AwakeEnergyScouter

I don't know that people believe Scouting America scouters or Scouting America national for that matter when you say that scouts are scouts. It's true - or should be. When it hasn't been, it's been a serious mistake on the part of Scouting America. I completely agree that scouts are scouts. But since it actually, sadly, has been the case that Scouting America profiled itself primarily on exclusion for decades, it's not exactly believable to the public (whom we're trying to recruit to join scouting) that Scouting America just now got with the program and their own Scout Law and Oath and is truly welcoming to all. You can't just turn around and say "mea culpa" and expect to be believed. The fastest way to fix this is specifically reaching out to the people Scouting America is known for excluding to say "hi, we really would welcome you if you like to join. Sorry about that." I do not believe that all Scouting America scouters and staff actually believe that scouts are scouts either and I'm a scouter myself. This very forum is full of examples in writing. I'm honestly surprised that so many are suddenly saying what has seemed taboo to say, that scouts are scouts. There's years of pro-exclusion image to undo in the public eye, and I would suggest we hop to it.

I feel obliged to correct myself. Our council does have a recruiting TV campaign running right now to help us all collectively out, which I ought to have mentioned. I knew that but forgot, because we're cord cutters and so see no TV ads. Not national, but someone other than units is doing something in the marketing department and credit is due where credit is due.

I did Meet the Teacher night at the school that we meet at, and just like during popcorn sales I can see that many in the general public have not registered that Scouting America is no longer gender segregated. (A number of people must therefore also not even have registered that female scouters are old hat even here.) I am constantly telling people (seemingly for the first time) that family packs exist. That Scouting America is for both girls and boys hasn't percolated into the general public consciousness. Even that messaging is falling to units. I will take on that as well, of course, but you're completely right in that it's not the most impactful approach. It's going to take a generation apparently at this rate.

I agree, a national campaign would be great. That's almost certainly going to be necessary for long-term overall growth. But in lieu of that, I am going to be a Juliet, as the Girl Scouts say. I'm not waiting.

This definitely seems to be true. I see a lot of synergy between the zeitgeist and Scouting, so since nobody else seems to be doing it a few people on our pack committee who are committed to scouting like myself are doing our own marketing in the neighborhood to make sure parents know we're here. We're getting some tips from a council marketing program also. We have a strong committee with mostly people who were scouts as youth, all of whom recognise the movement they grew up in, and hear from many parents who weren't scouts that they are surprised at how well the movement overlaps their views and what they want for their child... once they find out. We've had a lot of interest in our join night. We'll find out how well what we did worked in two weeks. We've had several new-to-scouting families really discover and appreciate scouting before this current marketing push, so I am convinced that the interested families are out there - we just need to find them, and that is going to take a heck of a lot more communicating and community-building that is currently happening. We will Do Our Best with the time we have and the resources we've got! 🫡

Only topic-adjacent, but I sincerely wonder if anyone has ever even tried to join anything from the Lotus Sutra with the rest of the service. Other than that worshiping deities is a sideshow at best and a departure from the path at worst, the Lotus Sutra builds so much on foundational teachings that it assumes that the reader knows that it would be very hard to cite only it unless the audience are all Mahayana practicioners already. Relatedly, some Theravada practicioners might take offense at the lesser vehicle/hinayana thing, and seeing as the sutra expounds on the difference between arhatship and full, complete, perfect enlightenment at length it's one of the Mahayana sutras most likely to being out that sectarian conflict.

I certainly don't trust people who make it clear that they don't think I should be where I am to give me advice or support. I am curious about whether that it's girls only scout craft catch-up says something about just how stiff that cultural resistance is in that council. In principle, just make it a scoutcraft basics camporee open to all new units. But why didn't they? The comments that remain make me wonder if the reason is that so many male scouts are opposed to girls that it wouldn't work to help the girls, or that the council had solid reasons to think it would end up there.

I agree that the quality of the program is going to fall on the den leaders to make sure they are choosing to do the engaging fun stuff instead of just what is easy for them, but that has always been the case - that's not a change. I'm not sure what you mean by "wiggle room" in what's required where, but in the case of Bear Habitat (which is rank required) there is only one activity suggested for requirement 7, which is the one I posted above. Unless Scoutbook doesn't have requirement 7 as required, which I can't check right now, it would seem that Bears are still required to make animal sign observations. That verbiage is even the same as before. Or am I missing something here? I was hoping that seeing that it wasn't in fact the case that you can walk the mile on a track without paying any attention would be heartening, but perhaps it wasn't. May all beings be happy regardless.

