On shaming

A few weeks ago, we had a discussion in Priesthood opening exercises about device usage during church.  This was, as you can probably guess, mostly aimed at the deacons and other teenaged boys.  The bishopric counselor conducting the meeting delivered the challenge, and it was a good discussion.  Quite pleased with it.  By coincidence (or maybe not; we maybe just independently reached saturation when it came to dealing with it) we had just told our boys that devices weren't coming to church anymore for them—on Sunday or Tuesday, either one.  They had become too much of a distraction and too much of an obsession.

And it seems to have worked.  Like I said, it's been a few weeks, and the problem seems to have been resolved, or at least I haven't noticed that it's still out there since then.  Which is good; I was afraid that it was going to backfire.  See; after the counselor delivered the message, someone else chimed in and "added" to it in a way that almost completely undercut what the initial message was.  I can't remember who chimed in with this coda to the message—the YM president, or the bishop, or someone else, but the gist of it was that we had had a teenage investigator at church, the son of a member who doesn't have custody, or something, who had finally broken down after years of resistance and come to church with his dad, only to have been so disappointed that his peers were on their phones in class that he didn't want to come back again.  So, see, apparently the bad example of boys on phones had caused an investigator to turn away from the Church.

At that exact moment, I nearly did a double take and lost not only the spirit I had been feeling, but any sense of the plot at all.  What was going on?  I talked to some of the boys (especially the two that live in my own household, but they seem to also have the pulse of the rest of the gang—our YM program isn't that big): the message was the same.

First off, they simply didn't believe such a ridiculous assertion.  A 15-yo kid was "offended" that other kids his age were using their phones?  Really?  Especially the backstory that was revealed that he only came very reluctantly to begin with after being nagged and wheedled by his dad for literally years about it—he finds an excuse to latch on to to explain why he doesn't want to come back?  It simply wasn't a credible narrative; it was a pathetically naive one.  But perhaps more importantly, there was something visceral about their reaction to the comment, that they couldn't quite articulate or identify, but which I think—maybe—that I can.

See, men don't react well to the emotional manipulation of guilt trips and the language of shaming.  It rarely motivates us, it mostly kind of ticks us off.  Being told that we're responsible for something that no, we're not responsible for, and we should feel bad and therefore do what we're being asked to in this instance, isn't going to go well.  It may have a temporary success, but the damage it does will linger.  Men—at least men of Western Civilization—talk to each other straight, and with honesty.  We don't try to manipulate each other, or deal with each other deceitfully or in bad faith.  We don't use guilt trips and shaming language with each other.  We tolerate that kind of stuff—reluctantly—from our women, because we know that it's in their nature to do so, but it's also not one of their traits that is attractive or likable, especially if they do it too much.  From Men, on the other hand, it's downright repugnant.  There's a visceral disgust attached to Men trying to convince other men by acting like a woman that, like I said, is probably difficult for the boys to articulate, because they don't have a lot of experience with it yet.  But they feel it nonetheless.  It's not just cultural, it goes deeper than that.  It's downright biological.  That's why even these boys, who've grown up in one of the sickest, most feminized, rotten to the core shells of a great civilization that the world has ever seen feel it, even if they don't understand it exactly.

This is a broader issue, in fact.  There's a reason that feminists are unattractive (besides the obvious answer that most of them are simply objectively out of shape and unattractive)—it's because they affect to act like men in some ways.  Given than Men have been drawn and attracted to femininity since the days of Adam and Eve, and have actual, scientifically confirmed, tendencies to do this, women who take on affectations of masculine behavior find themselves less attractive to men.  They may be able to ingratiate themselves to men as a kind of "one of the guys" tomboy approach, but this is not a sexual attraction, it's just a loosening of guard around the behavior of men who buy into it, so they feel more comfortable and treat the woman in question as a kind para-guy.  This is why even attractive feminists, like Emma Watson, for instance, are off-putting.

But if it's unattractive on women, it's death on Men.  Men who affect behavior that is feminine are not just unattractive, they provoke a visceral disgust or contempt.  One interesting example of this was an experiment undertaken by a couple of liberals, set out to prove that male privilege is responsible for the election of Donald Trump.  They wrote a "play" where all that they really do is recreate scenes from the debates, except with fictional characters speaking the exact same words and with similar mannerisms and tone and gestures to the actual candidates—except sex-reversed.  A man played Clinton and a woman played Trump.  What they expected to prove, of course, was that Trump's male privilege allowed him to use his toxic masculinity to "bully" Clinton and make her look bad, and that with the sex reversed on stage, it would be readily observable.  What happened—of course, as anyone with any real world experience with real women and men should have anticipated—was the opposite.  Trumps' answers from a women were suddenly revealed as quite clever, precise, convincing and common sense.  Clinton as a man was so off-putting that everyone hated him.  Trump didn't sail into victory because of male privilege, he had to overcome an underdog handicap of male privation. A few quotes from one article that describes the event:

"I've never had an audience be so articulate about something so immediately after the performance," Salvatore says of the cathartic discussions. "For me, watching people watch it was so informative. People across the board were surprised that their expectations about what they were going to experience were upended."  Many were shocked to find that they couldn't seem to find in Jonathan Gordon [the fake Hillary] what they had admired in Hillary Clinton—or that Brenda King's [the fake Trump] clever tactics seemed to shine in moments where they'd remembered Donald Trump flailing or lashing out. For those Clinton voters trying to make sense of the loss, it was by turns bewildering and instructive, raising as many questions about gender performance and effects of sexism as it answered.

Here's more:

We both thought that the inversion would confirm our liberal assumption—that no one would have accepted Trump’s behavior from a woman, and that the male Clinton would seem like the much stronger candidate. But we kept checking in with each other and realized that this disruption—a major change in perception—was happening. I had an unsettled feeling the whole way through.  We heard a lot of "now I understand how this happened"—meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back.

And another selection:

The simplicity of Trump's message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, "I’m just so struck by how precise Trump's technique is." ... Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was "really punchable" because of all the smiling. And a lot of people were just very surprised by the way it upended their expectations about what they thought they would feel or experience. ...  I was particularly struck by the post-performance discussions about effeminacy. People felt that the male version of Clinton was feminine, and that that was bad.  I was surprised by how critical I was seeing [Clinton] on a man's body, and also by the fact that I didn't find Trump's behavior on a woman to be off-putting. I remember turning to Maria at one point in the rehearsals and saying, "I kind of want to have a beer with her!" The majority of my extended family voted for Trump. In some ways, I developed empathy for people who voted for him by doing this project, which is not what I was expecting. I expected it to make me more angry at them, but it gave me an understanding of what they might have heard or experienced when he spoke.

And this is from the most liberal, feminized, people in the country—ones who are just convinced that "sexism" is cultural and not biological.  Reality is a very tough brick wall to run into face-first when you're convinced that your pet ideological principle is true in spite of the evidence rather than because of it.

Long story short—don't try and shame the men of the church.  Not only will it backfire and make you look like some kind of off-putting freak, but it's simply not a respectful way to talk to them in the first place.  It is not the language of someone trustworthy.  It is not the language of someone dealing with you in good faith.  Talk to them straight.  It's the only way that will work.