This is what I’m commenting on this NYT editorial. See an image of the piece at the bottom of this post. Here is the URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/men-who-needs-them.html?_r=1
By now, I think everyone should hate male-bashing just about as much as sexism. I’m all for a materialist, scientific understanding of life, of the biological underpinnings of it all,… but it’s characteristic of a superficially technic-and-commerce obsessed society that it be fashionable to denigrate the human – (which men, women and children are). The intimacy of newer technologies today conspire to create increasingly isolated, inexperienced people. Who needs to expose themselves to the potentially traumatic encounter of meeting someone, having sex, and struggling with the vagaries and ambiguities of relationship? We really are on the cusp of an historic world discovery here in our age; because we kinow that we are bio-social beings; that as we better understand every aspect of how things grow on a biological, material basis, it is dawning much more slowly that people (and in varying ways, each of our fellow animals) can’t and don’t develop without the full-on interaction of their protectors, the ones with whom they are intimate and who love them, who socialize them and from whom they learn language, behaviors to emulate, concepts and emotional intelligence, and so on. To discover that life generation can be materially reduced to cellular reproduction, passage of nutrients and immunities and all the rest of it, does not lead an informed person to conclude that males are inessential to children. Developmental psychology came late to the discovery of fathers; but it has come there, and has discovered numerous ways in which we need our fathers AND our mothers. Let’s not let ourselves get carried away in pithy denials (see the Times think piece above) of hard-won lessons, the ignorance of which causes far more heartache and soul damage than this NYT guest author means to concern himself with.
And by the way, someone should tell this man that not only do kids need their daddies, but their daddies also need them, despite the differences our respective developmental stages dictate.
… And another thing!!
This writer’s uncritical posture, like a half-dead Victorian or medieval school master, is actually that the only purpose of sex is reproduction and propogating the species – an archaic notion that we have never lived by. So if you can reproduce the species without dealing with people … what is really being said is that the intimate encounter with a desired, potentially loved person has become too traumatic, too risky, and in the long run, too much of an interference with the absorbing, narcissistic self. I daily watch my fellow New Yorkers, ears corked with earbuds, peering into iPods so intently, staring into a plastic rectangle with such great attachment, un-ready to deal with the presence of other humans, that I wonder … what will become of affinity if it’s not practiced?
Rant, rant. Rant … rant.
This post is motivated by the knowledge that Rui is stuck in a household in which males, particularly his loving Daddy, are little valued by his mother, aunts and grandmother. I believe that they are so naive and unthinking as to think that my loving boy’s self-worth is not affected. Every single day, I long to share thoughts and life with him. Without each other, we are lost.
For Rui Boy 