The left talks about this all of the time, as do the middle and right. Pretending otherwise makes me question whether the author is actually trying to help or simply sell his book.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
The latter is a valid perspective, but dominates the discourse which is hardly a balanced approach.
In particular you see pointless bashing of young men. Who are actually at the very bottom of the patriarcal order, completely disposable and a seen mostly as fodder. So punching at young men is actually punching down and reinforcing the patriarcal order.
Examples?
>the quasi-marxist idea that men are a separate species that exploits women
How is that quasi-marxist?
One of Marxism's core tenets is class struggle: The bourgeois vs the proletariat. Feminism offers a similar narrative, only the proletariat is patriarchy. A group or institution that allegedly serves to advance the interests of men at the expense of women; placing men into positions of power and leadership so that they can enjoy social benefits and privileges intentionally not offered to women.
Most "*-isms" offer this type of narrative. The only thing that changes are the particular power groups vs oppressed. It's not a "left" or "right" phenomenon. Nazism offered the same story and used its ideological bullshit to justify persecution of the Jews: by painting them as a self-serving group that was occupying institutions of power.
The most effective way to get people to hate others is to make the others look both powerful and self-interested.
Sure 20 years ago the sides were reversed but now the hypocrisy is mostly on the left ( I didnt say all), specifically when it comes to how we treat both sexes.
The problem is that a lot of people, many of them journalists and "influencers" writing for a lay audience, decided they could just cross out the "socially expected" part, which results in a completely different concept that puts the onus for the behavior entirely on the individual — hardly a socially enlightened perspective — and that amounts to the appropriation of academic jargon for the speaker's use as a rhetorical bludgeon. And sure, a lot of these writers were left-leaning self-described feminists who may have assumed they could do no wrong. And yes, many of these term-abusers would go on to propagate real toxic masculinity while decrying the failures of the target of the week from their position of presumed revolutionary thought.
But don't blame the sociologists. They used a reasonable term to describe a real problem. And now they've had to go pick a new term — I think it's something like "male role behavior syndrome" but I don't remember exactly.
> The left talks about this all of the time,
every time I've seen leftists talk about this. its always in the form of gaslighting men into blaming themselves for their failures. as if the k-12 educational system isn't currently stacked against them.
No facts about it, just some random assertion. Schools aren't going to change the way males relate to playing games, sports, and farting around in general compared with actually studying.
What other part of the article did I miss? Oh, this:
> the education system isn’t doing very well by lots of our boys and men now. We have a ten percentage point drop in the share of male teachers, incredible underinvestment in apprenticeships and vocational forms of learning, and all kinds of changes in school environments that mean that we’re not serving them very well.
What changes in environments? Vocational means simply that boys don't do desks and paper well- is that true? Do male teachers make that much difference? The thrust here is that the economy has left men behind. Maybe that's true, which is more important.
You would be surprised. A boy having a male mentor is extremely helpful. Oftentimes an adult male can connect with boys in ways that an adult female might have trouble with. Teachers, for better or worse, are mentors. They are who kids spend the most time around during school semesters, and where they receive the most instruction, outside of parents.
Now don't get me wrong. Boys can absolutely succeed without a male teacher in their lives, and it's great that we have lots of female teachers. But it is absolutely helpful for a boy to have a man to look up to in some fashion.
This article makes a lot of good points about it, though its more about mentorship in general instead of male mentorship:
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/boys-need-power-of-mentoring-b...
Sounds like you have already thought about this and came to a sexist conclusion.
lets flip this around. lets say we live in an alternative universe where primary school is primarily male dominated. just drawing from your own life experience, would you ask if not having female teachers affects female students?
They act more mature because they're pressured to by society. I won't bombard you with articles but I urge you to look into the causes behind that saying.
And they continue to wonder why the right has enjoyed such a resurgence across the world. Looking for any reason, any explanation that does not require a mirror.
I grew up in Europe and was ultra liberal most of my youth.
Sentence structure man, sentence structure!
A hugely shared article from 2 months ago in WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine...
Also in the Atlantic last year:
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/21-r...
This is just off the top of my head, but it's easy to do a Google search.
Second, an administration not having "an agenda" for an issue as intractable/abstract as mental health is not a sign that they don't genuinely care.
