Schools absolutely do not welcome healthy masculinity in boys. Instead boys are being forced to obey, sit still for hours, study things they don’t want to and they are given punishment or drugs or social shaming if they behave in a masculine way.

The way school treats boys is absolutely crippling to a lot of boys, and distills in them a deep lived experience that masculinity is not welcome. This implicit message that their masculinity is not welcome, is given to boys in school over and over and over again, for years, during their most formative and impressionable time alive.

This is not some kind of wrong conclusion either that boys are drawing. Boys’s masculinity literally is not welcome in school. One essential part of masculinity is that most boys want to move and do things and explore and have freedom and follow their interests and passions. Boys are not at all allowed to be masculine in school.

>>18115982

So, school is one huge way in which boys learn that their masculinity is not welcome, and hence in a sense, their very existence is not welcome.

Unfortunately, there are yet more things that cause men to feel that they are inherently worthless or even inherently a net negative on the world.

There is the endless barrage of messages that people in general are the problem. People are told that they are causing species extinction, soil erosion, climate change, et cetera. And lots of men inherently are wired to take responsibility and take action and fix problems, but in such an individualistic world, no one man can hope to stop soil erosion all by himself. So in practice, this feeling of responsibility coupled with a feeling of powerlessness often leads to subconscious guilt and to a subconscious malaise and possibly even self-hate.

Furthermore some people are being shamed for what their grandparents did. Again lots of men are wired to take responsibility and take action and fix problems, but in this individualistic world, no one man can fix the issue that a certain country colonized another country in the past. No one man can undo the evils of slavery. Again, this just leads to men feeling powerless, detached, helpless and sometimes they begin to loathe themselves.

>>18115991

Continued

Men also subconsciously feel that they don’t have any value as a loving father and devoted husband, because the media continually portrays fathers as incompetent, dumb, unattractive, unable to tie their own shoelaces without help, et cetera. And yes, of course lots of people do actually appreciate fathers, but media messaging has still given lots of men the subconscious idea that even if they are loving fathers and husbands, that they’re still losers. Then they’re still Homer Simpson.

We all understand that media messaging matters, right? If any group is consistently depicted negatively in television, then most people understand and agree that this is problematic and that this is creating negative stereotypes and possible self-hatred in that group. Well, fathers are being consistently depicted negatively on television and in movies.

So basically, lots of men feel that they are worthless, or even that their very existence on Earth is a negative. And men feel that even if they succeed at the traditional paths for men to prove their value as a person – being a father or being a successful worker – even then men subconsciously feel they still do not have any value as a person, and they might as well not even exist.

If you feel that you are inherently worthless and that there is no real path towards you having any value as a person – why would you not start behaving in a destructive manner? What is there to lose?