Why Men Are Hard to Help
nationalaffairs.com
nationalaffairs.com
Some of the aforementioned male friends have even been broken up with due to such an incident. It's of course nonsense because every human being regardless of gender should be able to express one's feelings and cry if needed, but perhaps not everyone sees it that way.
It is an interesting example of a revealed preference in the sociological space [0].
(Expose the generalizations. Am on my phone here with no proper keyboard.)
I don't see anything wrong with people feeling like any of those 2 from time to time. If it is continuous and long term, then it's a matter of concern.
These standards lend more and more credence to the thing that Chris Rock said, "Only women and children are loved unconditionally. Men need to provide something to be loved."
Of course, these standards are being enforced by men too, not just women. But it does not surprise me that so many men I know have checked out of one or more aspects of life.
I say this as someone who has gone through all of this, and a lot more. Instead of seeing these feelings as proof that the world is out to punish you, it‘s much more useful to see that pain as a signal. A signal that tells you that you‘re likely carrying some deep bullshit around from your past and early childhood. And that dating and relationships are here for you not as consumables to fill a need, or as a measure for your own self-worth, but as a challenge, a „task“ in your life that gives you the chance to grow beyond your childhood patterns, and to take an active role in redefining not only your relationships to „woman“, but to mankind as a whole.
If you‘re on HN, you‘re very likely an intelligent, resourceful, curious person. You have most likely solved problems in your life that have been much, much tougher. It would be a pity if you ran away from this one.
It just seems rare that women can maintain attraction after seeing a man be weak and vulnerable.
But what is also unreasonable is to expect that someone else out there („people“? „society“? „women“?) should be responsible for your growth. That might have been true in tribal societies („It takes a village to raise a child“). But live in an individualistic society. And just as people on the street won‘t go out of their way to help you learn, say, regular expressions, they won‘t do that to help you get laid, or find love, or make your marriage work.
With Regex, if you had books or articles that made it sound like an intractible problem, you‘d ditch those sources and find better ones. With women and relationships, though, guys just seem to happily accept the conclusion that things are rigged against them because they are men. Like some mirror-feminist ideology where it becomes a badge of honor to demonstrate that a man needs a woman as much „as a fish needs a bicycle“. What a silly game!
I once read about a psychologist who said that, in America, people mentally map the concept of „sex“ to the idea of „war“. „Battle of the sexes“ - that kind of thing. But one makes a mistake when one takes that map to be the territory. This „battle of the sexes“ thing is just one way of ascribing meaning to observations (and of filtering them). It‘s just a story. An ideology. You only have to play by its rules if you subscribe to it.
From an evolutionary lens they are presenting you with a sneaky test and when you cry you fail the test :)
Women don’t belong to some secret organisation that go around testing men for their viable “genetic strength”.
“Women” aren’t some sort of psychosexual Kobayashi Maru where every choice is just a different wait to fail. They might surprise you if you’re willing to engage with them on the topic of how society is engineered to oppress those with feelings and compassion, like women, in places like the workplace, etc…
Sounds like someone’s giving in to self pity.
100%. Many data points in my own life and lifes of other people I know. What woman say they will do and what the actually do are two completely different things. They can very easily rationalize about anything with "feelings".
It's not exactly about crying per se, but psychological weakness. If you shed a tear on a funeral of your parent etc it's ok.
But the moment guy seems like a wimp, they loose all attractiveness. They will get to hear that things got boring, or relationship is not fulfilling enough or something else like that at the first convenient opportunity (a more promising candidate has shown up).
They aren't obsolete. The mere notion of this is laughable to anyone spending a bit of time looking around.
What happened was the standards cranking up to 11 and either the rewards aren't visible, or they simply aren't there. In addition, there's far more entertainment available and children are no longer seen as an automatic achievement. Some might even say, having kids is actively discouraged in the upper circles.
>Feminist writer Susan Faludi has pointed out that many men are "clinging to a phantom status." She's right, of course.
Based on what? I don't necessarily see men clinging onto a "phantom status" as much as their (potential) lover, family, friends and business network not giving a hoot unless their status is deemed great. Men are still primarily judged on status, not the other way around.
>He is not the only one. A common thread running through many of the challenges facing men is the culture shock of women's economic independence.
The article really misses nuance on this whole "economic independence" thing. Yes, women got "more economically independent". No, they can't just start families on their own and get by. In many countries, they can't even get a decent home (dual income households say hello). Check the demands of typical college-educated women, and then compare with the available pool of men. Now compare to the current education system, the way society works and what is happening with starting wages. There simply aren't enough men for all those women, and it's evident most women aren't willing to drop their standards yet. Meanwhile, men aren't willing to "step up", as popular lingo would like to claim.
The author correctly identifies so many things, only to come to the most safe conclusion. The same conclusion which has yet to be proven correct.
A man I know is attempting to add a new wife to his household every 5 years...
Pretty sure that is a result of experience not just some miss placed belief
>Men on a dating site will message pretty much everyone
While true, the data was not just placed on messaging. Other data seems to back this result as well.
Men tended to rate women in a normal distribution, but they also mostly messaged women in the uppermost range of attractiveness.
Women tended to rate men more harshly, rating most men below average attractiveness, but they also tended to message those "below average" men regardless of their assessment.
Most women don't use dating apps to find long term partners, at least among my peers and online circles. The common use case is casual hookups, which would certainly place a higher emphasis on physical attributes.
Conversely, I have met/seen many men looking for long term partners on those same sites, which should place a higher emphasis on compatibility.
To be pithy, we went from men having economic independence and women not to a situation where neither (save the highest earners) has economic independence. Couples are now interdependent and single people often need roommates. If you're economically independent, by definition you don't have to concern yourself with your partner's income.
If I didn't feel like I had to provide for a family, I'd get drunk at night and play video games all-day. Certainly better than working 60 hours a week.
But it fell back into the familiar trope: if men aren't succeeding, it's entirely their fault. They don't have the motivation, etc. When people use this line of thinking for Black communities we rightfully call them racist, but how can you look at these numbers for men and boys, especially in the lower class and not see something structural?
The cynical side of me thinks it's because the people who could study it don't care. There's a notion that a group that has had power for centuries is now losing it, and so it's just providing balance. But making individuals of today worse off won't provide justice to those long passed.
I will give credit to this article for not making the case that we should do something because if we don't then it will harm women in finding mates, like you see in so many other similar articles. Men's well-being should be worthwhile on its own.
I think this is a leap, or maybe we have different ideas about motivation. Seems to me motivation and direction exist at the interface of an individual and their environment. Sometimes forming over the course of a lifetime, and sometimes changing with the wind, but always connected to the environment.
Most articles, like this one tend to lay the blame at the feet of boys and men in a way that would be obscene if it were applied to women or minorities. EG they are just lazier and unmotivated. This is a superficial answer that fails to get at the deeper question: why are they less motivated. Of course I don't have an answer for why, but I I think it is a very pressing question. It is tied to higher rates of depression, suicide, low productivity, and antisocial Behavior
But surely, we can acknowledge that there are at least some intrinsic behavioral differences between men and women. For example men are intrinsically more violent than women. 90%+ of violent crime is committed by men. This holds true across every human society ever studied. Another example, it's probably also a human universal that men have a higher predisposition to substance abuse than women.
So the fact that men commit far more murders at women, we can probably lay the blame at the feet of men. It's not that society has let them down. It's that testosterone increases the propensity to violence. So, we can't categorically rule out that men are intrinsically less suited to productive participation in a post-industrial economy. (For example getting in bar fights and going to jail during prime earning years.)
I think it is a valid question if men have gender specific challenges they face in modern society, economies, and cultures.
It is important to remember that the purpose of society is to serve men and women, not the other way around. If there is a problem, we should look at society with a critical lens to see if there are areas to reform to create a better fit.
Sure, men are probably always going to commit murder at a higher rate. That said, if men are depressed due to a lack of competitive and physical outlets, that is something worth consideration.
Higher testosterone I would guess (this is not my area of expertise so I emphasize "guess" here) is probably also correlated with higher competitiveness, leadership, and work drive, all perfectly suited for a post-industrial economy. Men are significantly more likely to pursue entrepreneurship and be competitive within companies (in fact studies show that the wage gap is the result of women prioritizing temporal flexibility, ie. greater work/life balance).
If you're going to suggest that men aren't suited to productive participation, you need to consider more variables than simply violence rates, which in practice is only relevant to a tiny fraction of the population.
And I don't see a lot of trans men throwing rage tantrums when they increase their T.
Maybe the correlation appears after sampling bias - If men are bigger on average, they might feel safer acting violent than a smaller person.
Often these problems are cause by systems we have set up rather than by innate character qualities.
• Lack of father figures affect's men's educational success more than women
• Feelings of helplessness due to impossibly high standards beyond just education
• Lack of males employed by the education system mean fewer role models
• Less attention given to them by adults as boys than as girls
• Easily satisfied by pornography
• Lack of success with women causes men to give up on dating and self-care
• Need for more physical activity during childhood and adolescence which school prohibits
• Lack of freedom in the education system puts off even intelligent boys
• Declining social spaces means that men and women participate in society less
I have no proof of any of these, just anecdata
Which is problematic because minorities are a subset of men. When you legitimize saying men are statistically for dangerous, that disproportionately ends up hurting black and brown men more as they are more likely to be assumed to be dangerous. It's implicit racist and it's crazy that it's acceptable in the mainstream just because no of wants to consider PoC
First off, something can be bad for simply hurting all men. You don't have to resort to a racial analysis.
Second, something can be statistically true in practice, but not intrinsically true. I don't think Arguments that say men are intrinsically lazy hold up under scrutiny anymore than claims that POC are intrinsically lazy.
Lastly, even if men are intrinsically more violent, which I think is plausible, that doesn't mean it's appropriate to blame men for their genetics. If it's a biological fact, I don't think it is something that can be weeded out of men. It is something that we simply need to understand and control. Maybe that means encouraging men to channel that energy into healthy and productive outlets.
At the end of the day, if journalists and policy makers are trying to say boys and men in America are falling behind because they are just naturally lazy and unmotivated, they are simply wrong. We can look across cultures and time and see that it is obviously not the case. There is something about our modern society and culture that is leading to these outcomes
But that's the thing-- I'm not "resorting" to that argument. I'm a PoC and I really think that really matters. But people handwave that away every time. Because it's not interesting to the majority of people, because the majority of people don't really care about these things.
It is not "problematic because minorities are a subset of men".
It already was problematic for hurting men. Your statement implies that it would not be a problem if it were just non POC being hurt.
To take a hyperbolic example, If someone shoots up a school, we don't say it is bad because there were children of color in it. It is bad whomever is hurt. It might also hurt POC, and it might especially hurt POC, but it was always bad.
