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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

> Boys have more capacity to transcend social media's focus on image and beauty by finding other ways to be valued as human beings.

Before absconding boys from harm, maybe we should check twice on their health. They are often forgotten or their difficulties brushed off in studies. How are addictions progressing? Obesity maybe? Why are they all on 9Gag? Let’s check their level of racism and misogyny, it might be a proxy for self-esteem. Have right-wing groups gotten more expressive recently? Are we taking proper care of the boys?

Can we ensure, if we measure something where girls are particularly exposed, that we also measure an area where boys are particularly exposed, before assuming boys are exempt from harm.

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>misogyny, it might be a proxy for self-esteem

Seems to me misandry would be a better proxy for self-esteem. I do know men who are very much misandrist. I'm not just talking about them "going woke" I'm talking about kids whose fathers abandoned them or whatever and they feel a lot of resentment when they look around and see this is a common story. As men collectively become more productive, more empathetic, less toxic, and all this stuff I only hear more and more people pleading that we ratchet up scrutiny of men to the point Gilette think's it's a good idea to run an ad directed by women about how men need to do better and do this and that wrong and just need to get their shit together [1].

Similarly, I would say that self-hating racism is a better proxy for self-esteem than racism in general. In fact this shit is out of control in Incel communities to the point they have terms like "currycels", "ricecels", etc. You know why they feel this way? Is it because they themselves are racist towards towards others? No it's generally because they look at dating site stats and see how women are racist towards them (in a highly specific context) and internalise the racism of others and hate themselves. Oddly I don't think I've EVER heard somebody suggest that women should be less racist towards men to improve men's self-esteem, even though I've seen such racism CRUSH men's self-esteem over and over.

I don't know I see the idea that the key towards self-esteem is holding people other than yourself in high esteem and think they're totally absurd on its face. If an Indian Man or Black Man or White Man or Asian Man doesn't like people like themselves, if they don't look up to proud Malcolm X like role models, their self-esteem is always going to be shit. Men are generally portrayed as either oppressor or oppressed, either way they have cause to feel bad about themselves.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYaY2Kb_PKI

I saw a video the other day which pointed out a troubling statistic: Universities today have more gender bias than they had in the 70s. But the gender bias has reversed - instead of men differentials succeeding more than women, men are now much less likely to graduate from university than women are.

I think it’s pretty awful having one gender succeed at the expense of another, whichever way around that goes. For society to be healthy we need everyone to thrive.

https://youtu.be/DBG1Wgg32Ok

Worse: Gender equilibrium in universities was reached in 1980, both in USA, France and probably other countries. Every effort we’ve made since then for women in a particular field, should have been met with an equal effort for men in another field.

Boys are for sure not exempt from harm, but the harm seems to be as a result of equity: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...

> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”

Powerful stuff.

Quote in more context:

> Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men. They want a partner who is emotionally open and empathetic, the opposite of the age-old masculine ideal.

> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”

I think it’s pretty clear that the harm isn’t caused by equity, but that the equity exposes the harm caused by other things.

Yeah fair, I obviously don't think equity is a bad thing, I just think a lot of men were taught to rely on inequity and now that it's being reduced, those men aren't adapting.

A bit disappointing seeing the implicit bias in that article. The thrust seems to basically be "women are fine, men are failing and need to do better". Some choice quotes:

> Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men

> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”

> The same emotional deficits that hurt men in the dating pool also hamper them in forming meaningful friendships.

At first glance the article is even-handed, but reading closely you notice that not a single trait of women is described using negative terms, but men are described as needing women to be their therapists, as "not having more to give" women, and as having "emotional deficits."

This is basically an inversion of the ancient trope that women are defective men, and just as harmful.

Of course it's on the men to adjust, and that's what we see in most men overall. The ones who struggle to find relationships are the men who aren't adjusting. We should figure out why they're not adjusting, not ask the women to give back some of their hard-earned freedoms because some men can't handle it.

The inversion would be if the claim was that a trait of men is causing this maladjustment, but the claim is instead that men are misprioritizing an equal relationship with a woman in favor of career and unequal relationships that they're now struggling to find.

Also I dunno if you missed this quote, but it's firmly discussing actions women are taking that impact these single men:

> Heterosexual women are getting more choosy. Women “don’t want to marry down,” to form a long-term relationship to a man with less education and earnings than herself, said Ronald Levant, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and author of several books on masculinity.

The article also ended on a hopeful note, giving an example of a group of men who do prioritize relationships, with their Man of the Year trophy, saying literally:

> “We treat friendship as a luxury, especially men,” Ritter said. “It’s a necessity.”

Women can't all "marry up" unless you systematically disadvantage all women, such that for F1, there is a M1 who is of higher whatever (status, income, looks), and so on for F2 and M2, F3 and M3, and so on.

Given the stats on enrollment in colleges, on who is preferred for tenure track in academia, and so on and so forth, well ... that's just not gonna work out.

This is not a binary decision, there is a third choice of not marrying at all.

