I’m going to start this article off with something that’s going to probably end up being raged against by a feminist on Tumblr and a few of my more proud lady friends, but it’s a fact of nature…
Men are more dangerous than women.
EASY! EEEEAAASY!
We can wax poetic about how women are better at convincing, manipulating, or thinking circles around men, but let’s face facts. At the end of the day, there is very little chance that a woman is going to overpower a man in a one on one fight. It happens, but it’s rare, and the advantage is entirely slanted for Team Phallus. Society knows this because men are often times the protectors of the home, the soldiers in the field, the hunter in the bush, and the slayer of the bugs.
While girls tend to play house, and dress up, boys play games like war, cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, etc, etc. They’re not taught to think like this, they just do. It’s how God (or nature if that floats your boat) programmed us. They need action and adventure. A task to accomplish. An enemy to fight. A dragon to slay! A day to save.
More and more I’ve been seeing these posts in the news about how boys are constantly getting into trouble at schools for being too rowdy, or being too loud, or being too rough, or being too destructive. In other words, they’re getting in trouble for being a boy. One boy pretended to throw a grenade at bad guys and was promptly suspended. Why? He was saving the world from bad guys. Are we to push the message that saving the world from bad guys is in fact…bad? Who was behind THAT line of thinking? Why did they feel they needed to make it?
They can tell me that they’re trying to stop school violence but you’re taking the actions of the common boy and turning it into the actions of a soon to be crazed gunman. At it’s bottom line you’re making every boy guilty of being a hazard. Especially since logically, it’s counter-productive for your safety in the long run. That innocent boy who was teaching himself heroism is now being taught that he can’t be a hero…he has to be safe. He has to be tame and compliant. He can’t slay that dragon, he might hurt somebody.
Problem is, that dragon actually does exist, and it comes in many forms. That boy that you taught not to be a brave, heroic, fighter won’t know how to slay the actual dragons as a man. He will be weak, compliant, and unable if not unwilling to fight against it be it a burglar, a competitive co-worker, or some dude getting fresh with his lady. His go to move will be to run or submit. It will cost his family, himself, and society overall when the dragon rears its ugly head, and the one born to fight it had his weapons taken from him long ago.
Author John Eldridge, who wrote the book “Wild at Heart,” wrote, “Yes, a man is a dangerous thing. So is a scalpel.”
I’ve repeated many times (and even made it a line of Agent’s in an episode of Merica) that one good dangerous man can stop many bad dangerous men. You needn’t worry about a good dangerous man because he’s of no danger to the innocent. He’s there to protect, rescue, and do violence on behalf of. When someone is in trouble, their first instinct is to call out to, or find a good dangerous man. He IS safety and security, and he is the majority of what every boy wants to become. The hero against the villain.
Of all historic figures we can harken to, the most good man that ever walked the Earth is also the most dangerous. Jesus taught compassion, mercy, and not making faces at the dinner table says my grandma. Once you get all that out of the way though, you have a man who flipped over tables after making a whip and driving out people’s live stock from a church. Oh, by the way, I don’t know if you’ve read His memo but He plans to come back on a horse, drenched in blood, leading an army, and killing everyone who ever screwed with His peeps. The dude is hardcore and totally UNSAFE…but He’s good, and the baddest of the bad fear the holy hell out Him.
So why take the man out of mankind? I have a few harebrained theories.
If I was a government that wanted a more compliant and easy to deal with populace, I’d start first by sapping it of it’s strongest point of resistance. I’d take the tendency for leadership out of it’s natural leaders. I’d convince people that bravery and honor aren’t really all they’re cracked up to be, and maybe even kind of a joke. I’d discourage violence by teaching that violence solves nothing, and that if anything goes wrong they should just tell an authority figure. I’d spread the word that most problems begin with the patriarchy, and that it was the masculine that have been holding back society all along from the fairness of social advancements. I’d make masculinity a foe and watch as society did away with my problem for me. Men wouldn’t even be able to speak proudly of their role or nature without others becoming insulted, and angry. They would shout them down. The true essence of man would become unwelcome and would go away.
Once that was out of my way, there’d be little to stand against me in doing whatever I wanted. Fighting me would be a much harder task. I’m a dragon, and there’s no heroes to stop me now.
Get out of the way of the boy. He has a job to do later, and he has to learn how to do it now.