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According to an anonymously leaked preliminary memo the US military will be cutting ties with Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America). This will reportedly amount to ending logistical and medical support for the annual Jamboree, ending the use of military installations as meeting locations for Scout troops, and possibly ending the practice of conferring rank/pay benefits on Eagle Scouts.
The reasoning given is that "the group once known as the Boy Scouts is no longer a meritocracy and has become an organization designed to "attack boy-friendly spaces"", "for being "genderless" and for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.", and because "the Scouts have strayed from their mission to "cultivate masculine values."".
I've spoken out before as a defender of the organization, especially against the slimy, "damn you for doing better than anyone else and still feeling bad about your failures" child abuse bullshit. I've pitched it to other adults, specifically citing the fact that the astronaut program used to use Eagle as a tie breaker. I was a Scout myself (I made Life; my troop fell apart over interpersonal conflicts before I even began the push the Eagle, and I never bothered finding a new one). And I was an adult volunteer as a Den Leader.
Key word there: was.
And a large part of that is because the criticisms alluded to in that memo are not wrong... though I don't think it's necessarily the result of "feminizing leftist attacks". I think the problem is much older, much more structural, and more fundamental to the gender war in general.
Let's roll back thirty-odd years. I was one of those kids who loved asking extremely awkward questions. I was smart enough to notice certain things, and too socially stupid to realize why without just blurting it out. On one occasion, I ended up sitting next to my Den Leader in his basement while we did some crafting project.
And, with the innocence of a child, I asked: "Hey, Mr. Den Leader. You're the Den Leader, right?"
He looked down at me with his usual surly, dour mien. "Yeah."
"So, why does your wife do all the work?"
Suffice to say, this did not endear me to him, nor improve his demeanor. Later in life I better understood the elements in play, like "construction worker with chronic back pain". But the point stands that in an organization theoretically inclined towards "cultivating masculine virtues", the first five years were mostly run by women and involved an awful lot of arts and crafts projects.
This dynamic stood out even more as an adult. In the Cub Scout Pack I volunteered for, I was the only male Den Leader. We had a dad serve as Quartermaster, and another who was a nebulous Committee Member. But every other Den Leader, the Treasurer, the Secretary and the Cub Master were all moms.
I don't want this to seem like I'm attacking those women. I was quite grateful to the Cub Master (who was also a Den Leader) in particular. She was a no-nonsense, hard-headed woman... by the standards of morbidly obese women who work in HR. The problem is not that the moms stepped up.
The glaring problem is that the dads didn't.
How the hell is Scouts supposed to foster masculine virtues when there's no men to serve as examples? It's the exact same problem as all the elementary teachers being women.
The second, compounding and reinforcing, problem is the program itself. Here is the actual Cub Scout program, running from Lion to Arrow of Light, roughly K-5th grade. Each of those activities awards a belt loop, and they call them "adventures", which is honestly kind of insulting to adventure. Take a few minutes and peruse a few, if you're unfamiliar. See anything that deserves to be called an adventure?
The overwhelming majority of the program is designed to be (I'm going to be blunt here) bonus social studies classes for the biggest pussies in the grade, with a side dish of "technically counts as a gym class, if we're being generous to the huge pussies".
Oh, and I guess once or twice a year, starting in the back half, they get to shoot the simplest, safest bows or BB guns at targets 10 feet away for 10-15 minutes.
Gosh golly, that sure sounds like something that should be worth a bonus rank in the military, right?
It felt like most of the fun, exciting, interesting, vigorous or masculine things we did were things I brought to the table. Like I had to fight the program to do anything cool. The official program doesn't even call for a single one mile hike until Bear - third grade. I had those boys out and loose on every park and wild area in a 45 minute radius every month. That was the part they enjoyed and cared about. The social studies lessons in between? Boring as fuck. I'm the one who took the initiative to teach them about tracking and dangerous animals and poisonous plants. For an organization that was always styled as teaching literary Native American style woodscraft, the entire program is designed to be completed at a school playground.
The very first meeting that I hosted as a Den Leader, I cut up dozens of slips of paper with the virtues of the Scout Law printed on them, then put them in balloons I blew up. I scattered them all around the meeting room, and handed the boys a 3' wooden dowel with a pin duct taped to it, and told them to "hunt for virtue". And with each one they picked up, we had a quick discussion about what "obedient" or "thrifty" meant. The boys had a blast, and obviously escalated to practicing throwing the "spear", and one boy got a minor scratch on his leg.
