The data are clear: The boys are not all right
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You can point to the decline of organized religion and with it traditional gender roles, but then what explains the relative stability in post-Christian Europe? The China Shock combined with America's threadbare social safety net starts looking more salient. We have inherited a much less trusting, much more alienated society than you are likely to find overseas.
Whatever the cause I fully reject the lazy conclusion this is somehow women's fault. The "Lump of Labor" fallacy is just that, a fallacy. Economic gains are not zero-sum.
Of course! The problem is not women!
The problem is media, schools, companies, everyone buying into this in a collective delusion.
Men also think this, but unlike women we are even encouraged to strengthen these insane ideas that we are somehow inferior (gets imprisoned more often, less academic success despite supposedly being extremely privileged.)
But I don’t think it’s really a gender thing, I think it’s a power and money thing. That is, I don’t think mainly white, rich and powerful men set out to disadvantage other men. I think they were more focused on advantaging themselves to the exclusion of everyone else.
What I find interesting isn’t so much why men are doing poorly. Why are women doing better in certain areas? Although progress has been made towards institutional equity, men still have the advantage in most places. Why are women succeeding despite that?
I find gender blaming conversation to be reductive. The decline of men and boys is not men's fault nor is it women's fault. Dare I say there's little data to show either way, nor is it really helpful in healing from a dysfunctional society that has failed you on a systemic and individual level.
Even worse, the way some people will wave their hands and use the word "power" to justify why men should be successful is pure misandry and a misunderstanding of the availability and avenues of power. A boy that grows up with an undiagnosed learning challenge is not afforded power or privilege, despite blanketly being regarded as powerful due to their gender. Parallel examples to this are countless.
> Why are women doing better in certain areas?
Easy. Feminism. It's the societal block for the broader representation of a spectrum of views that are women-centric that has significant force in society. They provide programs that are often woman-exclusive, advocate and raise alarms on issues, etc... There is nothing like this for men because modern rhetoric opposes the idea that men can be a victim to much of anything.
The point of the post seems to be, "Maybe stop treating men and boys like the villains in their own story, don't make scarecrows out of other groups as has been historically done, and use positivity to create a culture that men want and strive to be a part of."
It doesn't help that folks who attempt to represent men's rights are instantly smeared as either pathetic incel losers, or as alt-right oppressor misogynists. There's no in-between that I'm aware of. From what I can tell, shame is the main weapon used against men who claim that men's rights have a justifiable place in society.
No healthy "meninism" exists as of today the same way it does for women, and I suspect this is causing all sorts of problems.
Anyone who takes the time to listen to what he has to say knows his views are actually quite reasonable and mild.
Unlike his acolytes. He is careful in his language but seems happy for his followers to mis-interpret it.
Using the term "acolytes" is intellectually dishonest here and shows poor faith. Its conjures images of blind, zealous followers. No one who espouses hate can also truly be his "acolyte". He's publically denounced such individuals multiple times.
Ultimately, Peterson is famous because of reactionary politics. He got attention for opposing legislation protecting trans people and has been riding the "anti-woke" train ever since. That he also has written self help material is just happenstance.
I don't understand... Are you saying he's already claimed that he's been misunderstood (which seems like the opposite of what you're accusing him of) or are you assuming that this is how he would defend himself if pressed?
FWIW, In his GQ interview he quite clearly rebukes these types of "acolytes".
The men’s rights stuff is toxic because it’s about conflict. It’s about pushing back against feminism, which is essentially fighting against equity. With that said, I see nothing wrong with fighting for the interests of boys and men. I, too, want to see boys succeed (I have a son!) But it’s not about his rights. It’s about his opportunities and the support and so on, that he gets.
It isn’t feminism that is holding boys and men back, it’s that we live in an inequitable society. That makes feminists allies, not enemies.
I agree with your parent commenter, kodah, that gender blaming is reductive. I recognize that the way I phrased my views could have been better: perhaps a more constructive way of putting it is to say that the present situation is one that men have both the responsibility to improve, and the power to do so.
"Arguing for men's rights is bad because it's all about squashing women, otherwise they'd be arguing for women's rights, which is actually just arguing for everyone's rights." This just isn't a reasonable way to frame it at all.
There aren't many places where men have a clear and systematic disadvantage in society, but there are some and arguing that there shouldn't be is not all about conflict.
Of course, that’s true for any argument held between strangers, for both participants.
See the thing about this is even if you genuinely try to not make it about conflict in my experience people project conflict on to you. I once wrote an article about men being disadvantaged when it came to access to resources when escaping domestic violence, despite making up a significant proportion of victims according to data gathered by the Australian bureau of statistics (I'm Australian and was writing about the situation here).
A lot of government sources also presented domestic violence data in a way that was straight up misleading i.e. "31% of women experiencing assault experienced it from a partner vs 4.4% of men", totally ignoring that men were vastly more likely to be assaulted by strangers and a better comparison is the total number of men and women (73,800 women vs 21,200). Which works out to a little over than 1in 5 people surveyed who were assaulted by a partner being men, which despite still being significantly less certainly doesn't seem as minimal as the numbers when presented as a proportion of total assaults suffered. (note this happened nearly 10 years ago so these numbers are from a survey done in 2006).
My article discussed this kind of presentation and how it made male victims of DV more invisible than they should be, and how services for them weren't present (including some government services having "for men" pages which only had advice for how abusers can stop being abusive).
I legitimately had editors at places argue with me and suggest I was ignoring facts to have an anti woman agenda by quoting some of the numbers I was criticising in my article. That's how pervasive some of this stuff is. That you can say "hey look, this place is using very selective language when when framing the data, look if even using their own sources you can see how this creates an unfair comparison to minimise male victims" and then have someone use the exact numbers being discussed to tell you that you are being anti woman.
This is a sore spot for me because as a child I suffered domestic abuse, and I find the idea that there wouldn't have been resources for me if I had suffered it as an adult scary.
And I especially object to the idea that men's rights stuff is inherently about conflict. It certainly is for some people, but I made a genuinely constructive attempt to discuss a problem that in no way blamed women (my sister suffered the same abuse I did, I certainly wouldn't want her to not have resources!) and I had multiple people accuse me of being sexist.
Feminists are out rightly man hating. They are not allies of men/boys. They start killallmen trend, they started endfatherday, feminists support not jailing women for anything, NOW, the largest feminist org in the us oppose shared parenting, feminists in Canada shut down male dv centers....
Some of them. Many are reasonable. I even have one to thank for doing as well as I have done.
The problem is I can't see many of them distance themselves from the toxic elements you mention below.
I'm squarely in the camp that women and men are born with equal worth but different abilities.
I also think society and every human has a duty to protect the weaker ones from abuse by the stronger ones, but unlike many others I won't tolerate abuse of men and especially young boys as a punishment for what other men have done long ago.
The killallmen trend ESPECIALLY is the reason I don't like calling myself a feminist anymore. As the mother of two young children, a boy and a girl, it scares me to think to think people would hate my son just because he's a boy.He's 13 and is struggling with depression. It's become very clear to me that many young girls his age really enjoy repeating that horrible horrible slogan as a form of bullying.
I've been really thinking about enrolling him into a private school over this madness.
I think things have gone too far.
This is demonstrably incorrect. In our society, men are underrepresented in all kinds of quality of life metrics. They die younger. They comprise the vast majority of the homeless. The vast majority of workplace death and injury. They work much longer hours. They commit suicide at much higher rates. They have much higher rates of unemployment. They're failing, relatively, at every level of the educational system. They're far overrepresented in endemic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes; as well as mental health problems like depression and addiction. I could go on for a long time.
This isn't to say women don't have their own unique issues - like sexual assault. Feminism advocates for only issues in which women experience issues, and none of the issues I listed above. The net effect is observable today: areas in which women underperformed are now normalising at that "equity" level. But all of the many ways in which men are underperforming are getting worse. Any movement which purports to aim for equity cannot only focus on one side of the equation. Feminism doesn't aim for equity or equality. It is an advocacy movement for women. And that's okay. Just don't lie and say it has anything to do with equity or equality. Don't try to prevent men from having their own movement to try to improve some of the horrific ways in which men are suffering today in Western nations.
> The vast majority of workplace death and injury.
Where do you see gender inequity in this? The top 10 professions dominated by women are occupations like preschool and kindergarten teachers, dental hygienists, childcare workers and hairdressers. [2] We can agree that these occupations are less likely to kill or injure you than construction, aviation and firefighting. But it's certainly not the case that feminism has worked to keep men out of the safer jobs dominated by women. If you want to start a meninism movement that works toward creating more male preschool teachers or personal care workers, good luck to you.
> They commit suicide at much higher rates.
Women are much more likely to attempt suicide than men. But men are "better" at getting the job done. This seems to reflect what we tend to see, which is that men are more likely to be violent and to kill things than women. Again, is this because of gender inequity? And are you not concerned that so many more women want to kill themselves?
> They have much higher rates of unemployment.
This is just flat-out not true. In the US, right now, the unemployment rate for men is 4.10%, for women it is 3.90%. In December, it was 3.90% for both sexes. [3]
> They're far overrepresented in endemic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes; as well as mental health problems like depression and addiction.
True for heart disease and diabetes, not true for depression. Women experience depression at twice the rate of men! [4]
The broader point I would make here is that equity != equality. Equity is about creating equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. The measure of gender equity isn't that we have the same number of female fighter jet pilots as male. It's whether a woman faces structural difficulties that prevent her from becoming a fighter pilot if she wishes to pursue that career.
That is still not the case in today's society. You wrote, 'areas in which women underperformed are now normalising at that "equity" level'. In the US, women earn about 20% less than men do. [5] How is that "normalised"? Think about how much money that is across the entire workforce! It's a damn shame that men are dying of addiction and heart disease, but show me how that is the result of gender inequity. I think it has far more to do with class and race.
1: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-men-often-die-earlie...
2: https://ca.topresume.com/career-advice/top-10-professions-do...
3: https://www.macrotrends.net/2511/unemployment-rate-men-women
4: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in...
5: https://blog.dol.gov/2021/03/19/5-facts-about-the-state-of-t...
Holding a bunch of other factors constant, men would live the same length of time as women do: monks have comparable lifespans to nuns. Men die earlier because we work longer hours at shittier jobs and are socially punished for asking for help from others and aren't given the space for self care.
As far as men dying earlier on the job because they're choosing to be firefighters instead of kindergarten teachers, you simply ignore the discrimination male teachers face. In your "equity" framework, you'd demand men to just buck up and accept it and even deny it's social as opposed to a series of coincidental discriminations by individuals. The fact that you can't even see how your categories don't map to reality is a key tell for being captured by an ideology, in the social/Gramscian sense.
Lastly, you repeat the "wage gap" myth: women earn less than men because men work more hours than women. The rallying cry used to be "equal pay for equal work," but it seems to now have shifted to "equal pay for less work." (Despite that same excess work being what's killing men and destroying their bodies.)
I know that if I hit a rough patch in my life, I will certainly make myself miserable and would not care what happens to me. I know it by is not rational, but that would explain also probably why wars are fought by men.
Add the fact that society are blaming men for pretty much everything going wrong, it does not surprise me that men are getting loose
Might have something to do with women (speaking very broadly) being more social than men. Social connection provide a framework for cooperation and competition, without which some men drift aimlessly.
This is just an off-the-cuff hypothesis, though, not researched in any way (at least by me).
This is an incredibly asinine take.
> What I find interesting isn’t so much why men are doing poorly. Why are women doing better in certain areas?
You answered you own question. The """men in power""" spend more time helping women like them than helping men different from them (in terms of money and power).
I can only upvote. My comment is probably not very good for HN.
Although I am glad this topic is finally getting "some" attention.
Given current trends I expect things to get much, much worse.
Unfortunately I agree.
Politics is the new religion insofar as it develops moral frameworks and makes people abide by them while convincing them they are making the "rational" choice. This is informed substantially by Enlightenment-era philosophies and is the major component in modern consent manufacturing.
"Rational" in scare quotes because good luck converting questions of morality into questions of rationality.
There is nothing more frightening than someone that really and truly believes something. There is no end to what they will do.
That's not what I think motivated all the US school shootings in the last 25 years.
Ideological zeal that pursues actively harming others is something I don't think the US has much of, culturally speaking. No one preaches "those people need to die" or "we need to harm those people".
Still, as far as I can tell, even with the increase in frequency these are not common events. ~600 per year. No number of them is rare enough, but imagine if even 1 in 1000 of the estimated number of Americans who suffer from major depression (around 16 million) did a mass shooting. Running amok may be the exception that proves the rule.
I'd also point out that ideological zeal may play a role here. Ideology seems to underly policy of not only refusing to examine potential further restrictions on access but to broadly increasing access to arms/gear that make them easier. Characterizations of these events as mental health crises don't seem to lead to social policy supporting mental health. Certainly not the whole story, but probably plays a role in paving the way for harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...
The UK had one mass shooting, twenty-five years ago, and chose to end the problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre
Mass shootings are a horror that the US is unwilling and unable to confront. Far too many people would simply prefer to listen to Alex Jones and imagine that it's all fake.
Nobody says it out loud, they just strongly imply it.
Much like how nobody advocates for war by saying that <people in some other country should die>, they couch it behind nicer-sounding rhetoric.
.. yes they do? It's not usually spelled out in those words, at least not on the "respectable" side of the preaching, but when there's a mass shooter manifesto the shooter usually makes clear their influences and sometimes gives them thanks and citations.
It's also often done in the past tense. Whenever there's a controversial shooting, hundreds of commentators will turn up to say "that person deserved to be shot".
As far as I can tell, Europe isn’t all that post-Christian. Even countries that have low levels of people actively practicing religion still carry a strong cultural legacy from Christianity: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes...
Counterintuitively, America’s lack of a generous welfare system tends to destabilize traditional gender roles. Among women with children under 18, 56% would prefer a “homemaker” role if they were “free” to do either: https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-wome.... Contrast with just 26% of men. 39% of women without kids would also prefer to stay home if they had the choice. Even out of women who are currently employed, but have children under 18, the majority would prefer not to work.
Contrast say the Netherlands. It is an egalitarian, post-Christian place, for example, but 60% of working Dutch women only work part time, versus 20% of working Dutch men.
> Who wouldn’t prefer to stay home if they had the choice? I could spend my days traveling, hiking, going to the beach, reading, working on hobbies, learning new skills, cooking, etc.
"Homemaker" does not mean "staying at home, doing whatever you want."
But, would you still feel the same if you had to stay home to take care of kids and a working spouse ?
“Talking to someone” isn’t community. Colleagues provide an ersatz community for people who don’t have a real one in their life. You need a steady cast of characters and ideally repeated, purposeful interaction.
I don't think that is true in Europe. They are probably a fair bit younger than middle class mothers which could be a barrier to being friends.
My own experience of living in Europe is confined to Germany but middle class German girls mostly don’t even work part time jobs in university, never mind taking a year off before university to work as an au pair, in a foreign country. They do not nanny. Spanish friends made it sound like the same was true in Spain too. Students do not have jobs at university.
Being a homemaker can be incredibly isolating. Homemakers need meaningful adult interaction and relationships that are not centered around their children or exclusive to their spouses.
So go out and make them? My 2 year old goes where we are, if that activity isn't kid centered that's too fucking bad and kid is gonna have to deal; I have a life too. It's not like having all conversations centered around work at the office is especially meaningful either.
Hilarious, and maybe it works with a 2yo, but when the kid is 5 it's "everybody else is gonna have to deal" as well.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, though.
And yeah, it’s not supposed to be your only social outlet. Catch up with people who you’ve known from other parts of your life.
Sorry that experience was rough for you, I hope you've gotten to a better place.
Intentional how?
Basically everyone who doesn’t stay heavily involved in their professional field after retirement was doing it almost solely for money. There are better and worse jobs, more and less enjoyable ones. But a huge majority of people have jobs, not careers.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1720/Work-Work-Place.aspx
On the Internet these days I often see contructed claims of extreme despair - about finding a partner, jobs, war, democracy, crime, etc. etc. In a way it matches an older rhetoric of making brazen, extreme, baseless statements that frame the conversation (around the baseless claims rather than the issue at hand), inflame it, and disrupt people who disagree. It's time to think about whose interests the despair serves.
If you think this is despair I suggest talking to some depressed people. Most people work for money.
I think I do understand your personal view of working, which you are entitled to, but I see no basis for why you think (or I would think) others agree. Also, I have evidence (in the GP) that they overwhelmingly don't and my experience of people also disagrees.
I think that’s where disagreement lies.
Again, just statements with no evidence. Don't attack mine - provide some!
Also a stay at home wife was traditionally not isolated from society; in my family one generation ago almost everyone was in that situation and I can tell that social interactions were much stronger and more frequent than my generation.
Recognition? That stuff people look for in Facebook likes, Twitter shares and LinkedIn "achievements"? That is attention seeking, not recognition.
> Having no career advancement is sometimes like not having cancer: a net positive.
I have never heard anyone express or imply that. I don't doubt you feel that way, but is there any evidence that it's widespread?
> Most people have no career at all, they retire on the same job (just more "senior") they started with.
That is almost certainly not true. I believe the evidence says that the great majority switch jobs many times and switch careers several times.
> a stay at home wife was traditionally not isolated from society
I've heard otherwise from homemakers of prior generations - the isolation was one of their primary complaints. And I'm pretty sure I've read about research showing the same. What makes your narrative true?
I work from home, wife doesn't, that makes me the defacto stay-at-home dad. It's definitely playing the startup game in "hard mode" but I love not missing a thing.
Suerte.
As a man, I had the fortune to stay at home for several years with my child and it was the most wonderful time ever. Sure it's a lot of work, but also a lot of joy.
It's not travelling... If you're staying at home...
I think that often people with remunerative, intellectually stimulating jobs overlook the perspective of women who have (and are realistically only qualified to have) jobs we would probably regard as more mundane.
> Counterintuitively, America’s lack of a generous welfare system tends to destabilize traditional gender roles.
> Many religious people cannot fathom that something outside of and independent of their moral system exists.
Well, this isn’t exactly an unpopular theory among Atheists either. Never mind that Atheists can go toe to toe with religious people with respect to dogmatic faith, tribalism, etc. Perhaps it’s not an issue of categorical superiority?
>Well, this isn’t exactly an unpopular theory among Atheists either.
What part? You think Atheists cannot see that religion exists and that people derive their 'morals' from that? Dogmatic faith? That's absurd, and sounds again like Christianity imposing their worldview onto others when faced with different worldviews. It's the same 'Atheists=Satanists' again, in which Atheists are only understood in the framework of Christianity.
[edit] formatting
I think you're deeply mistaken on many counts. First of all, Christianity didn't "hijack" Christmas or Easter--those were patently Christian concepts; however, the medieval Church did dress up those concepts with superficial pagan trappings. That said, if you reduce Christianity to its holidays, then of course you would look at modern Western Civilization and feel that Christianity's effect was superficial. You have to have a modicum of understanding of Christian theology and ethics to see how those have influenced western civ.
> What part? You think Atheists cannot see that religion exists and that people derive their 'morals' from that?
I mean that I don't think "modern Western morals were significantly derived from Judeo-Christian values" is particularly controversial among Atheists.
> Dogmatic faith? That's absurd, and sounds again like Christianity imposing their worldview onto others when faced with different worldviews.
It's really not, you're just conflating "faith" with "religious faith". Atheists have faith in lots of things from various political ideals to the belief that God doesn't exist, and with respect to zeal the faith of Atheists can absolutely rival that of anyone else. Indeed, even your apparent belief that religious minds are feebler than those of Atheists is an article of faith. At the end of the day, people are just people and "religious" vs "atheists" isn't a useful taxonomy for virtually anything.
You're arguing that no culture celebrated that days are finally getting longer in winter (e.g. complete with family gatherings and evergreen trees), and that no culture had spring/fertility (rabbit!) rituals, millenia before Christinity? Don't be ridiculous. Christianity came, hijacked those established celebrations, and rebranded them. Simple as that.
>I mean that I don't think "modern Western morals were significantly derived from Judeo-Christian values" is particularly controversial among Atheists.
Well, you think wrong then.
>Atheists have faith in lots of things from various political ideals to the belief that God doesn't exist,
You have a very loose unreligious view of 'faith' then. Do you need 'faith' to trust that you won't just float away when jumping, do you need faith that the sun will rise again tomorrow? I don't.
Not believing that God exists is not in any way a larger leap than not believing in Santa Claus or Harry Potter. I wouldn't call that 'faith'.
>even your apparent belief that religious minds are feebler than those of Atheists is an article of faith.
I never said that. But now we're getting closer: At the core, are you saying that your 'faith' then is nothing but insinuating and lying?
> "religious" vs "atheists" isn't a useful taxonomy for virtually anything.
You're barking up the wrong tree then - religious people should simply stop doing that. Why do they feel so threatened and keep bringing it up again and again? I've never heard of an atheist crusade that goes around giving people the choice between not believing or being killed. That's just ridiculous. No atheist goes around banning and burning books. Why do I find bibles in every hotel room, but not 'A brief history of time' or 'On the origin of species'? The only true religious freedom is freedom from religion.
Oof, I don't think we can have this conversation until you familiarize yourself on a basic level with even the most superficial aspects of Christianity (the holidays).
> Well, you think wrong then.
Lol.
> You're barking up the wrong tree then - religious people should simply stop doing that. Why do they feel so threatened and keep bringing it up again and again?
Lol, you're the only one in this thread bringing it up :)
Anyway, I'm not getting baited into your holy war. You can have the last word. Enjoy your weekend.
Atheists don't derive their morals from these stories, that's the difference. That there is some superficial overlap (a tree? presents?) doesn't allow you to claim the morality of atheists as religion-derived. That's ludicrous. It's like saying the local butcher taking apart a pig is adhering to Aztec rituals and their morals because at some point in both 'ceremonies' someone holds a heart in their hands.
In fact, the source of morals among atheists seems to be a permanent puzzle for many people with religious background, simply claiming them as religion-based misses the point completely.
I don’t have a religious background and it’s still a puzzle for me. Best I can manage to explain it is through a combination of tradition and genes (“human nature”), and tradition is often indeed derived from historical religious environment. Moral is mostly universal but not completely - for one example the attitudes towards hard work at the expense of everything else vary greatly across different cultures and religious traditions.
Sure, religious people get their morals largely from their religion. But where do the morals of the religion come from?
It's not only not universal, but it's highly fluid (which it couldn't be if it was universal).
As a reference to my biases, I'm a theistic agnost, I don't know, but I believe. The life of pie or secondhand lions explain the why pretty well.
Raises hand: Atheist here who thinks that a historical Jesus is at least plausible. Obviously not a son of god, though, that would have been embellishment by later generations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus has a good overview of the non biblical sources.
1- https://i.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/religion#wiki_...
The notion that atheists--or Christians, for that matter--ground their moral reasoning in first principles, completely free of unexamined assumptions and social convention, is so laughable that I'm amazed anyone here is seriously suggesting it.
I also don't write about how Atheists would justify (religious) beliefs - and why would atheists have to justify religious beliefs? Now that is laughable. The whole point of Atheism is to no longer rely on beliefs, much less having or feeling the urge to justify other people's beliefs.
Also, rayiner doesn't write about that at all. What they claim is that the fact that certain cultural customs prove the original Christian origin and persisting influence of Christianity of these customs, ignoring that sitting around a pine tree with your family and celebrating that days are finally getting longer predates Christianity by hundreds or, more likely, thousands of years.
Rayiner in their reply to my post completely ignored that the whole point of my post was about 'cultural legacy' vs 'organized religion', so I don't feel particularly bad that you think I did not address their comment enough. Also, I can't change that they are hijacking the thread to praise Christianity over Arabs.
I should explain that I meant belief in a very ordinary sense of the word. As in, I believe capital punishment is wrong, or, Mike doesn't believe in the existence of aliens.
>What they claim is that the fact that certain cultural customs...
rayiner argued that the "cultural legacy" of Christianity is about more than just custom. They're saying that certain values--equality, moral universalism--are widely and deeply held throughout the modern, secular West, and that those values (or rather the great weight that Westerners assign to them) are a legacy of Christianity.
It's not a ridiculous position. Plenty of serious thinkers have argued along similar lines--Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, Charles Taylor, Marcel Gaucher, Ivan Illich. No doubt there are lots more.
I'll humor you anyway and just refer to [1] that thoroughly debunks the position that those values originate in any way as a legacy of Christianity. You're welcome.
Thank you, that's an interesting paper. Looking at the "morality-as-cooperation codebook," though, I see a great deal that contradicts orthodox Christian doctrine--for example, Giving preferential treatment to (members of) your group. Assuming that the opposite belief--that you should "love your enemies, bless them that curse you," etc.--has gained any adherence in the West, that ethic must have originated in something else (maybe a religion?) besides the code of reciprocity your paper's authors have assembled.
I'm glad I specified the planet, or else someone would have pointed out planets without a tilted axis.
[Edit] Fair point, though. I asked for a single counterexample and you delivered.
I really dislike religion claiming monopoly on morals.
Even tribes of cavemen cared for each-other. We have evidence of people being cared for and living for years with crippling iniiries. They could not care for themselves let alone help the tribe.
Even animals care for each-other and protect each-other, can't claim culture or religion there - its a basic feature of evolution.
If there was actually a correlation between religion and morality, then we would see less crimes like murder/ robbery /rape in religious societies. If anything, the opposite is true.
Where's the monopoly? A discussion on the moral values of religious rituals doesn't preclude anything. I don't even belong to a church.
It seems you think (perhaps subconsciously) that religion has a monopoly on morals. Why else are you bringing that into the discussion and arguing against it?
> Even animals care for each-other and protect each-other, can't claim culture or religion there - its a basic feature of evolution.
Religious morals are an instance of mutual care emerging through social evolution in an animal - the human, specifically. And humans call it "culture", because humans like to invent words to describe specific instances of phenomena.
It’s easier to notice when you compare between countries and across religious traditions. My dad was raised very religious (Muslim) in Bangladesh. His grandfather was an imam. He is non-religious and I grew up non-religious, but I joined a Christian church after I got married. From that vantage point I was able to see how much of what I thought was secular American culture could be traced back to Christianity.
Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality. They almost fall over themselves to welcome people from different ethnic backgrounds. I suspect this has something to do with Christianity’s origins as a Jewish religion adopted by the Gentiles. I mean, how many societies have a religion centered around some other ethnic group?
There’s so many aspects of society and culture that are the product of history, and of course history is deeply intertwined with religion. My atheist friend, who is white, was telling me how much she hated her uncle for being racist against Muslims. I pointed out to her that was an extremely Christian thing to say! https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2010&ve...
> Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. 37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
By contrast, Islam is a religion that arose in Arab society, where kinship ties mean everything. In my home country, putting people you don’t even know over kin, based on some abstract notion of justice, would be unthinkable. It actually made me a little uncomfortable to think that people like me had caused strife within her family.
Killing your own child suggests to me that kinship means rather less than it does in Western cultures.
Conversely, liberty starts with valuing humans for the individuals that they are. And not as mere appendages which serve a larger whole.
Is it though? I don’t think I’ve found more individualistic societies to be less racist or nationalist.
When a large group of your population is unable to financially afford justice that's a form of ethnic cleansing.
Genocide is horrible, but what could possible be more evil? Here is what: masterminding it so that a large group of your population no longer sees it for what it is and would rather point at another country for its concentration camps than solve their issues at home.
> but you don't tend to get ethnic cleansing or organized genocides.
How would you describe the US private prison system, or gitmo if not "organized genocide"?
There are 39 prisoners in gitmo. In its total lifetime there have been 780 people. 9 died in custody. I wouldn't call that genocide.
> the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group
Smallest genocide by death toll(killing of Tasmanian aboriginals by the British) killed just 400 to 1000 people.
