State of Health Report Shows Growing Despair Among American Men
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anecdotal nonsense, a few years back we went through a wave of new HR videos about harassment and intimidation and not one had a non male aggressor. it was so bad the women attending the sessions were mocking the presentation.
fortunately they canned that approach not long after after the poor reception.
Of course inversions of these tropes can be found all over the place so to properly see if there's a skew you'd need to analyse a whole lot of media and see which is more frequent. I'm not about to embark on that project so the best I can give you is a description of how it feels to me.
In the end I don't think these sorts of stereotypes are too unbalanced, for every bad female stereotype you can find a bad male stereotype. I feel like the conversation shouldn't be about who has it worse and deserves compensation, it should be about how we decouple both good and bad stereotypes from gender or skin color or sexual orientation or what have you.
You need stereotypes to tell compelling stories, otherwise you'd have to explain every single character in-depth. This isn't a bad thing, but we need to be more careful about attaching stereotypes needlessly to real existing groups of humans.
If I were a script writer and it'd be up to me I'd probably just write the script with whichever stereotypes it needs, and then once the script is done flip some coins for the irrelevant character attributes such as gender or skin color or eye color. As far as I can tell those basically never matter for telling a story. Even in the case of it being historically inaccurate I wouldn't say it matters: you're already suspending your disbelief for a lot of stuff in the movies, the idea that e.g. a woman would be a commander in the first world war isn't a stretch big enough to break immersion.
I need to learn to write more coherently and start a blog I think.
For example, if I were to pick a few top candidates for nerd representation in media I might pick the IT Show or CSI or Mr Robot.
- The Disappointments Room: David. At one point, he says that he plays Xbox and takes naps while he watches his wife Dana work, when he's asked what he does for a living.
- The sopranos: Tony Soprano has a hard time getting his son A.J. to do any work whatsoever.
- Seinfeld: George
And to be fair, the trope does have inverted instances as well, but again it seems to me to be uncommon:
- Married with children: Peg Bundy in the later seasons, Al bundy isn't much better though
> I asked for the most notable movies and shows.
And I ask god for a golden leprechaun every night, but that doesn't mean I'll get one. As a show of good faith I've spent some time researching an answer to your question, but just because you've posed a question doesn't mean you're entitled to an answer fulfilling your criteria.
There I suspect that the kid/woman v. dad/authority conflicts, the smart & pluck being on the first side and the obtuseness on the latter, really depicted the script writers v. the management.
Or if that's too far back, television's The Honeymooners (1955-1956). Or the Flintstones for that matter.
Or Fibber McGee and Molly if 30s radio shows are your thing.
The bumbling male and the stalwart woman is a trope that is thousands of years old.
Complaining about it is new.
Decades ago I briefly dated an extremely physically abusive woman. Nearly killed me a couple times. I ended it. Not a single person has the slightest bit of sympathy over this. I've never struck a woman but maybe I should have in self defense. If I had though I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever I would have been reported, arrested, and imprisoned, regardless of all facts.
I hope you've found support since then; if you haven't, here's my anonymous support.
Here are links to finding more support: https://malesurvivor.org https://victimconnect.org http://www.mensadviceline.org.uk
Fast forward to high school and college, and I freeze when a woman gets physically aggressive and starts to seem violent. A part of my brain expects to fight back, but years of inculcation of the mantra, "never hit a woman" stopped me from responding (and it's not quite in my nature to run). So I just tried to shrug it off while such things happened.
But, yeah, people should not hit people, unless in self defense, etc. Definitely if someone is attacking you it should not matter their sex when defending yourself. Ideally, anyway.
This is a perfect example of how corporate greed (and a political system that now mostly exists to support it) is ravishing the American people. After decades of obvious abuses, the company pushing OxyContin is finally being stopped, but no one is going to jail (see: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/762455218/as-drugmakers-face-...), and although the company is bankrupt, we're merely locking the barn door after the billions have escaped.
The despair is the disease. Drug and alcohol use are from people self-medicating their symptoms.
