When Factory Jobs Vanish, Men Become Less Desirable Partners
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
How many in which category? The article treats men who moved away as the same problem as being junkie. Social problems like alcoholism and drugs are talked about as if they would be same as being unemployed. It is odd conflation, it is not the same, not even nearly.
I don't know how all of the 8 billion people on this planet can be expected to meaningfully contribute to something (that can't be done better and more cheaply for everyone by automation) and "earn" their money, without seriously crippling technological advancement (e.g. the advent of self-driving vehicles, or robot lawyers/doctors.)
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
The later is in a way already happening just to keep unemployed people occupied:
Have a look at Potemkin economy:
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/frances-potemkin-econo...
> Candelia is one of a number of so-called “Potemkin” companies operating in France.
> Everything about these entities is imaginary from the customers, to the supply chain, to the banks, to the “wages” employees receive and while the idea used to be that the creation of a “parallel economic universe” would help to train the jobless and prepare them for real employment sometime in the future, these “occupations” are now serving simply as way for the out-of-work to suspend reality for eight hours a day
Society fears a large unoccupied class. Whether that fear is warranted or not is a different thing.
Those aren't necessarily very good goals, but they're more complicated and much harder to do away with than just lust for money.
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
Particularly for males.
Single mothers are a different thing altogether and if they can take care of their children without working and alone then they are praised.
When comparing two things, it's useful to understand what is the comparison being made. Of course these things aren't the same in general sense of things - but as far as making a man "unmarriable" (as in statistically desired by either gender for a long-term relationship and partnership), they have a pretty similar effect, don't they?
Anyone who has seen the upper echelons of society knows how many drugs are used up there too - and therefore knows that they are not first tier-causes (of being on the bottom) in every use case.
Not necessarily. A woman might be better off holding out for someone with a job. Especially when she isn't already pregnant.
I'd challenge TFA's "men less desirable" summary, however. Some men are less desirable, but that would seem to make others that much more desirable.
I was thinking the same thing. Hooray for being marriage material.
Not familiar with that acronym.
Care to elucidate?
"Fewer men were working in manufacturing, which tended to mean their wages were lower than they had been when manufacturing had more of a presence in their area. And their wages were not significantly higher than women’s wages, which they had been during the heyday of manufacturing. (Fewer women worked in manufacturing in the first place, so they were less affected by the shocks.)
"This made the men less appealing to the women, the authors suggest—so there were fewer marriages. They find that trade shocks reduced the share of young women who were married, and reduced the number of births per woman."
In terms of marriage candidates, those are the same problem (except those who had moved elsewhere).
Me, I'm amused by the title of George Lakof's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind . But actually, it turns out that "Women are not dangerous things", according to Plaster and Polinsky (2007).[0]
And it was an interesting read (basically about categories/measure words/collective nouns, "families" of meaning or "radial" categories, and rejection of the good old Aristotelian notion of definition as membership in a class together with some more specific boolean predicate, e.g. "a bachelor is a man that is not married").
Anyways, great title, great book. Interesting paper you posted, though I don't recall whether Lakoff actually made the case that Dyirbal speakers saw women as dangerous. The paper suggests that "there is no synchronic conceptual association among all of the items in a given gender class; in particular, the smaller subsets within a class do not need to be radially related to the semantic core. The overall class membership is motivated only diachronically, and even then not necessarily on semantic grounds." - would Lakoff disagree?
Birds fly and planes fly.
In the sci-fi movie Advantageous, a future society with a lot more automation, has high unemployment rates. Recruitment (which in the movie is mostly done by AI) eventually evolves to a consensus whereby most jobs are assigned to men because otherwise society would become a lot more dangerous to everyone.
EDIT: References:
[1] 74% of single mothers voting Democrat
[2] one quarter voting Republican
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/single-mothers-give-... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/single-moth...
If you're married to the state, then you vote for more of the state. It's one of the many examples where liberty has been eroded in recent decades, but few talk about it because it's a sensitive topic.
Also claiming that tax reduction is a form of welfare if very disingenuous since basically that would mean the State would be entitled to take all of your profit by default... meaning any amount of profit allowed would be welfare.
And if you'll remember the 1990s, the entire plan to cut welfare benefits was premised on the Earned Income Tax Credit taking up the slack. Which actually worked in some ways though, if anything, it makes it easier for single mothers to provide for a family by working a low wage job. Which has distorted the "marriage market" though in different ways from the welfare benefit.
It doesn't really matter how much welfare costs (obviously it should kept under control like military, health and education) and that's why I didn't mention that aspect. All I'm concerned about is the state becoming so involved in an individual's life, that it nannies them like a parent.
Huh? Marriage itself is a legal construct by the state, no different than a corporation. Is a corporation a "basic building block for society" too? Should it be? What makes you think marriage is such a great thing that society should be dependent upon it? Statistics show that it's a massive gamble, and you're more likely to lose with it than you are to benefit. On top of that, the risks are enormous: child support, alimony, and in many cases, bankruptcy.