There is a long and complicated history in English speaking people of "rights for me, but not for thee" which started with the king, was broadened to nobles with the Magna Carta, was broadened to rich landowners with the establishment of Parliament, was in the process of being broadened to free white men around the time of the American Revolution and has piecemeal been given to other groups over time.
What today we consider "universal rights" were historically not universal. Our awful treatment of others is tied to our not granting rights to them. And our awful treatment of ourselves (for example in totalitarian societies) is tied to our being subsumed in something greater.
Yes, there are many things that are accepted in other cultures as normal that I am happy to condemn. If you can't find it in you to condemn at least some of them, then I think that there is something wrong with you.
These are?
You give no examples. Also I'm in the UK and can't remember the last time anyone was killed for trespass or other minor violations (okay, one or two over a decade I think).
> killing multiple strangers in a rage of entitlement
You give no examples. Post some evidence, overall numbers of such cases, details please.
> calling police to kill or punish strangers who are having mental health crises for minor violations of public behavior ordinances
You give no examples - post summary details.
> basically killing or punishing strangers for any old reason. I
You give no examples.
> I'd venture to guess
so no evidence whatsover
> we do orders of magnitude more of it per capita in the West
The US is not 'the West'. Perhaps you'd like to consider the UK, Germany, Scandinavia....
I suspect you're right in thinking honour killings aren't common (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour_killing_in_Pakistan#Pre...> "The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan lists 460 cases of reported honour killings in 2017, with 194 males and 376 females as victims"), but it's the extreme point of a pervasively oppressive/intolerant system which can ruin lives without actually killing people.
> extremes in the behaviors of people with Western, liberal-individualistic belief systems
I can think a of few similar non-US examples of the above behaviors, but he's already answered the original question.
Yes, I take your point, he was talking of that specific subset, not (as I read it) the west in general.
> ..but he's already answered the original question.
Within that specific subset, I'd agree he has. Thanks.
Do you have anything other than the jordan peterson paraphrase to back this as a cause, as opposed to the actual dangerous ideologies? One could just as easily state as absolute fact that subsuming the individual to the societal unit is at the heart of the greatest accomplishments of humankind.
This idea is a straightforward false dichotomy presenting the only alternative to absolute individual liberty as complete subjugation of free will, and used to provide some truly absurd explanations for things, such as 'honor' being the actual problem in this case, not the 'killings'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivism#Origins_and_histo...
> One could just as easily state as absolute fact that subsuming the individual to the societal unit is at the heart of the greatest accomplishments of humankind.
Do you have a benevolent dictator in mind?
> complete subjugation of free will
The fundamental problem of religion (politics, generally) is that you agree to submit to an all-merciful, all-benevolent, all-knowing entity. The reality of the deal is rather less satisfying.
You can find similar points of view in many previous writers from points as distant in the ideological spectrum as George Orwell and Ayn Rand.
Nomadic desert life is brutally hard—I suspect that if a tribe of Arab nomads had the individualism of people from San Francisco they’d all quickly die of starvation. Independence of the individual from the extended family unit isn’t all that viable absent market economies, social safety nets, etc. Independence of women from men isn’t all that viable in an environment where survival requires physically demanding and dangerous work (herding animals, fending off intruders, etc). Even in modern western society, the old depend on the young for survival; the physical safety of women is underwritten by armed men, etc. We just have layers of abstraction (Social Security, police departments, etc.) that allow those things to be done at arm’s length. In a pre-modern society those social dependencies all collapse into the family unit.
I tend to agree that, as all these economic and technological predicates for individualism arose, Christian societies were better positioned to take advantage. On the flip side, my personal belief is that modern western societies have taken that too far, to the point where they’re no long even viable as societies. The future of Europe, for example, looks to be Islam. Maybe a moderated, more secular version, but probably still quite different than the culture that prevails today.
But Christian countries have our share of organizations such as the Mafia where family and ethnic group are paramount. Christian history is full of brutal totalitarian states and violent killing.
Separately https://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-p... suggests that rumors of an Islamic future for Europe are premature. And as Muslims integrate, their advantage in birth rate is likely to decline, and net conversions are away from Islam. As a result, long-term, I see no reason why Islam will grow to be more than a significant minority.
Even the ones that integrate are going to be far less individualistic than native born Europeans. Cultural legacy Carrie’s through for generations—and that’s likely to be especially true for European Muslims given how segregated they are.
1.
> Killing your own child
I can't hear this phrase without thinking of Abraham and Isaac. It's the story that the whole of the Old Testament revolves around.
(And then the New Testament goes to heroic lengths of reinterpretation? Or have I just gotten too much Girard in my head? I'm never sure how much to celebrate it as reformist (moving past the animal sacrifice cult of the Levites), vs. to detest it (continuing to worship the obscene god of the burning bush. But then how do you carve out that the Commandments are actually decent?). I'm also not quite sure that I'm really all that big a fan of Jesus himself; I may actually prefer the religion of Paul. But it was Jesus who was responsible for the Beatitudes, and for his famous and beautiful "whole of the law" summary. So I'm not sure. His radical anti-family message, combined with his urgency (and his apparent contempt for his disciples?) have never sat right with me. But maybe the urgency at least is essential.)
And supposedly the version we get in the Torah is the "Hollywood ending", whereas in the original (late neolithic?) story Isaac is simply killed and Abraham is rewarded. So the original is even worse.
(Or perhaps the fact of the "Hollywood ending" to Abraham and Isaac is itself an innovation to be celebrated, and we can view the Old Testament itself as part of that same Girardian process of reform, of yet-worse human sacrifice religions. A good thing about this is that it creates less of an Old Testament vs. New Testament binary/dualism; it expands the field of view.)
(There may also be a Yahwist vs. Elohist conflict I have yet to understand, which may help me tease apart good from bad parts of the Old Testament.)
2.
> honor killings
Not long ago I quoted Genesis 34, which disturbs me for several reasons -- that it celebrates an honor killing being one of them.
(Actually, maybe I'm wrong? Because they do not kill Dinah? More on that in a second.)
That the enemy clan is treated as a unit to be destroyed rather than the individual man is another. How can that possibly be justice?
(Some people will claim that Shechem raped Dinah. NIV translates it that way, but KJV doesn't. I don't believe the NIV translation. First, because those societies still exist and "consent" isn't really something they think about in judging these cases. And I mean, it says right there at the end that the Israelites kill the men and take their wives captive, presumably to be raped. Second, because Shechem is said to speak kindly to her and request her hand in marriage. And third because Hamor et al act as though good relations should be possible with the Israelites. KJV doesn't say "raped", it says "defiled" (more than once), and, given the rest of the chapter's focus on circumcision, I honestly think that the fact that he had sex with her with his intact penis is the thing they found offensive. Symbolic of course of his being an Other. A belief that comports with the rest of the Old Testament's repeated admonishments not to marry outside the Tribe (e.g., Samson and Delilah). I think it's much closer to a Black man being lynched for having the temerity to sleep with a white woman.)
...which brings us to, of course, the central role of genital mutilation to the story, which is another reason to be disturbed by it.
The complete rejection of an apparently good-faith effort towards peace and mutual assimilation is a fourth reason to be disturbed, but consistent with the particularism/separatism of the rest of the Old Testament.
And a fifth is the trickery involved. "Yes, yes, we can all get along! Undergo our painful and irreversible initiatiation!" ...and then be slain without mercy while you're still recovering.
I had the TV on the other day and saw a Rick Steves visit to Auschwitz/Birkenau, in which I was similarly disturbed by the amount of trickery involved. The victims were told to bring their luggage, so they would believe that they were being resettled to live good lives in another place. The sign over the gate famously said "Arbeit macht frei", another lie. All to avoid panic while their killing was planned. All like the promise of the sons of Jacob in Genesis 34:15-16.
All the more tragic because so many of those Jewish victims had assimilated into German society (not necessarily abandoning Judaism, but just treating it as another religion in the Liberal style, instead of as an ethno-nationalist thing), and they and the German gentiles they lived more-or-less peacefully among (until the Nazis riled them up) were essentially living as Hamor had promised,
> 9 And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you.
> 10 And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein.
which would have been the desirable outcome.
If it isn't clear yet, while Shechem may be a little dumb here (sort of a Romeo character), I think Hamor's the good guy, consistently trying to steer the situation towards a peaceful and mutually beneficial outcome.
We could really use Dinah's point of view here. I choose to interpret her as a sort of Juliet, stuck between these Montagues (Israelites) and Capulets (Hivites).
...
Can we bring it back to the themes of "kinship" and "Arab culture" (or, culture in the Middle East) vs. "Western culture"? To the themes of grandparent post?
Well, my interpretation of Genesis 34 is that it is anti-"miscegenist". Which would be, if not about kinship, then at least about nationality. And certainly not universalist.
And Abraham/Isaac is about sacrificing blood kin for the demands of a god who is arguably the personification of a nation.
So perhaps this is about nation vs. family -- dishonor to the nation outranking loyalty to kin.
Of course, this is all a bit inbred, so "nation" largely is "kin". Maybe then this is a meme that wants to create loyalty among genes at, say, the cousin-level degree of relatedness, at expense both of loyalty to specific children, and also of sympathy to outsiders. I'm thinking about ant colonies and cancer cells now. It's a choice to privilege a certain scale of "incorporation" -- what is the "body" we care about?
Also, just because some Christians share some of the morals of your humanist friend does not imply any relation whatsoever. There appears to be that desire from religious groups to often exaggerate and emphasize any such correlation as something more. When your friend meets with his family at the end of December and again at the equinox in spring - do you point out how Paganist he is? And, when you as a Christian presumably celebrate Christmas and Easter with your family - do you tell them they are just like Pagans as well? If not - why not?
You may want to read up on slavery. Abolition in Christian societies was mainly a religious movement. Arab societies practiced it extensively as well, but kept going until the 20th century, and only really stopped because of international pressure from Christian countries.
The crusades? Both Muslims and Christians engaged in offensive military campaigns during the crusades. Only in Christian countries do any appreciable number of people feel bad about it.
Likewise, the speed at which Irish and Italians were integrated into American society is pretty much unparalleled by anything in any non-Christian society. I’m Bangladeshi on both sides back into the the dim reaches of history. But if I went back I would be “bideshi” (foreigner) because I was raised in American. My white wife and mixed kids would never be considered Bangladeshi, no matter how long they lived there. (It’s an ethnostate: a country for people of ancertsin
Ah, so there were Christians who opposed it, which makes that the central tenet in Christianity. But there were also those Christians who practiced it - does that now make slavery a central tenet in Christianity instead?
You can't just cherrypick what you find most flattering for your group and then round it off with 'but the Arabs'.
Italians are still a protected minority in New Jersey, and Hispanics are still a protected minority throughout the US. Natives were forcibly Christianized and then killed or deported to barren lands no one wanted.
Slave abolitionists explicitly mentioned where they derived their morals from - clearly establishing causality.
Could there be something else common among slave practitioners apart from religion - like common materialistic greed and superior firepower to overpower and dominate others?
Cherry picking again, are we? So now we are looking for an alternative explanation - but only on the evil side. The existence of Christians who opposed slavery does not prove that it is in any way central to Christianity, or exclusive to Christianity. That's not how logic works.
How about spinning it the other way around? Giving man 'dominion' over everything that creeps on earth, throw in a bit of manifest destiny and some appropriate bible quotes - voilà! A perfectly fine Christian justification for why slavery is the Christian way to do things. https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-33/wh... https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/ etc.
On the other hand, the humanist Enlightenment in France led to the French revolution, led in turn to laicist France granting citizenship to former slaves in 1792 on non-religious grounds.
So yeah, there was something else among both abolitionists and slave holders, which is my whole point.
Supporters of slavery, by contrast, often invoked the language of science and progress and condemned abolitionists as religious zealots. The famous Cornerstone Speech, for example, given by the VP of the Confederacy:
> This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics.
Think about this logically. Imagine you’re a white European looking around at the world in 1776. There is no systematic archeology, there is no science of genetics. What would cause you to look around at the civilization and technology Europeans had developed, compared to what Africans or Asians has developed, and conclude that all people were equal? Back then it was a moral premise you had to accept on faith without the support of science.
Consider Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about the Creator endowing all men with alienable rights. Even though he was probably a deist, he expressly incorporated Christian morality into his worldview (e.g. the Jefferson Bible).
Or consider German Americans, one of Lincoln’s core constituencies that pushed him toward emancipation. These were recent immigrants to the Midwest who had no historical beef with the south. Yet, per capita, states like Iowa contributed the most soldiers to fight and die for the union. Do you think they were driven by abstract enlightenment principles of equality and justice?
It’s widely accepted today that the Civil War was about slavery. That has a remarkable implication. 360,000 union soldiers died to end slavery in the south. Can you name another example of one ethnic group incurring that kind of casualties to fight for the freedom of a different ethnic group? Maybe there are other examples but I’m unaware of any.
That's a bit too simplified. The South fought primarily because they wanted to keep slavery and thought Lincoln would abolish it, but the North fought primarily to prevent secession, and ending slavery was just a convenient tool they could use to help win the war. The "good north vs evil south" narrative is too often used as a political cudgel, and doesn't really accurately reflect the on-the-ground reality.
That there were Christians who opposed slavery does not mean it's central or exclusive to Christianity. Christians also justified slavery with the bible. https://time.com/5171819/christianity-slavery-book-excerpt/
That there were slave holders who justified their view in science does not mean that it's central or exclusive to atheists (see citizenship rights for slaves in the laicist French revolution)
>Consider Thomas Jefferson,
I'll consider Thomas Jefferson who readily incorporated slavery in his business while formulating his Jefferson Bible.
>Or consider German Americans
Maybe recent immigrants were driven by a desire to contribute to their new home?
>Maybe there are other examples but I’m unaware of any.
Unclear how superficial or cynical this is meant. WWII could come to mind.
Really, yours is the first account I read of the Civil War as a religious crusade of the Christian North to finally bring god to the heretics of the South.
This idealisation and universalisation is not only Western of course. I'm a mixed kid like your kids, but South India rather than Bangladesh, and I would be and am rather unquestionably accepted as Indian when I am there. But a major driver in the split between India and (then-)Pakistan comes down to the (novel & idiosyncratic) liberal ideals we compare to.
As a final note re: the Crusades. I was not under the impression the Crusades were looked down upon because of war, but because they too often were incoherent raiding expéditions that sacked and subdued parts of Christendom even more than they won control of the Jerusalem.
"Liberal India" is a narrow slice of the country--more representative of the British culture that heavily influenced the Indian elite than ordinary Indians: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...
Heck, my mom went to college and graduate school and had a white collar career in Bangladesh in the 1960s and 1970s. But she came from a wealthy, socially prominent family, and had British tutors growing up. It would be tremendously misleading to use her experience to talk about how "liberal" Bangladeshis are.
You are are oversimplifying, cherrypicking, or getting the facts wrong.
Isn't equality a tenet of Islam?
There are critical differences between Paganism and Christianity. For example, the philosopher Rene Girard showed that many traditions had stories of mimetic desire and scapegoating, but Christianity showed the crucial end of that story, the fact that the killing of the scapegoat to save the community is a lie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSzF2OG2ejI.
GK Chesterton has a lot of interesting things to say about Pagans also http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/heretics/12/, and his book The Everlasting Man is worth reading for the way that it uses pagan tropes to point towards Christianity.
And the common cherrypicking strawman again in this thread. No one claimed that Christianity is indistinguishable from Paganism, much like no one claims that the apple is indistinguishable from the apple tree.
I highly recommend GK Chesterton's book "The Everlasting Man", its a short read and still worthwhile even for atheists or those of other faiths as the author is brilliant.
Plenty. Southeast Asia has religions centered around Indian or Arab religions. Same for Iran and much of Central Asia with Islam.
All these places have adapted the other ethnicity's belief system to their own culture.
It's no different for Christianity. Bertrand Russell described it as the combination of Greek philosophy with Jewish mythology and Roman societal/power structures.
Some of the earliest extant texts in Christianity come from Justin Martyr, who, just a century after Jesus, was already workshopping the idea that Plato and Socrates were unknowing Christians that laid a philosophical ground for Christianity.
The British historian Tom Holland is very good on this topic. His recent book "Dominion" is basically an examination of how Christianity so pervasively shaped the West. He's got some good interviews on YouTube if anyone wants a shorter introduction to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIJ9gK47Ogw,https://www.yout....
The cultural legacy of modern Europe is that of Renaissance, which is a partial rejection of many religious morals and practices we would find abhorrent today. Like burning heretics, astronomers and philosophers at the stake, witch hunts, etc.
People were put to death for translating the Bible into english from latin, mind you.
There was a re-discovery and embracement of great works antiquity, think ancient Greece.
People did not go out and restart republics (for a couple centuries, which is a long time), nor bring back Aristotelian astronomy (rather the opposite), nor rituals of the old gods, nor rediscover ancient works that hadn’t been intentionally preserved by centuries of medieval scribes (papyrus lasts < 500 years in moist Europe). They reinterpreted the past. It was no longer “copy the procedures of the great doctor Galen”, it was “copy the curiosity”.
The fact that we call the time when Church was at the peak of it's power 'Dark Ages' is a testament to success of Renaissance era propaganda
> People did not go out and restart republics
The french revolution?
My experiences are almost the complete opposite to yours, I suspect there are major differences between congregations that can't be applied to the nation at large. Churches in the US are weirdly segregated by ethnicity, at least in the south[0] where you find black churches,white churches, Korean churches, etc.
I am African, and had the misfortune of attending a church that's part of the Southern Baptist Convention. I got the distinct sense that they are warm and welcoming to people requiring charity or to rake on as a "project"; not equals. Almost everyone who saw me volunteer assumed I was a poor student at the affiliated Theological college, and would be very warm, but when I'd let them know I was a software engineer and much closer to them socio-economically than they had assumed, they didn't know quite how to act, it was weird,and it happened multiple times.
Trump's presidency was a bad time to be black in an SBC church. I never felt quite comfortable, and my faith intensely tested. It came to a head when I encountered incidents of passive and active racism[1],and I came to the conclusion that we could not possibly be worshipping the same God. Then again, the southern churches could reconcile Christianity and slavery, so perhaps all ethnicities are welcome, with the long-lived exception of blacks. YMMV
0. As a point of comparison: South Africa has more integrated churches, just 1 generation since the end of apartheid.
1. Why aren't you going to a black church? Oh, the other black member, he's intelligent and articulate, he's practically white!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention#Di...
I think you are confusing “Western liberal democratic societies” with “Christian countries”. The latter are a subset of historically Christian countries (many are more accurately post-Christian, now), but plenty of Christian countries are not Western liberal democracies and those do not fit the mold you are trying to fit “Christian countries” into.
Citation needed.
> They almost fall over themselves to welcome people from different ethnic backgrounds. I suspect this has something to do with Christianity’s origins as a Jewish religion adopted by the Gentiles.
Yet Christian kingdoms had zero qualms about persicuting Jews for centuries.
> I mean, how many societies have a religion centered around some other ethnic group?
You mean like Islam which has over 1.9 billion adherents and privileges a language spoken by 300 million Arabs?
> Citation needed.
Jacques Ellul got you covered[1], if you dig through the footnotes and references in his books you'll be able to find hundreds more.
Jacques Ellul's La subversion du Christianisme (The Subversion of Christianity)
also "Trahison de l'Occident" (The Betrayal of the West)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#Bibliography
Even after the Reform, Christianity encouraged tight family groups, the wife's subservience to her husband, and similarly children's subservience to their father.
Equality only exists in Christian texts, it is not part of any common practice.
If you want to look for a historical source about modern ideas of equality between people that inspired the Enlightenment movement, then that source are the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee), whose society didn't have the same type of rigid hierarchies that all European societies at the time had.
> Consider, for example, the obsession in Christian countries with equality. They almost fall over themselves to welcome people from different ethnic backgrounds. [...]
This is true in anglophone countries, sure, but it's less the case in europe and in particular, say, eastern europe or the balkans: ignoring albania/kosovo/bosnia, you've got plenty of heavily christian countries there who are not so open to people of different ethnic groups (well, which deviate from ethnic groups common to the region). You'll be treated more or less well but still fundamentally considered an outsider, and may not be welcome depending on where you go. Consider otherwise the armenians who, while I'm heavily leaning on stereotypes, are still quite well known for being both 1. pretty deeply culturally christians, and 2. a pretty closed-off community that often intermarry (although I do know there's often intermarriages with greeks and georgians)
I would agree with your point, but I would warn you not to assume that everything true of americans and/or anglophone countries often follows closely in other christian countries.
If there is an effect here it can't be all that significant, if you look at wealthy countries with larger welfare states than the US most have a female labor force participation rate at least as high.
I would attribute this more to cultural aspects (there's something of a ravenmuter [1] issue in the Netherlands as well), but even more importantly, to basic economics. Kindergarden is very expensive, women get some maternal leave while men basically get none, so there's significant pressure on the mother to stay at home with the kids for longer.
When they return to the workforce after some years of childcare, they do so to lower salaries than they would have had otherwise, hence part time work becomes more attractive.
I don't deny that there's a natural tendency for women to be more nurturing, but I don't think that's the main force driving this disparity.
I don't think that's so counterintuitive. Generous welfare systems give more people the opportunity to pursue the work lifestyle they would like to rather than the one they would have to to make ends meet if the generous welfare system didn't exist.
That's a totally different scenario than gender roles being enforced by religious or cultural restrictions. That also promotes traditional gender roles but doesn't give individuals a choice in the matter.
But, I mean, obviously it would be good if most workers made enough to support a family with a single income.
I would imagine approximately everyone would prefer a homemaker role if it was possible.
I had the fortune of taking multiple years off to spend with my child at home, it was the best time ever. Unfortunately savings don't last forever so eventually had to go back to the soulless grind of daily status report standups and endless useless meetings.
Relative stability might be too presumptuous. Far right politics in Europe is playing better now than it has in generations, AFAIU. Largely for the same socio-economic reasons it has in the U.S. and elsewhere. The rise of conservative populism is a global phenomenon, which is strong evidence for it having a shared origin, such as trade-induced labor dislocation, the rise of social media, etc.
This state of affairs continued till the 1980s. Since then, multiple forces have led to a perfect storm - where men have no meaning/purpose in their life, and the desire to have meaning often signals that you want to go back to that older society.
But that's wrong. The people who desire to go back are actually who are rebelling; the rest of the men are either locked up in prison, or overdosing on opioids, or being incels or numbing themselves with video games. The failure of modern liberalism to acknowledge this is basically being an ostrich while the forest is on fire.
Find a meaning that is important to you; be a provider if you like. IMHO, people are spending a lot of time getting wrapped up in these questions, debating what is possible, participating in trendy despair - it's all a parlor game, like worrying about whether your car will start because you don't understand the physics and some people online say it can't possibly. Just stop talking to them and they will fade quickly; get up, turn the ignition, and go.
> The people who desire to go back are actually who are rebelling; the rest of the men are either locked up in prison, or overdosing on opioids, or being incels or numbing themselves with video games.
There are a lot of males - most of them, really - doing other things.
Because this was the case for the last 10,000 years and you cannot change it overnight, unless you are in Soviet Russia and send people to Gulag for re-education. It is built into men's biological nature to be provider (like most mammals in the nature), you cannot change it because society decided less than a generation ago that this is no longer needed.
And also because many, if not most women are still expecting men to be the provider. Biology dictates that women need a provider (resources and security) to bring a child to this world and that provider should not be the government (which destroys the idea of family and the society with it).
I'd say there is a giant citation needed on that one.
Economics. There's not enough jobs for men in society. Women are preferred for most entry level office jobs, industrial jobs were always the go-to for uneducated men, but those have been mostly eliminated. High achievers will always do well, but by definition not everyone can be a high achiever.
Another one might be a sense that getting ahead from the lower class is harder given wages versus house prices. I imagine that works against any motivation some people have.
What is that based on?
It's more of a dead-end job, in offices that still use administrative assistants (many fewer), and it was women back when they couldn't get better jobs. The entry level job for being a CEO, attorney, software developer, etc. isn't administrative assistant!
> The entry level job for being a CEO
Very few people are CEOs, it's not relevant when talking about jobs that uneducated people can do with potential upwards mobility
> attorney
A female assistant going from secretary -> paralegal -> attorney is definitely a thing.
> software developer
Is a rather specialised job in the grand scheme of things.
The point is, there IS NO entry level white collar work available to uneducated males. And all white collar work offers potential socioeconomic mobility.
It's not always the case, but if someone is organized, professional, and helpful, there are a lot of roles that will fit them and smart organizations move them around internally and hire a new assistant.
It would be interesting to see evidence that compares the affect of wealth/income on the popularity of males and females, and also to control for social conditioning, especially of older people. Remember that part of the claim (which I am dubious of) is that it has something to do with biology.
> Rage against it
Please stop raging against whomever you are imagining and talk with me.
There's a massive body of research/evidence that shows women still prefer partners who earn more than they do.
I think the issue is motivation and there are other causes, personally.
Also, those are things under an individual's control.
Imagining how impossible it is.
I'd agree that meaning/purpose is part of this puzzle, but there are still children needing a provider and partners who either expect a fulltime breadwinner or find some other balance.
My guess is the perceived opportunity of improving your lot in life has declined and males, on the whole, have struggled with motivation as a result. I suspect housing affordability is part of that.
It seems to me that in one generation we have gone from fatherhood and motherhood being high-status to being low-status. But maybe that is part of this very liberal bubble.
Good point. I hadn't noticed before, but that has been a repeated problem with my brother. When he transitioned, my parent's difficulty changing pronouns was interpreted as a sign of their lack of support. Well no, they're just trying to break 25 years of conditioning ...
You say the purpose of a man's life is meaning and the search for it. Do you use "man" to mean both men and women there, or are you simply ignoring women?
You say historically the role of being a provider provided (ahem) that meaning to men. You say the role of being a child-bearer and nurturer was forced on women and don't comment on what this meant re: purpose or meaning there.
So I have a lot of questions I don't see answered in your claims:
1) What is stopping men today from providing? I'm surrounded by male coworkers who (in)famously make more than many women, including most of their own spouses. Some of those partners are not employed, even. So clearly this is not a universal, but specific to a subset of men.
2) Are those men who are not doing "traditional providing" being provided for or are they simply solo? Being a bachelor is of course not new; living off your parents is also not new, but maybe more common today (?), being provided for by a woman would be relatively newer.
3) What is preventing men who are not providers from finding other meaning while being provided for?
4) If we want to go back in time, wouldn't the answer just be "man the fuck up and get over it"?
I'm pretty sure "modern liberalism" acknowledges that there is a problem (at the extreme level, incels who go on mass shootings are obviously seen as a problem), I think your diagnosis is just in a minority.
What data point supports your claims that society has broken men versus something like "the problem is that today many men have adjusted poorly to lessened dependence on them, and increased competition with them, and this is made worse by self-reinforcing downward-spiral bubbles like the "incel" wing of the internet." That the societal failing is actually "toxic masculinity," etc, which gives boys ridiculous expectations and standards to meet in order to feel successful. Not everyone can excel! Only 5% of people will be in the top 5% by definition! Pushing boys towards achievement and material success if doomed to failure.
That's not even getting into e.g. how suicide/opiod addiction/etc are hardly restricted to un-or-underemployed men who aren't in traditional gender roles!
Or how a major complaint of young women today in the dating world is "young men are fuckboys who have no interest in a long term thing" which is quite the opposite observed behavior from "trying to be a provider"...
Do you mean for white people? Last I checked, no one else's interests were ever substantially represented until very recently. And it still needs a lot of work.
> if you bury your head in the sand
Conversation doesn't need to be so bad either; we could have a constructive one.
