AwakeEnergyScouter

It seems that way to me as well. When I was a scout myself, I didn't even register a lot of the leadership training as such, because it was just something to deal with in order to go on epic adventures. Like I think a good number of folks have said repeatedly before here, the kids aren't signing up for leadership and character, it's what they get in the process of the sausagemaking. The kids want ADVENTURE. A Chief Scout that radiates cool suitably dangerous adventure is a great messenger for that reputation. I haven't surveyed all NSOs and MOs of course, but I don't think it's a coincidence that both Scouts UK and Scouterna are growing, are culturally "around", and are selling primarily outdoor adventure. When Scouts are mentioned in Swedish entertainment and news media, we're portrayed as fit, competent, and organized at survival skills. One match fire, all that jazz. We are always portrayed outside. I saw my now cub scout perk up when they saw that in children's shows. They're almost certainly not alone. When I see Scouting America portrayed in US media, it's mostly around civic/patriotic themes. That isn't bad, but it isn't alluring to the children the way outdoor adventure is. The parents probably like to see that, but becoming known in our local communities as the premier arranger of outdoor adventures for youth is probably strategically important if we want to magnetize kids. Now, a cool Chief Scout isn't the only way to create that reputation, of course. We scouters can talk up the adventure we're arranging to people in our communities. Our pack had a strategy discussion last year about leaning into outdoor adventure and (age-appropriate) responsibility for making it happen last year, and we're all heartened to see that the program bar for outdoor adventure has gone up to about where we wanted to put it. We're geared up to offer all the fishing adventures on both campouts and separate fishing trips this year so that we're offering camping, fishing, and hiking on a monthly basis. We need to beat REI and all the various get outdoors groups in terms of reputation as a great on-ramp to outdoor skills. We should be people's #1 choice for that.

Thanks for the reminder about stakes - I'll need the Texas summer tent the weekend before for a pack campout, so the gear and list check will be quite complete (I'll do the campout laundry and immediately re-pack it all, I figure), but we ended up leaving a lot of stakes behind last time we used it because I let the cub scouts use it as a hangout tent to get them some bonus practice with setting up and taking down a tent without adult help. They were less diligent in remembering the stakes it turned out! I need to replace them or I'll be sorry if there's any wind. Boots are broken in already. Camp chair is ready. Practicing scales and reminiscing over old scout songs now... See you on the trail!

Signed up for Woodbadge together with two other scouter friends from our pack. The course director is a commissioner who was formerly den leader and current pack parent, so I expect this to deepen existing friendships as well as build new ones. Can't wait to go. Just need to get that part C done and get a new tetanus shot...

I've got a field report on this potentially very good aspect of the new program. I'm sure more will roll in as we all execute it, but as Cubmaster of a pack with one particular den that's tiny and without a parent willing to step up to lead it I'm quite keen on seeing how I can lift some advancement into pack meetings as well as provide that tiny den with a quality program without overloading anyone. We tried doing the "vanilla" swimming adventures as a pack during our annual pool party, and it mostly worked well. In particular, the adventures are structured such that we basically dangle loops/pins as a reward for really engaging with Safe Swim Defense and executing the scout-tangible parts completely. We have never had such scout focus on swimming safety at that pool party! So, thumbs up on that part. However, the suggested activities that were worksheets were less engaging, shall we say. We got through it, but I can see that whoever wrote the Webelos swim defense worksheet didn't know some voodoo magic that I don't when it comes to making fun worksheets for kids. I think I will continue to try to come up with non-worksheet activities, but the success of the structure is perhaps more important. We also knocked out the cardio requirement of the personal fitness adventures at the first pack meeting. Super easy and fun for the scouts, all done at once. Thumbs up. In fact, if we do some more silent hiking in the hiking club, we can also move that requirement out of den meetings, leaving only 15 minutes of strength training for den meetings! (We made the health form reviews homework if families didn't do it when asked at the first pack meeting also.) We've knocked some of those out first thing before for multiple dens, and that was very hectic and crazy. This is much better.