Bear Habitat is rank required and wildlife observation is still a required part of the adventure, so I am also unclear on the problem. Personally, I like almost everything I'm seeing, and lot of the new adventures seem like invitations to gamify more outdoors programming to me. I've been focusing on Webelos first, and I see several of the new adventures as ways to get the scouts to get better at outdoors life and scoutcraft. A lot of the requirements seem to split up into plan/prepare for the outings during meetings and then go do outdoor adventure, which is exactly as it should be. There's more repetition of skills year to year, which will reinforce key outdoor skills. The glances I've taken to other ranks are consistent with that, IMO. Adding swimming, camping, fishing and boating adventures to all ranks is great, for example. That's a great way to encourage the whole pack to come out adventuring more. The requirements also set up a situation where the older scouts naturally serve as an example to the younger scouts. I see all kinds of potential for creating a strong pack scoutcraft culture by scheduling as many of the outdoor optional adventures as possible and choosing the outdoor and active options for the required adventures. Leave No Trace being interwoven into the adventures is also fantastic and makes it really easy to leverage their children's materials as well. Nothing is perfect, but I'm really excited to use these adventures to get those scouts outdoors more and with more skills asked of them for advancement!

Did you check the leader guide? Bear Habitat Outdoors REQUIRED Requirement 7 Wildlife Snapshot Snapshot of Activity While on a walk, Cub Scouts identify six signs of any mammals, birds, insects, or reptiles. https://www.scouting.org/cub-scout-activities/wildlife-snapshot/

I'm with you! The ventilation and being able to transfer the weight onto the hips is huge. I have two external frame packs and I'm not getting rid of them at any price! My old, smaller pack for my scout, the larger volume one for me. The soft packs were originally for climbers and it made sense for them, but I'm not a climber, I'm a hiker.

You don't mention your academic background on your profile, so apologies if this is telling you something you already know, but if Scouting America funded the researcher (as implied by "engaged" in the press release), then they weren't independent. I looked for the funding and conflicts of interest sections in the paper that I would expect to find, but either they're behind the paywall or weren't included. Either way, it's not clear to the public that the researcher really was independent. It's well-known that studies often end up biased in favor of the funding source in social sciences (see for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6187765/) so whether Scouting America funded them is key to know when it comes to claiming their impartiality. I also noticed this fairly unique statement: DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT The data that support the findings of this study are available from the BSA, but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. This is highly irregular. I would expect to see the opposite, along the lines of "due to space restrictions, the complete data set could not be included here, but can be accessed online at <url>." It says that the data supporting the findings are available, but also says that they aren't publicly available without clearly specifying what a colleague should do do get the data. How would someone replicate their study? Will Scouting America provide the data to someone else to check the original researcher's work or not? Unclear. Even if the answer is actually yes, it's not clear to the public that Scouting America is actually letting the sunlight in here. This particular point seems a little weak.

I'm about to preside over a cub scout rank advancement ceremony that includes two scouts that joined last month and two months ago, respectively. They went after that advancement hard and finished, using the opportunities for outdoor activities and knife safety we offered to the max. Both scouts asked their parents to sign them up, not the other way around. Since they're cubs they would have advanced without the badge, but they really wanted to be scouts and do the program so that's what they're choosing to do. It will be a pleasure to give them their badges and new neckers.

Oh, I see! That makes sense. I was a little surprised that you wouldn't have noticed at all. I also appreciate your willingness to explain your thinking process in several steps, and your thoughtfulness. I've enjoyed talking to you, too.

I find it interesting - and I don't mean strange or wrong, but literally interesting - that you ask a woman for examples of how traditional gender role expectations hurt men even though another man just gave a whole list with a lot of passion. Because I'm not one, all my examples are going to be second-hand, parroting back what I've heard or seen men say about their own lives. My personal contribution can only be checking that what they're saying is consistent with what I see from the outside. Why ask me, not @Eagle94-A1, when he's the one arguing that I underestimate the problem? I did find a short rundown that seems to summarize a lot of what I've heard, although I notice that it lacks the 'losing everything' type problems that Eagle94-A1 brought up: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202303/the-state-of-todays-male-psyche I'll note that while the male gender role makes it harder to connect with others, it's also not really the case that all women are totally fluent with recognizing their own emotions and talking to others about them, either. Brené Brown's legendary (at least among agilists) TED talk on the importance of vulnerability for connection includes her personal struggle with being vulnerable, for example. But our gender role doesn't make whatever personal hurdle we have taller and steeper. I do agree that two-parent households work better than one-parent households just based on adult-to-child ratio. I don't have a lot of opinions about any lack of masculinity in part because I don't know what you mean by masculinity exactly. It's one of those words used by a lot of people to mean a lot of things. I suspect you and I have pretty similar ideas of what a 'real man' is like, at least compared to the people who take toxic masculinity way too seriously. I routinely hear men who I find quite masculine called not masculine by others and rarely with a kind spirit, so... Without some kind of working definition of masculinity I don't really want to wade into that. Now, I think I should say something about what is not a problem in addition to what is, namely natural and authentic overlap between one individual's way of being and interests and traditional gender roles. While gender roles are made up (i e socially constructed), they do connect to patterns of behavior. The key issue for me is freedom to choose how to live your life. I suppose, strictly speaking, that the problem isn't the abstract existence of gender roles but that some (actually a lot of) people use them as a hammer to force people to live a certain way. The toxic masculinity and femininity problems are the folks who hide their insecurities behind a gender role wall. ("You can't criticize me because I'm the perfect man/woman!") But there's also a more subtle (but also much more common) level of basically pleasant but somewhat (or even very) unhappy people who don't feel like they can openly be who they are on all the points that don't live up their gender role 100%. And let's face it, that's most of us! Few people totally embody stereotypical maleness or femaleness, and that's ok. The male and female gender roles hammer people differently, but the basic problem is being hammered in the first place. I've been called a lesbian (I'm straight) and/or masculine for liking STEM. Good effort hammering there, but since I'm cishet and traditionally feminine presenting it's pretty obvious that the people trying to hammer are the ones with the problem, not me, especially because us girls and women in STEM seem to have no problems whatsoever finding partners. There are plenty of men who want a smart woman with high earning potential. Like you and your wife, my husband and I conform to traditional gender roles in some ways but not others, and, well... Doesn't every couple? Like you say, every couple is different and should be allowed to make things work however the two of them (or the n of them, whatever, same principle) please. If that confirms to traditional gender roles, fine. If it doesn't, also fine. The question that matters is "does this work in practice?"