The biggest examples are Christian sexual morality and the separation of things into good vs evil. Look at all of our popular culture or politics and find examples of struggles which aren’t some form of a struggle between good and evil, good guys vs bad guys. It might strike people as odd that in many other religions and cultures this idea is much much less dominant.
I think that has more to do with collectivism vs individualism, which itself may be to do with hierarchy and community. Those values may have been endowed through religion over time, but I don't know enough about Shintoism or Buddhism to comment on if it influenced Japan into becoming a collective focused society.
I can't really buy into a religion I don't believe in for the sake of making society better. I'd rather try to make society better directly, I don't want to do a "noble lie".
I'll gesture vaguely at "the suburbs". Low trust and alienation describes my childhood in a place where you needed a car to do anything and even when my parents let me wander, there was almost nowhere fun to wander _to_.
I don't have data to back this up, though. Maybe it's just resentment at how my childhood turned out.
I agree with this for sure, and such zoning issues have been pointed to as the root cause of other societal ills dating back to (at least) Jane Jacobs' 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...
I guess you could also try joining a church where it’s basically acceptable to be an atheist like the Unitarian Universalist church although that would maybe be too spiritual.
Pointing to something that is true doesn't need to be helpful. Making the statement it's not helpful to you, is helpful to noone.
but, one thing many religions provide is a social club. Every Sunday and for some religion even more days, you meet up with people socially. Churches have festivals, dances, classes, even singles events that you're encouraged to attend regularly and at which you'll likely make friends and possible more
Vs outside where sure I can join a club or go to a Meetup but some part of that just doesn't seem to hit the same levels as church type stuff. Maybe it's a stronger feeling of obligation to participate. Maybe it's shared beliefs ...
Let pitch a non-religious social club to YC :p
Or how about any of the various modern fitness fads. Crossfit, for example.
That’s actually a very interesting idea!
Frankly, I'm very tired of debunking the zero-sum trope.
Not only are many things in the economy zero-sum, in the case of labor, even if the economy is humming at 150%, it's trivial to imagine a scenario where the man and the woman are both earning 75% of what they would have without the other sex in the labor force. Both are worse off, yet the capital owners are better off and it gives the illusion that everything is going great.
The illusion is so good that we've divorced productivity from wage for 50 years, made tons of women miserable and no one so much as batted an eye.
And in many places, housing has effectively become zero-sum, due to pressure from large capital investors and zoning restrictions on building new housing. In these scenarios, even modest increases in demand can skyrocket the housing/rental prices beyond what is sustainable by the young population.
> Whatever the cause I fully reject the lazy conclusion this is somehow women's fault.
You're right to reject it, but the zero-sum argument is absolutely orthogonal to the issue. It's also completely incorrect and trivially debunked by anyone with a shred of economic common sense.
> The illusion is so good that we've divorced productivity from wage for 50 years, made tons of women miserable and no one so much as batted an eye.
Pop-feminism is too carefully-enshrined to speak openly about this, but I'm pretty sure it's absolutely correct.
The Economist quote:
> Immigration, which plunged during Donald Trump’s nativist presidency, has sunk further, to less than a quarter of the level in 2016
source here [1]
Can you elaborate further on this please, I'm not sure I understand your point (genuinely).
And increasing the supply reduces prices.
1) Everybody starts out as single, so young men start out with a sharply reduced salary due to higher supply, which makes it harder for them to become financially secure and find a partner (which would then decrease their costs).
2) There are many extra costs associated with a two-income household, and many more negative effects from a two-income-as-the-default economy. Elizabeth Warren write The Two-Income Trap on this very subject.
3) It's quite possible that it did halve prices, or came surprisingly close! Have you seen those productivity vs wages graphs? Productivity increased by about 245%, wages increased by 110% (since 1950). That means wages are now at 60% of what they were, relative to productivity. That's not quite half, and the switch to a two-income expectation can't be the only factor, but it's close. Then again, there is still a significant workforce participation gap between men and women, even in the USA (69% vs. 57%), so even in ideal circumstances I wouldn't expect a perfect halving.
2) I'll check it out.
3) 1890 to 1950 has also seen big productivity growth and I doubt the wages kept pace.
?
The threadbare safety net is definitely a huge driving force on that.
However, what we need to get past is "Your job is your worth." This needs to end. There are simply not enough "good jobs" to go around.
We have changed from the primary employers being US Steel, GM, etc. (manufacturing) to the primary employers being WalMart, Amazon, and UPS (logistics). The quality of job loss in changing from manufacturing to logistics is gigantic. And no matter how much manufacturing you bring back (which I think we ought to do as well), you will not easily reverse that.
I bet here in HN most people has a somewhat functional family, some savings and decent wages. It's not my case or the case of most of the people that I know.
And yes, in general men seem to be doing worse than women, although Spain may be a bit of an outlier here.
By my own account, I've grown poor. Meaning, that there has been times where I didn't have to eat. Not like I couldn't afford food that I liked, just that there was nothing in the fridge, no money to go buy anything, and I was queued for help (which by the way, it was almost all the time provided by NGOs...).
In the long way of getting out of poverty, I was offered barely any help, and, in hindsight, pretty poor guidance and counseling. I should have been told to study IT-related stuff given my predispositions or some trade, but oh well, it is what it is.
Now, of course I also had female friends in a similar situation. I'd say they had better counseling, better opportunies and above everything, which is a taboo here in Spain, there where more resources for them AND they had an easier time finding low-wage jobs, which is fairly important when you're at the botton of the society.
Now some of them are public employees. Which is kind of surprising given that I can't see how I would be able to study about two years full time (it's pretty difficult to get a position) or any of my friends. I mean, I know how that happend, they've got money that I can't qualify for because I have a penis. There are plenty of places where being a female gives you extra points by law, so I guess some of that benefited them too.
The major difference between me and my male friends is that I've got an stable contract in a telco contractor when I was about 24 (HelpDesk). I kept costs low and saved as much as I could. This saved my life. Liking computers saved my life. If it wasn't for that, I'd be who knows where, maybe homeless or in jail.
And I'm here now with 34 learning programming (thank you so much of all the volunteers that make this possible, in particular for the folks of Stanford Code in Place and The Odin Project).
Does this sound bad? Well, I know, I think 2 guys that are better off than me. One had a working class but functional family, and went to study physics, so good guidance and enough money. The other one had a hard time but eventually did the equivalent of community college and works as a consultant for wireless solutions. Everyone else is fucked up, and if look at the numbers in Spain I bet it will back up my observations.
Or maybe they're orthogonal. Or maybe the influence is going in the other direction. Or maybe it's a feedback loop (most likely). Or maybe they're both caused by overlapping upstream causes.
In any case, a return to a society that acknowledges and appreciates gender and sexual minorities is probably a positive. (A return, in that at least one ancient civilization had a place for these folks, namely the Sumerians).
What America is seeing is basically the result of a culture that only uses one moral value. Jonathan Haidt believes there is a set of moral primitives that all our brains support[0]. All other moral values or rules can be explained in terms of these. He also says that the US (potentially excluding the south) is the most single moral on earth. Particularly the "Liberal Cities" and particularly Universities. That one moral is care vs harm.
Some people want to be particularly moral. In societies the various morals have balanced usage, people will pick different morals to exemplify. Since different morals can give contradicting judgements on the same issue, this results in the net effect of these people being fairly neutral.
In a society with just one moral, all these people end up pushing in the same direction. If society is moving in one direction, then these people need to keep advancing in order to remain particularly moral. Given some specifics of US history, we see this result in the social justice movement we've seen in the last 10 years.
> what explains the relative stability in post-Christian Europe?
Europe, with a few exceptions, hasn't gone as hard at being focused on just a single moral value. They are largely biased towards care vs harm, but still use the other moral values.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory
I'm curious to learn more about how he concludes that most of the US has coalesced on care/harm, as intuitively I would assume at least fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, and liberty/oppression would also apply as I see them come up a lot in the discourse here in the US.
Could you share some other links about how he concludes that?
Liberty/Oppression is the primary axis (see gun control debates, state rights, mask mandates, neo-liberalism, etc, etc) with Fairness/Cheating (billionaires paying more tax, public healthcare for all vs excessive hospital bills, etc, etc) corresponding as the secondary political axis. Nearly all arguments portrayed in media, government, etc, orbit along one or both of these dimensions.
So, maybe a long way to say I'm grateful for what you said and glad we interacted here. Thank you :-)
What a jarring non-sequitur. The article doesn't mention anything about women being to blame, and I don't think anyone is raising this as the cause.
One of the consequences of women entering the labor force is banks will lend on the basis of two salaries instead of one. In a world of constrained housing supply (which seems to be most of the west) this means prices will be bid up to match the joint income.
This looks awfully like a zero-sum outcome to me.
Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen just…won’t pass on genetics.
Children are a lot of work and energy.
I’m highly introverted and high earning. My wife was the aggressor in my case. She pretty much made it all happen.
I think the ball is firmly in the woman’s court now. Women have most of the advantages (education, societal promotion, fit in better with our institutions) yet i see so many women who are generally apathetic about getting into a relationship at all.
There is also a massive obesity problem. If people have trouble getting attracted to each other versus the alternatives, makes it really challenging to find the motivation.
I wonder what all these effects will have over the next 200 years? If you play out the changing “relationship market conditions,” it seems like men and women with different personalities and dispositions towards seeking out relationships in order to reproduce will have a significant effect on the species.
Will people who were genetically predisposed towards being thin, hard working, open minded to approaching members of opposite sex and forming deep attachments resulting in children become more frequent?
On a genetic and evolutionary perspective I’m super interested - we know that IQ has been rising, but what else will change?
In some societies such as Korea I am told, women are sometimes or more frequently the aggressor. I wonder if this becomes more common.
I maybe in a skewed population (FAANG) but women are much more aggressive here in urban areas. While I was walking downtown, a woman pulled her Mercedes over in traffic and shouted an offer at me. I thought she was hilarious and bold but not attractive enough.
In the past, this was sometimes a thing too: in 1943, my grandmother (15) decided to have my grandfather (21 - war vet at 17 by lying). Their 70-year marriage was technically illegal too.
Here's what Our World in Data says: https://ourworldindata.org/intelligence
The Norwegian study cited to "Dutton E, van der Linden D, Lynn R (2016) The negative Flynn effect: A systematic literature review. Intelligence 59:163–169". Here's the HN thread on that paper specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723859 (Haven't read it myself; was just curious.)
Most statistics show indeed lower middle class and poor are having more kids than higher income families, but in time the number is decreasing for them too
I don't think you need these things to find a partner and have children.
Just go to a maternity ward. It sounds like you think everyone there is highly motivated, physically fit, and dedicated to working on relationships. They aren't. They're just normal people with a range of human flaws and a regular cross-section of society. Fat, thin, lazy, hard-working, professional, unemployed, etc.
Having kids isn't as hard as you make it sound!
Some folks will struggle more with the partnering aspect than others. Or mustering the will and resources to begin parenting.
But I think we have this unfortunate habit of severely underweighting the start process and things that aren't obvious.
You probably experience lots of stress over the span of raising a kid (or more). Other people see that in the classic screaming-kid seemingly-helpless-parent visual. You may also experience that same stress, perhaps cumulatively more, just from the start because it's (1) VERY stressful when it doesn't work, and (2) a situation that can drag on for what feels like forever.
So, everyone commiserates over work it is to raise a kid but few people talk openly or at all about how hard it is to start the process of having a kid.
Every single one of my friends or acquaintances who is obese has had trouble conceiving. Every. Single. One.
The men I've seen in maternity wards are just totally normal men.
Of course, I used to also think that my value was in my net worth and you could have seen all the way from space the “I’m an asshole and I don’t know why nobody will date me” vibes radiating off of me.
Then I grew up, I chilled out, and I put conscious effort into things other than my career and being Good At Tech Stuff. Stuff like listening, and exercising my capacity for empathy, and trying to be pleasant to be around. You can project being likeable or interesting for a bit, but I found that it’s easier to be likeable and interesting instead. And suddenly I stopped finding it so difficult at all to find matches and find dates.
I met my previous SO of three years on OKCupid and my current SO on Tinder, and it wasn’t until we’d been dating for quite a while that what I did for a living, all that Is This Man A Provider nonsense, even came up.
The difficulty is between the ears of one party in this selection process. It’s a mix of getting over oneself and understanding that it’s all a numbers game besides, but one of those things doesn’t work without the other.
None of that matters if you aren’t attractive. You have to be attractive for girls to swipe right on you and start a conversation in the first place.
Again, looking in any maternity ward at the fathers you'll see many conventionally unattractive men.
As 'rdtwo notes, though, it does take practice and commitment and it does take time.
Also, in regards to longer-term relationships, if this is true:
> You have to be attractive for girls to swipe right on you and start a conversation in the first place.
Then they're probably not the right ones to be starting a conversation with.
Why? Aren't women entitled to be attracted by phisique and by passing good genes?
To be fair, this is the 40+ age range. It's possible that 18-25 year olds of both genders haven't yet honed in on what makes for a good partner.
And now i have a wonderful SO and don't have to deal with those awful apps for the time being.
I’ve been seeing this exact trope repeated more and more on HN lately: Some vague assertion that Tinder is the only place for matchmaking and that only a tiny number of men are getting all of the matches.
It’s an objectively ridiculous claim for anyone who has experience in the real world where, yes, even “normal” men can find partners. It doesn’t even stand up to the most basic tests of logic.
Are only attractive people getting married and having kids? Of course not.
So what is actually going on here? Is this some talking point being repeated on some corner of the internet that resonates with a subset of people who view the world through their cell phones instead of getting out and interacting with real other people? It’s an objectively absurd assertion, yet it gets repeated with great confidence in a lot of online discussions.
The trend has been only towards waiting longer in the 20+ years since we were ahead of the curve.
It actually matches the real data and studies which have been done on the topic. When men ranked photos of women on a scale of 1-10, the majority of woman were ranked in the 5 category which would indicate the average person is seen as average. While when woman ranked photos of men, the majority of men were ranked bellow 5. The data that has come out of online dating is pretty damning and says a lot more than some anecdotes about some normal men finding partners.
I wish I remembered the exact study from a few years ago because there are more details which were even more depressing but I'm less certain on.
The original study was published on the OkCupid blog, but it was taken down after it caught on likely due to the obvious PR implications.
If you want a scientific explanation, look up "Assortative mating": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating
The idea that only the most attractive people are entering relationships with each other while everyone else, regardless of gender, is staying single is ridiculous.
I would not underestimate how much the process of dating and meeting romantic partners has shifted because of that, even as we re-open. the stigma is mostly gone and there is little reason not to at least be present there.
> Are only attractive people getting married and having kids? Of course not.
Have you considered that men are just having less partners than women? Many more men go childless (25%) than women (14%). As far as we can tell - men are having less sex overall. It's obvious that the majority of men eventually get a partner and settle down with someone but that's generally less than the number of partners a woman has before she settles down.
Here's a fun source - and this is BEFORE COVID. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame... I cannot imagine how much more grim it is post-COVID.
I find it weird that you didn't think about that. Men and women generally have very different journeys to their destination. One is usually more consistent in sexual experience whereas the other is wildly varying. The amount of men who have 50+ sexual partners completely dominates the amount of women who do. This doesn't mean that men are having more sex than women though. This means that a few men are having more sex than most women.
This is what feeds into the whole online discussion. It's obvious to anyone who has done online dating or talked to the women. They'll be like, "Oh yeah, I matched with that guy too." It's clear that many women are sleeping with the same select group of men. I don't know how this is a surprise to anyone...
Online dating is toxic, most people I know that used it years ago are still there safe for few unicorns. How could it possibly be? Weren't they lookimg for someone?
Maybe because it distorts relationships and people as commodities thus making meaningful relationships harder to initiate, maintain and commit.
Most serious relationships and marriages that I known of (including mine) that started within the last 7 years or so originate in online dating. I'm in my 40s. You might want to be a little less sure of your opinions.
Capitalism has taken a large swath of people out of the dating game just due to working to survive.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2019001/article...
Plz don’t trivialize it.
10% is what, ~30 minutes less?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B4701C0A222NBEA
And more work is done part-time(usually by those are unable to work full time jobs)
https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=B4701C0A222NBEA&ut...
That chart is not adjusted for population.
Working population since 1977
We have have roughly 50% working age population(136mil vs 205mil)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B4701C0A222NBEA
Hours worked is 65% more since 1977(155 257)
Or, we're working 15% more per eligible person.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/july/nonfarm-payr....
That said, I doubt it's enough to offset the growth in population among workers.
I've been scratching my head since orange_joes post because it didn't make sense from what I've been seeing.
You may have an argument with the absolute bullshit that people eat in our consumerist society but the fact of the matter is, if your calorie needs are 2000/day and you eat 14000 calories per week of grains, pulses, veg, fruit, meat, etc in the ‘right’ amounts, you’ll stay trim if you’re trim, you’ll stay fat if you’re fat, and any changes need you to adjust the calorie balance accordingly through eating more, eating less or exercising more.
In some countries people are slimmer without making a real effort cause there's a higher percentage of people walking to work, and there's less time spent in traffic so that can be redirected to leisure and exercise.
Similarly, dieting is not an activity, more so the absence of one (shoving food in your mouth). When I'm cutting weight, I have more time because I'm not cooking eating food all the damn time. Eat a carrot rather than a Pizza to lose weight is not super rare knowledge. It IS uncomfortable, though.
* Ill partner or family members to take care of * Child(ren) * Studying * Long travel times * Irregular working times * Poor upbringing food wise * Stress * Sleep deprivation * etc
Is it still so easy then? That pizza tastes good and is real comforting.
That said, "I have sleep deprivation" is indeed a common reason for skipping leg day (along with the vernal equinox)[0].
step 1: gather some savings and take an honest (3mo+) break from work.
step 2: take note of which of your habits actually change when freed from the work-imposed time restrictions.
my personal experience: good habits don’t just spontaneously occur out of the vacuum. and social connections don’t just come knocking on your door. you have to decide these things are important to you, motivate yourself, and build your life in support of them.
to the extent that we don’t teach non-job skills in school, that’s a societal failure. if by “capitalism” you’re referring to how much we shape schooling to focus on making you a productive worker, then sure. but this is as much a failure of our democratic systems (which govern schools) and our social norms around child raising (wherein it’s acceptable to believe that govt schooling is the only learning/wisdom a child needs to be given).
“capitalism” is a boogeyman and — without admitting anything of its merits/faults — using it in such a way only serves to keep yourself from understanding the problems you face more concretely.
Good critiques of Capitalism are important to help it continue to evolve, compete, and win in a competitive marketplace of ideas.
I feel the same about every bad weather event being “caused” by climate change in the media. The models predictions are so vague people could blame anything on climate change. Not saying climate change isn’t happening, it is, but blaming everything on it is intellectually dishonest, costs legitimacy, and can lead to poor policy.
That's not wrong, but it came at the cost of massively depleting the oil reserves and polluting the ecosystems.
Well with a birth rate below replacement level there will be less and less people with each generation if the birth rate stays at that level, so in 200 years there's virtually no one left or something like that.
I say all this just to try and fight the idea that crops up that if you're male and don't fit some jacked or "Chad" ideal that there's no one out there for you (who you'd have an awesome time with). When I look at the incel subculture, it's doubly sad because these boys are being fed a model of how attraction, sex, and dating works that is just flat out wrong. It's like a self-harm club based on false premises.
My only sticking point with your comment is it's not like that, it is that.
Same.
I work out as a hobby and for psychological hygeine, i.e. to keep myself disciplined and just feel better.
Oddly when I started dating my current girlfriend she thought my lack of a 'dad-bod' might be too much of a red flag.
Doesn't seem to be the case almost 5 months later.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What women say and which partners they choose in reality are 2 different things. You should always keep that in mind when discussing these issues.
This isn't meant as a critique of women, rather than of people in general. Stated and actual preferences are not the same (it seems obvious once you give it some thought, yet still has to be repeated, since some people just don't get it).
I spent my entire teenage and young adult years thinking that no one could possibly be attracted to me because I was overweight. Yet, I never could seem to pull myself out of the habits that got me there in the first place and I just kept getting larger - from somewhat overweight in high school to morbidly obese by the end of college. No one has ever randomly talked to me in a bar or out in public. The only time I ever experienced that was when I was abroad. I've not made a single non-work friend since college. I don't know where to go to "meet people my own age", etc. Here I am about to turn 29 and my social life is talking over the internet with the people in knew in college and I just feel ... lost. I have a high paying tech job, but that's about the only thing I feel is going well in my life. I recognize that never having to actually worry about money is most people's dream, but I envy those with diverse social lives.
Figured I'd start with actually getting my weight under control. 3 months ago I started religiously tracking calories and I've done a reasonable job of keeping my eating within my goals. Managed to lose 30 pounds so far. Would love to be half way to my target by my 30th birthday. Maybe try a dating app and make sure I'm honest about my looks. I'd love to be able to ride roller coasters again.
What's your exercise regimen? I know there's lot of stuff out there that tells you what to do. Not all of it easy to understand or even effective. Happy to keep replying here to give you some thoughts.
I'm 6'3"; was 190 lbs at age 19 (university); was 210 pounds at age 21 (could afford to eat out for lunch); was 245 lb at age 40 (depressed + about to be divorced); now back to 220-230 lb at age 46. Would like to be consistently 210-215 ish.
Have dated a number of 30 to 45 yo women who explicitly like a "Dad bod".
EDIT> I have never picked anyone up off the street, at a bar, club, whatever. I pass for sociable, but am actually a big introvert. Like, it bothers me when other people are in my home, with a very few exceptions. But I'm told I have "dork game". So my experience is biased -- only seriously dated in my 40's
Met my true love on Tinder, and she's more of an introvert than I am, yet fun and relaxing / no-maintenance / no-drama to be around.
There's hope.
> There's hope.
You need to make more friends with people who are down bad.
Contrary to popular belief by men, women are very visual. They say things to each other like 'How do I get the guys I am attracted to to notice me?' The problem we have is that when guys ask why we reject them we can't give any sort of honest answer because the men will start to debate our answers. Combine that with the fact that they are stronger and can physically assault us and many men don't get this important signal and are left with the impression that how they look doesn't matter to women.
Some men do eventually realize that their looks do matter when it plays out in the office.
If you want to look at it from an evolutionary perspective who should I choose for a mate: Someone I can see is strong, fit and in shape or someone who isn't? The lack of muscle definition hints of possible low T in the same way that overweight women hint that they are possibly already pregnant to men. Is that skin issue genetic or from lack of care? Who could better help and protect me and my offspring?
Sidenote: The fact that men don't take care of their skin is such a weird societal issue. Taking care of your skin at the basic level is an aesthetic choice like taking care of your teeth is. It shouldn't be gendered. Everyone should take care of their skin and wear sunscreen, it is your largest organ.
A man that is not overweight, has some muscle definition, showers and wears clothes that actually fit his body is instantly more attractive than the countless men that don't.
To add one final little bit to your original statement:
> All female partners have said that they don't care about my weight
We never want you to say that you care about our weight. We want you to care for who we are, not for what we looked like when you met us at 19. One day we will be 60. We also will not tell you what you have to do with your body. We have had a lifetime of men telling us what we should do with ours and know how negative that is. You can weight what you want and if you are our special someone we will not care, but we will be more attracted to you when you are not obese.
Get yourself a personality, don't be weird, dress decently and talk to people. That's really all you need, no matter what you look like there's someone out there that's into it.
Don't overcomplicate simple things.
Don't get me wrong, your conclusion is spot on. Getting there is the hard part.
Another factor is we live in a period in time where we have so much choice on how to spend our time, products that are personalized to each of our own tastes, that creates sparsity of shared experiences.
No longer is there a movie like Star Wars, that you could throw a stick and find someone who shares that experience. Now unless you're suckling from the teat of mainstream media, you need to go out of your way to find someone who shares your taste in film, music, art, games and ideas.
I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been an experiment adding a social component to Netflix.
You may as well just be with yourself at that point. Someone else bringing new experiences that you don't share, to learn and involve yourself in going forward, is where interest is found.
So many men try all your advice and still struggle greatly.
I don't think we at all can define what individuals should do based on their gender; that is sort of the point. They can be who and what they want to be.
Maybe by some theory women have most of the advantages, but the outcomes clearly indicate otherwise. Look at the successful and elite in almost any field.
Men's results are bimodal: if women are forced to break through a glass ceiling to reach the elite, men are similarly forced to walk on a glass floor that might collapse at any moment. And when it does, they're fucked.
I suppose the point of contention people would make is that men deserve it/have it coming so it's not worth discussing or treating as a political topic.
We certainly can find some ways in which the male population is worse off - though that doesn't establish any correlation or causation, inevitably in some ways it's true. But we need to look at the overall picture.
> I suppose the point of contention people would make is that men deserve it/have it coming so it's not worth discussing or treating as a political topic.
That's a pretty incredible strawman. Can you find one person saying that?
> Can you find one person saying that?
Let's be explicit about this, since you seem intent on evading the discussion: why shouldn't we treat male-particular suffering, discrimination, and death as important topics for society to address? What possible explanation is there for you to write those issues off as not part of the big picture except for thinking that men deserve it?
The population stats are something like 60% of men will be fathers but 90-95% of women will be mothers. Most women who can reproduce will but a huge percent of men who can will not.
40% of births are outside of marriage in the US.
I would think the only real generalization that can be made is that an introverted guy with money is more likely to get married.
I would bet money on that stat that women being the aggressor in Korea is simply not true in a statistical sense.
[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-rise-of-childless-america
[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/mens-fer...
One thing to keep in mind with those long term fertility rates is that child mortality rates going back that far is just shocking
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-al...
It is too harsh to even think about really.
It is hard also to understand the rise in fertility rates from the 80s to 2010s.
I think the idea that everyone has the option to settle down and have kids is a relatively recent phenomenon. It used to be that most men never had kids. Nowadays most men do have kids. That said - 25%+ of men will never have children. Kinda wild when you think about that. 1/4 of all men will never have children. Whether this is a choice or not isn't clear (I'm going to go with - not a choice overwhelmingly). The interesting part though is that the number is less than 15% for women. That means that there are ~70% more men than women who will never have children. These stats are usually taken for men who are age 45+ - where the gender balance is more equal.
I think it is that we have a bias when having this discussion that children are the product of this Hollywood love story lifelong marriage.
Google says 28 percent of all U.S. women with two or more children have children by more than one man. It is an incredible statistic.
I think Japan is a pretty decent model of where most of the US is going. Anime weebs and what not with waifu pillows will become much more normalized and other various forms of NEETs. But with more violence, unfortunately. I think shootings, suicides, and “accidental” deaths are going to stay the course or get worse. We’ll find ways to skew the statistics to cover this up so that we never have to address it (cause that’s require a different way of thinking about capitalism) but I don’t think this problem is going away for a few generations.
* The Santa Barbara shooter angry at women
* The El Paso, TX and Miami, OH shooters angry about the end of white genetic pool dominance or something
* The guy who tried to go on a shooting spree in Harlem and got caught after killing an elderly Black man as practice because "Black men are taking all the White women"
The biggest surprise for most women out here might be this tidbit: most men are incels until they're not. It's that some men never get out of that horrible rut and a small amount of those are the ones you see end up doing the shootings. The rest suffer silently or just kill themselves.
It's sad. Most of my female friends are completely unaware. All of my male friends are painfully aware because almost every man who ever went through that phase to any significant degree will do almost everything but forget it. Someday we'll get to the point where we acknowledge this but part of me thinks we don't ever want to. If we did - then we'd have to really change things and no one likes to change shit.
The second bullet point, a written manifesto was posted online. The third obviously admitted to his motivations.
These are not the people right now having more children - it's those who (often at least partly for reasons of disadvantage) have relatively less impulse control and are poorer at long term thinking/planning.
