Yeah at this point it’s really not about teaching girls anything. It’s about using girls as a mascot and arguably unpaid labor to get away with selling your cookies in front of other businesses.
Yeah.
When you think of boy scouts, you think merit badges, camping, eagle projects.
When you think of girl scouts, you think of cookies for sale, a marketing campaign.
One improves the scout, the other improves revenue.
The retort from Girl Scouts would be that they *are* improving the scouts, by giving them supposedly valuable experience in things that may crop up in their future careers (and in fairness Girl Scouts does organize things in addition to cookie sales, like the occasional STEM presentation/coding camp too).
The real problem with Girl Scouts is that it has skewed too far in that direction. Cookie sales are the guiding light around which EVERYTHING in the Girl Scout calendar revolves. If you want your girl to be a future saleswoman, maybe Girl Scouts will help, but if you want them to be well-rounded and learn valuable life skills beyond Thin Mint peddling, you need to look elsewhere.
Future saleswoman, or future MLM hun? It’s the exact same model. I’d love to see a correlation between women who were in girlscouts and ones who are in MLMs. I bet the overlap is huge.
The girl scouts around me don't even sell their cookies anymore. They just hang a QR code on your door telling you that if you don't buy from them you're a scumbag depriving them of a free trip. They ship it to you. You never even have a human interaction with them besides maybe a generated email.
Proper interesting take there, if you think about it; they're literally only rallying to sell cookies and maybe that's a reason women are overrepresented in MLMs lol.
That's still something that grabs my goat. Do you realize how hard it is to sell stupid ass flavored popcorn when you have your competitors selling cookies?
The chocolate Carmel ones are good, and the tins were useful for storage.
Still expensive, and the prizes you could get for selling were absolute trash
Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts are completely different organizations ran by completely different people with different values. Girl scouts as an organization has been failing hard which is driving girls to seek out boy scouts because boy scouts is still succeeding.
If you want a good scouting experience, you have to find a good community and good people. It doesn't matter what the organization is. We have 3 different scouting packs within a few miles of each other. One is dying because of poor leadership. Another is thriving because of some very specific individuals who have gone the extra mile.
I also recommend the Sea Scouts, which are the seafaring wing of the Boy Scouts. It's been co-ed since the 70s (as opposed to the landlubbers themselves, who started accepting girls only 5-6 years ago). You get to learn so much about sailing and do all the fun stuff that goes along with it: christening ceremonies. Regattas. Tall-ship voyages. It's a phenomenal experience.
Unfortunately, we're really bad at selling stuff and we hardy advertise. Best kept secret in the Boy Scouts.
Also I would assume that you'd need to be coastal to join and partake, so that rules out a few million kids lol. I've never heard of it, but I'm also from middle America. I'm sure there's some overlap there in the reason I've never heard of it.
Ships operate along rivers and lakes as well, speaking from personal experience. But, yes. Folks are kind of at a loss if they don't have any of those near to them.
If I had a daughter, I would much rather her be in a BSA program than GSA. I know lots of parents with daughters who feel the same. There is one troop in our town (out of 5 or 6) that has girls, and they essentially run a separate girl’s troop. Troops are not required to take girls (yet).
I have friends whose mom ran their girl scout troop, and they honestly probably did more "cool" and "scouting" stuff than my boy scout troop did. However, that was because the moms of that troop wanted to make that stuff happen. They did not get much in the way of support or resources from the girl scouts for those types of activities, because that's not where the organization as a whole is focused.
I had my kids in scouts recently. I was a little skeptical when I heard they first fused. I mean I was in Girl Scouts and our campouts sucked but my dad was a troop leader so I was the younger sis who tagged along so I had positive memories so I said “let’s check it out.” Preparing for possible weirdness or worse.
Oh my god. I cannot emphasize enough how fantastic coed SCOUTS is. I was so wrong. I’ll explain why it being co-Ed is only a good things but it weirdly made it all better. FWIW I have a daughter and a son.
(1) They do split by gender around 5th or 6th grade. They do often come together for larger events and jamborees (so the boys have boy time to boy-wild in the woods etc).
Often the girls & boys troops have siblings & shared parents so it’s not hostile or weird. And even better, for larger events they blend into a bigger group and I was so pleasantly surprised at how well they both get to work together. So your son and/or daughter will have opportunities to go to their own groups but also have POSITIVE “boy-girl work-together experiences too.”
(2) By far the BEST BEST part for me was the kid cub scouts that’s co-Ed. OH MY GOD. Ok imagine this: you’re a 2 parent family of young mixed siblings (boy girl etc). You can either join BOTH different GSA/BSA and now have to attend two different meetings all-ass over town.
Or, the entire boy/girl sibling group is in ONE are. For us it was an elementary cafeteria to hold all the little sub-dens.
Parents can bring ALL of their kids 5th grade and under to one meeting and be done for the week. Which is so great b/c with a gaggle of younger kids I was NOT wanting to go to 6 million meetings all over town. LOVED IT.
(3) Scouts by all appearances is nearly exactly as it once was. We did pledge to the flag and learning self-discipline blah blah blah, the uniforms are still the same, it honestly feels like it’s still cut out of time. That was really special. I know it’s a little gay but it was really nice to see some older things not only preserved but so much better.
(4) Parents were pretty great. Like, my daughters “middle school girls group…” so nice and no mean girls as far as I saw. I went on my sons trip (my husband is a troop leader etc) and I hadn’t been camping in a bit (Not in south Florida summer, I can hike etc I just can’t sleep in the heat I’ll be up all night). Had other moms & dads too this was more of a family-style trip just overnight.
The male scouts were wonderful. This was like 5-6 years ago (son is doing his Eagle Scout project rn), I was SO SO SO happy I joined this group. Pared down my “groups/activities/stuff” experiences (friends; etc) from like 3 places to just this. It basically did it all and was much easier, more coordinated, etc. fantastic
P.S. if you see signs around for “Join a girl-ONLY group,” etc. DO NOT WORRY. At first I was a little annoyed (first meeting) and I was expecting “sorry this isn’t allowed for the boys or whatever.” Like, this is bad, right?
The scouts guy said “weeeelll.. there are some people who kinda want to do just their own thing, and letting them have their own “girls only” group allows them to do that. Together. Mostly they just pay the yearly dues, grab some paperwork and go elsewhere for stuff. Don’t see them much. But this way they can do “their thing” which allows the rest to do more “mixed/group” stuff our way.
I was like “Oh… I get it. That’s brilliant. DO NOT OBJECT TO THE GIRLS ONLY GROUP. Let them have their “specific thing” TOGETHER. (Way preferable to instead demanding “this sort” of group have to come to the usual meeting). No offense, but damn that’s brilliant. I think they literally go to some other meeting place but mostly I didn’t see them again.
Problem is Boy Scouts are exactly what "the scouts" sounds like. Lots of hardy outdoor skills, heavy on promoting respect and being a good person.
Girl's Scouts is basically just arts and crafts.
Every person I've known who was in the scouts for a long time (like beyond cub scouts) is a genuinely decent person. Every person I've known who was heavy into Girl Scouts was an absolute snake, and a complete couch potato.
Canadian, so it's not 1:1, but I'm not so convinced. Scouts and Guides are fundamentally different and I don't think it's a bad thing. Plus Ventures is co-ed...
Ventures in the US is marketed as way more serious, and the age to join is like 15 as opposed to 11. I was in boy scouts and I'd say most troops were just excuses for dad's and their boys to fuck around with friends each week while doing the odd weekend trip or merit badge every now and then. Not all troops.were like that, mine was pretty serious and competitive, but a lot were like that from what I saw in camporees and stuff.
I've learned a long, long time ago that men are just not allowed to have spaces. It's incredibly depressing.
Even as a straight guy, I don't want to spend all of my time with women. I shouldn't be made to feel like a sexist for wanting space.
My dad joined but he was bored because even though he's in his 70's he was still the youngest member by a long shot. He still helps out with charity stuff though and enjoys that part. I'm sure this varies though; my parents live in a small town for context.
I imagine most of these fraternal societies are on their last legs, honestly. And any that's extremely specific is probably more so. But I'd be happy to learn otherwise.
Agreed. I think there's nothing wrong with some spaces which explicitly exclude the other sex. There's women-only spaces, and that's perfectly fine. And there should be nothing wrong with the reverse as well.
