To hate this current trend that girls should be raised to be fierce and fiery but boys shouldn't??

No-one is telling boys to suck up injustice.
There is no injustice in girls and women's rights.
There is no need to fear female equality, it really doesn't threaten men's lives.
Presenting the male of the species as some sort of victim of female oppression is risible.

And for those saying it isn’t up to women to fix men’s issues. Well those of us who are parents to future men do actually have a very big responsibility. No it’s not just down to mums (of course not), but it’s not acceptable to pretend we don’t have a role.

I just find it 🙄 that when women were on the back foot they just had to figure it out and break through the system themselves, but now men believe they’re on the back foot women have to rush to help and ‘understand’ them? They can bugger off and effect their own change, like we had to

Our boys are not responsible for the way women were treated in the past, they weren’t born. If some of our young men are following toxic role models then we as a society need to ask why, how did that opportunity arise? And we need think about how we best address that. Telling our boys that they are somehow privileged just because of their genitals, and therefore need to suck up any perceived injustices isn’t going to cut the mustard really is it?

Ooh I love it when people get overly concerned about a change in girls behaviour to behaviour that's been deemed acceptable in men for thousands of years.
'Girls are encouraged to be drama queens'
Have you ever... SEEN men at a football match 😆

I think you're right.

By comparison you rarely see little girls with very short hair cuts encouraged to wear combats and hoodies and grub around in the mud.

@FaeryRing I think that’s probably because it’s no longer acceptable to be a ‘tomboy’. Such girls are being led to believe they are actually boys in the wrong body. It’s a shame- I certainly enjoyed mud pies, Meccano and tree climbing as a little girl. My daughter also enjoyed the same things (after she’d come through her early pink and sparkly Disney phase).

Do you want to know a huge reason boys and men are disengaging? Weed. Weed is a huge problem. The shit they are smoking nowadays leaves them unmotivated, paranoid and unable to grow in any capacity. They end up isolated, unable to connect with girls/women and instead of fixing themselves, it's easier to lash out. Weed and porn consumption by teenage boys and up, is ruining them. I would wholeheartedly support a movement to fix this issue.
Instead boys/men and their mothers, blame girls and women. It's so fucked up.

Hopefully you won't raise your boys to be as misogynistic as you OP.

Funny how women have been disenchanted and disenfranchised since Eve allegedly offered Adam the sodding apple (or whatever fruit it might have been) yet it's barely a century since we were allowed the vote (conditionally at first, natch) and only recently had legal inequalities such as rape within marriage being criminalised and equal rights (allegedly) in employment enshrined, oh and the elevation of being the property of their spouse, but now some men because obviously NAMALT 😉 are getting their boxers in a twist about it due to clever marketing of a sex-trafficking half-wit to make money.

It's a scam, a dangerous divisive scam engineered to pit the sexes against each other, because an equal, tolerant society standing together to fight injustice against all humans threatens the established power base. Which is predominantly male.

There is in Shrek 2, when the Queen says to her husband "Oh, stop being such a drama king". Sorry, I couldn't resist it.

I think the OP has a point, in that not so long ago, the status quo was "boys will be boys", who are allowed to have fun and be naughty, while the girls be good, and stay at home helping Mother; and if they're naughty, they bring shame on their family. See also "What are little boys made of? Slugs and snails, and puppy dogs' tails. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all things nice." What I think the OP is noticing is a backlash against these old stereotypes.

I think the bigger problem is that there are expected gender roles at all, on either side. This is a problem which is centuries old, and each side keeps trying to "redress the balance", which then looks like it's saying one sex is better than the other. Lots of people misinterpret "feminism" as "women are better". One possible reason for men wanting to be women is a backlash against "feminism", with the thinking "if you can't beat them, join them".

It's been known for people to say "things will never be equal until men start having babies". And now, lo and behold, men are having babies! After a bit of tweaking the definition of "man", that is. Science can make so much progress just by stealthily changing the meanings of a few words; every politician knows this.

But the solution to this is not to push girls down.

We need better male role models. Andrew Tate isn’t successful because girls and women have boundaries; they’re successful because culture tells men they’re entitled to have whatever they want and they grow up and find that’s not true. And possibly in their own family they had a controlling father and submissive mother and they think that’s what girls will put up with but many girls and women know better these days.

You just need to be watch films or TV and all the women are stunningly beautiful and often end up falling on love with the guy who isn’t very nice to them….

