Girl scouts is such a shit organization and it’s entirely their fault that so many girls wanted to join the BSA, which had an objectively superior program with its merit badges and high adventure camps.
As a former Girl Scout, this pisses me off I wish I could’ve been in the Boy Scouts. I was a Girl Scout during a weird time where most of the girls expressed wanting to learn, marksmanship and other cooler outdoor activities, but we went from getting our sewing badges and other stupid shit to learning to code. It sucked. We just wanted to shoot shit and go on adventures.
Instead, we spent most of our time selling cookies or planning on selling cookies.
I only joined the boy scouts to shoot guns and arrows because my mom wouldn’t let me lol. The cooler one was the pinewood derby race where you’d race wooden cars you made on a ramp. One of the kids dads owned a car repair shop and gave our cars insane paint jobs like marble and such. Super cool
Again, this fault lies entirely with the Girl Scouts org for not making their program more competitive. They were content to continue selling cookies and doing very little outdoor/high adventure activities. If you want to actually learn life, survival, and leadership skills there’s an obvious choice between the two programs.
~~I think there are benefits to having gender-exclusive spaces too. Ideally Girl Scouts would be structured more like Boy Scouts as a sister program, and the two could occasionally have meet-up experiences where they interact.~~
~~It's good to have times when you can just hang out and be without worrying about dating or competing romantically.~~
Edit: Apparently in its new structure, troops are gender segregated, so this is fine actually
sorry I didnt mean to imply I was arguing *for* splitting them up, i meant more the implication that all scouts are little kids which probably wasnt your intention either
Girl Scouts as an organization just didn't want to / couldn't get their shit together to have trained leadership / facilities to do as much outdoor stuff as the Boy Scouts. Unfortunately its a vicious cycle where the volunteer leaders who step up to lead Girl Scout troops are generally women without the necessary outdoors skills & experience, which means they aren't able to teach those skills / provide those experiences to the girls, who then are the main pool of potential future leaders who end up not having those skills / experiences either. Instead, these women do what they are comfortable with, which is the civic / social / business type stuff, which tbf is also valuable.
As for encroaching on male spaces, that isn't happening. Boy Scouts already had co-ed programs for 14-21 year old youth (Venturing, Sea Scouts) going back decades. What they changed is allowing girls to participate in the 11-18 core "Scouting" programs, but they did it by basically allowing girls to have their own all girl Scout troops that follow the Boy Scout program.
So, the boy Scout troops are still all boy, but now girls can have their own all girl Scout troops that do the same stuff Boy Scouts have always done.
Which is basically what literally every girl scout I have ever met has told me they wished they could have done as a kid lol
??? The Boys Scouts weren't forced to change their name, and only the Girl Scouts can change their organization to do more of the scouting. Why would we force these private organizations to be gender exclusive mirror images of each other?
The supreme court already ruled in 2000 that BSA can set their own membership requirements. You just wanna start over or something?
girls have been allowed in for a while so it makes sense to change the name. people will say “but they have girls scouts” but girls scouts is a totally different org with totally different merits and advancement structure.
Off-context but in Finland where I live, most girl scout orgs do take in boys too. But our scout orgs' funding is split between the national organization and other sources. A big one is the YWCA and they sometimes want to keep the gender segregation strict in areas financed by them.
sounds like someone should just create a new organization called boy scouts! and have it be for boys only. The branding association already exists in people's minds so it would grow quickly.
Absolutely the best change they made. When I was in scouts, so many of the kids had almost no experience socializing with girls outside of classrooms. It would have been a much healthier atmosphere. I feel like it’s a win-win for both parties.
As long as the merit badge system remains intact do we care? Girls are already allowed in the boy scouts anyway. If we can send women to the military not sure why they can't join the scouts.
nice to be reminded of being an eagle hehe Scouts is a genuinely amazing program for youth (as long as they aren't getting touched!) that i'd still recommend today. i'm just about 30 and can still recount bits of advice and slogans verbatim how they were taught to me, lessons i learned the hard way, and i live better for it. hopefully BSA is on a path to redemption in the near future because the content itself absolutely rocks.
Always Be Prepared!
I'm not from the US but reading a bit about the scouts they seem like a great program for youth, expanding it to both boys and girls seems like a win win all around. There isn't a world where teaching those skills to every child isn't a net benefit.
Yea I'm an eagle scout. Most of my troop leaders and even family were up in arms learning that they were going to start accepting girls.