If anyone cared to address this problem, they'd look at what causes despair. That despair is often from economic and social distress.
Instead, everyone is outraged up on a media and politically driven moral panic about pharmaceutical medication that happens to be rarely abused and is almost never addictive (fewer than 0.1% chance of becoming addicted to prescribed painkillers, study on over 640,000 patients, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27400458).
No, I don’t think economic problems per se cause despair. People are richer, much richer, than 100 or 1000 years ago. I don’t think that changes the fundamental human struggle with meaning, hope, purpose, and everything else that wards off despair.
Most notably, it seems to me that owning your own house and land would bring a much greater sense of autonomy, accomplishment, control, etc. than more consumeristic things like TVs, video games, fancy food, etc. (not that its bad that those things exist).
The government restricting the supply of opioid painkillers has only served to push those who need them into the black market. Blaming companies like Purdue is only playing into the same talking points as the drug warriors: evil dealers pushing dangerous drugs onto innocent people.
We need to decriminalize and legalize all drugs: possession, creation, and distribution.
This is a pretty shallow summary of the actual state of affairs. Yes, people who need drugs have been forced into the black market. But so have people who are addicts. Legalizing might or might not help, but it doesn’t help to pretend that everyone is a chronic pain sufferer.
The reality is that for decades many people were handed highly addictive painkillers for relatively minor pain (and for too long for acute pain). The end result is an epidemic of addiction. Those addictions didn’t evaporate when doctors started to reduce the frequency of opiate prescriptions. Hence the shocking reality that “opioid overdoses have increased as opioid prescriptions have decreased.” Well, yeah. A bunch of addicts have turned from Oxycodone to heroin.
They are killing chronic pain sufferers and addicts alike, and addicts are sick humans too.
Also, a significant part of modern American culture actively devalues men and thinks of men and masculinity as problematic. This is particularly true within certain political movements and social cultures. That has health consequences, as is already widely known from many studies on various other forms of discrimination and discriminatory movements.
Not easy to do, but I've been working hard on withdrawing from social media, outrage news, etc., and those who are wrapped up in it. It seems appealing in the moment, but I do think it ultimately contributes to this sort of despair.
Finding and developing new interests and hobbies is a much better longterm solution.
I moved across the country for no good reason except to move. Absolutely nothing was different. I was still the same person, except now without friends or family. I wasn't running from anything but everything followed me anyway. I've had half a dozen friends in the same situation. You can't run from yourself.
Meanwhile I helped a friend move about a year ago because she couldn't get away from high school drama. She was in her 30s, and still caught up in high school drama from her high school friends. She moved away and made new friends and completely cut her old friends out of her life. Massive difference. I've had friends of friends do the same thing when their family life was toxic. Big help from the sounds of it. Immigrants do it constantly, running from toxic politics to start a new life in a safer place. It works.
But if you're running from yourself? You can't run fast enough or far enough. You will always be you. Fix that before you fix your geography, or it will just be a very expensive lesson learned. It took a long time for my bank account to recover from my move and even longer for my circle of friends to recover.
Moving doesn't have to be a financial hit. If you move to an area with higher wages it may earn you money.
If you are moving from Ohio to Indiana or from one town to another where you are then sure not much will change. But I don't think a lot of people realize how different societies and priorities are outside their bubbles. Where I am is the worst sort of bubble culturally and socially I could possibly be in for my mental health. Completely opposite to my core values. But desire isn't enough to "move". You need health, money, assistance.
Threads like this give the impression that everyone is miserable and fill up quickly with sad stories.
It’s good the internet gives those people an outlet and a place to connect, but if this was say viewed by thousands and only got 60 replies it might provide some perspective. Most people are just fine.
Secondly, why does one try to persuade people that the scope of hurt isn't that bad by... eyeballing a HN post for popularity? And using that to counteract a report full of collected data?
https://www.healthline.com/health/depression/facts-statistic...
https://www.verywellmind.com/depression-statistics-everyone-...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/suicid...