Even if they were just lazy and unmotivated, if an entire demographic suddenly becomes lazy and unmotivated, that's a problem for society to solve and not some individual character flaw.
The alternative is to be a looser the rest of your life. You might never succeed in becoming wealthy or get the pretty girl or whatever but that’s not the point. The point is to do the best you can. It’s the struggle against the perceived odds that makes you respected. Not the end result.
> Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust.
I've experienced this firsthand, and I think most men have, with their girlfriend or wife (or even mother or sister). Your value as a male romantic partner relies on you being that "rock," and anything to dispel that notion makes your value plummet. Women, even Margaret Atwood-quoting feminists like my ex, are repulsed by male vulnerability.
They need a better reward than just a nicer career to consider it worth it.
Many - if not all - of the difficult modern sociological problems we face are rooted in the inability for people to accept that while our technological understanding is, frankly, unfathomable compared to 100,000 years ago, our biology, our neurobiology, etc., is all still running under the software that was developed hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Take our social norms around sleep, for instance. We call bad dreams “nightmares”, we set our business hours to 9-5, etc etc. All of this is social, but clearly there is a biological link because we’re not inherently nocturnal animals.
IIRC the invention of agriculture caused a huge shift in cultural dynamics as regards sex and gender world wide, favoring men. It is not unreasonable to think that an age that lasted 10kyrs might have some lingering affects on how we view the world.
But most other norms are more complicated. So the idea of the man as a physically strong provider - it’s not universal but it’s extremely common across the world.
Cultures and societies are subject to the same kind of natural selection as individuals and species. Cultures that are self sustaining, defensible, and expansionary are the ones that win out in the end.
It's the automation of force that will drive change to how we view maleness. The increasing reality is that strong, aggressive males aren't nearly as necessary in the battlefield for the defense of societies. A 100lb woman can pilot a drone and drop bombs just as well as a 300lb linebacker of a male. Humanoid robots are rapidly entering the scene and will start to replace human soldiers and police officers as the ground units of power projection. eSports will start to overshadow the NFL as we start socially valuing individual human strength less and less in favor of tactical and strategic ability to control robots.
Societies have always used young males as disposable members who are thrown into the most dangerous and lethal jobs for the simple biological reality that wombs are scarce and sperm is not. If all of the lethal work gets automated away (a fantastic thing!) then that will be one of the most drastic changes to human social order that has ever happened.
You are making the same mistake as the clowns that cry how you “can’t use your AR15 to stop the government”.
Ignoring the reality of asymmetrical warfare, and failure of the strongest military or universe has ever seen failing to secure a state of uneducated farmers and merchants for the last 20 years…
If your goal is to glass something - sure the 100lb recruits in the drone program are your go-to. We leveled two parts of Japan and it ended things, then the math changed with mutually assured destruction.
But that isn’t how you actually take something over.
You take things by putting your people on street corners. Going door to door. Preventing undesirable assembly. Securing travel and trade.
Tanks and drones really suck at standing on the corner. The soldier isn’t as outdated as you suggest.
I had a friend whose mental health always seemed a little precarious. One time he told me that he'd broken down and just hugged one of his kids and cried.
Intellectually, I knew he deserved pity. But my gut reaction was revulsion at showing such weakness to one of his kids. In retrospect, what most bothered me was probably the inversion of caregiving burden between a parent and a young child.
Sorry for going off-thread a little, as I appreciate the subject here is men experiencing negative behaviours when showing vulnerability.
But I wrote about the issue of "inversion of caregiving" (good compact phrase) in Digital Vegan in respect to technology.
It's become perfectly acceptable for parents/adults to lionise the supposed skills of children around tech. They say things like: "Oh well kids just instinctively know about technology don't they", or feel perfectly happy recounting with a laugh how "My five year old has to show me how to use the TV remote".
If adults are too lazy or stupid to understand any technology and its attendant risks, handing it to children under their care is neglect.
I think this is part of a wider problem of shrugging abdication of agency under condition of "convenience" worship.
Understanding the technology and understanding its attendant risks aren't completely orthogonal, but neither does one imply the other - or else the kids who "instinctively know about technology" would also instinctively know the risks. On the other hand, it's probably faster and easier for someone who understands the technology to learn about the attendant risks, and understanding the technology may be required to personally validate the risks or to invent the best remediation strategies. But a considerable amount of parenting is, and always has been, received wisdom, for better or worse. I can see an argument to describe "lazy" as neglectful, but I take issue with "stupid": the scope of a parent's best reasonable effort to understand and mitigate technological risks for their children should be conditioned on what level of understanding they can realistically achieve, or else "neglect" is reduced to an IQ test.
It is possible to be simultaneously cautious and proud of one's children for quick adaptation, but it is far from common. In fact it's rare in my observation, and the pride is misplaced.
These "straw parents" are very real and embodied. I talk to them often through Digital Self Defence classes and have a first hand feel for their struggles (while also being a parent myself).
> Understanding the technology and understanding its attendant risks aren't [s] completely orthogonal, but neither does one imply the other
This is a very interesting point you make. My opinion is that they are very much orthogonal right now, and that is a major problem. Much of what passes for "understanding" is shallow marketing hype, at best dangerously incomplete, but more typically misleading, deception and propaganda. I quite agree with comedian Stuart Lee's assessment of Vodafone's guide to online child safety as "Mr. Fox's Guide to Hen-house Security".
We are in desperate need of a renaissance in digital literacy. I have called for Digital Literacy 2.0 as a movement to repair much of the cavalier and avoidant half-arsed education around technology these past 30 years.
Despite the likelihood that the implementation will be a shitshow - regressive for many necessary forms of speech to challenge technofascism - in the UK our "Online Safety Bill" contains much good stuff in the margins and has my broad support.
I get the sense that you are neither defending bad technology nor bad parenting. But together these the things feed off each other - and the results are self-evident in depressed, suicidal, distracted states of anxious acedia and nihilism so many children suffer today, along with the frustration and confusion of parents who feel their children "need" to engage in technologies and habits that are clearly harmful to them.
EDIT: My main point stands though - that ot is unacceptable for parents to transfer the burden of responsibility to their children. That is neglect, however you frame the abilities and knowledge of the parties.
respects
I'm like you, totally stoic. But if one of my mates has problems or is obviously in a dark place and wants to talk, it doesn't bother me at all, even if it is a, from my perspective, petty reason - we're humans and not rational machines, after all.
If someone's opening up about something truly traumatic or difficult, they get all my attention and respect.
But if I feel like they're being a cry-baby (e.g. being hurt by words rather than their meaning, complaining with a plank in their eye, complaining without making efforts, being dramatic over a small difficulty/fear/etc., not pushing their limits, etc.) I cannot but feel repulsed.
Edit: as for the why, I guess because as men I think we should always strive to improve, face the abyss, and overcome dragons on a frequent basis. If someone cannot overcome the tiniest of dragon eggs, they seem weak and not worth my time. It's the antithesis of someone I want to emulate or associate with.
It's not new, it's influenced from American Christian culture where the social perception of individuals is more important than the truth. The perception of holiness to buy ones way.
In reality the overwhelming majority of those that say it's "okay" for men to be vulnerable and emotional will react negatively when it happens.
Unfortunately that in itself is an unacceptable opinion by the moralist because it paints woman in a poor light. Again, caring about perceptions, not the truth. In truth its universal, woman+man relationships just happen to be the majority.
It happens in all other forms. It's something about the power dynamic of relationships.
This isn't a uniquely Christian thing, and it's definitely not something that suddenly popped up in the last century. Here's Jesus rebuking the 1st century jews for this exact behavior:
“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward." Matthew 6:5 ESV
I think this is more of a "human" problem than a uniquely Christian problem.
You have to be an extraordinary man to have an ordinary life these days.
Another time, she told me that the only value I bring to her life is 'to provide for our kid until they turn adult'.
I don't think we will be together much longer lol.
But I do think it's quite reasonable to expect more from life and relationships. Women tend to expect more, and society doesn't tell them not to.
It's possible to have a self-consistent worldview that does tell both men and women to expect less, but personally I think that would make for a worse society.
And how exactly this should help? It's clearly past that point already.
I mean, this is par for the course for nearly every married man in the West, myself included. We are objectified as wallets, we are treated very poorly, and when they inevitably leave to "find myself", they collect 50% of the assets we've earned and saved, and we collect 50% of the debts they've racked up in their instagram-influenced spending.
You can characterize the situation as "disgusting", but it's reality for millions of us.
Reality doesn't care about our moral judgements. It is what it is. The best we can do is attempt to educate our sons on the risks inherent in contractually obligating oneself to people who hate you.
Not to discount the lived experiences of men in this thread, but the discussion in here reeks of bitter manosphere ideology. Maybe people need to stop extrapolating their toxic relationships to an entire gender, or blaming them on biology.
And on that specific front, things are fine. The kids believe they are being raised in a warm, loving household. I've accepted my fate, but I will raise my son with different lessons than I had.
That said, I have (multiple) friends whose fiances turned from "Perfect Angel" into "Literally Hitler" the day after marriage, so even if my situation was a proper evaluation of my life partner, it should be noted that many men are defrauded by that particular trap as well.
That's optimistic naïveté speaking. Marrying someone you got pregnant just because it's the right thing to do, is in fact very much the wrong thing.
> The kids believe they are being raised in a warm, loving household
Maybe when they are very young. Kids aren't stupid, and you can't fake a warm, loving relationship accurately enough nor consistently enough to keep them fooled very long. At some point way before they become adults they realize exactly what is going on. At best they'll pity you. At worst they'll resent you for subjecting them to your inability to adult.
>> The kids believe they are being raised in a warm, loving household
> Maybe when they are very young.
Ehh, even a one year old is very good at sensing their parents' emotions.
Good grief, I hope not. My wife is nothing like that. At all. And very few of my friends and acquaintances have experienced a relationship like that. How sad to think that this is what marriage ought to be. That's horrifying. I'd be single and celibate before I'd let someone treat me that way.
My personal observation is that if the parents love the kid more than they dislike themselves, they are going to stay, at least until the kids become adults.
If kids are exposed to frequent arguments, spirals of primitive abuse, hatred, emotional coldness etc. they won't end up faring well in adulthood, and all the efforts of parents trying to stay together for them are pointless.
But yeah its a shitty situation where everybody loses.
I would replace "dislike" with "incompatible" though.
You can be very attracted physicslly to someone who is your intellectual and economic equal, to then not be able to hold it together because that person's personal traits ans preferences are so far off one's own. It goes beyond "he liked to watch tv instead of going out to eat w me"
That being said, your observation should be a heuristic, and it should be repeated more often.