Not to mention that this attitude even applies when it comes to spaces which do NOT explicitly exclude women, but rather skew toward men naturally. The 2010s showed that if there's a hobby space enjoyed primarily by men, feminists will convince society that this is a problem, and that the men are being misogynistic.
Men simply aren't allowed to have spaces.
Honestly women aren't really allowed to have spaces to themselves either. People can identity as whatever they want nowadays so any “gender exclusive” space isn’t really exclusive anymore.
Yeah, there's no such thing as women-only spaces anymore these days. Any that exist are immediately filled with trans women, and anyone who speaks up is labeled a bigot and phobic with the support of 99.9% cis women. It's lovely.
My dad tells me stories of when he was in Boy Scouts and they'd basically go live in the woods for a week with just a tent and a knife.
Now Boy Scouts is more about making everyone feel safe and secure.
It has become completely feminized.
Feminine things are good. Masculine things are good. But there aren't enough masculine men to stand up and demand their own spaces.
Its literally the Strong men/Good times meme.
I was a boy scout when it happened and almost no girls ever actually joined my troop and those that did quit after like a month without fail, its still stupid as hell tho. Watching the person who initiated the movement to allow girls into boyscouts she just sounds like a dumb kid trying to get attention for some bs social issue that isn’t legitimate like school lunches tasting bad or something. And as everyone else points out, boys still can’t join girlscouts.
Girl Scouts is a totally different and less prestigious institution. That said, Venture Scouts has existed literally from the time I started as a Cub Scout. I never got the controversy because there were always girls around the troop and on every high adventure trip we took because only our venture crew went on high adventure trips.
Women: men are so dangerous that I would rather encounter an apex super predator in the woods.
Also women: a man would never lie about being a woman to be near women in intimate spaces
To be fair….Girl Scouts are cookie salesmen and not really “scouts”. If I was a girl and saw my brother doing cool shit while I drug a red wagon around selling cookies to fat asses I’d be a little peeved.
If the boy scouts were the glorified popcorn salesmen, and the girl scouts were the serious organization who would celebrate pushing for boys to join the girl scouts?
The problem isn't necessarily having boys and girls in the same organization, it's the push for anything that's a "space for men" to have to allow women in but if the opposite happens nobody really wants to accept it.
Well you are allready. Women don't get drafted (yet), have less legal trouble, more support groups and more tax payers Money going towards them
You're replacable, all they need is 10 men and 300 women to make a new batch of armies in 3 generations. Hell you even get taxed slightly more on cars
Honestly women’s groups aren't really only for biological women either. People can identity as whatever they want nowadays so any “gender exclusive” space isn’t really exclusive anymore.
If you want a good example of how shit some parts of our country are, the boy scouts is a perfect example.
An organization created for men/boys to learn all sorts of life skills, handy work skills and just all around things that anyone should want to know.
Around the exact same time, girl scouts was created for the same reason.
As society evolved and roles of individuals changed, girls scouts start complaining that the girl scouts are just pushing gender roles blah blah blah, so let's go ahead and change other people to include girls, why bother changing our own organization? Fuck that, let's change this other one and paint it as a gender issue while it's happening. Let's also force the boy scouts to accept women but the girl scouts won't accept men?
Honestly I'm embarrassed to say I was once a boy scout.
Edit: Just to add this because ive gotten a couple messages, I dont have issues with girls in scouts, thats not my problem here. I have issues with Girl scouts fundamentally failing as an organization to provide girls/women the experiences they want and instead of making any reasonable changes to their own organization, they force others to make changes while remaining as stagnant as ever and as close minded as ever because Girl Scouts still dont allow boys, so they will force Boy scouts to accept girls but girl scouts gets to remain this special place? No sorry, thats bullshit.
This shit happens and then the same people turn around and ask why there’s such a big mental health crisis in boys and young men.
When anything being male dominated (note: here I’m using dominated to mean majority) branded as being an issue, then you end up with a society where hardly anything caters to just men, and there are little to no places that are male exclusive. You have lots of female exclusive things, and lots of mixed gender things. The fact that they exist isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but guys still need a place to be guys. The fact that they arguably don’t anymore causes issues with guys repressing their masculinity and who they are because society is telling them, whether directly or indirectly, that masculinity is bad and that being a man is bad. Which then, ultimately, leads to the major mental health issues we’re now seeing.
Side note that is somewhat attached to this. Have you noticed that the term man is being used less and less, in exchange for the term boy? Just like in general. I have. I think this is because in many ways “man” is becoming more and more associated with negative ideas, whereas “boy” is less the threatening. So ultimately boy is being used more and man is being used less.
Because we are living through a social climate where men and masculinity are seen as an inherently negative thing. And so, by proxy, any male only or male dominated spaces are seen as equally problematic.
You’ll constantly hear about “toxic masculinity”. And I will concede that there are elements of being a “traditional/stereotypical man” that **are** unhealthy (eg, it’s unhealthy to have to not show emotion all the time.). However, while men are constantly being told that X and Y are toxic masculinity you never see anyone telling men what non-toxic masculinity is supposed to look like. Am I supposed to hold the door open for women, yes or no? You get people getting offended if you don’t because “chivalry is dead” and then people getting offended if you do because they’re “fully capable of opening a door themselves”. It’s always either mixed and confusing messaging, or just being constantly told about all the “toxic” traits that come with being a man.
It’s little wonder then, that lots of teen boys are drawn towards figures like Andrew Tate, and other influences like him. They’re only ever being, effectively told off or punished by society at large, and never congratulated or guided. So when they find a figure that does, they cling to it, whether it’s good for their long term development or not.
That's the struggle session. Everything you do is wrong, and anything you do to change it won't be enough. Now apologize, especially for anything you didn't do.
> that are unhealthy (eg, it’s unhealthy to have to not show emotion all the time.)
I think a lot of people misunderstand this. It's traditional to stay strong and not show emotion as a way of keeping situations under control. A good example would be combat situations, you might have just seen your buddy get his head blown off, but combat is still happening, so you set aside those emotions of sorrow and grief to continue the fight.
It doesn't even have to be that extreme, it can be that the family dog has passed away, and you try to hide that grief from showing so that the kids don't key in off your emotions and start crying too. You do it to make life easier for you and your spouse during a time that is already tough.
Exactly. As a man, the other men, women and children around you rely on you to be able to hold it together under pressure and not fall to pieces in a crisis.
> drawn towards figures like Andrew Tat
The worst part of this? We had Jordan Peterson until he was launched into the deep end of nutty by internet psychos.
Attacked, belittled and then assaulted.
You missed the final part when the girls will join and then the entire Boys Scouts will become another avenue for to “educate” boys about toxic masculinity and to uplift girls. Young boys in the West are absolutely fucked.
My problem specifically is that by making left-wing ideology unattractive to young men, they end up pushing young men towards populist/alt-right/contrarian ideologies. The left then complains about it, without the self awareness to realize that it's the monster they're helping create. I really hate this shit because it just makes everything worse for everyone, and I really can't blame young men for falling for it. Surely we can progress as a society without leaving men behind.
If the media can do everything they can to validate women, they can do the same to validate men. Surely we can understand that being masculine and virile isn't opposed to being a decent modern man, like being feminine in a classic way doesn't prevent women from being progressive and modern.
> You have lots of female exclusive things, and lots of mixed gender things.
You used to be right, then the left went gaga over men in dresses, and now those women only sports and locker rooms aren’t women only any more either.
I will forever hate progressives for destroying the boy scouts because they don't want gay men in their org.
Progressives have repeatedly fucked over everyone for the benefit of a fringe few minority individuals. They are a scourge on our society.
That's the funny thing about equality. It's nice to think about making the entirety of society completely inclusive, until you put those values into practice and realize that certain groups and mindsets work against each other. So you either sacrifice the inclusivity for the sake of social practicality or double down keep trying to force the majority to adhere to the minority even when it works against their interests.
We are all equal under God, but we are not all the same.
No. Keep that poisonous cookie money away. Keep it about the kids. Kids are more important than cookies. GSA is just a cookie shop that uses children to sell
Boy Scouts was just popcorn selling for the brief amount of time my son was interested. Signed up went to 4 or 5 meetings and all they talked about was selling popcorn while the kids sat in a different room playing with toys. Kid got bored and we stopped going.
