January 29, 2017
Declining Gender Identity Means Declining Life Skills
by Connie
(henrymakow.com)
I can't believe I am about to ruminate about the "good old days," when "girls were girls and men were men." It's about the teen years, both NOW and THEN, for whatever use you like, even food for thought.
You know about this history, but the millennials need to see a revival -- before us oldsters die off. Think it could actually happen?? Here goes... starting with girls, but mostly about men...
Nowadays teenage girls are pet sitters, not baby sitters, and they are often paid well. There is not much call for babysitters, due to fewer kids, more daycare. Kind of irksome to see so much human love misdirected to mere animals. There is no shortage of volunteers at the animal shelter, and they will even get high school "community service" credit for it.
At our own local high school, students are offered a renamed home economics class ("life skills") without a shop counterpart. Boys and girls both take it, but nobody owns tools anymore. They stopped offering Wood shop and Auto shop in the 90s, changed focus to college prep (so they could indoctrinate all of them, not just the rich kids.) Not to mention, boys are no longer itching for their drivers license. Why should they? They now have garage bands along with their youtube channels!
More on lost male identity...
Once a boy's first job was a paper route and his second job was pumping gas. Today's young man doesn't know how to check fluids or change a flat, and they don't ask to be shown parts, because that's not nice. Actually, we all have become lousy consumers and as I have said before, we just throw money at things -- mostly on plastic to pay later. For example, we buy experimental software, and literally line up to be guineau pigs on the first version, which we know will have bugs.
(Women will throw out perfectly good clothing because it's "not in style," so they don't end up sewing, after all.)
At college, kids actually hire movers when they switch to a new apartment. The guys have strong backs, and UHauls are cheap, yet they still hire professionals. Too busy on Facebook, I guess.
With my son and his age-mates, their homes are filled with loose hanging cabinet doors, leaky faucets, walls that need painting. Neither are the dads in the neighborhood passing these skills along, because of the misguided belief that teaching anything at all to children is womens work, though child rearing is of course hired out, now, as well.
What we have here is the Prevailing impression that there is no need to nurture things at all in the private domain. There is no private sphere in which to exercise our personal (including gender related) talents, and so those talents which remain are minimized.
After all, everything worthwhile is public, there is no such thing as "typical" private family life being recognized by the culture. So the end of babysitting and shop class signal the virtual ignoring of what was once the nuts and bolts of our daily living.
