In my experience males aren’t too concerned with how other males spend their free time as they are with the other person’s personality (voice, related interests and dress) and actions. </p>
<p>However it is a societal view that academically inclined “nerds” aren’t popular/can’t get girls and this may cause some males to focus their efforts on other things like athletics or goofing off in an attempt to be popular/impress girls.</p>
<p>In my experience the males who were picked on were not the academics but rather those who talked about video games/tech and believed they were smarter/better than everyone else despite below average grades.</p>
<p>I agree with this. The “decline of men” narrative is really a story of loss of unexamined privilege. If you were born a white male in 1950, you were positioned on third base compared to everyone else. Circumstances were in your favor. You had the most choices of anyone. That is no longer the case. Men now are facing competition from groups that were formerly structurally excluded from fully competing with them. This new reality is painful but it must be accepted and not rationalized away as “discrimination.”</p>
Middle school? Yes, even in 4/5th grade it starts
Elementary school? I didn’t say it only had to do with girls, I also stated it has to do with popularity, these are just observations from my personal experience. </p>
<p>I am just stating why I believe being academically inclined is not seen as being feminine but rather as being “nerdy” (You’ll be unpopular, won’t pull girls) among males.</p>
<p>It’s fine. As a mother of two daughters, all I can say is that boys run in packs. They choose each other. If guys decide not to choose the smart guys? They lose out.</p>
<p>My daughters have always dated very academically successful and hard working guys. Also, plenty of smart guys in their friendship groups.</p>
<p>Around here, it’s “cooler” to be smart than to be an athlete, though many, if not all, are both. </p>
<p>But, guys choose which guys will be popular, not girls.</p>
<p>Yes, and being academic doesn’t make you unpopular as other guys don’t care about what your grades are, however the media (TV, movies) usually portrays the smart guy as unpopular while portraying the guy who goofs off as being popular which causes children to believe that being smart is going to make you unpopular.</p>
<p>Yeah, well, you don’t have to convince me that the shows directed at the kids, today, are bad influences. I personally think MTV should be rated TVMA, considering the crap they have on there.</p>
<p>I think another problem is that educational attainment expectations are much higher. There is the mantra now that EVERYBODY should go to college. Back in the Jurassic, vocational training was viewed as a valid and respectable path to pursue for kids (mostly boys) who were less academically inclined. And for the most part, vocational training led to a blue collar job that paid a comfortable family-supporting wage.</p>
<p>With credentials inflation, a college degree now is what a high school diploma was back then. A lot of employers are requiring a college degree for jobs that don’t really require that level of education. And a lot of boys are struggling in their pursuit of higher education, when in the past they just wouldn’t have and needn’t have bothered.</p>
<p>GMTplus7 that mantra is because, for good or bad, there are not many well paying jobs left that don’t require a degree. This is because of technological advances, and many other issues. It is what it is. Some boys still think they’ll support a family with a blue collar job. That’s not likely to happen and I think as a society we need to be forthcoming about that.</p>
<p>The fact that girls are doing more than they historically were, does not change the fact that boys today need to do better at obtaining a higher educational level. </p>
<p>If girls are outpacing boys, it means one of two things: either girls are intellectually superior to boys their age, or the educational environment favors girls success more than boys.</p>
<p>There are way more than two things it could mean, one of which, the fact that boys think they don’t “need” an education as much as girls, has been brought up, not to mention the fact that boys may well care less about an education than girls.</p>
<p>There are many more things it could mean, in fact.</p>
<p>Not that I think our education “system” is all that fantastic, for boys or girls, right now.</p>
See, this is the problem right here. There are boys who aren’t white and they have never been privileged and they are being lost completely now. That should bother everyone and, frankly, it shocks me that so many are fine with that.</p>
<p>My privileged white boy is going to be just fine, as are most kids of his socio-economic status, but boys who are not white, don’t have fathers in their lives, don’t have mothers with the time to support them, are NOT going to be fine.</p>
<p>Well, the thing is, I think men need to step up and start to do something about these boys and young men. As a woman, I’m very supportive of finding the right balance for our men and boys, but as a woman, how the heck am I supposed to know what would work better?</p>
<p>We need our prominent and well educated men to step up and start to advocate for and come up with the kind of implemental solutions to these problems that advocates of young girls came up with 20 years ago.</p>
<p>I support the idea, completely, but it’s going to need men to make it work.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone believes that nothing should be done to help boys succeed in school. I think that people are objecting to the attitude that our schools have all magically become “female-oriented” in recent years. The problems that boys are having with sitting still and doing their work have existed for far longer than that, but the problem has been masked by the lack of true competition (i.e. the deliberate handicapping of females that we have just recently gotten past, mostly).</p>
<p>Our legal/judicial system, by providing the presumption that mothers should get primary custody of male children in any custody suits, including those of divorce, contributed significantly to this outcome. Low-SES boys, whose statistics are primarily responsible for the male-female gap in educational attainment, are particularly affected by the absence of fathers in their lives. </p>
<p>By the way, I have known several men whose wives divorced them for one reason or another (never actually because the man was cheating but often in part because he lost his job) and who were given “joint custody,” and I know how misleading the modifier “joint” can be. Maybe “minimal” would be more accurate in describing the father’s rights.</p>
Exactly. Encourage more boys to become teachers. Tout the benefits of fatherhood from the rooftops. When Bill Cosby has done that several times, he has been criticized heavily. That’s not helpful.</p>
And now boys are being deliberately handicapped, and even people on this board seem to take the position that female is the default. Female is not better. Female is wonderful. Male is wonderful.</p>
<p>I have a son who is not the traditional male and the lack of diversity and inclusiveness in many places bothers me a lot. It’s only when a person is free to be whoever he or she is that everyone can do their best.</p>