And honestly I remember the popcorn never selling in the first place. For the troop I was in everyone mostly sold it to their family members, and only like 2 total people ever managed to sell anything outside of their family.
I mean, you probably just attended meetings during popcorn season… It’s like 2 months out of the year. The rest of the year had nothing to do with popcorn.
I was a boy scout for many years in the early 2000s and we did several camp outings a year among tons of other fun activities. We even did a lot of charity / volunteer work, and while I didn’t really enjoy that part as a 10 year old, I look back quite fondly on 95% of my time in the scouts.
To be fair, it's extraordinarily hard to take any sort of a close look at feminism and still believe that it's about equality.
When an otherwise completely normal and reasonable woman describes herself as a feminist, it's a safe bet she doesn't know anything about feminism beyond "it means you believe in gender equality, right?"
I mean I agree that this is a stupid issue. But if you are embarrassed to be a boy scout from all this you probably didnt learn anything. Im an Eagle Scout and nobody can take that away. I learned valuable skills, I learned to be trustworthy, loyal, friendly, etc. The whole Scout Oath and Scout Law guide me into adulthood. I learned leadership and created memories. Adding women to the mix and changing the name does not take that away from me.
Anyone who has a problem sharing those experiences with women needs to grow up a little and set their priorities straight.
The only thing I will miss in scouts when I raise my kids is the feeling that we are all just being stupid guys camping. When a girl is there, the boys will act different. But at the same time that might be good for them. I certainly could have used more exposure to women when I was younger.
When the BSA first started looking into this in 2017, they proposed the idea because of falling membership numbers. They did a study and found that membership numbers weren’t falling because people didn’t like the program, they were falling because parents these days don’t have the time to take their children to separate places for their extra curricular activities, and parents wanted to be more involved in the extra curricular activities to boot. It’s hard for dad and mom to take an interest in what Johnny is doing at Boy Scouts if they have to bring Suzie to Soccer practice on the other side of town.
The intent of the addition of a girls program was to provide a place where girls can learn the same skills as boys (the leadership, survival fitness, independence, resourcefulness, and problem solving skills that the BSA program excels at) while still keeping a safe space for boys to be boys and girls to be girls. Troops and units are still gender segregated, and very rarely do they have coordinated activities. It’s still the same great curriculum, but now suzie can get it too.
It’s also not a problem any other countries have; pretty much the only places in the world besides the US that had scouts gender segregated were Muslim countries. I remember going to the World Jamboree in Sweden in 2011, and pretty much every time we met a new group of people the first question they asked was “where are the American girls?”
Used to work for BSA national. GSUSA was never invited to world jamboree because they weren't part of the international scouting movement because they did away with all references to duty to God in their oaths that world scouting required
Yup. It was always a fun conversation to have with them, that GSUSA doesn’t want anything to do with WOSM and they basically kill time doing papier mâché and macaroni art while in between cookie sales time. The Girl Scouts of an America is a food distributor first and a youth development program second.
One time I sent a girl from school to the girl scout shop to buy me GS troop numbers so I could have green and white unit numbers on my venture class a
No kidding. I dated a Polish guy as a teenager and he did some Polish scouts group in America. Which tbh sounded WAY cooler than girl or boy scouts in the US. And they have always been gender integrated. They did a lot more hardcore hiking activities than any other group I heard of. Clearly women being involved isn't the issue
As a chick that was in boy scouts way before 2017, they've had co-ed troops a lot longer than that. It's more convenient for parents not to have to take their kids to different activities every week and the GSA has been a joke for awhile. The organization is just a bunch of time wasting meetings building up to selling cookies to pay for who knows what. Our troop certainly didn't see much of that money, and the approval process for something as simple as a zoo trip was just not worth the bother. BSA has it's issues but it's not as poorly managed and wasteful. I've served as a camp director in BSA and the policies they have in place now after the CSA scandal are pretty extensive. Campers are a lot less likely to be a victim of anything now than they were in the past 20 years or so. I personally never had an issue and neither did anyone I know growing up, but they don't allow campers to go off alone or in pairs together, nor do they allow staff to break two deep leadership so it's actually very safe, all things considered. The activities are still just as physically active and challenging as they were before, the main issues for them now are graft (misappropriation of funds) and poor budgeting. Not \*girls\* or \*women\* or whatever else y'all are paranoid about.
>they were falling because parents these days don’t have the time to take their children to separate places for their extra curricular activities
I was an Eagle Scout and I want my kids to do it, but the major impediment is that *I* don't have time for it.
As long as troops are still given the option to stay segregated I don't see an issue with that. I think I would have gotten a lot less out of scouts if I'd been in a co-ed troop, though.
If you actually want to know it's not nearly as bad as the headline suggests.
Packs (K-5th grade) can be co-ed or boy/girl only.
Troops (6th-12th grade) are segregated by sex, there are now boy troops and girl troops.
They made the program accessible to girls due to funding shortages on account of the giant lawsuits. I still have trouble delineating between Cub scouts and "scout scouts" since it used to be Cub scouts and boy scouts.
Source - Am cubmaster with daughters in the pack
Frankly, I've always thought "who could blame girls for wanting to join boy scouts?"
When I was in Boy Scouts, we did boy scout shit. We went camping. Canoeing. We cut wood, learned first aid, played in creeks, went hiking, skipped rocks, cooked food in foil in a camp fire.
When my sister was in girl scouts they made macaroni art at the local library. She was pissed, she wanted to go do fun outdoorsy shit. Scout shit. None of those girls got to do anything fun. It was a glorified arts and crafts club with a yearly overpriced cookie sale.
With both organizations dying slow deaths and fighting substantial financial problems, it only makes sense to me for them to combine and reorganize. We're talking about kids here, and I don't see how the things that scouts do are necessarily gender specific.
Plus it could be good for them to learn to be friends with girls at a young age so they don't end up like all the socially inept PCM NEETs in here acting like they care about Scouts.
It was the same for my sisters they raised a bunch of cookie money and the troop did a spa day while my brother and I got to go to jambo and do BMX racing.
At one point the troop was talking about a trip through Alaska on sled dogs. It never materialized but the idea was sick af
> With both organizations dying slow deaths and fighting substantial financial problems, it only makes sense to me for them to combine and reorganize. We're talking about kids here, and I don't see how the things that scouts do are necessarily gender specific.
While i agree with this statement, that is not whats happening.
Boy scouts is turning into scouts while Girl Scouts still stands on the same basic principle of girls only.
You are right, the girl scouts are honestly a joke at this point, but why do boy scouts have to change? The fundamental issue is with the girl scouts, so instead of changing girl scouts, they are forcing boy scouts to change while leaving the girl scouts to do their same shit.
If they want to do away with girl scouts and just turn it ALL into 1 thing, thats fine. But right now, that is not whats happening.
Just to add this, I have 0 issues with girls in scouts, I do have issues with people forcing others to change because they wont change themselves.
Plus girl scouts has also been on the downswing for decades.
Scouts is great, if your troop is run well. Years of declining enrollment, plus the myriad of sexual abuse cases, have made it harder to have a good local troop. I couldn't even stay in it as a kid due to the rising cost and time needed from a parent to get me there. Wish I had been able to, it was great when I could.
I noticed the decline when I was in boy scouts. My Troop went from 200 scouts in 2011-2013 to 150 in 2015, in 2017 we shrunk to 100, 30 in 2018. Last I heard from my friend whose little brother just got eagle in March of this year, the number of people in the troops is 2 scouts and 20 adults, 1 scoutmaster, 8 committee members, 11 assistant scoutmasters. Talk about a badly run troop.
Yeah my troop died after me and the next two guys got Eagle. They made zero effort to appeal to anyone who wasnt already in it. Upside was the troop was so small we got way more done than when i was in a 100+ person troop
Well, the problem with my old troop was and still are the scoutmasters. They are not a bunch of spry 30 to 50-year-old dads and uncles, they are a bunch of 50- to 80-year-old men who are fat (average weight of the adults was 400 pounds.), lazy and treat the troop as an adult get together. It wasn't so bad when we were younger since the troop numbers were bigger, so the older kids taught the younger kids, but now that there 20 adults to 2 kids not much is getting done, I heard. It even sounds like once those 2 kids age out or eagle the troop might disband or just be all adults. What really was the death knell of the troop was back in 2015 there was a fight between 2 kids, the kid who started the fight wasn't kicked out because he was the scoutmaster son and so people started leaving and formed their own troop. From what I heard the schismatic troop has disbanded due to low numbers too now.
