What If They Gave a Pep Rally and Didn’t Invite Boys?
Our easiest and best first step to ending the Boy Crisis
Girls are blessed with what amounts to a national — even global — pep rally encouraging them through the new opportunities and challenges wrought by changing gender norms.
Boys, on the other hand, are subjected to harsh critiques of toxic masculinity and public debates about whether males are even needed by modern societies. Low male morale is the inevitable result and it shows up in stark differences between boys and girls in school, suicide rates and social disengagement.
The new Boys Are Great Shop has a simple idea to help with that.
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Online Shop to Boost Boys’ Morale: the “Boys Are Great Shop”
[HIGHLAND, MARYLAND, August 5, 2024] — Today marks the launch of the Boys Are Great Shop, an online store intending to boost boys’ morale through “Boys are Great” messaging printed and embroidered on boy-friendly swag.
Founded by a retired social worker who specialized in the social issues of men and boys, the Boys Are Great Shop offers more than 300 items, and many more variants, including stickers, shirts, banners, genuine Frisbees, skateboards, and other products conveying the simple message that “Boys are Great.” For supportive parents, the shop also offers hats, apparel, boy-affirming posters and other “Boys are Great” home decor.
“The shop isn’t about individual achievements,” says Jack Kammer, the shopkeeper. “And it’s not about providing ‘Participation Trophies.’ It’s about improving how boys feel about themselves and their prospects as a group. Society needs the boy cohort to feel motivated and confident about living happy, productive lives.”
The concept originated in 1991 when a group of men in Baltimore joined Kammer in distributing simple “Boys are great” stickers at a neighborhood fair. The positive response from both boys and parents — especially mothers — highlighted the need for letting boys know they are valued and appreciated.
While acknowledging that boosting morale alone won’t solve the myriad challenges facing boys today, Kammer believes it is “our best and easiest first step” toward addressing the Boy Crisis, the troublesome social phenomenon manifesting in high rates of young male suicide, educational underachievement and displays of anomie and ennui among many boys.
“We don’t need immediately to re-tool the entire economy or educational system, or eliminate video games, social media and environmental toxins, all of which have been implicated in the Boy Crisis,” Kammer says. “Fundamental to any positive change is just making sure boys feel appreciated and cared about.”
The Boys Are Great shop is online at go2.boysaregreat.shop/boost.
[Media assets are available at www.boysaregreat.shop/media-room.]
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FAQs about The Boys Are Great Shop
Question
So really you’re just offering a bunch of “participation trophies.” Is that it?
Answer
Exactly “No.” Participation Trophies are problematic because they dilute accolades for performance, for what people do. The Boys Are Great Shop is not about what boys do; it is about what boys feel they are. Without feeling that they are great — inherently, essentially — they are unlikely to do, or even try to do, anything great. A fair and perceptive observation of the messages the current cohort of boys have heard about themselves for just about their entire lives — sometimes overt, more often subtle — is that boys and the men they are destined to become are somehow an inherently flawed and inferior type of human being. What could be more demoralizing to a young person than that?
Question
Why doesn’t the Boys Are Great Shop provide personalized messages of greatness to individual boys, as in “Aiden is Great”?
Answer
Our emphasis is on “boyness,” on the common experience of being a boy, rather than on boys as individuals.
Even if a boy hears that he, individually, is great, the context in today’s social climate remains “unlike most other boys.”
Our mission is to help boys overcome the notion that being male is fundamentally flawed, something to be ashamed of and depressed about.
Moreover, if a boy hears that he, individually, is great, but doesn’t believe the same about his male friends, why should he trust them, get close to them? The result is the atomization of boys, leading to isolation and loneliness.
That said, we do offer products on which a boy’s individual name can be printed, but the message is not “Aiden is Great.” Rather, it is “Aiden is a boy, and Boys are Great,” keeping the concept of greatness on boys as a group, as a class, as an essential social unit, which boys can be happy and proud to be a member of.
The only mention of individual boys is on products for appreciative parents to express the joy they find in their sons.
They need a better design for their merch.
Looks like it’s time for another Cataclysm!
What will it take? A “Heavenly Bombardment from the Taurid Asteroid Belt? If the impact or Lava-Hot Ejecta don’t get ya, the Climate Change - And I mean REAL Climate Change - will!
Is this what it will take for women - for SOCIETY -to appreciate men again?!?!?
Has society become this cruel and anti-intellectual? Maybe we need to get “Bombed back to the “Stone Age””!