That said, I certainly agree that the president - in fact, all presidents, left or right - have paid no more than lip service to men's societal struggles, image issues, mental health, etc, but that is clearly not the driving thesis in this thread.
It's precisely about how while liberals are recognizing the negative effects of the crisis of masculinity, they haven't been able to converge on solutions. And how that's a problem.
Disclaimer, I'm not very familiar with either The Atlantic, nor who runs allsides.com and whatever biases they may have.
Things were pretty non-masculine back in the late 70s and early 80s but nobody seems to care about that. I hate using the catch all of blaming social media but it does play a part in the attention to "issues".
I could post a bunch of links but here are two relevant ones: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/masculinity-for-the-modern... https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/boys-arent-growi...
Also the article tries to pin male graduation rates to masculinity but makes no mention of 300% tuition and crippling debt.
I hate these types of articles that try take one issue and make it the scapegoat for all these complex problems. This over simplification of lifes complexities and how much things suck really need to stop.
A common example would be the topic of male suicide, which is usually addressed as either "well, women try to kill themselves more often and that's totally not an indicator of attention seeking behavior versus genuine depression and fatigue with life" or "toxic masculinity and the patriarchy creates all of the problems for men". Both of which ignore pangender expectations and influences on the average (versus in-power) male experience.
There's no doubt that the American left (and other Western nations' equivalents) diminishes male issues or treats them as unimportant due to the perspective that men created and control all of those issues. Useful for political influence, but useless for discourse or problem solving.
The usual rhetoric I hear about toxic masculinity is very far away from the contents of that book. It is really easy to use that phrase in an aggressive way. Though, interestingly enough, Pixar’s Buzz Lightyear movie was written by someone who has thoroughly studied this. By that token, so can the contrast between Iron Man and Captain America in the MCU.
Ironically enough, some of the very problems brought up by the right can be understood in an insightful way with this lens.
Why this is relevant to the discussion:
The gun suicide rate is up for teens: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/07/27/guns-s...
Men are far more likely commit suicide by gun: https://preventfirearmsuicide.efsgv.org/about-firearm-suicid...
Unfortunately, the news tends to focus hard on the "mass shooting" angle instead of the suicide rate when discussing safe storage and red flag laws.
This is the crux of 90% of fallacious criticisms of political parties. A lot of people in power are immoral and don't care about certain issues for identity-politics reasons, but as well there are reasonable people in power who can only give so much attention to so many topics at any given time, and some issues naturally become more associated with one party than another. In a perfect world that would be fine and everybody would understand that just because the news articles and speeches concerning a particular party don't divvy their focus on particular issues in the same manner as one personally would given one's own specific politics, that doesn't mean "the left" or "the right" "don't care" about X issue or are "silent on" issue X. That phrasing is usually an oversimplification used as an excuse to bash a party disliked by the writer/speaker for other reasons. The two specifics reasons this pattern is fallacious is:
A. It implies that the people in power generally don't care about the issue, which may only appear true if you do not have a holistic sample of their opinions and policies, which is not something the media facilitates.
B. It implies that the voter base of those people must generally agree with them on the particular issue.
Multiple Democratic presidents have not done anything substantial to address some of the issues you mentioned. Not saying that the GOP is better, they are objectively far worse. But the Democrats have squandered every chance to really help this country in meaningful drastic ways.
Shit, Biden was THE biggest friend to Corporate America while he was in the senate, and that didn't stop while he was VP, nor as President. You think someone who was completely bought and paid for by the healthcare lobby was going to allow Obama to deploy a government-backed healthcare option, instead of the mess we got with the ACA?
Are you talking about Biden, or every single Republican here?
I'm well aware that the GOP sucks, but the corporate wing of the Democratic party has put their foot down and voted with the GOP for way too long...especially on issues that are popular across the country even among different political demographics. Drug reform, immigration, education, healthcare, gun control, etc... Corporations donate lavishly to both parties because it's just too easy and cheap to do so, plus the promise of having whatever party is in power completely subservient to your interests is quite appealing if you're a CEO.
I'd love a president who actively goes out of their way to fuck Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Healthcare, Bio Oil, etc... but the last politician to attempt to do that on the national level was Bernie, and he got shafted.
For example, the fact that males disproportionately commit suicide is blamed on toxic masculinity - lack of vulnerability, cultural self esteem issues or whatever. Ok, fair enough; now the counterfactual is, what if females disproportionately committed suicide? It's pretty clear that it would be diagnosed on the left as related to toxic masculinity too (like e.g. women being less assertive asking for raises is).