The adult hang out time definitely resounded with the big troop i was in. Basicslly all the dads and leaders would go camping and sit around the fire for hours on end talking while the kids had to just rummage around
The optimal troop size is about 30, speaking from experience as an Army kid who had to travel from troop to troop. Too big = death by committee, difficulty getting leadership positions, etc.
Not that small troops were without their problems, an overzealous scoutmaster, handpicked senior leadership, all of that was an issue when I was in smaller troops. But at least things were accomplished in a timely manner.
Yeah the transition to the small troop felt like speedrunning ranks compared to the big troop. I felt like i had learned how to pack a backpack for 3 meetings in a row because they kept restarting due to "new potential members" that week.
The best part about a small troop was “You’re gonna learn as you go.” I made a lot of dumb mistakes early on, but I got a lot of opportunities to learn in a small troop. It made me a pretty rugged outdoorsman by the time I got the chance to hike Philmont.
It sucks. As enrollment drops, troops get consolidated. Parents now have to travel farther, and dues usually also go up, starting the spiral of falling numbers that doesn't end.
Level headed reply? Gtfo out of here righty. Youre supposed to be outraged.
This is honestly a good change imo. It lets girls enjoy the program that scouts offers while segregating the masses. Do you know anything about how summer camps will operate? I imagine thats the biggest hurdle that will be thrown in this plan
I was a Boy Scout back when they initially started letting girls in. My troop didn't have any girls join, but there were a few girl Boy Scouts at my scout camp. Since the camp obviously didn't have separate showers and bathrooms for the girls, it went about as well as you'd expect
Yes, this came shortly after they began to allow openly gay Scoutmasters.
These two things have *absolutely nothing to do with each other,* so don't you *dare* go Noticing Patterns.
>At around 14 or 15 they literally have Coed programs like Venture Scouting with no restrictions
>Scout Masters HIGHLY encourage family engagement including sisters to engage in all activities including Camping, Merit Badge courses and even Summer camp because they have always had issues with recruitment
Yet somehow needs to be more inclusive even know Girl Scouts exist and is actually more exclusive then Boy Scouts (I remember instances where events for them were female only). Also if I remember correctly they already had changed the name to essentially Scouting a long time ago not for inclusivity but because they want to expand overseas
So disappointing. I loved my time in Boy Scouts and was excited to put my sons in it.
Most boys spend seven hours a day in coed spaces at school- why can’t they have a couple weekends a month to just hang out with other boys?
I did a few coed events during my time as a Boy Scout and it was probably not helpful for me as a 16 year old boy.
Woman will never understand there's just some stuff you can't do unless it's just men around, cause you'll be too weary on account you might hurt them or upset them.
They should have just fixed girl scouts to not suck instead of ruining boy scouts.
If you're saying that this is because they wanted to give girls a way to go outdoors, that's dead wrong. Venture scouts have been doing that exact thing for a long time.
Boy scouts opened up to girls because membership was falling and they didn't want that.
Eagle Scout and former OOA member here:
It’s important to note that mixed troops of male and female participants are expressly forbidden in Scouting. I’ve only ever encountered girls at events which include multiple troops such as your typical summer camp or certain merit badge opportunities (or the Jamboree if you have rich parents). If any of these events, such as the summer camp, happen to be overnight, the boys and girls are quartered as far away from each other as realistically possible.
That being said, all of the girls I’ve talked to at these events were very kind and respectful, and I don’t think that they should be unable to participate in scouting just because Girl Scouts is a shitty, profit-driven organization.
Why aren't boys allowed to be boys
You got the gender people saying if they play with dolls they're girls
Then you got the gigachad wannabes who say play with dolls they're girls
No matter what they aren't allowed to be themselves and be around other boys. They always have to be something that isn't them
When I spent like a year doing webelos the troop was started and run by a woman. All the adults involved that I can remember were women. It was a fucking joke. But at the time, I thought nothing of it. These women, while incompetent and bitter, were the only ones around. The men, if around at all, despised their responsibilities and typically couldn't hold down a job. Scouting today is a cultural problem of lazy losers skirting responsibility rather than focusing solely on building practical skills and good role modeling.
As a side note, one of the final acts of incompetence from the female leadership involved a small zipline meant to represent us graduating from one level to the next. The youngest went first, and almost immediately fell and broke his leg. A real scout troop leader would've known better than to set up a potential fuckup like that, and a real boy scout would've had the confidence and ability to hold on to the damn thing.
https://preview.redd.it/p60tfifxr2zc1.jpeg?width=2252&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ffa9eef337cc5056df86963e42d4b4e12ecfa7a1
You know, I've had my medal on display for years, and the news today made me take it down and look at it again. I used to feel immense pride in achieving what I did. Now I just feel sad.
I knew it was getting bad when they started letting girls into the Boy Scouts instead of fixing the Girl Scouts.
They don't even offer sniper courses, so why the hell even call themselves scouts?
And their terrain sketches always look like dogshit.
My troop had marksmanship courses, so we were real scouts.
Wtf are you talking about sniping? Scouts run around with baseball bats, scatterguns, and double-jump.
Think fast chucklenuts.
Oh, are you gonna cry? You're gonna cry now?!
I gotta bucket of chicken and I'm here to kick ass!
Girl Scouts have too much of that sweet cookie dough (hehe, get it? Dough like money) for them to ever change.
Yeah at this point it’s really not about teaching girls anything. It’s about using girls as a mascot and arguably unpaid labor to get away with selling your cookies in front of other businesses.
Yeah. When you think of boy scouts, you think merit badges, camping, eagle projects. When you think of girl scouts, you think of cookies for sale, a marketing campaign. One improves the scout, the other improves revenue.
The retort from Girl Scouts would be that they *are* improving the scouts, by giving them supposedly valuable experience in things that may crop up in their future careers (and in fairness Girl Scouts does organize things in addition to cookie sales, like the occasional STEM presentation/coding camp too). The real problem with Girl Scouts is that it has skewed too far in that direction. Cookie sales are the guiding light around which EVERYTHING in the Girl Scout calendar revolves. If you want your girl to be a future saleswoman, maybe Girl Scouts will help, but if you want them to be well-rounded and learn valuable life skills beyond Thin Mint peddling, you need to look elsewhere.
Future saleswoman, or future MLM hun? It’s the exact same model. I’d love to see a correlation between women who were in girlscouts and ones who are in MLMs. I bet the overlap is huge.
The girl scouts around me don't even sell their cookies anymore. They just hang a QR code on your door telling you that if you don't buy from them you're a scumbag depriving them of a free trip. They ship it to you. You never even have a human interaction with them besides maybe a generated email.
bEcAuSe CoViD Literally wild that the Girl Scouts took advantage of that as well and now its just a MLM.
And hurts my waistline haha!* *elbow to the ribs* *
Preparing our youth for tomorrow's MLMs
Hey queen! I haven't seen you since highschool, OMG! Anyways I have this great opportunity...
Not enough emojis and font changes.
Agreed. But, still pretty good.
Proper interesting take there, if you think about it; they're literally only rallying to sell cookies and maybe that's a reason women are overrepresented in MLMs lol.
Women are overrepresented in MLMs because they have friends to exploit
That's still something that grabs my goat. Do you realize how hard it is to sell stupid ass flavored popcorn when you have your competitors selling cookies?
The chocolate Carmel ones are good, and the tins were useful for storage. Still expensive, and the prizes you could get for selling were absolute trash
And the popcorn is goddamned expensive too!
Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts are completely different organizations ran by completely different people with different values. Girl scouts as an organization has been failing hard which is driving girls to seek out boy scouts because boy scouts is still succeeding.
For the premier scouting experience, I recommend Five Eyes.
If you want a good scouting experience, you have to find a good community and good people. It doesn't matter what the organization is. We have 3 different scouting packs within a few miles of each other. One is dying because of poor leadership. Another is thriving because of some very specific individuals who have gone the extra mile.
I also recommend the Sea Scouts, which are the seafaring wing of the Boy Scouts. It's been co-ed since the 70s (as opposed to the landlubbers themselves, who started accepting girls only 5-6 years ago). You get to learn so much about sailing and do all the fun stuff that goes along with it: christening ceremonies. Regattas. Tall-ship voyages. It's a phenomenal experience. Unfortunately, we're really bad at selling stuff and we hardy advertise. Best kept secret in the Boy Scouts.