But since then I've realized there are many other things that feminism means to people. It's not a great label as it doesn't mean anything in particular. Some variants are definitely bigoted hate against a certain gender. I don't agree with those. Diffusion of label-meaning: what can be done about this. For me... be a label-skeptic. Irrelevant, though no one cares. Only mindless labels matter in the great big wide world.
Likewise politically, I’m for individual liberty for all adults but not for an anemic taxation system for the rich.
I guess that makes me a centrist these days?
"The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. Even when they do not panic men often sense that older ways off feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary men feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That—in defense of selfhood—they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private men?
Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap? It is not only information that they need—in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need—although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy. What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves."
"What are the major issues for publics and the key troubles of private individuals in our time? To formulate issues and troubles, we must ask what values are cherished yet threatened, and what values are cherished and supported, by the characterizing trends of our period. In the case both of threat and of support we must ask what salient contradictions of structure may be involved.
When people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them, they experience well-being. When they cherish values but do feel them to be threatened, they experience a crisis—either as personal trouble or as a public issue. And if all their values seem involved, they feel the total threat of panic.
But suppose people are neither aware of any cherished values, nor experience any threat? That is the experience of indifference, which, if it seems to involve all their values, becomes apathy. Suppose, finally, they are unaware of any cherished values, but still are very much aware of a threat? That is the experience of uneasiness, of anxiety, which if it is total enough, becomes a deadly unspecified malaise.
Ours is a time of uneasiness and indifference-not yet formulated in such ways as to permit the work of reason and the play of sensibility. Instead of troubles—defined in terms of values and threats—there is often the misery of vague uneasiness; instead of explicit issues there is often merely the beat feeling that all is somehow not right. Neither the values threatened nor whatever threatens them has been stated; in short, they have not been carried to the point of decision. Much less have they been formulated as problems of social science."
"Yet men do not usually define the roubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they take part."
He goes on to talk about the relationship between work and leisure as a "crisis of ambition" in American society. Great read.
I worked hard, in a career beneficial to society. I helped people, always had great empathy, and treated others with respect. Even then I didn't really get it when I would come across someone like I am now. Someone who suffered and lost it all. Someone on the edge. I did what I could to help them but I was as ignorant and naive as ever believing the rest of the system and society would give them that same attention and value. I thought it would be ok. It's not ok.
The truth is in American society has decided human life and security isn't the most important thing. It's decided INDEPENDENCE and profits and ego and the chance to be wealthy and powerful is. Everyone for themselves. Guns are rights but healthcare is an "entitlement". Equality is somehow "wrong".If you need help you are "weak" and a "loser" and "nobody is going to live off MY tax money". They think if you can even open your eyes, or type an occasional rant online, that means you can grind away like everyone else and "why don't you just" and they KNOW this is true because they KNOW they would be able to when they reached this unfathomable state. Saying this will make a lot of people angry because nationalism is an identity for many and ultimately proves the point.
About the same time my health was ruined a friend in Belgium had a similar experience. He was given social support to keep his flat, healthcare, spent a few years reeducating in a new skill and was able to reenter society and function. He has a happy life and family now. My experience was denials from government assistance programs, struggling to manage with savings and small private pension but no health insurance, watching a family full of puritanical hypocrites turn away and blame. My friend lost something of his life, but was allowed to regain one worth living and not fear every little bump being the end. He gets to have a future as a result. I do not.
Next came cycles of motivation and disappointment and trying as hard as I could to hold it together only to have things collapse because with more limits and needs nobody can manage that alone despite what everyone needs to believe for their own mental security. The root of victim blaming right there folks. Some people are always going to need help. Some can rebuild at least some but still need help doing so. Stability. Access. Caring.
After you see that help isn't coming comes the anger...then that anger slowly morphs into despair. Then one day comes this indescribable sensation that even the moment before you couldn't believe would ever TRULY happen even thinking abstractly about it. Acceptance. Not acceptance of the decline. Not acceptance of the despair. Acceptance that you aren't afraid to let all of this life go anymore. You don't WANT to not BE...but you want to not be THIS. You want suffering, judgement, isolation, pain, complete lack or agency in LIFE anymore. You are exhausted all the time and it's not worth the tiny if any moments of joy anymore.
