Have Men Become Culturally Redundant?

Yes, old cultural expressions of masculinity have outlived their usefulness and become toxic in modern environments. One example, we no longer need to fight off predators, so what used to be valued as protective bravado now gets expressed as violence and aggression directed toward our frustrations. Yet, mainstream feminism has become so anti-masculinity that it leaves very little room for new, healthy versions of masculinity to develop. Our evolved impulses as men are left with little space for healthy expression. My ideals are very egalitarian, I'd love to see a world in which men and women are equal and living in harmony. At the same time, I don't think a new, positive vision for masculinity can come from feminism. Feminists are telling men to act more female: don't be competitive, get in touch with the softer emotions, cry more, etc. And while there is definitely a place for men to get in touch with their feminine emotions, we are still evolutionarily predisposed to have masculine emotions. How can we express our innate emotions like frustration, anger and aggression and channel them into healthy expressions that fit in modern life? I believe that we can do that. We need men's movements that cultivate positive masculinity. Movements that tell us what to do with our natural impulses to be physically strong and fight against threats with our bodies. Not feminine visions of masculinity, but neither victim-based visions like incels or men's rights activists.

> As a result, many men are struggling to fulfill their own outmoded expectations of what a man should be. “The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it has ‘gone too far,’” Reeves writes. “It is that it has not gone far enough”—that is, it has not succeeded in replacing traditional models of masculinity with something more adequate to our current circumstances. The Western male is stuck in a culture of masculinity that is now desperately mismatched with his material reality. “Women’s lives have been recast,” Reeves writes. “Men’s lives have not.” Men have been consigned to “cultural redundancy.”

It’s pretty simple. Adapt or perish. Big generational change is not uncommon.

This article quotes a bunch of statistics and then jumps to conclusions without analyzing why (some) men do worse than (most) women.

Given that most men still outearn most women and that more women attempt to commit suicide and the ongoing (predominantly female) teenage mental health crisis this whole article reads like a case study of how to lie with statistics and jump to (bad) conclusions.

Men have problems, women have problems and instead of framing it as a gender issue and arguing that either men or women have to change I think it would be more productive to zoom in and analyse why less men graduate from college or why (young) women have seen such a rapid decline in wellbeing in the past ten years.

If you are male: Learn to adequately feed yourself. Don't make that the responsibility of some woman.

There are many more things that need to happen to address these issues, but that's a place to start and it will make a difference in your life in an immediate and material fashion.

(Crickets chirp -- very loudly)

Given the amount of suffering reported in the article, its very telling how little sympathy the author has for those it reports on.

The author champions an ideology that is doing immense harm, but the author never stops to examine their beliefs.

Remember that what is bad for men is also bad for women, especially because women are innately hypergamous - wishing to marry across or up status hierarchies.

At some point a young woman will want to find a man she can respect to marry.

But the penny hasn't dropped with the author. Maybe the great achievements of feminism aren't all they are cracked up to be. How can they be? - when the world they have relentlessly demanded is making both men and women so desperately lonely and unhappy.

> Suicide is now the number one cause of death among British men under forty-five.

Wow.

"We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: in the first 10 years after passage of a duty-to-bargain law, male earnings decline by $2,134 (or 3.93%) per year and hours worked decrease by 0.42 hours per week. The earnings estimates for men indicate that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $213.8 billion in the US annually. We also find evidence of lower male employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation. Exposure to collective bargaining laws leads to reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which male workers sort as well. Effects are largest among black and Hispanic men."

https://www.nber.org/papers/w24782

That question frames it in reverse. The right question is whether gender should be culturally important. And I can't think of a single reason why it's good for anyone for cultural roles to be predicated on gender. It hurts men just as much to tell them that they're not supposed to be a nurturing full-time parent as it hurts women to tell them they're not supposed to be a breadwinner.

Now, you can certainly find a few places where men and women tend to have different biological capabilities due to how the body develops during puberty. Given that both height and strength have significantly non-overlapping distributions between men and women, it's unlikely you'll see a woman in the NBA. But that doesn't need to result in a cultural expectation regarding the acceptable gender of an NBA player. It's perfectly acceptable to say "most are men, but it's cool if a woman makes it" instead of "you can't do that, you're a woman."

So as to the question asked in the article? Well, you've got to be a little careful. Men, the individual people to whom the label "man" is applied, are absolutely not culturally redundant. They can participate in culture as much or as little as they desire. But it would be nice if the label "man" stopped carrying unique cultural expectations. Although as Betteridge's law would suggest, that's sure not a description of the present state of the world.

> many men are struggling to fulfill their own outmoded expectations of what a man should be

Why do we men have to be anything? Why does a woman? Can we just be ourselves and not worry about it? I never have. I've never aspired to be a masculine man's man all grr and .. go camping? Not be able to cook? Those are the traits of a couple of guys I know whose wives left them because they were fucking useless as parents and were aggressive about it. I don't feel like any less of a man because I can cook my kids a meal and would rather book a hotel.

I think the problem is constant messaging that we should be something or other and that impresses on kids. Then they feel disappointed that's not how things are for them and unmotivated to find their own path.

Occasionally I see articles like this that seem to have decent perspective and conversation, but they get flagged. What would be the reason for that? Is it just a lot of people here hitting the flag button? Is it because the article is not liked?

> “The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it has ‘gone too far,’” Reeves writes. “It is that it has not gone far enough”—that is, it has not succeeded in replacing traditional models of masculinity with something more adequate to our current circumstances

What if the problem we’re facing is that men actually need traditional models of masculinity?

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” ― Franklin Leonard

Clickbait headline used to advertise book that refutes clickbait headline. Next sports.

Has culture become culturally redundant?

It should be clarified in this kind of articles that they are talking about Single men, not married men. And that those articles are a covert attempt to shame men into 'doing more' to catch up with some kind of standard that is even unspecified

> As certain structural barriers that used to hinder women have been removed, women have proven their “natural advantage” in several areas, including in our colleges and universities.

This is part of the problem. You always hear of things that supposedly women are naturally better at than men, but nobody would dare say that the opposite might be true in some aspects.

Also it's completely lacking what those "natural advantages" are are supposed to be. After all, men still make up most of graduates in MINT as opposed to women who mainly graduate in humanities, except for medicine. Looking at it that way you might as well say women are better at obediently reading and learning by heart and men are better at actually thinking and figuring things out. I'm not trying to be inflammatory here, just pointing out how the point the article makes is generally considered acceptable, while framing it differently would be considered sexist.

> Reeves presents a cocktail of public policies that include longer and more generous paid leave for new dads, a reformed child-support system that no longer makes excessive demands of mothers, and more father-friendly employment opportunities (working from home, working part-time, or working flexible hours). This would help alleviate the gender-wage gap while also promoting a healthier model of fatherhood.

As always, the solution is government-mandated social change. And why, all of a sudden, when presenting solutions, is nature completely disregarded?