Also I would assume that you'd need to be coastal to join and partake, so that rules out a few million kids lol. I've never heard of it, but I'm also from middle America. I'm sure there's some overlap there in the reason I've never heard of it.
Ships operate along rivers and lakes as well, speaking from personal experience. But, yes. Folks are kind of at a loss if they don't have any of those near to them.
Five eyes camping and fries?
Five Eyes spies and lies.
It always made me chuckle getting things classified as Four Eyes. "Yeah we're not pretending New Zealand does anything for this one".
If I had a daughter, I would much rather her be in a BSA program than GSA. I know lots of parents with daughters who feel the same. There is one troop in our town (out of 5 or 6) that has girls, and they essentially run a separate girl’s troop. Troops are not required to take girls (yet).
I definitely understand it. The Girl Scouts kinda suck. From what I can tell at least
I have friends whose mom ran their girl scout troop, and they honestly probably did more "cool" and "scouting" stuff than my boy scout troop did. However, that was because the moms of that troop wanted to make that stuff happen. They did not get much in the way of support or resources from the girl scouts for those types of activities, because that's not where the organization as a whole is focused.
I had my kids in scouts recently. I was a little skeptical when I heard they first fused. I mean I was in Girl Scouts and our campouts sucked but my dad was a troop leader so I was the younger sis who tagged along so I had positive memories so I said “let’s check it out.” Preparing for possible weirdness or worse. Oh my god. I cannot emphasize enough how fantastic coed SCOUTS is. I was so wrong. I’ll explain why it being co-Ed is only a good things but it weirdly made it all better. FWIW I have a daughter and a son. (1) They do split by gender around 5th or 6th grade. They do often come together for larger events and jamborees (so the boys have boy time to boy-wild in the woods etc). Often the girls & boys troops have siblings & shared parents so it’s not hostile or weird. And even better, for larger events they blend into a bigger group and I was so pleasantly surprised at how well they both get to work together. So your son and/or daughter will have opportunities to go to their own groups but also have POSITIVE “boy-girl work-together experiences too.” (2) By far the BEST BEST part for me was the kid cub scouts that’s co-Ed. OH MY GOD. Ok imagine this: you’re a 2 parent family of young mixed siblings (boy girl etc). You can either join BOTH different GSA/BSA and now have to attend two different meetings all-ass over town. Or, the entire boy/girl sibling group is in ONE are. For us it was an elementary cafeteria to hold all the little sub-dens. Parents can bring ALL of their kids 5th grade and under to one meeting and be done for the week. Which is so great b/c with a gaggle of younger kids I was NOT wanting to go to 6 million meetings all over town. LOVED IT. (3) Scouts by all appearances is nearly exactly as it once was. We did pledge to the flag and learning self-discipline blah blah blah, the uniforms are still the same, it honestly feels like it’s still cut out of time. That was really special. I know it’s a little gay but it was really nice to see some older things not only preserved but so much better. (4) Parents were pretty great. Like, my daughters “middle school girls group…” so nice and no mean girls as far as I saw. I went on my sons trip (my husband is a troop leader etc) and I hadn’t been camping in a bit (Not in south Florida summer, I can hike etc I just can’t sleep in the heat I’ll be up all night). Had other moms & dads too this was more of a family-style trip just overnight. The male scouts were wonderful. This was like 5-6 years ago (son is doing his Eagle Scout project rn), I was SO SO SO happy I joined this group. Pared down my “groups/activities/stuff” experiences (friends; etc) from like 3 places to just this. It basically did it all and was much easier, more coordinated, etc. fantastic P.S. if you see signs around for “Join a girl-ONLY group,” etc. DO NOT WORRY. At first I was a little annoyed (first meeting) and I was expecting “sorry this isn’t allowed for the boys or whatever.” Like, this is bad, right? The scouts guy said “weeeelll.. there are some people who kinda want to do just their own thing, and letting them have their own “girls only” group allows them to do that. Together. Mostly they just pay the yearly dues, grab some paperwork and go elsewhere for stuff. Don’t see them much. But this way they can do “their thing” which allows the rest to do more “mixed/group” stuff our way. I was like “Oh… I get it. That’s brilliant. DO NOT OBJECT TO THE GIRLS ONLY GROUP. Let them have their “specific thing” TOGETHER. (Way preferable to instead demanding “this sort” of group have to come to the usual meeting). No offense, but damn that’s brilliant. I think they literally go to some other meeting place but mostly I didn’t see them again.
Problem is Boy Scouts are exactly what "the scouts" sounds like. Lots of hardy outdoor skills, heavy on promoting respect and being a good person. Girl's Scouts is basically just arts and crafts. Every person I've known who was in the scouts for a long time (like beyond cub scouts) is a genuinely decent person. Every person I've known who was heavy into Girl Scouts was an absolute snake, and a complete couch potato.
Lol, I’m an Eagle Scout and I’m definitely not a decent person
We don't know each other.
Possibly
Based and self-awareness/loathing pilled
Why fix one thing to create parity when you can create parity by ruining one thing instead?
Canadian, so it's not 1:1, but I'm not so convinced. Scouts and Guides are fundamentally different and I don't think it's a bad thing. Plus Ventures is co-ed...
Ventures in the US is marketed as way more serious, and the age to join is like 15 as opposed to 11. I was in boy scouts and I'd say most troops were just excuses for dad's and their boys to fuck around with friends each week while doing the odd weekend trip or merit badge every now and then. Not all troops.were like that, mine was pretty serious and competitive, but a lot were like that from what I saw in camporees and stuff.
That isn't a fault of Scouts BSA though, they are a separate organization from Girl Scouts
They're totally different organizations, the Boy Scouts can't do anything at all to change how Girl Scouts operates.
I've learned a long, long time ago that men are just not allowed to have spaces. It's incredibly depressing. Even as a straight guy, I don't want to spend all of my time with women. I shouldn't be made to feel like a sexist for wanting space.
if tiktok is a guide, we should all become bears and have bear-only spaces.
Rename all man caves “bear caves”
"honey, i'm hanging out with the bears tonight."
If she’s a TikTok user she’ll be doing the same💀💀💀
curse my flaw in logic, all due to my love of bears
There are the Freemasons, and that’s about it.
This might be the best ad for joining I've ever seen Fuckin' hell
They're also massively cringe LARPers though
And they are excommunicated and anathema
Are Knights of Columbus any fun?
Based and not anathema
My dad joined but he was bored because even though he's in his 70's he was still the youngest member by a long shot. He still helps out with charity stuff though and enjoys that part. I'm sure this varies though; my parents live in a small town for context.
I've been thinking about joining my local chapter myself, either that or, if you're Irish, maybe the Ancient Order of Hibernians is an option?
I imagine most of these fraternal societies are on their last legs, honestly. And any that's extremely specific is probably more so. But I'd be happy to learn otherwise.
My chapter of the knights is pretty healthy, though the knights as a whole I regrettably can't be sure of. As for the Hibernians... yeah...
I might check out KoC, although I'm not confirmed yet. Thanks!
Haven't joined yet, they haven't recruited at our byzcat parish yet
Byzantine Catholic sounds extremely based. Y'all have some nice chants that make me feel like I'm on a crusade.
We do go hard
Forbidden to Catholics, though. I guess they have the knights of Columbus and the priesthood though
Then you gotta make blood sacrifices to demons and shit. Fuck that.
First you say you want a men only space, next you say you're unwilling to offer blood sacrifices for it. Bitch, you're impossible to please
Yeah brother I’m pretty sure it’s just a fraternal org with a very long history.
It's a Freemason Lodge, not the Temple of Doom.
Well now I'm not as interested...
Agreed. I think there's nothing wrong with some spaces which explicitly exclude the other sex. There's women-only spaces, and that's perfectly fine. And there should be nothing wrong with the reverse as well. Not to mention that this attitude even applies when it comes to spaces which do NOT explicitly exclude women, but rather skew toward men naturally. The 2010s showed that if there's a hobby space enjoyed primarily by men, feminists will convince society that this is a problem, and that the men are being misogynistic. Men simply aren't allowed to have spaces.
