



As Michael Moore so aptly pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, the root of the American dilemma lies deep within the American psyche. We are a machismo-addled culture where bullies are rewarded and “wimps” get sand in the face. We live in an age of school shootings, rape, and ceaseless war. You can keep throwing the petty thieves in jail and try to impeach the big boys, but until you get to the source of what makes a guy a guy, you won’t stand a chance against the patriarchy.

This is what’s so wonderful about the war on boys. Teachers (who are roughly 75% female) have bolstered girls’ grades in England by including bad behavior in test scores. Where Sally may fail at math, Johnny gets an F in “sitting still,” and the bell curve evens out. When I was a kid, bad behavior was rewarded with a trip to the principal. Worse behavior got a suspension. Really, really bad behavior got a visit from the police, who scared the crap out of you. Today, we call the police for all infractions and everything is written down. This is effective because the government can keep tabs on who is a bad boy and ensure he is monitored for life. If we had this kind of system back when most school shooters were young, we never would have had school shootings.

“How many children have to die before we get tough on boys who sort of make gun gestures with their hands?”

The fight against bullying is a great way to eradicate masculinity, but that’s only the beginning. The evil males of tomorrow can be difficult to spot today. It may seem subtle to a layman laywoman, but boys commit their acts of patriarchal violence almost from birth. Last year, first grader D’Avonte Meadows was so sure he was sexy that he sexually harassed his teacher by saying, “I’m sexy and I know it.” Luckily, his (presumably) strong womyn teachers saw where this mindset was going and suspended him immediately. This all went down as Colorado was finally considering a zero-tolerance policy toward steel penises (guns) more than ten years after Columbine. In January of this year, another first-grader, Rodney Lynch, was suspended for making a gun gesture with his finger. Unfortunately, the school chickened out in the face of patriarchal outrage and removed the charge from his permanent record. Two months later, a seven-year-old worked tirelessly through lunch, biting and chomping his Pop-Tart until it resembled a gun. Josh Welch was suspended a good eleven years before he was able to buy an assault rifle and start killing his classmates. Now that’s what I call a preventive measure. Most recently, a violent little assassin was caught red-handed while seemingly pointing a pencil like it was a gun and pretending to be a Marine”ALL AT THE SAME TIME! Being a Marine is being a government murderer, but pretending to kill people with an imaginary gun is even worse, so the school suspended him.