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.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.