Jim Reynolds returns with one of his most poignant essays yet—a cultural gut check wrapped in memory and blood. What begins as a satirical takedown of America’s emotional overcorrection ends with a dodgeball game, a second-grade goodbye, and a brother’s legacy that never left the front yard. Read it slowly. Then let your boys climb.
1. The Velvet Curtain Falls
Once upon a time, America had a backbone. Now it has a feelings chart. Somewhere between the moon landing and the gender reveal party, the country stopped measuring character by what you built, broke, or carried—and started rating it by how affirmed you felt at brunch.
Masculine virtue didn’t get defeated. It got rebranded. Strength became “toxic.” Risk became “unsafe.” Certainty became “violent.” The republic didn’t fall—it got girlified.
2. The Emotional-Industrial Complex
In girlified America, how you feel is more important than what is. Truth must now pass through a gauntlet of emotional checkpoints before it can be spoken. Disagreement is aggression. Discomfort is harm. If someone somewhere might frown, the entire system screeches to a halt until the proper apologies, trainings, and breathwork exercises are completed.
We used to forge consensus through competition. Now we host consensus by coercion. We don’t argue—we affirm. We don’t build—we process. And if you refuse the script? You're branded as cruel, broken, or worse—insufficiently sensitive.
3. Safetyism Is the New National Anthem
America now confuses safety with virtue. Not actual safety—emotional safety. Words are weapons. Opinions are “microaggressions.” The highest civic value isn’t liberty or truth—it’s comfort. We’ve bubble-wrapped the culture and called it progress.
This is the country that once stormed Normandy. Now we cancel field trips because someone might get wet.
4. Boys Were a Problem—So We Solved Them
To fully girlify a country, you have to start with the boys.
You slow them down. Sedate them. Diagnose them. Remove roughhousing. Eliminate competition. Replace dodgeball with “conflict resolution.” Tell them that being loud, aggressive, or physical isn’t natural—it’s pathological.
We didn’t raise boys. We corrected them. We fed them pills and labeled their instincts as disorders. And then we acted surprised when they disappeared from college, marriage, and work.
5. Before the Girl Fog Rolled In
Bob remembers. So do I.
Back then, we didn’t have play dates. We had a front door and a question: “Can Johnny come out?” No apps. No sign-ins. Just a handshake and a full day to burn.
We played a game called Babes. Nothing to do with girls. It was tackle football on any patch of grass—no matter how small. One kid ran with the ball. The rest tried to flatten him. No pads. No helmets. No referees. Just noise, collisions, and the unspoken rule: walk it off.
And if the yard was really small? My older brother Jerry—gloriously impractical—invented knee football. Two full teams crashing into each other on their knees like legless gladiators. The jeans didn’t survive. But we did.
And when the wind came? We’d climb the tallest tree in the yard—thirty, forty feet up—where it swayed like a ship’s mast in a nor'easter. We were captains on the Bounty, fighting mutiny and weather with no rope, no helmet, no adult supervision. Just bark in our hands and wind in our lungs.
Ask Bob if he had a female principal. He didn’t. Most of the teachers were men. War vets. Coaches. Women taught too—but with grit, not guidance counselors. They didn’t ask how we felt about long division. They made sure we could do it. And if we couldn’t? We did it again.
I recall my 6th-grade teacher, Mr. Edwards. He was also our softball, football, and basketball coach. He demonstrated to us how to swing the bat with power and precision. It was the first time I heard the distinct whooshing sound of a baseball bat! I was impressed, but I also noticed that his thumb stuck out at a weird angle from his hand. Jerry told me that Mr. Edwards was a veteran of the Korean War and sustained various injuries in that conflict.
6. Now We Heal Instead of Win
Today? We hand out therapy dogs during finals week and create online apology portals for “tone violations.” We don’t challenge boys—we redirect them. Stoicism is recast as repression. Confidence is now privilege. And the very traits that once built bridges, businesses, and frontiers are now labeled threats.
We used to raise men. Now we file reports on them.
7. Girlification Isn’t About Women—It’s About Weakness
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about women. Real femininity is strong. Maternal. Wise. Anchored in sacrifice and love. But girlification isn’t femininity. It’s fragility in a pantsuit. It’s not nurturing—it’s neutering. It replaces clarity with consensus. Strength with softness. Reality with relatability.
Girlification punishes the qualities that built civilization—and rewards the ones that make HR departments thrive.
8. Best Gift I Ever Got
And yet, one of the best gifts I ever received came from a woman.
Second grade. Halfway through the school year, my family had to move. On my last day, the teacher, a sharp, kind woman who saw me, asked what I wanted to do during activity time.
I said, without hesitation: Dodgeball.
She didn’t flinch. She nodded and made it happen. And not some nerfed-down version either. We played with those red rubber utility balls—the kind that left welts and echoed when they hit you just right. Boys and girls, together, laughing and shrieking and launching missiles across the asphalt like it was the Super Bowl. It was chaos. It was beautiful. It was childhood. If I’m not mistaken, I was the last kid standing.
She didn’t try to fix me. She honored me. She gave me what I needed. She let me leave like a boy—on my terms, in my game, with my tribe.
To this day, I’ve never forgotten it.
Because that wasn’t girlification. That was grace. That was a strong woman who understood what boys are for.
And here’s the truth:
It’s hard to learn how to avoid danger when nobody’s throwing anything at you.
You don’t develop judgment in a padded room. You develop it in motion—with bruises, bad ideas, and fast reflexes. Dodgeball wasn’t just fun. It was training. For life. For risk. For consequence. You learned how to duck, when to throw, who to trust. You learned what it meant to get hit and get back up.
As I stood triumphant and alone in the dodgeball circle, I realized that this was the last time I would see any of these happy kids again. We’d started kindergarten together just a few doors away. One memorable hour of pure joy before the door closed. And she gave it to me.
One last note. After school that day, Mr. Edwards dropped by our house to tell my mom how much he was going to miss both Jerry and me. Jerry had been Mr. Edward’s favorite student two years before.
9. Bob’s Final Word
“Empathy’s a virtue,” Bob says. “But once it starts running the forklift, things go sideways.”
He doesn’t hate feelings. He just knows you can’t run a civilization on vibes. You need courage. Standards. Strength. And you need the kind of society that doesn’t apologize for raising men.
America didn’t get girlified overnight. But somewhere between banning dodgeball and replacing merit with mood boards, we lost something vital.
We can get it back.
Let the boys climb trees again. Let them play Babes. Let them fall. Let them get back up.
Let them become what they were meant to be.
Bob’s Epilogue:
“You can’t raise a man if you’re afraid he’ll bleed.
You can’t save a country if you’re afraid to be called mean.”
—Bob
Postscript from the Author:
My brother Jerry, who passed in 2013, invented games that didn’t make sense—on purpose. “Babes”? Even the name makes you laugh. Knee football? No problem — who kicks off — and how? He taught me that boys will turn bruises into laughter, and tight spaces into kingdoms. Every wild paragraph in this piece has his fingerprints on it.
—Jim
By: Jim Reynolds
June 10, 2025