Correct! Which is in itself an interesting bit that also serves to make the "dating scene" (that feels too small to encapsulate the whole problem) fraught: men are, for want of a better term, thirstier than women are, on average, only extend that slang to far more than just sex. If this is true, and I think it is, this will only leave more men milling about, unmatched, which can lead to a better fulfillment of "marrying up" for women, at the cost of more men remaining unmarried.

Of course, nobody cares about men in and of themselves, so that's not really a problem.

It's amazing how easily you skim over the behavior that women don't marry down.

It's always been a selfish behavior void of love, but I suppose that one can find rationalization in needing stability and protection if one is to start a family.

Now, however, as women match earnings or even out-earn the typical guy, they still won't marry down. Which creates selection criteria of an "impossible man". Acceptably attractive, stable high earner, emotionally advanced (yeah, right).

Meanwhile, men do marry down. And none have an ever increasing list of demands. Just noticing the asymmetry here.

Anyway, men won't emotionally "improve" because that is a strictly female value assessment. We're not broken, we're just different. My girlfriend gives me a daily update of all the ups and downs and gossips in her dealing with colleagues at work. I do not give a shit about any of it, but will pretend to care.

Neither of us are broken, we're different. And that is fine.

> We should figure out why they're not adjusting, not ask the women to give back some of their hard-earned freedoms because some men can't handle it.

No one is asking women to stop having careers, or stop going to college. Rather, my point is that the article treats the women's perspective unquestioningly as reality — men aren't emotionally available enough, and aren't successful enough, and those are facts, not merely biased perspectives of a single gender.

I don't know how to fix this problem. Undoing a century of feminism is a non-starter. But you can't fix this by telling men to be better. They need the same kind of societal consideration and institutional support that women get.

> it's firmly discussing actions women are taking that impact these single men

Sure, it's stating that these are things women do. But the phrasing is neutral at worst. There's no implication that women wanting to "marry up" in a world where most men are now "lower" than them is an unreasonable desire.

> Of course it's on the men to adjust

Why? How? Even if men can somehow just become more emotionally available (assuming that the problem is on the mens' side and not womens' for expecting men to act like women), how do you suggest men fix issues like not being more academically successful as women, or not earning more than them?

Boiling all this down to a single question (I'm curious how you would answer): How can you possibly reconcile a world where men and women are equal, but women still only want to marry men that are older and more successful than them?

Exactly. So boys are hurting and the conclusion is: do better. We'll just add that to the ever growing list that defines Mr Perfect.

Imagine that in this particular article we'd say to teen girls: your mental health issues are imagined, just be sane and normal. Do better.

Wildly unacceptable, but perfectly normal to talk about men that way.

They can expect more, but it might not be all that reasonable.

Right now, single women are earning more than single men (and have greater home ownership). Yet most women would prefer than men earn more than they do. Put those two things together and you create this untenable situation where women desire only a fairly small fraction of men. And that's just from an economic perspective and what people will admit to right now, nevermind anything else.

an earlier newsletter shows this distressing graph of teen suicides and, shocker, boys are doing terribly, a suicide rate at least three times more than girls, but the author seems to find the 34% delta less distressing. the data is unsettling, but the author doesn't remotely confront the question about why 2017 is a post-2010 maxima for both boys and girls. (which would probably change the boys delta to at least 60 percent and possibly undermine the premise that social media exclusively harms young women)

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-...

Recently an organization representing war news reporters was distressed by the rise in female reporters getting killed, 6 more than the year before.

The fact that 85% of killed reporters were men...ah, well.

Men are not doing alright. And our response to it is nothing at all or...do better.

I think this might be whataboutism. It’s clear to me the original poster was speaking exclusively on the social media aspect and the fact that social media does not have a similar causal effect of mental illness specifically on boys, and so I don’t know how addiction/obesity/etc contribute here. I agree there may be other effects on men, but it seems very clear here that the original poster was talking about social media specifically.

We should not accept topics which de facto exclude men.

Huh? The article is about how social media impacts the mental health of girls. They didn't study boys, why would we talk about boys without any data on them in the source?

It's overly inclusive to insist on talking about everything all the time, lest we leave someone out... We'll talk about the men, lots of people are talking about the men, but let's take a second to talk about how women are feeling, okay?

The answer of why is quite obvious to many people but no longer politically acceptable.

There is a large external pressure for studies to show that there are no differences between men and women while there is also demand for studies that show negative outcomes of women in comparison to men. The same problem happens again and again with these studies in that nothing explains the negative outcomes of women. Except one explanation that is instantly discarded for being socially untenable.

The intersectionalist looks at the studies and declares, "It must be something - let's keep looking!" while the sexist takes a look and nods.

Nobody is going to risk their careers or their funding when they can continue being paid to investigate other avenues of explanation. The suffering of people will continue until a more acceptable explanation is found.

And because I don't wish to speak between the lines: There are psychological and emotional differences between men and women. And, from all the humans I've known at least, women tend to give more of a shit about the opinions of other people than men give a shit about the opinions of other people. While the toxic negativity of social media impacts both genders I would honestly be shocked if it didn't impact women more if for no reason other than because they care more.

I have built my whole identity on not caring what people think of me, and of me not asking for anything from anyone.

It's lonely.

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