhood as a good example of how males and females act when unperturbed by society. They often point to the differences in boys’ and girls’ behaviors as proof that there is some innate gender difference manifesting. It seems that they set an arbitrary start time (some even set it around the start of puberty) for when gender socialization really starts.
This is simply ludicrous. Gender socialization starts from the moment a newborn exits the womb. Mothers treat their newborns differently as soon as they know they’re boys or girls. Parents of newborns describe boys and girls in different terms from such a young age, such as describing boys as stronger and less delicate and the inverse. They even treat newborns differently, with newborn boys being treated rougher and receiving a higher degree of certain types of physical contact. Even “Baby X” experiments show people enacting these biases on infants whose sex they’re not sure of but only told what it is.
One can only wonder how modern scanning technology interplays with this. Provided they don’t want it to be a secret, ultrasound imaging allows parents to know the sex of their child as an embryo. One can only wonder how much this maximizes gender socialization differences. If we assume that a child’s first six years of age are the most malleable, how malleable could the first 9 months be?
Children learn an unbelievable amount about the world during the first years of life: children grow 80% of their brains in just the first six years of age, learn attachment strategies mostly during the toddler years, and most developmental cascades stem from fundamental experiences and learnings from the early years. While most gender socialization is subtle rather than direct, young children have an uncanny ability to take in information about the world and be molded by it (thus the common saying that children are like little sponges)
Girls’ tendencies to mature faster cannot be the only factor explaining why boys aren’t as good or as likely to skip or jump rope. We could even say that the very fact girls mature faster is itself a product of gender socialization — but we can leave that aside for now. No, the fact that boys are taught to inhibit such proprioceptive activities illustrates how differently they’ve been socialized.
Gendered Socialization —A Problem for Free Will
We tend to think of our sense of self as being personal and unique. Of course, we know that this isn’t the case; we’re shaped by outside forces as much as we’re shaped by our own predispositions. However, we often ignore this in the course of daily life — when it’s practical to think of ourselves as uniquely developed. We rarely stop to think of how little control we had of our own shaping, to the point we’re more likely to be out of touch with our locomotive skills — what allows us to control something so fundamental as our body —just for the fact of being born with male genitalia.
Why bring up such a seemingly trivial difference in gendered behavior? Well, it’s often the little things that are most telling. The fact that boys are inhibited from activities regarding coordination and locomotion is yet another facet of the trend of boys being inhibited from their own bodily awareness. There is a parallel to be drawn with emotional intelligence: stillness of movement, rather than fluidity, stands in parallel with stillness in emotional expression. The body must be controlled, and so must the emotions.
Little boys are drilled with the value of discipline so much that they get alienated from their emotions as well as their bodies. This often leads to alienation from other people, as one must know oneself before getting to know other people. It’s often been shown that boys exhibit less empathy than girls. This difference probably stems from boy’s stifled development of their Theory of Mind (ToM). Across cultures, boys display lesser abilities in ToM than girls.
If boys can’t understand their internal state, which is mostly shaped by emotions and internal awareness, how can we expect them to have empathy for others? Add to that the fact that girls are more often encouraged to be caring and cooperative and to try to ensure social cohesion. Girls are given the whole package for developing ToM: emotional expressiveness (which allows them to assess their internal states), cooperative activities, and general training in working with others in an empathetic way. Boys aren’t even given the tools to work through their own internal states, let alone those of others. In a way, we could say boys are conditioned to have little empathy for themselves.
Education and Personality
Are little boys more likely to have ADHD? It seems so. Girls have a mysteriously superior ability for self-regulating themselves. This is enough that they can sit still and silent in a classroom, being praised and rewarded for being so much better behaved than the little boys. Some people protest that this is not the boys’ fault but rather a systematic issue; this is an unnatural state for little children to be in, and little girls are (for some reason) just more willing to endure it. While Austrian schooling might indeed be unnatural for children to endure, I posit that boys’ issues with adapting to the system stem from socialization.
Self-regulating requires a degree of initial loss of control. No one is born learned; we must learn from our mistakes in order to develop strategies to deal with them. Asking a child to self-regulate while never allowing it to be disregulated is like asking a child to skip when they can’t even walk yet. Girls are allowed to do this by freely expressing all their emotions — with the possible exception of anger. They’re often given warm, empathetic, and understanding counseling as well. Boys are not allowed to express anything but anger, and when they fall out of line, they’re punished more harshly (usually with shaming, arguably the most destructive and poisonous punishment that exists.) The prerequisite for emotional control is a lived understanding of their emotions.