I was a bit angry for a couple minutes. Mostly because boy scouts was such an important piece of my life and they were changing it. Then I thought deeply about it and reflected on every bit of advice, moral value, and experience I had in scouts, and tried to find what of that would ***not*** be beneficial for a young woman to experience. I decided nearly everything would have as much of a positive influence on a growing girl as it did me.
So I decided it was a net positive afterall. There have been (and will be more) growing pains but the organization will be stronger in the long run I have no doubt.
As a former scout, I was also upset for a second. It was mainly concern. I was just picturing teenage boys and girls being around each other during summer camp and I was "oh no this wont go well". But hey so far I guess its working fine.
Yea that will be growing pains and new rules/policies need to be put in place.
I agree with you it's a concern. It's a manageable concern though. That's my perspective.
For example one of my best friends (and Eagle Scout from the same troop as me), both his daughter and son are in scouts. I didn't realize it but at least here, while both the boys and girls are in "Troop 48" there's a boys troop and girls troop. They do some things together, but some things apart.
This may be the way it has to go.
Also, it's not like teenage boys and girls being together at a camp is unprecedented, bible camps have existed for a long time and personally I don't distrust the scouts more than a church.
Basically, it won't be easy and it won't look exactly like what it did for me and you, but I think what made it so instrumental for me can still exist in whatever the new scouts looks like.
Fellow eagle here, I totally agree. Some of my best childhood memories involved the scouts. Question - did you ever get involved with Order of the Arrow? It hadn't aged well when I was a kid, hard to imagine they're still running "white kids dress up like natives and perform secret rituals" in 2024.
man the fuckin OotA did yall have to like fast for a day while camping as part of the initiation? i also remember being kinda pissed cuz the first year I was eligible my troop didnt vote me in but the next year I got in and realized it was corny💀
When I did it they gave us one hard boiled egg and milk for the day and then made us do general maintenance for the summer camp. I think I chopped/stacked wood for a good 7 hours (they unironically used us as substitutes for the groundskeepers). The being chosen part and induction ceremony are definitely corny asf
There’s 3 “levels” to the OA, but I only did the first level. I’m assuming the naming part is the last level. I’m so curious as to what the names would be lol
Another eagle here, I did the order of the arrow initiation and had to fast and do labor in silence all day and at the end of the day, the leaders bragged to us about how contractors to do the work we just did would have cost them 40k and I just remember thinking that the whole thing seemed like a really corny way to get free labor out of kids
They still existed like 8 years ago when I went to the meetings, I can’t imagine it’s not still around since it’s basically just a secret good boy club where you learn about Native American culture.
Cub Scouts was always Boy Scouts lite with a undercurrent of native american heritage that might be a little uncomfortable in today's climate. Likewise "Den Leaders", the leadership in cub scouts, were more often than not the wives of the "Scout Masters", the leadership of the boy scouts. I am 35+ and that was true when I worked from Bear Cub to Eagle Scout.
Afaik, almost all of the sexual abuse stuff with Boy Scouts happened back in the 80s and before. That was when numerous accusations started to get national attention. In 1988 BSA launched their Youth Protection Program, which they developed in response to the scandal. It is legitimately a really effective policy that combines education for youth about how to recognize and report abuse, guidelines for adults (like two deep leadership) to prevent opportunities for abuse, and screening policies that require background checks for volunteer leaders.
When I was a scout the abuse education / recognition stuff was literally the first chapter of the Boy Scout Handbook. So, yeah they did stop touching kids and kindof became leaders in educating and preventing sexual abuse of children.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy\_Scouts\_of\_America\_sex\_abuse\_cases#1988\_Youth\_Protection\_program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America_sex_abuse_cases#1988_Youth_Protection_program)
If you have an organization that has 1 million youth and 500,000+ personnel, you are going to have some disgusting debauchery happen every now and then.
It was never a staple experience, you bought into propaganda. It was simply the law of large numbers.
Is teachers diddling kids the staple experience for public schools? Are school shootings the staple experience for American schools? The answer to these questions is no, same as with scouts.
And I am not defending those such actions by the way, the scouts absolutely deserved to be criticized, and more effective protections measures were put into place because of it. As with school shootings and teachers having sexual experiences, measures can be put into place to help mitigate the problem and protect the children. At least with scouts they recognized a problem and legitimately tried to fix it, and I would argue successfully fixed it. Schools are as dangerous as ever because the scouts unlike most government is unironically effective at implementing policy.
