If you turn on the news these days, one of the first things you will discover is that “being a boy” will very often get you thrown out of school, suspended or even arrested.
Consider, for example, this 10-year-old boy who was suspended for pointing his finger like a gun. Or this eight-year-old boy who used his finger as a gun. Or this six-year-old boy…
You know the slogan, “point your finger, go to jail.”
The very fact that there exists one school administrator, not to mention many, who does not understand that this is simply how boys play is alarming enough.
But this is only the beginning of the war on boys. Matt Walsh goes into great detail in this excellent post.
A few highlights:
According to the CDC, more than 20 percent of 14-year-old boys have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lifetime. Twenty percent.
Boys are 125 percent more likely to be stuck with the ADHD label than girls, and 127 percent more likely to be medicated for it.
I suppose we can chalk this up to a mental disorder that mysteriously discriminates based on sex, or we could contemplate the possibility that we have turned boyhood into a disease. Overall, young males are almost twice as likely to be deemed “learning disabled.” Could boys really be this inherently flawed, or is the system itself flawed?
Whether or not a boy manages to exhibit the “correct” personality traits and narrowly avoid a psychiatric diagnosis, he has a much greater chance of being expelled or suspended from school. In fact, boys make up about 70 percent of the suspensions from grades K – 12. They’re also five times more likely to be expelled from pre-school.
And then there is this:
Feeling abandoned, angry, hateful, and confused, guys are about 4 times more likely to kill themselves than girls. It’s true that females attempt suicide at a higher rate, but males are at an exponentially greater risk of completing the horrible deed.
And the story doesn’t end there. While (if) these boys grow into men, it is much more probable that they will become alcoholics and drug addicts.
Everyone knows that men are infinitely more likely to go to prison, but did you know they even receive longer sentences for the same crimes? Indeed, women convicted on the same charges are twice as likely to avoid incarceration altogether.
Is this what you call “male privilege”?
Privileged to be drugged as a child, expelled from school as a teenager, and incarcerated as an adult? Privileged to bad grades, a psychiatric diagnosis, and an early death?
I don’t agree with everything in Matt Walsh’s post, but I would like to point out that, as a father of three boys, I worry about a culture that is attempting more and more to emasculate them. A boy who bullies another boy or who beats people up should be punished. But a boy who points his finger at another boy? He should be allowed to be a boy.