You are still rational. You aren't running around with your underwear on your head and flinging you poo at people. You are just running on empty, You swim as hard as you can and you sink, you relax and go with it and you sink, nothing works. It's always said to be your fault, not the fact you were unceremoniously dropped in the ocean and told to fend for yourself whilst people give "advice" from the shore like "just learn how to swim" and then get offended when you cannot as if your drowning insults them. You have walked over every "next hill" for years looking for petrol, and it's never there. Or if it IS there 1/1000000000 times and some nice and truly well meaning shopkeeper is smiling and waving you there, someone else swoops in front and takes the rest or the shop closes right as you straggle up to it because you stepped in a hole and that slowed you down even more.
Despair isn't some inexplicable thing. It's 99% of the time rooted in clear, multiple causes. But this society, ESPECIALLY this society, won't face or address them. Most people like me don't end up like me out of some fault in themselves or some unsolvable problem. But it's easier to punch down for both ego fulfillment and to bolster your own feelings of personal safety because YOU are better than that and it will never happen to you. You were smart, and planned, and have good people around you. Well guess what...the "Just World" isn't.
There was a time I was an activist for health and social issues. It never had any macro effect. I tried to "just get out of you don"t like it!" Doing that alone is very, very hard and I could never get it to work permanently. The damage done here would follow me everywhere and ironically block the path to even a life in those better conditions. There was a time I thought about crazy things like applying for asylum in a more socially conscious country, but the truth is people in this situation don't get approved. I am out of fuel and hope, there is no petrol station over the next hill, and my bootstraps were worn to dust years ago. There are countless people like me and nobody here ever thinks they will be one of them.
The land of opportunity Work hard and be rewarded The shining nation on the hill
And what you see as an adult
Lose your job? No healthcare, and little support
Get cancer? Go bankrupt and lose everything if you’re not lucky or super rich
Let’s pass major legislation! Oh great another huge tax cut for the mega rich.
Go to school? Be saddled in debt for decades.
Get out of school? Work multiple jobs just to make ends meet in a system that favors employers
And how’re you supposed to escape? By buying material possessions that don’t bring lasting quality of life improvements, or by wallowing away in a drugged up haze, or by binge watching television and other media.
We’re supposed to be the leaders of the free world but we our government is increasingly disfunctional and tailored to special interests and the wealthy.
Meritocracy? Ha. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is being hollowed out.
This administration certainly hasn’t helped as it amplifies its fear based rhetoric of migrants, and crime while pushing us backwards on climate initiatives and ruining our reputation abroad.
It’s no wonder people are depressed. Wage slavery sucks, living on a knife’s edge sucks, and there’s really not much going on to change it.
I’m pretty hopeful for the younger generations, but boy is it a mess they’re inheriting.
This administration certainly hasn’t helped as it amplifies its fear based rhetoric of migrants
Migration was and is a big part of the process. Not the only part, but still a problem to be solved. If you presumably want a European-style healthcare system in America and a job market that doesn't only favor employers, you'll need to acknowledge that the laws of supply and demand apply to labor and social services, and that an all-inclusive welfare state and mass migration can't work together.
This doesn't stand up to the least amount of reflection.
There are immigrants in Europe. If you look at European countries individually there is massive immigration between them, as well as immigration from outside. And yet.
The US system favors employers not because of free-market competition between employees (or at least not predominantly so) but because corporations have bought the US government and twist every law to their advantage. Destroying the last vestiges of labor unions was just one small part.
And yet in almost no country has the original population almost become a minority, unlike the US. So clearly the cumulative net immigration is greater in the US. And Bernie Sanders (someone who has certainly applied the "least amount of reflection" to this) seems to share the GPs view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
Or to put it another way, brown people who speak Spanish, for example, have been in North America just as long as white people who speak English...