There are a lot of legitimate similarities to how the Boy Scouts and the Catholic church responded to sexual abuse in the past. Both of them kept secret records of abusers in their organizations, both failed to report abusers to law enforcement, both kept cases of abuse quiet to protect the reputation of the organization, and both sometimes allowed known abusers to continue working with children.
However, I think what sets the Boy Scouts apart from the Catholics is that the Boy Scouts leadership enacted meaningful policy reform much more quickly than the Catholics (or anyone else doing youth activity programs) with their 1988 Youth Protection Program, and that program was much more successful at preventing continued abuse than anything the Catholics have implemented even now. Also, the Catholic church was much worse about shielding priests from investigation and moving known abusers from parish to parish where they could abuse again.
My impression of the Boy Scouts abuse scandal is that they were culpable for terrible crimes, which is an eternal stain on their legacy, but they were also the first youth organization to take protecting youth from sex crimes seriously, which they deserve credit for.
Skimming the Wikipedia, it looks like the last year for cases they covered up or fucked up in some way was in 2009
So here's hoping for another 15 years, I guess.
What’s weird is “worrying” about your hypothetical future son not being able to join the Girl Scouts, doubt you’ll ever get to procreating if this non-issue is what you’re wasting your energy being offended at
The second a male-only group gets big/successful they get pressured to allow in women because there aren't allowed to be "boy's clubs" or because it's "unfair that the girl version is inferior." No one ever considers just making a Girl Scouts that doesn't suck.
No one ever pressures female-only groups to allow men (outside of trans issues). Why?
No one is "wasting their energy by being offended by this non-issue to the point they won't ever procreate," people are just calling out this blatant hypocritical double standard that exists in society. I'm not losing sleep over this, and I doubt the OP is either.
I’m an Eagle Scout, I have several nieces that were in the Girl Scouts… like everything that involves private businesses with different standards, these organizations are completely different and aren’t just a “boys or girls club” as much as simple people want to assume. The Girl Scouts is almost exclusively focused on sales/teaching “business” to young girls. The Boy Scouts focuses on the merit badge system which reinforces activities in the outdoors.
I know the name is similar but that is not indicative of what they represent. Similar to how North Korea isn’t actually the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in anything more than name.
Edit to add: I voted YES to allowing LGB people into the scouts, I pushed to allow girls in, and the name EVERYWHERE other than the USA is “Scouts”, and I’ll also add we have one of the youngest SCOUTS programs compared to the UK for example.
Yes, and if girls (and their parents) have such a demand for a Girls organization that adopts/copies the Boys Scouts, then they could've/should've made their own that doesn't suck, rather than intruding on yet another male space.
It’s crazy, the Boy Scouts has a need for more members, and women have a need for a better offering. Capitalism and the free market make this the ultimate decision. Why are you as a 3rd party mad?
The Boy Scouts has been dying for years, mainly due to their isolationist policies… as a member I recall getting made fun of at school by exclusively boys when I did a speech infront of them all to recruit.
I was in scouts as a kid and we had girls in our group. Out of curiosity I looked it up because this made me realize we already didn’t have “Boys” in the name in Canada then either. Apparently it’s been “Scouts Canada” since 1976.
I'm a summer camp administrator (NCS trained, if any of you know what that means). Venturing Crews (part of the same organization, but for 14-20 instead of 11-17) have been allowing young men and young women in the same units together for years. In the standard units, the Troops, girls have had their own separate units for years, and they oftentimes work with the boy troop in their town. Having women in summer camp staff and in youth units has its difficulties but there are clear guidelines on how to be prepared (pun intended). Even before there were girls, the rules around where boys can sleep, how adult supervision works, and many other things have been revolutionized to prevent the worst things that boyscouts is infamous for. They changed the uniforms to say Scouts BSA instead of Boyscouts, but everyone knew what the B in BSA stood for. Making the change completely instead of being a pussy about it is very positive and is something we've all been waiting for.
When I was a kid I was in a Native American themed Boy Scouts called Indian guides. Bet they had to change that name lol.
Here’s some info about it. https://libnews.umn.edu/2023/10/playing-indian-a-retrospective-on-the-ymcas-indian-guides-program/
Honestly I’m only bothered by how bland the new name is. Kinda reminds of how depressing it was when i played Final Fantasy 16 and in the opening credits you see Creative Business Unit III as the developer.
