Some attorney named Jennifer Brandt was on Fox News today defending the feminization of American boys.

Now, personally, I don’t usually get all that upset about stuff like this.  I grew up in a relatively poor family with four older sisters, so I spent a lot of my younger years playing with the toys they grew out of.  That meant a lot of Barbies and doll houses.  I would have preferred GI Joes and matchbox cars, but you play with the hand you’re dealt right?

But there comes a point where this stuff goes overboard.  It often seems like society doesn’t want little boys to be little boys any more.  In schools we take away boy-friendly things like recess and gym class, and then when those boys get fidgety in class from all the energy they haven’t burned off we send them to counselors and load them up with drugs like Ritalin.  Even the occasional playground squabble or fist fight now often prompts a call to law enforcement from school administrators even at the grade school level.

“Boys will be boys” is a banned phrase now, and I don’t think that’s anything we should be proud of.  Certainly I don’t think we need to go back to a time where boys got preferential treatment, but there’s nothing wrong with recognizing that boys are different from girls in certain fundamental ways that go beyond mere physical differences.  It’s not merely a matter of letting boys be boys, but rather that boys need to be boys.