I don't see youth with behavioral issues as being connected to nondiscrimination at all. They're not the same topic. Maybe this is a cultural thing. I thought that the US shared a value foundation with Sweden (and wider Europe) and thus also with Scouting, but perhaps some parts of the US do not? A whole bunch of you here seem to be framing "inclusiveness" in a way I've never heard or seen it framed before in my life. I didn't live in the US in the 90s, so I can't speak to what was happening here "on the ground" but I remember the 90s as the decade when LGBTQIA+ discrimination awareness went mainstream. Pride parades, support hotlines, special youth support at government activity centers, lots of media coverage about the suffering that the anti-LGBTQIA+ bullying caused, the increased suicide rates, all that was in the news a lot, and it triggered both near universal social acceptance of being LGBTQIA+ as well as legal changes (first registered partnership and then marriage equality). It seemed like a societal "oh, whoops, so sorry" moment. Since then, opposing LGBTQIA+ discrimination is among the most milquetoast social stands one could take - up there with opposing bullying of differently abled people and donating to Save the Children. I looked up some numbers on this to see if my perception might reasonably be shared by Swedes in general, and that is indeed the case. 94% of Swedes agree that LGBTQIA+ people should be accepted in society.1 Among supporters of the far-right populist party literally founded by a returning old Nazi after WWII, that support is very low at only 80%, not surprisingly since their whole outlook is centered on discriminating against almost everyone.1 Their supporters have made news by stealing a Pride flag off a flagpole and burning it, for example. These would also be the party getting Russian dark money, that had to institute a uniform ban at meetings, and whose now former leaders were photographed sieg heiling in brown uniforms at a secret training camp. Their members often defect to a party even further right that openly advocates for destroying democracy in favor of national socialism. I say all this to thoroughly explain my next point, which is that to me this is a straightforward, uncontroversial in mainstream society Duty to Country point to support full LGBTQIA+ rights and social inclusion. It's hardly just progressives who support it, it's all of mainstream society! The voices raised against it are the ones on the margins of society kicking up a stink about something for political purposes. The six EU values2 include equal rights and respect for the human dignity of all, so that's not exactly my personal interpretation, it's the standard interpretation in my cultural universe. Support for equal civil rights and social acceptance of all groups of people is a governance/strong civil institutions matter, opposed not to kicking disruptive kids out but being jailed, fired, or treated poorly for some detectable and unchangeable thing like appearance, gender, sexual orientation, disability, neurodivergence, etc. As such, related to freedom of speech, democracy, and in this serious security situation in Europe defending our values and our institutions from attempts at weakening them by a foreign power. The exclusion we're trying to avoid with inclusion is modelled on the other side of the eastern Finnish border, complete with the general effects on society of not having strong civil rights for individuals. They don't call us Gayrope for nothing - our support for liberal democracy is inextricable from our support for equal civil rights for all. They know that and we know that. And the reason this is so is the Holocaust. We Europeans took Niemöller to heart. If LGBTQIA+ rights aren't secured, how do I know mine are? Etc, etc. I have to come to help the first group targeted if there's to be anyone left to help me later, because there's always some just-so story explaining why such and such group is evil. And if you look - which I highly suggest that you do - you will find that WWII also changed some of BP's outlook, not surprisingly, given how the discovery of the death camps made a kink in European history in general. We no longer say that scouts are to follow directions unquestioningly, because of the Nuremberg Trials. We realized collectively that we didn't actually literally mean that, there was an unspoken context asterisk on that that we needed to verbalize and say clearly, and not just in scouts but in society at large. Brush your teeth without whining every night, but say NO when someone asks you to kill thousands of civilians for belonging to some ethnic or political group. We were always thinking about brushing your teeth and packing your own stuff when we said that, not genocide or agreeing to keep secrets about CSA. So now we clarify. I saw in the Pew Research study (1 below) that the US is quite the outlier when it comes to attitudes to LGBTQIA+ people among what we used to call Western countries during the Cold War, and that both age and being Christian makes people less accepting. I don't know where any of you live, but based on what Eagledad wrote, perhaps he and some others here live in a particular cultural bubble where you think of equal civil rights for all citizens very differently. I say bubble, because this forum is the only place I hear these opinions. I've lived in the US for 20 years and the Americans I meet, including in Scouting America, seem to share my view of the importance of equal civil rights for all citizens. 72% of Americans say that LGBTQIA+ people should be accepted in society.1 Trying to exclude them from Scouting America is, as Krone said, limiting. If you're looking around and everyone around you is anti-LBGTQIA+, then know that your community is not representative of wider society. Bubble may also describe your experience of scouting if you think exclusion of certain groups is key to good and proper scouting. The values I was taught as a scout in the 90s were what I say above, and wouldn't you know it there is a fleur de lys on my old worn scout shirt. It's not a WOSM vs WAGGGS thing. There have already been literally millions and millions of coed WOSM (and WAGGGS, I also have a trefoil on my scout shirt) scouts, LGBTQIA+ scouts, scouts in every imaginable skin color, scouts with nontheistic religions and atheist scouts. It's a fait accompli, decades ago. The choice Scouting America has isn't whether or not to allow that in scouting, it is whether or not to follow the societal and/or scouting mainstream. WOSM explicitly says that tolerance is a key scouting value3 and has a whole position paper on it.4 We explicitly advocate for gender equality and LGBTQIA+ rights. This seems to be news to many of you. Of course we are, we have been for decades. It's Duty to Others (Duty to Country and doing a Good Turn) and living by the Scout Law. Going back to the start of this thread and what Navybone said about it, complaints about hypothetical events from which boys are banned, or declined to have an equivalent event for them, from the same individuals that think that exclusion/discrimination is a key part of scouting and who repeatedly say they want to reverse the membership policy changes ring very hollow. It comes off less as a principled stand and more as an attempt to build momentum to do just that - kick now registered scouts out of Scouting America. Not cool, guys, not cool. And that's completely unrelated to the need to manage disruptive kids in scouts. Now that's an issue I would be interested in discussing. Where should one draw the line between normal, age-appropriate squirreliness (which admittedly can make it hard for them to get things done at the younger ages) and real disruption for which one gets asked to leave? Not sure I have a handy-dandy suggestion, but in our unit we stay in close touch with parents about any neurodivergence as well as to ask them to help manage their child's behavior as needed and so far I that has worked, but it's probably a matter of how bad the kids are and obviously won't work at all in Scouts BSA. 1 https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/06/25/global-divide-on-homosexuality-persists/ 2 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20210325STO00802/eu-values-explained-in-one-minute 3 https://www.scout.org/what-we-do/young-people-and-communities/diversity-and-0 4 https://learn.scout.org/resource/diversity-and-inclusion-position-paper