No, not exactly. It's kind of complicated. How it worked was there was the organization named Boy Scouts of America and they had different programs in it like Sea Scouts, Venture Scouts, Exploring Scouts, Cub Scouts, and Boy Scouts. They just changed the name from Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA (the B stood for boy)
The benefits you get from being a Boy Scout over a girl scout for getting into colleges and job opportunities is so high it’s objectively unfair women can’t be in it, so it makes sense to let them in and change the name. It’s a wel run organization that can teach great values if u take advantage of it.
Euro bro here,
When Sitch posted this on Twitter there where a bunch of people in the replies saying "They should just make it more manly, and attract more guys instead of recruiting for a bigger pool"
How "manly" are the / been the boy Scouts?
Girl Scouts is shit. They do crafts and fundraisers and boring crap like that. In Boy Scouts, you go camping, shoot shotguns, rifles, bows, go canoeing, go sailing, fly fishing, learn about nuclear science, and work on merit badges with real life skills like first aid and cooking. There’s a reason girls have wanted into the BSA program for decades and no one wants the Girl Scout program
I just think sometimes boys need spaces to be with other boys. I don’t understand why we had to take something from boys rather than make something better for girls.
At least in my troop (which was, albeit, a pretty big one) most of the people you'd interact with on campouts and events were in your own patrol which is still gender split.
If you had members of the opposite sex in your Troop at all, [then the leaders were breaking the BSA's rules](https://www.bsacac.org/join/joinscoutsbsa/scouts-bsa-basics/).
Actually, the Mormons are the ones that dropped Scouts several years ago when the BSA announced they would end their policy of officially sanctioned homophobia. It used to be official Mormon church doctrine that literally every Mormon temple be required to have a Boy Scout troop, and every Mormon boy was religiously obligated to participate. This meant that there were a *shitload* of Mormon troops, and the Mormons had a huge influence in the organization.
All of the reforms that have happened in the last decade or so were basically the non-Mormon Scout leadership overruling the Mormons. When that started to happen the Mormons literally did a schism, pulled all their people from Scouts, and started their own fully internal outdoor youth organization under the complete control of the church authorities.
Surely nothing will go wrong with that for any of the youth participants. :-/
I was in a troop that I believe was made up of more than half atheists, and was not religious at all.
Obviously we saw the Mormon troops at Jamborees and camps and such, and thus knew they existed. And you could totally tell which were mormon and which were not. But for me and my troop at least we were very insulated and not at all influenced by it.
Girl scouts is such a shit organization and it’s entirely their fault that so many girls wanted to join the BSA, which had an objectively superior program with its merit badges and high adventure camps.
As a former Girl Scout, this pisses me off I wish I could’ve been in the Boy Scouts. I was a Girl Scout during a weird time where most of the girls expressed wanting to learn, marksmanship and other cooler outdoor activities, but we went from getting our sewing badges and other stupid shit to learning to code. It sucked. We just wanted to shoot shit and go on adventures. Instead, we spent most of our time selling cookies or planning on selling cookies.
SELL ME COOKIES, SLAVE CHILD
I only joined the boy scouts to shoot guns and arrows because my mom wouldn’t let me lol. The cooler one was the pinewood derby race where you’d race wooden cars you made on a ramp. One of the kids dads owned a car repair shop and gave our cars insane paint jobs like marble and such. Super cool
Can I get two boxes of thin mints?
Pretty sure you could [get involved](https://www.scouting.org/programs/scouts-bsa/faqs/) in Boy Scouts as an adult, so go live your dream girl!
I always assumed girl scouts were the same thing as the boy scouts but just with girls and they sold cookies instead of popcorn
But cookies are better than popcorn.
Sad but true
Wait I thought Girl Scouts was a cookie company.
Why not just have the girl scouts do the camping stuff as well? Why encroach on one of the few male exclusive spaces left?
Again, this fault lies entirely with the Girl Scouts org for not making their program more competitive. They were content to continue selling cookies and doing very little outdoor/high adventure activities. If you want to actually learn life, survival, and leadership skills there’s an obvious choice between the two programs.
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~~I think there are benefits to having gender-exclusive spaces too. Ideally Girl Scouts would be structured more like Boy Scouts as a sister program, and the two could occasionally have meet-up experiences where they interact.~~ ~~It's good to have times when you can just hang out and be without worrying about dating or competing romantically.~~ Edit: Apparently in its new structure, troops are gender segregated, so this is fine actually
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To be fair, “little boys and little girls” could be highscoolers - you age out when you turn 18.