>All I'm concerned about is the state becoming so involved in an individual's life, that it nannies them like a parent.
That's funny, coming from someone who obviously supports marriage, which is absolutely an example of the state nannying people and becoming involved in an individual's life. Try going through a contested divorce and tell me the state wasn't involved.
The simple fact is that your "standard familes" are a complete and utter failure. Society needs an all-new paradigm, because clinging to this archaic institution clearly isn't working.
This is the first I'm hearing of this. I know the right is against "leeches," but I've yet to see them single out single mothers.
Unless you're referring to undertones in their (Republicans') way of conduct. If so, then I wouldn't expect single mothers to be able to recognize the subtlety.
That kind of language, in various forms, has been a dogwhistle of the right since Reagan started saying it at campaign rallies.
The only people who actually seem to think that welfare causes these problems, are the ones who don't think we should be paying welfare. People who are on welfare or know those on that kind of assistance know better.
I'm not making a value judgment or saying we should want this disparity, just pointing out that throughout our history, it's mostly been this way.
This doesn't mean that women in these situations wouldn't tend to gravitate toward the most power male with the largest resources in the pack but in most case it's the other way around.
Why won't the men compete for the jobs the women are getting?
Alternatively, the men could stay home and take care of the kids while the women work at the jobs they have, providing the stable two-parent household.
It seems like a large portion of the problem is tied up in men's idea of what constitutes a "manly" role. I don't mean to trivialize the difficulty of changing one's perspective, but changing diapers has to be a better option than dying from an Oxycontin overdose doesn't it?
The reality on the ground is that many women consider extended unemployment a good-enough reason to end a marriage.
A cynical but not unrealistic view is that humans tend to display loyalty to performed roles in relationships, not to individuals.
If one individual stops performing their assigned role, the relationship ends.
When there is no more work, in the house or out, all that is left is room for enlightenment or self-destruction.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
>If one individual stops performing their assigned role, the relationship ends.
This is a very succinct way to describe reality.
Thank you for stating it so clearly.
+ well hot, smart, and having lived interesting lives by 35. That describes all 3 of them.
I am a feminist man and I would not be keen to form a lasting relationship with an unemployed woman unless she was already wealthy.
It's statistics and sociology.
The last time I saw data on this, that was one of the most common causes.
Sort of makes me glad that I met my fiancee while I was very poor, hopefully I set the bar rather low.
I suspect that there are deeper compatibility issues at play and major events like infidelity or job loss just act as catalysts for divorce.
Although, as you say, that's still out of the husband's control.
Source?
Very difficult to change in any meaningful way.
You'll have outliers, but statistically it will be insignificant.
I seem to be an appallingly bad feminist. For me, it's about equal social and political rights, but it turns out it's really all about a whole lot of crazy stuff I don't understand. It's odd that the people who most loudly understand what feminism really is seem to be those opposed to it, and people who simply label themselves feminists (such as myself) end up mystified by where all this extra junk comes from. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps people aren't conflating advocation of equal social and political rights with a whole lot of other things, but it's generally not worth the conversation.
That mentality is one of the reasons we need feminism. Women will only become increasingly equal to men as time goes on. If we blindly cling to antiquated, unrealistic notions of what constitutes an acceptable partner, we impede progress.
Edit, forgot to include the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795397
This "women want a higher earner" picture is a bit crude, and applying it to this situation ignores that men are often ass holes who aren't interested in a genuine partnership, and that category has some overlap with the chronically out of work.
For all the attention that is given to the lack of women in CS and Engineering the story in aggregate for all majors is that women outnumber men at colleges. It's been that way since 2000 and the trend has continued in the past 17 years. Its to the point where women outnumber men two to one at some large schools like UNC which are, for example, 60% female. [1]
It's very much both sex's perspective of role. Clichéd it may be, but there's a truth behind women preferring men with money, power or strength, or a combination of all.
Okay well how exactly "common" is it?
> but there's a truth behind women preferring men with money, power or strength, or a combination of all.
And men prefer attractive women...so what?
The majority of these men are uneducated and unemployed. The article states many are HIGH SCHOOL drop outs.
I'm a male. and I can tell you right now that I probably would not marry a female high school drop out.
The problem to me is not the women. it's that boys are being left behind in school and more work needs to be done to educate and re-purpose males from unskilled drones to skilled or white collar workers.
Frankly, I would not want such father for my children.
The article said it is women making the decision.
Today, the burden of household work has been cut to 1/10th of what it used to be, jobs are primarily intellectual, and education is paramount. The model to compare against is not the factory worker who was poor in the 1900s, and somehow due to a quirk of history became middle class in the 1950s.
We ought to compare against the gentleman class---those who in the 1900s had maids, butlers, personal transportation, and intellectual jobs akin to what we do today: management, clerking, accountancy, licensed professions, etc.
