Fox News Worries Shooting Toy Safety Will Stop Boys From Growing Up To Be Navy SEALs
If you walk into the toy section of any given department store, you could probably make out a laundry list of complaints pretty easily. For example: where are all of the girl superhero toys? Why do the vast majority of the sports-related toys have pictures of boys on them? And why, oh God why, hasn’t anyone invented a Lego magnet of some sort to keep them confined to one area and save us the pain of stepping on a forgotten brick in a dark hallway?
But if you work for Fox News, the greatest single threat presented to childhood play today is that … it’s making boys wimpy. The hosts on the network’s show Outnumbered were in their very finest pearl-clutching form, as Raw Story reports, over new rules issued by the Boy Scouts of America National Shooting Sports Manual, which is apparently a thing that exists. Per the new rules, Boy Scouts should be always prepared to not point water guns or rubber bands at anyone else when playing with them. And per the panel of Outnumbered, this rule in an obscure Scouts manual is likely to cause the downfall of the Navy SEALs. That is not an exaggeration. I mean, what they said is definitely an exaggeration, but what I just wrote is literally what someone paid them to hyperventilate about on live television. Host Rachel Campos-Duff wondered:
“So, if we keep emasculating our boys and not letting boys be boys”¦ how are we going to raise the next generation of hardcore CIA operatives, Navy SEALS?”
If your eye didn’t start twitching after both “emasculating” and “letting boys be boys” appeared in the same sentence, congratulations on your hardy constitution. Other hosts complained about the new policy’s “wussification” and “feminization” of boys (because God knows no girl has ever shot anyone in the face with a water pistol) (I’m sorry, elementary school friend Heather, I hope you didn’t lose that eye); and expressed their concern that boys directed away from shooting rubber bands into each others’ faces would be neither “tough” nor “cool”. Because nothing’s cooler than losing your depth perception to a snapping piece of elastic!
The frenzy over this small change on the Boy Scouts’ part is as comically overwrought as anything William Shatner ever did on Star Trek. The existence of boys who might not find shooting other kids in the face with squirt guns to be the world’s greatest joy is not an endemic flaw in our society; and laughing about boys who are too “wussy” to like guns is obnoxious, too. (Psst, boys! The patriarchy sucks for you guys, too! Pass it on!) And really? The only ones who are acting “wussified” here are the people who need someone to fetch the smelling salts because an organization wrote that maybe kids should prioritize their corneas over their need to shoot their friends in the face. And if you want to make your kids tougher and able to bear up under any challenges they’ll face someday, just make them sit through a few minutes of Fox News every now and again.
(Feature image: Outnumbered via Raw Story)