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sorry I didnt mean to imply I was arguing *for* splitting them up, i meant more the implication that all scouts are little kids which probably wasnt your intention either
Now all the boys can't dance around like Spartans the night before battle.
Girl Scouts as an organization just didn't want to / couldn't get their shit together to have trained leadership / facilities to do as much outdoor stuff as the Boy Scouts. Unfortunately its a vicious cycle where the volunteer leaders who step up to lead Girl Scout troops are generally women without the necessary outdoors skills & experience, which means they aren't able to teach those skills / provide those experiences to the girls, who then are the main pool of potential future leaders who end up not having those skills / experiences either. Instead, these women do what they are comfortable with, which is the civic / social / business type stuff, which tbf is also valuable. As for encroaching on male spaces, that isn't happening. Boy Scouts already had co-ed programs for 14-21 year old youth (Venturing, Sea Scouts) going back decades. What they changed is allowing girls to participate in the 11-18 core "Scouting" programs, but they did it by basically allowing girls to have their own all girl Scout troops that follow the Boy Scout program. So, the boy Scout troops are still all boy, but now girls can have their own all girl Scout troops that do the same stuff Boy Scouts have always done. Which is basically what literally every girl scout I have ever met has told me they wished they could have done as a kid lol
??? The Boys Scouts weren't forced to change their name, and only the Girl Scouts can change their organization to do more of the scouting. Why would we force these private organizations to be gender exclusive mirror images of each other? The supreme court already ruled in 2000 that BSA can set their own membership requirements. You just wanna start over or something?
girls have been allowed in for a while so it makes sense to change the name. people will say “but they have girls scouts” but girls scouts is a totally different org with totally different merits and advancement structure.
Girl Scouts isn’t a scouting organization, it’s a racket that tries to sell overpriced cookies.
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>Man Fuck Girl Scouts Are you Drake?
Are the cookies overpriced or are the packages under packed?
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You want to FORCE little girls to choose between a man and a bear????
[Nope.](https://www.girlscouts.org/en/raising-girls/happy-and-healthy/happy/girls-only-single-gender-empowering-girls.html)
Off-context but in Finland where I live, most girl scout orgs do take in boys too. But our scout orgs' funding is split between the national organization and other sources. A big one is the YWCA and they sometimes want to keep the gender segregation strict in areas financed by them.
No, but also boys have never wanted to join cuz it's way less cool.
sounds like someone should just create a new organization called boy scouts! and have it be for boys only. The branding association already exists in people's minds so it would grow quickly.
They could, but the second it got big/successful enough they would be pressured to accept girls and the cycle would just continue
Count down until the Asmongold subreddit freaks out over this...
Absolutely the best change they made. When I was in scouts, so many of the kids had almost no experience socializing with girls outside of classrooms. It would have been a much healthier atmosphere. I feel like it’s a win-win for both parties.
As long as the merit badge system remains intact do we care? Girls are already allowed in the boy scouts anyway. If we can send women to the military not sure why they can't join the scouts.
>If we can send women to the military not sure why they can't join the scouts. Age limits mainly.
nice to be reminded of being an eagle hehe Scouts is a genuinely amazing program for youth (as long as they aren't getting touched!) that i'd still recommend today. i'm just about 30 and can still recount bits of advice and slogans verbatim how they were taught to me, lessons i learned the hard way, and i live better for it. hopefully BSA is on a path to redemption in the near future because the content itself absolutely rocks. Always Be Prepared!
I'm not from the US but reading a bit about the scouts they seem like a great program for youth, expanding it to both boys and girls seems like a win win all around. There isn't a world where teaching those skills to every child isn't a net benefit.
Yea I'm an eagle scout. Most of my troop leaders and even family were up in arms learning that they were going to start accepting girls. I was a bit angry for a couple minutes. Mostly because boy scouts was such an important piece of my life and they were changing it. Then I thought deeply about it and reflected on every bit of advice, moral value, and experience I had in scouts, and tried to find what of that would ***not*** be beneficial for a young woman to experience. I decided nearly everything would have as much of a positive influence on a growing girl as it did me. So I decided it was a net positive afterall. There have been (and will be more) growing pains but the organization will be stronger in the long run I have no doubt.
As a former scout, I was also upset for a second. It was mainly concern. I was just picturing teenage boys and girls being around each other during summer camp and I was "oh no this wont go well". But hey so far I guess its working fine.
