ginmar: The dangerous book for boys
In the culture I come from boys and girls were treated almost exactly the same. The only difference is that boys received corporal punishment at times, whereas girls did not. Girls grew up to be tomboys. Almost all of us did, in this colonial culture. The western version of femininity still comes as a shock to me in many subtle ways.
That is why the western troll culture really betrays what is wrong with western culture in general. In my day and place, girls were boyish, and boys were rugged to a point of near impossibility. They actually had lives. You get a life by going out and finding one. You get one by taking risks, by thinking on your own terms, by having fun. These are lessons I learned in my colonial culture. I am a female, but young males in this culture need a book to educate them on what I already took for granted as a child. (We all did.)
In my day, it would have been impossible to even imagine a boy or any male thinking that harrassing women online could help to make them more macho, or attractive. Actually, the males of my era really did have independent lives. Like myself, they chose to do what they wanted to.
The term may be an unfortuante one if it suggests that girls want to be a like a boy or a man. As I have argued elsewhere, one of the vulgarities of western thinking, in my view, is that it relates everything in a comparative sense, so that all aspets of life have a predefined place in a hierarchy. Women for intance are lower in the hierarchy than men. I consider this to be aborted life. Actually if one’s nature is predefined before one does anything, one may as well be dead.