Actually, the more I think about it, the more curious I am about who you think the "original population" of the United States is, and why
Actually a century longer! The original European capital of North America was Santa Fe in 1610...
Actually it’s the opposite. In fact it’s an area of concern for the EU as they have not been ale to make highly skilled occupations (lawyers, engineers, etc) as portable as hod carrying.
> Many European healthcare systems are more strained than ever.
Citation? Complaints from my friends in France and Germany are risible to someone who has had to interact with US system.
America is the third world country of all developed countries.
For individuals like you seeking human connection, I highly recommend SE Asia as a place to permanently migrate to.
You will find meaning in mingling with people who don't care about the rat race on the edge. Comes with its own shortcomings but you've lived the lonely life of America. It cannot go lower than this.
Due to my limited ability to type/dictate and the controversial nature of my experience, I am not going to go into detail. I just want to give another data point to people claiming that more welfare programs will make these problems go away.
I have completely given up on the traditional health care system. It is so unbelievably bad when it comes to my illness that I am better off becoming my own doctor and paying for everything out of pocket. Because of this, I am a strong proponent of reducing welfare programs(except UBI) and making healthcare participation an option. I am battling a crippling illness. Almost no one has moral high-ground to insist that I give them my money for their health care. I am so so much sicker than easily 99% of the population. I should qualify for disability, but I don't because my illness is poorly understood by slow-moving government bureaucrats.
But I am fortunate to have identified the cure, and in a few years perhaps I will be back to normal. At that point I will be happy to pay health insurance premiums to help those sicker than I, but right now, my survival depends on the ability to not pay. $3000/year is the difference between life and death for me.
It's worth noting that this varies by state and tends to change based on the number of employees. In NJ for employers with under 50 employees, 25 hours/week is considered full time for the purpose of extending medical benefits.
You'll be happy to know then that a key provision of Obamacare was gutted, and there is now no fee/tax/penalty for not being insured.
https://www.healthcare.gov/fees/fee-for-not-being-covered/
Dont take this post as an approval of the change - I think it will end up making healthcare more expensive for everyone, as now there is less incentive for healthy people to carry insurance. Not carrying insurance in the US is extremely risky in my opinion, but most healthy young adults don't end up needing much medical care, and a few hundred dollars a month is not a trivial expense. Certainly when I was younger not carrying health insurance for a period of time was the difference in making rent or not.
I understand that there are many who believe the gutting of Obamacare is a universally bad thing, but it does put more money in the pockets of hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of sick people who the healthcare system completely neglects. I'm not talking about moderate illnesses either, I'm talking about illness that completely destroys every aspect of your life. Many of the most seriously ill commit suicide because the other option is withering away in excruciating pain while people accuse them of being crazy.
I don't think you appreciate the choice I've had to make. I'd rather take the risk and go without insurance. The other choice is death from not being able to afford the treatment I need right now.
I am disabled myself and I have experienced this. But, I am a dual US|EU national.
I actually experienced a very traumatic injury on Thursday, and had to be seen in my city's level 1 trauma unit. I am physically disabled and fell down some steep concrete stairs, (I probably need to use a wheelchair probably from now on.)
I ended up having surgery to repair the injury on Friday.
My pain was under control in the ambulance, but that was it.
I literally screamed nonstop during Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, due to the hospital refusing to give me adequate pain control. My abdominal muscles are still sore and my voice is gone still. When pain management finally came on Monday, they cared more about what medications I could "get outside" the hospital and "what the maximum quantity would be" more than actually controlling my pain.
They didn't even have any pillows for me on the unit to elevate my limb.
The whole experience was extremely traumatic and barbaric. It was reminiscent of a third world country.
Supposedly this is one of the best trauma units in the country, too.
I am done with this country. I cannot do this anymore. It is killing me.
I have 2 rare immune-mediated diseases that affect my peripheral nervous system, plus type 1 diabetes.
