Postscript:
Why should US boys be more violent than French boys? The
above article gives some suggestions, but we can add to those suggestions:
*
About 60% of American boys
are genitally mutilated in infancy, while French boys are overwhelmingly not.
*
American hospital births are more traumatic and damaging, even aside
from circumcision: the USA rate of Cesarean section birth is currently at around 25%,
which is 24.5% higher than it should be. Cesarean birth rates are a general indicator for
the presence of other highly traumatic and invasive procedures which work a damage upon
the maternal-infant bond, even when a laboring mother does not have a Cesarean. A high
percentage of French births are delivered by midwives, often in out-of-hospital clinics;
in the USA, only a low percentage of births are so delivered.
*
AIDS hysteria and sex-repressive ideology are much more widespread in
the USA than in France or Europe. "Abstinence education" is a main-stay of USA
public school education, whereas schools in Western Europe emphasize contraceptive methods
without the sex-negative ideology.
* "Don't
Touch" phobias appear more predominant in the USA, where children are more and more
brought up in environments where hugging and kissing and touching are increasingly taboo.
USA children have been expelled from school for innocently kissing, for example, and
teachers have been threatened or actually fired for hugging students. Among USA males,
homophobia is also extreme, such that a boy who hugs another boy will certainly be
ridiculed as being "queer", etc.
*
Breast-feeding
phobias are still abundant in the USA, to the point where state legislatures recently were
forced to enact laws to end a spate of jailings and police harassment of mothers who had
breast-fed their infants in public. The rates of breast-feeding in France are not
available, but are believed to be higher than in the USA.
*
"Statutory Rape" laws in the USA (originally formulated to
prevent the recruitment of young girls into prostitution) currently are used to put
adolescent and teen boys into youth detention centers and prisons for very natural and
consensual sexual expression with consenting adolescent and teen girls, whereas in France
and most of Europe, such laws are appropriately applied only when forcible rape occurs.
California and several other USA states now have
Special Prosecutors whose sole job is to seek out and prosecute youth "statutory
rape" cases, as part of the new "population control" regimen passed by
Congress. If a state does not employ such Orwellian anti-sex prosecution of young males
for healthy sexual expression, the State loses money ear-marked for contraceptive
programs.
*
American
parents and teachers may be more dogmatic and authori- tarian, and less demonstrably
physically affectionate towards their kids than French parents and teachers, with a higher
percentage of hidden sadists, reflective of a more violent background population.
*
American
television and movies are demonstrably very violent, even for programs developed for
youth. Many cartoons for boys are nothing more than mass-advertising for violent-type
"action figures" modeled on the most violent adult-content movies (compare
"Rambo" to "GI Joe").
Karate-type, wrestling and shoot-em-up
police-criminal-violence programs occur during all hours of television, and young boys in
the USA are often seen to mimic such media violence in their interactions.
*
The
same hypocritical President who authored and signed into law the above "Special
Sex-Prosecutors for Kids" laws, also fired Jocelyn Elders, former Surgeon General,
for openly saying that masturbation was OK for youth.
Americans were not detectably bothered by these
extremely sex-repressive actions of the President, but many were extremely bothered to
learn the President had a consensual extra-marital affair, to the point of demanding his
resignation and/or impeachment. This suggests that many/most Americans generally agree
that adolescent sexual expression of any kind is a very bad thing sometimes requiring hard
jail time, and that Public Health officials who dare to publicly favor adolescent sexual
pleasure should also be strongly punished -- and that extra-marital sex should also be
punished. What are French attitudes towards masturbation?
The above factors, and general knowledge of French openness towards physical nudity on
beaches, in magazine advertisements, and towards sexual matters in general, suggest they
view adolescent sexual expression more positively than do Americans.
Obviously many of the above points require additional cross-cultural examination, but
for the most part they are already demonstrated in various cross-cultural studies.
See my book Saharasia
for more details, and extensive citations for similar cross-cultural studies demonstrating
sex-repressive factors underlying youth violence and social violence in general.
James DeMeo, Ph.D., Director, Orgone Biophysical Research
Lab,
Greensprings Research and Educational Center, PO Box 1148, Ashland, Oregon 97520 USA,
http://www.orgonelab.org demeo@mind.net |
In a cross-cultural study of affection and
aggression done at McDonald's playgrounds, pre-schoolers in France playfully touched each
other twice as much US children did, but while the French children acted aggressively only
1 percent of the time, the US youth did so 29 percent of the time.
But the study in
McDonald's playgrounds in France and the United States, along with
other new evidence, suggests that it's time for America to take another look at how it
raises its children, particularly boys, to stop the crisis of violence, researchers said
at the nation's largest annual psychological association meeting.
violence," said Tiffany Field, MD of the
University of
Miami Medical School, who conducted the study at the McDonald's
playgrounds especially since international statistics have consistently shown that France
has the lowest homicide rate of developed nations, while the United States has the
highest. Dr. Field said she fears there will be even less physical affection toward children in
our society as a result of teachers and day care providers worrying about accusations of
sexual abuse