What specifically about the program today would you not consider scouting?

I don't know that people believe Scouting America scouters or Scouting America national for that matter when you say that scouts are scouts. It's true - or should be. When it hasn't been, it's been a serious mistake on the part of Scouting America. I completely agree that scouts are scouts. But since it actually, sadly, has been the case that Scouting America profiled itself primarily on exclusion for decades, it's not exactly believable to the public (whom we're trying to recruit to join scouting) that Scouting America just now got with the program and their own Scout Law and Oath and is truly welcoming to all. You can't just turn around and say "mea culpa" and expect to be believed. The fastest way to fix this is specifically reaching out to the people Scouting America is known for excluding to say "hi, we really would welcome you if you like to join. Sorry about that." I do not believe that all Scouting America scouters and staff actually believe that scouts are scouts either and I'm a scouter myself. This very forum is full of examples in writing. I'm honestly surprised that so many are suddenly saying what has seemed taboo to say, that scouts are scouts. There's years of pro-exclusion image to undo in the public eye, and I would suggest we hop to it.

I feel obliged to correct myself. Our council does have a recruiting TV campaign running right now to help us all collectively out, which I ought to have mentioned. I knew that but forgot, because we're cord cutters and so see no TV ads. Not national, but someone other than units is doing something in the marketing department and credit is due where credit is due.

I did Meet the Teacher night at the school that we meet at, and just like during popcorn sales I can see that many in the general public have not registered that Scouting America is no longer gender segregated. (A number of people must therefore also not even have registered that female scouters are old hat even here.) I am constantly telling people (seemingly for the first time) that family packs exist. That Scouting America is for both girls and boys hasn't percolated into the general public consciousness. Even that messaging is falling to units. I will take on that as well, of course, but you're completely right in that it's not the most impactful approach. It's going to take a generation apparently at this rate.

I agree, a national campaign would be great. That's almost certainly going to be necessary for long-term overall growth. But in lieu of that, I am going to be a Juliet, as the Girl Scouts say. I'm not waiting.