If you want your kid to have successful relationships when they grow up, FFS don't let your kid grow up in an unsuccessful one.
Good call.
Appreciate that she has made this commitment. Confirm it to her and tell her you are on board, and you will make life as easy as possible for the both of you until then. See if she is willing to make the same commitment out loud.
I have a suspicion, perhaps too romantic, that once you and her are broken from the bonds of obligation, you will discover yourselves again and will voluntarily decide to stay together.
But then again, some people just shouldn't be married.
So where I live, the standard for alimony is 1 year for every 3 that you are married. On top of that, if you're married 20+ years they think you should pay for life. There is no law that states this and couples are free to decide whatever they can agree to, but once layers are involved you're at a more significant financial risk the longer you stay married.
In short, if you honestly believe it will not work you should get out sooner rather than later. It will be better for both of you. Not sure about the kids though, but living under a broken relationship isn't good for them either.
I don't know the best way to proceed, since you no doubt have entanglements such as your children to consider, but I wish you all the best in finding your way out of that relationship. You deserve better than someone who would treat you that way.
A guy I knew once told his girlfriend “just be a mom!” when she was tired and their son was crying. Rather than be a dad, he demanded that she resume a role and shamed her for wanting a break.
And yet I’ve experienced the same as a man. The sort of “just be a man” mentality and rhetoric you can encounter is widespread and ranges through all depths of relationships. Ever been unemployed as a man? People can be absurdly insensitive and unkind about it. It really makes people uneasy sometimes… Like there must be something wrong with you. Never mind why you’re unemployed; there could be any number of valid reasons, but people seem to assume that’s not the case.
The point is that this isn’t a gendered problem. I suppose it’s a people being selfish problem first, coupled with many possible issues leading to the selfishness and the gendered presumptions we make about our partners. We do the same thing with genderless accusations though. We just want certain behaviours from our partners and use all kinds of means to justify it, gendered or not.
But after that second quote about value, that is a big, fluttering red flag signal for you to leave. That is no longer a functioning relationship.
But there are no shelters for men in most provinces, and many shelters that accept children will reject male children over a certain age. Moreover, based on court-enforced outcomes, men who leave an abusive home face a serious risk of significantly diminished custody and access in the future[1].
The fact is, a lot of Canadian men are living in abusive homes with nowhere to turn and the knowledge that if they leave their children will be left to face their abuser alone.
0: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2016001/article...
1: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/jf-pf/2017/nov02.html
No you can't. Do you think circumcised men don't fully enjoy sex? Where did you get that idea from?
I also don't see your point in being pedantic. Both are procedures which do not benefit the majority and are an active effort to make most lives worse (be it unknowingly or knowingly). The only case for male circumcision, is the extreme minority of men who would suffer otherwise.
Surely you're not going to make your case on this petty a detail.
That would be news to hundreds of millions of men.
>Surely you're not going to make your case on this petty a detail.
I think any sane person would see removal of the clitoris to be quite different.
It's called pilpul and he obviously will.
From Wikipedia’s bios on two of the people responsible for the spread of the practice, Lewis Sayre and John Harvey Kellogg:
> In 1870, Sayre began using circumcision as a purported cure for several cases of young boys diagnosed with paralysis or significant motor problems. He thought the procedure ameliorated such problems based on a "reflex neurosis" theory of disease, which held that excessive stimulation of the genitals (i.e., masturbation) was a disturbance to the equilibrium of the nervous system and a cause of systemic problems.
>Kellogg did promote extensive measures to prevent masturbation addiction. He circumcised himself at age 37. His methods for the "rehabilitation" of masturbation addicts included measures up to the point of cutting off part of the genitals, without anesthetic, on both sexes; he wrote men who did should be circumcised and women that did should have carbolic acid applied to their clitoral glans.
People have tried, the last person I am aware of that tried to get a mens shelter off the ground was harassed to the point of suicide, and faced extreme resistance and protesting in attempting to fund it. There is lots of government funds for womens shelters, and zero government funds for mens shelters
It is also possible that all the modern pressures and beliefs won't really override physical attraction. In general if someone is pretty to look at they have a lot of slack personality wise, whether they are a chest thumping mansplainer or an emotional crybaby.
Good for society: People should not be harassed or mugged when they walk at night. Good advice for an individual: Stay aware of your surroundings and make situational choices about your clothes and behavior.
Good for society: Men should also express their feelings, including their bad ones. Good for individuals: Know who is safe to express your feelings to, and who is not.
There was a big revelation that maybe we should try to improve society instead of all the victim blaming of the 70s-90s. I think it's great that we focus on perpetrators more than victims, but we forgot to tell individuals that they still live in a imperfect world, and that even though it's not their fault when they get targeted, they could still take action to protect themselves while waiting for society to improve.
This is an awesome way to put it and applies to so many more topics of public debate. Consider as a simple example:
Good for society: Close tax loopholes. Good for individuals: Exploit tax loopholes.
We should all be mindful that this distinction exists, and acknowledging it openly should be part of healthy debate culture.
I think this is wrong - like 180 degrees wrong. The mode of failure I see most often for men is low EQ - misreading the wants / needs of the woman and delivering the wrong things with no awareness of where they are going wrong.
The reason why women find confidence attractive is because low self esteem / insecurity is often the root cause of negative and harmful behaviors. See pride and envy occupying the lowest circles of hell.
Many guys totally misread this as women want assholes, rather than incessant approval seeking behavior indicates low self esteem / insecurity which has the potential to make her life hell. It’s not that you can’t be kind to women, you just need to be doing it for the right reasons - because you feel this is the right way to conduct yourself - and not because you are scared that you are unworthy of love or admiration.
Women don’t want assholes, they want security, and the traits I listed are all indications of security, whereas being emotionally sensitive is less so. Hell everyone wants security, it’s why confidence is so attractive.
If your time in the gym was a path to being more comfortable with who you are then it wasn’t a waste of time. Maybe you were good enough all along and just didn’t realize / believe it
there are a lot more factors that help with being confident with yourself.
i am none of these things: wealthy, handsome, social, and fit yet i am quite confident with myself. i'd say that with all the mistakes my parents may have made, this is one of the positive things i got out of my childhood. it probably also helped that i grew up in an environment where these things didn't matter. there was noone wealthy in my school, noone telling me that i had to be handsome, or that not being social or not being fit were bad.
[citation needed] (no snark intended)
https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2021/march/...
> We are interested in the nature of narcissism. Narcissism is a personality disorder that is conceptualized as excessive self-love and manifests as a grandiose sense of self-importance, entitlement, and superiority (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Auerbach, 1993; Freud, 1914).
> More recently, two subtypes of narcissism have been distinguished. “Vulnerable narcissism” characterized by low self-esteem, anxiety about attachments and extreme sensitivity to criticism and “grandiose narcissism”, which manifests as high self-esteem, self-aggrandizement and self-importance (Dickinson & Pincus, 2003; Rohmann, Neumann, Herner, & Bierhoff, 2012; Wink, 1991). This distinction has shown itself to be fruitful - vulnerable narcissism is associated with low self-esteem, life-satisfaction, and interdependent self-construct. Conversely, grandiose narcissism is associated with high self-esteem and life-satisfaction and an independent self-construction (Rohmann, Hanke, & Bierhoff, 2019; Rose, 2002). These differential attitudes also present behaviorally. Both grandiose and vulnerable narcissists have a tendency to deliberately induce jealousy in their romantic partners, but for different reasons - a vulnerable narcissist is motivated by insecurities and seeks reassurance to compensate for low self-esteem whereas a grandiose narcissist induces jealousy primarily to gain power and control in the relationship (Tortoriello, Hart, Richardson, & Tullett, 2017).
> . . .
> Grandiose narcissism seems to resemble psychopathy in many respects, which raises the possibility that the tessellation of these conditions could be improved. It appears to be the case that grandiose narcissism might be better understood as a manifestation of psychopathy. This notion is supported by the finding that individuals who strongly exhibit psychopathic traits also tend to have a grandiose sense of self-worth (Gustafson & Ritzer, 1995; Miller, Sleep, Crowe, & Lynam, 2020). Conversely, vulnerable narcissism might be better conceived of as “narcissism proper” or “primary narcissism”.
Looks like they are pretty much trying to rebrand grandiose narcissism to psychopathy as you might suggest. Not really sure I see any value in changing the widely understood definition. I also didn't see any numbers about which type was actually more prevalent, however. Again, I was only able to do a cursory review. At this point, I think it's fair to conclude that there's more than one type of narcissism and that one of them probably has nothing to do with low self esteem, while the other probably does.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188692...!
Even the "quit dating assholes" stereotype is obvious, with women falling for the typical cocky jerk who goes against what society claims a man should be. Then it turns out, that guy ended up being problematic and scarred the girl for life.
Does that mean assertiveness has to be dark? No. But frankly, society is doing a lot to kill the "dark assertiveness" while not doing anything to insert "light assertiveness", if you're willing to view it that way. We're not exactly raising boys to be cowboys and gentlemen, we're raising them to be doormats and appeal to women in ways which clearly aren't dropping panties.
The seven virtues provides a useful framework to think about this. Prudence (emotional intelligence) gives rise to justice (knowing what is owed to whom), which gives rise to fortitude (assertiveness), which gives rise to moderation. Moderation without fortitude is cowardice. Fortitude without justice is tyranny. And justice without prudence is injustice. A little esoteric, but St Augustine knew a few things about life :)
It is very evident that [confident jerk] > [lacking confidence]. Kindness and compassion are not substitutes for confidence and assertiveness, as far as both anecdotes and token evidence goes.
As far as society goes, it is removing [confident jerk] in boys. It is not replacing it with [confidence]. It is also not teaching girls to actively value any of your other supposed virtues. Congratulations, most boys are now [lacking confidence], one of the few measuring standards.
Your "useful framework" does not align with the reality of the western world.
1. In my view “confident jerk” == lacking confidence. The confident jerks usually have the lowest self esteem. Their “confidence” tends to be a facade - a lie they tell themselves - which is why they seem to always have something to prove.
2. Assertiveness is not necessarily indicative of confidence. Again, it is clear that some of the most assertive wanna be dominant people are deeply insecure and simply acting out to assuage their internal feelings of low self esteem.
3. Compassion and kindness require true self confidence.
You can be assertive without being a jerk. Society and moral philosophy generally encourage this; and they discourage being a jerk. The difference is that constructive assertiveness is kind and compassionate and comes from a place of confidence. Destructive assertiveness comes from a place of low self esteem (pride/envy). Moral philosophers have written about this for over a thousand years so I don’t think that these values are especially modern.
The writing of St Augustine are a key part of the foundations of modern western (Judeo Christian) moral philosophy. This they offer many insights into moral reasoning in modern western society.