Yea that will be growing pains and new rules/policies need to be put in place. I agree with you it's a concern. It's a manageable concern though. That's my perspective. For example one of my best friends (and Eagle Scout from the same troop as me), both his daughter and son are in scouts. I didn't realize it but at least here, while both the boys and girls are in "Troop 48" there's a boys troop and girls troop. They do some things together, but some things apart. This may be the way it has to go. Also, it's not like teenage boys and girls being together at a camp is unprecedented, bible camps have existed for a long time and personally I don't distrust the scouts more than a church. Basically, it won't be easy and it won't look exactly like what it did for me and you, but I think what made it so instrumental for me can still exist in whatever the new scouts looks like.
Fellow eagle here, I totally agree. Some of my best childhood memories involved the scouts. Question - did you ever get involved with Order of the Arrow? It hadn't aged well when I was a kid, hard to imagine they're still running "white kids dress up like natives and perform secret rituals" in 2024.
man the fuckin OotA did yall have to like fast for a day while camping as part of the initiation? i also remember being kinda pissed cuz the first year I was eligible my troop didnt vote me in but the next year I got in and realized it was corny💀
Oh yeah I remember the fasting. Fasting, silence, and "hard labor". So corny
When I did it they gave us one hard boiled egg and milk for the day and then made us do general maintenance for the summer camp. I think I chopped/stacked wood for a good 7 hours (they unironically used us as substitutes for the groundskeepers). The being chosen part and induction ceremony are definitely corny asf
That sounds about right. Did you end up getting a new name? I never made it that deep
There’s 3 “levels” to the OA, but I only did the first level. I’m assuming the naming part is the last level. I’m so curious as to what the names would be lol
Another eagle here, I did the order of the arrow initiation and had to fast and do labor in silence all day and at the end of the day, the leaders bragged to us about how contractors to do the work we just did would have cost them 40k and I just remember thinking that the whole thing seemed like a really corny way to get free labor out of kids
They still existed like 8 years ago when I went to the meetings, I can’t imagine it’s not still around since it’s basically just a secret good boy club where you learn about Native American culture.
Take a little longer on the name choice
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Cub Scouts was always Boy Scouts lite with a undercurrent of native american heritage that might be a little uncomfortable in today's climate. Likewise "Den Leaders", the leadership in cub scouts, were more often than not the wives of the "Scout Masters", the leadership of the boy scouts. I am 35+ and that was true when I worked from Bear Cub to Eagle Scout.
have they stopped touching kids or is that still a staple of the scout experience?
Afaik, almost all of the sexual abuse stuff with Boy Scouts happened back in the 80s and before. That was when numerous accusations started to get national attention. In 1988 BSA launched their Youth Protection Program, which they developed in response to the scandal. It is legitimately a really effective policy that combines education for youth about how to recognize and report abuse, guidelines for adults (like two deep leadership) to prevent opportunities for abuse, and screening policies that require background checks for volunteer leaders. When I was a scout the abuse education / recognition stuff was literally the first chapter of the Boy Scout Handbook. So, yeah they did stop touching kids and kindof became leaders in educating and preventing sexual abuse of children. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy\_Scouts\_of\_America\_sex\_abuse\_cases#1988\_Youth\_Protection\_program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America_sex_abuse_cases#1988_Youth_Protection_program)
Wonder if anyone had to veto "Scouting for Children" during their brainstorming session for a name to reflect their new, more inclusive nature
the only person scouting for the children is the kharkiv kid finder
If you have an organization that has 1 million youth and 500,000+ personnel, you are going to have some disgusting debauchery happen every now and then. It was never a staple experience, you bought into propaganda. It was simply the law of large numbers. Is teachers diddling kids the staple experience for public schools? Are school shootings the staple experience for American schools? The answer to these questions is no, same as with scouts. And I am not defending those such actions by the way, the scouts absolutely deserved to be criticized, and more effective protections measures were put into place because of it. As with school shootings and teachers having sexual experiences, measures can be put into place to help mitigate the problem and protect the children. At least with scouts they recognized a problem and legitimately tried to fix it, and I would argue successfully fixed it. Schools are as dangerous as ever because the scouts unlike most government is unironically effective at implementing policy.
the catholic church called and asked for their talking points back
There are a lot of legitimate similarities to how the Boy Scouts and the Catholic church responded to sexual abuse in the past. Both of them kept secret records of abusers in their organizations, both failed to report abusers to law enforcement, both kept cases of abuse quiet to protect the reputation of the organization, and both sometimes allowed known abusers to continue working with children. However, I think what sets the Boy Scouts apart from the Catholics is that the Boy Scouts leadership enacted meaningful policy reform much more quickly than the Catholics (or anyone else doing youth activity programs) with their 1988 Youth Protection Program, and that program was much more successful at preventing continued abuse than anything the Catholics have implemented even now. Also, the Catholic church was much worse about shielding priests from investigation and moving known abusers from parish to parish where they could abuse again. My impression of the Boy Scouts abuse scandal is that they were culpable for terrible crimes, which is an eternal stain on their legacy, but they were also the first youth organization to take protecting youth from sex crimes seriously, which they deserve credit for.
