RIGHT SPEAK: The Four Terrible Things That Are Destroying Boys In Our Culture

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Our culture is very bad for boys. It's bad for girls, too. It's bad for everyone. But I think we fail to recognize and appreciate the unique struggles that boys face. Partly we fail to recognize it because we are too busy worrying about the Patriarchy's persecution of women. Partly we fail to recognize it because, collectively, we just don't care that much about boys. Partly we fail to recognize it because men are not as likely to talk about their own plight. And partly a man will not talk about it because everyone, even his fellow men, will only laugh at him and downplay the problem.

There are many factors at play, and they all lead to a pretty dire situation. Men are told about their privilege, but if you look at things honestly you will not see much evidence of this privilege. On the contrary, you will see several profound disadvantages suffered by men in general and boys in particular.

Here, I think, are the four biggest:

1) Our culture preys relentlessly on a boy's weaknesses.

Let's imagine the world the average 13-year-old boy inhabits. He has long since been exposed to hardcore pornography, and probably watches it regularly. Then puberty hits. His hormones are going haywire. His brain is hardwiring itself to focus obsessively on sex. He cannot really help it. He is now fertile, even as the girls his age, for the most part, are not. He feels the biological impulse to go out and find a sexual partner, though he does not understand this urge and his conception of human sexuality has been perverted and confused by the porn habit he developed in sixth grade.

The boy cannot escape sex. It is all over his computer. All over his phone. All over social media. All over the TV. All over the music he listens to. He goes to school and his female classmates are dressed like strippers. He goes anywhere and that's how the women are dressed. It seems that everyone is doing everything they can to make a degenerate and a creep out of him, even as they demand that he control himself. We ask for self-discipline and self-control from the boy while providing him with no tools to develop them. Rather than tools, we give him temptation. Non-stop temptation, everywhere he goes, all day, every day, right at the moment when his brain is least capable of overcoming it.

And even if the boy possesses the almost superhuman moral fortitude required to pursue chastity and purity in the midst of the sex-choked fog that engulfs him, he will only meet mockery and discouragement from our society. The very people who demand that he "respect women" and "control himself" will heap scorn on him if he tries to do exactly that. Again the boy will need to call upon his superhuman courage to ignore the jeers, just as he rejects the temptations, so that he can walk the path to virtue on his own, with no help from anyone.

Most boys do not have this courage. Most adults do not have it. Yet we expect of our boys a virtue that we do not possess and have never demonstrated.