I find this to be a very convenient belief, in the same vein as "criminals are stupid" or "[not my political party] is stupid" or "good things happen to good people" or "bullies are insecure." I don't see any evidence or have any reason to believe that confident jerks are secretly harboring internal conflict, as satisfying as it may be to believe.
I mean the convergence of beliefs across a bunch of religions and moral philosophies is probably pretty good evidence. They were not exactly running randomized controlled trials; but they were smart people who thought a lot about this stuff. I’m not sure that the methods of modern behavioral science are so much more advanced :)
Otherwise this is just like one of those “obvious”, self evident things (i.e. obvious to some not to others). I do concede that there are a subset of jerks who have Dunning Kruger syndrome as well as a small number of true sociopaths out there.
Low self esteem and insecurity aren't the problem. Lots of people suffer from it through little fault of their own and, frankly, people who think they're always right and never question themselves can be just as toxic.
The problem is people repressing their insecurities, acting out and making other people responsible for their pain, instead of facing their insecurities head on e.g. through therapy.
That may sound like a strange statement, but our programming is strong and no matter how much we debate it in the society it doesn't change. We are what we are. We may be able to evolve, but you can't snap your fingers and have that happen in a century. Arguably, I don't see us evolving past it either, as our programming likely gives us some advantage in reproduction.
In terms of "helping men" I used to work with troubled youth (13-17yrs); young men need role models and a place in society. They'll ask for help and the role models can help them. They do much better in apprenticeship type roles. I don't really think it can be force, but a bit of encouragement and guidance goes a LONG way.
Today our society coddles everyone, young men need responsibility, guidance and hard work. Everyone has the desire to be respected, show them how to fit into society and be respected and they'll follow your lead. Many of the issues we face in society today is we don't have high expectations coupled with mentorship. Sports do this to a degree, but it needs to be through all walks of life.
The main issue IMO is that we have removed male and female only spaces and are attempting to homogenize. We also coddle children and young adults to the point they are offended when someone uses their wrong pronoun. It's good to have roles in society it helps optimize and provides guidance to those who need it. It's also good to have a thick skin, so you can roll with the punches and still succeed. Men and women alike are attracted to the traditional roles of the opposite gender because it helps both partner. There's a good reason for that, historically and today. That's not to say other configurations aren't possible, but biologically, societally and economically the traditional roles make sense to most people internally.
People will play on social cues to gain benefit, it doesn't matter which social cue.
The idea that every person with non-standard pronouns is a good person is misguided, even if it was an overwhelming majority.
The capacity for self-centeredness and/or bullying behaviour exists in all demographics.
All people have morals; the ones to be fearful of are the ones that allow their morality to bend depending on the recipient.
I think the self interest heuristic is generally overused.
The way I see it we are fundamentally the same species which committed all of the atrocities of the 20th century, 19th century, heck all of the extremely violent and callous behavior in recorded history. To believe that human nature has changed much from that in only the span of a few decades is foolhardy.
so i need to assume that most people are not just out for themselves and engage others hoping that they are not, but maybe just be cautious until i know them better.
If you assume most people are out for themselves, the rational solution is usually to violently suppress or exterminate your opposition whenever possible. Kill them before they have a chance to kill you.
"the problem"...
You don't get to choose what other people call you. Confident, hardworking people, don't don't care what others call them. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is a common phrase school children say. I've been called a plethora of names, that doesn't define me, why let others define you (so to speak)?
This is exactly the coddling I was discussing.
The purpose of pronouns are to help others understand who you're talking about. It's not to validate the individual being discussed. Confident people don't need validation.
What? That’s literally the definition of a legal name change, which happens all the time. If someone continued to, intentionally, refer to my wife’s maiden name after she went through the nightmare process of changing it, you can bet she’d be offended, and rightfully so. Being offended by behaviour being done specifically to offend isn’t being coddled or a sign of weakness, and it’s frankly kind of weird that you think it is.
Sure, she can’t technically “choose” if someone continues to be a jerk and call her by the wrong name, but the social convention of respecting given names has existed forever, and extending that same logic to pronouns seems like a pretty fair expectation of basic human decency to me.
You’re seriously saying that if everyone around you referred to you as “miss” or “ma’am”, forever, that wouldn’t start to get to you? (I’m assuming you’re male, I find it hard to believe a woman would have written this) I’ll believe it when I see it. I’ve met plenty of men who like to think they’re that confident, but yet to meet a man who actually is.
No, that is choosing what the GOVERNMENT calls you, largely for the purpose of ensuring they can extract a large portion of the labor for redistribution.
There is nothing requiring me or any other person from using your legal name, and in fact in some situations today using a persons legal name would be met with outrage and offense (i.e dead naming)
>If someone continued to, intentionally, .... you can bet she’d be offended
Seems like an odd thing to be offended over, maybe annoyed, or even feel disrespected. Offended nah... My first name has a commonly used short name that I dislike, people use it for me all the time but I am not offended by it it is just annoying
>extending that same logic to pronouns seems like a pretty fair expectation of basic human decency to me.
One big difference in language is pronouns are not directed at the target of their use, where names are.
Normal use of pronouns is used when describing a person to a 3rd party. "Go find Jim, he has your report"
He/She etc are outward expressions of secondary sex characteristic to aid people in their observation of the world. to use a another example
"Go find Sam, she has your report", I would go looking for a human with outwardly female characteristic. where as "Go find Sam, he has your report" I would look for a human with male characteristic. "Go find Sam, they has your report" is not only grammatically incorrect, it gives no indication on the type of human I should be looking for so I would just go down the hallway yelling Sam at everyone
>You’re seriously saying that if everyone around you referred to you as “miss” or “ma’am”, forever, that wouldn’t start to get to you?
I have a problem if people refer to me as Sir but it has nothing to do with the gender. /s
>but yet to meet a man who actually is.
Nice to meet you. Call me Ma'am, I dont care. Call me asshole I dont care, call me anything you want except late for dinner
I don't believe you. What if I called you Pedo?
That would be accusing me of crime, and accusing me of victimization of others. These are actions that one would have to take.
That is a far different statement than simply calling someone the wrong name, pronoun, etc.
One could be arrested, jailed, fired, etc for being a "pedo", Referring to a "they" as "she" or "he" would not result in that person being arrested, jailed or fired. if anything today the person using the incorrect pronoun would have higher legal jeopardy than the person being "mis-gendered"
Calling someone Ma'am if they wanted Sir or vice versa is not going to result in the person the incorrect salutation was directed at being fired or jailed
Your "gotcha" is both insane and idiotic, raising to the level is disbelief anyone would even make that as a analog comparison
My wife didn’t take my last name, 2 of her aunts keep intentionally sending cards and such, addressed only to her, with my last name. It’s been 13 years.
That does not make it true. It is also not great to put the onus on the victim of bullying.
As someone who was bullied quite severely, I always preferred a fist fight over words. Still do; feels more honest, less manipulative getting-in-your-head but more visceral and present. To each their own perhaps, underlining the fact that words can and perhaps should hurt as much as sticks and stones; if you think words mean something, well, then they mean something.
Confidence only gets you so far, there are no simple solutions. Any study on bullying will elucidate that fact.
Just naive. Like saying the bible or the koran is "just words" rather than the foundation of societies and the cause of wars.
It _is_ just a collection of words though, it's people that take it very seriously and get offended that start the wars. Had they learned this credo when they were young, they might not have escalated it to war. Anyone can just shout words out, you going to get offended at everyone ?
What on Earth? Yes you do. Do you not tell people what your name is? When someone asks you for your name, what do you say? I don't understand how you have human conversations with other people and make this claim.
You don't have to have a particular stance on trans issues to have the common decency to use the correct pronoun. Mind you, I'm talking about reasonable things here: I am not necessarily sympathetic to wholly invented pronouns (because that doesn't come very naturally), although I think "they" is fine, and of course, it would be ridiculous if (hypothetically) a person switched pronouns every day, but in the cases I have experienced, someone communicates that they now identify as the other gender, and that's fine. Usually it's also accompanied by enough outwards changes that it's also not too hard to do; I've met trans men that I didn't know were not biological men at first.
So, idk, to me "please refer to me as man/woman in the future" sounds like a simple, easily satisfied request and getting worked up over it to me signals that one prefers emphasising their political opinion over just being decent and accomodating.
The disgusting thing is that if one's value does plummet, that serves as a blank check for the partner to harm the relationship as a passive-aggressive feedback mechanism to discourage subsequent behavior like it, be that withdrawal, or avoidance, or picking fights over inconsequential things.
Thus, men should constantly be striving for more value (read: status), or risk losing leverage with those they love. In a sense, projected status anxiety ensures that it is impossible for men to fully escape the evaluative sphere.
Internalizing this will age your soul, and not in a good way.
A more disgusting thing to me is the idea that people see their partners (or believe their partners see them) as having “value” like they’re a breathing stock ticker symbol.
Something's profoundly wrong when people put so much importance on what is an externally mediated measure. I don't know what it points to other than a sort of spiritual void, but the status game is one you are statistically almost guaranteed to lose.
It is the thing I hate most about my 30s and 40s: the utter seriousness with which status is regarded.
There are some sad stories in these threads.
I just want to add that not all partners are like this.
But the ones we attract in certain parts of our lives are definitely prone to it! When our self-identity (or at least our time and energy) is wrapped up in material success, or job prestige or some other externality, we attract people who agree with us.
It's a delicate edge, because most of us want to build, accomplish, achieve something that makes us proud of our efforts, and we dump a lot of that into "work" in our most-eligible years.
So if we "succeed", or move toward success, we attract those that see us the same way we imagine that part of ourselves.
And then the rest of life starts happening. I want to live in a van and see the national parks! I want to take the modest exit and move to the Caribbean. I want to get a dog and stop running in place in BigCity. I've saved enough and don't want to deal with issue X. Etc.
This new status is not always met with the same enthusiasm as the climbing part of our journey. We created the fiction, so maybe it's not completely fair to be disappointed when our focus shifts and theirs does not.
(I don't mean to suggest that I know anything about your life, I'm just riffing on your last sentence.)
I can't recommend this enough!
The harsh reality of life is that all relationships are necessarily about value transference. If we're not stronger together than we are apart, then what the hell are we doing together. If you're sucking more value out of me than you're giving back, then you're a parasite and I'd be better off without you.
If you're not doing the calculation of whether a relationship is and will continue to be mutually beneficial, you're almost certainly going to become a host for a parasite.
In general it's not intended to offer advice, but there are some moments that invite thought, for sure.
