The War on Pop-Tart Guns

Oh gag me with a spoon.

Feminist critic Christina Hoff Sommers has done what she does best, badly, this time writing in Time about her fave topic, the so-called War On Boys in schools.

"As school begins in the coming weeks, parents of boys should ask themselves a question: Is my son really welcome? A flurry of incidents last spring suggests that the answer is no. In May, Christopher Marshall, age 7, was suspended from his Virginia school for picking up a pencil and using it to “shoot” a “bad guy” — his friend, who was also suspended. A few months earlier, Josh Welch, also 7, was sent home from his Maryland school for nibbling off the corners of a strawberry Pop-Tart to shape it into a gun. At about the same time, Colorado’s Alex Evans, age 7, was suspended for throwing an imaginary hand grenade at “bad guys” in order to “save the world.”

In all these cases, school officials found the children to be in violation of the school’s zero-tolerance policies for firearms, which is clearly a ludicrous application of the rule. But common sense isn’t the only thing at stake here. In the name of zero tolerance, our schools are becoming hostile environments for young boys."

Is it ironic that this so-called war on boys prevents boys from playing war in schools? Who knows!  Who cares! Those male persecution complexes aren't going to feed into themselves!

What I do know for sure is that first and foremost girls and women were formally and/or legally banned from many forms and levels of education for many years in US history.  And, feminists who reference that history and context today in terms of their lingering effects are largely thought of as thin-skinned dummies who get our panties in a bunch over nothing.

Might gender gaps in wages and certain fields maybe be explained by this history and the concomitant social conditioning around gender? Nah. We're instead to believe that sure all that stuff about women's oppression happened a long time ago, but then a buncha other stuff happened mumble mumble equal opportunity not equal outcomes everything's fair now except boys have it worse now that they're expected to compete against girls and women as equals! *insert big "Men are #1" foam finger and start waiving it around*

But my my my, just look at the outrage! the hyperbole! the exaggeration! in the rhetoric when the so-called feminized school system does even the tiniest little thing to take away a boy's god-given, rightful place in the world to shape his pop-tarts into guns during lunchtime at his school.

Suddenly, the whole entire educational system is rigged against him! Suddenly, getting in trouble over playing at violence explains EVERYTHING about EVERY gender gap in which women might be outperforming men.

Which brings me to point two. The whole "schools is rigged against boys because they can't pretend violence anymore" argument only works if one believes that violence is inherent to boys and therefore cannot and should not ever be tempered.

That is, it's just another fuckin' way to say that it's a boy's world and everyone else just lives in it, because boys are violent and rough 'n tumble and whuddaryagunna do, ladies? Tut tut, you better keep yourselves safe and not go and get yourselves shot or raped!

And even though society wrings its non-existent hands every time a boy commits another school shooting, if we dare suggest that little boys not minimize gun violence by treating it as a form of play, or maybe if we even want to explore why little Tommy feels so compelled to nibble his pop-tart into a gun in the first place, it's a war I tell ya, a war! A war not against violence, but against boys!

Ker-pow!

Seriously, anti-feminists. Calm the fuck down.