This definitely seems to be true. I see a lot of synergy between the zeitgeist and Scouting, so since nobody else seems to be doing it a few people on our pack committee who are committed to scouting like myself are doing our own marketing in the neighborhood to make sure parents know we're here. We're getting some tips from a council marketing program also. We have a strong committee with mostly people who were scouts as youth, all of whom recognise the movement they grew up in, and hear from many parents who weren't scouts that they are surprised at how well the movement overlaps their views and what they want for their child... once they find out. We've had a lot of interest in our join night. We'll find out how well what we did worked in two weeks. We've had several new-to-scouting families really discover and appreciate scouting before this current marketing push, so I am convinced that the interested families are out there - we just need to find them, and that is going to take a heck of a lot more communicating and community-building that is currently happening. We will Do Our Best with the time we have and the resources we've got! 🫡

Only topic-adjacent, but I sincerely wonder if anyone has ever even tried to join anything from the Lotus Sutra with the rest of the service. Other than that worshiping deities is a sideshow at best and a departure from the path at worst, the Lotus Sutra builds so much on foundational teachings that it assumes that the reader knows that it would be very hard to cite only it unless the audience are all Mahayana practicioners already. Relatedly, some Theravada practicioners might take offense at the lesser vehicle/hinayana thing, and seeing as the sutra expounds on the difference between arhatship and full, complete, perfect enlightenment at length it's one of the Mahayana sutras most likely to being out that sectarian conflict.

I certainly don't trust people who make it clear that they don't think I should be where I am to give me advice or support. I am curious about whether that it's girls only scout craft catch-up says something about just how stiff that cultural resistance is in that council. In principle, just make it a scoutcraft basics camporee open to all new units. But why didn't they? The comments that remain make me wonder if the reason is that so many male scouts are opposed to girls that it wouldn't work to help the girls, or that the council had solid reasons to think it would end up there.

I agree that the quality of the program is going to fall on the den leaders to make sure they are choosing to do the engaging fun stuff instead of just what is easy for them, but that has always been the case - that's not a change. I'm not sure what you mean by "wiggle room" in what's required where, but in the case of Bear Habitat (which is rank required) there is only one activity suggested for requirement 7, which is the one I posted above. Unless Scoutbook doesn't have requirement 7 as required, which I can't check right now, it would seem that Bears are still required to make animal sign observations. That verbiage is even the same as before. Or am I missing something here? I was hoping that seeing that it wasn't in fact the case that you can walk the mile on a track without paying any attention would be heartening, but perhaps it wasn't. May all beings be happy regardless.

Bear Habitat is rank required and wildlife observation is still a required part of the adventure, so I am also unclear on the problem. Personally, I like almost everything I'm seeing, and lot of the new adventures seem like invitations to gamify more outdoors programming to me. I've been focusing on Webelos first, and I see several of the new adventures as ways to get the scouts to get better at outdoors life and scoutcraft. A lot of the requirements seem to split up into plan/prepare for the outings during meetings and then go do outdoor adventure, which is exactly as it should be. There's more repetition of skills year to year, which will reinforce key outdoor skills. The glances I've taken to other ranks are consistent with that, IMO. Adding swimming, camping, fishing and boating adventures to all ranks is great, for example. That's a great way to encourage the whole pack to come out adventuring more. The requirements also set up a situation where the older scouts naturally serve as an example to the younger scouts. I see all kinds of potential for creating a strong pack scoutcraft culture by scheduling as many of the outdoor optional adventures as possible and choosing the outdoor and active options for the required adventures. Leave No Trace being interwoven into the adventures is also fantastic and makes it really easy to leverage their children's materials as well. Nothing is perfect, but I'm really excited to use these adventures to get those scouts outdoors more and with more skills asked of them for advancement!

Did you check the leader guide? Bear Habitat Outdoors REQUIRED Requirement 7 Wildlife Snapshot Snapshot of Activity While on a walk, Cub Scouts identify six signs of any mammals, birds, insects, or reptiles. https://www.scouting.org/cub-scout-activities/wildlife-snapshot/

I'm with you! The ventilation and being able to transfer the weight onto the hips is huge. I have two external frame packs and I'm not getting rid of them at any price! My old, smaller pack for my scout, the larger volume one for me. The soft packs were originally for climbers and it made sense for them, but I'm not a climber, I'm a hiker.

You don't mention your academic background on your profile, so apologies if this is telling you something you already know, but if Scouting America funded the researcher (as implied by "engaged" in the press release), then they weren't independent. I looked for the funding and conflicts of interest sections in the paper that I would expect to find, but either they're behind the paywall or weren't included. Either way, it's not clear to the public that the researcher really was independent. It's well-known that studies often end up biased in favor of the funding source in social sciences (see for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6187765/) so whether Scouting America funded them is key to know when it comes to claiming their impartiality. I also noticed this fairly unique statement: DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT The data that support the findings of this study are available from the BSA, but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. This is highly irregular. I would expect to see the opposite, along the lines of "due to space restrictions, the complete data set could not be included here, but can be accessed online at <url>." It says that the data supporting the findings are available, but also says that they aren't publicly available without clearly specifying what a colleague should do do get the data. How would someone replicate their study? Will Scouting America provide the data to someone else to check the original researcher's work or not? Unclear. Even if the answer is actually yes, it's not clear to the public that Scouting America is actually letting the sunlight in here. This particular point seems a little weak.