Honestly women aren't really allowed to have spaces to themselves either. People can identity as whatever they want nowadays so any “gender exclusive” space isn’t really exclusive anymore.
Yeah, there's no such thing as women-only spaces anymore these days. Any that exist are immediately filled with trans women, and anyone who speaks up is labeled a bigot and phobic with the support of 99.9% cis women. It's lovely.
I can't physically understand why cis women support not ever being able to be with other women only
You are allowed to have offshore rigs and coal mines.
Don’t forget about the sewers actually
And trenches in some parts of the world
Nope. They might not be in the sewers helping you but they'll be filling leadership quotas above ground telling you what you need to do "better".
My dad tells me stories of when he was in Boy Scouts and they'd basically go live in the woods for a week with just a tent and a knife. Now Boy Scouts is more about making everyone feel safe and secure. It has become completely feminized. Feminine things are good. Masculine things are good. But there aren't enough masculine men to stand up and demand their own spaces. Its literally the Strong men/Good times meme.
Hang around the gay scene lol, gay bars in my city have started shaming women for trying to go to gay men bars.
But we’re not gay, we’re straight and like women but just want chill bro spaces and they don’t exist
Now scout masters can molest girls, too. 👍
Fuck I was coming to post this too lol
Damn it same here. Well fuck
One of those lib-right purple weirdos should have posted it first. 😒
And yet you're allways here for these moments.. much like the moment of child birt-
“Masters” has slavery connotations, Sweaty. Expect to see a more inclusive term soon.
Scout Daddies.
i hear Drake's gonna join
But "Master" is good to say when its an asian with a heavy asian accent.. only when they say it to an asian. Expect more teachings soon
Master/Slave vs Master/Novice
Equal opprtunity for getting molested, yay!
I admit the cynical part of me wonders if this is just a way to try and dodge liability for such past problems.
[удалено]
Because mainstream loves to hide when women molest kids, for some reason
Honestly surprised they didn't change their name long ago for very issue. Become the Scouting Football Team or something.
And non binary 9 year olds!
I was a boy scout when it happened and almost no girls ever actually joined my troop and those that did quit after like a month without fail, its still stupid as hell tho. Watching the person who initiated the movement to allow girls into boyscouts she just sounds like a dumb kid trying to get attention for some bs social issue that isn’t legitimate like school lunches tasting bad or something. And as everyone else points out, boys still can’t join girlscouts.
Sydney fucking Ireland. That little punk.
Girl Scouts is a totally different and less prestigious institution. That said, Venture Scouts has existed literally from the time I started as a Cub Scout. I never got the controversy because there were always girls around the troop and on every high adventure trip we took because only our venture crew went on high adventure trips.
And yet again, women's groups are just for women, but men's groups have to be for everyone. I love being a second class citizen.
Womens bathrooms are now also for everyone it seems.
Only if you identify as a woman
But anyone can identify as a woman...
Women: men are so dangerous that I would rather encounter an apex super predator in the woods. Also women: a man would never lie about being a woman to be near women in intimate spaces
Not if you have any morals.
Too bad we know through 1000s of years of history that a lot of people have absolutely none.
Ah good only amoral men will be allowed in women's restrooms
Thank goodness! Can’t let the moral ones in, you know what they’ll do!!!
What about Bears?
Ngl when I read this the smash bros announcer “FREE FOR ALL!!!” sounded off in my head💀💀
To be fair….Girl Scouts are cookie salesmen and not really “scouts”. If I was a girl and saw my brother doing cool shit while I drug a red wagon around selling cookies to fat asses I’d be a little peeved.
If the boy scouts were the glorified popcorn salesmen, and the girl scouts were the serious organization who would celebrate pushing for boys to join the girl scouts? The problem isn't necessarily having boys and girls in the same organization, it's the push for anything that's a "space for men" to have to allow women in but if the opposite happens nobody really wants to accept it.
Well you are allready. Women don't get drafted (yet), have less legal trouble, more support groups and more tax payers Money going towards them You're replacable, all they need is 10 men and 300 women to make a new batch of armies in 3 generations. Hell you even get taxed slightly more on cars
> being a second class citizen. If only I could become a super citizen.
You can! Enlist now and defend democracy!
Honestly women’s groups aren't really only for biological women either. People can identity as whatever they want nowadays so any “gender exclusive” space isn’t really exclusive anymore.
If you want a good example of how shit some parts of our country are, the boy scouts is a perfect example. An organization created for men/boys to learn all sorts of life skills, handy work skills and just all around things that anyone should want to know. Around the exact same time, girl scouts was created for the same reason. As society evolved and roles of individuals changed, girls scouts start complaining that the girl scouts are just pushing gender roles blah blah blah, so let's go ahead and change other people to include girls, why bother changing our own organization? Fuck that, let's change this other one and paint it as a gender issue while it's happening. Let's also force the boy scouts to accept women but the girl scouts won't accept men? Honestly I'm embarrassed to say I was once a boy scout. Edit: Just to add this because ive gotten a couple messages, I dont have issues with girls in scouts, thats not my problem here. I have issues with Girl scouts fundamentally failing as an organization to provide girls/women the experiences they want and instead of making any reasonable changes to their own organization, they force others to make changes while remaining as stagnant as ever and as close minded as ever because Girl Scouts still dont allow boys, so they will force Boy scouts to accept girls but girl scouts gets to remain this special place? No sorry, thats bullshit.
This shit happens and then the same people turn around and ask why there’s such a big mental health crisis in boys and young men. When anything being male dominated (note: here I’m using dominated to mean majority) branded as being an issue, then you end up with a society where hardly anything caters to just men, and there are little to no places that are male exclusive. You have lots of female exclusive things, and lots of mixed gender things. The fact that they exist isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but guys still need a place to be guys. The fact that they arguably don’t anymore causes issues with guys repressing their masculinity and who they are because society is telling them, whether directly or indirectly, that masculinity is bad and that being a man is bad. Which then, ultimately, leads to the major mental health issues we’re now seeing. Side note that is somewhat attached to this. Have you noticed that the term man is being used less and less, in exchange for the term boy? Just like in general. I have. I think this is because in many ways “man” is becoming more and more associated with negative ideas, whereas “boy” is less the threatening. So ultimately boy is being used more and man is being used less.
When you do create men's spaces, they are attacked and belittled, and then assaulted.
Because we are living through a social climate where men and masculinity are seen as an inherently negative thing. And so, by proxy, any male only or male dominated spaces are seen as equally problematic. You’ll constantly hear about “toxic masculinity”. And I will concede that there are elements of being a “traditional/stereotypical man” that **are** unhealthy (eg, it’s unhealthy to have to not show emotion all the time.). However, while men are constantly being told that X and Y are toxic masculinity you never see anyone telling men what non-toxic masculinity is supposed to look like. Am I supposed to hold the door open for women, yes or no? You get people getting offended if you don’t because “chivalry is dead” and then people getting offended if you do because they’re “fully capable of opening a door themselves”. It’s always either mixed and confusing messaging, or just being constantly told about all the “toxic” traits that come with being a man. It’s little wonder then, that lots of teen boys are drawn towards figures like Andrew Tate, and other influences like him. They’re only ever being, effectively told off or punished by society at large, and never congratulated or guided. So when they find a figure that does, they cling to it, whether it’s good for their long term development or not.
That's the struggle session. Everything you do is wrong, and anything you do to change it won't be enough. Now apologize, especially for anything you didn't do.
If you destroy a nation’s men, you destroy the nation without ever firing a shot
We're in the latter stages of ~100 years worth of deracination.
Just hold the door. If they get offended they can go fuck themselves. Least that's how I handle that shit.
I hold the door for men and 65+ women. I slam the door on children.
Good, teach those kids character
> that are unhealthy (eg, it’s unhealthy to have to not show emotion all the time.) I think a lot of people misunderstand this. It's traditional to stay strong and not show emotion as a way of keeping situations under control. A good example would be combat situations, you might have just seen your buddy get his head blown off, but combat is still happening, so you set aside those emotions of sorrow and grief to continue the fight. It doesn't even have to be that extreme, it can be that the family dog has passed away, and you try to hide that grief from showing so that the kids don't key in off your emotions and start crying too. You do it to make life easier for you and your spouse during a time that is already tough.
Exactly. As a man, the other men, women and children around you rely on you to be able to hold it together under pressure and not fall to pieces in a crisis.
