Bullshit. There are problems but it's not because of some "war on masculinity". The real issues are economic.
I think you're right that the real issues are economic. In fact I'd say that this is part of a larger, more general tendency to use cultural conflict to distract from class conflict.
I've had numerous conversations about this with my son, starting when he told me he didn't want to grow up to be a "man". Because of what he had absorbed from culture/society.
Today, men are told that we are disposable; Neanderthals; a legacy of the last century and the cause of everything that's wrong in the country/world; that we're patriarchal oppressors; that we're unnecessary and obsolete. The word "masculine" is at best a negative connotation, and usually meant as an attack.
So, yeah, I have first-hand experience with this. On the flip side, from talking with a couple of my son's female friends, they feel the pressure of being told that they can do and be everything. All at the same time. That's not great either.
The best response is to disengage from media and just be yourself. Easier said than done sometimes, for sure, but that's the longterm win.
I think this is incomplete by itself. Taking a couple of points from the article:
- Women are less likely than men to live at home with their parents.
- The increase in men living at home with their parents is primarily driven by those without college degrees (15->25% among those without college degrees over the last 25 years, 10->13% among those with college degrees).
Per [0], in 2019, there was a 8 point gender gap among young adults (25-29) for college degrees (associate's and above).
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_caa.pdf
A guess at a fuller explanation might then be that wage growth for jobs that don't require a college degree haven't kept up with rent growth, and the gender gap here is driven by the gender gap in educational attainment.
One other thing that I observed:
If you look at the labor force participation graph in the article, it slowly trended downwards from the 60s, and then suddenly jumped down around 2008-2011, and since then stayed mostly flat until last year.
Meanwhile, the fraction of young men living at home rose steadily from the 60s until the mid-90s, dropped for a few years, and then resumed climbing after 2000 (with no such jumps around 2009 or 2020).
On one hand, we have these economic shocks (Great Recession, pandemic) that force a bunch of men out of the labor market, but at the same time, more men are living at home even as labor force participation remained largely constant throughout most of the 2010s. That reads to me like it refutes the article's central claim of correlation between these two variables.
But I also can't help but feel commenters are conflating 'attack on masculinity' !== 'attack on toxic masculinity.'
There is not some organized movement trying to make young boys 'less of a man.'
I'm guessing a very large % of HN is male so would be nice to amplify any female voices who want to chime in.
For whatever reason, women will go into debt or be allowed to go into debt to get useless degrees and there is no countervailing force to say: “uh marine biology is cool but…$500,000?”
This has lead to a situation where women have gotten 13 million more colleges degrees than men over the last few decades.
Meanwhile I think a lot of men go: “eh; yeah no.”