In those cases, people married sideways---intellectual women marrying men then helping to run the estate, daughters of merchants marrying other merchants and participating in the businesses, 'professional' socialites giving the entire clan a leg up by creating situations where networking was possible.
This is the position we have inherited, and if we must take lessons from the past--we should take lessons from the right class.
There's a lot more sideways than there is 'down'. Technically its pretty hard to even get to know people of a lower class than you; rarely do you mingle.
Anecdotally, I know at least two families in my neighborhood, in which the father stays home with the kids. One of the moms is a physician, and the other is a business executive.
It's a real mess everywhere.
Because different people are suited to different jobs. Why didn't (and don't) women generally compete for manufacturing jobs? Because being a creative designer or HR professional or pre-school teacher or dental hygienist is something much preferred for certain types of people. Just look at the numbers [1].
Men not only don't want to do certain types of jobs, but in many cases can't - they're not well-suited for them. So even if/when they compete, they'll lose to less experienced women just entering the workforce. And vise-versa for other types of jobs with flipped genders. There are gender differences, plain and simple. You can argue why they exist, but for this discussion it's not as relevant at this point.
I would like to note that the next "industrial wave" could affect women pretty hard as well: artificial intelligence. Recruiting and HR software, health-care robotics technologies, therapist chatbots, etc, could upend the female-dominated jobs listed in [1].
> Alternatively, the men could stay home and take care of the kids while the women work at the jobs they have, providing the stable two-parent household.
Heh, I guess you haven't read many women's online dating profiles for what is acceptable in a mate and what isn't. You generally have to be higher up on the ladder (education, wealth, status, etc) to attract a woman for mating in the first place. How this manifests in data: 80% of guys are "below average"! [2]
But who needs data, ask your grandfather if he could have "stayed home and taken care of the kids while the woman works" and he'd laugh at you and tell you to stop being a sissy. They may not have been able to explain it, but older generations have typically understood more about human nature than we give them credit for.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...
[2] https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...
A) Be a man, don't compete for women's jobs, drink beer instead of going to work, likely don't have a girlfriend or get laid because you don't have your finances in order...
B) Be less of a man, compete for women's jobs, drink less beer and more wine at dinner parties, bite your tongue about the manliness and receive willing girlfriends and sexual partners...
Anyone with any sense will laugh at this above false choice implicitly being promoted.
or in women's idea of what constitutes a "manly" role.
> This group includes Olivia Alfano, a 29-year-old single mother living in Evansville, Indiana, where she works as a waitress at Red Lobster. The money is pretty good, she told me: She drives a BMW and was able to buy a house last year.
Am I the only one who is surprised by that? (I don't live in the US)
The problem with a story like the quoted is that it presents the superficial elements of someone's lifestyle without giving any actual insight into the fundamentals (i.e., budget) on which the lifestyle is based.
So, I guess stuff like this might seem surprising to those unfamiliar with US culture. But my point is it may only seem surprising if the assumption is the person actually paid for those things. It's highly unlikely that a house, car, and kids are in the clear on a part-time waitress salary, and more likely that the person is up to her eyeballs in debt and neglected to mention it.
For the "nothing strange at all" argument: Median home value in Evansville Indiana is $105700 [1] - even with a bog-standard 30 year mortgage at 4% with no down payment that's a monthly payment of only $505. A relatively small down payment ($20K via help from parents), and/or some fancy (unwise) 5/1 ARM financing could probably get you below $400/month mortgage payment. Depending on age and model and condition, a used BMW can be had for under $3K.
If she owns an above-average home and a new/expensive BMW, then I would say there are important details being left out.
IOW, it matters less if you're living with less than a month's worth of savings, so long as you can afford the payments and have a history of making payments; so here's a BMW.
I bet she has a gigantic pile of debt and gets a lot of help from state. And alimony.
I worked at an similar restaurant back in the 2000s and cleared $25k a year working part time, mostly weekends. I'm an unattractive man. The attractive women I worked with would clear double what I made each shift.
Evansville is a cheap place to live, relative to the rest of the US. It's doable to raise a family on that salary with help from family for child care.
"The American federal government requires a wage of at least $2.13 per hour be paid to employees that receive at least $30 per month in tips. If wages and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any pay period, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate. As of May 2012, the average hourly wage – including tips – for a restaurant employee in the United States that received tip income was $11.82."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_St...
In other words, the minimum wage does apply, and even with tips the employer must pay at least some money.
Everyone I know who's ever worked for tips has tended to make quite a lot, considering.
Edit: incoherence
> “You don’t want to marry a man who is in all likelihood not economically viable, because it’s not a free lunch,” Autor said.
"Not economically viable" is the exact phrase used in the movie "Falling Down" by the man who was denied a loan by a bank and was arrested while the Michael Douglas character looks on sympathetically. His wife ditched him, too.
Yes, old school partnerships are dying, but that doesn't make males more disposable.