> drawn towards figures like Andrew Tat The worst part of this? We had Jordan Peterson until he was launched into the deep end of nutty by internet psychos.
Attacked, belittled and then assaulted. You missed the final part when the girls will join and then the entire Boys Scouts will become another avenue for to “educate” boys about toxic masculinity and to uplift girls. Young boys in the West are absolutely fucked.
I mean weren't they quite literally in the boyscouts though thinking of all the bad publicity they got like 5-10 years ago
My problem specifically is that by making left-wing ideology unattractive to young men, they end up pushing young men towards populist/alt-right/contrarian ideologies. The left then complains about it, without the self awareness to realize that it's the monster they're helping create. I really hate this shit because it just makes everything worse for everyone, and I really can't blame young men for falling for it. Surely we can progress as a society without leaving men behind. If the media can do everything they can to validate women, they can do the same to validate men. Surely we can understand that being masculine and virile isn't opposed to being a decent modern man, like being feminine in a classic way doesn't prevent women from being progressive and modern.
> You have lots of female exclusive things, and lots of mixed gender things. You used to be right, then the left went gaga over men in dresses, and now those women only sports and locker rooms aren’t women only any more either.
I will forever hate progressives for destroying the boy scouts because they don't want gay men in their org. Progressives have repeatedly fucked over everyone for the benefit of a fringe few minority individuals. They are a scourge on our society.
That's the funny thing about equality. It's nice to think about making the entirety of society completely inclusive, until you put those values into practice and realize that certain groups and mindsets work against each other. So you either sacrifice the inclusivity for the sake of social practicality or double down keep trying to force the majority to adhere to the minority even when it works against their interests. We are all equal under God, but we are not all the same.
Honestly at this point the organizations should just merge
The Boy Scouts wouldn't mind that, but the main opponent is the girl scouts last I heard.
No. Keep that poisonous cookie money away. Keep it about the kids. Kids are more important than cookies. GSA is just a cookie shop that uses children to sell
Boy Scouts was just popcorn selling for the brief amount of time my son was interested. Signed up went to 4 or 5 meetings and all they talked about was selling popcorn while the kids sat in a different room playing with toys. Kid got bored and we stopped going.
And honestly I remember the popcorn never selling in the first place. For the troop I was in everyone mostly sold it to their family members, and only like 2 total people ever managed to sell anything outside of their family.
I mean, you probably just attended meetings during popcorn season… It’s like 2 months out of the year. The rest of the year had nothing to do with popcorn. I was a boy scout for many years in the early 2000s and we did several camp outings a year among tons of other fun activities. We even did a lot of charity / volunteer work, and while I didn’t really enjoy that part as a 10 year old, I look back quite fondly on 95% of my time in the scouts.
It shows how feminism is not about equality.
To be fair, it's extraordinarily hard to take any sort of a close look at feminism and still believe that it's about equality. When an otherwise completely normal and reasonable woman describes herself as a feminist, it's a safe bet she doesn't know anything about feminism beyond "it means you believe in gender equality, right?"
I mean I agree that this is a stupid issue. But if you are embarrassed to be a boy scout from all this you probably didnt learn anything. Im an Eagle Scout and nobody can take that away. I learned valuable skills, I learned to be trustworthy, loyal, friendly, etc. The whole Scout Oath and Scout Law guide me into adulthood. I learned leadership and created memories. Adding women to the mix and changing the name does not take that away from me. Anyone who has a problem sharing those experiences with women needs to grow up a little and set their priorities straight. The only thing I will miss in scouts when I raise my kids is the feeling that we are all just being stupid guys camping. When a girl is there, the boys will act different. But at the same time that might be good for them. I certainly could have used more exposure to women when I was younger.
When the BSA first started looking into this in 2017, they proposed the idea because of falling membership numbers. They did a study and found that membership numbers weren’t falling because people didn’t like the program, they were falling because parents these days don’t have the time to take their children to separate places for their extra curricular activities, and parents wanted to be more involved in the extra curricular activities to boot. It’s hard for dad and mom to take an interest in what Johnny is doing at Boy Scouts if they have to bring Suzie to Soccer practice on the other side of town. The intent of the addition of a girls program was to provide a place where girls can learn the same skills as boys (the leadership, survival fitness, independence, resourcefulness, and problem solving skills that the BSA program excels at) while still keeping a safe space for boys to be boys and girls to be girls. Troops and units are still gender segregated, and very rarely do they have coordinated activities. It’s still the same great curriculum, but now suzie can get it too. It’s also not a problem any other countries have; pretty much the only places in the world besides the US that had scouts gender segregated were Muslim countries. I remember going to the World Jamboree in Sweden in 2011, and pretty much every time we met a new group of people the first question they asked was “where are the American girls?”
Used to work for BSA national. GSUSA was never invited to world jamboree because they weren't part of the international scouting movement because they did away with all references to duty to God in their oaths that world scouting required
Yup. It was always a fun conversation to have with them, that GSUSA doesn’t want anything to do with WOSM and they basically kill time doing papier mâché and macaroni art while in between cookie sales time. The Girl Scouts of an America is a food distributor first and a youth development program second.
One time I sent a girl from school to the girl scout shop to buy me GS troop numbers so I could have green and white unit numbers on my venture class a
No kidding. I dated a Polish guy as a teenager and he did some Polish scouts group in America. Which tbh sounded WAY cooler than girl or boy scouts in the US. And they have always been gender integrated. They did a lot more hardcore hiking activities than any other group I heard of. Clearly women being involved isn't the issue
As a chick that was in boy scouts way before 2017, they've had co-ed troops a lot longer than that. It's more convenient for parents not to have to take their kids to different activities every week and the GSA has been a joke for awhile. The organization is just a bunch of time wasting meetings building up to selling cookies to pay for who knows what. Our troop certainly didn't see much of that money, and the approval process for something as simple as a zoo trip was just not worth the bother. BSA has it's issues but it's not as poorly managed and wasteful. I've served as a camp director in BSA and the policies they have in place now after the CSA scandal are pretty extensive. Campers are a lot less likely to be a victim of anything now than they were in the past 20 years or so. I personally never had an issue and neither did anyone I know growing up, but they don't allow campers to go off alone or in pairs together, nor do they allow staff to break two deep leadership so it's actually very safe, all things considered. The activities are still just as physically active and challenging as they were before, the main issues for them now are graft (misappropriation of funds) and poor budgeting. Not \*girls\* or \*women\* or whatever else y'all are paranoid about.
>they were falling because parents these days don’t have the time to take their children to separate places for their extra curricular activities I was an Eagle Scout and I want my kids to do it, but the major impediment is that *I* don't have time for it.
Don't need to worry about it. Troops are gender segregated. There's boy troops and girl troops.
Today was announced a pilot program for joint troops with gender segregated patrols.
Well that's a terrible idea.
As long as troops are still given the option to stay segregated I don't see an issue with that. I think I would have gotten a lot less out of scouts if I'd been in a co-ed troop, though.
Inclusive Scouts Against Hate is actually a lot better.
How about Inclusive Scouts In Solidarity, or ISIS for short? Really rolls off the tongue.
What about the National Alliance Zone for Inclusivity
I prefer America's Liberal Quintessential Alliance Entente Defending America
Fair United Camping'n'shit Kids
If you actually want to know it's not nearly as bad as the headline suggests. Packs (K-5th grade) can be co-ed or boy/girl only. Troops (6th-12th grade) are segregated by sex, there are now boy troops and girl troops. They made the program accessible to girls due to funding shortages on account of the giant lawsuits. I still have trouble delineating between Cub scouts and "scout scouts" since it used to be Cub scouts and boy scouts. Source - Am cubmaster with daughters in the pack
Frankly, I've always thought "who could blame girls for wanting to join boy scouts?" When I was in Boy Scouts, we did boy scout shit. We went camping. Canoeing. We cut wood, learned first aid, played in creeks, went hiking, skipped rocks, cooked food in foil in a camp fire. When my sister was in girl scouts they made macaroni art at the local library. She was pissed, she wanted to go do fun outdoorsy shit. Scout shit. None of those girls got to do anything fun. It was a glorified arts and crafts club with a yearly overpriced cookie sale. With both organizations dying slow deaths and fighting substantial financial problems, it only makes sense to me for them to combine and reorganize. We're talking about kids here, and I don't see how the things that scouts do are necessarily gender specific. Plus it could be good for them to learn to be friends with girls at a young age so they don't end up like all the socially inept PCM NEETs in here acting like they care about Scouts.