I'm about to preside over a cub scout rank advancement ceremony that includes two scouts that joined last month and two months ago, respectively. They went after that advancement hard and finished, using the opportunities for outdoor activities and knife safety we offered to the max. Both scouts asked their parents to sign them up, not the other way around. Since they're cubs they would have advanced without the badge, but they really wanted to be scouts and do the program so that's what they're choosing to do. It will be a pleasure to give them their badges and new neckers.

Oh, I see! That makes sense. I was a little surprised that you wouldn't have noticed at all. I also appreciate your willingness to explain your thinking process in several steps, and your thoughtfulness. I've enjoyed talking to you, too.

I find it interesting - and I don't mean strange or wrong, but literally interesting - that you ask a woman for examples of how traditional gender role expectations hurt men even though another man just gave a whole list with a lot of passion. Because I'm not one, all my examples are going to be second-hand, parroting back what I've heard or seen men say about their own lives. My personal contribution can only be checking that what they're saying is consistent with what I see from the outside. Why ask me, not @Eagle94-A1, when he's the one arguing that I underestimate the problem? I did find a short rundown that seems to summarize a lot of what I've heard, although I notice that it lacks the 'losing everything' type problems that Eagle94-A1 brought up: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202303/the-state-of-todays-male-psyche I'll note that while the male gender role makes it harder to connect with others, it's also not really the case that all women are totally fluent with recognizing their own emotions and talking to others about them, either. Brené Brown's legendary (at least among agilists) TED talk on the importance of vulnerability for connection includes her personal struggle with being vulnerable, for example. But our gender role doesn't make whatever personal hurdle we have taller and steeper. I do agree that two-parent households work better than one-parent households just based on adult-to-child ratio. I don't have a lot of opinions about any lack of masculinity in part because I don't know what you mean by masculinity exactly. It's one of those words used by a lot of people to mean a lot of things. I suspect you and I have pretty similar ideas of what a 'real man' is like, at least compared to the people who take toxic masculinity way too seriously. I routinely hear men who I find quite masculine called not masculine by others and rarely with a kind spirit, so... Without some kind of working definition of masculinity I don't really want to wade into that. Now, I think I should say something about what is not a problem in addition to what is, namely natural and authentic overlap between one individual's way of being and interests and traditional gender roles. While gender roles are made up (i e socially constructed), they do connect to patterns of behavior. The key issue for me is freedom to choose how to live your life. I suppose, strictly speaking, that the problem isn't the abstract existence of gender roles but that some (actually a lot of) people use them as a hammer to force people to live a certain way. The toxic masculinity and femininity problems are the folks who hide their insecurities behind a gender role wall. ("You can't criticize me because I'm the perfect man/woman!") But there's also a more subtle (but also much more common) level of basically pleasant but somewhat (or even very) unhappy people who don't feel like they can openly be who they are on all the points that don't live up their gender role 100%. And let's face it, that's most of us! Few people totally embody stereotypical maleness or femaleness, and that's ok. The male and female gender roles hammer people differently, but the basic problem is being hammered in the first place. I've been called a lesbian (I'm straight) and/or masculine for liking STEM. Good effort hammering there, but since I'm cishet and traditionally feminine presenting it's pretty obvious that the people trying to hammer are the ones with the problem, not me, especially because us girls and women in STEM seem to have no problems whatsoever finding partners. There are plenty of men who want a smart woman with high earning potential. Like you and your wife, my husband and I conform to traditional gender roles in some ways but not others, and, well... Doesn't every couple? Like you say, every couple is different and should be allowed to make things work however the two of them (or the n of them, whatever, same principle) please. If that confirms to traditional gender roles, fine. If it doesn't, also fine. The question that matters is "does this work in practice?"