None of the parents actually complained, but there were a few comments along the lines of "Huh. Are we allowed to do that?" And the answer is... prooooooobably not? If you read any of those "adventures" above, notice the massive safety disclaimer on each one?
Like @FiveHourMarathon said last week, you have to serve a master. But you can't serve two. If your highest priority is safety, you have to sacrifice fun. If your highest priority is inclusion, you have to sacrifice excellence. And if you insist on making Scouts a place where the weakest, most coddled boy in his cohort feels safe and protected, with his mom as Den Leader to ensure everything is maximally Safe and Supervised, then you're going to drive off most boys who might grow up to be special forces, or an astronaut, or a bronze age king.
AIUI, actual Boy Scouts (grades 6-12) are less coddled, even now. They're more independent, they plan their activities themselves and can choose to focus on actual adventures and range time and such. But I don't know for sure, because my own son begged me to stop with the pussified social studies bullshit before then (there were other, personal reasons involved as well, but when I bring scouts up now, a few years later, all he remembers is the boring bullshit and the too-rare hikes). And it's a moot point, because the Boy Scout Troop that his Cub Scout Pack fed into collapsed, because there was no new kids joining.
The military used to value Scouting because a boy who'd spent 12 years LARPing as special forces in the Boer War presumably had a certain independent-mindedness and a bevy of practical skills that might come in handy in a tight spot. NASA used to value Eagle for the same reason, that it showed a certain level of initiative and decision-making that might serve well when all alone with a small team in the cold depths of space.
These days, as I hear it, the Eagle program has been Goodhearted to hell and back. An Eagle rank is desirable, it helps with college, employment, the military - shit I knew a guy who kept his Eagle cert in his wallet to hand over with his license to get favorable treatment from cops. It's desirable, it's known to be desirable, so of course it's gamed to hell and back. Eagle is supposed to involve an independent project that the scout conceives and executes entirely on their own, with no adult help. But of course there are troops that are functionally "Eagle Mills", where the people signing off on the promotion are themselves coaching the kid into doing the bare minimum to technically qualify. I hear the Mormon troops were particularly bad about this, before they spun off into their own thing.
That ties into other safetyist crap. There's a nearby park that has a bunch of small wooden bridges that were built as Eagle projects. Bridges. Uninspected, built by an unlicensed 17 year old. Can you imagine? It's like something out of an irresponsible comedy show. What if something happened and someone fell three feet into knee-deep water? Who would get sued?! Forget that they've stayed up for 30+ years, and served countless thousands of people, you can't do that stuff anymore. The closest Eagle project that I'm aware of from the last 10 years was a couple of public benches.
I hope they at least talked a municipal building inspector into double-checking the work.
The problem with Scouting is that you definitely can get a great experience out of it, with a ton of valuable learning and practical skills... with the right dads, using common sense to flout the technical rules when needed. And then you get the same rank as the useless pussy who was hand-held through a badge mill.
Don't even get me started on fucking popcorn.
I honestly think, for the money you'd spend, you'd get a better experience just organizing a hiking group out of the youth members at the local gun/archery range. You just have to be willing to tolerate a bit of risk and tell the most timid moms to STFU and deal.
In conclusion, while I think totally cutting ties is kind of petty and stupid, well, so is modern Scouting America.
I saw a study offsite about the lack of male role models and there was a lot of anxious whining about how men are afraid of being seen as creeps/pedophiles but I think any attempt to explain the problem without accounting for the general reasons why men are under-included in communities in general is going to fall prey to occam's law. It seems obvious to me that a satisfyingly complete explanation for why men don't join the scouts will also explain...
... And so on, and so forth.
But agreeing on that explanation is near-impossible because nearly without exception, people work backwards from their preffered solution to determine what the cause of the problem is. Anti-safetyist mottizens want to make scouting dangerous again, anxious redditors want counter-propaganda to convince women to not be afraid of men, women want to pressure single fathers into taking responsibility, and I even saw one dude that thinks the solution is masculine bonding via class warfare. If any of these groups is right, I suspect it's mostly by accident.