Of course. That's how I got several boyfriends, including this last one that I married and had a cub scout with. I've also supported him financially when he was unemployed. He supported me when I was unemployed. That's how partnership works. In fact, that's in general how I expected to find a partner based on adults' how-we-met stories, movies, TV, etc. You become friends, you hang out, enjoy each other's company, and if there's mutual romantic interest see if it could go somewhere... if you dare. The risk is always ruining a good friendship. I had a crush on one of the boys in my patrol, but I couldn't tell if he was interested in me like that and didn't want to risk awkward patrol dynamics or even having to leave so I never did anything with that. I'm assuming there's some kind of bound on this statement? Surely you don't mean that every man on this forum is focused on getting the female scouters' attention, or that men can't get any work done in mixed-gender workplaces because their focus goes to getting the women's attention. I have heard people say that boys need a girl-free space here and in other places on the Internet, and I'm a woman so clearly men do admit it to women. Men post it for all to see, including girls and women. It's an opinion that's around in the media landscape. Current boys don't have to admit it to current girls in order for the idea to swirl around. And the idea wasn't swirling around when I was a scout, at least not where I was.

The damage that the traditional male gender role causes is certainly very real and a problem to solve for sure. The suffering is so unnecessary. I'm surprised to hear that people would divorce someone for needing support - you know, scratch that, I've heard of people divorcing their spouses after a cancer diagnosis. Some people are just... Not considerate. But unlike cancer, divorcing someone for breaking gender roles has a pattern to it that can be more systematically addressed than being people being shallow. This issue has indeed been around forever, and I knew about it when I was a scout. Feminism was a big topic of discussion in middle and especially high school. There was a lot of mutual exploring of how traditional gender roles impact girls and boys, men and women. How we had felt in various situations, what we wished would have been the situation instead. Obviously, the general gist always ended up being that we resolved to consciously support other people who didn't want to be imprisoned by their gender role, and used each other's experiences to understand better what to say and do to let people know that we didn't really care if they didn't conform to their gender role. Tangential but related, I heard a lot of complaints from my male friends and my BF about the constant pecking order checking and re-checking. Sounds exhausting! But I was a little surprised to see this, because one pattern of behavior I've seen men take literally for decades to help themselves survive while working to slowly weaken the grip of gender roles is to seek out female friends and co-workers... And patrolmates. My husband had groomswomen at our wedding, because this was exactly what he did. Being a girl with STEM and outdoorsy interests, I've been a talk-about-your-feelings friend for many a male friend. So to me, gender-integrated patrols is the obvious solution to the problem you bring up. You can have the situation of a few girls being together in that close way, and a male patrolmate can just join the atmosphere if he wants. Some did, some didn't. Their choice. Similarly, I was able to see that I can also rise to the 'provider' role, I can be the strong caretaker if that's what's needed. We girls all did in part because of the nature of scouting activities but probably also because it's less taboo for girls to act like boys than vice versa. The female gender role has weakened more than the male role. The phenomenon that I never saw was boys my age saying "I need time away from girls in my own boys-only space". I didn't see any boys-only friend groups past third grade. Sometimes refugees from the Bosnian war would drive around town in all-male groups, and it was notable that they never, ever had any girls with them. Had we been saying sus like the alpha kids, we definitely would have called it sus.