> anything to dispel that notion makes your value plummet The disgusting thing is that if one's value does plummet, that serves as a blank check for the partner to harm the relationship as a passive-aggressive feedback mechanism to discourage subsequent behavior like it, be that withdrawal, or avoidance, or picking fights over inconsequential things
the devalue phase of an unhealthy narcissistic relationship is not representative of most healthy relationships. a healthy compassion based relationship would see a value plummet met with support.
I hate that I speak from experience on the matter.
Thank you.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/fertility_rate/fer...
But this is not an inconsistency in feminism, this is a discrepancy between feminism and what many women actually want.
I wonder how many analogues to that beyond feminism I can come up to that in a minute?
My point is that I feel like it's not necessary to hold these groups to the standard of being logically consistent and rational all the time. The movements are still in their infancy. They will make mistakes. It's all experimental right now. We will figure it out, but it may take generations so the best thing to do is just relax and be supportive.
The society I can think of that has made the most progress is Israel, as it is modern but also has a TFR of 3 and generally is an outlier on plots of TFR and GDP per capita
This sounds weird to me, like "support damaging behavior because that's how people find themselves". Because, after all, damaging behavior is what this thread is about. Sure, maybe someone will grow out of being an ass, but maybe they won't. If you support them "no matter what" instead of calling them out, you're prolonging that behavior.
Not that we can't forgive and make mistakes, but aiming for other than "being logically consistent and rational" is likely a road to Hell, or rudderless at best.
Another point is overall physique. Almost no woman admits it, but ask good looking gym builders who don't overdo it, how easy is for them to get a date. I don't mean from all women, but finding some decent looking one, often smart is simply much easier. Or even better - ask a smart well earning guy who was weak and pale who went through proper gym/sport transformation (while remaining smart well earning) - the change of interest from women is ridiculous. I can attest to that, I've changed few personal opinions after putting in enough time with free weights. Its not so much about muscle mass per se, but overall posture, confidence, happiness and projection of strength.
Women, much more than men, like to feel they are above primitive emotions and impulses. Well sometimes only till they aren't.
Women have been ostracized, sometimes killed, for not appearing virtuous for thousands of years. Women strongly retain a defense mechanism of virtue signaling in sexual relations. It's overwhelming and suppresses true sexual preferences among women of all types (education, income level, age, cultural background and so on). Always keep this in mind when reading what heterosexual women say they want in a potential partner.
E.g. the pay gap. The pay gap opens up only after marriage and especially children; in the majority of major metropolitan areas today, young single women actually earn more than men.
Heterosexual women's mate choice is what drives this: they have a strong preference for a male who makes more over one who earns less. Everyone wants to earn more money, but men have the additional incentive of needing to earn more to attract a mate. Given this incentive structure, it's inevitable that men as a group will outearn women.
Most individual women have an easy way to contribute to the pay gap statistic: either by not pairing at all, or by pairing with a man who wants to play a supportive role at home instead of being the "breadwinner." The large majority of women choose the tradeoff that results in the current social structure we see.
Men, of course, also use their agency to create this world with restrictive gender roles. But everyone recognizes this; point out that women also bear responsibility for their use of agency to create it and you get, at best, called nasty names.
This isn't accurate: Contemporary feminism has long been obsessed with this topic; specifically, how some women contribute to their own oppression. Books have been published debating whether or not this is an inherently bad thing. You're conflating feminism and society, but society isn't feminist. Sure, libertarianism exists, but our current governments aren't libertarian, even if they pay lip service to the ideas and ideals; the same applies to feminism.
Your thoughts and ideas are reasonable enough but you should have a little more intellectual humility when presenting them.
My only counter to what you've said is that I think while you acknowledge the inertia of the status quo makes on current gender dynamics, you are not appreciating how making even the slightest decision against the prevailing culture is incredibly difficult.
For example, I have a male, married friend who had a child and they used the mother's last name. This seemingly minor, insignificant little protest has already caused him like 10 problems because nobody can imagine a child not having their father's last name. Going against the status quo is not easy!
So like, OP predicted your argument and tried their best to explain that's not what they meant, and you ran with that interpretation anyway. Unless there's some edit shenanigans going on that I don't see, I don't know. I'm trying to figure out a polite way to say this, but like from where I'm sitting you don't look like you're responding to OP, you look like you're responding to a straw-man that OP went out of their way to explain was not what they were actually saying.
> The large majority of women choose the tradeoff that results in the current social structure we see.
As I said, the OP has reasonable points but to skate over these two obviously connected points while pointing out a "critical flaw" in feminist theory is very incomplete.
It it also a disingenuous argumentative technique to say that his points are so dangerous that to bring them up would get somebody called names. Most if not all academics would be happy to argue any of these points without name calling.
And also it is ridiculous to say that "contemporary, modern feminism" is a well defined term that means the same thing to everybody. What's modern conservatism mean? Modern liberalism?
You might benefit from a read through of these articles: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-th...
Particularly the bit on "The Cluster Structure of Thingspace"
>>A verbal definition works well enough in practice to point out the intended cluster of similar things, but you nitpick exceptions. Not every human has ten fingers, or wears clothes, or uses language; but if you look for an empirical cluster of things which share these characteristics, you'll get enough information that the occasional nine-fingered human won't fool you.
Also I'm not from the US so this really isn't my fight at all, I'm not arguing with you about this I'm just trying to point out where you're making a mistake that is going to make it difficult to communicate.
Here's an example, instead of saying "you can't point at contemporary modern feminism because language is hard and ideas are fuzzy" you can say "I don't think that the vice you're accusing these people of really comes up that often". Instead of trying to debate whether true feminists are whatever OP accused them of, you can just say that you don't think whatever OP accused them of is really a big deal that affects very many real people. Skip the definitional debate (you know what group they're trying to point at) and get right to the meat of the argument, whether that issues actually shows up in real life.
If you see people as at least partially rational actors, "Have enough income on your own that you're not trapped in a situation with anyone," and, "Have a partner that is successful," aren't two opposed concepts.
It's not a logical inconsistency, it's actually rational. I think you may be falsely equating "consistency" and "fairness," or "equability," but they're distinct concepts: A person can want to be successful and still find a successful partner more attractive. This isn't inconsistent.
Women's preferences don't define feminism. I think the Feminism is not a good word to describe feminism because it creates associations like these.
And here is why there is not a single feminism. I made two categories, but there is more, it is just easier for my brain. You have the "liberal" feminism, targeting equality, and the "traditional" feminism (inherited from Emma Goldman and other marxist and Marxist-adgascent like Beauvoir, so maybe calling it traditional is wrong. Postmodern Feminism?) targeting emancipation. Emancipation is not equality, it is just asking to have the possibility to do what you are able to do (aka firewoman, general, or pornstar).
Short story about emancipation and empowerment:
At first, i thought it was the same. That the French "émanciper" was translated as "empowered", and did not go further. Then like 8 years ago (i was still a lib at the time), i've heard at the radio "We don't have an equivalent in French, this is the idea of empowerment". So i looked into the difference between emancipation and empowerment. Empowerment is practices to reach freedom for the self within the institutional structures, and emancipation, is a process of freedom for the self and others in society through challenging and changing the existing structures of power. Giorgia Meloni and Simone Veil.
I have a lot of female friends. They will rip their boyfriends apart for vulnerable moments or emotional needs or economic inadequacies. One complained about him having to visit his dying aunt and leaving her alone for a weekend. Another called her boyfriend a loser for not making enough money for them to live in Vancouver proper (an expensive place). Heck, my mother has called my father as loser for "only" making about 250K a year (my parents live in a 1 million person LCOL city).
You go through this as a man and it reinforces your suppression of feelings and desires to never open up to anyone because of the humiliation.
No wonder men kill themselves 4x as often as women.
good old triggers are more potent than any progressist concept that popped up in the last century
You're allowed to cry when your mother dies or your dog dies. Anything else and you may as well be wearing a dress. The constant encouragement to be vulnerable and express feelings is merely a test to make sure you're still "masculine enough."
I've always found it strange how women wearing men clothes is normal and just a style choice, while men wearing women's clothes is perverse and emasculating. Even many of the pro equality people feel this way
A 200lb man, who has the physical ability kill someone with their bare hands crying over an emotional vulnerability is scary. The issue isn’t “men aren’t allowed to have feelings”, but men are expected to have self-control over how they express themselves.
See also the responses of women learning their partner is bisexual or their dating racial preferences.
Their mating strategy optimizes for status and in the process creates and reinforces the very structures they claim to oppose. What they are really opposing is the negative effects these structures have on them.
They are not evil or man-hating, but all of us are ruled by instinct way more than we would like to admit. And the people self aware enough to recognize and avoid reacting to them, specially when they relate to something as important as romantic relationships, are not very common.
But of course cherrypicking just the convenient parts of feminism is common, and it's not always easy to tell early on what kind of person the other one is.
I don't know if I see the connection to emotional vulnerability in a romantic relationship.
>> Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust.
How is that relevant? Supposedly men are not good at asking for and receiving help because of their traditional gender role.
So I think this reaction can change but it will take time.
the question then would be, how does gender equality look like that doesn't rely on these narratives?
if on the other hand we assume that these ideals are good, then the problem is not that the narratives are false, but that we haven't yet actually achieved equality.
Second, you can have “moral equality” without assuming “fungibility.” My cousin just got married. The wife is brilliant—she’s civil engineer. The aunties are all impressed. But if they have a baby and her priorities shift and she decides she wants to stay home (which happens to many women!) those same aunties will 100% expect my cousin to take up the slack and support the family, because he’s the man. Morally equal, but not fungible.
traditionally picking up the slack would mean for the man to go earn more money. but women want to keep working. and, this is part of the issue, in middle to lower income families they have to. we have created a situation where a single income is no longer enough to support a family. the economic change is not financial freedom for women as much as a financial dependency on both parents working.
and the narrative we are creating and that we seem to want is that men help in the household and with childcare. and that too is happening but only just enough so that everyone supporting that narrative can point to an example, but not as much as everyone thinks. even in households where both parents are working, most of the housework is still done by women.
When the narrative of "the one" breaks down, marriages dissolve. Children get custodial_parents -= 1.
I don't want to generalize, but that's a common narrative also. I have no direct experience.
Some times, one way is objectively better than another way. And yes it may be ego-bruising for those doing things the "less good" way, but we don't need to throat-clear so obnoxiously whenever these things are discussed.
I do think you should also take an honest approach to the valuable points Rayiner has made, here and elsewhere. Not everything is correct, but recently it seems like you're just jeering and nervously trying to change the subject when actual discussion of the issue would be uncomfortable for certain current orthodoxy.
In this case, American women (and men!) have been told, through the media, their peers, and reinforced through modern corporate culture, that behaving, acting, and expecting things in a certain way will make them happier. But that's not bearing out in reality. So are they being setting up for ego death, when reality doesn't match expectations, if the expectations are wholly unrealistic and perhaps even wrong?