And/or those who are part of a culture that encourages fertility and discourages contraception.
I don't see how current trends point to this changing in the direction you mention. Being young has more to do with thinness than genetics, and most babies are born outside of marriage.
Edit: added qualifications and clarifications
Nobody wants to talk about this "elephant in the room" but I agree with you. Even obese people don't find other obese people attractive. Young people are dating (and having less sex) today because the majority of them are obese or overweight.
When women are ovulating, they are statistically more likely to select men with higher testosterone levels and of course the physical qualities that go along with that (bigger/more muscular, stronger jawline, more aggressive, etc...).
When women are horny, they are statistically more likely to select men based on appearance.
"When horny, men are statistically more likely to select women with big tits" is banal and adds nothing to the conversation. I don't understand why these references to ovulation get a pass.
Before birth control, women normally always had ovulation roughly every month.
After birth control, not as much.
I don't have any idea why you're talking about men.
What, you think women are automatons that can't resist an instinctive prime directive to have babies when they are fertile?
Which doesn't mean women only fuck when they're ovulating.
>> can't resist
I'm not sure how you've implied that from what I've said. You sound awfully defensive and angry. I haven't stated any opinions here, in case you didn't notice.
We are told america is the best place on earth with all the doors open to you to be rich. That all other forms of government are flawed and we have excellence here everywhere you look.
And then you look at reality and see something else. Sure there are pockets of excellence and the dream still lives in fits and starts, but for the general person, they are likely shut out from any real hope of this grand vision.
You add in COVID and the lockdowns, and economic turmoil, and then people start realizing that the whole race is kind of pointless. I can be poor busting my butt at a crappy job i hate, or i can be poor moving in with family and being 'unproductive' (for some definition of societal unproductivity).
Women, on the other hand, haven't been given the same advertising on the American dream that men have, which obviously is a terrible thing, but in this one sense probably helped them survive and prosper even when life sucks in a modern world.
I'm supposing the sell-job of an equivalence of the 'american' dream in other countries is not nearly so commercial, and blaring. And so kids are likely not so shocked at the difference between expectations and reality. Throw in that many other countries are flat out better in many social structural ways, and i think that explains why, it's especially troubling in America.
There is a documentary, "Born Rich" [0]. It's interviews with the children of very rich people, done by one of their peers. I noticed that in the film there is stark difference between the girls and the boys: the girls were all well adjusted, enjoying their wealth, happy, satisfied, seemingly well-aware of their good fortune; but for ALL the boys wealth meant having a full-blown existential crisis.
This is oblique support for your claim: the classic American dream for women results in being taken care of by a wealthy man in a nice house, maybe with kids, where even house duties become negligible if he's really rich. But men and boys are supposed to work, first at learning then finding something you like then getting good at it. Your work defines you in a very profound way - a profundity that is reflected in our last names. If you're a rich boy, it's like you've been denied an identity. (I recall one of the young men who, to save his sanity, disavowed his inheritance to take a job as an oil field worker. And he seemed the best adjusted of the boys.).
I studied abroad for a semester in England, and in one of the classes I took there the (Australian) professor asked us what socioeconomic class we thought we belonged to. It was a good university, but most of the British kids answered "working class." When he asked "Why?" they answered, "Because our parents work."
That always stuck with me. In England, the aristocracy is alive and well. They don't have to work, and they don't pretend to. They do live comfortably, but they're highly educated and reasonably well adjusted. They don't have to partake in the charade that they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, and they generally don't blow their family's fortune over a debauched decade in Vegas like their American counterparts either.
If the former, it might be worth remembering that ARM, which many consider the be the next big leap in computing (there was a thread saying it just yesterday) is an English company. Of course I could give many more examples, the technology you're using to post this comment for one, but I think I've made my point.
If the latter, I imagine thats too generic a group to say
Yes, the UK middle class is over-represented at Oxbridge, but the definition is so narrow that they are outnumbered by the lower classes - state school kids and other riff-raff constitute two-thirds of Oxbridge classes, especially outside the upper-class signal subjects like Classics.
Well that's hardly the middle is it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_Kin...
What other countries are great compared to America? With all its flaws America is the only country where you can dream of building spaceships, create multi billion dollar tech companies in less than a decade.
Any ideology that forces individual to be less ambitious for the prosperity of the group only gives more power to the enforcer's of the ideology. As an insider you may not realize how powerful America's culture of individual freedom has impact on other countries.
I was miserable.
I moved to Japan with a much lower income, but my standard of living is so much more higher.
> you may not realize how powerful America's culture of individual freedom has impact on other countries
Does individual freedom include not wearing masks? Does individual freedom include feeling unsafe from crime?
Japan feels much safer than any urban center in America, especially during this pandemic. This feeling of taking public transit without anxiety throughout the pandemic alone is already worth forgoing those FANG salaries.
I grew up in Portland, Oregon. That place has deteriorated. Parts of San Francisco is more dangerous than Vietnam or Egypt. NYC is filled with confrontation for all sorts of minor problems, none of which you would ever face in Tokyo.
> Any ideology that forces individual to be less ambitious for the prosperity of the group only gives more power to the enforcer's of the ideology.
This is not inherently unique to America or individual liberty. In fact, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is based on the idea that the whole benefits because the individual is acting in their own self regard, not altruistically for society at large.
Asian countries are collectivist with much less individual freedom.
> What other countries are great compared to America? With all its flaws America is the only country where you can dream of building spaceships, create multi billion dollar tech companies in less than a decade.
Speaking of great, how about China? China's bullet train networks span longer than the rest of the world combined. All of that was built within a decade. They have spaceships and unicorns too.
And all you need is hard work, persistence, and a couple tens of millions burning a hole in your back pocket... and a legion of people, like you, who don't have that kind of capital to do the heavy lifting.
Varies a lot but all the people I know who are relatively young and doing startups come from pretty wealthy families.
Pedantically, literally anyone anywhere can dream of building spaceships. But let's examine that claim on the basis of people who have actually done it.
- Musk has, but he's South African.
- Bezos crossed the Kármán line so he's done it, but he hasn't reached orbit yet so calling New Shepherd a 'spaceship' is a slightly dubious claim.
- Branson hasn't either and he's British anyway.
- Carmack isn't in the news for space stuff any more, so maybe he's given up?
Looking at the evidence of 'billionaires and their space toys', I think 'not Americans' are a little ahead.
Musk is a US citizen and he did all of this in the US. The point is about the opportunity provided by the country, not about where you were raised.
Why are these top priorities? Metrics like happiness seem like much more valuable metrics than number of spaceships or massive tech companies.
--to be honest, the vast majority of people just don't care, because it is completely detached from any experience they have, and is in fact kind of obnoxious to them. To them, your evidence is a category error.
How do countries treat their poor->lower middle class, is more salient for a judge of societal excellence, for them. Is a country interested in raising the ceiling or the floor? America has always been focused on raising the ceiling.
I have a hard time seeing we're unique.
It's time we focus more on how do we appeal to boys, and how do we get the most potential out of them. The cultural messaging is "girl power" while the counterpart is "toxic masculinity". The great heroes of the past (even the present, see how Arnold Schwarzenegger was cut down for the affair with his maid) have been merely reduced to "misogynists" or "terrible fathers" rather than reflecting on both their merits and weaknesses.
Liberal philosophy does not even try to understand what motivates and drives young men to success: it's building, exploring, and accomplishing. Instead it blindly assigns any flaw as a result of "toxic masculinity" while also ironically applying the same "toxic masculinity" it preaches against: "you need to grow up and get over yourself, things are so easy for men because we are in a patriarchy". And then when studies like the above are cited, we go around in the same circle: "men are so pathetic, they need to stop embracing toxic masculinity" while being blissfully unaware that we are the least "toxically masculine" that we've ever been in society, and yet men are suffering emotionally far more than they ever have in the past. Hint: it's the culture. We are driving innocent young men into depression, purposelessness, and masochism -- and it's shameful to see such a lack of care or empathy for it. Seriously, shame on everyone in this and the orginal article's comments that are pointing fingers and blaming this on men, rather than trying to root-cause why this is happening and working towards helping innocent young boys.
“—Boys are going from female-dominated home environments to female-dominated school environments, back to female-dominated home environments—where boys are being told to behave.
—In our culture today, “boy energy” is at best not valued and at worse demonized.”
https://ifstudies.org/blog/young-men-and-society-we-will-onl...
While I hate that things are getting worse for anyone (and want to fix it!), these findings are good reminders for me that almost everyone else has dealt with similar circumstances much more often than I have. Often the cause is out of their control and that they are just trying to make the best of it, with varying results. It gives me good perspective and reminds me that peoples choices / actions include inputs that I'm not exposed to.
That all being said I hope we can find a way to make these situations less common for everyone. I'd settle for quick fixes (adjust taxes, better welfare, etc.), but I'm excited for the societal changes that I hope are the eventual long-term fix.
You're mid-30s and you might have just experienced your first thing like that? Man or woman, that's hard to believe. And more importantly, I'm not sure your experience can be generalized to all men.
As someone who has experienced situations like that frequently, and knows other men who have, it's a bit frustrating to see the implication that we all feel like "we're perfect for this" or "we're made for this" all the time.
Shouldn't we care about how society is treating people, no matter who they are, instead of getting into a pissing contest about who society is _really_ screwing over the most?
Not to mention, frankly, it's ridiculous to imply that a 35-year old male software engineer's experience is at all representative of that of the average male (who is far, far worse off).
This is a great point that often gets overlooked in discussions around gender, race, sexuality, class, or any other issue surrounding equality. I think people often hone in on the latter and it becomes counter-productive to fixing these issues. Thanks for bringing it up.
You're jumping to a bit of a conclusion here. Most people seem to be reading this comment as re recognition that this particular guy is privileged compared to most people, not a blanket argument that women have it worse. Consider why you reacted so defensively to such an anodyne self-reflection.
* "Semi-recently I had an (maybe my first?) experience where I wasn't the favored party in a situation."
* "almost everyone else has dealt with similar circumstances much more often than I have."
For example why are boys being diagnosed with ADHD so much more than girls, why are they on so many more drugs, well, supposedly it's because female teachers - who have very clear and proven biases towards girls - are much more likely to react to normal boyish energy by getting frustrated and being unable to handle it. So once the psychiatric world gave them this neat excuse-in-a-box that let them blame boys, and even better, an off switch for children, instead of learning how to handle boys they started just telling parents their children were neurotic and broken.
A related issue is grading. Girls get better grades than boys. There's a neat experiment out there that appears to show this is caused by teachers having a built-in bias towards children of their own gender, but, the bias is much more extreme in women. This would be totally expected - feminism practically insists that female-female loyalty is a a moral virtue and to NOT give the sisters a helping hand makes you a bad woman. Women routinely discriminate in all sorts of ways against men and in favour of women, so much so that feminism is currently ripping itself apart through debates on whether trans women should be treated as women or not (often, for the purposes of allocating perks!). That it happens in education too is only to be expected. Until people start routinely classifying feminism as an unacceptable form of hatred, boys outcomes won't start improving. Going back to gender segregated schools might even help, although I'm a bit shocked to see myself typing that, because I never supported such schools before. It's just so unclear what can be done about these sorts of cultural problems except keeping vulnerable boys away from places where women can discriminate against them.
Is this really true? You are describing the quintessential basement-dweller, which is not exactly a rosy stereotype.
I think there is room for another look at this (without condoning it):
men have careerism out of necessity for stability - or at least conveying stability - and made environments that were comfortable for them to make it tolerable
women have careerism out of choice for stability and are finding pursuing this choice out of pride enters them into an environment that was never really about professionalism
so the two audiences are exploiting themselves in office and corporate environments for different reasons or pressures
I'm all for making environments comfortable for a greater population to be productive and sustain their lifestyle, I think acknowledging why an environment is uncomfortable for new entrants can help that
When I was younger and I wanted to go to bars and get drunk and be an idiot I had plenty of attractive sexual partners.
So I don't buy this at all. The guys I know who have an easy time dating are 1 or 2 points more attractive, make minimum wage as yoga teachers or selling crystals or dumb stuff like that, and tell Women painfully stupid stuff they want to hear about their quantum vibrations matching and other new age nonsense.
So I can say this narrative empirically doesn't feel true for me.
If you are looking for a reason for your travails, here it is. If you started out with this level of contempt, it’s no wonder you’ve been unsuccessful. If you became embittered due to your challenges, then I’m sorry. That is a hard path. But if you want it to change, I think you have some work to do. And I wish you luck with it.
I suggest you take your own advice and work on your issues that make you respond in a knee-jerk manner, blaming them like that, instead of assuming that OP may be correct in their assessment about the dating scene.
> tell Women painfully stupid stuff they want to hear about their quantum vibrations matching and other new age nonsense.
Do you think "quantum vibrations matching" and "other new age nonsense" are not painfully stupid? Or do you just want to attack the parent comment?
And no high-earning, rational male in a STEM career would ever want to be with a partner that values that sort of conversation.
I know it sounds a bit stupidly obvious, but do the stuff that works!
Depends on the bar. Certainly when I was young there where certain bars that where known as places you go to be social and meet girls and certain bars that where known as places where you sat and drank with your mates and got left alone. By selecting which bar you went to you could greatly influence how your evening went.
My god I hope you aren't talking about tinder are you? You are totally clueless about women and dating if that is what you are talking about.
Go out to bars, talk to people, do activities and meet lots of people. stop doing 'online' dating (of any kind)
Seriously, myself and everyone I know found that upon reaching 33 the interest from women in their 20s sky rockets. You are definitely doing something wrong, not society.
39% in 2017. I'd be very curious to know the numbers over the past two years as in 2017 bars/restaurants were at 27%, school/college at 9%, and work at 11%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/06/the-virtues-...
of those with a partner, 21% said they met them online (gets lower with age too)
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/nearly-...
And note that this says "online dating" not specifically tinder. Statistics show that 80% of women sleep with 20% of men on Tinder. Tinder is a place women go when they are interested in having sex with men based on nothing other than their looks. That is fine, if you are in the top 20%, if you aren't, it is a real fools errand.
Huge YMMV. A lot of us are physically similar to what we were in our 20s but I definitely peaked when I was around 25. It’s been a steady downhill trend since then and the interest from women has gone completely downhill. Mind you - I’m not exactly surrounded by many women I’m interested in but at least in the past I might’ve had someone I wasn’t into express some mild interest in me.
In my 30s though? Nope. Definitely not. Haven’t even lost hair or gained a bunch of fat. Yet - from the results one would think I have.
So, I’d say… grain of salt as far as your experience and your friends goes. I know many men who have basically given up in their 30s because they feel completely undesired and have managed to keep up their physicality.
No surprise that women in their 40's are more responsive. There are less men alive at their age and less men interested in dating their peer age. Many men in their 40s want to date someone in their 30s. Men in their 50s want a 40s, etc. It's uncommon for men to want to date someone in the same age bracket as they get older.
"go out to bars" is advise that's about 20 years out of date, mate. However, being successful at online dating is non-intuitive and takes skill.
Of course, if you're in your mid 30's and you want to bang college chicks half your age with daddy issues, maybe "going to bars" is the way to go...
You missed the rest of the sentence.
I've met people online and dated them. I've also met girls in other ways and dated them, now marrying one. Once or twice, well, we didn't quite want to tell other people how we met. So we didn't. We just said we met online. It's the perfect blow-off justification when you don't want to get into a perhaps complicated and messy story.
People meet in all sorts of ways. I used online dating for years but it was never the most successful strategy. What did work - meeting girls at events, in bars, ideally at events in bars, one or two less conventional ways, and never giving up.
It's pretty easy to strike up conversations with people at bars and events. I know people who met their long term partners on overseas tours, at work and at music festivals. Not everyone uses dating apps, not every person at a bar is ancient or has daddy issues.
These sound like the kind of partners you're trying to avoid anyway. Although I may be projecting.
Also, are you wanting an easy time dating, or are you wanting a long-term relationship with kids on the horizon? They're two wildly different desires.
Is it instead that some of these folks who have an "easy" time actually don't care that much about the process? Not ignorance, but not spending much time over-analyzing everything. Instead, they're out and they're drawing people to them because they're not thinking about having a good time, but just doing it?
It really is that simple in some ways. Focus on enjoying yourself throughout your day to day and especially in social situations and perhaps someone will find their way to you instead.
PS: those crystal sellers don't sound to me (generalizing) like good long-term matches for most people. So, stop comparing yourself to them.
Perhaps this is your problem? I've seen this with folks at work. They're middle aged, successful, extremely bright and they want to find a mate. The problems as I see it:
1. They insist on living in "Man Jose" aka SiValley. There is a serious lack of demographic diversity here.
2. They want to find a bright, attractive woman with an amazing career, 10/10 body who is wowed by their lack of life balance, an obsession with career and status, and lack of fun/joy in their lives.
If these guys would live practically anywhere but the valley and accept that, even though they make a lot of money and are great at their tech jobs, they are just average in terms of what a woman looks for in a mate, well, they might get somewhere.
Lonely nerds: you've got to accept that in all likelihood your mate will disappoint you in some way and vice-versa. Don't just marry the first girl you find, but consider lowering your standards to match with reality.
> I had plenty of attractive sexual partners.
This sentence is a serious red flag. If you think your ability to bang hot women who hang out in bars bears any relation to your fitness as a mate then you need to check your beliefs about what women want in a relationship. I'd like to hope this is just an insensitive way of you telling us that you're not a hideous monster and hopefully that's all it is. If not, I don't know, maybe stop trying to date, take a break from the tech world, and just work on your social skills for a while.
> tell Women painfully stupid stuff they want to hear
Jesus... so many red flags. Really man, you have a condescending attitude towards women and you wonder why you can't find a mate?
You might feel like your achievements and positive qualities are not being valued by women and you've worked so hard to improve yourself for nothing. Trust me, this is not true. There are other factors at play that make online dating unreasonably unfair for you.
1. If you are in the Bay Area, you are at a distinct disadvantage. The male-female-ratio, homogeneity of interests and credentials make stand out far less than you would in the general population. It is also natural for women to form negative stereotypes about men in tech if they've been on bad dates. There's no way to tell that you won't be the same from your profile. I've experienced this first-hand where every woman I managed to go on a date with responded positively and complained to me that the guys they meet are immature, entitled or lack social skills.
2. If you are not white and live in the USA, your odds are slimmer even among your racial group. There are studies to confirm this and you can compare yourself to your peers.
3. Physical attributes like height, fitness and facial attractiveness matter but to a way lesser extent than people think. I've been skinny as a rail and ripped with a substantial amount of muscle and the number of matches were still about the same and women I met in person didn't seem to care either way though I would rate myself as considerably closer to the generally accepted male standards of attractiveness when jacked.
4. By far the quickest hack to get more matches on dating apps is to improve your pictures. Bite the bullet and do it, the bar is pitifully low.
5. No matter how many matches you get, the vast majority of them will act the same way. They'll not respond, stand you up and ghost. Most people are incapable of dealing with the pressures of interacting with other and will choose to do what's easiest for them instead of what's right. However, the more matches you get, the less you'll care about this.
6. Your point about appealing to the lowest common denominator sounds attractive when you feel like you have no prospects but you'll realize it is a sheer waste of time once you learn to value yourself appropriately and stop degrading yourself because of the feedback you're getting from the apps. This is difficult to do unless you really deeply understand the dynamics of these apps so the typical suggestion is to get off them and just date in person.
7. You were pretty much sold a lie growing up that everyone is entitled to love and the average guy will have an easy time finding a partner. When you understand the evolutionary pressures placed on women to select the best partner and today's world where women feel like there are many more high value men due to social media, it is easy to understand why they find it repulsive to settle for someone who's average. Most women grow out of this kind of thinking and seek real connection at some point though.
TLDR; You're probably undervaluing yourself but its not really your fault. Move out of the Bay Area. Get better pictures for your dating apps. Don't expect to have an easy time dating if there is nothing extraordinarily exceptional about you.
> If you are in the Bay Area, you are at a distinct disadvantage. The male-female-ratio
This is just true in the entire USA under age 35. If you're a man - you have a distinct disadvantage. More men (107:100) are born than women. This evens out around age 40 because men killed themselves at a much higher rate than women have. (Think about that - women kill themselves too but 7% of men have to off themselves to just even it out if all the women lived)
And regardless, even if it was somewhere between slightly favorable and slightly unfavorable in NYC, it is strongly unfavorable in SF, which accords with my subjective experience dating in the two places.
First Google search result. Census data contains all the info you desire. It’s not highly publicized because no one likes to admit that men might be struggling with something - lol. It doesn’t sell well in the media.
I will agree that the gender ratio of SF and SV are wildly worse for men than NYC. Just saying that it isn’t some holy grail that people like to sell it as. Men outnumber women in this world from birth. It’s only because men kill themselves that we have less men than women by age ~40.
What changed for you?
The way you are killing it in your career, I suspect that your female companionship objectives are a tad bit too demanding. At the least, you should try to find a women you can trust and enjoy in small moments of life. Start there.
Put those monetary resources your brain has afforded you to work.
If you were able to get laid at bars in the past, you are good looking enough. Your profile is just likely bad / has poor photos. And I know that sucks but its the real world.
I mean it is a crisis (at least potentially), creating a large group of disenfranchised men is not going to lead anywhere good.
When was the last time your heard politicians talking about it? Ross Perot and DJT?
> Interviewer: Ah, the lovely language of economics once again. “Costlessly reallocate to their next best opportunity,” meaning that some American who loses his manufacturing job just hops over to the next good job, which just happens to be available, near where he’s already living, and for which he just happens to be perfectly qualified for…
> Economist: That’s not what we see. We see those falls in manufacturing employment correspond to about equally large falls in overall employment rates over the first 10 years in those trade-impacted locations. So every half a point that manufacturing falls, we see a total decline of about a half a point. So some people are leaving the labor market, some people are going into unemployment. Some people are going on to disability. And so the reallocation process seems to be slow, frictional, and scarring.
[1]https://freakonomics.com/podcast/did-china-eat-americas-jobs...
>The fabric of hundreds of families unravels, as an itinerant class of fathers — “Janesville Gypsies,” they call themselves — start commuting to G.M. factories in Texas, Indiana and Kansas, just so they can maintain their wage of $28 an hour. Those who stay home invariably see their paychecks shrink drastically. One of the men Goldstein follows, Jerad Whiteaker, cycles through a series of unsatisfying, low-paying jobs, finally settling in one that pays less than half his former wage and offers no health insurance. His twin teenage girls — to whom I’d also like to send awed notes — share five jobs between them, earning so much money for their family that they compromise their eligibility for student loans.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/comments/67lg2q/in_j...
I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own free will because their wife is working and they are staying home with the kids, both of these facts could be true, but seems like a win in both gender equality terms and allowing men to have the life they want. This seems better then having two working parents.
I don't really like how "out of the workforce" is coupled with unemployed. "out of the workforce" implies they don't have to and don't want to work, as opposed to unemployed
It's one thing to be single and roaming the world carefree.
But my observation has been that most men who are married, especially if with children, have some innate desire to provide for the family and not being able to do so (due to unemployment, underemployment, etc.) causes them stress even if the wife is earning more than enough.
Those that don't seem to be an outlier. Is it biological? Is it social pressure? I don't know.
Similarly, if you know you could take someone in a fight, and they challenge you in public...its easier in that case to "take the high road" and walk away than it would be if you knew you would lose the fight, or you weren't confident you would win. The people in the latter case are much more likely to feel shame and/or resentment towards the aggressor later on.
I think with "power" like that its easier to make the best choice in many cases. It's a shame too...I know a few people that are miserable because they don't have a "real job", even though they don't really need one financially. That lack of power keeps them from being happy and choosing the lifestyle that would obviously be best otherwise.
I've long considered traditional gender roles of man works and provides income and woman raises kids and cooks to be unfair to both genders and a general issue that affects everyone, and not really a "feminist" issue as such (or rather, not exclusively feminist).
In my country there's been a lot of discussion that a lot of women are working part-time rather than full-time, with many claiming this is horrible and evidence of discrimination. Maybe that plays a part, but it seems to me the real question is "why aren't more men working part-time?" rather than "why aren't more women working full-time?"
And more general: up to a few decades ago it was entirely normal for a single earner to support an entire family and still have money for a yearly holiday. Now that's much harder financially, if not outright impossible. Something really profound changed in our economy with seemingly few people noticing or commenting on it.
Feminism also contains the culture that wants six year old boys to be held back, feel shame and suffer for the sins of their fathers.
Feminism also contains the idea that being a man is some kind of disease, something to be ashamed of.
If you ask a representative sample of men most will disagree strongly and loudly.
If however you ask feminists to distance themselves from the extremists you'll probably find a completely different answer.
I have no papers to show but I have been watching the debate from the sidelines:
Even something as simple as getting feminists to condemn "kill all men" is hard.
Your whole argument hinges on this word, you are not arguing in good faith, but rather, building a strawman. I'm not going to engage with this style. Thanks.
> I have no papers to show but I have been watching the debate from the sidelines:
First strawman is not the word here anyway. That would mean I misrepresent others to make it easier to knock down their arguments.
That said, I'm not a native speaker and it probably affects the quality of my arguments.
I'll try to rephrase it as a thought experiment:
If one ask
- a random sampling of men to distance themselves from a tweet that says women should be chained to the kitchen
- and a random sample of women to distance themselves from a #killallmen tweet
how do one think the results would be?
> I'm not going to engage with this style. Thanks.
Your choice, for the benefit of everyone else I answered.
But I think it is unfair to say I argue in bad faith.
My point is that among mainstream feminists it is more ok to write even gross hate speech against men (#killallmen) than it is to write even bad jokes about women (they should be chained to the kitchen) amongst not-feminists.
I'm not suggesting mainstream feminists conspire to actually kill all men.
All "isms" contain outliers, but it's a mistake to get too hung up them in almost all cases. One of the oldest tricks in the book for people trying to push back against idea is to identify these outliers and generate a narrative that this is what the idea is actually about - it's bad faith argument and shouldn't be engaged with.
Is that too a bad faith argument?
Which is I think what the sibling commentor was trying to say, no?
The bad faith argumentation doesn't come from the specifics of whatever group you are talking about, it comes from trying to represent a fringe view or characterization as definitive of the group, then attacking them all for it.
Take for example the current news about Canadian trucker convoy, there was some coverage of people in the convoy being pictured with swastika flags.
It's perfectly reasonable to say: "hey, what's up with the neonazi's ? Are you guys really ok with them being part of your protest?"
And it's perfectly reasonable to judge them on the response to that question. There are even nuanced answers that it's hard to judge.
However, it's a bad faith argument to jump from that to: "Canadian truckers are nazi's".
I said:
> There are examples of men who want women to be chained to the kitchen; we should consider the reasonable views though,
and
> Ignore the fringe elements
Emphasis added on the important parts. I was arguing there are always fringe elments, and to ignore those, not that the men who are shitheads are important to focus on. You're really twisting things around and I won't comment further on these bad-faith arguments, have a nice day.
From what I've read and people I've spoken to, quite a large number – though far from all – feminists seem to agree on that in broad lines, yet somehow the public discourse still remains fairly narrow IMHO. Personally, I blame the "MRA" people and their nonsense.
Please kindly let me know where such sort of feminism is happening - I would like to move there.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feminism
Feminism is the belief that women are deserving of equal consideration in all things.
Women, regardless of their own earnings, do not want men that are unemployed, lowly employed, "in between jobs". You will be completely ignored. It's a crude reality, but a reality nevertheless. Men are selected by utility.
Read the article again. It seems there's whole armies of men with time on their hands. Unemployed, unable to get a partner. A great supply of male homemakers one would think.
But no. Nobody wants them. A male without utility is cast aside like trash.
