I had way too much fun with the Borderline Sociopathic Book For Boys yesterday. Judging from the mail I got, you did too. So we’re going to have a little sideshow called:
You can find it in the blogroll here at Sippican Cottage, or bookmark it and visit it every day.
I don’t know when I became the unelected spokesman for the y chromosome. I always thought of my childhood as a kind of sheltered existence. But it appears that is not the case. I’m told that many of my readers did not take a bus ride cross-country unaccompanied by adult supervision in Guatemala when they were barely high school age. You people need to get out more.
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Wait a minute, team. There is an important piece missing, and I of all people should have seen it.
We readmitted a 30-year-old woman today, one who has multiple interacting difficulties. One enormous factor in her sad life is a head injury she received when she was 8, roughhousing by a pool. Head injuries figure all too prominently in the histories of people who have trouble with impulse control, delaying gratification, and reading social cues. There is certainly a chicken-and-egg piece to this, but the brain scans and neuropsych testing often reveal specific deficits consonant with the personality problems displayed.
In our estimation of how dangerous the rambunctiousness of youth was, we neglect what is called “silent evidence.” We are the ones who didn’t get the handicapping injury, who went on to have lives, and computers, and verbal facility. Those who were not so fortunate disappeared from our sample group.
I once asked an elderly psychiatrist, wasn’t it ridiculous how we were so overprotective of children now – I mean bike helmets – can you imagine. His brow furrowed. He had worked at children’s rehab facilities. “The ones who got injured were sent away to special schools and you forgot about them.” Ouch.
And true. When I put in effort I remembered some boys who were “slow,” as we called it then, or had “difficulties,” and realized in retrospect that several displayed head-injured behavior. Of course I didn’t remember them as part of my group of friends – they were either not-quite-capable of playing our games, or were so notoriously uncontrolled and in trouble that we didn’t want to be with them.
It may be that the risk-taking of boys is a necessary thing for leadership, for defense, for families being fed. But there are those who pay the high hidden cost of risk-taking, and they have long since dropped out of our social circles and consciousness.
They are in a way analogous to soldiers, who endure risk, injury, or death on behalf of others for the good of the whole.
Sorry to be such a downer on such a fun topic, but we’re after truth here, not stories which make us feel better.
The purpose of the BSBFB is to be lighthearted. But you raise an interesting point.
I’ve read that the entire purpose of civilization is to humanize male humans. But there is a difference between being civilized and being a domesticated sheep.
If the fear of injury trumps the fear of participating fully in life, people become neurotic. It appears to me that young males are discouraged from showing much of any traits that generally add up to a fully formed male human being. And any person that is completely unacculturated to assessing risk and testing mental and physical resolve against that risk become much more likely to become reckless adults.
It’s dreary that a large portion of children are now drugged to make them into tractable automatons, many solely because they showed the slightest inclination to be what they are. Male human beings.
The neuroses manifest themselves two ways, generally, that I see: half never leave their mother’s basement, and the other half become so fascinated with the uncultivated half of their nature that they end up like participants in The Jackass Movie, pointlessly participating in destructive, self-destructive, and mindlessly risky behavior.
I encourage no one to be reckless, and everybody to be daring. Let’s go!