---Jan Mease <jmease@mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> Here's a great editorial by Richard Lessner, editor of the Manchester,
> New Hampshire Union Leader, printed August 12, 1998.  
> 
> 
> Male Identity Crisis--Social Engineering Has Produced Killer Kids
>  
> The majority of violent crimes are committed by young men between the 
> ages of 15 and 25. Increasingly, however, we are seeing horrific crimes 
> being committed by younger and younger boys.
>  
> In an Arkansas school yard, little-boy killers dressed in fatigues gun 
> down their classmates. In Chicago, boys 7 and 8 are accused of murdering 
> an 11-year-old girl for her bicycle. Teachers polled nationwide say that 
> student violence is the worst problem facing the schools; 40 years ago 
> it was talking in the classroom.
>  
> Here in New Hampshire, we still are trying to make sense of the 
> slaying of 14-year-old Robbie Mills of Laconia, who was murdered, police 
> say, for his bicycle. An 18-year-old is accused of this senseless crime.
>  
> How do we account for the rising numbers of violent children? 
> Doubtless many factors are at work, but one of the most important may be 
> the crisis in manliness. Writing in the current issue of the Weekly 
> Standard, Walter R. Newell, professor of political science at Carlton 
> University in Ottawa, Canada, details the rising toll we are paying for 
> our foolish experiment in gender leveling.
>  
> For more than 30 years, Professor Newell notes, we have pursued a 
> prolonged effort at social engineering. The aim has been to eradicate 
> any psychological or emotional difference between men and women. The 
> rationale for this vast social experiment has been the radical feminist 
> notion that any concept of manliness inevitably leads to aggression and 
> violence against women and rigid hierarchies of power that exclude and 
> marginalize.
>  
> Baby Boomers were told not to be hung up on providing distinctly 
> masculine role models for boys and to de-emphasize differences between 
> the sexes. At the same time, we have endured the breakdown of the 
> family, rising divorce rates and, thanks to the misguided sexual 
> revolution, an explosion of out-of-wedlock births and single mothers.
>  
> Many of these un-fathered boys model themselves not after loving, 
> faithful, hard-working bread winners, but after super-macho male sports 
> figures fathering children willy-nilly like rooting boars or the 
> violently misogynist rock stars of MTV.
>  
> Un-fathered young men are prone to identify their maleness with 
> violence and aggression because they have no better models. "It seems 
> plain enough," Prof. Newell writes, "that we are missing the boat on 
> manliness; for there are forms of pride and honor that would be good to 
> impart to males. Indeed, manly honor, and shame at failing to live up to 
> it, are the surest means of promoting respect for women." 
> 
> Though there are always exceptions, the single most powerful predictor 
> of violent behavior among boys and young men is fatherlessness.  Absentee 
> fathers, researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead finds, is a more important 
> factor in adolescent crime than poverty, lack of education or minority 
> status.
>  
> Boys and girls are different--physically, hormonally, emotionally. 
> We need to recover a sense that to be a man means to be "honorable, 
> brave, self-restrained, zealous in behalf of a good cause, with feelings 
> of delicacy and respect toward loved ones."  So the first step is to 
> recover a positive tradition of manliness from three decades of feminist 
> stereotyping that identifies any expression of masculinity with 
> violence, dominance and aggression.
>  
> According to the prevailing orthodoxy, however, there are no 
> differences between boys and girls; all have exactly the same capacities 
> and ambitions. Yet as Prof. Newell asserts, all that 30 years of such 
> conditioning have done is to drive manliness underground and distort it 
> by severing it from traditional sources of restraint and civility.
>  
> In our therapeutic society, moreover, we have psychologized normal 
> male behavior, what once would have been regarded as boyish 
> high-spiritedness. The object, however, should not be to suppress such 
> normal male energies--or medicate them with powerful mood-altering 
> drugs--but to channel them into the development of a mature masculine 
> character.
>  
> Feminists will shriek, of course, that any effort to restore a 
> traditional understanding of manliness would be to return to the era of 
> patriarchy and the oppression of women. In this view, the lives of our 
> parents and grandparents were hell holes of male aggression. Yet our 
> 30-year social experiment has succeeded not only in liberating women, 
> but in producing killer boys. This, it is said, is progress.
>  
> Our hubristic effort to undo biology is failing and the history of 
> Western civilization is not the long nightmare of male oppression of 
> women that the feminists imagine. Perhaps a more traditional approach to 
> our understanding of what it means to be male would provide a better 
> foundation of respect between men and women than the speculative fevers 
> of feminism. And perhaps the best way to convince boys and young men to 
> treat others with respect is to raise them in the traditional virtues of 
> manliness.
>  
> -Richard Lessner
> 

==
Children deprived of their natural fathers, including those living with step-fathers, compared to children in two-parent families, are more likely to go to prison by 8 times, to commit suicide by 5 times, to have behavioral problems by 20 times, to become rapists by 20 times, to run away by 32 times, to abuse chemical substances by 10 times, to drop out of high school by 9 times, to be seriously abused by 33 times, to be fatally abused by 73 times, to be one tenth as likely to get A's in school, and to have a 72% lower standard of living.  The mortality rate of divorced and single mothers is 80% higher than for married mothers, and their children's mortality rate increases 44%, which means that feminism has been responsible for more than 1.4 million American deaths in the last 26 years.

The Fathers' Manifesto Forum is now on-line at http://fathers.zq.com
_________________________________________________________
DO YOU YAHOO!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com