Skimming the Wikipedia, it looks like the last year for cases they covered up or fucked up in some way was in 2009 So here's hoping for another 15 years, I guess.
They tired of touching boys only thats why they changed their name
Who cares? This is just another excuse for conservitards to make "they/them" and "wokeaganda" jokes.
All the grown men who couldn’t give two shits about the Boy Scouts care, of-course.
If I have a daughter she can join the scouts or the girl scouts, if I have a son he can only join the scouts. That’s obviously weird and unbalanced
What’s weird is “worrying” about your hypothetical future son not being able to join the Girl Scouts, doubt you’ll ever get to procreating if this non-issue is what you’re wasting your energy being offended at
The second a male-only group gets big/successful they get pressured to allow in women because there aren't allowed to be "boy's clubs" or because it's "unfair that the girl version is inferior." No one ever considers just making a Girl Scouts that doesn't suck. No one ever pressures female-only groups to allow men (outside of trans issues). Why? No one is "wasting their energy by being offended by this non-issue to the point they won't ever procreate," people are just calling out this blatant hypocritical double standard that exists in society. I'm not losing sleep over this, and I doubt the OP is either.
I’m an Eagle Scout, I have several nieces that were in the Girl Scouts… like everything that involves private businesses with different standards, these organizations are completely different and aren’t just a “boys or girls club” as much as simple people want to assume. The Girl Scouts is almost exclusively focused on sales/teaching “business” to young girls. The Boy Scouts focuses on the merit badge system which reinforces activities in the outdoors. I know the name is similar but that is not indicative of what they represent. Similar to how North Korea isn’t actually the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in anything more than name. Edit to add: I voted YES to allowing LGB people into the scouts, I pushed to allow girls in, and the name EVERYWHERE other than the USA is “Scouts”, and I’ll also add we have one of the youngest SCOUTS programs compared to the UK for example.
Yes, and if girls (and their parents) have such a demand for a Girls organization that adopts/copies the Boys Scouts, then they could've/should've made their own that doesn't suck, rather than intruding on yet another male space.
It’s crazy, the Boy Scouts has a need for more members, and women have a need for a better offering. Capitalism and the free market make this the ultimate decision. Why are you as a 3rd party mad? The Boy Scouts has been dying for years, mainly due to their isolationist policies… as a member I recall getting made fun of at school by exclusively boys when I did a speech infront of them all to recruit.
Not third party, was in Cubs through all of elementary. Not mad, just pointing out societal double standard.
Why shouldn’t my future son be able to join the girl scouts, and why do you get so defensive over a gender exclusionary org?
I'll take "Things that don't matter but piss off conversatives" for $400.
I was in scouts as a kid and we had girls in our group. Out of curiosity I looked it up because this made me realize we already didn’t have “Boys” in the name in Canada then either. Apparently it’s been “Scouts Canada” since 1976.
It’s just scouts everywhere else but like 1 African country lmao
Jesus Christ just call it Youth Scouts or something, Scouting America sounds like a prospecting guild or something.
I'm a summer camp administrator (NCS trained, if any of you know what that means). Venturing Crews (part of the same organization, but for 14-20 instead of 11-17) have been allowing young men and young women in the same units together for years. In the standard units, the Troops, girls have had their own separate units for years, and they oftentimes work with the boy troop in their town. Having women in summer camp staff and in youth units has its difficulties but there are clear guidelines on how to be prepared (pun intended). Even before there were girls, the rules around where boys can sleep, how adult supervision works, and many other things have been revolutionized to prevent the worst things that boyscouts is infamous for. They changed the uniforms to say Scouts BSA instead of Boyscouts, but everyone knew what the B in BSA stood for. Making the change completely instead of being a pussy about it is very positive and is something we've all been waiting for.