If anything,it gives men and women more options and opens up our society to fine tuning. (effects of large scale single momhood/dadhood, competetive job markets and novel family and supporting social structures) the old was nice, but if a single unit can function and achieve what a complex unit used to, wed all benefit. Supposing the experiment doesn't end in failure and twist society. Though even if it does, we'll self correct. After all, nature still rules us.
It's a culture of work hard, fuck-young and marry-old(er) for partnership for the coming future, we'll see where that takes us.
Single-parent families, step-families all require better parenting, management, and communication skills, since they're more complex, and these parents aren't more skilled than the average, with predictable consequences.
Check the statistics on "fatherless" households, children of single mothers perform worse on every single metric. Worse academically, commit more crime (and much more rape), more runaways, more addictions, the list goes on.
> Yes, old school partnerships are dying, but that doesn't make males more disposable.
Implies that "old school partnerships" are dying, but being replaced by something new. That's not the case. It's not a case of old-thing-evolving-into-a-new-thing. It isn't being replaced by anything, just being destroyed. I'll bet you single mothers are much less happy than married women, especially in their 50s and 60s, not to mention the increased likelihood of being abused by dates, strings of failed relationships, increased stress, and loneliness.
that said, ill add that single parents of the past are often a result of a broken house hold. the single parents of the future will do so by choice, this will give rise to interesting dynamics, i think.
it isn;t replaced by anything right now, but crises leads to break through, we might/(most likely will?) deal with is, as nature would have us, by either coming up with a new paradigm, or breaking then reverting to (a better?) version of the old.
maybe im an optimist, but ive seen so much shit, and the world is knee deep in shit these days that i need to believe that we'll make it.
to deal with this issue i personally would suggest community (kibutz style?) child care, which ironically echoes a communist tint, to deal with time-not-spent with children. top that with corporate/workplace restructuring (ala sweden with mandatory father-time as well as mandatory mom-time off for birth) and we'd be on our way.
one issue i do see is old age and loneliness. i see so many lonely old people here in europe. for now, females are growing older and finding it more difficult to find a partner after choosing not to marry. the men are reluctant to take an older woman as a partner, and while i understand hypergamy, im not sure i understand why the older men are not taking mid-30-smth women as partners.
also, i dont understand why can't couples marry and support each other's careers and just have kids later. is it so unnatural? it might boil down to the socioeconomics of hypergamy, which is a thought that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, to think that our females are "programmed" as such is no comforting notion.
Well that's the problem, isn't it? The self-correction is for nature to destroy us so that something else can take our place.
It's completely possible for births to be below the population replacement rate until the people die out. It already is in first world countries save for immigration, and that can't save you if the third world industrializes and automates to the point they're in the same situation.
If we don't want that to happen we may have to start finding ways to enable people to marry and have more children.
A culture and society which devalues having children and raising them properly, even as a side effect of a nobler purpose, is one that will die out and be replaced with another.
Neither unemployment nor environmental destruction is incompatible with population decline.
The unemployment rate is independent of the population size, because fewer people means less demand which means proportionally fewer jobs.
And unchecked evil corporations can perfectly well automate environmental destruction and carry it out with a minimum number of people.
And adaptation is a real challenge, because it may mean learning completely new technical skills as well as completely new social and political skills as well as being unusually creative and inventive - and most men have to attempt this after a very poor education and little or no mentoring or modelling of the possibilities.
In the past, men could get by fairly passively because the job-market was full of ready-made slots for them. They could turn up and fill a slot and money would start flowing.
Now the slots have to be invented before they can be filled. That immediately disenfranchises the 90% or so of the population who aren't particularly creative or entrepreneurial.
And even if a slot is invented, the odds of lasting success aren't great. Most projects fail, and failure isn't tolerated well.
So we've gone from an open job market with limited selection pressure and relatively easy rewards to a very closed and challenging job market which only works for maybe 5% of the male population - specifically unusually intelligent, creative/inventive, socially connected and/or wealthy, or just plain sociopathic men.
It's a huge, huge change, and I don't think we've even started to see the effects.
If we eliminate STEM fields from the set of options, the prospects for young men to earn as past generations seems to be drastically reduced.
It's not the absence of a job that'll Choke us, it's the pricing of things with ill adapted wages. I'm in IT, but still,I can see trouble down the road thst I'm trying to tackle now.
We do live in interesting times.
So what if the coal mines close down?
We dont live in aculture where needs stop evolving. Where there's a need, there's industry of some sort.
Humans brains adapt, especially generationally.
I dont see Germany suffering any detrimental consequences of the modern workplace (where I am right now) and infact it's flourishing.
That Said, the education system and the industrial system works close together here, and it's a better system than most. So countries need to pitch in to the effort if educating it's populace for modern day jobs
Then people need to get a very good education to get one of the new jobs. Because the old jobs are dying out, those you could get into with little education.
The problem for men? That boys fare far worse in school than girls. This gets rarely addressed, e.g. the vast difference in reading comprehension.