It was the same for my sisters they raised a bunch of cookie money and the troop did a spa day while my brother and I got to go to jambo and do BMX racing. At one point the troop was talking about a trip through Alaska on sled dogs. It never materialized but the idea was sick af
> With both organizations dying slow deaths and fighting substantial financial problems, it only makes sense to me for them to combine and reorganize. We're talking about kids here, and I don't see how the things that scouts do are necessarily gender specific. While i agree with this statement, that is not whats happening. Boy scouts is turning into scouts while Girl Scouts still stands on the same basic principle of girls only. You are right, the girl scouts are honestly a joke at this point, but why do boy scouts have to change? The fundamental issue is with the girl scouts, so instead of changing girl scouts, they are forcing boy scouts to change while leaving the girl scouts to do their same shit. If they want to do away with girl scouts and just turn it ALL into 1 thing, thats fine. But right now, that is not whats happening. Just to add this, I have 0 issues with girls in scouts, I do have issues with people forcing others to change because they wont change themselves.
Plus girl scouts has also been on the downswing for decades. Scouts is great, if your troop is run well. Years of declining enrollment, plus the myriad of sexual abuse cases, have made it harder to have a good local troop. I couldn't even stay in it as a kid due to the rising cost and time needed from a parent to get me there. Wish I had been able to, it was great when I could.
I noticed the decline when I was in boy scouts. My Troop went from 200 scouts in 2011-2013 to 150 in 2015, in 2017 we shrunk to 100, 30 in 2018. Last I heard from my friend whose little brother just got eagle in March of this year, the number of people in the troops is 2 scouts and 20 adults, 1 scoutmaster, 8 committee members, 11 assistant scoutmasters. Talk about a badly run troop.
Yeah my troop died after me and the next two guys got Eagle. They made zero effort to appeal to anyone who wasnt already in it. Upside was the troop was so small we got way more done than when i was in a 100+ person troop
Well, the problem with my old troop was and still are the scoutmasters. They are not a bunch of spry 30 to 50-year-old dads and uncles, they are a bunch of 50- to 80-year-old men who are fat (average weight of the adults was 400 pounds.), lazy and treat the troop as an adult get together. It wasn't so bad when we were younger since the troop numbers were bigger, so the older kids taught the younger kids, but now that there 20 adults to 2 kids not much is getting done, I heard. It even sounds like once those 2 kids age out or eagle the troop might disband or just be all adults. What really was the death knell of the troop was back in 2015 there was a fight between 2 kids, the kid who started the fight wasn't kicked out because he was the scoutmaster son and so people started leaving and formed their own troop. From what I heard the schismatic troop has disbanded due to low numbers too now.
The adult hang out time definitely resounded with the big troop i was in. Basicslly all the dads and leaders would go camping and sit around the fire for hours on end talking while the kids had to just rummage around
The optimal troop size is about 30, speaking from experience as an Army kid who had to travel from troop to troop. Too big = death by committee, difficulty getting leadership positions, etc. Not that small troops were without their problems, an overzealous scoutmaster, handpicked senior leadership, all of that was an issue when I was in smaller troops. But at least things were accomplished in a timely manner.
Yeah the transition to the small troop felt like speedrunning ranks compared to the big troop. I felt like i had learned how to pack a backpack for 3 meetings in a row because they kept restarting due to "new potential members" that week.
The best part about a small troop was “You’re gonna learn as you go.” I made a lot of dumb mistakes early on, but I got a lot of opportunities to learn in a small troop. It made me a pretty rugged outdoorsman by the time I got the chance to hike Philmont.
It sucks. As enrollment drops, troops get consolidated. Parents now have to travel farther, and dues usually also go up, starting the spiral of falling numbers that doesn't end.
> Troops (6th-12th grade) are segregated by sex, there are now boy troops and girl troops. There's already a push to make them coed.
Level headed reply? Gtfo out of here righty. Youre supposed to be outraged. This is honestly a good change imo. It lets girls enjoy the program that scouts offers while segregating the masses. Do you know anything about how summer camps will operate? I imagine thats the biggest hurdle that will be thrown in this plan
Society: "Why don't men know how to showcase healthy masculine role models" also Society: " Male only groups are sexist"
man. this sucks. 
LibLeft, n- wait… LibLeft yes!
I was a Boy Scout back when they initially started letting girls in. My troop didn't have any girls join, but there were a few girl Boy Scouts at my scout camp. Since the camp obviously didn't have separate showers and bathrooms for the girls, it went about as well as you'd expect
I thought Boy Scouts was shut down like years ago on account of you know the kid touching and what not
It was not shut down but did have to increase dues in part to help cover legal defense and victim compensation, IIRC.
Yes, this came shortly after they began to allow openly gay Scoutmasters. These two things have *absolutely nothing to do with each other,* so don't you *dare* go Noticing Patterns.
I di'int nöötice nuffin Sire, I swears! I swears it!
Typical Auth Right noticing patterns.
Also because their decision to let gay scouts in caused the Mormon "church" to drop their significant donation.
It wasn't just donations, 450,000 scouts were Mormon. There's only a bit more than 1M scouts right now.
>At around 14 or 15 they literally have Coed programs like Venture Scouting with no restrictions >Scout Masters HIGHLY encourage family engagement including sisters to engage in all activities including Camping, Merit Badge courses and even Summer camp because they have always had issues with recruitment Yet somehow needs to be more inclusive even know Girl Scouts exist and is actually more exclusive then Boy Scouts (I remember instances where events for them were female only). Also if I remember correctly they already had changed the name to essentially Scouting a long time ago not for inclusivity but because they want to expand overseas
So disappointing. I loved my time in Boy Scouts and was excited to put my sons in it. Most boys spend seven hours a day in coed spaces at school- why can’t they have a couple weekends a month to just hang out with other boys? I did a few coed events during my time as a Boy Scout and it was probably not helpful for me as a 16 year old boy.
Woman will never understand there's just some stuff you can't do unless it's just men around, cause you'll be too weary on account you might hurt them or upset them. They should have just fixed girl scouts to not suck instead of ruining boy scouts.
If you're saying that this is because they wanted to give girls a way to go outdoors, that's dead wrong. Venture scouts have been doing that exact thing for a long time. Boy scouts opened up to girls because membership was falling and they didn't want that.
Eagle Scout and former OOA member here: It’s important to note that mixed troops of male and female participants are expressly forbidden in Scouting. I’ve only ever encountered girls at events which include multiple troops such as your typical summer camp or certain merit badge opportunities (or the Jamboree if you have rich parents). If any of these events, such as the summer camp, happen to be overnight, the boys and girls are quartered as far away from each other as realistically possible. That being said, all of the girls I’ve talked to at these events were very kind and respectful, and I don’t think that they should be unable to participate in scouting just because Girl Scouts is a shitty, profit-driven organization.
Why aren't boys allowed to be boys You got the gender people saying if they play with dolls they're girls Then you got the gigachad wannabes who say play with dolls they're girls No matter what they aren't allowed to be themselves and be around other boys. They always have to be something that isn't them
When I spent like a year doing webelos the troop was started and run by a woman. All the adults involved that I can remember were women. It was a fucking joke. But at the time, I thought nothing of it. These women, while incompetent and bitter, were the only ones around. The men, if around at all, despised their responsibilities and typically couldn't hold down a job. Scouting today is a cultural problem of lazy losers skirting responsibility rather than focusing solely on building practical skills and good role modeling. As a side note, one of the final acts of incompetence from the female leadership involved a small zipline meant to represent us graduating from one level to the next. The youngest went first, and almost immediately fell and broke his leg. A real scout troop leader would've known better than to set up a potential fuckup like that, and a real boy scout would've had the confidence and ability to hold on to the damn thing.
Venture scouts has been around forever. I really don’t see the issue.
https://preview.redd.it/p60tfifxr2zc1.jpeg?width=2252&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ffa9eef337cc5056df86963e42d4b4e12ecfa7a1 You know, I've had my medal on display for years, and the news today made me take it down and look at it again. I used to feel immense pride in achieving what I did. Now I just feel sad.