Of course. That's how I got several boyfriends, including this last one that I married and had a cub scout with. I've also supported him financially when he was unemployed. He supported me when I was unemployed. That's how partnership works. In fact, that's in general how I expected to find a partner based on adults' how-we-met stories, movies, TV, etc. You become friends, you hang out, enjoy each other's company, and if there's mutual romantic interest see if it could go somewhere... if you dare. The risk is always ruining a good friendship. I had a crush on one of the boys in my patrol, but I couldn't tell if he was interested in me like that and didn't want to risk awkward patrol dynamics or even having to leave so I never did anything with that. I'm assuming there's some kind of bound on this statement? Surely you don't mean that every man on this forum is focused on getting the female scouters' attention, or that men can't get any work done in mixed-gender workplaces because their focus goes to getting the women's attention. I have heard people say that boys need a girl-free space here and in other places on the Internet, and I'm a woman so clearly men do admit it to women. Men post it for all to see, including girls and women. It's an opinion that's around in the media landscape. Current boys don't have to admit it to current girls in order for the idea to swirl around. And the idea wasn't swirling around when I was a scout, at least not where I was.

The damage that the traditional male gender role causes is certainly very real and a problem to solve for sure. The suffering is so unnecessary. I'm surprised to hear that people would divorce someone for needing support - you know, scratch that, I've heard of people divorcing their spouses after a cancer diagnosis. Some people are just... Not considerate. But unlike cancer, divorcing someone for breaking gender roles has a pattern to it that can be more systematically addressed than being people being shallow. This issue has indeed been around forever, and I knew about it when I was a scout. Feminism was a big topic of discussion in middle and especially high school. There was a lot of mutual exploring of how traditional gender roles impact girls and boys, men and women. How we had felt in various situations, what we wished would have been the situation instead. Obviously, the general gist always ended up being that we resolved to consciously support other people who didn't want to be imprisoned by their gender role, and used each other's experiences to understand better what to say and do to let people know that we didn't really care if they didn't conform to their gender role. Tangential but related, I heard a lot of complaints from my male friends and my BF about the constant pecking order checking and re-checking. Sounds exhausting! But I was a little surprised to see this, because one pattern of behavior I've seen men take literally for decades to help themselves survive while working to slowly weaken the grip of gender roles is to seek out female friends and co-workers... And patrolmates. My husband had groomswomen at our wedding, because this was exactly what he did. Being a girl with STEM and outdoorsy interests, I've been a talk-about-your-feelings friend for many a male friend. So to me, gender-integrated patrols is the obvious solution to the problem you bring up. You can have the situation of a few girls being together in that close way, and a male patrolmate can just join the atmosphere if he wants. Some did, some didn't. Their choice. Similarly, I was able to see that I can also rise to the 'provider' role, I can be the strong caretaker if that's what's needed. We girls all did in part because of the nature of scouting activities but probably also because it's less taboo for girls to act like boys than vice versa. The female gender role has weakened more than the male role. The phenomenon that I never saw was boys my age saying "I need time away from girls in my own boys-only space". I didn't see any boys-only friend groups past third grade. Sometimes refugees from the Bosnian war would drive around town in all-male groups, and it was notable that they never, ever had any girls with them. Had we been saying sus like the alpha kids, we definitely would have called it sus.

@BetterWithCheddar, I also appreciate the courage to share, and the gentle reminder to not accidentally imply that all individuals who had a gender-segregated scouting experience failed to learn how to work with the opposite gender respectfully. The folks on our committee who scouted gender-segregated are quite well-adjusted and respectful. I see and hear other examples of that in media and on the Internet. So, if you don't mind explaining some more - is the view you're expressing an adult-looking-back view, then, rather than what you were thinking at the time? What were your friend groups like, did you have any that were single gender? And how did you stop peacocking? (I assume you no longer do what you did back then, even when you are actively trying to catch a particular woman's romantic attention.) The reason I ask is that while I've certainly seen peacocking, I don't remember seeing much of it in middle school (but that was long ago so maybe I didn't notice or don't remember), and middle school was when girls and boys in my town started to form mixed-gender friend groups spontaneously after the "cooties" period in elementary school. There was kind of a redefining of gender relationships to reduce overall tension as people let go of some fixed ideas about what girls and boys were like, and people sorted themselves more along interest and personality lines and disregarded gender except for romantic pursuits. Almost like now that we were starting to turn into men and women, we could stop role-playing gender and just do what we wanted. So for me, middle school was a time of relaxation into friendships with boys - and I do mean friendships - in a way that sounds almost opposite to your experience.

That's what this looks like to me. Obviously being young can be rocky and the adult world needs to offer compassionate and skillful support, but I am curious about why this just wasn't a thing when I was that age myself and now it is.