...how have things gotten objectively worse for young men?
Now social media blasts kids with "this is what's cool" on an hourly basis. Not got the latest Off-White? Uncool. Jordan Mids? Uncool. Still wearing [brand here]? Uncool. On top of that, everyone promoted is wealthy, beautiful and photoshopped. And on top of that it's all insanely addictive. So not only are you told over and over you're behind with the latest trends, and not only are you made to feel over and over that you're not pretty/wealthy/happy/cultured/whatever enough, but you're addicted to seeing it. And then everyone has a platform to bully you for it 24 hours a day. It's not even like you have that 12 hour respite where you're not at school.
I can't begin to imagine how as a fragile teenager this sort of thing would have affected me. Props to anyone young that keeps their head together.
Anyway, just my 2c.
And for some reason it's even harder to make friends today. (Probably because people drift away from each other faster. Better global mobility, you can have a job anywhere, you can study anywhere, your work might include a lots of travel. You switch jobs faster than people used to. There are a lot more things to do even on a budget, so individual differences get an emphasis, but then those things to do don't provide with new friends. You can do yoga, hiking, biking, sailing, paragliding, and whatever for a few months then switch to the next, the years go by, and you haven't formed a lasting connection. Plus add the whole experience industry - you don't have to do the hiking with the local enthusiasts, you can simply pick a guided/organized event every week, and meet new people every week. And there are even more things to do online - which are again not the typical friends making venue.)
Oh, and don't forget those beautiful echo chambers on the Internet. That helps to radicalize people. (Just go to a gun enthusiast site after any/each shooting and look at the comments. Then look at an anti-gun whatever site, maybe HufPo?)
Someone right now could be bullying me on Facebook. Someone might be targeting me with a Facebook ads. They might be sending me links to the latest fashions. None of it affects me or my mental health at all because I have not used Facebook in close to ten years.
Now, the obvious reply to that is "but online dating is for men too, look at all these guys meeting a different girl every day". This applies to a very small minority of men. The confident, attractive types with great bodies. An average woman will still get lots of attention on dating website and have a lot of guys to pick from, an average guy won't really get any attention on such websites.
Women are more empowered to choose their own partners today than at other times in history, for sure. For much of human history, the privilege to choose one's partner was reserved for men (at times exclusively). You can certainly remark that today things are relatively worse for men (for some narrow definition of worse), but hopefully we can agree that it would be best if everyone enjoyed an equal opportunity to choose their partner regardless of gender.
Realistically, no -- parents and family were far more determinative than individual men. The just-so story where men have been free for tens of thousands of years while women were in bondage doesn't hold up. Most people in the middle ages were serfs. Men mostly didn't choose their professions or have preferential access to education because pretty much everyone carried forward the life of their parents and education was not widely available. The "men were free and women were restricted" narrative, in the specifics, compares the rights and privileges of women 500 years ago with those of the men of the 1980s.
I've found that broadening my horizons and communicating clearly go a long way in this new swipe right world.
I don't know where you live/what dating pool you have experience with, but here are some contrasting anecdotal observations from NYC:
1) Straight women I know here get way more swipes than straight guys, but lots of straight guys will swipe indiscriminately and immediately unmatch, or will send extremely lazy or off-putting, salacious messages a ton of the time. It's not everyone, but it's common enough to be extremely obnoxious and discourage straight women from swiping right on guys or messaging them. They get more swipes, but more of those are noise.
2) Straight guys will get way fewer matches, and straight women will tend not to message them first/respond very often. This encourages some guys to swipe indiscriminately (see above), though my straight guy friends who are more measured have far more success.
3) Attractive/hip people tend to date each other. The hot guys aren't out there dating less attractive women/taking them out of the dating pool for less conventionally-attractive guys.
4) I've seen awkward, conventionally unattractive straight guys get tons of dates online. It seems a bit harder than if they are conventionally attractive, but none of them seem to have any trouble finding dates.