I receive SSDI off of both mine and my deceased father's work record, as I was able to prove that I was disabled before the age of 22. I somehow had enough work credits at age 21 to claim off of my own work record, even though I was a university student. I worked like a madman.
I receive 75% of the maximum SSDI payment (due to my father's earnings) and my healthcare costs exceed my social security/SSDI check. Next year, if the ACA is overturned, I will die if I do not leave the US.
People do not realize that social security does not go far if you are unhealthy.
I naturalized by descent when I realized that there was legitimately a remote chance of the ACA being overturned...as in before the lawsuit came in to fruition.
A good place to consult is reddit.com/r/IWantOut but I would not post there as they are ableist as can be and there is a keyboard warrior demographic. Nevertheless, it is a good resource.
I've been trying to get out (back out) for a long time. It always went under because of the my health getting worse and family bailing from any support as a result, so I couldn't maintain residency another way. If everything that's happened to me had happened in a country with social systems, which likely wouldn't have since the surgeries that disabled me were profit driven and unneeded, I would at least have a chance to live. I want to live. I am not some emo woe-is-me case. There is just nothing but closed doors in front of me and the place I am now in is closing to me as well. The ONE time in all these years one DID open thanks to someone kind, more went wrong with health and family and I couldn't get through it before it shut. Your life shouldn't depend on one lucky chance from a stranger.
You did nothing wrong. There is way too many high expectations to even get approved for SSDI, like needing to be continuously insured.
It is absolute insanity.
I know you have been doing everything you can. Unfortunately, I have been spending this year making plans for leaving the US with my extremely complicated health stuff.
The only reason why I get by is because I have an extremely supportive family.
To have to rely on the "goodwill" of strangers is a cruel existence.
I know that you are not emo. I know this country is killing people. It is believed that the third leading cause of death in the US is preventable medical errors. Plus, when healthcare costs an arm and a leg too...we really are killing people,
I have an elderly family member (70s) that is treated as a pariah by one of the few pain clinics accepting new patients in the city.
So yeah, you're experience doesn't really fit my worldview, unless this is a hard counter-reaction to the recent opioid-epidemic.
The only thing the majority of men are useful to in society is work/production. If you take that away, then the other function of men (reproduction/fertilization) can be accomplished by a much smaller fraction of the male population.
We are taking away the only thing that justifies the existence of most men, and we are reminding them of it every day with the society we are creating with no safety net or healthcare.
But after the last election, I stopped caring.
Additionally, the female age-adjusted obesity rate is higher than men's (41%! vs 38%) which can lead to larger health problems later in life, so we may only just be seeing the S-curve for equivalently increased female mortality rates.
Obviously economic power is tied closely with overall respect, power, and influence, but it seems to me that more work (heh) should be done challenging the assumed correlation of economic value and human value. Instead we see an accelerating of capitalism's implicit devaluing of all value that isn't financial, by unconsciously further denigrating the (again, imo) important but lower-paid jobs traditionally occupied by women.
Home care / care takers / medical assistants are super low though.
Yes it is! An employee only produces so much value. You don’t raise a salary beyond that no matter how limited supply is.
Say what? Why should increasing opportunity for one person imply some sort of diminution for another? Seems pretty sadly zero-sum to me, and the very opposite of a capitalist society.
This kind of reductionist world view is what screws up efforts to provide UBI, universal health care etc.
Only in the sense that specialized “jobs” are a product of the industrial revolution. But the idea that people are defined by their work goes back basically to the dawn of time. Many English last names come from peoples’ trades (Smith, Miller, etc.). In hunter gatherer societies, rituals for adolescent males often revolve around hunting and war. Men who couldn’t do those things were a burden on their community, unless they fit some other social niche (spiritual leader, etc.).
Yes though we are talking about Europe, not, say, India.
Source: I have a degree in European history and specifically studied non-aristocratic social systems of late feudal France and England. But my assertion is just as applicable to the non-landholders of the American colonies and early United States, as is well attested in the contemporaneous literature.
