The Life Slant - Page 12

*After some consideration, the American Psychological Association has determined that being masculine is “psychologically harmful.” None to my surprise, the APA has determined that there is more than one gender, and that you are not necessarily the gender of your biological sex at birth.  The APA has concluded: “socialization for conforming to traditional masculinity ideology has been shown to limit males’ psychological development, constrain their behavior, result in gender role strain and gender role conflict, … and negatively influence mental health and physical health.”

This is good to know, and in the next paragraphs of this article I will explain what this behavior has engendered. The study indicates the source of many problems, excuse me, “male” problems that have burdened society for far too long.

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*The advent of social media was first welcomed as harbinger of world peace and connectivity. It’s creators put forward that an increasingly connected world would lead to a global society of peace and understanding. Borders would dissolve and national affiliations would be shed in favor of a new, global identity. We would be “Earthlings”, not Americans or Russians or Australians or whatever. Once disparate economies would blend and merge, lifting people out of poverty and enriching those who could tap these new markets. Isolated communities would become part of the global cultural zeitgeist.

Rather than moving humanity towards this utopian goal of a global, interconnected community, its proliferation and creep into every facet of one’s life made it a powerful and unchecked tool of misinformation, surveillance, and corporate psychology. It devolved into a laboratory of mass manipulation where sociological and psychological experimentation could be performed on an unprecedented scale. A powerful tool of propaganda and misinformation that has opened a whole new front of information warfare. In short, it has become the bane of modern existence and is doing significantly more harm than good to our societies, our institutions, and our collective mental health.

*We are now in the “You know what? Fuck it!” era of politics. This is being exhibited during elections and referenda and by politicians themselves as throwing caution to the wind – or simply blurting out exactly what’s on their mind rather than fudging and waffling.

The YKWFI trend can be good or bad, depending on your viewpoint, and you might be delighted with certain manifestations of YKWFI while despairing at others. These moments are not necessarily limited to one end of the political spectrum.

Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as US president are the two most obvious manifestations of YKWFI. This is not to insult those who voted leave or for Trump – indeed, for many people, to have the YKWFI moment in the privacy of the voting booth in either the EU referendum or the last US presidential election was not necessarily because of stupidity or paucity of intellect* or lack of serious thought and soul-searching before polling day. For many, the YKWFI moment was borne of desperation, of years of feeling neglected, of wanting change even if might seem unpalatable to others, of figuring their vote could lead to an outcome that was a risk worth taking.

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