Peter Coates
1 min readOct 24, 2024

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When my son came home from the first grade and innocently asked, "Why do the teachers hate boys?" I didn't attribute it to some sort of woman-hating fantasy. He certainly didn't get it from his parents. Your logical and emotional error here is that you slide back and forth between positions that are appropriate to addressing the problems/failures of one particular boy, and applying them to a group of tens of millions. If one boy fails, it can be legitimate to call it failure, fragility, etc. If a generation of boys are failing, it's structural. Have you ever sat in on a class, or read what they're being told? When was the last time you heard the word "masculinity" without "toxic" prepended? The lesson sinks in. For more than a generation girls have done better in every measurable area other than one (team sports): grades, attainment, happiness, etc., and boys have failed more in every category of failure: performance in school, jail, suicide, drug addiction, early death, criminal victimization, etc. I believe you project your anger at the world as it was when we were young onto young people today who aren't part of that world. Your visceral anger at today's real, live, boys for the historical sins of men is wrong and destructive.

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Peter Coates
Peter Coates

Written by Peter Coates

I was an artist until my thirties when I discovered computers and jumped ship for a few decades. Now I'm back to it. You can probably find some on instagram.

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