Stock says we’ve become too concerned about upsetting words rather than upsetting facts. For example. It is impossible to change your sex. Full Stop.
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In Flight From Manhood
You don’t have to become a woman to like yourself.
Psychotherapist Joseph Burgo, Ph.D. speaks to the “crisis of masculinity” in the Western world. I agree. There is a crisis.
I’m a psychotherapist who works with biological males considering transition, and also with men who have resumed living as their biological sex after having inhabited a female identity, often for years. Some are homosexual men who struggle to accept themselves as gay; others are heterosexual males on the autism spectrum, bullied as boys because they were misfits. Others have a rare condition known as autogynephilia – a straight man’s sexual arousal at the vision of himself as female.
The psychological factors behind such a flight from manhood are various and complex, but all my clients have been driven to some degree by shame about being a man. While an abusive or emotionally violent father occasionally figures in their backstories, they all lack heroes or positive male role models. When I ask them for a positive vision of masculinity, they can’t articulate one; at the same time, they feel vaguely ashamed for falling short of it. They may have come to accept the fact of being a biological man, but they often hold the male sex in contempt.
The large number of young girls suddenly showing up at gender clinics has received much media coverage of late, but an increasing number of adolescent boys are identifying as female. I see them as reflections of a crisis of masculinity in the West, along with the boys falling behind in school and in the labor market, the fathers losing touch with their children in increasing numbers, and the disaffected young men addicted to drugs, video games and porn who seem never to grow up – all of them in flight from manhood.
In his recent book Of Boys and Men (2022), Richard V. Reeves describes how our culture tends to “pathologize naturally occurring aspects of masculine identity, usually under the banner of toxic masculinity.” For young men coming of age, “the message, implicit or explicit, is all too often, there is something wrong with you.” The APA’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men (2018) has endorsed that message, essentially pathologizing masculinity in nearly all its forms.
Burgo finishes his article with this….
Despite what the APA Guidelines tell us, there’s a lot to be said for masculine men who can be aggressive, even violent in the service of protecting others; competitive in a way that promotes innovation; and able to suppress strong feeling during crises when a cool head is needed. Until our society finds a way to make young men feel good about themselves for being men, as evolution in part has shaped them to be, we’re doomed to see too many of them take flight from manhood in increasingly dysfunctional ways.
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Mothers & Fathers, Raise Men
Downstream Costs To Low-Birth-Rate Societies
The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.
Psalm 90:10 – English Standard Version (ESV)
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth….”
Genesis 1:28 – ESV
Low birth rate societies are usually not very healthy societies. Several Asian countries, Japan, South Korea and China are facing a real crisis today. They don’t have enough young people to support their aging populations.
Virginia Postrel, has written a substack article which highlights the current problem in Japan and how it might foreshadow what’s coming for the United States. Postrel, a childless baby boomer, doesn’t have a solution, but she’s definitely sounding the alarm.
In January, prime minister Fumio Kishida told legislators that the country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” because of its falling birth rate.
But even if the government succeeds in goosing the birth rate, the effects will be felt decades from now. Japan has an immediate problem that dates back to policies adopted in 1948. People over 75 now make up 15 percent of the population, and they don’t have a lot of kids to take care of them. Japan’s postwar baby boom lasted only about two years. By contrast, the U.S. experienced high birth rates from 1946 to 1964.
In 1948, the Diet passed the Eugenic Protection Law. It made abortions legal and cheap, about $10. “Critics assert that it is easier for a woman to avoid an unwanted child in this way than to have her tonsils removed,” The New York Times reported in 1964. “One result of the practice has been the virtual elimination of illegitimate births.”
The bill also promoted contraception, establishing “eugenic protection consultation offices” throughout the country. They provided marriage counseling and gave couples “guidance in adequate methods of contraception.” Local governments trained midwives and nurses to encourage family planning. Employers, unions, and nonprofits pushed the idea of smaller families and helped spread information about how to achieve them.
FULL STORY
As we are seeing, the normalization of this kind of “family planning” whether it be encouraged by much Feminist Theory, all Queer Theory, or Corporatism, will have negative downstream consequences.
God made us male and female for many joy filled reasons. The calling to be fruitful and multiply into caring God-like families is one.
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Celebrate God’s Good Bi-Natured Creation