There has been a lot of news coverage recently about Social Status Wars and bullying. Many parents have lost sleep over their children's "slights" toward those who aren't "like them." It's all a part of growing up, unfortunately, and there's no question that being socially liberal is now a very attractive trait. Still, the problem with these social-liberal people is that they can become overbearing and abusive when they get a little bit frustrated with others. We've seen many examples recently:
One of the most widely-known recent examples was the Virginia Tech shootings, which had a lot of media coverage at the time and created a huge reaction across the country. One of the major disputes that came out of this was whether or not the killers, Robert Lewis Denn, who was killed in the cafeteria, were acting out because of his gender or his status as a student. Some people argued that he was acting out because of his masculinity or his socially liberal views; others believed that his actions were a result of stress caused by his inadequate social status. So, which is right?
Well, the answer is complicated. On one side of the question, we have those who argue that gender police are necessary to keep girls safe from violence and that violence against girls and women is somehow endemic. These are especially popular with conservative viewpoints. On the other side, we have people who believe that boys and men are being targeted by social status wars - that boys are being hit harder and more frequently by school shootings, that there is a connection between how society judges gender and violence and that there is a definite connection between the two.
There is a strong connection between how gender police are perceived by those on one side and how bullying affects kids on the other side. Those who believe that boys are being targeted by gender police are often male children of parents who are perceived as having a socially liberal attitude. And those who are the targets of this bullying are overwhelmingly female. Boys and girls are both being pushed into a sense of womanly honor based upon their biological differences. Gender policing is the very antithesis of what a boy should feel like - and that's what happens when you have a social status war going on in his world.
What all this really shows us is the failure of the American government to address the crisis of bullying in schools by finding effective ways to deal with it. The Department of Education has zero dollars earmarked for studying the phenomenon of female victimization in schools and they do not seem to want to look at the connection between poor social status and bullying. So the question remains, who is responsible for fixing this problem? Bullying is a symptom of a much larger problem that goes way deeper than anti-girl violence - our broken culture.
Schools are places where masculinity is put on a pedestal and where children are treated worse simply for the sake of having a social status. And that, by the way, is a direct result of the breakdown of our culture. We're still walking around with the remnants of the colonial mindset from the French Revolution and the Jim Crow laws. We have a seriously distorted understanding of who we are supposed to be and how we should treat each other as well as how to behave in public. In short, we need to get out of the bubble and realize that we live in a violent society that glorifies violence as a means of getting what we want.