This hurts women in two ways. First it makes them more likely to select shiftless men who will run out in their families to pursue their dreams of being YouTube stars. Second, by setting cultural expectations and incentives, it increases the supply of such men.
The hard part is that it's something you can only really learn about your partner with certainty once it really matters.
So in a way it's actually better to open up early, when the cost of being disappointed isn't too high yet.
it is still good to have friends, but for me this is the definition of an ideal relationship. a fortress of well-being where both partners support each other.
That isn't to say I don't think they should be divorced. It's just what's on my mind.
I’ve been open and emotional on multiple occasions with my partner, including to the point of crying. I’m open about my doubts, flaws, and weaknesses. It hasn’t diminished her desire or commitment in the slightest.
And if it did, I’d much rather lose her than lose myself like I did in my marriage.
Living your life behind a mask to earn the approval of someone else is the path to the life of “quiet desperation” that Thoreau wrote about. You’ll never feel loved and accepted for who you are, because you won’t have truly revealed yourself.
Why be with someone if you can’t be truly known by them?
It's not the vulnerability itself that is the problem- it's that the vulnerability is revealing what is perceived as a huge character flaw: emotional weakness. When guys are admitting that they feel afraid, helpless, scared, etc. it's demonstrating that they are lacking strength, courage, and emotional maturity to deal with hardships constructively. They probably really are lacking these things, and the women didn't realize it before because they kept silent.
Ironically, vulnerability is actually one thing women find most attractive in men, as explained in Mark Manson's book models- it is really an impressive and attractive thing when done properly, it shows that you aren't afraid of the woman's rejection.
However, to be attractively vulnerable you also need to be strong, brave, and emotionally mature. You can't really fake this, it comes from hard work and life experience. It takes a lot of work and time for most people, and yes, crying over little things might be a valuable first step in being aware of your own emotions and starting to work on these issues.
What women are looking for in a vulnerable man, is a man that has overcome some really difficult stuff, and is tough and stable as nails in the face of adversity. He might be upset about something, and share that, but he also has a plan for what he is going to do about it. He isn't much afraid of her, or of sharing his inner feelings and challenges, because he has a lifelong habit of directly facing his fears in a courageous way with circumstances much more difficult.
I do share my inner challenges and feelings with my girlfriend, and she finds it attractive. I have also been through some really terrible shit in my life, and always have that in mind that the current challenge is tiny in comparison, and something that will make me even stronger once I overcome it. I also plan to fix the problem myself, and let her know that I have such a plan.
Vulnerability revels inner truths about a person. Are those truths about you attractive or unattractive? If your inner truths are unattractive is that her fault or yours?
Ironically, I think many men seem to experience this in the opposite direction implied by the article. Men are told to be obedient male feminists, and they find a world in which that mentality sets them up for failure. Women on the otherhand are encouraged to pursue the "toxic masculinity" mindset that men have been chastized for.
So it seems that masculinity itself is a winning strategy, just the sex pursuing that strategy has partially reversed.
There are good situations out there, and as you get older you may gain the ability to explore more and find one.
It will give you peace of mind and it will take away that "wtf?!" anxiety you feel (in time; it's not immediate so be patient). Just read the books and consider the ideas, don't get sucked into the manosphere bs (there are a lot of idiots who grift on these ideas—the only guy who actually backs up his points is the author of this series).
As a male I always hated school because I thought it was tyrannical, being forced to learn and do things I didn't care about. Luckily I still complied enough to get by, but had I been more principled I might've just withdrawn from it altogether. I think a lot more men would relate to my experience than women. A better education system I believe would better facilitate independent thinking, real world problems, and entrepreneurship.
> "The cost-benefit analysis showed an overall gain of $69,000 per female participant — a return on investment of at least 12% — compared to an overall loss of $21,000 for each male participant. In short, for men, the program was both costly and ineffective."
I wonder how they calculated this. If they are referring to post-graduation earnings, this does surprise me. I wonder how many years after graduation they are using to calculate these values.
Americans seem to have an almost pathological blindness to seeking out the experience of other countries.
That's not even true in the developed world, much less so in the rest (where ethnic or religious conflicts often lead to disastrous consequences). It's just that Americans sometimes have a narrow lens when it comes to diversity: "they're all white (or all black), so they must all think the same, speak the same language, have the same religion, etc." Linguistic diversity, for example, is much greater even in individual European countries than in the US.
I'm certainly not making the absurd claim you're proposing that "they're all white so they're the same thing". What I am claiming is that, partially due to the relative population sizes, the "white" population of somewhere like France is more homogeneous in cultural tradition. Obviously there's some amount of cross-migration between EU countries, but most of the US's "white" population is, obviously, non-native within the last 3-6 generations, and from all over Europe mostly. Obviously not all of China or India is exactly the same culturally, but those are both countries who have a core cultural history for their residents that goes back far before the US was even a thing, and that tends to provided a basis for the more specific cultures that are different, providing some commonalities.
Same with religion - while the US is predominantly Christian, it's essentially the breeding ground for almost every major denomination of Protestant church/new faith movement, compared to countries that have a strong Catholic-specific background. Just structurally, the teachings and culture of US Protestant/Evangelical churches are more different from each other than what I've seen within more top-down Catholic or Muslim communities I've interacted with.
You're certainly right about countries with a history of ethnic conflict, "developed" or otherwise, but many of those are majority religions/cultures fighting minority ones in an attempt to create a homogeneous state, and separately, I'm assuming OP didn't imply that the US should be looking to Yemen or Ethopia for examples on how to solve problems of cultural issues at this point.
I'm not even sure about the linguistic part. Per US Census in 2017, only 78% of US households speak English at home, compared to 90% of residents in Germany speaking German at home according to a 2019 Pew Survey, or 92% of people in England and Wales speaking English per a 2011 Census there.
Countries like Switzerland, Belgium etc. are linguistically divided with no one language common to all. Even countries with one dominant language (e.g. Germany) have regional minority languages (e.g. Danish). Russian-speaking people live in Ukraine (without being "Russian" in any political sense) or in Belarus. Swedes live in Finland. Yugoslavia fell apart because of ethnic tensions between groups of people that are linguistically close, but religiously diverse (Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim), and there are still Serb minorities in Croatia and vice versa. In general, the history of Europe is littered with people that are not that culturally different going at war with each other, or treating each other like shit, without the need for there being a difference in skin colour (just consider the 30 years war, for example). It's calmed down in the last century, but it still reverberates throughout society.
edit: Forgot to mention Spain with its decades-long tension between the central government and Basque or Catalan separatists.
edit2: You mentioned India. India has 23 official languages.
But the data doesn't seem to point to this, at least any more than other countries. More households, almost definitely by absolute numbers but also in percentage, in the US are predominantly speaking a language other than the official language of the country than almost anywhere in Europe.
The fact that Europe has a history of strife among culturally similar people seems to, if anything, prove my point? A lot of Europe is culturally similar, and yes, often the dividing lines are arbitrary and strange, but that diversity is a little different than the US. It's not as if Oregon is just all of the people in one cultural minority in the US, whereas sub-groups in Europe are often geographically distinct to some degree. Scotland, Calalan, plenty of bits of Eastern Europe, while a part of a larger country legally, are distinct cultural units. In the US, there's almost never that stark of a division larger than a specific neighborhood in a larger city.
Yes, Swedes live in Finland and countries like Austria have multiple official languages, but my original point is that, culturally, most people in Finland and Austria have more cultural similarity to their neighbors than I do with the 2nd generation Chinese immigrants that live on one side of me and the French-Creole couple on the other side.
I feel like we've gotten a bit afield from the original dispute though. The OP was implying that the US was being ignorant for not seeking counsel from other countries about cultural topics like gender differences. My issue with that is that it implies that there's an obvious solution to the US's cultural problems in some other country, when it's likely that the reason men or women may be struggling in the European/Protestant immigrant community may be different from why they're having issues in the Indian/Hindu immigrant community, which is likely different from the Indian/Muslim community and the Central American/Catholic community or the 5th generation Gen Z Caucasian Atheist community.
Handling and diagnosing each of those are likely different, and at a whole-country level, the US probably can't just try to import a solution that worked in the UK and think it will work broadly here. On the other end, I'd imagine groups in the US probably are looking at what groups in the home country of various immigrant populations are doing and sharing ideas, but that's likely happening at a level you won't know about unless you're in those communities.
In general, the US, even regionally or locally, isn't as close to being a monoculture in the same way many of the towns and regions in Europe or Asia are. I don't mean this to say that either way is better or worse, but that when it comes to values and culture, there's often much less of a shared understanding and history, which can make sharing large-scale social initiatives harder.
Do you think there are no Chinese immigrants in European countries?
My examples were about people who have been living natively in certain areas for centuries. Of course, on top of that, we have had immigrants from all over the world in recent decades: Turkish people came to Germany in large numbers in the 50s, Tamil people fleed Sri Lanka in the 90s and came also to Europe, then all the refugees from the Balkan Wars and more recently from Syria and Ukraine, ...
Is NYC more ethnically and culturally diverse than a random mountain village in Austria? Yes, for sure. But Berlin is also more diverse than some random town in Montana. That's just a feature of big cities.
As a whole, though, I feel you're severely underestimating the cultural diversity in Europe.
We have the exact same problems with different cultural segments of the population having distinct discourses about important issues such as gender roles, LGBTQ, COVID, the war in Ukraine, etc.
I would argue the current anti-car movement in the U.S is a result of more americans going abroad for vacation to Europe and Asia and seeing what works there and bringing those ideas back. But how easy is it for Americans to go abroad? Most can't.
...
> "These gender differences in academic performance become apparent early. Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be "school ready" at age five"
Is the theory being presented that 5 years old boys have inherently lower internal drive and direction than 5 years old girls? In my world, providing motivating and directions to 5 years olds is generally the responsibility of adults.
Either way, when kids get to school, the young girls are (on average) better prepared and more likely to follow teachers’ directions. Then school systematically rewards well prepared (and “well behaved”) students while punishing under-prepared or troublesome students. For many students and their families, rather than leading struggling students to seek additional help and work harder to catch up, it just causes emotional pain and feeds apathy or resentment towards schoolwork.
The problem is not then that men are struggling to find motivation, but rather that school are designed at early age for the statistically small girl. An external pressure we should fix.
In the case that this isn't biological but culturally, we should fix the culture, an external pressure.
Either way, fixing that children at the age of 5 already get unequal outcomes based on gender seems like a problem we should address, not 10 or 15 years later when those factors can multiply and compound. For example, if science and statistics can prove that boys are more physically active at that age, then the school system should adapt and incorporate more physical activity for boys in order to create better motivation. It is just as much discrimination to not do that as if schools were to measure muscle mass and give girls a lower grade, and then be surprised that women motivation later in education would be lower.