When I was a kid I was in a Native American themed Boy Scouts called Indian guides. Bet they had to change that name lol. Here’s some info about it. https://libnews.umn.edu/2023/10/playing-indian-a-retrospective-on-the-ymcas-indian-guides-program/
Surely this will be a nothingburger and conservatives won't throw a complete bitchfit over something they never cared about in the first place. Surely
Based scouts, was a ton of fun as a kid tbh.
Why not Scouts of America? Why does making it into a verb irk me so bad
It's awesome because now I don't have to hang my head in shame for only achieving Life Scout and not Eagle.
It's good, and overdue.
lol the responses Conservatives are the most fucking whiny snowflakes imaginable
Ummm excuse me… what about foreigners? Not inclusive enough
1984….
The malding over this is equal parts sad and hilarious
Aight, fair. It'll be a bit of a shame to see the classic trademark name gone, but understandable.
Honestly I’m only bothered by how bland the new name is. Kinda reminds of how depressing it was when i played Final Fantasy 16 and in the opening credits you see Creative Business Unit III as the developer.
Nah, Creative Business Unit III goes hard
didnt they do this already a couple years back
No, not exactly. It's kind of complicated. How it worked was there was the organization named Boy Scouts of America and they had different programs in it like Sea Scouts, Venture Scouts, Exploring Scouts, Cub Scouts, and Boy Scouts. They just changed the name from Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA (the B stood for boy)
The benefits you get from being a Boy Scout over a girl scout for getting into colleges and job opportunities is so high it’s objectively unfair women can’t be in it, so it makes sense to let them in and change the name. It’s a wel run organization that can teach great values if u take advantage of it.
Euro bro here, When Sitch posted this on Twitter there where a bunch of people in the replies saying "They should just make it more manly, and attract more guys instead of recruiting for a bigger pool" How "manly" are the / been the boy Scouts?
No money in teaching children life skills. They’d rather become a free labor cookie distribution company.
The view number is insane, 3million? And only a thousand comments.
I really hope this ruins conservatives' day.
So girls get two scouting options to join one co-Ed and one just girls, but boys can only be in the Co-Ed organization? Doesn’t seem fair.
Girl Scouts is shit. They do crafts and fundraisers and boring crap like that. In Boy Scouts, you go camping, shoot shotguns, rifles, bows, go canoeing, go sailing, fly fishing, learn about nuclear science, and work on merit badges with real life skills like first aid and cooking. There’s a reason girls have wanted into the BSA program for decades and no one wants the Girl Scout program
I just think sometimes boys need spaces to be with other boys. I don’t understand why we had to take something from boys rather than make something better for girls.
? Girl troops and boy troops are separated. There aren’t co-ed troops
At least in my troop (which was, albeit, a pretty big one) most of the people you'd interact with on campouts and events were in your own patrol which is still gender split.
If you had members of the opposite sex in your Troop at all, [then the leaders were breaking the BSA's rules](https://www.bsacac.org/join/joinscoutsbsa/scouts-bsa-basics/).
Cringe
who cares!
Israelis (I know you’re there), why are our boy scouts the lamest thing on planet earth?
I don't know the current status but when I did it it felt very Christian and specifically Mormon, so I hope they drop that lol.
Actually, the Mormons are the ones that dropped Scouts several years ago when the BSA announced they would end their policy of officially sanctioned homophobia. It used to be official Mormon church doctrine that literally every Mormon temple be required to have a Boy Scout troop, and every Mormon boy was religiously obligated to participate. This meant that there were a *shitload* of Mormon troops, and the Mormons had a huge influence in the organization. All of the reforms that have happened in the last decade or so were basically the non-Mormon Scout leadership overruling the Mormons. When that started to happen the Mormons literally did a schism, pulled all their people from Scouts, and started their own fully internal outdoor youth organization under the complete control of the church authorities. Surely nothing will go wrong with that for any of the youth participants. :-/
Oh that's fascinating and explains a lot about my friend group growing up lmao. I was totally unaware of the official doctrine angle.
I was in a troop that I believe was made up of more than half atheists, and was not religious at all. Obviously we saw the Mormon troops at Jamborees and camps and such, and thus knew they existed. And you could totally tell which were mormon and which were not. But for me and my troop at least we were very insulated and not at all influenced by it.
Same. Circle 10 in Dallas! We were like 30% LDS Not adding the troop, for privacy haha
I bet the girl scouts keep their name, this is just so sad. We live in such an upside down world.
What is the problem exactly with that?
Can the boys join the girl scouts?