Boys then should just adapt? Well, whenever women seem to have a disadvantage (the whole MINT-discussion), society is supposed to fix it. Whenever men have problems, they remain their individual problems, and it's definitely their fault. No systemic forces here to be seen, move along everybody.
A last comment about Germany: The lack of jobs for unskilled workers is definitely a huge problem. It makes it incredibly difficult to integrate everybody with a, shall we say, sub-par education. Almost half of the Turkish hailing migrants in Berlin are unemployed. 75 % of them did not graduate from secondary school.
there's a distinct need to revise all schooling before it's too late, tbfh. the men of old were very well educated, those who could get an education. but it was a harsh education, so the world today isn't willing to deal with it.
if boys sucked so much at reading and writing, we wouldn't have had all those male authors or male scientists. the system's whacked now, and it'll crash and crumble before it's fixed, especially in germany with their switch to MBAs, worsening school systems, and neglect of young boys (have nothing against trying to push women forward, just don't forget the boys)
Wow, this is staggering. Do you remember where you saw those figures? (I don't doubt them, I just want to quote them in other discussions.)
What does MINT refer to?
You seem to have a lot of faith in education systems in a capitalist environment. My own observations is that universities are just enrolling students in courses regardless of there being jobs available in those fields or not - as long as they are making a profit. I doubt governments can move fast enough to develop proper education systems to educate the population for modern day jobs.
The majority of the population opting out of traditional higher-ed would be a wholesale benefit to the current state of affairs, imo, as it would allow something more suitable to appear.
systems such as the one switzerland has (tight coupling of industry and education) are not bad at all, but it requires an informed public, and more imprtantly, informed lateral-thinking politicians.
the coming crises will test us, and i believe we'll come out stronger, albeit with a few bruises and some lasting scars.
Have you ever talked to people who live in the projects? They have little hope. There is no "industry of some sort".
I view these two minorities as a result of governmental neglect,corruption or/and policy.
Can you argue about how the topic at hand affects them? Maybe I don't follow your argument well enough.
If we assume that means the next generation adapts, what's the current one to do with its remaining 40-60 years, except for voting for Trump?
"Generationally" is the key word in your comment.
what do you suggest we do about it? i have a few plans after im done with my studies which include education centers, but ill need to delve deeper into the issue first, something my studies currently don't allow.
I guess men who just want to have sex might benefit, because they can just sleep with women and then leave, and society takes care of the single moms. Likewise, women can have more sex with varying partners.
The downside is not having a family or having a stressful family life (as a single mom).
And for the absent dads, the state will try to get the money back from them, so their outlook isn't pretty. They'll bend up being poor and lonely.
[0]: http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequen...
Some statistics:
> Children living in female headed families with no spouse present had a poverty rate of 47.6 percent, over 4 times the rate in married-couple families.
> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states, “Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.”
> Children of single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to commit suicide.
> Children age 10 to 17 living with two biological or adoptive parents were significantly less likely to experience sexual assault, child maltreatment, other types of major violence, and non-victimization type of adversity, and were less likely to witness violence in their families compared to peers living in single-parent families and stepfamilies.
The "gender roles" crowd is deeply dogmatic and misguided, and it's having incredible consequences.
EDIT: To clarify, I do NOT condone violence toward non-traditional arrangements. Sorry if I came off that way.
Moreover most tribal societies in Western/Central Europe up until the 7th century -- in Scandinavia until the 10th century -- were polygamous. Some of these societies were highly successful. The Vikings for example weren't just barbarous brutes and pirates, but also tradesmen and farmers with highly sophisticated technologies like metallurgy, coinage and shipbuilding.
So no, I don't think that "Civilization is built on monogamy". If anything, monogamy as a family model is built on the roman church, and it's the heritage of the roman church our society is based upon.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
That said, infedility is also a corner stone of our civilisation.
K-selection is civilization. r-selection is feralization. One of the goals of religion was to tame r-selected behaviors and to encourage K-selected behaviors.
That's not a claim, it's a fact. You need to study evolutionary psychology. Women seek a man to provide and protect. Period. Other qualities are in play too, but I'm talking about an evolved need. You take away the ability of a man to provide and protect and he becomes shit to a woman. You take away the womans ability to provide for herself and she becomes more dependent on marriage to get by. Why does this gender difference exist? Because being pregnant and caring for children both make women more vulnerable and detract from their self preservation ability. Hence the evolved family structure that works.
Do you have any idea what the social structures of paleolithic humans were?
Is that a good thing? Is it something we should pursue?
http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequen...
It's much more complex than "we need to accept everybody! Every arrangement is just as good as any other!"
[0]https://psmag.com/8-000-years-ago-17-women-reproduced-for-ev...
I wonder if the universal basic income will be enough to make the societal shift needed in this case.
It's a recipe for disaster. Civilization is built on monogamous relationships: children being raised by a couple (statistically a far better environment than single parenthood), young men and women focusing their energy for the betterment of society.