5) Some of my friends have unrealistic standards for their partners, whom they expect to be more attractive, socially graceful, fashionable, intelligent, and/or wealthy than themselves. These friends either reject everyone they might have a chance with on dating sites or complain about their partners.
6) I've seen plenty of really hot women with homely men and vice versa in couples I know. I can't say I've noticed that women have an easier time than men "dating up" in terms of conventional attractiveness. It seems like conventional attractiveness is just a starting point, but good presentation, social graces, and wealth markers can push overall attractiveness arbitrarily far in either direction.
It probably varies a lot from place to place, but in my slice of NYC, it's not particularly dominated by conventional attractiveness, and overall outcomes seem similar across genders (despite the swiping behavior differences noted at first). Standards of conventional attractiveness also vary widely of course.
Dates are easy to get, but explicitly looking for a long term thing puts off a lot of guys because it's just not the expectation. There is pressure to hold off on deep conversations or say you're just looking for fun when that really isn't the case.
'sometimes I just tell the guy on the first date that I'm looking for someone to settle down with. I've never gotten a second after that'
Getting ghosted by mr right for the twentieth time and wondering what is wrong with you seems as self esteem destroying as not being able to get a date at all.
I guess tinder just wrecked dating.
But it's true, most people really go to Tinder expecting only dating and one night stands.
However, when you're upfront and tell guys you want to settle down you're filtering them, so I guess it's working as intended?
Maybe putting that info in your profile would make it harder to get matches, but at least you'll won't have bad surprises.
EDIT: Another choice is to just keep quiet during dates and probe the guys subtly. Works for some people.
Also, I bet the West Slope of Colorado is different, dynamically, than NYC. I live in a town, not a metropolics, so that has to make a difference.
Tinder is a super lazy product, terrible even. I wouldn't be surprised if they're optimizing for a high number of matches and happy with that outcome.
I don’t think those guys are even close to the majority of straight male users, but since they always swipe right, you have a 100% chance of matching one of them if you swipe right too. So they pollute your match list disproportionately and end up making it worse for everyone. Pretty annoying.
The problem of discouraging men from expressing their emotions nonviolently is definitely not confined to these boards, however. I see tons of characters in media and people in real life who model the idea that anger or violence, while bad, are understandable ways for a man to express feelings (the same sentiment for women is much rarer). It might be bad that a man did something violent, but it doesn't undermine his very identity by eroding his masculinity in the same way that weeping and sobbing and being sensitive might.
I can't count the number of times I saw guys punching walls in movies growing up, often in circumstances where their characters were really feeling sad or hopeless or hurt. Women in movies under the same circumstances would often cry or be consoled. Or to put it another way, in a movie scene with a man and woman under extreme stress in a room together, I've never seen the woman punching holes in her own walls while the man sits on the bed crying. There are tons of other examples of stress reactions that are usually modeled in media along gender lines in this same way.
I think this stuff is self-fulfilling. Guys are discouraged from acknowledging difficult feelings except through stoicism or anger, and in turn people continue to associate that behavior with guys. When men on 8chan start buying into racist ideology and feeling like they can only express their distress through anger and violence, it seems inevitable that things like shootings will follow. The copycat effect with shootings that already happened only encourages it (see how this shooter cited the NZ shooter as inspiration).
I think things are improving, but I think that until guys are trained to express a full spectrum of emotions openly and without shame, and people in general are acclimated to supporting and validating men's feelings, it's going to keep encouraging this sort of snapping behavior.
I agree, but there is even more to this part. The Nazi ideology was not just about superiority, about also about struggle between races for power and need to win that struggle. You have to fight for your own and prove superiority through military conquest and physical domination of other races.
For that to happen, you need certain kind of fighter. Ruthlessness and nazi really seen ruthlessness as virtue.
Empathetic male eager to share emotions is less likely to gain domination through violence. Or through manipulation, backstabbing, lying and all those things that are seen as practical tactic by white supremacists. Less likely to push knowingly for laws that harm minorities or political opponents. Less likely beat or kill opponent. Less likely to force own friends into compliance with own ideas.