Likewise, women do not really want the feminine or sensitive men that they claim to want. They may want it after first securing a man with good looks and good earnings, after which said man may at times express his emotions. But don't overdo it, obviously.
This feminist idea to destroy male gender roles directly contradicts what women actually do. For as long as feminists do not marry economically disadvantaged men and financially take care of them, none of this will change, and it's all just a bunch of hypocrisy.
> women do not really want the feminine or sensitive men that they claim to want.
You are wrong. Yes, as a partner you're supposed to have drive and groom yourself properly - this is true for everyone. After those basic life requirements, what is important is that you are capable of having a mature relationship with someone else. Part of that is knowing that you should express yourself and how to do it in such a way that it isn't a fight every time.
But if you don't believe me, do go ahead and create a fake dating profile. One in which you show economic fragility (which is the point of the OP article) yet that you're very much in touch with your feelings.
Enjoy the crickets. Nobody wants you.
Hence my point: be attractive, economically successful and only then might you also express some feelings. The thing you're missing here is "economically successful". You describe it as a basic life requirement but I made my remark in context of the article, which describes millions of men for which this is out of reach, even if they try. So the "mature relationship" doesn't apply as they won't be in any due to their economic status.
And as this lack of economic success leads to a lack of romantic success, they sink into a depression, start drinking, and then kill themselves. None of which apparently is worrying, instead the worrying part is saying that women select for economic success, as this sounds shallow, bitter or even offensive.
It's not offensive, it makes total sense from both a biological and cultural perspective.
People have become experts in dodging and bending realities they dislike. When it rains outside they deny it, change the subject, or even redefine the meaning of the word rain.
But to me it still just rains. I'm a man and I know what is expected of me: utility. I have to deliver it and there's no safety net. Failing is not an option. It doesn't matter how I feel about it as it doesn't matter how I feel about the rain. Rain doesn't care, and the world doesn't care about men.
You lived on your farm or in your village. Both parents did work on the farm as needed. Dad was never far from home and did take the older kids to the fields.
Until my children grew up and I rejoined the workforce. That has been a struggle.
Another thing is that it's awkard for breast-feeding women to be away from their babies for long times, and formula comes with its own set of problems.
True. But it is a short period.
Or adjust your lifestyle to not need to earn so much.
If you really want to stay home, there's probably a way to make it work.
It’s also a sign that the gender income gap decreased, because it’s worth both people’s time to work. It’s not worth womens’ time to work either when the family is poor (because they can’t earn much and might as well do home/childcare labor) or rich (because the amount one partner can add with a job effectively doesn't matter).
This means the easiest way to get back to a one-income family is to lower womens’ wages again, so you probably shouldn’t wish for it.
"This means the easiest way to get back to a one-income family is to lower womens’ wages again, so you probably shouldn’t wish for it."
There's no connection to this and the rest of your post. It also assumes that families don't need two incomes to stay out of poverty or off of assistance.
The easiest ways according to your post is to make a family poor or rich.
Probably depends on the neighborhood - there's claims in this thread that single motherhood is up, but those can't both be true. (I don't have any evidence to add here.)
> The easiest ways according to your post is to make a family poor or rich.
Yes, but making someone poor's a lot easier. Murphy's law, y'know.
They can. I think you're missing one of my key parts - without assistance. It's highly likely single mothers are getting child support. It's possible they are getting assistance too.
Just look at the stats on how much people have saved in emergency funds and for retirement. That should show you the dire need for two incomes.
I'm curious - are there any human cultures where the woman was the traditionally (as in, not a recent modern phenomenon) the breadwinner and the men stayed at home? I know there are cultures that were matriarchal in leadership, and that there are animal species (i.e. lions) where the female does the hunting. But were there any true "Amazon" cultures in the past?
However women would take babies with them while doing things like picking nuts and berries.
and
> Research shows that one significant factor women look for in a partner is a steady job. As men’s unemployment rises, their romantic prospects decline. Unsurprisingly, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from 1960 to 2010, the proportion of adults without a college degree who marry plummeted from just over 70 percent to roughly 45 percent.
Seem to imply that this isn't a case of men choosing to stay at home with the kids. I'm curious what the actual data is though.
It's not like everyone lives on a farm anymore. You probably can't just build a starter house on the other side of her dad's back 40 acres.
I then realized that for much of history up until recently by the time a young man was 18 years old he was already a skilled craftsman at his craft to a large extant. The young man would've been training with his father at his craft from the time he was ten years old and so by the time he was 18 would be proficient in what he had to do.
I wonder then is part of the issue we face due to the fact that we spend so much time trying to instill a modern education into youth until they are adults that they have to spend an additional 4-8 years acquiring an actual skill in order to be able to provide value in the workforce?
Sadly, doing so also stripped dignity from vocational / blue-collar work - even when it pays (very) well, kids are told that a life in the trades is for the uneducated, ignorant swines.
Ironically, part of this development is led by emancipation of the lower classes themselves: "I break my back every day but my son will study and be a doctor". A sentiment we all admire, but ends up reinforcing the idea that the father's blue-collar work is crap - and that's not how it should be, all workers should have equal dignity and value.
Modern society and its trajectory seems a fundamentally unsustainable enterprise.
Assuming that value equals price, the only way everyone would have an equal price is if supply and demand were exactly equal across all occupations over a long period of time.
That is not a realistic expectation. And the only way for people (by and large) to be incentivized to do the things where supply is not meeting demand is to have a higher price where supply of labor is more needed than elsewhere.
That's a big assumption. There are lots of careers with social and financial values that diverge, ignoring that would I think miss the point OP is trying to make.
In other words your argument could works equally well for the father urging their kid to do something that on average won't pay better, but will bring them more respect and social standing.
If most plumbers started earning top 10% wages in the US, they would have similar social standing to doctors. Even doctors have probably moved down in relative status, where the new ones are basically W2 employees with metrics for a big company.
Hell, put a noble prize winner (or Olympic gold medallist, or astronaut, or you pick) in a room with a guy who made 50mm on property development. No contest, but chances are the developer is at least 10x as wealthy.
There are examples all around you; might not be why you respect people, but its' what people actually do. Trying to reduce this all to wealth just doesn't stand up to even a little scrutiny, though it's equally clear that wealth does contribute.
The fact is that money buys better health and familial outcomes. The parents want that for their kids. Manual labor, regardless of how well it pays takes a toll on your body and generally pays less than a lot of the highly sought after knowledge worker jobs.
I really think the rising cost of living is whats driving these kinds of ideas. The parents want their kids to make more money so they can have a better life - a reality in america. Others see this and assume that the blue collar job is bad or something.
If we had an adequate healthcare system that didn't favor the super rich with good outcomes, I would agree. Until then, my kids are going to be encouraged to go into a career where they can make lots of money sitting in an air conditioned office.
I've worked the blue collar tough as fuck jobs, and now I work in an air conditioned office making 15x as much. Objectively, which one is the better job?
I agree, not how it should be, but you gotta get yours.
Also, if you've ever worked in the trades you would know that a large portion of them are ignorant and uneducated. That stereotype exists for a reason. Its just a fact, and they have a tougher time navigating life because of it. I've lived it.
I agree with you there, I think there is a tendency to romanticize the life of a blue collar worker, and thing of them as the noble simple idealized "proletariat", when as you point out the stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
But I have to wonder is part of that because of the brain drain in the trades that resulted from everyone going to college and feeling they had to do white collar work. Before a smart, observant, hardworking young man could become an electrician and by virtue of being observant and quick witted could succeeded and excel and become an outstanding electrician that could bring about innovation and elevate his work team. Nowadays though the same hardworking intelligent young man is being told that the trades are for stupid people, and he is too smart for that and wouldn't it be much better to go get a college degree so he can get a "real job". Then twenty years and $50,000 of student debt later he finds himself as a project manager trapped in a standup meeting at 8:00 on a Wednesday morning, hating his life, drowning in unfulfilled despair and wondering what went wrong with his life.
I just think that part of the stereotypes about the trades has become a self fulfilling prophecy.
Two things I would comment on are:
1) the amount of debt, try 150-200k
2) in this example, how can you know that he wouldn't hate his life if he chose the trades?
[1]: https://www.credible.com/blog/statistics/average-student-loa...
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude...
There seems to be a bunch of variability here. In support of my original assertion of 150-200k, that site has multiple average debts for different fields in my stated range.
Actually, the article you linked confirms my original statement. Look at the "graduate loan debt" section.
From the article you linked: Average student loan debt for a professional degree from a private, nonprofit institution $243,300
I have no idea how they got 28k when most every number I see on that page is much larger.
All the other numbers you see that are higher are graduate degrees. Comparing a medical student debt (4+ years more of school beyond the 4 of undergrad, residency, perhaps a specialty on top) to only a 4 year degree is not representative of the vast majority of student debt.
This is already coming to pass in hot real-estate markets where it's almost impossible to get any sort of trade help. It feels like most of the skilled tradesmen (and women) have a plethora of job choices and they by far prefer to build new housing instead of dealing with nitpicky rich people for the same money.
It's just like most programmers preferring to work on greenfield projects rather than maintenance.
Not everyone can work an information sector job.
In many places a skilled plumber or electrician earns more than an office worker or even junior engineer. A skilled highway construction worker earns more than the country average. A crane operator makes more than the average software developer. There are many surprises when it comes to blue collar job payment.
Take the electrician for example. Minimum 4 years of work as an apprentice, then you have to do a year of schooling, pay for it out of pocket, take a test and your making about as much as a entry level developer who only needed to spend 1 year studying in their free time, spent $400 on a laptop, got all their learning for free online, and isn't doing back breaking, more dangerous work. And from there the tech worker's salary is going to go to 150k+ in 3-5 years. You don't even need college to do that anymore.
Same thing with the crane operator. Starting salary for tech is more, requires less time to get started, and the tech worker's salary goes up quick after starting. You don't start out on the path to being a crane operator at 50k+ a year. You start helping doing rigging and spotting for $12 an hour.
I lived both sides of it, trust me. I see where your coming from, some blue collar jobs pay more than you'd think, but in reality there's just no comparison.
> if you've ever worked in the trades you would know that a large portion of them are ignorant and uneducated
Yes, and that's why there used to be a view that adult education was to be promoted and encouraged.
My point is that at some point, we just stopped aspiring to a better tomorrow and accepted we're all doomed to live in hell. Which, inevitably, condemned us to a life of pain.
Craftsman usually had a decent living because it took training and there was generally demand. But if you train twice as many electricians, its not like there will be twice as many electrician jobs created. So learning a craft or trade is a great personal strategy, but it not a solution we can universally apply.
I do think we force way too many people into college-track for little benefit and quite a bit of harm.
I don't know that I agree with that, right now at least on the data I have available and the anecdata I have observed there is a serious shortage of skilled blue color work, plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc. so there is definitely a shift that would be beneficial for society at large and individuals.
But let's explore this idea a little bit more, right now we are used to the idea that there are X jobs for Y persons, especially in white color work. This seems to derive largely from the fact that white color work is focused not on production of goods and services but in the production of information (and to some extant bullsh*). For example there are only so many marketing jobs out there because there are only so much marketing a company needs done. Sure adding your first 3 marketers may increase your revenue by 50% but adding your 300th marketer probably isn't going to increase your income at all, in fact it's likely it might actually be a negative investment. The problem is the marketer doesn't actually add a resources to the world, they aren't producing marketing widgets, they merely identify and optimize existing distribution channels, and help others become aware of your company, and there is only so much you can do in that area, there is only so much inefficiency that can be optimized away.
Contrast this instead with a plumber. You hire your first plumber he can do say 5 jobs a day, if you hire 3 more plumbers you can do 20 jobs a day now. Well let's suppose later on you hire another plumber he still adds the value to do 5 more jobs a day. Now you may say that there are only so many plumbing jobs out there, only so many people have their 3 year old push a bouncy ball down the toilet, but the plumber is also working on new housing and new business, the plumber isn't just optimizing the existing pie they are causing the overall size of the pie itself to increase. Now there does of course exist some sort of maximum to this, but after reading World War Z that explores this concept in quite a bit of depth (and has no similarity to the movie at all) I've realized that if society did collapse I as a software engineer have absolutely no real or applicable skills, whereas an electrician or a carpenter, they will be able to keep on doing their job as they were now, because they are creating actual wealth, not just optimizing existing wealth generation activities.
My point being a society with an overabundance of electricians, carpenters and plumbers is probably better off than a society with an overabundance of project managers, paralegals, and risk analysts.
I think this is the root of a lot of people's frustrations around housing, and adulthood. For most our history it was expected that you would have multiple generations sharing a household. The idea that you move out of your family's house the second you turn 18 or finish college is a relatively new idea. As parent commenter points out, this was really only the norm for two generations, suggesting that that, and not our current situation, is the historical outlier.
Living with your family for a while allows you to save money and help your parents out after they spent the better part of two decades raising you.
We have a lot of choices in this life, but whether I get brought into it isn't one.
I have no expectations of what my son will or will not help me with in the future and will try as hard as possible to set him up well - because he didn't have a choice in his circumstance, I and solely I did.
Wow. This is wild to me. My grandfather was an orphan, most likely because his parents weren't married(if he were alive today, he'd be well over 100).
I am absolutely grateful that my parents have done their best to raise me to be the intelligent, caring person I am, and to take care not to perpetuate the misdeeds of their parents(which, being Boomers, were numerous). As both someone who suffers from depression and identifies as a materialist, it is probably the single thing I am most grateful for, and certainly the most profound intangible in my life. The feeling that I owe them is honestly one of the fundamental things that keeps me going.
If your parents are decent to you and showed care with how you were raised I absolutely think that you owe them. Having a functional, caring family is one of the greatest privileges one can have in life. You know who I don't owe anything too? The people who put my grandfather up for adoption.
At some point you need to just do these adult things in order to get good. Delaying doesn't change that much. Better to get the practice over with as soon as possible.
What is the average number of romantic partners that a person lives with in their life? It probably isn't that high.
This does bring up an important concept of "emerging adulthood" [0]. Where in modern day societies there seem to be a time period where young adults do what you are describing. There seem to be some of this coupled with some young men not being able to find purpose in life as evidence by the increase in suicide and drug use in the that group.
Why we all think it's a great idea to leave our families at 18 and pay high rents so that we can live with strangers we found on the internet is beyond me.
It's more difficult to maintain a romantic relationship when living with family (especially if both partners live with family), and it can also delay life skills (e.g. learning how to cook at home, clean, and generally learn to live more independently; though it's possible to deliberately learn this while living with family, it becomes a necessity to learn after moving out).
In many parts of the world, the point where you are expected to (and socially pressured to) move out of your parents home is marriage. Of course there are exceptions, like moving to a faraway city for a job, etc.
Whereas I see many American youths bleeding away their income on rent and expenses while living 10 minutes away from their parents' home.
So of course, in print, there's a crisis of young men staying at home with their parents til they're 30. But for young men, there's a crisis of incentive. Why on earth would a young man want to go give half his waking life to barely pay his own rent, then run on the treadmill that is modern online dating for, at best, meaningless hedonistic interactions with maybe, maybe not, women he's attracted to?
What it comes down to is that men have no incentive to do anything other than low effort, intangible self service, because the other alternative is just a more expensive version of the exact same thing.
Who are these people and are they in the room with us now?
Here's an example, it is openly stated that the government maintains an inflation rate to discourage saving and encourage spending to stimulate the economy. This is a deliberate attempt to influence the culture of the US, and it works. We have a consumer culture where everyone buys services and cheap stuff and nobody saves money, the stated goal of these fiscal policies.
They don't say what they mean, they say come bizarre abstract exaggeration to get a reply or reaction, then completely back off from what they originally said, then get mad that they are asked to explain their original claim.
I didn't claim people don't save enough money. I claimed that it is fiscal policy of our government and has been for decades to stimulate the economy by discouraging saving and encouraging spending via debasement of currency. Discouraging saving and encouraging spending is manipulation of social structure. I fail to see where your disagreement lies in that statement. You did not address my example at all, you just dismissed it entirely. I restated it here to give you an opportunity to correct that if you want.
I can give you more examples of government managing social structure if you like. In some instances the social and cultural impacts are secondary effects, often unintended consequences, but in many cases they're deliberate and openly stated, such as the example I've already given.
What exactly do you think government means when they call themselves "government"? What does it mean to govern a society, population, land mass or nation?
Here you are just talking about inflation and implying that that is the same thing as "systems planning of our social structure".
Monetary inflation is planned. there are men, in the US that would be the board of the FED, that try to decide what the inflation rate will be using interest rates to borrow from them. They target certain rates because they want certain social and economic consequences of the conditions they impose.
This is one example. Draw me a picture of how that's not systems planning our social structure.
Now, to answer your question, yes, there are people that do treat our society like a system and do systems planning to attempt to create desired social, cultural and economic outcomes. These people collectively form what is known as government. This is not a matter of contention, it is not a controversial statement, this is literally their stated goal, their mission for existing and what we pay them to do.
Now let me ask you a question: what exactly do you think a government does?
Anyway, unless you're going to reply to a statement I made, answer a question I asked or actually state your disagreement with anything I've said there's not a discussion here to be had.
I know, but it turns out you are really just upset about inflation. You haven't connected that in any real way to claims of "system planning our social structure".
[0]https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/censu...
seems to be the answer is right here - college. Historically the basic level of necessary education has been increasing. 4 year grammar school couple centuries ago to the K-12 30 years ago, and today it is "K-16", i.e. K-12 plus college. Not having college today is more and more like not having GRE several decades ago.
There's a heap of complexity around this. Society needs to shift and work this out. Its only been around a century. The answers are not so simple.
This will take more than a generation to solve. Culturally this is not acceptable for women. Women are looked down upon for dating men who make less than them.
For the next 20-30 years, women will continue to shame themselves and others for dating men of “lower” or even equal value.
My experience suggests that people are rarely more flexible than they need to be to meet their goals. And: why should they be?
This results in some amount of assortive mating (of the social, rather than genetic, variety), but I don’t see a likely path out of this. It’s the human version of “birds of a feather”.
Not what's happening. For one, marriages are decreasing too and marriage age increases.
And although not very gendered, it is a shitty contract where the worst clauses have extremely high rates of occurring. Even when isolating to later aged upper middle class economic equals, a 10% rate of triggering the worst clauses in a financial contract is extremely bad.
You simply can't decouple the financial aspects of a financial contract just because how someone might have been conditioned to romanticize an overarching concept.
This is a distinction without a difference. Even today, with women's educational attainment and workforce compensation skyrocketing, they still strongly marry "up". In the aggregate, this leaves the situation arguably even worse than before:
1. More men are pushed out of the marriage market.
2. Men who are in the marriage market still face financial devastation when the wife decides it's time to "find herself" in a no-fault divorce state (e.g. nearly all of them).
Yes, while the delta between spousal earnings is much smaller which also leads to a third observation:
3. Economic equals that are stable are marrying each other for the first time/generation, which increases inequality for the people (mostly for the other remaining women) that have nobody to marry up to.
The women aren't interested in being in an unstable situation and are also not interested in taking care of a man, both genders in this binary situation are opting to avoid marriage (or merely consider it unattainable) if there is no stability. And of course there is my observation that it's also a bad contract.
This cannot be overstated.
True even with a prenup.
The worm has turned
I’m guessing we are talking about two different things.
I will also add that, in my circle, women are getting screwed as much by this as men, so “the worm has turned” might better be “be careful what you wish for”.
I largely have no issues with approximately equal division of assets acquired during a marriage.
The two main issues I have are:
1. Determining what counts as an asset.
2. The method of contesting anything in a contested divorce.
For 1, appreciation of any asset counts as an asset that should be divided.
If you came into a marriage with $1 million in ETFs and a $1.5m house free and clear, and those go up to $1.7m etfs and $2.5m house, spouse gets half of $1.7m asset appreciation for…. I struggle to answer this question in a way that us not “being lucky”.
Note that they do not owe half of losses if assets lose value.
Meanwhile, somehow inheritance is treated as largely untouchable money. How does that make sense?
For 2, if a divorce is not amicable, sometimes the party that feels scorned takes a scorched earth approach and basically is willing to give a ton of money to lawyers (“spouse doesn’t get it!”) while also freezing assets.
I’ve seen some very asset rich people be cash poor because their former spouse just wouldn’t let them sell anything, even when they split the proceeds. This was just nothing other than malice. Sure, you can go to court to force them to let you sell for cash, but this is just another example of a pathological aspect of our current system.
This aspect can also create complications in things like limited partnerships and other businesses in which it can be really hard to assign values to the asset and even harder divide the value of the asset without simultaneously destroying that value.
Pre-nups can help, but they largely make the outcome slightly more certain while still leaving much to be contested via litigation if the party that feels scorned chooses to do so.
I know a lot of these rules are in place because of the historical economic shenanigans that men have subjected women to, but that doesn’t mean that the system is reasonable, fair, or not pathological for certain (perhaps many or even most) cases.
That depends on how one's finances are set up beforehand. There are quite a few financial instruments that are almost always untouchable. One such instrument is the irrevocable trust. In short, an irrevocable trust isn't owned by the trustee/divorcée. As a result, anything awarded from it is not subject to property division.
Unmarried couples may fall into one of two types: common-law marriages and meretricious relationships. In the US, the former is approved by a vanishingly small number of states. The latter has no legal rights to property division or palimony without an explicit cohabitation contract. Even then, many states don't recognize palimony at all.
Sure it can. It's not complicated (pathologically or otherwise), it's just not what some people want.
I definitely think (particularly young) people should be better educated about what a marriage contract is and isn't before they get into it.
I agree, but I think the HN crowd might grossly underestimate how difficult it is for lay people to get accurate, actionable advice that is also fully understood.
The default takeaway for a not small number of people is “don’t get married if you are successful and like financial security”.
But that's terrible advice really, and doesn't follow reality. So I think there is something more going on.
I don't think simple, actionable advice is that hard really, but there is a lot of political and ideological noise around the subject that confuses people.
It's common. The root problem is presuppositions in the marriage contract are wrong.
The reality is most relationships don't last forever for lots of reasons and most reasons being benign.
But the penalties in the marriage contract are based on the fallacy that relationships should last forever and if they don't it's the provider's penalty and the provider's life energy should be consumed forever to pay for it.
Obviously there's some reasons it was setup that way such as providing for kids, but it's out of balanced and been abused for so long it's now a stereotype.
This is a major cause for lack of relationship formation! Because a failed relationship can demolish your future many hardworking smart men have moved the goalposts so high that we can see statistically they are less likely to have children.
Those who didn't work hard and have nothing to lose are not being punished they are instead given welfare.
Won't someone think of the children and fix this stupid law driven power imbalance that's driving us toward the future warned in the idiocracy movies.
I'm not sure I blame them. If I had no prospects of a wife or kids, I'd quit my job and argue with people on the internet in my dad's basement too.
20 trillion in debt for illegal and stupid wars probably didn't help either, though it does tie in once again with the 1% class.
What does that mean?
It's not men vs women, but workers vs owners.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...
"The middle class still gets its preferred policies enacted 26 percent of the time even when the rich are opposed."
Gee, thanks!
Most of this "debunking" rests on the idea that the tiny minority of rich people should have about the same amount of power as the rest of us, so it isn't so terrible that they actually have a fair amount more. That just doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, the fact that a few people have a few quibbles with a few minor details doesn't amount to "that study is false".
It is surprising that the middle class and rich agree so often. But as I'm sure you know, most Americans don't think of politics in economic class warfare terms, so maybe that's why.
So you have someone who makes 50k a year who has 10k of investments, and they would rather compare themselves to the CEO making millions, rather than someone lower in the org chart who makes 30k a year.
They have investments, so they'll approve of tax cuts on dividends, even though the people who profit from these tax cuts are the people who have 100 million invested, not the middle class who might just get a few hundreds in dividends from their investments a year.
So even though they are completely dependent on their salary and the whims of their employer, they like to think of themselves as independent upper middle class people and vote accordingly.
It's amazing how people will tell themselves stories and vote for policies that are bad for themselves just so they can feel superior to someone else.
Quite a lot of people vote for the system they think will bring the best outcomes for all. Some people think it's by levelling outcomes; others by increasing opportunity.
Assuming the increasing opportunity people are doing it to feel superior is likely false, and also likely just a way to feel superior to them.
You are right about that, maybe it's not about feeling superior, I don't know the real motivation. My argument would probably be stronger without this remark.
But I don't know if the differentiation between "outcomes" and "opportunities" really makes a difference. People still vote for "opportunities" that are only meaningful for people richer than themselves.
For example, you could say that lowering taxes on dividends is providing an "opportunity", but it's only an opportunity for those who already have more money than they need, and it rewards people proportionally with how much money they already have.
With many opportunities the outcomes are rather predictable, so I'm not sure what the difference is between focussing on "opportunity" vs. "outcomes".
I don't think this is that simple. Only considering billionaires, when most businesses fail in 3 years and owners can often get paid very little for a long time, is far, far too reductive in my opinion.
This was described by Herman and Chomsky as "manufactured consent". No rational consideration of middle class priorities would wage half a dozen ruinous wars in faraway unimportant places in two decades, but for a time many in the middle class were patriotic for such atrocious policy. That time has passed, yet the wars continue, which is what we're actually talking about: the result of disagreement. That middle class preferences are honored when they agree with the preferences of wealth is a triviality. That they are not honored when in disagreement, is the topic under discussion.
That's really the elephant in the living room. Perhaps as a society we are poorer because we set fire to trillions in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the HN crowd here's a metric: the average seed round is like $2M these days, so Iraq at roughly $3 trillion would be enough to fund 1.5 million startup companies.
Money is just accounting. The real economy is physical.
Women at 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles saw real wage increases from 1979-2019; men saw a decrease at 10th and 50th.
(I'm morally opposed to the top 90th percentile's growth at the expense of the bottom. I'm not morally opposed to gender pay equality, which I _think_ is zero sum and results in lower wages for men as it improves.)
"Staying home with the kids" might also include learning some skills, or trying to start a business, or self-employment. The radar will likely miss this. In the US, singles who earn under $12,500 don't need to file a federal tax return.
(Note that the radar will always remember that 'missing time' ... which you may need to account for later! And that info is widely available.)
One thing to remember when looking at manufacturing capacity in the United States is that it's somewhat skewed. For instance, when a CPU doubled its speed, the US government decided that we had doubled our manufacturing capacity. I don't know what other interesting if you points have skewed the data.
You sound like you didn't look at or have any sense of the statistics around two- vs one-income, single-family households before you posted this comment.
Society really loves to kick them while they’re down these days.
Less men in employment is not a good thing. It isn’t some kind of passing the torch to women happy event. Its just mass unemployment of a significant number of people in their prime earning age. Its societal failure.
I look at the variety of protests (of all sorts) and wonder how many people are there for a cause and how many want something to be part of, and a bit of motivation and thrill.
Society was formed because it was better for all members than all members being left to do it all themselves. Fail to fulfill the basic needs of its members and those members lose their incentives to abide the social contract.
If children are being raised on TikTok, okay, the average video length on TikTok is a couple minutes. Advertisements are now 5-15 seconds. This is not conducive to 'long attention span'. Now, imagine popping these kids into a classroom and expecting them to pay close attention for, say, 15 minutes, without any breaks. What to do... diagnose them with ADHD and dose them with amphetamines, what else? Of course this is the same issue for girls and boys but is generally going to create more of a dumbed-down population. Kids are probably better off playing video games instead, those require more attention. Even better, encourage them to read actual books.
I wonder if the WaPo would be interested in publishing any critiques of social media effects on children, given their ties to Big Tech... Let's see... "New report: Most teens say social media makes them feel better, not worse, about themselves (2018)"
Corporate media claims... remember this one? "NAFTA and China WTO will raise the standard of living for all Americans!"