Here's the thing though - not having a script is a good thing. It allows people to discover what matters to them and what humanity and society is to them. If it's something other than the current state of things - then it should've been changed a long time ago, rather than putting pressure on people to conform to an ideal that nobody wants when they're allowed to think for themselves. It's also what LGBT people have been dealing with for a long time, so you might want to ask how they deal with it, rather than asserting it's the end of society.
Single parenthood isn't the only alternative to being raised by a couple. In fact, those being the only two options is a fairly recent thing. It used to be that children were broadly brought up by communities - to the point that food would be served by whoever happened to have the kids nearby when it was served. Still happens in some places, even in the middle of huge cities - I was brought up like that. Now, for some reason (fear?), parents attempt to keep a tight leash at all times, and the only interaction with one's community a kid might get is through approved and strictly regulated extracurricular activities.
brave new world. maybe it will take the shape of "Universal Basic Soma".
orgy porgy!
But I was mostly dismissing it, considering that rational thought would in the end triumph. Considering that, in the least, each repetition should bring extra information for the effect to manifest.
That thread prompted me to give some though to the subject and the answer I arrived at so far does not make me happy at all. Realizing that repetition by itself is enough, clarifies some things I did not understand and simply classified as reality not making sense.
I feel ever more justified in my energy consuming efforts to fact-check information I receive and in my strides to present information as opinion/personal thought/conclusion based on sources/mere reproduction of sources instead of truth. I am more aware of this than before but at the same time it causes a lot more stress to me now than it did before.
I am less willing than I was to engage in live discussions where I receive information, because that places a burden of fact checking on me and I can not always do that at the speed of real life. And depending on the interlocutor I can not rephrase the discussion in terms of hypothetical statements.
> The other, minor difference is that men are polygamous, not hypergamous. A man’s imperative is not (necessarily) to get the best woman. It’s to get as many women as possible with as little investment and commitment as possible. If he can do it, he would love to get as many women as possible at and a little below his own SMV, and have sex with as many of them as possible for as long as possible, without committing to or investing in any of them. That’s spinning plates. Most men don’t do this, because they can’t, because they’re not attractive enough, but that’s a different post.
OK, so I'm a guy, and I can say for sure that this is what I always wanted. Most of the time, I wasn't attractive enough, because I was too self-conscious and nerdy. But I did manage it for a few years, until STDs took me down :(
Anyway, there's also this about women:
> A woman’s imperative is to get the best one man she can get for sex and for provisioning. That’s why you don’t see many women “dating” (i.e. having sex with) several different men at the same time. Women don’t spin plates; they pick the best plate they can and take care of it as best they can. Instead of trying to collect plates, they just change out the plates, one for another, when a bigger, better one comes along.
That's consistent with what the parent article concludes, I think. It's just that there aren't many good plates left.
0) https://therationalmale.com/category/hypergamy-2/
Edit: Responding to therpe1, I'm no evolutionary biologist, and I get that I've quoted a guy with quite an agenda. Still, the distinction that he draws fits will with the biology that I learned, and my personal experience. But please, do cite evidence.
First, most everybody has a natural urge to have sex with a lot of hot people. It's just that some people (women, for instance) will face greater opprobrium from their families and communities for doing so. That doesn't stop all women though. Many do in fact have sex with multiple men at a time. I am open to talking about the statistics of how many men vs. how many women do this, but I would not make conclusions involving stupid plate-spinning metaphors as that article does. And actually, the only stats I can find indicate that women tend to engage in polyamory more so than men [1].
And whether or not you're personal preferred lifestyle is to settle down, it's pretty much irrelevant when you're speaking about men generally. I have had a very high number of sexual partners, but I chose to then get married and have a single sexual partner. It's not because I would have been unable to keep sleeping around. I get approached by women more now than ever before and I'm not lying to say that I could find a new attractive sexual partner every day. I don't want to though. So, my experience and attitude directly contradict that passage you quoted.
[1] http://www.advocate.com/current-issue/2016/1/08/polyamory-nu...
"She may not leave you the day you lose it, but the countdown has begun."
I mean, I get the basic facts, but I find it oddly jumping around between the men's situation, interjecting manual labor in fields that are dominated by women and then going off in the direction of single parents. Not that I would expect any kind of mentioning possible solutions, but this piece left me scratching my head a little .
If a woman prefers a man with wealth or status, she's a gold-digger, and feminism is wrong about women -- they want traditional gender roles. Women are just naturally drawn to wealth and status despite what feminism says they should want.
If a woman has sex with a man regardless of his wealth or status, she's a slut. Feminism is wrong about women -- they are naturally attracted to "bad boys", not "Good guys" who are responsible and work hard. "Good guys" are being cheated out of sex by women. If they support feminism despite the fact that women no longer value social/economic status, which reduces their chances to have sex, they are "white knights".
If a woman won't have sex with a man, it's because she's a frigid bitch -- feminism has made men irrelevant. Feminism is responsible for suicide bombers and spree killers because they couldn't get sex from women.