There have been other big societal changes of the past 50–100 years feeding in here: kids are more often under close supervision, are more tightly scheduled, are given fewer freedoms and fewer real responsibilities, live in smaller families with fewer siblings and cousins, spend less time unscripted with their friends, etc.
Children in general would benefit from more play, more autonomous peer interactions, more time outside, and more physical activity from age 5–10 than they get from many schools and homes.
It’s an uphill fight though, because there are many who insist that children need to be forced to do lots of academic work (with particular focus on stuff like memorizing arithmetic facts and spelling lists) from the earliest age whether or not they are interested.
If it were up to me we’d also spend a lot more time reading aloud to/with children and teaching children to solve increasingly difficult puzzles (but not under time/performance pressure), play increasingly complicated games, make things out of a wide variety of materials, and experiment with as many parts of the physical world as practical, with a general focus on supporting the children’s own goals and ideas. (All of the above both in and out of school.)
In general I agree with all those things you say that we should provide to children. Most of that is what my own country laws says that school should provide, and to add, it should be adapted based on the individual child needs and ability. I would add to it what the article just briefly mention, which is that matching gender between teacher and student has a fairly long history of showing improved results. There is still need to do more research on the subject, but there has been studies done since the 70s that shown how gender of those around a person can influence behavior. I have even remember reading in one study that the conclusion should be uncontroversial by now.
For something like college I don’t think it would be a horrible idea for parents to have their sons take a couple of gap years to mature.
* Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be "school ready" at age five" "a seven percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in the fourth grade widening to an 11-point gap by the end of eighth grade" ~7% more girls graduate high school in 4 years (88%/82%) * gender gap in bachelor's degrees was 15 points
Which is odd, it seems like almost a reversal of the typical gender stereotypes (men are strong, ambitious, career driven; women are fragile lilies who don't really know what they want).
I'm curious, is this limited to the United States? And is it possibly something biological? (declining testosterone?)
They need good grades to get into college, they need college to have a career and establish themselves before they hopefully find a partner and have a child around 30ish?
Might not go according to plan, but it's a template of sorts.
Men really don't have anything like that, in the past perhaps there was, an expectation of getting educated and established by a certain age in order to attract a wife and provide for her and the family.
I think it probably leaves some men unanchored with no real direction or ambition, no clue even what they should do.
Women, even a hundred years ago, have always been more pro-social than men. They tend to have more friends, talk to their friends and family more often, know and ask more about the personal lives of the people around them. This far predates modernity, and has probably been true going all the way back to the neolithic era. The only difference is that in an age where email jobs have replaced the factory floor, the economic premium to these skills has gone way up.
Despite the whole "cooperation and communication" argument, most individuals aren't going to be in such a position for quite a few years, where the income differences are. During those times, most individuals are stuck doing grunt work.
Call me crazy, but things don't add up here.
By contrast healthcare is more than 3X the size of STEM, and when looking at new entrants is just as skewed towards women as STEM is to men. When you step outside STEM and healthcare, and look at high-paying jobs that actually employ at scale, you see that most of them heavily favor "soft skills". Attorneys, real estate agents, middle management, marketing, sales, speech pathology, graphic design. All of them are much more about working with people than working with things.
Ultimately the point still stands. "Cooperation and communication" are not the super valued soft skills you claim they are in the initial years, which is about the only period women outperform men in earnings. Afterwards, women are left behind in the dust as a whole.
It's blatantly obvious there's more going on here than "women are better in the post-modern labor market".
I'm under extreme pressure to hire and promote female, lgbt, or poc developers (even if under qualified). Resumes are filtered by third party contractors before they even get to me, so our company has plausible deniability. We have third party diversity groups give seminars, that are borderline insidious because they imply all men are just handed their positions and money or there is a global conspiracy to keep women out of tech.
This causes me EXTREME difficulty because my team is extremely high performance highly technical and critical team. I cannot compromise on skills or allow a hire that would demoralize the team.
Out of curiosity; how would lgbt developers be identified in this case? Since sexual orientation is not visible per se and I guess you cannot ask, is one just looking for specific patterns of behavior or dressing etc?
Staffing agencies even have facets in their CRMs/spreadsheets list/search system to quickly identify candidates.
Well, obvious selection bias at play-- only some lgbt people do this.
If any founders/managers/HR people are reading this: I say this as a member of the lgbt community: if sexual orientation is completely irrelevant to the actual work (don't kid yourself, it probably is), then promoting careerist opportunism over irrelevant aspects of one's identity is not helpful. We don't need handouts, we actually need the same level of respect as everyone else. Please stop treating sexuality as being up for exploitation.
This all sounds insane to me and I wouldn't have believed this if not for the fact that I was once asked by the (female) founder of a company I worked for if I knew any female engineers looking for work because another friend of hers was looking to hire specifically female engineers. I was surprised and mentioned that being sexist and she didn't seem to see anything wrong with it. It's incredible what a double standard there is when it comes to sexism because if the genders were reversed, it'd be national news.
I personally have worked with new hires that most certainly did not meet the bar but were hired because of their minority group to increase diversity. I really wondered how they passed their interview because their technical ability clearly did not meet the standard.
I was also involved in an interview with a candidate that was not qualified however the other interviewer passed them and said they’re giving them the benefit of the doubt because they were POC!!!
I’m all for diversity and increasing chances of folks from minority groups, but not at the cost of lowering the bar. Note that I’m not saying that ppl from minority groups are less competent, just that the bar is lowered for them when it’s not for others.
I myself am from a POC background and I really wonder if that was the case with me. Does it mean that Im less qualified and would not have been hired if I was not POC? It’s really not fair to me if so.
What you describe is but one symptom.
The article correctly identifies the result of experiences like mine:
>> "Rather than external pressures, the challenge facing men is one of internal drive and direction."
But then fails to identify this. It was hard not to notice girls were treated better by a faculty made up almost entirely of women. This kind of lopsided representation leads to the exact same sorts of problems when it goes the other way. We're just not accustomed, as a culture, to recognizing it when it fails to match our well-developed heuristics for identifying sexism. Recognizing the fact that this lopsided representation is due to the undervaluing of teaching due to sexism doesn't actually help the kids it affects.
The internal drive is crushed early, and it's not easily fixed. All the lovely ideas presented by the article won't amount to anything, and don't by the presented data, when we shove kids into a room where half of them are destined to be treated as uncontrollable monsters in training at worst and future leaders who don't and shouldn't need help by dint of birth assignment at best at five years old.
Women get cut down later in the pipeline by shitty bosses, sexist work cultures, etc. Men get cut down as boys and, if they're lucky, they may find some support later in life if they're willing to conform to toxic norms.
If (as you say) the support comes from conforming to toxic norms, does the lack of support come from conforming to non-toxic norms?
Then wouldn’t the toxic norms, providing support, actually be less toxic - at least in terms of receiving support?
I bounced off a tech career track because of all the sexism and, for lack of a better term, "bro shit" in the classes.
It sounds like you let a group of 'bros' decide your career track. The world is full of shitty people both men and women, you can't let their behavior drive yours.
I also don't mesh with most of the experiences and feelings I hear about from trans women. I knew about trans people, but had no idea about nonbinary as an identity until the 2010s, so I was pretty much listless and confused identity-wise until then. Now I keep meeting enby after enby whose experiences mesh with my own.
>> "I’m wondering, do you feel like your experience has anything to do with your identity?"
Identity is just a tag you put on a collection of experiences. You can take the tag off, add others, and make your own. Gender is a social construct, but it also seems to have a biological aspect that every culture we have meaningful records of found a way to apply socially.
How so ?
Her opinion is that men have co-opted and subverted feminism to ironically increase exploitation of women.
In practice, this meant that men who didn't go to Ivys, MIT, Stanford, and other top colleges didn't even get interviewed. Most women were interviewed, and they got multiple chances to pass interviews. The end result of this system is that elite men were hired exclusively, while women of various classes were hired.
I don't think this was some moustache-twirlingly evil plot to exclude non elite men. I think leadership just responding to pressure to increase the share of women, and the end result was this set of double standards. The end result of mandating a specific percent of women is that companies get more selective when choosing men.
And FWIW, most women didn't like this situation. I'd say at most 1/3rd were supportive of these practices. The double standards were open secrets, and many women worried that this would affect perceptions of competence. Especially when equal promotion rates were also enforced. Since now you have a double standard at hiring and both groups were guaranteed equal numbers of promotions, which inevitably led to different standards in promotions too.
And yet they obviously did get elected and had real power. "Men rule the world" as a serious statement is obviously nonsense and it's so easy to disprove I'm amazed that it was even claimed, unless it's with the modern sociological twist of "power is male, therefore these women were men while in power" and similar attempts to destroy all capability of language transporting information.
It was ALWAYS just a small group of men. The group of men doing the ruling is the largest and most distributed in history.
> I asked Hershbein what was behind the massive gender gap in Kalamazoo. Because he is a true scholar, his answer was, "we don't know."
When you see that, you know that you’re facing a good scientist. Someone who listens and looks at the world. Real science is dirty and doesn’t bode simple explanations.
Even in the face of 2:1 female to male college student ratios, look up the ratio of sex specific scholarships that still very very very heavily favor females. As if now wasn't the time to proclaim victory for female enrollment and at least move those scholarships to be sex agnostic.
But it's more than that isn't it. There are many great scientists. What you see here is the courage to speak the truth. Not to be afraid. Not to turn your back on it. In a bullshit culture run by imposters, that is as close to heresy as you can get. Lesser scientists find the truth and know they would be better to bury it to protect their selfish short-term ambitions. Those kind of "good scientists" are ten a penny.
I love computers & coding, but it makes me so bloody sad how America is only good at "movies, micro-code, & pizza delivery". We have some other fronts for innovation & advanced works, huzzah, but we are so uncompetitive (given our absurd costs of living, adversarial legalism, & extremely acquisitive mega-corporations), that so much doing stuff, making stuff is inordinately hard to support.
What id there to be ambitious & driven for in a world where so few have roles & jobs where they get to be a real & significant part of making stuff? That post-war post-depression era, of building a country anew was such fresh & wide opportunity, & that wont come again, but making a competitive internal economy with things to do, rather than a fistful of megacorps & nearly everyone somewhere deep deep deep down the org chart.... it's the choice between vitality & forever rot. Men wont get better under the prevailing economic dominance by juggernaut corporations using offshore labor.
The new EV tax-credits being tied to onshore labor is interesting. But these are still micro scale incentives, an isolationist policy assuming sparseness. Creating a more open competitive economic competition at home, finding ways to tackle extreme cost of living crunches & supporting new ventures, enabling new industrial growth... there's much to do to heal & restore America to a place with things worth doing. This challenge isnt American; we all share making affordable life with things worth doing tennable.