Oh come on. You're either being misleading, or have been mislead. What you wrote doesn't make any sense:
1. Why would the existence of an example of one type of article show the absence of a different type? It's not like the Washington Post cannot report on multiple sides of an issue.
2. A single article from five years ago? How is that supposed to support such a sweeping statement?
3. It's not hard, at all, to find examples of the WaPo "publishing any critiques of social media effects on children": "Instagram is even worse than we thought for kids. What do we do about it? (2021)" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/09/17/instagra...), probably all the articles in this search https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awashingtonpost.com+%2..., etc.
> Corporate media claims... remember this one? "NAFTA and China WTO will raise the standard of living for all Americans!"
As far as I can tell, you just made that up. Literally no Google hits: https://www.google.com/search?q="NAFTA+and+China+WTO+will+ra... (at the time of this writing, it looks like your comment hasn't been indexed yet). So, no, no one "remembers" that one.
And even if if the WaPo did publish an article claiming exactly that (most likely some kind of advocacy on the op-ed page), what's the big deal? Do you think they should censor articles like that? Perhaps by using their precognitive abilities to know who the future will prove wrong?
It's kind of ironic that many people's who criticize the media for being some kind of propaganda rag issue critiques that implicitly advocate for it to be a propaganda rag.
NAFTA was passed in the very early days of the internet. Here's a great quote about it from former presidential candidate Ross Perot via wikipedia:
"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car—have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south. ... when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals."
Perot was from Texas, and mocked by corporate media as a clueless hillbilly for suggesting that NAFTA would be a bad deal for Americans. It was one of the few issues Noam Chomsky and Rush Limbaugh and all the major unions agreed on. Trump, whether sincere or not, uses it as one of his main talking points because it is absolutely true. Selling out our capacity to manufacture our own goods has been a terrible choice for Americans. We can't make the things our civilization needs to function. We have hollowed out entire metro areas and replaced steady paychecks and fairly cohesive social units with "gig" work and broken families.
That's a long way of saying their memory is accurate, but I think it's a critical moment to understand in modern US history. NAFTA was a big fucking deal, and the owners of corporate media spared no one to make sure it would get passed. They understood the power it would give them in terms of wealth accumulation and bargaining power to beat down unions and wages. Everyone thought Clinton wouldn't capitulate since it was unpopular with Democrats, but Clinton was attracted to and further corrupted by Wall St power and depended on them for guidance.
For a lot of Americans, NAFTA was the beginning of the end of their community. They are still pissed off about it, and that's the reason the criticism of the Clintons can turn vile in certain circles. It's not entirely unearned. I don't like the Clintons, though I voted for her as the lesser of two evils in 2016.
>> As far as I can tell, you just made that up. Literally no Google hits
> NAFTA was passed in the very early days of the internet. Here's a great quote about it from former presidential candidate Ross Perot via wikipedia:
I'm well aware. What I meant was the headline he "quoted" was almost certainly made up (I mean "NAFTA and China WTO"? There was a bit of a time gap between those things). Obviously there were advocates who made grand predictions in favor of free trade in general, and advocates who said that was all BS (and for the record the latter have been proven to be far more correct). The issue I have is with the sloppy thinking and sloppy argumentation in the GGP.
A lot of people seem to lazily think of the media as a unitary agent, and think that agent's intentions are revieled in some random cherrypicked op-eds they read sometime that pissed them off. That's almost as big of a pet peeve of mine as libertarianism.
That's not to say it can't be taken by a zeitgeist or its participants don't show bias, but it's kind of an important thing that ought to be thought about more carefully and less conspiratorially.
> Selling out our capacity to manufacture our own goods has been a terrible choice for Americans. We can't make the things our civilization needs to function. We have hollowed out entire metro areas and replaced steady paychecks and fairly cohesive social units with "gig" work and broken families.
No disagreement there.
TV and TikTok don't cause ADHD. They're products that arise to exploit people's attention, and they work excellently on people with poor executive function. TV doesn't cause ADHD, ADHD causes TV.
You can probably train attention span, and there are ways to cope with ADHD (I cope pretty well, and I have only mild symptoms), but it's measurable and it's genetic.
I guess you and I would agree on the conclusion - Treat social media like any other addictive drug: Regulate it, don't let kids get hooked on it, maybe even discourage adults from abusing it.
I think a lot of it comes down to, video and human faces exploit something deep in your brain. Maybe Hacker News just feels high-brow to me because there aren't image macros and constant ":O" clickbait thumbnails like some other sites.
That being said, I despise TikTok personally and would even go as far as to say that these short-form content platforms are reinforcing lower attention spans, but does it cause ADHD? I think that's a stretch. What's more likely is that it turns susceptible individuals into "whales" who sink time into it like nobody else. Not just ADHD folks, but those who are lonely or lack socialization too.
I know "toxic masculinity" is a dumb academic term that never should have become a slogan, but Andrew, Mr. Yang, that's not what it means.
It's like "async functions". Not all functions are async. It's okay if a function is sync. Adjectives modify nouns to make them refer to a specific subset.
It's fine to be masculine. I don't know what it means to be masculine (are monster trucks masculine? I like them anyway), but if it's safe, sane, and consensual, it's fine to be very very masculine and I support boys being masculine.
It just doesn't roll off the tongue.
Toxic masculinity is not solely men’s fault. It’s a systematic issue that is perpetuated by everyone.
Unhealthy independence is a good example. From the individual it’s “I don’t need anyone”, refusing help, and not forming connections. The worst manifestation of this is having to literally fight the men in my life to see a doctor for like glaringly obvious issues. It’s infuriating how many guys see it as emasculating. But from society it’s “glad to hear, because we’re not gonna offer you any help”, make you out to be a failure if you dare ask, and all media portrayal is going to make macho lone wolf archetypes seem cool and something you should strive for.
Tell me, when I was sexually assaulted by a woman who told me that I should want what she was doing and there was something wrong with me if I didn't, who was being masculine?
The conceptualization that men always want sex is false, but like it is a stereotype that exists. That someone used that stereotype about masculinity to try and justify assault (to you, perhaps to themselves also?) is what makes such stereotypes toxic. No one in a situation needs to be doing a masculinity for toxic masculinity to be present.
> who was being masculine?
I think it becomes clear very quickly that this is not really the question you want to be asking here. The implication here is that actually, it was the person who was assaulting you who was being masculine when they assaulted you, because they violated your consent. That's not a trait we should be associating with masculinity either (and so, to be clear, my answer to this question is something like "neither" or, "its unspecified", as masculinity shouldn't be a thing we choose to associate with sexual assault).
In this way, "toxic masculinity" is a useful descriptive term for a set of historically masculine-associated traits that are used to justify bad behavior both by and towards men ("boys will be boys", male-disposability, all kinds of sex-adjacent stuff, stereotypically masculine ways to (not) process feelings, attitudes around aggression, etc.).
Like I think a bunch of those are toxic traits, and I think all of them have been historically associated with and perpetuated as a part of what it means to be masculine. None of this does (or should) proscribe what masculinity should be. And also importantly, and what sometimes gets lost, these things being perpetuated aren't solely men's fault, and they certainly aren't any particular man's fault. But, a lot of them are perpetuated in historically/predominantly male spaces, so addressing many of them does predominantly fall onto individual men to speak up about and address when they happen. But it's equally important for role models in media to demonstrate nontoxic traits and that's obviously not just men's responsibility, not can you or I do much about it short of voting with our wallets.
It's the perfect self-describing terminology -- the very phrase is an example of the toxicity it describes!
I’m sure in certain environments such an approach to life is the optimal strategy.
Similarly with “men need to share emotions” but perfectly legitimate emotions associated with masculinity (like anger) are toxic.
Who came up with this stuff and why?
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
Well, according to an earlier post today: knowing the word "parsec."
monster trucks are not safe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chihuahua_monster_truck_accide...
Masculine traits are not cleanly divisible like that. Is masculine emotional distance toxic? Maybe so, if it leads to unaddressed problems; or maybe not, if it helps a man to reframe things positively. Is taking control of a group toxic? Yes if it overwhelms or dominates others, and the man doesn't know how to follow; no if it's a willingness to step up only in situations where a leader is necessary. Is mansplaining a thing, and am I doing it? On the one hand, some men are braggarts and instant experts on everything; on the other, everyone needs to explain their own thoughts sometimes, even laymen.
I assume academics are well aware that some gender-coded traits are double-edged swords, but that nuance is lost in public conversations. I don't think I've ever heard a respectable public figure describe toxic femininity, either, though it obviously exists.
Bonus: here is the actress from the Hanna TV series, describing the father character from the show, the man who sacrificed his life to protect her from extraordinary threat, and Esme Creed-Miles lazily throws out the "toxic masculinity" label. The phrase is just a reflex, at this point, and has no meaning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPMdEtzoj-Q&t=433s
I don't think this is as true as you claim. While the word toxic isn't used, black culture and to a lesser extent gay culture are often described as toxic or harmful, either to those groups or to society more generally.
This is even more true if you look at, e.g. transness, where an article about how it's contagious was in the NYT this week. And, IME, there's usually agreement that men aren't solely to blame for toxic masculinity, while allusions to these other toxic cultures are usually used to specifically avoid addressing issues that affect those groups.
I suspect that the good-hearted members of any community, however that is defined, are generally more against woke/cancel culture than for it, since it dehumanizes everyone. So, yeah, your assertion is totally compatible with this state of affairs.
I agree with you, masculinity is good, fantastic, worth cherishing. I'm a man, I enjoy my masculinity (whatever that is, yeah), and I enjoy expressing it in mostly positive ways. This sometimes means doing stereotypically feminine things, or acting in "softer" ways, which is fine. Emotional maturity is masculine.
This leads to me sometimes being referred to as a man who is "written by a woman" or an "egg" (a trans person who isn't yet out/hasn't realized it yet). These are obviously jokes, but they're still harmful jokes, because they perpetuate the idea that my good attribute can't be masculine. This shifts from toxic masculinity being a bad subset of masculinity, to masculinity being toxic by exclusion (as nontoxic traits are inherently non-masculine).
That's a really harmful pattern, and one that people shouldn't perpetuate.
When a man engages in a stereotypically gender-conforming behavior in a harmful way, it should have been called "internalized misandry".
Instead, because academia is not free from biases of its own, a condemning, shaming, loaded term was coined for this side of things.
I don't believe it started with Academia, it was a social term that came into use, I'd probably blame Twitter:
Coined in late 20th-century men’s movements, “toxic masculinity” spread to therapeutic and social policy settings in the early 21st century. Since 2013, feminists began attributing misogyny, homophobia, and men’s violence to toxic masculinity. Around the same time, feminism enjoyed renewed popularization.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1097184X2094325...
It's much like dealing with hackers who take umbrage with it's public definition meaning computer criminal, vs. the more sophisticated it thing it really means, and simultaneously being in denial about the transformation that happened many decades ago.
If you say you are "visiting the famous Golden Gate Bridge", people will understand that you are visiting the Golden Gate Bridge, and that you said it is famous. Nobody will think you meant there are many Golden Gate Bridges, but you are only visiting the famous one.
Google Ngram seems to agree: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=data+is%2Cdata...
Like something you'd find in a bit-sized "fun fact"...
"Did you know that data is the plural form of datum and [...]?" and so on :)
Prescriptivist "data" is plural because it comes from the cartographical term "datum". Descriptivists say it's singular because nobody in the 400 years has used the term in an information context while referring to the geodetic datum.
This is the equivalent of the Washington Post being snobby by saying that technically a tomato turns it into a fruit salad.
Conversely: as young men's potential future employability rises, their romantic prospects also decline. That is - the men who'll grow up to be stable and reliable have lonely teenage years.
Males should be fixing that by making some female friends. Don't go the "creepy incel who hates all women and Chads" route.
Absolutely. I am on the autism spectrum so part of the difficulty I have can be attributed to that. However I accept that my social shortcomings are my own responsibility. I think a big part of the problem is finding new friends now that I am in my 30's and life is very stagnant.
I think all it takes is going somewhere where people are and being friendly, somewhere that doesn't include existing friends and acquaintances, just sticking with it and not really caring who thinks what about you. Anywhere but a bar would be my criteria, and ideally not a commercial establishment. For me it was the local swimming pool in my community.
Since women can pick their friends and generally pick gregarious, outgoing, and socially competent men for their friend groups, they ignore and do not understand the type of man who is labelled an incel.
Incels are fundamentally working off a broken model of women, attraction, dating, and sex.
EDUT> Not getting "Stacy" is making them crazy, but they don't realize that they don't want Stacy. Stacy's frumpy-seeming neighbour will rock their world.
That broken model is unfortunately widespread in both genders. Some "girls next door" can basically feel like failures in the dating/relationships sphere, which ends up making them even less appealing to others. It's worth trying to fix this of course, but it's not always easy.
There are plenty of excellent places in the world where you can have a reasonable quality of life for about $10k/year, your goal is to have that covered from your real estate income. Go do that as soon as you can, travel slow. Overnight trains, house/pet sitting, couch surfing, 'etc are all good things to try.
Try to find a remote job and never touch your salary income again, keep investing it. Do not mention your net worth to anyone.
You will find in a few years that "DevOps" is a very finite skillset so there is no real need to push so hard as you'll know most of what you need to know in about 3 more years if you do not already.
No reason not to have a social and romantic life and great weekends. I'm quite confident your employer and less talented peers are exploiting your age and willingness to put in long hours.
Don't be available after hours and avoid being on call as much as possible.
You only get your 20s once. Make memories.
Money is important but you need less than you think and is never a worthy goal in and of itself. You can convince yourself of this by reading up on behavioral economics. Optimize for quality of life. Have a FU-money number, reach it, and bail.
Anyway, HN is hardly the place for this kind of topic but thanks again. I'm giving it my best but it's not a piece of cake.
HN is certainly the place for this kind of topic, it is one of the most important topics discussed here. I've been on this site for over a decade and was exactly in your shoes when I found it.
Tech crap comes and goes and is repetitive. You'll sponge it all up sooner or later anyway.
It is absolutely not a piece of cake, I know buddy. It requires a massive investment on your part and I am flailing around to really drive home the fact that it is worth literally ALL THE EFFORT YOU CAN MUSTER. Guaranteed.
I sincerely hope you succeed in making the very necessary changes you know deep down you have to make. Best of luck!
I sometimes wonder if my career destroyed my ability to make and keep friends.
Social groups just dry up when you get to your late 20's as people are marrying off, having kids, and only maintaining the utmost of friendships. I know it's brutal but it's a time thing... significant others and families take lots of time if you're doing it right so socializing time becomes of higher value/expense.
It was way easier to meet people when I was younger - not just romantic partners. Social groups were much more cohesive and much less based around couple activity. People were just down for whatever and would jump at something just for the experience. I had tons of friends I could just call/SMS like "hey I'm bored let's go find a show" whereas I would feel inappropriate doing this as an adult.
You spend thousands of hours at your job. It is inevitable that it will change your personality.
Choose wisely.
My experience has been that a lot of the stereotypical jocks ended up in finance and are doing quite well and that software is no longer dominated by social loners.
36% higher lifetime income for joining a college fraternity.
The numbers don't lie.
I don't think any of this is true.
If you're wondering why people see it that way, just imagine a world where a large number of people had undiagnosed social anxiety, and another large group of people had undiagnosed sociopathy, and they both got pushed out of normal society into the same place. Then the ones with social anxiety look at the ones with sociopathy and associate their slightly greater success with short-term relationships with the condition they do have, rather than the one they don't.
I think you're probably right with your second paragraph.
There is definitely an arc-type of socially awkward boys who grow up to be engineers, accountants, etc. But within that group, romantic prospects are positively correlated with employment prospects. An awkward guy w/ a job is better than an awkward guy w/o one.
You are describing nerds having high paying tech jobs, right?
I find that little bit short sighted, there are huge number(probably the majority) of people with balanced lifestyles who are employed in stable jobs, just not really in a trendy high paying or high status sectors.
There are also a sizeable number of people who don't posses the nerdy characteristics at all and still are good in academics and business. Colleges are actually full of that kind of people, they all end up in good jobs.
A reasonably intelligent person with an athletic background probably did well socially in HS, and will probably do well in the working world.
Wouldn't that be nice? That sort of karma is not really guaranteed to exist. Chances are the ostracized lonely introvert will be worse off due to poor networking and if he finds any success at all it will be despite many disadvantages. Meanwhile, asshole bullies could very well go on to become their bosses because sociopathy is often found in powerful people.
I think high school kids in the U.S. should be exposed to STEM, the humanities, and the trades. We have pushed college/academic achievement long enough, and I suspect that some of the data we are seeing represents a backlash against it, particularly when you consider the cost of university and the job prospects for new graduates.
Only if you can start your independent business, which few can do pretty much by definition. That's still a recipe for bimodal outcomes. And the U.S. has pushed "college achievement" on paper, but their K-12 education still sucks. There's no way that this isn't a drag on college outcomes.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the trades are a gravy train for everyone, but the idea that you will barely make ends meet is also not the case.
But union jobs are at an all time low.
In my area nearly every high school including the one I attended offered great programs that for many lead to careers in the trades.
I know several people who were in one of the trades programs who decided it wasn’t for them and seemed to wander aimlessly just like many of my friends who went to university.
Maybe the issue isn’t opportunity for training or trades vs university?
On a side note a skilled trade career can pay very well, but is it reasonable to expect everyone will be a union-member or own a business? Union support seems to be declining in the US and owning and running is business is not for most people.
The study he sites at https://www.statista.com/statistics/276025/us-percentage-of-... is titled "Percentage of births to unmarried women in the United States from 1980 to 2019"
I think it's quite dishonest to present this data as "2/5 men are raised without a father." I simply do not believe that claim. Maybe my perception of the country is detached from reality so please correct me if my intuition is wrong.
Further, some of those 23% are bound to be temporary situations. My initial gut reaction to your link just says "whenever this census was conducted 23% of minors had only one adult in the house."
Not trying to downplay the issue of single motherhood, but the statistics available just seem fuzzy.
A graph from a random internet search result: https://educationalpolicy.org/hello-world/
There's even data from the pre-1900s, especially in the primary school years.
Only recently have we stripped away a lot of the sexism however, providing a successful transition to higher education.
It all boils down to:
Girls are more likely to do their damn homework when the teacher tells them.
Therefore they out-perform in formal education.
https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents...
https://ideas.repec.org/a/uwp/jhriss/v48y2013i1p236-264.html
(Not the exact studies I remember seeing.)
It's a common finding and one of the rare effects in the social sciences that are very reproducible.
https://news.yahoo.com/study-teacher-observations-biased-aga...
(The actual study is available at https://my.vanderbilt.edu/brendanbartanen/files/2021/10/gris... )
Black teachers and male teachers are rated lower during teacher observations than white teachers and female teachers, despite comparable or better outcomes for their students in test scores and student attendance.
Interestingly, the bias against male teachers is around twice the bias against Black teachers.
Is it really so difficult to consider that career preferences are gendered? That millions of years of sexually dimorphic specialization could lead to statistically significant differences in interests, abilities, and desired life outcomes?
The recent popularity of blaming any disparity on {$x}ism really bothers me. Culture and genes influence outcomes at least as much as any external force in the modern world. That goes for gendered differences too.
>girls are more likely to do their damn homework
Also ironic that the people who are so eager to fight against sexism/racism have no qualms about generalizing their scapegoats. But it sort if proves my point: you are willing to acknowledge that males may have intrinsic negative traits which could cause them to underperform, but of course acknowledging the obvious implication that such groups may have innate advantages is forbidden; maybe because doing so would undermine the very underpinnings of the modern progressive push for equality of outcome.
Metrics targeting equal representation among all industries/disciplines are fundamentally flawed. There's no reason to expect such parity if people are truly free to choose their own paths, nordic countries are an example, where gender disparity persists despite an egalitarian culture.
Matriculating to higher education isn't really preferring one career over another, other than white collar blue collar. But with absolute surety women are going to college.
I feel like you've got multiple different hypotheses in your comment, so I'll address the big one at the start.
> Is it really so difficult to consider that career preferences are gendered? That millions of years of sexually dimorphic specialization could lead to statistically significant differences in interests, abilities, and desired life outcomes?
Consider that 60% of college students are female now, and 0% were a hundred years ago.
I strongly feel like there's very little innate attraction to "traditional" gender roles amongst women.
If you look at the trajectory of change, it's very clear that every single decade, the change in women's choices marches in a particular direction. Decade on decade, the numbers all point one way.
Which makes me think that women themselves feel traditional gender roles are very unattractive. If there was some sort statistically significant difference, clearly it's not changing the direction of the trend, much if at all.
And change is basically percolating its way through society, slowly but surely.
------------------------------------------------
Given the above:
If women's preferences were genetically or otherwise innately determined, why have they gone for such an enormous, dramatic change in their lifestyles and social situation in the last 50 years? Because women have chosen that for themselves.
My deeply held assumption, is that all our "assumptions" about "what women want" are just that, assumptions.
If you think from a perspective of geological time, the 50 years since the 1960s are nothing. That's 1 generation or less. And yet the lot of women in society has changed dramatically, and they seem to be happy about it.
Given how much change we've had, I think it's fair to say that the attitudes of 100 years ago were not genetically or innately constructed.
I assume pretty much everything in society is just a giant social construct.
Very, very little sexual dimorphism between girls and boys is down to nature.
It's 100% to nurture, not nature.
Typically when we see outcome differences between two groups in a system, most people will blame the system... unless they think it's good/natural for one group to do worse than the other.
The gender pay gap: clearly there is no legitimate or natural way that men would make more money than women in a fair system, so the system must be biased against women.
The gender academic success gap: boys don't pay attention or do their work so it's only natural for girls to do better.
It's clear that for both of these thoughts to exist in someone's head, they must think there's a superior gender.
[0] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/gender-gap-in-stem-women-are-...
I would be crucified for what I did as a youth even though nobody got hurt and I turned out to be a top 1% productive member of society.
Today being a docile beast of burden is the only acceptable option. If not completely in practice at least ideologically. Most comply but increasingly more choose to opt out of society or worse: become hypocrits and schemers that comply in appearence but cross any boundary in secret practice. If most rules are stupid they might all be. Rational conclusion for a boy.
Picture a distribution, like a bell curve or something.
The programs are meant for the side of that distribution that need it. You can talk about how the other side of the distribution doesn't need the help, but don't lose sight of the fact that many do.
(To be clear: I am wildly privileged to live in a Western country now instead of living almost anywhere else at any other time. I'm also generally happy to be a strong and healthy male. My thoughts are best best explained by the fact that 1. all else being equal I'd prefer to recruit a woman rather than a man to the company I work for because that gives me more "social credit" at work 2. Boys systematically do better on anonymous tests, at least in the western world.)
Rather, the pissing up the wall of men's potential in the name of "equality" has made life more arduous, stressful and anxiety-inducing for everyone.
Yes if we take those children and cut them lose with no one to tell them what to do, they will be lost. I don't think the problem is that we aren't giving people busy work to do. It's that we're raising them to psychologically depend on it. My wife literally thought she was worthless as a person because she didn't have a job for a few years. It's kind of disgusting.
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong
"Sixteen Tons", Tennessee Ernie Ford
There are few Real Men jobs like that any more.
A cognitive surplus [1] can be dumped into projects like Wikipedia, but where does the physical surplus go? Supposing we are omnipotent deities who want to make people happy and free and avoid unrest.
Encourage people to build henges and pyramids for the hell of it?
We can't pay them to do that without a global welfare system... Russia would just race us to the bottom.
Don't know. It's the underlying cause of much of the unrest in the US.
I have a lot of time on my hands, and I always find ways to use it. However I suspect that most modern men don't enjoy such a privilege. They're just as busy as they ever were.
Great song though
like more men being raised by single mothers, or declining wages - I imagine phenomena like this would be effecting both genders roughly equally? I do not know - but without knowing for sure, I am more skeptical of the article's premise
If we looked even farther and studied how many fatherless boys grow up to have legal problems (i.e. become incarcerated), the scope of the problem becomes even more alarming.
Kudos to the author. I think the area is ripe for bipartisan study and hopefully constructive change.
Interesting to read that from a vocal proponent of UBI - which would, by design, allow people, including men, _not_ to get a job.
UBI replacing means tested support doesn't (unless benefit levels are also boosted) help people with no outside income, but it does make it easier to improve one’s condition by earning outside income.
It enables people to work and benefit from that work compared to the status quo, it doesn't enable people not to work.
This is surprising to me when the reduction in crime in NY in the 1980s/1990s is often attributed to allowing abortions, i.e. a reduction in single mothers.
But he's also really facile about underlying economic causes. It's easy to blame problems on "our culture has been broken by the wokes!", but many of the problems of young men are not unique to them. Fewer women are entering college, also. Women are dropping out of the workforce, also. More young women are living with their parents, also. Is that because they lacked strong masculine role models?
Or is it because the rising costs of college, housing, healthcare, and living have made the traditional path much less attainable? Absent fathers didn't do that. These are the same patterns you see in any country with a shrinking economy; it's just a shock to Americans who feel they were promised better.
(In summary: Maybe Andrew Yang should spend more time talking to Bernie Sanders)
Ease in befriending and reaching real camaraderie with women does not depend on masculinity at all. It depends on seeing others as equals. I sure don't think about masculinity and whether I'm doing it right. What would that do?
I doubt the kind of masculinity advice Jordan Peterson is slinging helps any of the men who listen to him. Instead, they find comfort and self-justification in that advice. It isn't changing their outcomes. It isn't the on-ramp to good relationships. It is the on ramp to the "intellectual dark web" and that will keep your dick dry more reliably than anything.
¿Por qué no los dos? A positive worldview and mindset makes it even easier to see others as equal. The negative 'woke' mindset is hardly conducive to true equality.
> ... Jordan Peterson ...
Jordan Peterson has never thought very well of seeking "comfort and justification". He's the "clean your room and get your ducks lined up instead of blaming the world for your failure" guy. I'm not sure you're familiar with his thought.
The only times I recommend someone read/hear Jordan Peterson is when they radically misrepresent him.
Peterson's whole schtick is challenging young men to take responsibility for their own outcomes.
They know they should do it between certain ages which means they need a career which means they need an education e.t.c.
There's nothing equivalent for men, no event they can see coming within a decade or two that helps anchor them in their lives.
Do you see that as innate or as a symptom of society's biases?
No, that is exactly what you are doing.
All the available evidence shows boys, especially, do less well across the board when raised without a father in the home.
Years ago I coached at an inner city school, lots of single moms, I've seen the results first hand. I'd like to think for many of those kids I was a positive male role model, maybe one of the only ones in their life. Unfortunately I don't live in that area anymore.
So anecdotally, the theory that (in general) boys need more nudging than girls from someone in their life in order to be successful rings true. But what would account for a modern change? Are there fewer people pushing, now? Are boys more resistant to it now, or maybe more distracted? Are expectations of boys different now than they were in the past?
Or perhaps parents are more distracted. Much has been made of how our digital age has made us, as individuals, more distracted and less connected to individuals in our life. For a parent, it doesn't seem unlikely that that would translate to being less invested in their child, or at least not as proactive in this kind of nudging.
Of course they're less motivated, it's quite literally a rigged game.
Also, just in defence of female teachers, I don't think it matters so much that they're women, but that they understand that boys will be boys. Anti-male teachers were, at least in the experience of myself and a friend who went to a different school (we discussed this once), definitely present but firmly in the minority.
You're not wrong, but at the risk of drawing an unhelpful analogy, I'll point out that the "all lives matter" response to "black lives matter" missed the point in the same way. Of course the prospects of everyone is important, but describing how young men have distinct and perhaps underappreciated experiences should be a viable conversation that doesn't get bogged down before it really gets going.
