Excited
Has China’s one-child policy made parents too overprotective — to the point that their boys are spoiled and causing them to be “sissies?” This is one of the reasons why Qinlinglu Elementary School in Zhengzhou, Henan province, has started a new initiative called ‘Looking for a Real Man’ encourages boys to act more like… well.. boys.
As part of this the youngsters are taught how to act more masculine and must take an oath swearing to act like ‘real men’, reports the Dahe Daily.
Wang Jianhua, who has been teaching at the school for 14 years, says he has noticed that boys have become “more and more girly.”
In contrast, he says the girls at the school are becoming wilder and wilder. [full story]
I want to know what these lessons involve: Fighting? General mischief and misbehavior? Medical exams to be sure they are have the correct proportions of frogs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails?
I think they’re wasting their time on this initiative. Everyone knows the way to “man up” is to listen and learn carefully* from the songs of Disney’s Mulan:
Be a man
We must be swift as the coursing river
Be a man
With all the force of a great typhoon
Be a man
With all the strength of a raging fire
Mysterious as the dark side of the moon
(From I’ll Make a Man Out of You)
* Extra man points if you also sing and do your own choreography.
(h/t: ProfessorEric)
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That's silly.
That's silly.
I like to think these boys just sit in a circle and talk about their penises.
There have been many unintended consequences (.e.g. "Little Emperor Syndrome", gender ratio imbalances), and I have read that China is considering ending it.
Dude! I have the Mulan training montage choreographed by heart.
As a gamer, I hate to agree with Christine's remarks on jump-roping-- but uh, I agree.
Anyway, I think that the spoiled-child pampering will continue despite what manliness programs lower education schools provide. It appears to me that gender identity issues seem less important than the self-entitlement problems associated with the single-child policy.
maybe it's just me, but i feel like the "one-child" generation is a big social experiment that's going awry.
Idealizing traditional masculinity seems to lead to homophobia as well as the idealization of traditional femininity and traditional gender roles, resulting in generally more sexist attitudes. Like Efren said, it can be harmful to heterosexual men as well because of all the expectations to be strong, tough, and unemotional.
I'm tempted to say manly compared to whom? If manliness means hiding your emotions and being unable to express yourself to the point where you go and kill innocent children because you have no other way to express one's anger--which I'm surprised the teacher doesn't talk about, I'm all for less "manliness".
I have also noticed that there do seem to be more same-sex identified men coming out in China--is this an added benefit of having such a gender discrepancy? I'd like to think so. ;)
I think they've got it all wrong with how they're approaching this. The only way to become real men and women is to give them responsibility - of which used to be in the form of taking care of siblings and each other - but is now negated because of the one-child policy. They don't have to look out for themselves, they're constantly protected and monitored.
Then again, I'd rather have my boy jumping rope than in front of the computer playing video games. And as for the girls becoming wilder, honestly, what guy doesn't want to see girls fight.
I post this comment on the site but I'll repeat it here.
I'm guessing from the top of my head that half of all the American dads want something similar program to this. Let's be honest, most guys want their sons to be manly in some way (within reason and respect for others, of course).
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[...] One of big online shopping sites in China, taobao.com, reports that male bras, imported from Japan, are a hot item. In Japan, they are apparently a hot seller (as you can see in the video), even for the steep price of $30 per bra. The bras are apparently popular with cross dressers and metrosexuals who need to support sagging male pectorals, also known as manboobs or moobs. Thin men who want to beef up their chest are also said to be customers. Interesting trend, especially as a school in Chinese is trying to make boys more masculine. [...]