I would be curious to see how the effect of video games stacks up against the effect of the significant support industry established for helping girls succeed in STEM while comparable support for boys is nonexistent.
The state of the current education system is outright hostility towards boys. feminists (specifically third wave) long ago, infiltrated k-12 and shove their ideology down little boys throats at every level. any overt show of masculinity is treated as toxic. I don't think a lot of this pride stuff being pushed by the mainstream media right now is about accepting lgbtqa+(and whomever else I'm probably missing) members of society. Its more about instilling feminine traits onto young boys. Since there are few male teachers, the boys without a strong father figure at home never get taught how to channel their masculine energy in a healthy way. It continues to university where all the programs are geared towards the advancement of women.
Its fairly unsurprising that incel culture has grown rampant given the massive scale of male disenfranchisment. I'm lucky to have been raised in a 2 parent household with a dad who gave a damn about making sure I had educational opportunities in life. many guys out there right now weren't so lucky.
Now we're teetering towards a system where a lot of men have simply been left behind. its a recipe for societal collapse. Meanwhile we can't even build a simple high speed rail line or critical infrastructure. I fear for the future and I'm not really sure what the way out is.
I'll give an alternative perspective: people who talk this way try to shame men into traditional "masculine" roles
I'm not just talking about hetero vs queer either. More like, pressuring men to "care about" the marriage -> kids -> nuclear family life track. Or pressuring men to (implicitly) see women as sex objects
Something I've realized: whenever someone talks about this "crisis", they're always making some implicit demand on how other people should live
Wokeists have managed to get into powerful positions in most if not all Western institutions, so their attacks are being enabled throughout society.
That's why there's so much discussion about how to end whiteness, suppress toxic masculinity, and promote queerness. These are thinly veiled discussions about destroying the oppressor class and taking power. They were never about human rights, mutual respect, or acceptance.
Some Western communists are more direct and aware of it than others, and some actually want the system to collapse because it would create opportunity for their preferred system to emerge.
Male impotence serves its purpose of reducing resistance to the political project. Men can regain their social power by joining the revolutionaries, but at personal cost. For example, I've recently seen incels talking about transitioning as a means to access intimacy and support. I've also seen hetero white men change their entire appearance and cultural views in the last several years, in order to receive popular approval.
The men who don't do these things, either because they don't understand it or because they reject it, are being left behind. Many then join reactionary ideologies like The Red Pill (Andrew Tate-ism), Trumpland, Inceldia, or Christian nationalism. Many become akin to the hikikomori in Japan - socially isolated and withdrawn, playing videogames and watching porn all day. Others get on with their handicapped lives and try to avoid attention.
Those who do compromise are still constantly walking on egg shells. If people don't like them for some reason, their past will be dug up. If something is found, they get excommunicated.
To be clear, I have no problem with trans or queerness in people. I just recognize that it's one of the best ways for modern men to gain support and approval in a world where they're otherwise being systematically attacked. I see the appeal in picking up a pride flag in order to be embraced by the broader community. I can understand why an emotionally damaged person would go to great extremes to end the suffering, whatever the rationale.
The main points I want to get across is that this is all part of a demoralisation process, people are being victimized and coerced, and there is no intention to resolve the issue. The only allowable way out for men is to join the game, anything else is to be met with derision and hostility.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/08/whats-beh...
> Men are more likely than women to point to factors that have more to do with personal choice. Roughly a third (34%) of men without a bachelor’s degree say a major reason they didn’t complete college is that they just didn’t want to. Only one-in-four women say the same. Non-college-educated men are also more likely than their female counterparts to say a major reason they don’t have a four-year degree is that they didn’t need more education for the job or career they wanted (26% of men say this vs. 20% of women).
> Women (44%) are more likely than men (39%) to say not being able to afford college is a major reason they don’t have a bachelor’s degree. Men and women are about equally likely to say needing to work to help support their family was a major impediment.
> In some instances, the gender gaps in the reasons for not completing college are more pronounced among White adults than among Black or Hispanic adults. About four-in-ten White men who didn’t complete four years of college (39%) say a major reason for this is that they just didn’t want to. This compares with 27% of White women without a degree. Views on this don’t differ significantly by gender for Black or Hispanic adults.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/mar/why-women...
> In this blog post, we argue against these explanations, showing it is unlikely that the gender gap in college attendance reflects some sort of failure on the part of educators or college admissions officers. A more likely explanation is that the labor markets reward women with relatively higher financial returns to college enrollment.
Based on the chart in the St. Louis Fed link, in the US women have outnumbered men since 1980 (shortly after the Vietnam draft ended). While the ratio has been increasing the only real visually noticeable upticks in the data were around 1993 for 4+ year colleges and 2001 for 2-year colleges. I wonder if some men who might have gone to a 2-year school instead enlisted following 9/11.
I don't think there was any particular STEM support for women in 1980 and into the early 1990s, at least. But maybe something did happen in 1993 (and possibly something additional to 9/11 in 2001). Are these additional women going into STEM majors?