What’s the Matter with Men?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
-- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Many approaches have been proposed, none of the wrong in their way, and they all work for the ones proposing them. Yet none of them have been agreed upon as a commonly held definition of what makes a man. This is the crux of the problem.
Please note I've phrased this explicitly around the definition of the male gender. The statements do not imply any qualities about, or imbue any attributes on, any of the other genders. Let's keep the discussion civil and focused on men.
We do know that many matriarchal cultures exist and have existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#History_and_distrib...). The degree to which these are truly matriarchal vs. simply egalitarian varies, but to say that male gender roles are historically universal universal is patently untrue. They are clearly culturally specific.
Maybe the problem is the belief that we must have one and only one definition of manhood to which all males should conform. Maybe we should realize the rituals and customs of masculinity are transitory, contextually and culturally fluid, and in a world no longer as rigidly bound by intersectional hierarchies, often not even necessary.
The other side of that is how many people who choose to go that route have unintended effects on others. My own father decided that he want to live his life and reject his traditional role by leaving my mother and going out to party. Now you have six children who ended up without the things a father can provide in their lives.
The problem is that with so much emphasis on the individual we have lost the importance of responsiblity.
Less that (although yes) and more "let people define manhood however they like."
That's an entirely different argument than individualism versus collectivism. Plenty of men have been bad husbands and fathers within the traditional framework of acting as breadwinner. A lot of men are simply assholes (no specific offense to your father, mine was little different.)
That model of masculinity brings a lot of toxic elements with it, including the premise that men should be sexually promiscuous and aggressive, that it's simply in their nature. It often reinforces and, through popular media, commoditizes harmful behavior.
About 50 years ago most kids were raised by their biological parents, today it’s about half. Boys seem to be thrive less effectively without male role models in the home for a number of reasons (many unknowns).
We are starting to see the downstream effects are that are arising due to this relatively new change/experimentation in family structure.
Cultures that can’t respond will just die as we see now.
Well, why wouldn't they? The historical social expectation of providing for the whole family is long gone. The amount of work required to sustain just one person is considerably lower than the amount of work required to sustain an entire family.
I guess at this point what reason do most young men have to invest in society?
Yet schools never seem to take into account the different development rates of girls vs boys which massively advantages girls. Then combine it with a majority of female teachers who understand how girls learn much better; and further combine it with the relative decline of play and sports and the school becomes a very hostile place for boys very quickly.
When the boy leaves the school and goes into the workplace and is confronted by all sorts of women in tech organisation but not men in tech (or the like) they immediately are made to feel that there is less space in the workplace for them.
I would honestly hate to be a boy growing up today and am very glad I have a daughter rather than a son.
Even if there are more women in tech now than before, they are by no means outnumbering men, much less dominant in tech to where you can't find any men.
Popular entertainment (movies, music, social media) are giving boys the wrong messages.
Of course, more broadly, the universe doesn't have feelings and this new shape of man simply is what it is. There is no 'need'.
The trappings of status and qualification on the topic slows the introduction of new perspectives. Here's how:
There are respected and established people who can investigate. They will start their investigations with the same pile of axioms that allowed a blind spot to grow into an issue in the first place.
The alternate is challenging the status quo without pre-existing status to speak on the topic. Which makes it easy to shut down, or at least make sure they're ignored in the official channels.
An interesting idea, but the general problem of up to one year of an age gap between classmates still remains. IMHO, it would make more sense to lower the bucket size for classes - stagger school introduction not yearly but half-yearly.
Obviously a lot more wrong, but fixing that would go a huge way on its own.
Can this partially explain the change?
University or college isn't easy even for the nerdiest of us. I don't know how it's now but it used to be that straight-A students out of high school could easily turn into C average, all-nighter-pulling neurotics by fourth year university. Now you have the C students pressured into post-secondary study.
At home, I can just about guarantee active outdoor time has plummeted in the last 3ish decades, and kids come to school in whatever state home's left them. I'd further bet less work happens around the house than in earlier decades, outside of actual paid WFH stuff (which is mostly screen shit)—working on cars, mending clothes, caring for chickens or other livestock, that sort of thing, so kids are exposed to and participate in less of it.
I dunno if any of those are contributing to this, but it's not like we've held everything the same and just watched boys' achievement fall in isolation.
