Boy Scouts of America has completed its girlification by finally dropping the last mention of “boy”. It’s the latest move by ‘progressives’ determined to pathologise masculinity and erase men, says Heather Mac Donald in City Journal. Here’s how she begins.
The Boy Scouts of America has a Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion. The organisation requires all Eagle Scouts to earn a badge in diversity, equity and inclusion. It admitted girls to its programme for 11 to 17 year-old boys in 2019 and changed the name of that programme from the Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA. The word “boy” has been routed from the organisation’s promotional materials and replaced with “youth”, as in: “For more than 100 years, Scouting programmes have instilled in youth the values found in the Scout Oath.”
Does it matter, then, that the Boy Scouts of America has now extirpated the last use of “boy” found in its entire portfolio — the “boy” in “Boy Scouts of America”, the name of the parent organisation? It does. That the Boy Scouts cannot tolerate even an atavistic use of “boy” reveals how powerful the impulse is to efface males from our culture. The transformation of the Boy Scouts of America into Scouting America is an object lesson in the incapacity of traditional institutions to withstand progressive takeover.
The need for an entity that valorises males, or that merely acknowledges their existence, is greater today than when the Boy Scouts was founded in the early 20th century. The British war veteran Robert Baden-Powell despaired at the lost boys he saw in London’s slums, seemingly deficient in the Victorian virtues of honesty, hardiness and self-reliance. Baden-Powell envisioned an organisation that would combine boys’ craving for heroism with a code of chivalry, wrapped in the lure of the outdoors. He and his North American counterparts understood masculinity as self-sacrificing and ennobling. Chief Scout Citizen Theodore Roosevelt reminded the American Boy Scouts in 1915 that “manliness in its most rigorous form can be and ought to be accompanied by unselfish consideration for the rights and interests of others”. Baden-Powell wrote that the Scout must ask himself, when forced to choose between two courses of action: “ Which is my duty?’ that is, ‘Which is best for other people?’”
The value of an all-boys organisation was self-evident to the Boy Scouts’ founders and to the Scout leaders who followed them. Masculine comradeship underlies males’ willingness to undertake military and civic sacrifice. Boys compete with one another, torment one another, but also sometimes elevate one another. They seek adult males to emulate — ideally their fathers but, in the absence of their own father, a father figure embodying masculine virtue. That father figure can even be imaginary; boys’ aspirations are fired by tales of male courage and the accomplishment of great feats.
Today, American boys are plagued by fatherlessness, both real and symbolic. Whereas in the early 20th century, boys lost their biological fathers to industrial accidents and tuberculosis, now they lose them to parental irresponsibility. In 2022, 40% of all American children were born to single mothers. Black newborns faced a catastrophic 69.3% illegitimacy rate, while more than 53% of Hispanic children were born to unmarried females. Whites had a 27% illegitimacy rate; the rate among the white underclass is twice that. Already in 2016, 59% of births to white women who did not finish high school or obtain a GED occurred outside of marriage. Boys suffer the most in the typical fatherless household, with its lack of structure, parade of shiftless boyfriends and inconsistent discipline. (There are exceptions to this chaos, of course.)
The disintegration of the family coincided with the devalorisation of males, making the possibility of even a symbolic father figure remote. Feminism was zero-sum: it championed females by tearing males down. The concept of toxic masculinity was active decades before the American Psychological Association declared traditional masculinity (which the APA defined by such civilisation-creating traits as competitiveness, stoicism and the desire to provide for others) a malady. Positive male characters in television and movies were replaced by dolts and abusers. And a cascade of female-uplift programmes started pouring out of the Government, foundations, corporations and universities.
Any high-status, high-paying endeavour where males still predominate has been targeted for anti-male intervention. The bulk of attention focuses on the STEM fields. One would have difficulty finding a large philanthropy or school system today lacking a Girls Who Code-type initiative. The Break Through Tech AI Programme, sponsored by MIT, UCLA and Cornell Tech, is typical. It is targeted at black and Hispanic female computing students, who benefit from an 82% placement rate in paid internships with such prestige companies as Accenture, Amazon and Google. That boys even know about STEM fields today reflects their innate drive for knowledge and discovery, since the entire society goes mum if a young male might otherwise overhear any encouragement to pursue a science career.