It’s not up to women to solve men’s behaviour.

I don’t see that being ‘fierce and fiery’ = being a drama queen. To me ‘drama queen’ smacks more of ‘spoilt princess’ behaviour.
Which is not the same as being assertive when necessary, and not taking shit from anyone - I’m sure we’d all wish that for our dds/Gdds.

What I do dislike is the often implied idea that anything associated with what boys typically like or do, is preferable to what girls typically like or do. E.g. a girl who likes pink and netball is somehow ‘lesser’ than one who likes navy blue and football.
You might as well say that being female is in itself inferior to being male. But that’s the impression given by some people who like to call themselves feminists.

Who's 'telling you' this? What rubbish.

@BringMeSunshineAllDayLong agree with this, worded much better than I could have!

Agree with this. The likes of Andrew Tate would not become popular if we were meeting the needs of our boys and young men adequately. A lot of them feel disenchanted and disengaged, for the sake of all society (men or women, girls and boys) we need to address this.

This is bullshit. Schools are just not very good at addressing bullying. I’ve seen it on countless occasions: girls bullying other girls; boys bullying boys; boys bullying girls etc. What tends to happen is the child who’s being bullied is told to suck it up.

I think it’s down to two primary reasons: the school knows the bullying child comes from a very difficult family background and therefore makes more allowances for them (obviously they can’t say that to the parents of the other child for reasons of confidentiality); or, the bullied child is more malleable/has less volatile parents and it’s easier to deal with the fallout with them then with the bullying child.

Have a look around this site and you’ll find plenty of examples where the same behaviour is lauded for women but condemned for men.

Other examples:
Parents who view you with suspicion when your child invites their daughter over for a play date because they’ll be home alone with a man.
Not wanting your wife to walking around a dark and deserted area after dark on her own, because apparently that’s controlling.
Getting reported to HR for having intimidated a female colleague by body language because apparently being taller makes you “scary”.
You can have your opinion and I’ll have mine, we do not have to agree.
Not that this post is relevant to the op.

This has got to be a joke post Op

This.

And I have two grown up sons who are very in touch with their feelings and also can stand up for themselves with girlfriends who are similar.

What I think is more of a trend is the number of threads on MN that are telling us that men are very hard done by and women should be more kind.

I don’t know if it’s men coming on here to wind us up or make us doubt ourselves, journalists looking for copy or just some people thinking it’s fun to cause a shitstorm.

I think you've possibly fallen down a bit of a manosphere rabbit hole on social media. I've just read 'men who hate women' by Laura bates. I get that as the mother of boys the title might put you off, but it's a very good insight into how a few deeply dysfunctional groups take advantage of young boys/teens to instill this sort of belief- and how truly damaging it is to boys (particularly in terms of self esteem and ability to escape archaic macho sterotypes that lead to depression). Worth a read even just to understand what they're being exposed to at school/via social media, and countermeasures available.

Good luck, we all worry for our kids, it's hard!

All sounds a bit MRAish to me....

I'm a mother of sons too.I don't recognise what the OP is saying.

I don’t think they are, I think the opposite actually. Girls seem to be the preferred sex now, and very much their parents ‘pink princesses’. I know a handful of parents who have had 3-5 sons in their quest for a daughter, and in the cases where they finally got her, she’s been treated like a lapdog, constantly snuggled and carried and pandered to long beyond the toddler years. As a result they’ve turned into highly strung or sullen little girls who have been taught acting in a vulnerable way will ensure the attention of the parents; whereas the boys are left to get on with it.

I suppose I agree that some parents encourage their sons to be ‘gender neutral’ (more so than their daughters) but I think this also plays into the ‘acting girly is better’ thing. Look at all the Hollyweird celebs whose sons are now ‘daughters’, have been encouraged to grow their hair long, wear dresses and now present as a female. Equally there are loads of insta mums with sons where the sons ‘coincidentally’ all have ponytails and wear neutral clothing and have ‘girly’ hobbies, and the mum writes endless posts about how ‘un-boyish’ her sons are. By comparison you rarely see little girls with very short hair cuts encouraged to wear combats and hoodies and grub around in the mud.

It’s a shame we can’t go back to when I was little, girls and boys were dressed in primary colours and the toys were much less gendered and beige. Parents just left kids to get on with it and play without virtue signalling to them about gender stereotypes.

I have no idea what you are on about.
I raise both my DC (one of each sex) the same and encourage/discourage the same traits in both