On the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Tuesday evening, Daily Wire podcast host Matt Walsh gave a speech on how our modern culture is destroying masculinity.
Walsh pinpointed four areas where our culture is destroying boys, namely the complete saturation of pornography, the female-tailored education system, the denigration of masculinity, and intentional gender confusion directed at boys.
“Our culture preys on a boy’s weaknesses,” Walsh outlined. “Let’s imagine the world the average 13-year-old boy inhabits. He has long since been exposed to hardcore pornography, and probably watches it regularly. Average age of first exposure is now 10. Perhaps younger, depending on what study you read. Then puberty hits. His hormones are going haywire. His brain is hardwiring itself to focus obsessively on sex. He cannot really help it. He feels the biological impulse to go out and find a sexual partner, though he does not understand this urge and his conception of human sexuality has been perverted and confused by the porn habit he developed in sixth grade.”
Boys cannot escape sex, he emphasized. “It is all over his computer. All over his phone. All over social media. All over the TV. All over the music he listens to. All over everywhere.”
“It seems that everyone is doing everything they can to make a degenerate and a creep out of him, even as they demand that he be the opposite of that,” Walsh said, noting that we are providing boys “no tools” to navigate this.
“And even if the boy possesses the almost superhuman moral fortitude required to pursue chastity and purity in the midst of the sex-choked fog that engulfs him, he will only meet mockery and discouragement from our society,” he explained. “The very people who demand that he ‘respect women’ and ‘control himself’ will heap scorn on him if he tries to do exactly that.”
Next, Walsh targeted the education system, which he argued is tailor-made for females and works to punish boys, especially by over-diagnosing male students with “disorders” for simply exhibiting behaviors normal in boys.
“The typical classroom environment is torture for a boy. It penalizes him for being himself. It penalizes him for being a boy,” Walsh said. “… Boys get lower grades. Boys are more likely to drop out. Boys are more likely to be expelled. Perhaps worst of all, boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.”
“By high school, 20% of boys — 20% — are diagnosed with ADHD. And yet, we never stop to ask ourselves why boys are more susceptible to this mysterious mental condition. We never stop to consider that perhaps we are not so much diagnosing boys as we are diagnosing boyhood,” he said.
“The problem is us, not them,” Walsh asserted. “We are the ones who need to change. If there is no room in our schools, in our homes, in our culture, for boys who act like boys, then our schools and our homes and our culture — not our boys — are sick. If we have established a system that cannot handle half of the kids who are fed into it, then the system is broken. Tear the system down. But leave the boys alone.”
Boys are also hit with challenges, the “Unholy Trinity” author argued, due to deluge of media denigration of masculinity.
Nobody would dare mock femininity as “toxic” or “fragile,” but these types of attacks on masculinity is commonplace, he said. “Nobody would label all women ‘dangerous’ or ‘potential monsters to be feared,’ as someone from The New York Times once said about men.”
“If stoicism, competitiveness and aggression are ‘on the whole harmful,’ then manhood itself is harmful. These traits are natural to men. Not every man has them to the same degree, and perhaps some men hardly display them at all, but in general, men are more emotionally reserved, more aggressive, more competitive, and more physically dominant,” the columnist continued. “It didn’t become this way because society engineered it. It already was this way, it has always been this way.”
“Society didn’t invent masculinity. Society, rather, noticed masculinity,” Walsh said, noting that masculinity is “ingrained” and “innate.”
Lastly, Walsh spoke about the clear effort being made to confuse children about their gender, highlighting boys as the prime target here.
“There has been, as you may have noticed, an overwhelming push in recent years to impose gender confusion onto children. Boys seem to be the special targets; they seem to be the ones who most commonly fall victim to it,” he said.
Drag Queen Story Hours, Walsh said, can now be found at libraries across the country, including in red states. “What is the purpose of that? The purpose, quite plainly, is to normalize, that is promote, this kind of lifestyle to children. There could be no other reason.”
As for how we tackle this concerted attack on our boys, Walsh suggested we implement “good laws” targeting pornography, protecting children and taking on the education system to make it more localized and less one-size-fits-all.
The main solution offered by Walsh was the presence of fathers — fathers who teach their sons that they are not toxic or bad by nature of their biology and guide them appropriately.
“A boy feels the indescribable, uncontainable urge to go out into the wild and find fulfillment in something — something out there — but he doesn’t know precisely what or where,” Walsh started his powerful closing remarks.
“The culture comes like the snake in the garden, and says ‘Go that way.’ And if the boy follows, he will be lead, potentially, into a lifetime of failure and misery. That is where the father is needed. To come to the rescue. To stomp on the serpent. To take his boy’s hand, to look him in the eye, to tell him ‘You are a boy. And that is good. And that is wonderful. And one day you will be a man. I will show you how. I will show you the way. Follow me,'” he continued.
“That is what a boy needs. Many will never get it. And we will hate them for what they become. But it didn’t have to turn out that way. If only someone had been there. If only they’d been given a chance,” concluded Walsh.
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