It’s often noticed that boys are more likely to express anger. Some have noted that anger is linked with unfairness, which is very telling. Boys and men having a higher propensity for anger might stem from an unconscious rebellion against stifling socialization. As shown by Ian McGilchristis's influential work on brain lateralization, anger is associated with a left-brained, emotionally detached mode of thinking. Academic research supports this obervation by showing higher left-brain lateralization in males.
Emotional detachment and apathy is seen in certain disorders such as antisocial personality, alexithymia, and autism. People with these disorders also show a lower ToM conception. It’s certainly no coincidence that these are more prominent in boys: in the process of socializing boys to be more stoic, boys’ brains are molded in a highly asymmetrical way that favors the left brain.
Why is this? Some evolutionary, cultural, and societal theories have been put forward. A notable one is the expendable male hypothesis. Theoretically, a man in an island alone with 100 women can quickly rebuild civilization, while the inverse cannot happen. This could lead society to see men as more expendable. The development of human warfare makes this difference even more prominent — men across cultures are the ones used as cannon fire.
In order for men to not rebel against this inherently unfair and inhumane modii operandi, society must develop strict socializing mechanisms. In a warring society, you cannot have well-adjusted, well-regulated men with strong ToM conception. These men would possess enough empathy and perspective to realize the ridiculousness of war, especially their expected role in it. Not only that, but they would be functionally useless for it — who wants to go and kill other people who might not have done anything to you personally?
The Underprivileged Privileged Position
Cultural, societal, and philosophical conceptions of masculinity almost universally describe it as a categorizing, objectifying, and logical force. Nationalism, patriotism, and militarism could rightly be called masculine. They abstract inter-human relationships into concepts that one can get behind — provided one is socialized enough to do so. This, too, is the work of the left-brain mode of thinking. From this perspective, patriarchy was inevitable — societies that did not develop patriarchal systems would not have survived. The ones with the strongest of these, such as Ancient Greece or Rome, would’ve eventually experienced the most prosperity due to their achieved (domestic) stability.
You might think this is a terrible deal for women — and it is — but it is too for males. It’s often said that patriarchy also hurts men, but this statement is usually framed in the wrong way. Women’s suffering under a patriarchal society is distinct from the male suffering. In fact, calling it suffering partly misses the point. Estrangement from one’s internal states, as represented by a disconnection from bodily and emotional experience, is its own form of hell. It’s different from the materialistic form of suffering we often think of when we look at issues of oppression, subjugation, and lack of opportunities. It’s an ethical concern of a different variety than women’s oppression: the estrangement from the self.
John Vervaeke would call this being trapped in the having mode. Likethe prince Siddhartha before he became enlightened, men (decreasingly so) are given a superior material and worldly position. While wanting good material conditions is a universal human tendency, males are particularly sold on the idea of attaining things such as power and wealth. This is not a one-way street; these benefits are attained at the cost of limiting access to the tools needed for personal, spiritual, and transcendental growth.
For this reason, male suffering under patriarchy is of a different dimension. However, in our developed and safe societies males have increasingly been subject to the female variety of suffering as well. Feminists and other observers often note that males are sold on their superiority and greatness while women are “put in their place.” Society tells men more often than women that the world is their oyster. In an increasingly materially egalitarian society, this fiction quickly gets destroyed — often with terrible consequences.
Unrealistic standards apply to both sexes and making this a male-only issue would not be accurate. However, the consequences of failing to meet these standards are much more problematic in the case of males. Violence, toxic ideologies (incels, redpill, etc.), and date-rapes are some of the ugliest. Have a particularly perverse set of circumstances and you create a school shooter.; worse, a serial killer. When men suffer, the consequences in society are felt astoundingly more harshly than when women suffer.
