Crazy Gender Stuff: Micromanaging Boys

This sort of thing isn't entirely nuts.

   The problem just seems to be wildly overblown, and the people who are obsessed with "fixing" it usually have conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality that are at least as cracked as the ordinary/traditional ones they're trying to change. And I'm somebody who thinks that old-school, liberal feminists has some important insights into the stuff. But that's the pattern: the sensible, modest insights of liberalism...well...for some reason they're not enough. The left seems driven to move "beyond" them, past the heights of sensible insight, right on out through the stratosphere and into the...I dunno how to continue that lame metaphor...into the conceptual vacuum of...some analog of outer space or something.

   How is it that I and all my friends were raised in rural and small-town Missouri without any of these pernicious attitudes? Except for some moderate--and, IMO, salutary--element of the traditional, somewhat Stoic conception of masculinity, I didn't get any of this stuff that allegedly afflicts boys. If, for example, I had ever pressured a girl for sex, I'd have been wracked by guilt. And if it every became known, my parents would've killed me. And I'd have been ostracized from the community. I've heard of the idea that it's permissible / expected for guys to do such things...but it was viewed as history even when I was a kid.

   It's not that there aren't interesting questions about such topics. It's that they are radically overblown, and people who obsess about them think everyone else should, too. So personal obsessions and leftist fads have been turned into culture-wide obsessions and fads.