It’s not really news, but it’s a taboo, so we talk about it little, badly, and quietly.
I am talking about the very worrying situation of boys in Quebec.
Let’s summarize it simply: boys drop out of school. They are less and less present at university. Which means that in the medium term, they will be downgraded economically, socially and culturally. Sociological and symbolic mechanisms work against them.
Was all this inevitable?
Was female emancipation, which everyone rightly celebrates, inevitably bound to produce male collateral damage?
- Listen to the news review commented by Alexandre Dubé and Mathieu Bock-Côté via QUB :
Masculinity
No. On the contrary. But some believed that it paid the price of the devaluation of man, presented as the residue of a bygone time, as the waste of the prehistory of humanity, and this in a context of deindustrialization destabilizing professions. traditional masculine. Equality has given way to revanchist discourse.
Who has really forgotten advertisements from the 2000s, where men were presented as idiots?
And the situation has become more radical in recent years.
Let’s summarize this: we are contemporary with an ideological war waged against masculinity.
Masculinity is increasingly presented as the hallmark of thick bullies. In recent years, we have even come to talk about toxic masculinity.
The program is known: man, to re-educate himself, should deconstruct himself. He would have to renounce his protective function, renounce the spirit of competition, renounce also the attempt to accomplish great exploits. All of this is now devalued. We simply want to see it as the syndrome of someone who wants to prove that he has a big one.
The figures with whom he could identify were now forbidden: I am talking about the knight, the policeman, the soldier, the musketeer, the great professor, the adventurer.
Likewise, the figure of the father has been devalued. It is now optional. In the making of children, the man is reduced to a quickly ejected drop of sperm, when it is not simply collected in the laboratory.
Male desire itself is forbidden: it is compared to rape culture. The man who wants to seduce a woman is always suspected of being on the verge of aggression. I add that if he is content to be gallant, by opening the door, or even worse, by paying the bill, he will be accused of reproducing patriarchal stereotypes.
Adobe stock photo
Of construction
And from now on, he is destined to live in a non-gendered world, in a non-binary world, which will erase the last traces of virility – unless they are associated with communities associated with diversity. Then they will be celebrated.
And yet, we continue to deny this crisis of masculinity. We are told the big lie of a world still subject to male domination, of a patriarchal world, of a world that needs to be overturned, so that the paradise of equality can finally arrive.
We continue to imagine the West as a macho tyranny. This ideological fiction is maintained by the dominant neo-feminist academic discourse.
We are walking on our heads and they want us to believe that everything is normal.