Boys Today

I watched this TED talk recently, Philip Zimbardo: The demise of guys? | Video on TED.com, where some stats are presented showing how guys are falling behind girls in academia and developing a new fear of intimacy and an increasing social awkwardness, so much so that girls don't really want to date these guys, which feeds back into the problem. Zimbardo blames this on excessive use of the Internet, gaming, and porn. And I'm going to combine that idea with one in another TED talk, Tony Porter: A call to men | Video on TED.com, where Porter basically states that contemporary society implores a emotional repression except for the expression of anger, through which all our emotional energy is then channeled such that sexual violence is a result.

There's definitely a problem with guys today. However, video games and porn are a symtom of that problem, not a cause. And, where I agree that emotional health and awareness would go a long way to towards resolving a lot of these issues, including excessive gaming and watching porn, it doesn't get to the root of the problem.

I'm going to suggest that the problem and the solution is this:

The Maasai people of western Africa once required their boys to face and kill this when they hit puberty.... alone.

And the question I pose to you is, what would that do to a boy... knowing that this was in his future? What goes through his mind as he grows up. Does he decide to spend his time playing video games and furiously masterbating or does he watch men who've gone through the process themselves. Does he focus on understanding his joy, his fear, his anger or does he have to get beyond all that to keep his senses about him.

The thing about rites of passage like these is their symbolic nature. The lion is the possibility... that which the universe could throw at us, the situations for which we must prepare... because, above all, if the time comes, the responsibility falls on us (for the feminists, I'm not saying women don't have a responsibility too). And it's that responsibility that men have to be ready and willing to take up.

Natural and sexual selection have engineered men for this, and it's this recognition of our responsibility that women still find attractive. As guys continue their decline, women are just going become more and more frustrated with dating.

We've spend centuries separating our lives from threats, though. In the last century, since WWII, we filled our live with so much convenience and asked so little of our men that they've had no reason to leave here:

And that's how we get leaders like:

I'm not claiming that we need to reintroduce risk into society or that we need to start sending our adolescents our to kill predators. It's not necessarily the act of killing a lion that matters. It's the psychological and physical preparation, the impetus to shed the mind's selfish concern for its own well-being and its possessions, and the ability to express that preparation in action that we need to once again instill in our boys.

We need them to become men.