To use another analogy: it's like going to the ER for a sucking chest wound and being told you should reduce your cholesterol. They're not wrong, but this is probably not the most pressing concern.
I believe he addresses the root causes more than Bernie. Free college + federal jobs, or rather should we live in a society in where corporations are so productive that people shouldn't just follow a college track + work themselves to death to stay afloat
Ideas for how we can push for more equality, inclusivity, opportunity, without causing this far-right reaction?
Maybe it's unavoidable since we're often talking about structural change to benefit one group, and the other side feel (wrongly) that for others to have more they have to have less. All lives matter is an example.
The same thing is happening with trans and queer rights (which also tags along with gender roles like this article talks about).
A scary % of people feel under attack or at least a group of politicians is generating/amplifying this for their gain.
I'm about to be a bit facetious but scarily not really, a lot of people truly think that a mob of commies is trying to recruit their kids to be gay/trans and that 'men/boys' (part of the issue here is their understanding of gender) will invade their bathrooms and take over their sports.
This backlash is actually producing legislation to further political agendas and harm kids.
This weeks "Don't say gay" bill in Florida is shocking to me.
Would ban LGBTQ topics in schools. And likely force counselors to out kids to their parents, lest they be sued - the TX trick that is going to be abused on all social issues from now on.
It's like one step forward culturally, two steps back legally.
> Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. [...] The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [...]
I agree that the massive increase in the US and UK over the last 20 years in the use of medical jargon such as "dyslexia" and "ADHD" in high school educational contexts isn't a helpful strategy for society to be taking.
I don't think the "mainstream" has fully caught on yet, but all those disaffected men are getting nothing from these empty "we see there's a problem" articles and empty half-acknowledgements, because the entire political and academic system is now fully aligned against them.
Lots of men these days are all turning to Red Pill content online whether you agree or not because its the only counter to the "masculinity is toxic" narrative. You better hope that people like Jordan Peterson succeed because his message to men is way more centrist and reasonable (watered down some would say) then the Red Pill elites like Rollo Tomassi, Fresh and Fit, and anyone else in the Rule Zero crowd. I'm sure many of you will gasp in horror if you've never heard of or seen their content on youtube, but realize this IS the backlash and the pendulum swinging the other way. WP and outlets like it (I'm looking at you NYT) created this culture and now you have to live with the backlash. I actually think that the mainstream will catch on to this pretty soon and label it the new boogie man at some point but by then nobody will watch or read their content so it will be too little too late.
Pretty soon the "all masculinity is toxic" crowd are going to find themselves labeled as the "uncool" crowd just as the religious evangelicals who were trying to censor south park back in the 90's were. And the pendulum swings...
I'm homeschooling my own son to keep him sheltered from both sides crazyness and plan to teach him to be a reasonable centrist who doesn't get caught up in dogma.
Went from being raging mad at his family and others to start taking responsibility for his own life.
I still disagree with him but we can now speak together.
I was thinking private school, but its clear there is some kind horror show going on in the US right about indoctrination of political ideologies gone insane.
That idea has itself done harm to several generations.
> Here’s the simple truth I’ve heard from many men: We need to be needed. We imagine ourselves as builders, soldiers, workers, brothers — part of something bigger than ourselves.
Add: protectors
This need is a very powerful piece of puzzle that is a man, IMO. It is, to me, completely inate, and something that emerges as you accumulate more of the traditional constructs of life: romantic partner, marriage, kid(s), dwelling. But it's also difficult to control and can cause unwelcome side effects like anxiety, tension with family, and etc.
One solution: I can't recommend therapy enough for everyone out there, especially the guys reading through this thread. It doesn't need to be therapy because you think you have a problem. Just a session per week or every other week that gives you a place to export your feelings and emotions.
I've talked with a therapist once a week for almost two months. It wasn't because I was feeling depressed about personal life or sad about a job. I just felt that it could help me balance some of the ups and downs in life, and it has accomplished EXACTLY that goal. Example: my therapist helped me better understand that some recent blood-boiling-level anxiety was caused by my desire to feel like the protector of my recently expanded (kid #2) family and desire to be the primary helper.
Therapists help you unlock connections between things that currently bother you and your past and provide you with epiphany-like moments. Very difficult to produce those moments when your coping mechanism lives entirely in your own head.
On one of those walks recently I went across a bridge to a lake. There is a stream or river under the bridge, depends on your definition, its was about 30 foot wide but under one foot deep. It's a beautiful area, on the border of city and country.
And it was quiet, peaceful, no people around. There was only 2 problems:
a) while the water was shallow enough to not break my fall, the drop from the bridge was not high enough, and I would likely just break a bunch of bones and survive anyway
b) I don't want to die.
I am bitter, and I think I have a right to be bitter, even though I know it's not healthy or a smart thing to feel.
But I _am_ bitter, because I was lied to.
It’s kind of like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for a society. If your higher needs are only being met at the expense of your lower needs it’s all going to come crashing down.
The lower needs in this case are channeling the energies of those that can commit the most violent atrocities away from committing violent atrocities and into something constructive like jobs and families.
"Helping boys and men succeed should be a priority for all our society’s institutions. Schools that have succeeded in keeping boys on track should be expanded, by both increasing the number of students they serve and exporting their methods to other schools. Vocational education and opportunities should be redoubled; the nation’s public school system should start the process for early age groups, and apprenticeship programs should be supported by the federal government. Nonprofits helping boys and men — such as Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the YMCA — should receive more investment." -- This whole paragraph is advocating for far more than we've done for women. We're still out here fighting for reproductive rights, the fairness in considering women when designing society, city planning, healthcare and pharmaceutical research studies, car safety tests. Let's put all of that on the agenda alongside Yang's plan to invest in institutions that better serve boys shall we?
"we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic" -- we're not defining masculinity as toxic. We're defining toxic masculinity as toxic. There's a difference. And boys have full agency to display healthy, positive masculinity instead of the toxic kind.
"Here’s the simple truth I’ve heard from many men: We need to be needed. We imagine ourselves as builders, soldiers, workers, brothers — part of something bigger than ourselves. We deal with idleness terribly." -- Literally nobody is forcing men to be idle. And historically, men have had the least constraints imposed on them to do whatever they wanted to do. I imagine if a boy did not want to be idle today, they would have plenty of opportunity to not be. At least more than a girl typically has had.
People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have 'come down in the world' are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind
From Down and Out in Paris and London.
(Someone should have known better than to try to link to Google Books from a mass media piece.)
-FDR
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO
Screens have fixed this problem since Orwell wrote that in 1933.
Here in Europe, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, a large amount of men were fired from their construction job.
I'm talking about incredibly tough and hardened men. The type doing this job for decades, getting up at 5AM each day, working in the bitter cold, never calling in sick, breaking their body and taking pride in it.
Just like that, society suddenly declared these men to be zeroes. They have to call to this unemployment agency, where they're treated as if beginners, and with distrust, as if they're leeches. They have to go to the red tap, none of which they understand.
Reportedly, many of these men broke down and cried on the phone. They probably hadn't cried in decades.
It just shows how absolutely devastating it is when such a man loses purpose. It breaks them. They take pride in their strength, their sacrifice to provide. They cannot be idle nor can they be in a dependent position. It's not them.
I agree that a woman can't be a role model in the same ways as a man, but I believe this is not necessarily a bad thing.
source: student of Depth Psychology
You can see a direct correlation in outcomes when comparing children that emerged from two-parent households over those that emerge from single-parent households. But because that is an uncomfortable and pervasive problem to discuss, almost all social effort is focused on solving less tangible problems.
The fathers I did have ranged from absent, to addicts, to abusive. I realize nobody is perfect but there has never been a positive role model for me and this affected me terribly in my relationships for so long (I've been to jail for abuse). I'm only lucky in that I got out of that cycle at least somewhat, and I can probably only credit the massive improvement in my economic condition. My brothers have not been so lucky.
My dad worked in public housing and I used to do tutoring as a kid in the summer. It was sad as I saw the 10 year olds who I really related to grow up in negative paths, mostly because nobody cared.
In contrast my mother works in a Title 1 Elementary school[2], she spends much of her day dealing with children that are in chronically bad situations, it has been her observation that the biggest problem is that no one cares about the kids, not in a the parents hate them sense, but there is no one actively concerned with and thinking about and preparing for the child's future, there are all sorts of resources the school makes available to try and help these kids but it doesn't matter much because no one is invested.
When you have only one parent that one parent has is the sole person responsible for helping prepare that child, investing in that child, and guiding the child, and that kind of work is exhausting. It can be done my own mother is evidence of that, but when you have two parents now you don't have to be the point man on it all day every day you can share that burden with someone else, you have someone to help bear the burden when it is too much for you, and that shares the load.
That I think is an important part of what having a two parent household rather than a one parent household brings, even if finances aren't great it still means there is someone that can invest in the child.
But what doesn't get talked about with family (especially small kids) is that you're with them for 16 hours a day.
Emotions get messy. Someone is always upset about something. And the larger the family, the more probable that someone is upset at any given moment.
The nice thing about a two parent household is that (hopefully) one parent keeps a cool head while the other me be annoyed, etc.
It's so much of a help to have a partner that says "why don't you take five minutes" or "I think you were too hard on ..." And I can reciprocate the same support.
I don't know how single parents do it.
This was an op-ed by a politician, not any kind of analysis.
> "Economic transformation has been a big contributor. More than two-thirds of manufacturing workers are men; the sector has lost more than 5 million jobs since 2000. That’s a lot of unemployed men. Not just coincidentally, “deaths of despair” — those caused by suicide, overdose and alcoholism — have surged to unprecedented levels among middle-aged men over the past 20 years."
A society divided into wealthy elite homeowners living off investment cash flows, and poverty-striken underclass renters living off minimum wages, is not a very stable or healthy society.
Historically, an economic middle class is a relatively recent phenomenon. For ages past and across cultures, there were "rich" and "poor" and relatively few in between.
What created the middle class in the US was a government system that restricted the power of the elites to abuse that power. As Thomas Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal". I.e. the rich, powerful, government, or otherwise privileged people ought not to have rights that the poor do not have.
I think the disappearance of the middle class today is largely due to favoritism and miscarriage of justice in government -- like failing to prosecute gross economic crimes adequately (embezzling, insider trading, monopolism, etc.). I don't think rich people are bad by definition, but I do think our government tends to show favoritism to them.
EDIT:
Lest I sound like I'm coming down on conservatives only, liberals in the US have also been hugely responsible for the disappearance of the middle class. The bipartisan post-WWII GI bill, signed by FDR, severely disadvantaged African-American veterans in how it was carried out - by disproportionately denying applications by African-American veterans for housing.
In the decades that followed, Democrat welfare programs provided significantly more total income to 2 divorced adults with kids than a family with 2 married, cohabiting parents -- thus encouraging men to move out so their family could have more welfare money, and (broadly speaking) causing an entire generation of children in poor (and especially African-American families) to grow up without a dad in the home. This lead to further poverty, crime, drug addiction, and ultimately devastation.
Clinton's "war on drugs" and his three-strikes rule only made the problem worse by merely prosecuting and imprisoning people in poverty instead of working to repair the root causes of their behavior. This resulted in many more fatherless families.
Upholding the rights of the poor is everyone's responsibility, especially those in government, regardless of their political affiliation.
The aggregate of individual moral/ethical choices manifests as social phenomena.
That's not entirely false, but it's misleading. The personal choices follow relevant distributions, which are themselves not aggregates. Also, such choices are made in circumstances and under constraints that are not up to individual choice.
No couples with a brain are marrying when doing so would render woman and child ineligible for state aid. The downside to this is that the man is free to leave and leave they do. That's the big one but many government policies have have had the net effect of decreasing stability in poor urban households (regardless of race, but we all know poor urban households do not represent a cross section of society).
I feel a son would be so much harder to raise in today's world.
As the other commenter said, we see different families in very different mindsets.
I have been personally affected by sexism type B: was expected to work, to be a provider someday, to pay my own way to university, if you want a car you buy it, etc. etc. My sister had the second family car at disposal and the tuition was paid for. There was this undercurrent interpretation of feminism that "women will eventually suffer so they should be pampered when possible".
There were other factors at play: I have a tendency to self-indulgence, my sister does not, so it is prima facie difficult to separate what was proper, individualized upbringing and what was sexism. But sexism was a part; many male friends of the same generation have the same complaint and some could be better off today had they have more support at home.
Then there is this relative of mine, that simply threw his daughters out at 18, since they are supposed to get a wealthy boyfriend and marry rich, so they don't need any further support. BTW they are disowned, too.
This is sexism type A, and make it a big A.
Not necessary to say this strategy did not end well: both are stuck with less-than-optimal partners and careers. We are in 2022 and a nice, wealthy and rational guy won't commit to someone without a career and finances in order.
This is more often false than true. I know many men who have or are marrying women who make 1/2 or less what they do. Nice, wealthy, and rational folks. They however need a woman. And there is a strong lack of women who are anywhere near where many men are in compensation and wealth.
I am example of that. I married someone who made nothing. I put her through a prestigious college in the most expensive location in the country and paid for it all. Etc.
Supply+demand. We got way more men than we do women in this world under age 35. As a guy - you have to settle.
Even when choosing a career, men seem to place a lot of importance on compensation, while women seem to place just as much, if not more, importance on other non-financial factors too.
I am also an example. I make much more than my wife, and it made zero impact on my decision to date and marry her.
In general I rarely see couples where the wife earns significantly more than the husband. Generally the husband makes more, they both make about even, or the wife might make slightly more.
My personal experience and from what I've learned from other men: It's because most men know they won't receive a dime from their partner. It starts with how a man almost always pays for the dates or at best they split it. (Or they have a rule like - "whoever asks X out has to pay" which is of course always the man because almost no women ask any men out) Similarly - the wife is usually the SAHP not because the man doesn't ever want to do it (I know many men who'd love to be a SAHP!) but because financially it makes little to no sense. As a man - you could try to choose a woman who makes more but that's very hard. Most women don't want to be the bread winner - why do it when they've never been the one to do it anyway? There's a level of entitlement that comes with carrying children to term as well - there's an idea that they should get to spend time with their children at home for as long as they want before they have to go back to work. (A weird mentality of, "It's work that deserves to be compensated but I also really want to do this and would do it even if I wasn't compensated and definitely don't wanna go back to work!") When it makes more financial sense - I see the men be SAHP but I've only ever met one guy in that position. One! And it's because he's broke AF and his wife makes way more money. They are the one couple I know who go against the grain on these gender roles and they're both incredibly liberal leaning people.
When I think back on my own experience and that of the many men I've listened to... The gifts men received, the treats, the support, etc. it's always much less than what the men were putting out. Most men know they won't receive anything from a woman even if she has the ability to. There is a certain level of entitlement and certain patriarchal values that many women have not given up and refuse to give up for the foreseeable future. One is giving up the notion that the man provides the majority or all of the financial support. There's also a nature of feeling like a woman needs to be financially spoiled in order to feel "supported"/"loved". I don't know if this is due to consumerism but it feels closer to gender roles than that.
I don't think any of this stuff is ingrained. I think it's cultural. Again - why I said I don't see this changing for generations. If people are still so adamantly doing this now and it feels like many are even more ingrained now with it - there's no hope for the next 50 years. I think people will dig in more and more men will go without reproducing.
> In general I rarely see couples where the wife earns significantly more than the husband. Generally the husband makes more, they both make about even, or the wife might make slightly more.
It's hard to say if that's because the men chose that or if the woman chose that - but I know many women who outright declare they won't date anyone who makes less than they do and many are hesitant to date anyone who makes even the same. I know many of these women - almost all of them are my friends. Only people I know who date someone who makes less than them are men. (Gay or straight)
As I said in the other comment, I am moderately optimistic because some indicators are already moving e.g. you mentioned that more men will go childless. This is already happening.
As it stands, most women have far greater leverage in romantic relationships than most men. They can easily walk out the door and find a partner the next day. Most men spend much longer looking for someone.
To my son, I teach that there are no gender roles set in stone. If in doubt, stay single and childless; he has many, many decades to opt out if the Right One shows up.
Yes, I am hoping that I have daughters. I do not want a son. I experienced life as a man and have seen what the life of my partners is in comparison. If the girls come out even half as decent looking - they'll coast through life with little guidance needed from me.
I have friends with just daughters - and they all do not envy the parents with boys. They are all feeling blessed to have daughters. I think being a woman has its struggles but the plights are mostly for those in the poor class. If you're upper middle class or above as most people in tech within SV - you can mostly skate by many issues. The issues of a man do not go away regardless of your class - short of being hyper-wealthy.
I don't think this is true. I think population evens out at about age 18 then it's more women until death.
It's age 40 where it evens out. Mainly due to suicide. (A lot of "accidental" deaths and occupational deaths are low-key suicidal behavior)
"number of men vs women by age usa"
Maybe, but today's world is not the world your son would grow up in. We're at the end of the cycle from the G. Michael Hopf quote below. The beginning of the cycle is once again imminent, thankfully.
"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
There is no need to tell people how to behave 'on a cultural level'. It has nothing to do with anything other than some people trying to impose their beliefs on everyeone else.
And now I'm left wondering how much of that effect actually contributes to what's being discussed in TFA. Underdeveloped males probably underperform in myriad ways.
Seeger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Zt0O2lyhk
Cash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppa__7ZLAU8
When a woman or other media-favored-identity (which can include gender, race, religion, different-abledness, or an intersection of several, changing day-to-day and year-to-year, and media source to media source) achieves great things, their status as a woman or favored-minority is highlighted alongside their achievements (I would say this is not a bad thing as maybe people sharing that identity will believe in themselves a bit more and be inspired to do great things).
But when a man achieves success, their manness is certainly not highlighted. If the man is also a member of a media-favored-identity, then that will be highlighted. When was the last time you saw a headline: ‘First Man to [do thing]’? Instead, it would be ‘First Person to [do thing]’, or if someone else had already done that cool thing then it wouldn’t be a headline (unless it was like ‘first man to give birth to octuplets’, I can see that making the front page of the NYTimes).
Also, as a society we celebrate woman-dominated professions such as teachers and nurses (very deserved imo, except for my 6th grade teacher), but, at least in the ‘liberal’ mainstream, there is no similar celebration of male-dominated professions (except when a media-favored-identity finds success at that profession and the media is like ‘breaking news! single-mother black woman Polly-Ann drives steel like a man’ [too much?]). Is it any surprise that those who identify as men are more likely to also identify with the political and intellectual movements that still glorify the man-identity (I would say the liberal mainstream also forgets about rural folks, with the same effect)? Example: many Republican-leaning outlets will celebrate those who work in our military, regardless of the soldier’s identity (well, maybe not regardless, but at least so long as they are a meat-and-potatoes sort of man).
Maybe the answer is that we all ought to think of ourselves as people above all else. Maybe an achievement should be celebrated and highlighted equally no matter what sort of person you are, because it is no surprise that one sort of person is just as capable as a Man sort of person. I do not know the answer, but I would also say this: Did man-people have tens or hundreds or thousands of years of society saying that only man-people are capable of great achievements? Should we spend some time saying loud and clear that ‘yo, we got it wrong. not-man-people are also capable of great achievements’? But should we also hope towards a time where person-achievements are celebrated regardless of identity? Do we still have work to do before we get there? I would say yes.
Looking forward, the media says automation will eat our jobs, from truck drivers (self-driving cars) to soldiers (self-shooting-missile-drones) to programmers (self-programming-program).
If you listen close you can hear the clanging.
The steam drill is a’coming for ya.
But, man, watch Polly-Ann swing that hammer.
> we'll fix all these gender inequality problems once parents stop making such a big deal about gender
Citation needed. Gender matters. It's possibly the most fundamental component of the ego. Different genders react differently to stimuli.
> girls are not respected because they are raised to be shiny princesses with no real power
Massive, massive generalization here. Girls are respected (among men, which I assume is your grievance) when they show up and work hard. My wife was raised in an ultratraditional Christian environment, wasn't allowed to wear pants until she was 18, and had to wear a headscarf whenever she left the house. Talk about taking someone's agency. She's the blue-collar worker between the two of us, and she's well-respected at her job because she puts in the work and is helpful.
> boys often have violence issue as in the article because they are raised to be "tough"
You need to hear this: boys tend to be more violent. That's what testosterone does. It raises aggression, lowers empathy, and lowers agreeableness. This is normal, boys fight. This is where the phrase "boys will be boys" comes from—not rape apology. Boys have anger issues at a higher rate than girls, but oddly, it happens more when they don't have a good father figure, one who will teach them how to bottle it up when it needs to be bottled up. I'm sick and tired of women with no experience of being male trying to tell men how we should deal with our emotions. Sometimes, being raised to be "tough", as you so eloquently put it, is absolutely necessary.
All the best.
The feeling comes from being on the losing side of every action the government and popular culture takes. Being told that you can’t even be involved in a conversation about that fact.
Reading what happens elsewhere, I'm happy to live in a more cohesive society.
"Men are trash." "Men are awful." Then look up on Wikipedia the "Women are wonderful" effect. And of course the ever-popular "dick is abundant and low-value."
You get suggestions like white people should be vaccinated last. And so on and so on. It just never stops.
It's hard to be left when it feels they hate me.
Maybe stop relying on google front page doodles for your own sense of self-worth?
My son’s school has a “Girls Can Code” program. All collateral features women and girls. (Boys are welcome though)
I worked at a place where a C-level executive hosted company endorsed dinners at her home for female managers to mentor them for executive roles.
If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a men’s IT society at work, that wouldn’t end well.
Maybe not, but nearly every <Subject> Users Group I've attended may as well have been a men's IT society for all the women I've seen attend, despite specific outreach efforts to get them there.
So what is the discrepancy? What has changed and what is being done differently between the groups where 'boys' can optionally attend and ones that 'girls' appear to self select against attendance? We should reach for a world that doesn't require discrimination.
2. Given a brand new group with 0 members yet, it's still likely that women will avoid it, because of their past experiences with 1. putting them off joining groups in general
3. Women are less common than men in general in CS. Any group that accepts the average person will statistically end up with more men than women.
The groups that "advertise" to women avoid these problems, which is why they tend to work.
I agree that we shouldn't need specialized groups, but I haven't seen any other solution, at least in the immediate term. Likely society will improve simply due to the passing of time, and in 50 years from now and it won't be a problem anymore.
Also, this has been even broader:
Around here, until recently girls got extra points even on studies were they were massively over-represented (in addition to being generally over-represented in higher education.)
Just recently boys started to get extra points when applying for Engineering degrees in Chemistry or in Nursing.)
I'm not a native English speaker and while I get my points across I struggle with the school system. Sorry for that.
Point is, around here when you apply for higher education you get a standardized score based on:
- how good your grades were.
- being over a certain age
- having extra maths/physics/chemistry classes
- being a girl (at least in STEM)
- etc
Recently, but only recently they have finally started to add extra points for boys applying for BSc nurse studies.
One obvious example of this is the fact that CMU admits 50% women into its CS program, even though their applicant pool and similar caliber schools have around a 20-30% ratio. So if you believe that women and men in the applicant pool are equally qualified, women have a 2x higher chance of getting in. That's just basic statistics.
This is a reasonable initial assumption (candidates are equally qualified), and so there is evidence that something is happening (by examining the initial figures). But it may or may not be a bias in favor of women (that is, in this case, something like giving "points" to female applicants either explicitly or implicitly). You'd have to examine the actual applicant pool to determine what was happening other than being able to conclude that something is happening. It is also plausible that the female candidates are, as a group, more qualified than their male counterparts.
You'd also have to ignore that similar caliber schools have the same 20-30% ratio so CMU would have to be doing something special that MIT, Stanford et. al aren't in its applicant recruiting/marketing - that's a tough one to believe.
EDIT: my bad, think I got you confused with a different comment.
>If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a men’s IT society at work, that wouldn’t end well.
That's because most computer clubs and IT societies are already primarily men. It's kind of the default, which is why women-only groups are seen as transformative.
If you want to look at it in a different way, you probably wouldn't have a problem setting up a group that teaches miners IT
These are not mutually exclusive things!
These aren't rhetorical questions. I'm genuinely asking.
This can't apply to men? I believe there were such clubs and they were considered sexist in the past. I don't see why it's so strange an idea that men might like a club where they can be catered to and taught in a way that works for them.
I've not tried that exact thing but I have tried twice carefully to bring attention to mens day at work.
I stopped doing it and I probably won't do it again; it's just a simple way to get some mockery thrown at oneself even at the generally very civil place where I work.
One example might be the Isbister v. Boys' Club of Santa Cruz case, in which the Supreme Court of California ruled that, according to civil rights laws, no space could be legally barred to women. (imagine that same justification banning women-only spaces; it simply wouldn't happen, because of course it wouldn't).
Or, more famously, Earl Silverman's attempt to open a shelter for male domestic abuse survivors in Canada, for which he was ridiculed and ostracised and eventually, when the government refused to fund such a thing (male domestic abuse victims? Perish the thought!) had to shut it down, ending his own life in despair. Erin Pizzey, who founded the first women's shelters in the UK, faced similar harassment (including bomb threats serious enough that the police decided that they needed to intercept all of her mail to check it for explosives) when she began discussing the same thing, and was eventually driven out of her home country.
In fact, the dearth of male-focused help in general, even in situations where men are the overwhelming majority of the at-risk population. See, for example, homeless shelters in the UK. Ironically, some women in need of assistance escaping their abusers sometimes get turned away from these places because they come with male children.
Generally speaking, most "assistance" actually primarily aimed at men treats them like shit. See, for example, the Duluth model, the most common batterer intervention program in use in the United States. It explicitly pre-concludes that any domestic dispute is caused by men trying to dominate women. Ellen Pence, its creator, has even gone on record stating, "By determining that the need or desire for power was the motivating force behind battering, we created a conceptual framework that, in fact, did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with. [...] Speaking for myself, I found that many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over their partner. Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers. Eventually, we realized that we were finding what we had already predetermined to find." (emphasis added) This has not lessened its popularity as an intervention mechanism for domestic disputes.
I mention this not as an example of a male-only space being destroyed, but as an example of why they may be needed. Many men, emotional illiteracy aside, do in fact realize when the chips are stacked against them. They do not learn to socialize with other men in school, nor in the manner that men have historically been socialized. They are allowed in the public forum, but most attempts to share their perspective, at least in the more woke circles, are met with hostility - after all, they are the historical beneficiaries of the social order, and therefore they cannot also be allowed to be even perceived as victims, especially when being a victim confers social status. No matter that "privilege" is not uniformly distributed.
Philosophically speaking, men ought to have a male-only space if only for the benefit of being able to calibrate themselves against other men, rather than having to constantly downplay their own difficulties and miseries by the standards of women; a man ought to be able to feel bad about losing his job without having to also remind everyone that he still has it better than a woman who would be jobless and also facing sexism. He ought to be able to exult in a promotion or other achievement without "checking his privilege" and feeling guilty about how his success closes the doors for others who have not had the opportunities he has.
If men should be more emotionally intelligent, they need a safe space where they can express their emotions. It has become abundantly clear to many of them that gender-integrated spaces are not safe, for the same reason that I'm posting this comment from a throwaway account.
For example, we have parent-child meetups here. Since it is almost exclusively mothers who show up (despite being open to all parents), they at some point introduced an extra meetup for fathers. This gives men an opportunity to take part in something with their kid where they aren't the only man in the room.
X-only spaces make sense when X is marginalized or a minority. If you start a kindergarten teacher group for men, noone is going to complain.
Also, the reason that running a "boys club for computers" or a "men's IT society" wouldn't end well is because men already make up a large portion of the tech space and, like I said, there's a lot of gender bias in the tech world. This comment comes off as you using anecdotal evidence to disprove the marginalization women face.
Are they paid less for the same work? Denied promotions? Are men being favored for hiring over equally qualified women?
