Ostroeuropa wrote:I noted that even if it is the case that they are genuinely impoverished, tampons aren't really going to do much to address the underlying issues there.
It would take around $100 to address the sanitary needs of a single mother and daughter over the course of a year, assuming we include the sales taxes. Families with three or four daughters would take $200 or $250. That's not a whole lot, but the most vulnerable families are likely skating by on $18,000 annually or less, and are single parent households where the mother is raising the children. Though, notably, single fathers of girls are in similarly precarious positions. On the higher end, this is probably a month and a half to two months of groceries if you're making shrewd purchases. But there's also concrete benefits to the education of all pupils by not having to deal with the drama of girls forgetting tampons/pads and whatnot.
Ostroeuropa wrote:As for ideas on how to uplift men and boys, i'd begin first by immediately implementing Leonard Sax's ideas regarding ADHD diagnosis in schools.
Potentially even begin class action lawsuits against drug companies and school therapists. (Sax notes that boys are *vastly* overdiagnosed, often given drugs to "fix" them for displaying boyish behaviors, and beyond this, notes that it is done flagrantly in violation of standard medical practice requiring "These symptoms" not "One of these symptoms" as is done to male children).
The drugs when used on a healthy boy cause significantly adverse life outcomes and predicts terrible school results and psychological issues in later life.
I'd also note that this appears to me to be a much more pressing and dire problem in philosophical ethical terms, and yet we've put it behind "Tampons" in the discussion despite Sax having written his book a decade ago and been campaigning since. (As in; It is more vital that you stop stabbing the homeless man than it is you up and decide to give money to a different homeless man. That seems to me to be straightforwardly uncontroversial.).
It is a problem emerging from a combination of hostility and hatred for boys and masculinity and capitalism and profit motives of drug companies all too happy to exploit peoples animosity towards male children and their sense that they are "Broken" somehow. The schools hire therapists who drug the male children into compliance regardless of whether they actually have a mental health issue.“There are more kids in Spokane on ADD medication than in all of France,” Dr. Leonard Sax said during our conversation about raising boys for last week’s column.
All the feminist waffling about bodily autonomy and you live in a country that is force-feeding amphetamines to male children because of the hatred of masculinity and viewing it as abnormal.
I do think our present approach to education, in more broad strokes even beyond the over-diagnosis of ADD, has led to disparate outcomes for boys and girls, especially when it comes to the attainment of higher education. With that being said, there is compelling evidence that boys tend to concentrate towards higher and lower levels of academic achievement whereas girls tend to concentrate more towards the center. We may well need to consider that, as well as the intrinsic behavioral differences of many boys and girls, in developing curricula and strategies to educate children in a manner that assures us some degree of equity.
I'm not an expert on this by any means, and I'm almost tempted to begin quoting papers or to fetch Lumi, but I don't disagree that there does appear to be serious issues with how we've been treating boys over the course of the last twenty to thirty years. On that same note, we also tend to under-diagnose girls with ADD in all likelihood.
Discriminated against as domestic violence victims, often prosecuted for trying to report being victims of violence. Services designed to support victims of domestic violence actually mock them for being victims of domestic violence.
DD