I’d be uncomfortable around any child who enjoyed pretending to kill–anything.
Especially if that child was going to grow up to be a man, was going to be flooded with testosterone for several years.
I’d also be uncomfortable around any adult who considered that behavior “a game”.
1 comment
You are totally right. At the very least, in an effort to minimize and moderate male violence, it should not be allowed for children to pretend to shoot one another at school. Their parents are mind-manipulated by the patriarchy to believe otherwise. Sad and wrong.
One thing that fascinated me in how you posted was how one of the boys so quickly blamed a girl as having pointed and made a pow sound, which I would seriously doubt from raising a daughter before my rf sensibility when many of her playmates were male. Also recently in a store I watched and overheard a six-year-old boy deliberately lie to his younger sister to try to get her to eat something nasty off the floor he’s picked up. He said “it has protein and vitamins and is really, really good for you.” His mother stopped him. I said, “oh, I don’t envy you, raising a boy, because the lying of men starts so early, doesn’t it.” She responded, “it’s not about gender but about the person, and we’re working on it with him.” I said, “if you ever want to learn more, google radical feminist blogs. And really, best of luck. My heart goes out to you [I really meant it].” Blank stare back , but maybe it planted a seed.
In raising my daughter, it was a male friend of hers who gouged her on the bus with a pencil when they were third-graders. He was an identical twin; his brother didn’t gouge her. But the propensity was obviously genetically there in both. It was a male who threw rocky dirt in the faces of my daughter and her girlfriends when they were in middle school, sending them to the nurse with bruises and creating awful drama. On and on. Not that girls can’t be violent on occasion (especially when pushed too long, or as recently media seems to be programming them to be), but even with the worst patriarchal programming girls will never be violent to the degree as boys because for girls it is not innate but has to be socially engendered.
I do believe boy’s violence, and men’s, can be socially programmed to be worse, or better as in some phases of past history. Now we’re in a programmed to be worse phase. But innately, males are predisposed to cruelty, dishonesty, violence and rapism which comes out with the slightest social pressure or programming as living in this world and knowing what men do always proves.
As the parent of boys, you can do a lot to minimize and moderate their violent tendencies while they live under your roof, and I cannot say that’s a bad thing if it is a time and energy cost you’re willing to pay. But I feel for you, truly, and my heart goes out to you, for in the realm of grown sons relating to mothers, from the many women I’ve known with grown sons there seem to be only three major defaults: (1) violence against others if not you; (2) vampire-sucking dependency on you and your resources (housing, etc.); or (3) his later-life emotional detachment because he’s made it and doesn’t want to be a “mama’s boy,” perhaps punctuated by his sending nice gifts or arranging expensive trips if he’s been an economically successful patriarch in adulthood.
I sense that you’re really trying to be a good mother and raise boys right, to be good men. I honor that you have the integrity to set a worthy goal, whether or not it can be achieved. So many countless mothers of sons before you have tried to raise good men. Are men as a sex class or the rapism of men against the entire planet any better? In deciding how to spend the gynergy of your life, maybe this is a question to ask.
And, oh, Goddess, does my heart goes out to you. Having a wonderful gynergetic daughter birth to age 18 now changed and re-programmed from being all grown up in patriarchy has been so painful [(3) option only as the girls’ default at this time in history] that I cannot imagine the pain those of you suffer when (1) or (2) above turn out to be the case for your grown sons.
(2) obviously is the option you’d have something to say about, and a choice not to allow, but (1) is, I believe (and you don’t), entirely out of your hands once your sons become adults. Please don’t let our disagreement divide us as rad-fems, though.
Whatever you are determined to do with and for your sons, it is none of my business. There’s always the possibility that as to your sons, I’m wrong. But there are so many second-wave feminists who likewise expected with gentleness, no soldier or guns at play, etc., to raise good sons and failed, having wasted so much of their own lives trying. Don’t know how much of their feminist-mothers-of-sons literature is still around given that men erase our literature all the time, and my personal carry-round library has in it mainly what relates to my motherhood-of-a-daughter and what she and other women might most urgently later need to know if they become willing to seek (for instance, menstrual extraction techniques).
In any event, I send you Blessings of the Cosmos, Consciousness, Gaia, Goddess and All that is Genuinely Good.