Matching the flood of female-preferring programmes in STEM is the flood of female-serving programmes in health. The Affordable Care Act codified eight offices of women’s health throughout the executive branch; it created a host of women-only benefits (like annual “well-woman” visits). What did men get? Higher insurance premiums. The Department of Health and Human Services has an Office on Women’s Health; the Centres for Disease Control has an Office of Women’s Health; the Health Resources and Services Administration has a Women’s Preventive Services Initiative; women’s health analysts are seeded throughout the ten regional federal health offices. The Government’s Healthy People 2030 initiative set 29 health targets for women and four for men. Requests by men’s advocates for an Office on Men’s Health in HHS have fallen on deaf ears.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden created a Gender Policy Council with a focus on “gender equity and equality” — i.e., on creating preferences for females in every walk of life. Despite the superabundance of existing female health initiatives, the Gender Policy Council rolled out a new White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research earlier this year. It was time, declared the March 2024 executive order announcing the push, to “fundamentally change how we approach and fund women’s health research in the United States”. A crazy optimist might think that the only possible “change of approach” would be to rebalance the funding between men’s and women’s health research and care, since it’s hard to imagine that one could stuff any more resources into existing pro-female disparities. But that’s exactly what the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research did.
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From the nineteen seventies, at least, feminism evolved into a pathological ideology that is harmful to boys and men – and actually to women and girls as well. Nowadays it is one strand in a competing set that make up the woke religion.
We can’t have boys learning to be resourceful, independent, strong, caring, free-thinking MEN, now can we? They might threaten the status quo, and we can’t have that.
I recall my own days as a Scout, in the 1990s. Even then I felt very strange having hot soup made ready for us by a selection of mothers upon returning from a night’s camp in the wild. And when that one mother declared that the expedition was too dangerous and the weather too cold for her little Christopher, so the whole thing got cancelled.
Let BOYS BE BOYS.
Let GIRLS BE GIRLS.
Let TOMBOYS BE TOMBOYS.
And let the boys who don’t like being on expedition be the boys who don’t like being on expedition. It’s not a problem.
FFS. We are not all the same.
The future elite need weak, stupid, unquestioning creatures who do as they are told, don’t ask questions, who are cheap to feed through fake meat and insects, and who will accept euthanasia overseen by the state when they are no longer of use to the Tony Blair club followers, and the “elite” .
Yes, exactly my point.
Well you know the phrase, ”If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” That is exactly what this progressive BS that the social engineers are continually doing to us amounts to. Changing things for the sake of changing things, but definitely not for the betterment of the citizens. I know you know this and I’m preaching to the choir but can any sane person tell me what was wrong with good old Girl Guides and Boy Scouts? Like, seriously, leave stuff alone that works perfectly well before you come along and stick your toxic bloody oar in and make a right pig’s ear of things! It’s just pathetic, it really is. Well if I can’t blame Bill Gates I’ll need to blame the communists.
I recall my own days as a Scout, in the 1990s. Even then I felt very strange having hot soup made ready for us by a selection of mothers upon returning from a night’s camp in the wild. And when that one mother declared that the expedition was too dangerous and the weather too cold for her little Christopher, so the whole thing got cancelled.
Hehe …
Some time in the 1980s, I was on a Pfadfinder (German equivalent of boy scouts, always had female members as well, though) summer camp in Hinsbeck (a village somewhere in the vicinity of Krefeld). We (boys) were all sleeping on a part of the meadow covered with a large tent. Unfortunately, it was raining heavily during this time and our shelter was anything but watertight. As workaround, we all got a plastic tarpaulins to cover our sleeping bags during the night. One would usually be woken up in the early morning by rain falling onto one’s face. Next came the tricky task of carefully getting rid of the water which had meanwhile collected on the tarpaulin in order to be able to rise without getting completely wet. After this had been accomplished, one could get up and go to a heated and waterproof tent to warm up and have breakfast. I did eventually get a hell of a feverish cold because of this, but apart from that, I still have all kinds of fond memories about this trip.
Children are not half as fragile as some people fooled themselves into believing.
I remember going Windsurfing in the early nineties near Cirencester Gloucestershire at a Lake. Remember falling in many times and it was a cold day and got bloody freezing.
So sick of the concerted erasure of the male of the species to be replaced with weak, lost individuals whose inate masculinity is taught as something to be ashamed of. This in combination with the ridiculing and hatred of the biological female by the DEI, and Trans lobby. Why are we allowing the erasure of our species by what is a small group of individuals backed by billionaires and those who are anti human? The threat to us is not from other countries, the enemy is within it is in our Parliaments, our Universities and public sector who oversee what our children are taught. These are the enemy and it is these people who we must fight and remove their poisonous dogma from our society.
