Democrats and other American leftists are waging a war against something they call "toxic masculinity."  Any attribute deemed exclusively male is bad.  Meanwhile, China is heading in a different direction.  It's decided that its boys have become too feminized and is working hard to inculcate more manly qualities.

The war on boys has been in play for some time.  I first became aware of it when my son was three, and a darling kid who was the perfect boy stereotype.  He was fascinated with trucks, dinosaurs, and superheroes.  Unlike my daughter and her friends, who often sat and talked, he and his friends frolicked like little goats, jumping around, and butted heads for the fun of it all.

Outside his little enclave, all was not well.  The first tip-off was the five-year-old girl in the t-shirt that read, "Boys Having Feelings Too But Who Cares?"

Schools were a problem, too.  Outside Montessori classrooms, which allow children to move around, public school education is geared to girls, who sit quietly.  Boy energy is anathema in a classroom.  This is especially true given the fact that public schools are overrun by women — and, nowadays, women who, in college, didn't learn much about history (or math, geography, English, etc.), but did learn about toxic masculinity.

Technically speaking, according to the New York Times, toxic masculinity is nothing more than the unhealthy, dangerous manly habit of tamping down on emotions, appearing tough, and using violence.  The world would be a better place if men sat around and talked about their emotions, appeared soft and gentle all the time, and were never physical.

That's ridiculous.

The reality is that men process emotions differently and are inherently more physical than women.  (I recommend Deborah Tannen's brilliant You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which explains how boys and girls deal differently with each other and the world practically from the time they draw their first breath.)  And yes, men do appear tough because, physically, they are tougher than women, and, in the fight for resources (one that exists even in our modern world), the tougher man has the advantage.

In a sane world, we take men's innate qualities — the competitiveness, the physicality, and the more limited emotional vocabulary — and channel them into virtues.  We encourage healthy competitiveness, bravery, loyalty, athletic prowess, the masculine Yang that meshes so gracefully and naturally with the feminine Yin.

In leftist world, we insist that men must become like women.  And indeed, with the obsessive focus on transgenderism, many leftists are going beyond saying that men must become like women.  Instead, they're encouraging men to become women.

Vulnerable little boys of two or three who dress up in their older sisters' clothes are suddenly denominated as girls and forcibly put through their paces as putative girls.  They're given drugs to stop normal development and, once they've been sufficiently brainwashed, have slice-and-dice surgery and estrogen to turn them into beings that are neither fish nor fowl — and that are deeply, suicidally unhappy.

Meanwhile, in China, things are different:

A notice from China's education ministry has caused a stir after it suggested young Chinese men had become too "feminine". The message has been criticised as sexist by many online users — but some say China's male celebrities are partly to blame.

For a while China's government has signalled concern that the country's most popular male role models are no longer strong, athletic figures like "army heroes". Even President Xi Jinping, a well-known football enthusiast, has long been seeking to cultivate better sports stars.

So last week, the education ministry issued a notice with a title that left no doubt about its ultimate goal.

The Proposal to Prevent the Feminisation of Male Adolescents called on schools to fully reform their offerings on physical education and strengthen their recruitment of teachers.

In a clash between the two societies, it doesn't take a genius to see which will prevail.

Image: Photo by Rosemary Ketchum from Pexels.