In an increasingly ultra competitive environment, I can't say I haven't thought about claiming to be gay.
har har har.
They'll only accept help as a favor to you. But they'll call in that favor some time down the line, by making you accept their help, which you'll only accept as a favor to them, of course.
My gf works with kids, the stories I hear are absolutely mind boggling. Children show up to school with only cookies/chocolate for lunch/breakfast. Discipline at home is nonexistent. Parents give their kids an ipad and call it good.
Girls are generally calmer and have an easier time focusing than boys.
so maybe its a case of boys having exacerbated effects because of their natural tendencies.
I helped a lost homeless man near my home. There is a YMCA nearby, and you'd think an organization that has "Young Men" in their name would be a place I could point him to get help, but nope. It's a "family" YMCA: https://www.ymcasf.org/locations/peninsula-family-ymca
If girls have a head start at 5 years old, there may be a compounding effect. It is sad to think about.
I guess if you can afford private schooling and tutoring, you can decide how to allocate those resources. In public school you're a little bit at the mercy of your zipcode.
> In 1972, Congress passed Title IX — a landmark statute to promote gender equality in higher education. Quite rightly, too: At the time, there was a 13 percentage-point gap in the proportion of bachelor's degrees going to men compared to women. Just a decade later, the gap had closed. By 2019, the gender gap in bachelor's degrees was 15 points — wider than it had been in 1972, but in the opposite direction. Today, women far outperform men in the American education system.
When debugging a system, you look for what changed. The above change may have had necessary components, but like any change, it also had unwanted side effects.
It's an economic problem and the fact is lower class men are, for lack of a better word, fucked.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/10/sex-ratio-college-c...
Many activist groups have spent generations influencing almost all systems (education, industry, politics, etc) to promote minorities, but instead of raising females to the level of males, they instead removed opportunities from males. I can give tonnes of examples. There are scholarships at schools only for females, there are job application events where only females can attend and there are now positions in political office where only females can apply. There are no opposite example I'm aware of. These are not additional opportunities, these are removed from men and given to women.
Anecdata for schools: I know multiple teachers (read: more than 6) that thought it appropriate that they purposely bias their attention in classrooms towards the girls in their classes to "correct the balance". I heard in some cases they would even say "I don't want to hear from a boy", or purposefully pick any girl over a boy to answer a question. In a room full of teachers, not a single one objected to this.
In modern times we are told that systemic bias is bad and that more should be done to stop it. And yet, we systematically see bias in the name of "positive discrimination" and simply ignore the extremely obvious fact that young boys and subsequently men have been suffering for a long time as a result.
Let's go back to basics. We know how to treat people fairly and promote desirable behaviour. We used to live in a meritocracy and we apparently stopped it to address historic bias. Surely this is now done (for females vs males)? When can we return to a meritocracy?
The article says that boys and men have less motivation, less persistence, and less ability to plan. These are synthetic facts being pointed out.
The article repeatedly says that no-one knows why these things are so: they are symptoms, not causes.
The article also says figuring out the causes is a fairly urgent and important problem, yet it is being ignored.
> Let's go back to basics. We know how to treat people fairly and promote desirable behaviour. We used to live in a meritocracy and we apparently stopped it to address historic bias. Surely this is now done (for females vs males)? When can we return to a meritocracy?
This was never true. That is pure nostalgia.
> The article repeatedly says that no-one knows why these things are so: they are symptoms, not causes.
Well, I have some ideas as I suggested. I'm not going to claim it fully explains the current situation we are in, but I think it could be at least partly be attributed to these biased systems that were supposed to address bias.
I'm mostly against the use of "positive discrimination" (putting 'positive' in front of something terrible doesn't make it good), but one of the largest concerns is that there is no plan in place to either measure acceptable levels of balance or a system to transition into after.
For example, if we now find men are struggling (which they are), do we now implement "positive discrimination" until men are equally represented in education? Do we reject perfectly capable females from the application process in order to address the balancing, eventually over correcting and needing to re-balance again? Where does this end?
> The article also says figuring out the causes is a fairly urgent and important problem, yet it is being ignored.
And it will continue to be ignored. The many systems involved have zero incentive to change. They quiet the small vocal activists by implementing their bias. You may ask "well, why don't men become activists?". They tried, look at how the men's rights activist groups were treated.
> This was never true. That is pure nostalgia.
I'm not suggesting meritocracy was implemented fairly across all people everywhere in the past, but for small pockets of society it has been. Like many systems, it cannot work without some oversight, but the nudges should be minimalist.
I am skeptical interventions actually help - the students who do the right things in their own time will get better grades.
> It's not really meritocratic. There was a clever study on this some time ago that proved female teachers systematically give higher grades to girls.
To add anecdata, I did some marking of written and typed work, and I found I was extremely accurate in determining whether the writer was a male or female.
> It's definitely not that women benefit from meritocracy.
We really don't know yet. There was a time when females were kept out of education (and poor males too). The claim is made that "women bias to counter historic bias". Based on this, now that females now perform better than males in education, is this not now a completed task?
> Indeed what I've seen over my whole life is that many women are determined to eradicate meritocracy of any kind.
Equality was simply never the goal. We don't see surges of females becoming construction workers or hauling trash. We don't see males encouraged to enter into female dominated fields such as sociology or language studies. What we see almost exclusively is females encouraged into historically male dominated fields - that's all.
i.e.: in the US at least you can get just enough to be complacent as a man by doing bare minimum stuff.
So why endure hostile environments, places where you don't feel like you belong, etc... when the benefit is "you can afford just a little more stuff", especially when you are not planning for long term success.
Contrast this with east asia or india where you have the other end of the extreme where mostly men kill themselves when they get bad grades or fail standardized tests because it means they can't get any job that matters or pays well and subsequently lose social perks like getting married.
Why aren't women in the US complacent? Couldn't they just get by doing the bare minimum?
These are just my observations, there couldn't be anyone who is less qualified to comment about women than myself, so if any woman reads this, please educate on things I have gotten wrong.
According to this, there's a preference (genetic and societal) to condition men to take risks, and that risk skews the distribution outward, with more failures and successes.
One of the main punchlines is that comparing means is useless. Men just have way more outliers in both directions, and grades (maximum-capped) will tend to be lower on average, while income (no maximum cap) will tend to be higher on average.
But men deal with that elevated testosterone as a ratio throughout until middle age. Men go through ‘andropause’ too, but don’t get enough support.
Women get used to mood swings and wild variations in their hormone level right after menarche. This is also why while gender transitioning, MtF is more brutal on mental health than FtM.
In farming, men taught boys how to work and corporate with other men. Then the shift to manufacturing meant the men were gone all day away from the kids. It's now common for women to play a bigger role in raising boys. In addition, in the modern education system women outnumber men. So boys are now being raised and taught more by women then men compared to other parts of human history.
Anyway it's a good book and written by a PHD with real world counseling experience, not some pick up artist or right wing activist. I recommend reading it if you struggle with your own masculinity in today's society.
My theory for the gender performance gap... Men need productive work to be happy and motivated. Schoolwork, mostly filling in worksheets, is not productive work.
and it felt reasonably cuz I've noticed that majority of relationships in my circle are like that - woman is 2-4 years younger.
I think it could explain successed in formal education
I feel like this gap starts closing around 20s
As a laymen though, I’m free to guess. I do think boys propensity to binge video games is a explanatory factor. Based off my experience, playing progress- oriented games tricks your brain into thinking you are accomplishing something tangible. I think the only thing that steered me away from heading down a dark path was athletics, which grounded me in the real world growing up
In the past, maybe 20-30 years ago, it seems like parents or the school system would have identified the boys lacking intrinsic motivation, and track them into something else. For example, if a boy wants to become a pilot, but doesn't know any actual pilots, there's no flight school nearby or they can't afford it, and the school doesn't have any teachers who know anything about flying, and he doesn't seem focused enough to learn on his own... then he would have been nudged into something else. Probably toward a trade or other blue collar job, which inherently have defined training programs with tangible steps of accomplishment that can keep students interested and motivated (or they won't require much training at all).
For whatever reason, that kind of tracking and nudging isn't as prevalent anymore? I don't know... Part of it is probably the push to send everyone to college, but also a general disdain for trades in the education system. Though it is true that blue collar jobs mostly don't pay as much as they used to, relative to white collar degree-requiring jobs, so I can understand that sentiment... But, no tracking/nudging means that more students are essentially being left to fend for themselves in terms of motivation, and harder today than 20 years ago. Why spend time studying a topic that won't provide any tangible sense of accomplishment for maybe 5 to 10 years... when you can play a video game with a literal 'Accomplishment' badges?
Yes, it's unfortunate that the boy who wanted to become a pilot wasn't really given that opportunity... but is it worse for him to be nudged into a different career than him for him to play video games through his teens, drop out of college, and then working sporadic service jobs? I don't know...
From my own life, I know that I was pretty unmotivated throughout school up until my junior year when I was able to take a basic programming course (not actual BASIC... it was C console apps). I didn't have the intrinsic motivation to learn coding on my own... I just wanted to play Counter-Strike and WoW. After that class though, my grades all started improving, and I did well through my CS degree and afterwards. Without that one programming course... who knows what would have happened? Or, what if I could have taken it earlier in high school? Or if my school had more than one programming course?
What's my point here? Not sure... maybe we as as a society should realize (again) that kids need real guidance in their education. Especially boys. They need to feel a sense of direction beyond just learning for learning's sake. If we're going to give every kid the opportunity to chase their dreams, then we'll need to re-think the structure of our education system. More investment to expand topics being taught, more structured curricula with periodic tangible accomplishments, more student tracking/nudging, more specialized magnet schools, maybe even boarding schools to bring students to certain training programs.
For whatever reason, a lot of girls seem to be doing fine in the system as it is. The article has some thoughts, but I can't come up with any theories myself.
It looks a lot like the intersection of the Dunning-Kruger effect and (deep breath, I had to look this up) ultracrepidarianism [0] and oh yeah, fragile egos.
It frankly makes me lose yet more confidence in HN as a place of remotely well-conceived opinion.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutor,_ne_ultra_crepidam
and it's also not a surprise that a larger crowd of HN readers are struggling socially. (and not to forget that the topic is likely self-selecting and attracting people who have a story to tell, or feel strongly about it.)
so yes, HN is not representative of the average world, but some of the stories shared are indicators of serious problems in our society. and some are not new problems either.
if you disagree with some of the points made here, please do provide counterpoints that we can discuss.
Also the quotas thing is def real. Idk where you work (I work in SV) but I’ve seen them and I’ve seen how they affect men directly.