Girls Ruin Scouting

Newsletter 2024-05-10

The biggest downside of being on the internet is being on the internet. If a massive solar flare permanently disabled all electronic devices, civilization would end and everyone would starve, but for the first hour or so, it would be pretty cool to be spared from the online discourse of the day. This week, the rage-bait driving up engagement numbers concerned the woman in the woods scenario. If you, as a lady, were alone in the forest, would you rather encounter a bear or a man? To be clear, it’s not a real situation, or at least not one that came up anywhere in the news this week. It was created to make people from two different groups yell at each other, which is the main point of social media these days. When responding to the completely fictional bear situation, women on the internet universally reported that they’d rather encounter the largest land predator on the planet than a man they don’t know. Then they laughed at all the men who got angry. I don’t know why anyone would be upset about being told that they personally are worse than a wild animal simply by virtue of being born with a certain set of genitalia. Taking into account the demographics of my readership, I have to side with the women here. I know who pays me five dollars a month. The irony is that the ladies of cyberspace are only using this hypothetical dilemma to mock men they’re most definitely not afraid of. If someone actually scares me, I don’t get in their face and offend them. It’s the same reason I don’t purposely harass bears. Then again, I do have a long history with dressing up taxidermy in ridiculous outfits. I better pray a living bear never finds me.

Regardless of if you identify with Team Man or Team Bear, if you participate in the argument at all, you’ve already lost. Contrary to everything posted on the internet, men and women actually do need each other. I guess that’s only true if we want to continue the human race. If the plan is to achieve voluntary extinction, we can all go our separate ways. The never-ending internet gender wars remind me of the story of the ents from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The female ents, known as the ent wives, disappear before the books take place. It’s a great mystery as to why. My theory is that the ent wives got fed up in an argument about what was the greatest threat in the woods, which is ironic since ents and ent wives are the woods. I might be reading too much into this. The reason the ent wives left and where they went shouldn’t have been a mystery at all. The ent wives likely told the husband ents exactly where they were going. The husband ents just didn’t listen because they were too busy watching sports.

Pointless internet arguments and failing ent marriages have more in common then you might think. Both Middle Earth and social media are equally divorced from reality. This morning, the first tweet I saw was a group of men and women lamenting that the Boy Scouts of America is changing its name to Scouting America. The rebranding doesn’t actually alter anything about how the program works since girls are already in Boy Scouts. The move simply solves a semantic conundrum. For the past few years, it’s been extremely awkward for me to write about what my daughters were up to in girl Boy Scouts. I think there was an interim step where Boy Scouts called itself BSA instead, but reverting to an acronym wasn’t fooling anyone. Everyone knew the B stood for “boy” (although now that I think about it, it could have meant “bear”). It’s kind of like when Future Farmers of America officially shortened its name to FFA to drop the stigma of its agrarian roots. They didn’t want to limit their membership to aspiring farmers, but the acronym didn’t solve anything. If you insist that the F doesn’t stand for the profession your group is actually named after, you invite people to come up with other things that begin with F and A. None of them are good. Who would want to join the group that was a triple profanity? Actually, that might make membership skyrocket.

The people complaining about the scouting name change insisted that girls were going to ruin a boys-only space. Here’s what I have to say to that.