[MSM]

The only way that you can be surrounded by women for your entire upbringing is if you don't engage in sports. Sports are typically hours per day. Coaches are absolute authority figures, and there are very few female coaches.

I can't think of any men that never played sports but are somehow punished for being "so masculine"

[mycologos]

"Sports" may be hours per day for boys --- and even this is probably but organized sports definitely aren't, and that's where the coaches are. Unless he's playing AAU basketball or club soccer or something, I really don't think a boy is spending even a few hours per week under an "absolute authority figure" coach.

On reflection, the parent comment jibes with my experience growing up in the suburbs in the early 2000s. Literally all of my elementary school teachers were women. The only man I remember was a PE teacher, and I don't remember ascribing any authority to him at all.

[AussieWog93]

Same era, same experience here. I don't think it's fair to ascribe too much blame on women teachers, though.

The overwhelming majority of them genuinely care about their male students, acknowledge their different learning styles professionally and give them as good an opportunity as any competent male teacher would.

If you wanted to make a big difference, you wouldn't need to change gender ratios through social engineering. The small minority of female teachers that undermine boys' education are all known by the student body and other teachers.

[wearywanderer]

Competitive highschool sports often practice for several hours a day. It's not really a serious sport if you're only going to practice a few hours a week, is it? Maybe badminton club practices an hour on thursdays, but the swim team is going to be swimming for at least two hours every weekday for much of the year. Sometimes we had practice in the morning before school as well, two practice sessions in a day. There were days I spent almost as much time in the water as I did in a classroom.

But to the point raised in comments above, most boys were not participating in sports. Maybe 1 in 4 were at my school.

[mycologos]

I think we agree? I was responding to a comment claiming, I think, that the serious sport participation you describe is the norm among boys, and as you observe, it definitely isn't.

[username90]

As far as I know boys playing sports do far better than those who don't, so this you'd conclude that adding grown men to their lives helps them and that "toxic-masculinity" isn't really the main issue boys have.

[MSM]

"Most" boys play some kind of sport. I have to assume it's the vast majority. My argument is that in those kids' lives, I would wager many of the authority figures that they spend significant time with and respect the most are men.

Blaming women as a whole makes no sense to me.

[username90]

Most kids doesn't even get the recommended level of physical activity, I doubt they spend that much time playing organized sports. An hour a week isn't really a significant amount of time compared to how much time school takes.

And to add, if you go to less privileged neighbourhoods you'll see sports participation drop significantly, most don't do any sports at all. And the problems are much worse there. It might have been even worse if they did more sports, who knows, but I doubt it.

> According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, only 24% of youth ages 6 to 17 engage in at least 60 minutes of physical activity per day, down from 30% a decade earlier. B

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/20...

[developer93]

So having more working mothers and stay at home fathers makes tons of sense in this case, would you agree?

[CapricornNoble]

>>>>"Most" boys play some kind of sport. I have to assume it's the vast majority.

There was a TED Talk a few years back from a US Army General about how the terrible physical fitness of America's youth is becoming a national security problem.[1] I think the "low quality" of adolescent males over the past 2 decades is partly behind the push for more women in the military: we have so few physically-fit high-testosterone males that we have to cast a wider net and recruit physically-fit, comparatively-high-T females; they are better than soft fatbody guys. If boys were seriously engaged in sports at the rates that you are suggesting, teen obesity shouldn't be so widespread.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWN13pKVp9s

[horns4lyfe]

In my experience as an army officer, the “wider net” is cast for positions in the army where that fitness isn’t really necessary; ie, logistics units, cooks, admin, etc. I spent all of my time in infantry units and the people in those physically fit, high T jobs are still almost all men that are physically fit and aggressive. And that’s in normal units, so not even counting special forces and rangers. I also met some guys that looked fat and soft that fought like devils when pressed and would run exactly as fast as they needed to to pass a fitness test.

[wearywanderer]

Strange implication. My swim coach was a woman and that wasn't unusual, many of the teams we competed against were also coached by women.

She was a very good coach too; she was also the one who taught me to swim about 10 years earlier.

[odiroot]

> Sports are typically hours per day.

Maybe in some parts of USA. Definitely not the case for Europe.