Off topic, but is anyone in the Southport area? This just happened a few hours ago…Kids have been stabbed, FFS! Is this the work of another mentally unstable ‘incomer’??
”Eight people including children have been wounded by a knifeman during a stabbing spree in Southport this morning.
Armed police officers detained a man and seized a knife after the attack that left multiple people wounded in Southport, Merseyside.
Officers urged people to avoid the area around Hart Street but said there was ‘no wider threat’ to the public.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13684031/Stabbing-spree-leaves-multiple-casualties-including-children-knifeman-targets-Southport-property.html
I’m pretty sure it’s a toss up between terrorism and mental illness depending on skin colour these days;
https://x.com/dnlgee/status/1817701563445461176
It was a 17 yr old. I fully expect we’ll be told he is suffering from mental illness and his origins are irrelevant.
Tom Lehrer had a few words of advice for Boy Scouts.
In 2007 I discovered the Angry Harry website and it was fresh air to me at the time being a white working class male. The guy calling himself Angry Harry would comment sometimes on Sp!ked Online, he died some years back but had some good conversations with him on Sp!ked. Shame that website was so dismal over the jab fascism.
I was a single mother of two boys; their father left when they were 4 and 2. It IS possible for a mother to bring up boys successfully – I did it. They were lucky to have a very good grandfather and I “made use” of other men in the family …. uncles, great uncles etc. I chose their Primary School from a range of good local ones because at the time my older son joined, it had a male Headteacher and 4 other male teachers. One by one the male teachers left and by the time my younger son left the school 7 years later, there were none left.
Steve Biddulph’s book “Bringing Up Boys” was a godsend and I applied his advice as much as possible. That recommended enrolling them in “male” groups with a strong male leader ie Cubs, Scouts, Football Clubs, Cricket clubs, which is what I did.
It looks like the “Progressives” have studied Steve Biddulph’s strategy and are deliberately dismantling it. First destroy male influence in the family; then destroy male influence in the schools by feminising it; then destroy the clubs and associations which provide male role models.
I’m afraid people are going to have to band together and make their own male role models. That’s not easy if you are a single mother (and the serial boyfriend route is a negative not a positive one).
Just not the Tates and the Yaxley-Lennons of this world.
‘Destroying male influence’ is no more than an attempt like Baden-Powell’s to civilise men. His was a remedy of the Edwardian age. Though the virtue of considering others before oneself is the Self-denying of Christianity.
The serial boyfriend/partner route is repeating the original condition of being an abandoned wife. Not an uncommon experience for women in the Edwardian era when divorce was difficult and costly in many ways.
On the other hand, no-fault divorce has only enabled selfish men to indulge themselves in their fickleness. And the sexually permissive society has made women available to men in the ways that men have always wanted.
If families separate, two homes are required instead of one. Or more if the children have to be cared for by others.
And the sexually permissive society has made women available to men in the ways that men have always wanted.
The sexually permissive society has made certain women and certain men available to each other in ways they always both wanted. I’m usually more than happy if the whole lot of them just stays out of my hair.
This is precisely what Millicent Fawcett complained about.
Whenever she achieved something, she objected to being described as ‘being as good as a man’ or ‘just like a man’. She was hardly out to erase men. In fact, described as being ‘as good as a man’ erased women. Why should any girl belong to an organisation that associates certain virtues solely with masculinity?
Baden-Powell may have associated selflessness with masculinity and chivalry, but putting others first – properly, denying the Self – is something of Christian origins. The medieval code of chivalry has been criticised as being as performative as present-day virtue signalling. It was only practised by men of class to women of class. It did not stop the medieval practice of slaughtering male villagers and raping the women in war.
As for the male companionship that ‘elevates’ them, this can include the sort of ‘banter’ that really has the purpose of stopping them fighting each other. This is their ‘natural’ state. The very last thing that is any good for males is to have them congregate together where this ‘banter’ puts them in contradistinction to women. Recent research from Glasgow by a women reporter demonstrated what predatory behaviour this encourages.
Despite this supposedly masculine characteristic of selflessness, when Millicent Fawcett was assisting her husband in campaigning for the abolition of the law that gave a husband ownership of all his wife’s property and money, she encountered a number of farmers who were affronted by the idea that in the absence of this law they would actually have to ask their wives for money.