It's amazing to me how much pseudoscience and entrail-reading comes into discussions of gender. It's so tightly linked to our experience of the world that it's almost impossible not to spin one's own experiences into quasi-rational explanations.
For example, this quote from the article: "A substantial number go on to have children with a second partner, or even a third, creating complex and unstable family lives that are not good for children."
Says who? Human beings have pretty much always lived in extended clans with "complex family lives". The nuclear family is a pretty recent invention in the history of homo sapiens. The whole article seems to be trying to paint a picture that humans lived in nuclear families from the dawn of time to just a few years ago -- that it is taking children away from the way they are meant to be raised. In fact, this is bringing humans closer to the way they've pretty much always lived, in extended clans with complex family trees, with incredibly complex language for describing those relations.
"This creates challenges for the people (usually women) who have to raise a child without the economic or social support of a partner. Their struggles are why the authors see such an uptick in children living in poverty in the aftermath of a decline in manufacturing employment."
This is just terrible writing. Women raising children without support of a partner would, by definition, not be affected by the decline in jobs for men. The whole article (and many of the comments here about it) are filled with these kinds of self-refutations and self-fulfilling prophecies. People just start with a conclusion when it comes to gender and work backwards.
I'm wary to offer my own opinions on these issues, because they might be just as full of confirmation bias, question begging, and social proof-seeking. Maybe human beings are just really bad at discussing this topic.
> Says who? Human beings have pretty much always lived in extended clans with "complex family lives". The nuclear family is a pretty recent invention in the history of homo sapiens.
I think the article is saying complex AND unstable, not complex THEREFORE unstable. The assumption being instability is bad, complexity alone isn't bad, but both together can be worse than instability alone.
> "This creates challenges for the people (usually women) who have to raise a child without the economic or social support of a partner. Their struggles are why the authors see such an uptick in children living in poverty in the aftermath of a decline in manufacturing employment."
> This is just terrible writing. Women raising children without support of a partner would, by definition, not be affected by the decline in jobs for men.
I think the assumption there is that before these women would have a partner with a full time job, but instead they have no partner and have to work + raise a child. This isn't saying that women who didn't have a partner before are worse of now, it is talking about a demographic shift from having a partner to not.
I not only find this with lower middle class men but men I work with as well. They are getting sick and tired of being manipulated by women and trapped into families they never planned to or agreed to and being expected to do all the work financially for the rest of their lives...
I find in male dominated environments with men of higher socioeconomic status, that they end up dating financially needy women who are incentivized to lock them into a long term financial relationship because theres not enough economically independent women to date.
Additionally, I find women like me tend to be much more attractive to them for the reason that working women doing well and climbing the socioeconomic ladder by ourselves are attractive because we have ambition, which in their socioeconomic stratus is not something they are conditioned to, so not only is it attractive because you have more in common to talk to someone about, but its also from their point of view rather exotic and rare, and thus instantly more desireable. While a comment below stating chinese stats is generally worriesome, in America, the issue is not that lower income men can't get women, its that they cant get the women that they want. While most of the comments talk about how these women need to be more openminded, I find myself as a socioeconomic 26yr old woman progressing in my technical career in engineering and software development, I find that there is not nearly enough women, and that we need many more.
IF this happens (and that happening whether its happening and causes behind it happening or not is a WHOLE different discussion) over time then the standards men have for women will raise. While these men are pining after women who in reality don't exist in great numbers, just highly highlighted, the other 95% of women are incentivized to compete on a personal and economic level if they find men on their level and above their socioeconomic level are choosing women who make their own money, and they will begin to understand they are the only ones providing for themselves and over time women will seep into previously considered male dominated environments and take on more management and leadership roles.
Over the long run, this will hopefully allow men and women to engage in short or long term relationships or whatever they choose as we all become more accepting and openminded based on the person and less on the economic benefits they can provide. Progress is painful, and as one of the few women pioneering in it, I get pressure form men i work with to date and marry, men who serve me drinks to date and marry, and I get hate and drama from all the girls who are mad at me for making more money than them (who have no problem dating men with money but lots of problems with women making money, and can't seem to solve that issue in their head)
In general, its not as glamorous as it seems if you are actually a full time, preference for low drama female with your career as your first priority. Women like us are highlighted as the pain point of the issue, but we are not the cause of it, and over time hopefully the solution.
The other complaint I have about this whole argument is if women are getting a higher socioeconomic status while men complain they don't have jobs, then there are clearly jobs, they are just stereotypically female jobs, so instead of men complaining that the universe isnt entitling and providing them to the (in the grand scheme of things incredibly fleeting and nonpermanent manufactoring jobs) they should be more open to becoming nurses, teachers, government jobs and other jobs that are clearly in a great shortage for that women are not only working full time side jobs while taking night classes to become nurses and etc but raising kids while doing it often times as a single parent.
