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I may be covering points that have already been covered, and I'm speaking purely from experience and from a male perspective.
Boys and young men absolutely need positive roles models or male figures in their life as they're going up. We also need positive female figures too, it's very much a balance in my opinion.
I went to an all boys high school in Australia, and looking around these days I think there is somewhat of a crisis in regards to positive male figures in the lives of many boys and young men. Males need to bond with other males, and we so often take our queues from our older peers and male figures, especially when it comes to women. I really don't think it is enough for young males to just have positive female figures to learn respect to women, it really must be reinforced with positive male figures too. The consensus of ones peers has a profound affect on shaping a persons attitudes.
Young blokes need to feel like that they belong to something, and a way to constructively use all that raging testosterone as they become men. An environment in which they can release all the anger, rage, and almost animal need to be aggressive and fight that is constructive and relatively safe. That's why I think sports can play a part in young males lives. However, I'm well aware of the danger of young men using sports heroes as their sole role models.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that it can't just come down to one male role model in a young males life. There are many figures that can have a profound positive, and just as easily negative, affect. The father figure, the older brother figure, the teacher figure, and the male figures that are their peers.
Mixmedia, While it's all very well to say young men shouldn't be walking around questioning what it means to be a man, I'd like to ask why not? I'm not going to blame women, at all, I think at the moment both young males and female are entering and age where we define are roles on the fly, or are really learning that roles don't have to be defined at all. But in an age of instant communication, the social environment for kids growing up now has completely changed and is still changing. I think its critical young men ask themselves what it means to be a man, just as young women should consider what it is to be a woman.
The fact still remains that in this society there are still societal norms. I can say from experience and from the young male friends of mine who are still teenagers, things are incredibly confusing. I think gen Y are being left to figure out a hell of a lot of things out on their own, and aren't really being given much of push in the right direction. With the amount of fuzz, white noise, hypocrisy, and misinformation that the modern media and the internet bombard them with, is it any wonder young men who lack many male figures in their life question where they stand? These are the young men who are most at risk of developing depression or start walking down some bad paths.
Melbourne, where I live, is seeing violent crime, especially violent crime that involves packs of males, getting way out of hand. There has been a disturbing cultural shift where young blokes find it acceptable to gang up on one person in simple bar fights, where before this wasn't so much the case. The question is, why?. If the male figures in the lives of these young blokes made it clear that this kind of behavior is absolutely not on, would we still see this concerning rise in violent assaults on the streets of my once chilled out city?
I've said it a number of times to my friends, but I can't help but feel that Australia reintroducing national service for both young men and women would do a hell of a lot to help some of these problems. And this is coming from a feel good lefty hippy.
This is a very interesting topic, to be sure, and I think it's certainly something that both young men and women should think about and ask themselves. We don't all have to come up with definitive answers, I think that would be silly, but posing the question is better than having our youth running headlong into the dark.
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You are not a slave
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