“We are raising our young boys to be way too soft, way too careful, as if the ultimate prize in our parenting of boys is to get them to 18 years old and say they never got hurt, nothing bad ever happened,”

By that logic, I suppose the ideal life would be to experience traumatic amputation of all four limbs, accidentally causing the lingering, painful death of everyone you care about, to live for decades with locked-in syndrome, and to die by being eaten alive by insects.

And of course, the guy lamenting a hypothetical “weak, soft, ineffective man” is a flabby jackass with jowls and an auxiliary chin.

As a wee lad in the shithole town known as Perryton, TX, I experienced that attitude ALL THE TIME. If you weren’t constantly suffering in one way or another, you were detestable.

A similar form of this exists in the co-worker that EVERYONE has had at some point, who brags endlessly about how they’re so damned tough that they never call off sick. No-sir-ree, they’ve stoically gone to work with 103F fever, running to the toilet to spew from one end or the other every 15 minutes. They may be suffering diseases not widely seen since the middle ages, but by God they’re coming to work. Not even if they had Ebola and were spewing horrifyingly contagious atomized death from my every orifice would they wimp out and call in sick. They pull their own weight, and anything less is just un-American.

Of course, they reliably infect 5 or 6 of their co-workers who are usually Commie pinkos who go to doctors and get admitted into hospitals from time to time.

A huge part of the reason my father became physically incapacitated at age 55 and died at age 63 was because he had that same attitude. Following doctors’ advice amounted to “giving in”, and was thus a sign of weak character.

AUGGGHH. Why did I read that whole stupid article, including several of the even more idiotic comments?!?!