Ignoring the De Jure (or De Bello) aristocratic and 2e Estate ranks, jobs were pretty loosely connected at best to one's "rank" in medieval society, in particular in the countryside. Certain jobs had a cap ex element (miller in particular, but smith too) but that would likely have been the property (and investment) of the local squire or lord, not the property of the operator.
Even the jobs you named such as cooper, baker etc tended to be tied to urban societies (towns really), and a farrier was sufficiently specialized to be in the court, but not to have any sort of special grade or rank.
In the later Middle Ages as the growth of the guilds and cities began to challenge the aristocracy, rank still depended more on wealth than job (an inversion of the aristocratic order, and that of the Roman republic and empire, where you became wealthy though power rather than the other way around as today). But even there we're talking about a small number of people; being a baker or miller wasn't really a self identity in the way we think of it today.
And there were people assigned job-related surnames as a tool of scorn (Goldschmidt -- goldsmith) where there were jobs reserved for specific outcasts (i.e. jewish people in Europe): again they had those jobs as part of bing an outcaste group; they didn't become outcastes by having those jobs.
But yeah the dispoable male is a dubious theory.
It definitely gets oversimplified/overapplied and abused in service of more extreme MRO/Incel people, but last I looked there were actual biological evidence from other species.
With regards to poly whatever, it’s frequently mentioned that the top 80% of women are competing for the top 20% of men on dating apps. What happens as cohorts age will be the interesting part.
If I had to wildly speculate, a whole lot of folks are going to end up unhappy, and those who can will settle for whatever partner they can find once they meet the point of emotional exhaustion (ie loneliness, etc).
Well from my experience it isn't settling for an older man.
When I was in my 30's and making $100K+ I tried on-line dating and was pleased at how many desirable women responded to my profile. Assuming that would always be the case, I decided to focus on my career and postpone getting into a serious relationship.
At 47 I decided to "settle down" and resume on-line dating. With a target age range of 34 to 40 since I would like to have children. I am millionaire, tall, good looking, muscular, high-income, etc. But the only responses I received are from women 50+. Not sure how this ends for me but at the moment I feel a sense dread.
Just my two cents, I’m a bit younger than you but similar means, married but in an open relationship and date. Be picky, but cast a wide net.
I don't have hard statistics and won't try to look them up.
Men capable of rethinking their relationship with women and what it means to be a male, rather than a man, I imagine will do fine in the coming social upheaval.
No one is making an absolute value claim of the two genders, so your comment is at best begging a divisive question that isn't relevant here.
Women have plenty of idiosyncrasies and errant behavior, too.
No one is challenging your claim either. Women are capable of making subjective value judgments and many who are willing to talk about it are demonstrating them.
All I see is individuals being more choosey. People ghost both ways now a day. No gender does it more than the other.
Additionally, the same technology level that could make men reproductively useless could do the same for women. In reality, neither will happen.
Single or cohabiting though? As a recent parent, I doubt it. Raising children remains extremely challenging, and significantly easier if you have a committed partner for it. There's no way my wife would be able to go on, say, a 10-day business trip to Laos or a 3-day industry conference if I weren't holding down the fort at home, or for that matter able to get to the gym tonight if I weren't picking our son up from daycare, taking him to gymnastics and cooking dinner for him.
How a couple chooses to split up the labor in their relationship is their business, but the fact that there's more than enough labor for a couple isn't going to change regardless of technology.
> Men capable of rethinking their relationship with women and what it means to be a male, rather than a man
And what does this mean, exactly?
> Men capable of rethinking ... what it means to be a male, rather than a man
What does this even mean?
In your specific case, it is bound to fail because the children of religious parents are rather likely to leave religion. The various kinds of injustice children experience at the hand of religious organisations helps in that regard.
If you don't believe me, just think back in time: religious people have always had more children. And yet, religion has a been declining for a long time.
Among the most reproduction-happy have been groups like the Amish. But they haven't taken over the US, have they?
You realize their population in 1900 was around 6000, and they're now 325,000 right? At current "population doubles every 20 years" rates, well, it won't be long now.