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Originally Posted by mountaincaats
Acksiom - Thanks for the knowledge. Anything you have to throw my way, I am interested. There is so much out there to know. Please post any extra references you have. I will gladly read it.
~~mountaincaats~~
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YW, MP!
Here ya go:
I once saw someone claim that the only reason why routine and ritual male genital amputation continues in the usa is because the victims can't make their resistance known.
Well, no, actually; it's not that simple. Baby girls can't make their resistance known either, but they're protected from this under federal law regardless.
No, there's more to it than just that. And on that topic, here's something I wrote a while back in response to the question:
"HOW could they pass that law and have it apply to only one gender?"
Welcome to Men's Issues. . .which is something that you might want to investigate on your son's behalf.
The short summarized answer to your question is that technology has not advanced sufficiently to allow loosening of the fundamental restrictions of male role socialization.
To expand on that point -- the genuine advances in equality for women in the western industrialized nations over the past couple of generations (as opposed to the false ones) can be attributed to several technological advances: drastically lowered infant mortality, cheap safe effective birth control, and legalized abortion, and also, to a lesser extent, advances in the preprepared foods industry and other areas of traditional women´s responsibilities, such as labor-saving devices in the home.
All these things have afforded the societies of western industrialized nations the ability to relax women's role socialization. 'Equal' opportunities for women are based fundamentally upon these technological advances, which free up the resources necessary to afford women such opportunities.
It is the necessities of biology and fundamental survival which create social role constraints. Women are traditionally directed and restricted to careers in childrearing and homemaking not because of men's lust for power and dominance but because certain facts are obvious to the members of human communities, empirically demonstrating to them that the work of community survival has to be divided up efficiently in order to be accomplished successfully.
Now that women no longer must bear eight or more children to make sure that at least three survive, no longer have to make by hand for entire families the clothing needed to defend against nature's rigors, no longer must expend huge efforts in preparing foodstuffs not only daily but in storage for the rest of the year, and so on and so forth, not to mention the tremendous biological demands caused simply by pregnancy itself, the members of the communities in which they live can afford to allow them to perform other tasks at their choice.
The same is not true for men.
Men still make up the overwhelming majority of those who do the dirty, dangerous, deadly,
daily work of civilization´s engines -- mining, logging, construction, sanitation, heavy industry, and so forth and so on. 24 of the 25 worst jobs employ men in 95% to 99% of available positions. And the responsibility for socially endorsed appropriate violence also remains almost exclusively male.
Consider, for example, martial arts training advertisement directed to women. It primarily -- if not indeed exclusively -- focuses on the element of self-defense. But 'self-defense' is categorically
not why we train men in violence skills; we train men in violence skills for the defense of
others.
And we further indoctrinate men to accept that by generally applying lower standards of applicability of protection and defense to men. The members of a population that are expected and directed to perform the majority of defense and protection
by definition receive the least amount of protection and defense themselves. It´s tautologous.
Watch the modern entertainment media with an eye towards whom are accounted the appropriate and justified targets of violence, and it will quickly become obvious to you. Those persons are overwhelmingly men.
We do this because we need a constantly resupplied pool of willing self-sacrificers -- persons who will give up their integrity, health, and lives for the needs of others. Men must be trained from birth to be simultaneously more autonomous and yet less self-serving. Men must be trained to believe that their physical integrity, health, and lives are less valuable than those of others -- those others primarily being women and children.
This is the sort of basic everyday stuff everyone knows on a deep level but never acknowledges consciously and fully. And that fails to happen for pretty much the same reasons that some parents who are complicit in the genital mutilation of their children react negatively to the truth about it. We are all pretty much complicit in the social brutalization of men for the purpose of maintaining a large field of willing self-sacrificers ... specifically, men who will work themselves to exhaustion, illness, injury, and death, to satisfy the needs of others.
Much the same pressures have long been applied to women for precisely the same reason; a community needs well-raised children to survive, and women are the ones who make the babies. It is not because of the demands of power-hungry men; it is simply the empirical exigencies of community survival needs.
We put men at risk because they are the ones that we can afford to lose, in terms of population replacement. We protect women likewise -- because they are the ones that we
cannot afford to put at risk, in terms of population replacement. Our technology has changed the latter, but it still has not really changed the former.
But, of course, it is
terribly politically incorrect at the moment to point this out -- or to point out that women are equally responsible for the cultural standards and prejudices that restrict both women
and men´s opportunities.
Nevertheless, however, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Rules The World. Men and women together made the world our parents, grandparents, and ancestors lived in, with all its prejudices, restrictions, and cultural standards.
In short, we protect and defend men less because the division of labor necessary to our civilization -- and, let's face it, our high standards of luxury -- requires it.
And we train boys (and girls) to value boys' physical integrity, health, and lives less than those of girls in order to make sure that both genders accept that division of labor, submit to its requirements, enforce its dictates, and reward its enactment.
We not only allow but
endorse and even
reward the general greater brutalization of boys overall in order to make sure that they will grow up willing to do the dirty, dangerous, deadly work. We train them from the cradle to value themselves less, and the needs of others more.
And that's the fundamental reason why we can have a Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act voted into law in direct violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Social standards -- the general acceptance of such discrimination -- the cultural inertia which resists changes to it -- are far more
means to that end of maintaining our high standards of luxury than they are ends in and of themselves.
The bottom line is that little boys are denied their fundamental equal right to genital integrity because we still need them to grow up to become the men who will accept the risks necessary to mining our ores, logging our forests, shoveling our wastes, building our infrastructure, and protecting our lives.
We have a lower standard of protection for boys because we need them to value themselves less than they do the rest of us.
And that's really all there is to it.
And because of that, your little boy is
four and half times more likely to kill himself than his female peers -- and
six times more likely to kill himself between the ages of 20 and 24 -- and
ten times more likely to kill himself after being divorced and deprived of access to his own children.
When a well-trained man is deprived of his children -- who are the primary focus of his socialization and the reward for accepting it -- what does that training tell him?
That he's a worthless waste of resources which are better given to others.
And so he blows his brains out with a bullet.
It is the last service to others that has been left for him to perform.
Added postscript point. . .you may have noticed Frankly Speaking's sigline. David Reimer killed himself after losing his job, and his adopted children to divorce. We can never know for sure. . .but it certainly does appear that what all his years of abuse and torture at the direction of John Money could not accomplish, the loss of his children did -- his self-destruction.
I think it's something to consider.
I wanted to show him and enlighten him even more. He is just like, "I cannot believe this is still allowed and legal." We talked and figured that one day it will be illegal(unless medically neccesary) and the doctors who have done this will be sued. One day they will equate ripping part of a boy/man's penis off to the genital mutilation of females. That was legal up until 1959 here, right? I cannot believe it is 2004, and it is still legal. And to think that people who research this still do it. 
))
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