There are obvious issues like sexual harassment. Almost every woman I know has been a victim of it at some point, but I don't know any man who has been sexually harassed at the workplace. For this reason men typically think that sexual harassment at the workplace is not a big issue.
But there's also more subtle things, that are hard to measure since companies aren't open about them, like women being made lower offers for the same job with the same qualifications, or women being less likely to be promoted, or women straight up being refused the job because "they might leave the job soon to have children".
Getting evidence for these things is hard, because companies rarely give a reason why they are hiring or promoting someone, and even if they give a reason it's very rarely something that can be objectively measured.
Or maybe there are a bunch of "convince women that nursing is a career for them, too", "day care workers shouldn't all be men", "ladies can become receptionists", etc. programs that I'm not aware of.
Why? Why not just let people decide for themselves what kind of jobs to pursue?
Maybe, just maybe, the point of those events for women has something to do with the fact that everything else in the tech world is a de-facto boys' club.
My current team at work: 6 men. Previous team at a different company: 27 men, 3 women. The team before that: 5 men. The team before that: 10 men, 2 women.
I guess we can debate "marginalized", but women are unquestionably a minority in tech.
(I am also a man, fwiw)
Right now, tech companies are desperate to hire anyone qualified. Are you saying they are deliberately excluding women from consideration?
From what I've seen, all the tech employers are desperate to hire and promote women, and there are just very few women interested.
So then the question is why are very few women in tech? If you really dive into this, it's a chicken-and-egg problem: The fact that so few women are in tech makes the whole scene into sort of a frat house, which is often not a welcoming or kind environment to women, so women avoid it. A feedback loop. And one way you can try to combat that is by encouraging entry into the field. Et voilà: "Girls who code".
I have had several jobs in tech. None of those work environments resembled a frat house.
Maybe a few startups resemble a frat house, but is it really indicative of the industry as a whole?
Are the jobs you've worked at indicative of the industry as a whole?
This is why it’s perfectly socially acceptable to set up a specific group to give women and girls a chance to learn skills in an environment where they feel safe from sneering, lewd comments, and other such behaviour which is not conducive to learning, or simply having a good time.
The article under discussion here is important, because boys and men face a great many difficulties in life, but the Venn diagram of difficulties faced by men and women has problems unique to each and problems shared by both.
Complaining about people getting help in areas where they face a disproportionate struggle just seems unkind.
So, hypothetically, what do you and others believe needs to change? How would a 'girls can code/tech/etc' look if it couldn't //market// towards girls or any other focus of discrimination? Other than perhaps types of being in the 'have nots' category which any body-type could qualify for?
No. You just make it clear this is an environment where such behaviors are not tolerated.
Also, it's not true that women and girls are incapable of sneering and lewd comments.
You come across very much as the kind of person who believes boys are inherently deficient and deserve to fail, based on your assumptions about how boys will behave, and that they are incapable of behaving differently.
That’s a leadership and culture failure. When a female employee or student is marginalized or harassed, that’s an issue that needs to be dealt with unequivocally and swiftly.
In the school scenario I’m familiar with, my son is in 5th grade. There isn’t a gamergate environment there. We should be exposing kids to technology and coding, period. School clubs should be building that culture where the idea of bullying girls is both unacceptable and repugnant.
Women don't face a disproportionate struggle in tech. They are given more opportunities in tech than men are. There are uncountable scholarships, fellowships, hiring initiatives, mentoring initiatives, and all kinds of programs for women in tech - while there are none for men. There are many positions that are explicitly advertised as for women or for underrepresented minorities only. Companies and universities give preference to hiring and admitting women, even overtly. And finally, multiple studies showed that women are given preference in hiring for STEM positions.
The first step to help men is for us to admit that men are discriminated against, and it is very counterproductive when people pretend that is not the case.
My school also hosts a hackathon for women and underrepresented gender minorities every year (organized by a student org that rents out a building from the school for it). The hackathon is also open to high school students. Many people I've talked to there talk about how they only went into CS because someone they knew invited them to the hackathon, or have made friends and feel less alone in CS because of it.
There's a real need for these groups. Whether men needs their own groups is a separate discussion that I have no real stance on.
That doesn't imply there is a need for women-only groups. There can be a CS group for all genders and we just teach girls to stop being sexist and be part of that group (if they want to).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30277540 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30278113 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30276633 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30299883 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30276633
Given the current cultural and moral fashions, I can't think of many things that would be harder to empathize with than the laments of straight working-age men. There are so many more groups that are higher on the oppression totem pole that there's no way anybody will ever make it far enough down to care about boys.
People have been sounding those alarms for years to perfectly deaf ears, and there's nothing in the current culture that would indicate that we are ready to start listening anytime soon. Nobody cares, and help is not coming.
We're here as a society because of mishandled social responsibility. Women have only started to take up their own personal care because they can't rely on established conventions any more.
We as individuals likely have not done much, if anything, to contribute to this social circumstance. Just like women as individuals have not done much, if anything, to contribute to it. It is none of our faults. Yet they are taking personal responsibility for their wellbeing in this situation anyways. They are "manning up".
Men on the other hand... are we just sitting around crying with our thumbs up our asses? Yes. Yes we are. That shit is weak. That perspective on the situation is what's hard to empathize with, not the situation itself. Change your attitude, take personal responsibility, and bask as love and empathy showers onto you.
We can do better than looking to others to solve our problems for us. It just takes seeing an example of how. They are in short order, but they exist if you dig hard enough. I encourage any men who resonate with this to dig deeper. There is sweet sweet fruit to be had if you do. And tons of pussy.
At the same time, it's important to recognize the social forces that constrain different groups and limit the power that personal agency can exert over outcomes. The masculine gender role is extremely narrow, and if you deviate much from it, society will punish you: so-called "personal responsibility" plays the role of telling men to shut up and fit their role. As a man seeking a female partner, if I want to be a homemaker who teaches belly dance part time, I'm going to be in for a really hard time, no matter how much personal agency I embrace.
That also ignores the shittiness that even people who do manage to fit neatly into the masculine gender role still have to experience.
It's worth calling out these things in the hopes of driving social change, and it's something both men and women must participate in if we want to see a change.
> As a man seeking a female partner, if I want to be a homemaker who teaches belly dance part time, I'm going to be in for a really hard time, no matter how much personal agency I embrace.
If you say so, it will be so. If you write this code, you should not be surprised when running it achieves the programmed result. Whether you believe me or not, your statements are false. I spent time thinking this way, I suffered immensely, I put in deep effort to explore a larger perspective, and I am now greatly enjoying how incomplete was the field I saw before.
Women don't all want a provider. The trust of many has been damaged beyond that. They provide for themselves now (lots of men actually say we want that). What else can a man offer? Emotional support. The ability to make her feel like a fucking goddess. Being a homemaking belly dancer more aligns with that than doesn't.
You are right that women must participate too. They already are. It's men's attitudes that need to catch up.
Because replying with the precise tropes of toxic masculinity as a solution to… the problems caused by toxic masculinity, whew.
What's toxic is when the masculine is out of balance with the feminine. When structure, force, and closure crowd things out because there is not enough flow, softness, and openness. Simply making a decision and acting on it is not in and of itself toxic. It's the inability to adjust later that is toxic.
One of the key roles that the political left-wing should represent is fixing disenfranchisement. Unfortunately for about the last few decades, that not only is untrue, the opposite is what is happening. It has been the left-wing who has been disenfranchising boys and men.
>Yes, men have long had societal advantages over women and in some ways continue to be treated favorably. But male achievement — alongside that of women — is a condition for a healthy society.
Here it is coming from Yang. The right-wing are obviously where traditional gender roles are still represented. The equality or rather attack on traditional roles started many decades prior but for example it's the left-wing who has attacked the boy scouts.
It's the same reason that homelessness is in vast majority men, but the vast majority of homeless shelters are women's only.
>Our media, institutions and public leadership have failed to address this crisis, framing boys and men as the problem themselves rather than as people requiring help.
This is intentionally being done by those groups. Hard to address the crisis that they themselves are intentionally creating.
>Resources that keep families together when they want to stay together, such as marriage counseling, should be subsidized by the government — a much more cost-efficient approach than dealing with the downstream effects.
What's more important. This isn't zero-sum, women benefit from men being strong.
>On a cultural level, we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic and start promoting positive masculinity. Strong, healthy, fulfilled men are more likely to treat women well.
This was intentionally done and in fact, it's trending in a worse direction. This is about to get worse before it gets better.
>The above is, of course, a prodigious undertaking. But I see the need around me all the time.
Toxic masculinity isnt a thing on the right-wing. When the left-wing says 'toxic masculinity' the right-wing rolls its eyes. He sees this around him all the time because of where he stands politically. If you're interested in some right-wing positions on this subject.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/the_lefts_w...
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/why_leftist...
https://mises.org/library/marxism-and-manipulation-man
Oh and if Yang continues this push. We shall never hear from him again.
The bakery has lots of bread rolls today. Bread rolls are very tasty!
not sure how yang made this his topic. my sense of his random walk is 'had a job at yahoo' -> future of work -> UBI -> numbers guy -> times square -> ?
really miss the andrew yang policy bot on twitter though
Another is “The Will To Love: Men, Masculinity, and Change” by bell hooks (2004)
There aren’t a lot of authors that I feel get it right about issues relating to men and masculinity. Bell hooks is one of the few.
> not sure how yang made this his topic. my sense of his random walk is 'had a job at yahoo' -> future of work -> UBI -> numbers guy -> times square -> ?
I live in NYC and spend a lot of time online, so we got kinda saturated with Yang during the last year because he was in the mayoral race. As far as I can tell, he’s a passionate self-promoter, and engages on a shallow level with tons of different topics as some kind of cynical way to promote his brand. If he were at least more skilled at it I would respect him more, but he’s made so many obvious PR blunders and it’s obvious he doesn’t listen to advisors. He pokes around at sensitive topics like race and sexism, but as far as I can tell it’s so he can stay in the news, because he rarely has anything interesting to say on those subjects.
It seems like a random walk because he’s doing whatever will get him in the news online.
> He provides actual substantive policy suggestions with evidence to support his claims.
This is untrue. The policy suggestions are all poorly researched and reminded me of the kind of ideas you'd see on a comedy show like Silicon Valley... you know, TV depictions of tech bros coming up with "solutions" for problems that they don't understand.
I'm not saying that they were all laughable, but it was very hit or miss. Yang had some good ideas mixed in with bad ideas, and I think a combination of inexperience, lack of deeper research, and a refusal to listen to experts is what caused all the problems in his policies.
> In fact, NY Times and the NY Daily News spent so much time focusing on bashing Yang that it's literally the reason why Eric Adams of all people ended up being our mayor.
Yang ran a incompetent campaign. He relied far too heavily on internet presence--Twitter, Reddit, etc. I don't know why he thought that was enough. Say what you will about Eric Adams--Adams wasn't in my top 5, and so I didn't vote for him--but Eric Adams knew how to work with the press and he spent far more time hitting the streets during the election than Yang did. Adams was far more in touch with the people in NYC who vote, far more knowledgeable about how the press works, and had experience with NYC politics.
You can complain about "hit pieces", but Yang was out of touch with most voters in NYC, made a series of obvious PR blunders, showed no competence at working with the press, and had nearly zero experience working with NYC politics... Yang didn't even vote in local elections.
Spare me the uneducated "tech bro" commentary that I've heard throughout. It's unoriginal. I'm eager to hear your ranked choices and what policies made so much more sense to you though than Yang's and what Yang's good ideas were.
Yang made PR plunders sure, but it was completely disproportionate. It's odd to me that you can be so complimentary towards Eric Adams though, Brooklyn borough president, a position that's notorious for doing literally nothing. Voting in local elections is important, but I consider living in NYC rather than Fort Lee, NJ to be mayor to be even more important. NYC newspapers certainly didn't care though.
Here's the best example of the muck-raking that I can think of, which I've been thinking about since Michelle Go's murder. Yang talked about the mentally ill, homeless population, the need for enforcement of Kendra's law, psych beds, and the concern of ordinary New Yorkers. The media and voters ran with the soundbites to mean that Yang hates homeless people. Kendra's Law would have saved Michelle Go's life by the way.
Comedy writers make original takes, I’m just some rando on the internet sharing my opinion. Likely it’s gonna be an opinion you heard before.
> I'm eager to hear your ranked choices and what policies made so much more sense to you though than Yang's and what Yang's good ideas were.
Why?
Are you looking for five (5) opportunities to roast different politicians running in the Democratic primary that I think were better qualified for the mayoral position than Yang? No thanks, I don’t see the point. Pick anyone that ran. Chances are, I preferred that person over Yang.
You’re also casting the discussion strictly in terms of policies. Policies are only one of the reasons that I would choose one candidate over another—I disliked Yang for lots of other reasons besides policy.
> Yang made PR plunders sure, but it was completely disproportionate.
It wasn’t just “PR blunders”, he made mistake after mistake, and those mistakes betrayed unfamiliarity with basic stuff that a good NYC mayor should know. He proposed making domestic violence shelters (that already exist), he proposed having the MTA take control of various bridges and tunnels (which are already under its control), he made comments about the conflict in Israel and Palestine (with predictable results). And then when he (predictably) got some bad press, he whined about it like a schoolkid being bullied at recess.
It would be one thing if he actually were a little kid getting picked on by bullies. But he’s an adult, this is politics, and the reason he got picked on so much by the press is because he was a constant source of entertainment—either when he made a basic mistake, or when he whined about how he was being treated by the press. That kind of behavior gets clicks and eyeballs online.
> It's odd to me that you can be so complimentary towards Eric Adams though…
Maybe I was relying too much on subtext. “Say what you will about X” one of the most uncomplimentary ways you can introduce a subject into a discussion. Even though grammatically, it’s a request for you to talk about Eric Adams, it’s not actually a request for you to talk about Eric Adams.
I don’t know if the above explanation is appropriate or welcome to you, but I have started explaining subtext in direct terms, for various reasons.
> Yang talked about the mentally ill, homeless population, the need for enforcement of Kendra's law, psych beds, and the concern of ordinary New Yorkers.
Yeah, among other things, he proposed homeless shelters dedicated to domestic violence victims, which already exist. He talked about a ton of things, but talk isn’t enough. He showed that he lacked basic knowledge about the policies he proposed.
Also, it is bizarre to characterize Yang's mayoral campaign as listening too little to advisors. He seemed a completely different person than in the presidential campaign, and it was mostly because of all the expensive new consultants.
yang had a test prep company that got bought by kaplan, apparently, per wikipedia
Sounds like a biological problem.
WTF can I do? Work is sparse and obtaining one is never clear. Being stronger is not even an advantage now. Now I'm a programmer and now workers are in short supply but that was hell back in the days.
In primary school a lot of female teachers would explicitly felicitate the "girls for being better than the boys" and give them privileges for being "better".
School is clearly designed for girls. 8 hours on a chair listening patiently and being nice? Please.
Most things that seems fun and worth doing are "dangerous for you and others".
Lifting weights is "dangerous"
Nothing to do except eating and playing video games (if any).
When young, being strong, resilient and stoic is boring and even frowned upon. Being a victim or in a victim group is celebrated and pretty much the only way to get attention and getting ahead.
Violence and insults are always bad, including rough and tumble play that could go "too far", but somehow girls will go for these kind of assholes.
"Who hurt you? / You can't see because you're privileged (except for those with the proper ideological goggles) / You're angry, your emotions are invalid / You're mad because you can't get women"
If you get abused nobody will believe you as a boy/man (we were explicitly told this by the social workers making speeches at school). If you get accused everybody will believe you are guilty as charged however.
The dating market has been ruined by dating apps and OnlyFans. I'm in my 30s and it's getting easier, but man I wouldn't want to be a 20 years old guy in my parents' basement.
Saving for having a house. Haha.
There's a limit to the number of men ruined by family courts that you can see before simply giving up entirely on relationships and starting a family.
As a personal anecdote, I have met and befriended a few Africans over the years. They more or less express the same concerns about their children growing up here and dating North-American women. They all tell me I should go in Africa, make great money and have "beautiful metis children in a traditional marriage". Somehow I'm tempted haha.
How has onlyfans ruined dating?
Who said lifting weights is dangerous? It's very healthy even in old age!
There is a HUGE amount of things to do besides eating and playing video games. Perhaps you lack the motivation or imagination to do literally anything else.
No school has children sit for 8 hours at a time and any gender at almost any age would have a hard time having the patience to do that. Also implying that men can't go a whole 8 hours being nice?
I'm not sure what you think is fun, but yeah if it's actually legitimately dangerous for others you shouldn't be doing it unless in an environment where everyone consents to it.
In what situation - besides war - is violence good? + Insults, what function do those have and how will that help you live up this idea you have in your head of your role in society or get the partner you want?
Perhaps it's the other ways around and it's your perception that's wrong and in fact most women aren't attracted to those behaviors.
Yes it's wrong that men aren't believed and don't report abuse. It's also the exact same for women and other genders.
But, there's a person for everyone, no matter how different or however they view gender roles.
But yeah if you have strict, unchangeable views and behaviors that do not meld with the majority of potential partners you might have to go somewhere where women have less options and will settle for money/more stability.
I for one am happy that people do not have to make those trade offs and get stuck with 'traditional marriage' as defined by the viewpoints above.
Most of the things I've pointed out were either not about women or were from external actors or external factors.
> How has onlyfans ruined dating?
Most men wouldn't have intimate relationships with prostitutes (which is what it is)
> Who said lifting weights is dangerous? It's very healthy even in old age!
It was often cited as the reason not to have a gym at my school and other neighboring schools. They're afraid of lawsuits and complains from parents.
> There is a HUGE amount of things to do besides eating and playing video games. Perhaps you lack the motivation or imagination to do literally anything else.
Most children are not allowed to go outside alone. Playing with siblings (which less and less people have) can grow old very quickly, literally.
> No school has children sit for 8 hours at a time and any gender at almost any age would have a hard time having the patience to do that. Also implying that men can't go a whole 8 hours being nice?
Boys need more physical activity to concentrate. This will well known to anyone paying attention around kids. https://ideas.time.com/2013/10/28/what-schools-can-do-to-hel...
And yes, most of the time is spent sitting down, with less than 3 hours a week of physical activity per week.
Boys mature slowly compared to girls, including on the emotional side of things and unmet needs will fuel aggressive and disruptive behaviors more than girls, especially if they have too much unspent energy.
> I'm not sure what you think is fun, but yeah if it's actually legitimately dangerous for others you shouldn't be doing it unless in an environment where everyone consents to it.
Is going alone in the city / street too dangerous? Is running in the woods too dangerous? People have called CPS over this.
> In what situation - besides war - is violence good? + Insults, what function do those have and how will that help you live up this idea you have in your head of your role in society or get the partner you want?
Insults are part of life. Getting pushed around physically when very young is part of growing up (even if the authorities that be try to control it) and necessary to development. And you can't protect and be assertive without being dangerous because violence is always in the background of any kind of social interactions that is not with trusted people. There needs to be limits of course, but the "zero tolerance" we are seeing in schools (and which began to hold place when I was young) lead to zealous overreactions and causes more harm than good.
> Perhaps it's the other ways around and it's your perception that's wrong and in fact most women aren't attracted to those behaviors.
Bad boys are popular with women, they admit it themselves. No matter how much you try deconstruct it.
> Yes it's wrong that men aren't believed and don't report abuse. It's also the exact same for women and other genders.
Except it not the "exact same", it's worse.
> But, there's a person for everyone, no matter how different or however they view gender roles.
That's just magical thinking.
> I for one am happy that people do not have to make those trade offs and get stuck with 'traditional marriage' as defined by the viewpoints above.
I have nothing against people who chose to opt out of tradition. Freedom is important. But for the majority of people this is what they seek for their life and what is more favorable for raising children. That doesn't mean non-traditional families or single parents can't succeed, just that it's harder and harder to find people who will have different way to achieve their life goals.
Point being that not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer or a physicist. There will always be a good portion of the population that really has nothing to contribute economically but their labor. For women, these labor positions are the ones that have survived our transition to a mostly service based economy; healthcare, childcare, cleaning, food service, etc. For men, they mostly have not. The days of a man being able to use his comparative advantage of physical strength to earn above the median wage are long gone.
Most of this “running out of work” thought is just excuses for the US’s bad economic management in the 90s-2000s; as the GP said, now we’re at 4% unemployment and anyone with skills will be able to find a way to use them. Anything can be a skill if it's unique enough - if AI took all the jobs, "being human" would be a skill. That's comparative advantage.
Socialization is moving at a slower pace than the shift in economics. The trade deficit starting in the 1970s has overwhelmingly affected goods [1], resulting in the exporting of goods production overseas and leaving the US with a service-based economy[2]. The US at the time had a greater proportion of gender-dependent occupations[3]. The export of goods-producing jobs tended to disproportionately affect men as a result of this gender-occupation dissymmetry[4].
At the same time, people have been socialized with system of gender values. In the past these gender values were congruent with both gendered occupations[5] and gendered occupational values[5]. However, as the proportional of service occupations grew, a portion of men found themselves socialized with values[4] incongruent with the values associated with occupations now available to them. The lag between value socialization and economic realities represent a point of friction and frustration that is expressed as a feeling of being undervalued economically[7].
1. https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...
2. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/services-investment/services
3. https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-occu...
4. https://statusofwomendata.org/gender-differences-in-sectors-...
5. ANN C. MCGINLEY Masculinities at Work (2004)
6. https://www.annelitwin.com/masculine-and-feminine-workplace-... (this isn't the best source, but it is hard to find an example of how gender values connect to goods-service work and how that has changed over time)
7. Gould, R. 1974. Measuring masculinity by the size of a paycheck. In: J. Pleck & J. Sawyer (Eds.) Men and masculinity (pp. 96 – 100). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
The other challenge is figuring out what activities actually have a low-level differences translate into significant advantages. There are very few job where a single low-level difference is both significant and the only path to success — in most fields, there isn't a single model of top performer.
Do you know who ran the board on the wordcel tests? Like, all of the girls.
Just another anecdata point, so don't take it seriously.
So the Internet intelligentsia have:
- Re-discovered that hard and soft sciences (or, gasp, the liberal arts) attract different people
- Declared their preferences (and themselves) superior
- Invented a disparaging name for the inferior class
His actual point is more like “ML developers are making a lot of money but don’t talk about themselves in the media; journalists don’t earn as much and you have to hear them complain about it all the time”.
Take this "actual point" to its logical ... well, I was going to say "conclusion", but it occurs to me that there's no point here at all. The unemployed are not happy? The ultra-wealthy know better than to incite class wars? No idea.
But anyone who coins the term "wordcel" to label a group they are not a part of, certainly seems to have ill intent.
I think the joke inventor made up a philosophy behind it to stop the VC guys from turning it into a culture war thing. He also put crypto guys under "wordcels" not "shape rotators" because they like writing whitepapers.
But, the thing is, men are on not just equal footing, but a very advantageous footing especially where men dominate investment decisions. There is no excuse for men not to step up to the challenge of being equals when others carry a heavy disadvantage, still.
In 1980 the guy that fixed a radio antenna in a blizzard because "what good is fall protection if I don't use it" got told he did a good job. Today he would be chewed out for taking unnecessary risks.
"You need intelligence, emotional intellect, and analytical skills. All of which men and women are on an equal footing at."
Well that went downhill quickly.
You start out with men and women on equal footing. Then the next sentence men no longer have anything useful to contribute.
Shouldn't the obvious conclusion be that men and women have equally as much to contribute? And therefor you would expect an equal number of men and women succeeding academically?
Not really, because what men traditionally had to contribute was their physical strength to perform labor. Having that as a requirement for many lucrative positions like manufacturing and resource extraction is what allowed men to out earn women with their labor in the past. Women never filled those jobs with physical requirements en masse, and so they now already occupy a far greater portion of the other parts of the workforce that men must now compete for.
The vast majority of those suicides are coming from a specific “ethnic category”. But if you say which one, it makes you a domestic terrorist. What is the motivation to live in a world where you’re not even allowed to talk about what’s happening to you? We are living in idiocracy. Up is down, the only morally righteous thing to do is to cheer on censorship and beg for Patriot Act 2.0, 3.0 etc to be passed. Agreeability wrt the decrees of big brother is the only virtue.
If you don’t have kids you are going to die by getting abused by minimum wage nursing home employees who quite possibly have been brainwashed their entire lives by every large media company to believe that you are racist and evil because of your “ethnic category”. But if you get married, your wife can take everything from you, and big brother will lock you in a cage if you don't want to pay your ex wife to fuck some other guy in the house you bought that she now lives in. So why would an intelligent person get married?
And yet what is the national conversation about? It’s only about how all straight men of a particular “ethnic category” are racist and evil and they all need to focus on giving more to people in other “ethnic categories”. It’s a complete nightmare to anyone with a brain. It has nothing to do with anything that is going to lead to a better future. Race-based ideologies are a dead end. And nothing ever gets better. Epstein gets arrested, assassinated, and you have to listen to talking heads on news say he committed suicide year after year even though everybody knows its not true.
Domestic terrorists? Social justice warrior nursing home staff? Patriot Act? Incel-oriented divorce court angst? Epstein?
> And yet what is the national conversation about? It’s only about how all straight men of a particular “ethnic category” are racist and evil and they all need to focus on giving more to people in other “ethnic categories”.
I just am never convinced by this reactionary argument when I hear it.
The internet skews people’s perceptions of the world, and this comment is exemplary of it. These Twitter-fueled “culture war” distortions have not done us any favors. In the most polite way possible, I recommend you go outside once in a while.
I think I did decently on the front of taking his post in good faith, that’s why I didn’t ask him if he listens to Jordan Peterson (hint: he probably does).
The guy is in pain, that much is clear.
The categories with the highest suicide rates are "Non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native" followed by "Non Hispanic White". The highest rate of increase is in that first category.
If this elder abuse at the hand of brainwashed nursing home workers is so certain, then where is the correlating data? Here's a study that attempted to find racial disparities in elder abuse and found little disparity https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3694735/. It cites several previous studies.
The national conversation about race can indeed be very frustrating to encounter, but you're taking an incredibly one sided and defeatist stance on the whole thing.
You are a bigot with no empathy and hate in your heart. Please grow as a person.
Women are still paid less than men, and hold fewer positions of power in politics or business. They still far outnumber men as victims of sexual assault. They are still expected to carry the burden of unpaid domestic work and care.
If women as a whole are achieving more than men, despite the disadvantages they still suffer, then good on them. That funding should be going towards educating men so that women can walk down a street at night without a completely reasonable fear of violence.
The tone of the article comes off uncomfortably close to the whole incel thing.
One area I think this is evident is mass shootings in US schools: primarily carried out by boys, mainly white (oof, walked right into grouping by age and race). What is happening to boys to lead them down that path? Another area are deaths-from-despair [1] (the graph is from the UK*). What is leading men towards suicide? One more stat, violent deaths are, by a wide margin, mainly carried out by men on men [2]. What is driving men to be involved in violent deaths. Altogether, and I think you agree here, men are not doing well in important areas.
Above is collection of red flags and calls for direct help. And the current public conversation revolves around balancing opportunities for women (which is necessary, good for society, and I give credit to those that have brought the subject to the fore). But men and boys need more as well, perhaps in different ways than wages, positions of powers, etc. (granted how much can be determined by income bracket). Homicidal boys are likely different from the ones that grew up in households of mental/emotional/financial/stability. And men dying by despair are likely different than those in positions of power or wealth.
The crux of my argument is this: there is a difference between boys and men of wealth, power, and privilege. And ample attention by governments or communities should be offered, for a better overall society
One last point, on the point of incels: what is happening to boys to create a large enough group for a label (and the ridicule) of incels?
[1] https://archive.ph/xW50c [2] https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-stud...