LogFAQs > #975230694

Jen0125 posted...

And I don't trust men until there's a culture shift.

And herein lies the problem: You've created a false dichotomy between blindly trusting all men (which I agree is a terrible idea) and blindly distrusting all men. The middle ground (which is likely what you actually do when you're not talking philosophy on the Internet) is to default to distrust, but trust some conditionally, with criteria that are appropriate for the context. In the case of child care, that's a background check and other protective measures.

Jen0125 posted...

I would love for parents to give boys the emotional tools they need to not fall in predation.

One of those tools can be male babysitters, or daycare workers, or elementary teachers, all of which rely on giving men a chance to fill those roles instead of categorically screening them out. Very, very often, young boys only have their fathers and maybe their gym teachers and/or extracurricular sport coaches as adult male role models. Given that gym teachers and sport coaches tend to lean more toward the physical side of masculinity, that means it's pretty much just a crapshoot whether or not the kid gets a good dad (if he has any dad at all). Not only does having more men in ECE give more opportunities to get it right, men in ECE are generally going to be more emotionally intelligent than the average man (by virtue of being willing to go into "women's work"), further increasing the chance that young boys have a positive emotional influence in their formative years.

This is why I'm particularly bothered by this idea that men shouldn't be hired as babysitters because too many of them are predators: Hiring more male babysitters can be expected to help with the rate at which men become predators (at least, in theory. I'm not sure if this hypothesis has already been shot down by actual research).