@BetterWithCheddar, I also appreciate the courage to share, and the gentle reminder to not accidentally imply that all individuals who had a gender-segregated scouting experience failed to learn how to work with the opposite gender respectfully. The folks on our committee who scouted gender-segregated are quite well-adjusted and respectful. I see and hear other examples of that in media and on the Internet. So, if you don't mind explaining some more - is the view you're expressing an adult-looking-back view, then, rather than what you were thinking at the time? What were your friend groups like, did you have any that were single gender? And how did you stop peacocking? (I assume you no longer do what you did back then, even when you are actively trying to catch a particular woman's romantic attention.) The reason I ask is that while I've certainly seen peacocking, I don't remember seeing much of it in middle school (but that was long ago so maybe I didn't notice or don't remember), and middle school was when girls and boys in my town started to form mixed-gender friend groups spontaneously after the "cooties" period in elementary school. There was kind of a redefining of gender relationships to reduce overall tension as people let go of some fixed ideas about what girls and boys were like, and people sorted themselves more along interest and personality lines and disregarded gender except for romantic pursuits. Almost like now that we were starting to turn into men and women, we could stop role-playing gender and just do what we wanted. So for me, middle school was a time of relaxation into friendships with boys - and I do mean friendships - in a way that sounds almost opposite to your experience.

That's what this looks like to me. Obviously being young can be rocky and the adult world needs to offer compassionate and skillful support, but I am curious about why this just wasn't a thing when I was that age myself and now it is.

TBH when Scouting America announced that they would allow girls to join, but hastened to add gender -separated still to preserve the benefits of that, my immediate thought was "what benefits?" They never even explained what they were meant to be, and until encountering this anxiety about girls in Scouting America I had never heard of all these problems with doing things together with the opposite gender at any and all ages, not just in scouting but anywhere. Well, I take that back - I have heard about it from refugees. But from my Swedish POV their complaints sound like optional problems to have, since nobody else is having them, not even all refugees. I hear what they're saying, but it doesn't 'click' with my own experiences and the fact that the ones with issues with people doing things with the opposite gender are also from countries with little respect for women doesn't help endear me to their angst. My own experiences with men from those countries easily top my personal 'most sexist experiences' list. I mention this so that you know that this "genders need to be separated" idea is in my mind strongly associated with sexism with the intent to disenfranchise women, take away our freedom to do as we please, and treat us like sex objects. I'm not saying that everyone talking about the need for gender separation in any circumstance ever, but because the association is so strong you should be aware that it's there. The subject triggers it. It's like that for me also with this boys need their own space line of thinking I hear people express here. It doesn't seem to be 'boys' as much as 'some boys', and I'm not entirely sure what the problem is exactly. My best guess is social anxiety based on what I've read. It's not a problem everyone is having. People allude to it but rarely get specific enough to problem-solve, and the correlation between more sexism and more gender separation is the elephant in the room. I'm assuming that your sincere personal intent is not to be sexist? Would you be willing to explain what was happening for you that made you want to retreat from girls? Even if they're 2-3 m tall? I thought saplings were much smaller.

This isn't a big difference, but since so few others on the forum scouted gender integrated themselves I'll write it out also - sometimes we ditched the tent when backpacking and brought two tarps to construct a lean-to either on private land with permission to take a few .. what's the English word for young tall tree about as thick as a wrist? anyway, them, or where the SM had dropped the precut tall thin debranched trees for us to work with in advance. But this didn't really change how we slept in terms of relative body location - it's even more important to huddle together in the lean-to than a tent, especially if the.. what's the English word for the slow-burning parallel log fire that makes the "heat curtain" at the open end of the lean-to? anyway, the heat curtain fire doesn't burn that strong, the cold creeps in now just sideways but from your feet too, so nobody ever suggested anything different from the whole patrol in the same lean-to.

No, it was a summer model without a wood stove, but all the combined body heat also did help on chilly spring, summer, and fall nights. We did lie right next to each other (resulting in quite a bit of trying not to step on your patrolmates when you needed to pee in the middle of the night), helping hold on to our warmth. But backpacking with a cast iron wood stove and fuel for it would have been a bit much 😄

Of course we did backpacking. And our leaders made us divide up that whole heavy monstrosity to carry with us. At the time I thought it was ridiculous, but now as a leader I think it was in part for budget reasons (the reason given) but also in part to prevent miscellaneous interpersonal problems by keeping the whole patrol together.

We slept in big circular canvas tents. If you're looking to prevent sexual activity at scouting events, it's perfect. Only the most daring exhibitionists are going to have sex with an audience of people you personally know and will eat breakfast with the next morning. For the same reason it's hard to get away with CSA when the entire patrol is present at night.

Not saying nobody ever got together withing scouting, or that relationship drama can't cause problems, but again, scouting doesn't automatically turn into a meat market just because girls and boys are doing the same things. That's all I'm saying.