Off on a tangent.... That is the subject line of the email I just sent to my English professor. Our next project is research, with a paper due in just over a month. In preparation we are reading a bunch of stuff from the textbook, which includes a chapter from a book about American men that deals with the issues surrounding something that made the news years ago called the Spurs Posse. A bunch of high school boys made a contest out of tagging girls, and it made headlines when it came to light because they could only get one point for one girl, no matter how many times they had sex with them. Naturally the idea was to stick the wick into as many different female orifices as they could, and they somehow got associated with the Spurs basketball team.

I'd never heard of this gang, so I looked the shit up on the Internet and didn't find much. I did however find an essay about the other side of the issue... it deals with the negative effects that 'gender activists' (a term from the article, not mine) have on the present population of boys in general. Pretty interesting stuff.

When a social studies class of 11-year-olds in San Francisco made a quilt to celebrate "women we admire", a boy called Jimmy chose to honour tennis player Monica Seles, who had been stabbed on court by a deranged man.

Jimmy stitched a bloody knife on a tennis racquet onto his quilt square. His exasperated teacher, a gender activist committed to getting boys to take part in characteristically feminine activities, told him to start again.

After another of her classes, a boy confided to a visitor: "Men are pigs, you know."

Sounds like something my wife would say, cept that men are dogs, not pigs. Anyway that is kinda interesting, I remember having to do Home Ec in junior high for a few months, and I learned how to sew. It served me well in the military when I needed it to mend my own uniforms....

Here's a very interesting excerpt......

Today's boy may be uneasily aware that girls are more likely to go on to college. He may believe that teachers prefer to be around girls and pay more attention to them. At the same time, he is aware that he is considered to be a member of the unfairly favoured "dominant gender".

His critics forget that the energy, competitiveness and daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world. Nobody denies that boys' aggressive tendencies must be checked and channelled in constructive ways. Boys need discipline, respect and moral guidance as well as love and tolerant understanding. They face genuine problems that cannot be addressed by constructing new versions of manhood. They do not need to be "rescued" from their masculinity.

Funny, there is what some would call a very sexist statement there. All that is right with the world is the result of male aggressiveness!!! Sounds like something that would have been right at home in the talk given by the Dean over at Harvard, the one that had everyone up in arms.