Boys aren’t losing role models – girls are

[Truthlikeness]

Another excellent article from Victoria Smith

thecritic.co.uk/boys-arent-losing-role-models-girls-are/

"The problem with masculinity is not that there are good versions and “toxic” ones. It is that it is a relational concept. To make any sense at all, masculinity must be something that femininity or womanhood are not. The ongoing obsession with presenting boys with “good” models of masculinity will always run up against the fact that, beyond greater physical strength, there are very few positive qualities that men possess that women do not also share."

"Boys aren’t losing role models — girls are. This is not due to some misguided attempt at inclusion. They’re losing role models for the same reason they always have, the same reason they’ve been excluded from activities of which only men were presumed to be capable, the same reason they’ve been denied a history and a legacy: because men have not yet worked out a way of being sure they exist unless it is in relation to female inferiority."

Superb article, @Truthlikeness. What a talented writer Victoria Smith is!

As it happens, I have been thinking about this - that we teach boys that it is integral to their identity as male that they are superior to girls. So of course they feel threatened when women achieve, or even just do the same job. Some women therefore try to minimise themselves (or women in general) in order not to upset their partner (or men in general) out of conscious or unconscious fear of male violence.
It's part of the paradoxical appeal of gender ideology that it seduces with false claims - of breaking with gender norms when it actually reifies and reinforces them, of ridding us of sexual inequalities, all the while favouring one sex over the other and ignoring where sexual differences are important, to the detriment of females.
It would be great to get away from masculinity and femininity - somehow we have to keep emphasising that what makes a boy male is physiological, not personality.

And yes of course she is right about the more serious loss of female role models. This is why transing dead women is so traumatic for us.

Yes. The subtractive definition of masculinity has always been the problem, i.e., defining men by what women are not. It's then natural, if you are a certain kind of masculinist, to grab all the good adjectives for your part of that definition, and in extreme cases to leave women only the biologically unavoidable bits.

I saw this when I was a girl. Bravery, honesty, friendship etc. were all coded masculine by many in the society.