By that I want to say that the aggressive masculinity is virtue and something you want males to be, if you have aggressive goals. Hence peer pressuring males to be like that.
https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/B03E1C0B-B635-456...
Oh and literally everything is mens fault.
Now actually I agree that a lot of this is individual mens faults but theres also something cultural and societal that we need to address as a society
"Young women are getting richer, as young men get poorer-
More millennial men are earning less, even with the gender pay gap in their favor, the U.S. Census Bureau reports"
This isn't a men vs women thing. It's a young adult thing, and like you said it's something cultural and societal. The fact that young women are getting educated is a victory for everyone, but MarketWatch would rather use it as social justice bait.
It would be odd to say that 'young men are less educated than the average young person' because men and women essentially completely partition the space of persons. It is obvious if young men are less educated than the average young person that women would have to be more educated than them.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Sure, for those Women it's a victory, and many others in society.
But for everyone ? I'm sure some people in society do lose from that extra economic competition and the lower status they get.
Also more likely to be violent or aggressive and thus kicked from legit places to live. More likely to have criminal record. The whole "on average men take their aggression against others women again themselves" in this aspect hurt men more.
Some of the above are related to each other, obviously.
"Overall rates of psychiatric disorder are almost identical for men and women" - https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/
"Women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder". - Anthony JC, Warner LA, Kessler RC. Comparative epidemiology of dependence on tobacco, alcohol, controlled substances, and inhalants
"But when subsequent surveys asked who struck first, it turned out that women were as likely as men to initiate violence—a finding confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence" - https://web.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
The only wholy true points is that men tend to be more likely veterans, for which accounts for 10% of the homeless, and more likely criminals, but the majority of offenses for which they are arrested are for public intoxication, followed by theft/shoplifting, violation of city ordinances, and burglary.
"The findings challenge the depiction of homeless men as serious predatory criminals, and suggest a number of theoretical and policy implications." - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3096817?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
2.) Crime record makes it harder to find housing and job and access social services. That includes shoplifting and other similar records.
3.) And of course, you use study that casts addiction so wide, that it is compeletely irrelevant. Smoking is not relevant addiction to homelessness.
Here is study about substances - you used last sentence of paragraph, but it is preceeded by: Men are more likely than women to use almost all types of illicit drugs,13 and illicit drug use is more likely to result in emergency department visits or overdose deaths for men than for women. "Illicit" refers to use of illegal drugs, including marijuana (according to federal law) and misuse of prescription drugs. For most age groups, men have higher rates of use or dependence on illicit drugs and alcohol than do women. However, women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder.
So like, totally.
With crime it should be no surprise that public intoxication and violation of city ordinances is more common for homeless people. If we account for social economical status then theft, burglary, and shoplifting make also sense. If more men than women are homeless than those numbers will correlate accordingly, but say nothing about why people become homeless.
The initial claim is that men were more "violent or aggressive". If you want to make a claim that men are charged more often than women for murder or being in a violent gang then go ahead, but when it comes to initiating aggression or violence both women and men are fundamentally equal. The idea that men are inherently aggressive and violent while women inherently meek and passive is nothing but gender stereotyping, and that may be a reason for difference in homelessness.
1.) But like, when it comes to homelessness, you looking like junkie and acting like junkie is what gets you eventually kicked out. Illegal drugs is what matter. Not whether you fall under substance disorder due to smoking.
2.) Non-homeless males are more likely to get criminal record. It is exact reason that makes housing for males with criminal record harder to find.
3.) Third, no it is not just that males are more likely to be charged while kills being the same for both genders. Males kill more people. Males get into fights more often. It does not matter whether it is inherent or something that happens due to socialization.
It does not matter that majority of men are not violent at all and not aggressive. What does matter is that there is subset who are like that and those are more likely to end homeless.
"1 in 5 millennials are lonely and have ‘no friends’: survey"
If you want to learn about young man's plight.
While there is no problem in someone going their way but they are doing it a wrong way and some men are going to fall in wrong line of thinking.