Maybe men shouldn’t be shamed every time they stick their head up to get involved. There are all kinds of stories about men being assumed to be a pedophile for the crime of taking his own child to the park. Men don’t dare to volunteer to work with kids because again, the meme of “any male showing interest in kids is dangerous” means that the male who gets involved in scouting is assumed to be grooming.
"Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" seems like an insufficiently powerful explanation. While it may explain some fraction of why men volunteer less for boyscouts, it's almost certainty downstream of why men volunteer less in general, which in turn is downstream of whatever combination of factors leads to less male involvement in communities/pro-social activities/the male loneliness epidemic in general. I have a hard time believing that pedophile-accusation-risk is the reason why men commit suicide and abandon their children more often, but conversely I can imagine a satisfying explanation for suicides and absent fathers also being applicable to the problem of why men don't lead boy scout troops anymore. "Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" isn't false, but my gut instinct is that it's noncentral. Actually, the link I posted seems to hint at the real causes by looking into the crosstabs-- men with children and/or bachelor's degrees volunteer at much greater rates than single and/or uneducated men. Given that men are facing rising rates of singlehood and falling rates of education, I'd look in that direction for the true causation. Just don't make the mistake of fingering whatever most flatters your beliefs as the problem... you might not be wrong to blame misandry, or anti-intellectualism, or whatever your personal bugbear is... but a lazy epistemology isn't going to convince anyone of your point, and won't do anything to get the issue fixed.
I think there are two related reasons: one, motivation dies quickly after becoming mired in bureaucracy. Someone who is highly motivated to provide a mentoring opportunity for a group of boys might not be able to find the drive to complete more than a single form, let alone typing up paragraphs of baloney. Same thing hampering science IMO.
Second is legitimate fear of liability. Even if you jump through all the paperwork hoops, even a minor accident can easily result in years of expensive legal wrangling, even if you ultimately win. Insurance against this is expensive and yet scourge bureaucratic hurdle to doing anything.
As usual, if you want to make the world a better place, first kill all the lawyers.
Again, this sounds like noncentral, reasoning-backwards stuff. Women don't like bureaucracy either. Men tolerate liability when it comes to other pursuits. Other countries and organizations have varying levels of both but still face a surplus of male suicides and lack of male mentors. Without rejecting your premise that bureaucracy and liability are onerous, I find myself unconvinced by the argument that they must therefore be the principal causes of our crisis of masculinity.
The fact they're the only class with the power to deal with it (because the moral hazard is in their favor) but are doing fuck-all about it is the fundamental root of the problem here.
Men gave up their power to unilaterally dictate terms to women in relatively peaceful ways. Until women figure out they have to do the same- until they fully embrace the fact equality is a solved problem, as men did so many years ago- this will continue, but the fact they're on the high side of those gibs makes this unlikely.
Liability being financially ruinous because reasons (that are tangentially related to the above core) doesn't help things either.
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Nobody tolerates liability unless they can insure it away, and that means accepting the constraints the insurance companies put in to prevent actually having to pay a claim.
Yes, because you have a reason in mind (in general terms, that men, in some way, suck), which is wrong, but is the only reason within the Overton window.
Don't put words in my mouth, buddy. I'm not part of some sort of anti-man conspiracy; my position is that basically no one (including myself) should have the epistemic confidence to have a position.
Speaking very broadly, I suspect the problem is less about actual costs and more about opportunity costs-- basically, I think that most men just have better things to do than volunteer given their goals and incentives. I think I would enjoy volunteering for boy scouts, liability and bureaucracy (and the risk of false accusations) be damned. But I'm trying to get myself in position to secure a wife and kids, and to that extent the best uses of my time are earning money, getting fit, and seeking legible status. Optimizing for the intersection of those things and also enjoying my life generally leaves me focused on working, working out, and trying (so far, futiley) to get published. And I'll have to keep focusing on those things indefinitely because suddenly letting myself go wouldn't be a great recipe for keeping a wife and kids.
But to the extent that all the things I said are true, and generalizeable, I know I'm still not reaching the bottom of the issue-- I'm not getting to why these opportunity costs exist. And even discovering that wouldn't necessarily suggest which actions could or should be taken to mitigate them. I could make suggestions, but no matter how hard I tried for apolitical neutrality they would probably flatter my interests and goals in particular. So the problem remains intractable, and everyone who says otherwise without addressing the full complexities just makes more convinced that no one really knows what's going on.
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