I've been seeing a lot of buzz around the "boy crisis", and am in turns annoyed and concerned about the double standard in the rhetoric.

We all know when the pay gap issue and the glass ceiling issue is brought up, one of the common canards is, "Well, women make different decisions," and "You can't force equality of outcome." These are superficially true, but most people do not seem interested into digging into ugly guts beneath the surface.

With the boy crisis, men (and women, sadly) who say the above canards totally reverse course; they don't apply the same standards to men and boys. If you look at the data, it's pretty clear that men and boys are simply doing the easy thing and opting out to play video games and watch porn. At least one (male) scholar has noted that these men who drop out of the work force are on their screens and not participating in family or community life (i.e. they're not spending their time doing more housework to help their working partners or parents, they're just spending that time watching something--my bet is porn). So this literally is a case of them making different choices: they can do something else. They can get jobs. They can try to play the education game, especially since many universities have been unofficially lowering the bar for boys (the sex ratios are too lopsided). They are simply choosing not to take them, and to play video games and watch porn instead.

No one says this.

This really pisses me off. I can also see troubling, anti-girl, pro-boy policies being put into place. Zimbardo, for example, has as part of his proposal that boys be given girl students as "helpers"--he is very specific about the sex. He says girls should be assigned to help boys (this is based on his talk on YouTube) in elementary school. This would, essentially, teach boys that girls are there to help them (entitlement) and teach girls that they are there to serve.

This is fucked up.

No one says this.

I am fed up with this bullshit.

We really need to do something about this anti-woman, anti-feminism that's coming from everywhere all at once. I'm stumped as to what to do, however, since I already know using facts to try to establish reasonable changes to whatever is going to be shouted down by men, because they will deny until the end of time that they are architects of their own destruction--we women are going to be expected to fix this, too, without getting any credit and taking all the blame.

So fucking done with this shit!

Edit: A few points of clarification about Zimbardo!

1. Yes, he is the "Stanford Prison Experiment" guy.

2. He doesn't phrase it the way I did in the TedxTalk. He says "mixed-sex groups", but when he clarifies he says girls should be paired with boys so the boys can learn skills from the girls. So the same thing, but phrased more diplomatically. Traditionally, it isn't uncommon to pair low-achieving students with high-achieving students (much to the pain of the high-achieving students), but to code this via sex rather than achievement independent of sex is a leap backward. I do think there are contexts where boys should learn to communicate with girls, but not at the expense of the girls' educations/achievements.

3. To his credit, he did cover the video games and porn angle. This is more than a lot of the activists in this sphere does, since many of them might mention video games, but somehow doesn't mention porn--or if they do, it's in passing.