The Boy Scouts ponder bankruptcy over the cost of abuse lawsuits. Men’s Rights Activists blame … feminism?

By David Futrelle

Men’s Rights Activists claim to care a lot about the sexual abuse of boys. And they do, to some extent — at least so long as the perpetrators of that abuse are women. Any time news breaks of a female teacher having an “affair” with a male student, you can expect to see multiple posts in the Men’s Rights subreddit about it.

When the abusers are male, though, MRAs aren’t much interested. Last week, NBC News reported that

The Boy Scouts of America is considering filing for bankruptcy in part because insurance companies are balking at paying settlements to almost a dozen men who claim they were sexually abused as boys by a notorious scoutmaster.

The news inspired several discussions in the Men’s Rights subreddit. But there was no real anger at the organization for its decades-long failure to protect the boys in its charge from predatory scoutmasters, leading to literally thousands of cases of abuse.

Indeed, most of the commenters in these threads — apparently not bothering to read past the headlines of any of the articles linked to — seemed to have missed the main reason for the potential bankruptcy filing altogether, and instead convinced themselves that whatever financial troubles the BSA is having stem from the group allegedly kowtowing to evil feminists by opening the doors for girls to join — and leading membership to plummet. (Never mind that membership in the Boy Scouts first began to decline in a big way in the early 1970s, nearly a half century before the group first started admitting girls.)

“As an Eagle Scout, it was sad to see the BSA fizzle to extinction,” complained a Men’s Rights Redditor called VaultGuy1995.

The heads of the BSA succumbed to the push of the feminists and now it probably won’t ever come back. If I have sons I wanna teach them as much scouting stuff as I can, because the BSA no longer has their best interests at heart.

As opposed to the days when sexual abuse was rampant in the organization?

Others were blunter, suggesting that feminists see the possible collapse of the BSA as a “Mission Accomplished!”

“I’m sure that was the goal from the start; no environment for men,” rooster-one4 agreed.

“Whatever feminism and sjw culture graces automatically disintegrate,” someone called perplexedm sniffed. “It is a great way to destruct organized, positive structures and bring in anarchy.”

“Feminists officially eroded Boy Scouts,” TheShShCreature added sarcastically. “Nice job.”

“Get woke, go broke,” declared frankattack1.

Very sad, but unfortunately things are going to get worse before they get better.

We started with two decent organizations, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Soon we’ll have neither. Progress.

(Of course, not all Men’s Rights Redditors think it would be such a tragedy if the Girl Scouts were to fold. “I thinks it’s dangerous to teach young girls self esteem and leadership skills,” someone called GreyStomp remarked in response to frankattack1’s lament.)

A few commenters went so far as to suggest that the real problem with the Boy Scouts today is that they are too vigilant in trying to protect boys from predators.

“[A]ll the changes to prevent lawsuits made it that much harder to have the basic scout program,” complained someone called vinyardmike, who said he was a former scout and scout leader.

No more on on one contact means a scout leader can’t give a scout a ride home and a scout leader can’t wait with that one last scout for his parents to pick him up after an event.

These days, he continued, the “organization … treats all leaders as pedophiles.”

“[T]he regulations that one needs to pass to become a leader [have]increased,” added someone called goodfoobar, “meaning that it has become that much harder to find new leaders.”

Possibly. But these rules also make it harder for sexual predators to find Boy Scouts to abuse. And given the exceedingly poor track record of the Scouts on this issue that seems just a teensy bit more important.

Maybe it’s just me, but complaining about rules put in place to protect boys from sexual predators really doesn’t seem like the best way to protect boys from sexual predators.

This is hardly the first time that MRAs have shown a distinct lack of interest in protecting boys from male predators. In October, after former Iowa youth basketball coach Greg Stephen pled guilty to multiple child exploitation and child porn charges after admitting to sexual exploiting some 400 boys, I discovered that there had never been even a single post in the Men’s Rights subreddit about this exceedingly disturbing case. Had a woman done the same thing there would have been hundreds of posts.

It’s almost as though MRAs aren’t so much interested in protecting boys from predators as they are in using cases where predators are female as an excuse to rail against feminism and women in general.

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