The left talks about these issues like that, all the time, indeed - that makes it easier to dismiss the issues or to blame them on the "victim". It appears that the author thinks some other approach is needed.
I argue that's the whole of the left discourse.. any new issues would be handled similarly regardless of the outcomes to be discussed. Can you provide any issues as counter-examples?
I mean left in US context. The further to the left, the more issues/the more the issues are diagnosed like this, as far as I can tell
This is not at all clear to me.
Women are actually more likely to attempt suicide then men, yet men are more likely to succeed. If what you say is true we should already be able to observe the phenomenon you describe. So where is it?
An institution that is barely left leaning describes one of the major causes of female depression (in turn a major cause of suicide) as being, to use a shorthand, patriarchy - i.e. some problem with men. The causes of increased suicides in men, as far as I've read, are also various problems with men.
Which is exactly the point I was making... see also, violence and incarceration, etc.
If so then I must have missed your point. Because it seemed like you were making a point about the left jumping to conclusions. Not accepting studied medical literature. Does "the right" not think any of the causes the Mayo clinic lists are legitimate causes? Which ones? Where can I learn about this?
> If this is the "institutional" view, imagine the actual left-wing view
No. Plenty of people spend lots of time imaging what "the others" believe. It's rarely leads to an accurate view.
They absolutely do NOT. The right has Jordan Peterson and a raft of people discussing men's issues. The left has NO equivalent. The silence is deafening. If you dare to bring up men's issues in education, parental rights, etc, you get lumped in with the MRA wackadoodles. The left is especially harsh in silencing dissent, and frankly every time it happens, you're pushing people further into the arms of the right wing.
Edit: exhibit A. This is the fastest I've had an innocuous comment go negative on hackernews. Tow the party line or be silenced I guess...
they are all about addressing feminists and female minorities. I can tell you from my own experience, the vast majority of the left don't give a shit about minority men either.
I wonder when I see these characterizations of the left if they are coming from social media. I’m not on any social media aside from this site I guess, so I’m not sure if that’s what’s going on. The folks on the left that I interact with in real life are definitely a very big tent group.
What people mean here is talking about problems imposed on men by society and how to fix that, not discussion that merely boils down to repeating feminist talking points. For example, one issue affecting men is the way they are vulnerable to immediate and vicious punishment if any woman anywhere makes allegations regardless of whether they are substantiated or even eventually proven false. Try bringing that up with your friends and see what happens.
The only time I’ve seen that happen is when the proposed solutions are things like rolling back women’s independence or trying to excuse things like harassment as “boys will be boys”. I’ve otherwise read tons of things about helping build healthy relationships, having non-sexual friendships, improving educational options, bolstering employment options which don’t require college degrees, helping with unreasonable expectations and mental health/substance abuse traps, etc. and have never seen the dynamic you describe.
Modern capitalistic practices are terrible for mens health. The previous paradigm was terrible for women. Any real solution has to address both.
I'm not rushing towards the right, I'm being pushed away from the left.
And this is a great pity. The left needs someone understanding male problems, able to discuss them and offer some concrete plan forward. The deafening silence you mentioned causes the gap go wider and decreases the chances of mutual understanding, as exemplified by many comments under this article.
The left doesn't have an equivalent of Jordan Peterson in general—there aren't any well-known celebrity spokespeople on the left. It's just not how they do things. So if that's what you're looking for, to understand what people on the left think about anything, really, you're going to be disappointed.
What discourse I've seen that focuses on men's issues from the left tends to not really get it. If they just tsk tsk harder at Jordan Peterson and criticize toxic masculinity harder, surely the incels will realize the error of their ways. Meanwhile, other groups are offering a sense of purpose in life that doesn't require feeling ashamed of yourself. Even if that purpose is not a good one, don't be surprised that people sign up for it.
It's hard to think that even centrists are interested in fixing the problem when there's headlines like this:
> Biden criticizes ‘white man’s culture’ as he talks violence against women
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/27/politics/joe-biden-white-mans...
That's just a random example. The article adds a bit more color, but not much. Do you think rhetoric like that will draw in any white men that don't have a shame kink? I don't, and a few weak hand-wringing articles here and there don't make up for it.