Fixing that is nontrivial, but it goes from "hard" to "impossible", when so many people start it with "The problem is women".
I am not sure that is fair. The system was designed for women like software was designed for men. Which is to say that the people doing the work bring their own gender experiences and biases which cannot be separated from the design, and as educators are overwhelmingly female that's what you're going to get.
It is not like there is some kind of supervillain sitting in their lair, tenting his fingers, saying "School will be only for women! Muhuhahaha." Indeed, it makes for a great conspiracy theory when you can think that people could actually be that well organized, but back down to reality you really just have a large number of clueless people bumbling around doing the best they can, but the best they can is certainly biased – we all do it.
> Fixing that is nontrivial
The biggest thing is, who cares? Sitting here in what the OECD identifies as the most educated place on earth, and regarded as having one of the highest quality education systems around, I am really not sure what we have gained from it. Once those students become adults they don't seem to amount to much. We don't stand out on the world stage and in many ways lag behind. This is like trying to fix a dam across a canyon that is completely dry. You might be able to fix it, but take a step back...
> but it goes from "hard" to "impossible", when so many people start it with "The problem is women".
The double standard is quite interesting. 5-10 years ago when the software industry was identified as not serving women amid the overwhelming presence of men "The problem is men" was quite ever-present. In return, we got "Oh shit, they're right! We'd better do something to fix this." And, while perhaps there is more work to do, it is undeniable that great strides have been made.
Hard times make strong men,
Strong men make good times,
Good times make weak men,
And weak men make hard times.
Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide.
..And men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics.
..Yet, for all the strides that women have made since gaining the right to vote, the highest echelons of power remain lopsidedly male. The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.
That's a really aggressively nasty take on progressives.
Do you have data to support this? And how do you define 'radicalization'? Remember, there was an entire summer of violence in cities across the US after George Floyd. If by radicalization you mean extreme political views, you'll find that those on the left are less likely to date and socialize with people on the right than vice versa.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/24/most-democr...
The center of American politics have very much moved to the right the past 50 years. As such, a small rightward shift from the mean has the appearance of being moderate. What is considered radical left in the U.S. is left of center in European countries.
By quite a large margin more women lean leftward in the U.S. than rightward. Women are more discriminating when than men when looking for partners so it is expected to see the outcome in the link you posted. Tied to the paradox of tolerance, and the definite rightward shift of the center in American politics, we see that it is expected that left leaning people are less likely to associate with right leaning people than vice versa.
We had an insurrection 3 years ago that most people on the right fail to acknowledge as such. It doesn’t get much more radical than that. Far more people think Biden was illegitimately elected than that Trump was illegitimately elected. I could go on with more examples but I think it won’t be productive. Try reading about the historical political trends in the country dispassionately.
Can we just put this lie to rest. Economically maybe, socially very much not, for example abortion is much more restrictive in many parts of the EU than even Roe v Wade allowed. Or immigration, it is much harder to immigrate into Euorpe than it is to get into the US. There are dozens of other social issues Europe is far more conservative on than the US.
In terms of what the purpose and role of government is, Europe is far more classically liberal minded than the U.S.
EDIT: Now that Roe has been gutted by the very conservative Supreme Court your point about abortion is very much wrong. Outside of Poland and Malta, I think Europe has much more liberal views on abortion. Especially when you consider that healthcare is generally free at the point of service there.
https://www.politico.eu/article/abortion-chart-world-map-eur...
Holding mostly centrist views from my childhood makes me "radical left" now as politics have swung hard to the right. I don't believe your notion of what radicalization means to be correct.
The detoxification of masculinity is a messy and necessary process after all. Some may die but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make as the ends justify the means. Do not pity them, they deserve it. They are reactionary radicals.
..Cool and normal.
Right after the quotes you have is written:
Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, and a self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” would like to skip past the moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them in.
I suppose it fundamentally has to be that way? My understanding is that this radicalization stems from the "they took er jerbs"-type belief about economic struggle, which only applies if you believe in capitalism in the first place. Those on the left believe in the government (or similar model of shared ownership of capital) providing them a living and would be happy to see their job go to someone else. Any economic struggle they face is naturally blamed on that shared ownership model not being realized.
All situation stakeholders involved want to escalate, thinking themselves the winner ones the smoke clears. Romantic narratives replace situational awareness, as the generation who experienced a similar escalation leaves the stage.