It should be clear to anyone with knowledge and perspective that there isn’t anything inherently perverse about the male sex. Neither testosterone nor XY chromosomes destine someone to be dangerous or toxic. Instead, these issues stem from the complex interplay of issues regarding society’s male socialization and its failings: the remnants of a utilitarian, militaristic socializing leave men unable to develop emotionally and unable to self-regulate. In addition, the socializing of men to expect unrealistic expectations that are but destined to be broken in the current day,
When males inevitably discover the truth that they won’t be able to meet expectations, a crisis occurs. Like a balloon that gets popped, they descend to the darkest place. Unlike women, who have self-regulatory strategies and support networks to rely on, men are left stranded to deal with it on their own. We can’t expect every man to be discerning (or lucky) enough to turn to healthy communities. There WILL be men falling down the cracks and joining far-right communities, turning to problematic areas of the manosphere, or isolating themselves and becoming a ticking time bomb.
Men’s socializing resembles that of the schoolboys at the beginning of All Quiet on the Western Front. They are sold optimistic dreams of status, greatness, and camaraderie — all the while being kept in the dark about the truth. The boys in the film can’t be blamed for falling into line like useful idiots — they were never given the tools to do anything else. Just like the boys sold on the patriotic war effort, boys today get sold on toxic masculinity. Eventually, a transformative event that shakes their entire world happens, such as facing the harsh realities of war.
The worst part is, sometimes a transformative event never happens. without experiencing the modern-equivalent of going into war, they might be kept in the dark about what’s causing so many of their problems. Worse, the modern world probably has more outlets for men to use as a crutch rather than face the issue head-on. Compulsive gaming, certain types of content, and other crutches are abundant.
Equality Is Making Us More Unequal
Giving prescriptions for dealing with these issues is a hard endeavor, one outside of the scope of this post. My goal for this piece is mainly for it to serve as a wake-up call. There are some ideas we can play with, though.
Certain sections of the feminist movement are absolutely right about one thing: gender roles must go. They are, for the most part, useless and cause more harm than good. Clearly, the abolishing of gender would benefit women as well. The material oppression they often face should be reduced as antiquated gender roles are eliminated.
We can already see this process start to take place in advanced, egalitarian societies such as those of Scandinavia. Gender roles, attitudes towards sex, and a movement away from tyrannical expectations is mainly showcased around this area of the world. Unfortunately, most of the world isn’t nearly as enlightened. Even in developed countries, advancements in gender disparities often don’t apply to men as much as women. Feminists and other actors signal lots, but do little — they encourage men to do things such as be comfortable expressing emotions and being vulnerable but do nothing to ensure this can realistically happen.
As misguided as their conclusions might be, some observations from the redpill movement are on point. Women enjoy the benefit of the doubt from a majority of institutions. This is justified in certain cases such as car insurance premiums, as men statistically pose a higher liability. In other cases, however, the system is baselessly biased against men. It’s becoming more well-known that family courts disproportionately discriminate against men. This degree of discrimination, particularly in child custody cases, cannot be explained by simple statistics or empirical observation.
The “War on Men” is a concept that has gained popularity relatively recently. Statistics such as men falling behind in education, professional attainment, and other areas point to a systemic issue. This shows how ludicrous removing all limitations for women while not doing the same for men has been; men are left behind because a more pervasive, societal upbringing still enslaves them. Recent surveys show a worrying trend of younger generations having fewer close friends, with men having significantly fewer friends. Not only that, men lucky enough to have a support network are less likely to talk about important topics such as family dynamics, personal life, or emotions.
Once again, externalization presents itself. Men's tendency to talk about sports and current events is no coincidence—it’s yet another instance of men being disconnected from their own subjective experience. The tendency for men to excel at external, instrumental activities is particularly shown in sports: popular sports are rarely individual, and individual sports such as golf or gymnastics are niche and unpopular among men.
Unfortunately, Western society hasn’t done nearly enough to help men escape from the chains of male socialization. In our endeavor to end sexism, we have inverted the paradigm. Women are increasingly being put at a double advantage by being given preferential treatment and enjoying the personal benefits of being allowed to undergo female socialization. In many cases, women often only need to work on a few things to have successful career. A bit of assertiveness training, safe sex, some research on women-only opportunities, and perhaps other minutae. In contrast, men need to battle demons ingrained on them by society and come out on top.
Men need to be helped, rather than shamed and ostracized. Before they can ever be told to “man up” ever again, we must conceptualize what masculinity and the concept of manning up are. Right now, we’ve got it wrong. Values such as stoicism and discipline can be virtues, but not in the absolutists way we’re pushing them. The War on Boys is a matter of nuance — we need to put men and women on an even playing field again, and this time for good. Abolishing gender roles is a promising solution. Perhaps others will surface. All in all, I remain hopeful.