If they can do it men can do it, they just don't want to because its an uncomfortable stereotype to break, but in WWII many women stepped into manufactoring jobs to fill the void in America, so men need to do the same thing.
For now its a bit of an awkward phase for men because they are used to being the ones that get to choose and women have always been very willing to compete in looks and otherwise to get access to that financial stability as it was the only socially acceptable way to do so for so long without permanently striating yourself into a considered deplorable condition.
Men need to realize over time women becoming more independent is a good thing for everyone. Gorwing pains will always exist in society, its how we adapt to them that makes both men and women successful and competitive candidates in the working field and in the personal relationship realm.
This ongoing complaint I keep hearing about men wanting to fall back into manufactoring jobs and women getting jobs is a more a complaint about how they wish things would never change and how they want people to accomodate them instead of steering the dicsussion to how to adapt to reality.
Men seem to have been replaced by a master-slave relationship with masses of people working for a small group of large companies that provide for both men and women. It is like large businesses are the new man. I feel like they are a middle-man that simply should be replaced. I tend to agree with the unabomber in that modern life simply isn't compatible with humans.
Life used to be rough and unfair for most us men. Maybe the oldest son had a chance to inherit the farm or shop of his father so he could provide for a wife and family. Many men, however, had no such luck and went through life without marrying, many without ever dating or being with a woman.
Western women don't need men to provide an income to the same extent as before, and that opens up a lot of other possibilities for us men.
Guys can actually get married although they only earn enough to support half a family or 40% of a family. I even know several guys that makes less than 10% of the family income (and that's through welfare). What chance would a stay home dad have had in 1920? What chance would an unemployed guy have had?
And equally important, we can date women without providing them anything else than a bit of romance. It has still only been a couple of generations in which a majority of us dated for years without having to marry.
Some women still look at earning ability but many women also look at other traits nowadays. Looks, intellect, humour, family skills, interests etc. Work on that and be grateful you weren't born at any point in human history before the 1950s.
Why is post-1950 men better off in this regard than pre-1950?
Anecdotally, I've heard quite a few Chinese woman tell me that they wanted to marry someone who was rich only to end up marrying a few years later someone who earned about as much as they did.
I don't have statistics for countries that have been developed for some time like US and Europe but, in my experience, flexie is absolutely correct. It's not that difficult to find women who don't really care about the earning ability of their mate.
Post-1950 man has so many more freedoms and opportunities and ways to live life, sure it is probably harder if you want to live your imagined 1950s lifestyle but now you don't have to live that 1950s lifestyle.
I am sure a huge number of men were chain ganged into living that way during the 1950s which made life a lot worse than now.
But I guess with choice and freedom brings anxiety and fear of choosing incorrectly.
Citation needed. This has absolutely not been the case in most of recorded history and in most of the known world.
Not for men without college degrees.
I wouldn't even want to change for a successful young, white American male in the 1960s or whenever America was at its industrial peak.
Look, we are so lucky at this point in time in the Western world. Far from everything is great, but we live long lives in comfort, mostly painless, mostly without death or disease or hunger, mostly without war, we date around for fun during a decade or two, travel as we like, wherever we like, get entertainment on demand, chose our own profession, before we marry out of love when we are in our 30s or even 40s. Kings would envy our comfortable lives and I bet even Cary Grant would envy the dating life of a regular young man armed with Tinder.
That book has a lot of his opinions on the disappearance of the men's virility, but the parts in which he explains the causes and consequences of that are fascinating.
The industrial revolution and global colonization changed that, injecting opportunities for an ever-growing section of men; and genocidal mass-war eventually did the same for women. This land of mirth and honey where every man has an opportunity to bootstrap himself is a somewhat fantastical invention. Social mobility might have been higher than average in the US between 1850 and 1950, but anywhere else "where you come from" was always the most important factor in anyone's fortunes.
[1] http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/151/the-white-feath...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-wee...
We should do well to recognize criminals as fellow human beings, instead of mindlessly reject everything about them, just so that we can follow the predictable and tiresome ritual of shunning the deviant so we ourselves can be perceived as good.
I feel that you rely more on interpretations of personal experience instead of objective look at the world.
Civilization was built on all sorts of identity-based subjugation relationships and as we chip away at them, in the long run, it gets better.
If your implicit assumption is true (women only stay in relationships because they require a partner's income to survive) then we have a moral imperative to provide escape hatches from those toxic relationships as quickly as possible.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795530 and marked it off-topic.
From the article it seems the problem is that women continue to seek providers, despite what decades of feminism have tried to tell them they should want.
Are you implying that we should be closed and/or ashamed of beliefs we might hold in this category of discourse?
As someone who's hung around this place along time, I'd love to see a link of a discussion with "unchecked" claims that women should stay home.
And then look how many people have ideas about what's "natural" that come straight out of Victorian etiquette books.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795608 and marked it off-topic.
But I accept your disapproval of my jibe towards HN.
Poor men cannot afford weddings and children. Shocking.