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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

This is part of a greater trend in the United States for higher education. Women now enroll in college and I believe matriculate at a rate of two to one when compared against men.

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

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Some ideas:

• 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

Plus, the education system is more suited for girls. It has been shown that boys learn best by doing and there is a real lack of practical work in schools.

I think, laying blame to a demographic and then considering the cased closed is a dumb kind of logic anyway.

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.

> 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.

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.)

There are absolutely intrinsic differences between men and women.

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.

Suggesting that high testosterone being correlated with higher rates of violence implies that men are " intrinsically less suited to productive participation in a post-industrial economy" is an enormous logical leap.

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.

I don't know if there's a causal link between testosterone and violence. I'm on feminizing HRT, so my T is lower than it used to be, and I still get angry about as much as I did before.

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.

my suspicion would be that male violence is linked very strongly to dating/sex/mating. though that's probably true for both genders. women w/ more inward domestic violence, men more violent against competitors.

In current society I suspect a man being abused by a woman is considered "a joke" (the words "man up" come to mind)

There is no reliable evidence that testosterone increases the propensity to violence in humans.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2019.104644

Black people have a higher murder rate than white people worldwide. That does not mean black people are more intrinsically violent than white people or "intrinsically less suited to productive participation in a post-industrial economy".

Often these problems are cause by systems we have set up rather than by innate character qualities.

Women aren't certainly more productive in a post industrialized economy. Its only due to government mandated favoritism and hand outs that women gain economic independence. After all, if the old claim of women doing more for less were true, no one would be forced to hire them. Any venture primarily manned by women fails for all the usual unmentionable reasons, and we have to pretend this isn't true. They sometimes say women are better represented in successful companies, but as with all consequences of regulatory capture, its more that they are able to carry the burden to suppress the competition.

I read this and interpret this with "men communicate more with the body than with words", rather than "more violent". Yes the communication can be hostile.

I am a male and I am sick and tired of seeing males moan about how hard they have it and that they would rather play video games all day long than work to improve their future. Grow a spine, put on your big boy pants, and get to work!

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.

>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.

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

I don't think that is the problem for a number of reasons.

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

>First off, something can be bad for simply hurting all men. You don't have to resort to a racial analysis.

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.

I think people (like me) react because they feel it is dismissive of the harm done to non-POC people.

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.

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