There’s a little boy who used to attend my daughter’s previous pre-school, though he just got kicked out. This is the second or third school where he’s gotten the boot. He’s four, just about to turn five, and you’d think he already has a criminal record the way the neighborhood women gossip about him.

You know after about thirty seconds in this kid’s presence that he’s destined for a life of Ritalin, getting scolded by teachers, and scraping by via the skin of his teeth. He’s a nice kid – friendly, social – but very, very high energy. Passionate about everything, no matter how unimportant, to the point where he throws things and hits people. He’s not emotionally disturbed, or actually trying to hurt anybody. He doesn’t need psychiatric help for emotional disorders or meds to numb him or anything like that. He’s just a victim of shitty parenting, no boundaries, and teachers who don’t want to deal with him and pass him off, so he doesn’t know what to do with his abundance of energy or how to cope with things when he gets frustrated.

I’m not saying he’d be a model of excellence under other circumstances. He probably actually has ADHD or is slightly on the Asperger edge of the spectrum. He’d probably benefit from medical intervention, at least until he learns socially acceptable coping skills. But the thing that would give him the greatest benefit is a system that actually deals with him and improves him instead of a system designed to make life as easy for the system as possible. That and better parenting.

In the last two schools he was asked to leave, the triggering event that earned him the boot was hitting girls. He scuffles with boys, too, but the boys generally fight back, there’s discipline involved for both parties, and nobody’s kicked out. But girls at that age tend to react in shock when physically confronted. They’re not used to it. They just buckle down and scream and cry.

Hitting boys is still a big deal, but hitting girls is treated as an unforgivable slice of awful.

So my wife was chatting with another girl’s mother whose child still attends the latest pre-school, and the gossip is that this young boy “doesn’t like girls.” As the conversation goes on, it comes up that his father is “a man’s man” and “that’s probably where he gets it.” Because as we all know, muscular and professionally successful men who do manly work in their garages and back yards and toss the football with their kids take a lot of extra time to teach their sons misogyny, mostly through example by mistreating their hot wives who clearly only stay with these men due to the extreme low self-esteem and lack of confidence that plagues all super-hot women with designer clothes and purses.

It was a very funny thing to think about, because if you look at this without the emotions in play, a kid who hits everybody that frustrates him – guy or girl – is definitely a messed up kid, but he’s the least sexist kid at the school. The ones who don’t hit girls, because they’re girls, are actually sexist, because they’re treating girls differently and more gently on account of their sex. Already, at age 4, they’ve been indoctrinated with the mentality that girls are weaker, lesser – inferior – and that you don’t hit them because they can’t take it the way you can. Because you’ll get into extra trouble if you hit a girl.

It was also kind of funny thinking about his dad and the idea that “a man’s man” is so likely to be a misogynist. Buff, socially apt, confident guys who play sports all through high school, fuck cheerleaders, join a cool frat in college, fuck sorority sisters, and go on to get a cush job through their social connections tend to be the least sexist guys out there. These guys actually like and appreciate women. They’ve been around women all their lives and interact with them like normal human beings.

It’s the scrawny/fat, socially awkward, under-confident guys who suck at sports, suck at social situations, and never got a date all through high school or college that are bitter and hate women. Yet none of the women in the neighborhood accuse the fat, stand-offish, socially awkward engineer with the domineering Type-A wife who lives at the end of our road of being sexist. But you should hear the crap he spouts on poker night after a few beers. His daughter has issues so extreme that her mom pulled her out of public school to home-school her. Of course, none of the women in the neighborhood really acknowledge his existence at all. Not even his wife, most of the time. He’s kind of invisible, never invited to social functions, only around when his wife brings him. He has an awesome computer in his office, though. He might even be reading this right now.

Manly men like and appreciate women. They treat women like people. It’s the white knights and the womanized losers that make up the large majority of misogynists.

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