I was going through some comments this evening when this statement made me consider if I should comment or blog.

I focus on what women’s problems are here, but there is another whole side to this thing which we don’t often discuss here, and that is the passivity and cowardice of many men in the modern age.

Well, the question is why. And the answer is that men have been trained to be wimps. If you play up, if you get angry, that is seen as a problem.

You get a diagnosis.

You get put in special education, with special needs, and in the sheltered or short bus. If you want to succeed, you make sure that you are not on the short bus.

One of the jobs that parents have to do — particularly fathers — is keep their children out of the clutches of that diagnostic process. I should add that there are some children who are emotionally crippled, socially crippled, despairing and overwhelmed with fear. They do need help, and support — and at times the most oppositional make most of society fearful.

But most of the time kids are angry something is unjust. Most of the time, the schooling system is not stacked in boys’ favour.

And if you think they do not know that, you are a fool.

So smart boys become compliant. Polite. They leave their testosterone in a jar at home and go to school and play by the rules they know are manifestly unfair, because they also know that any, any criticism of their teachers will end up with them being excluded from school.

Which is much more damaging than any cane, or the rough games we used to play.

This has consequences. Boys have to learn their limits. I won’t talk about my sons, but I am a true geek, a bookworm, but by the time I was 10 I’d broken an arm jumping over a stack of boxes (which I was making higher and higher), I had most of my play huts hidden in a golf course (trespass, with a nice exposure to toxic sludge in the creek between our house and my parents) and had a series of scars from playing soccer every recess (I had played rugby for a school team, but it did not take). I avoided fights — but still had them. So I learned how to handle the fear of conflict. Scornful laughter hurt more than bruises.

Boys do not develop courage if they are wrapped in cotton wool and protected. The current zero tolerance stuff — sending kids home because they have toys that look like guns, arresting any child who says he’d like to do what this song says of facebook — trains kids to be compliant, to have no courage, to lose their spine: and you cannot repair that with recreational gore.

(Ah yes, the song, sung loudly when I was a kid was….

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school,
We have tortured all the teachers, we have broken all the rules
We have stabbed the secretary and we hung the principal
The school is burning down

It’s worth noting that the bullying was confined, most kids felt safe, the safety rules (such as play soccer barefoot as not everyone could afford soccer shoes) were kept… but we were allowed violent songs and images.

It seems that as we eschew the aggressive words, we either become wimps or turn instead to heavy aggression. Wiser generations invented rugby for this — get the lads to burn off their energy and then let them do their lessons.

But not today.

Instead, we train cowards, then demand that they have the courage to commit, to marry (despite the odds being against them) and wonder why young men turn instead to their playstations.