Notes on Being a Man
profgalloway.com
profgalloway.com
It's much worse than that. History shows that young men are the free radicals of society. If a society doesn't have systems in place that enable them to form stable relationships with partners, peers, and esteemed communities, they will burn the thing to the ground out of rage at being thrown into a system that doesn't want them.
Any segment can be a free radical if given the motivation but right now the motivation is very heavily male dominated. Male employement is down like 15% while female employement is up nearly 30% [1].
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/cps/demographics/women-labor-force.htm
My pet theory about Gamergate was that it was in part a reaction from young men who felt disenfranchised by the offers mainstream society gave them. So they retreated to videogames and a virtual world where they could have some level of (virtual) success and esteem. And then when some women showed up there, they reacted with the anger you would expect from someone already driven out of one place and forced into a corner.
Even so, sedation and distraction only gets you so far. People want to feel that they have meaning and dignity in the real world, not just on their screens.
Women also on average go into slightly more debt: https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-gender
The pay gap mostly has to do with what careers women choose. Most men and women earn the same given the same credentials, years of experience, and job.
Do they actively choose lower paying professions or do they unwillingly end up in those professions? It seems to be you're making a logical leap without citation.
Why would a gender choose en masse to earn less money?
Damn, first time I'm hearing that women can't choose their majors in college but for some reason men can!
What kind of learned helplessness wokeist bullshit is this?
It's no wonder this country has gone to the capitalists. Idiotic arguments like this are at the forefront of every left movement. "Women can't do anything! They can't choose their own careers!" Left leaning people just like to shoot themselves in the foot and say, "I blame the right!" You could, you know, maybe fight for something and actually choose a direction in life rather than being a victim of everything.
Where's the old left that would actually fight and kill for their rights? This country fucking sucks.
My objection is to explaining away observed data with unsupported assertion.
There is a pay gap = fact
The pay gap is largely attributable to women working in fields that pay less = fact
Women work in these fields because they choose to = unsupported assertion
Dress it up in some internal dialogue you have with yourself about “left” “right” and “woke” if you wish but it doesn’t speak to my point at all. You’re just settling on an answer that feels right to you and shutting down any further thought. “Everybody knows it’s true” is pure laziness.
The assertion is supported by the fact that in most modern countries, women are free to choose what school they’ll go to.
At the very least, why isn't every student in the same major? Why isn't everyone working toward the highest paying field at any given time?
I would also be interested in data on this. I simply can not buy into it being biologically based. Approved social-cultural identity is the likely culprit.
An example I keep thinking about when this topic comes up, is how computer science and programming was considered "women's/secretarial" work in the early days. It's one of the few STEM areas where looking at it's history, no one is having to dig though obscure archives to find women who were buried or left off co-discover/creator list just to prove they did that work back in the day. This is in part to that profession's invisible "identity badge" being beneath a man to wear (still many males enjoyed it then and got into it, but I doubt his buddies looked at him the way they would today). Women were secretaries; computers and programming was secretarial work. Main stream (US) society looked to this as the way god made men and women at that time; these days they are working with an updated list of approved men-this, women-that and still attributing biology for things far outside the actual body.
Once home computers started marketing the machines to males a rapid shift happened, and now it's male dominated -- and paid at higher rates than when it was "secretary" work and for the "human computers" -- women who did the calculations of computers manually; see early NASA. Yet, today, its looked at as male bio-backed bias thing? It simply doesn't make sense to me to chalk it up to a biological sex difference in determining one's profession.
As far as I know, biological differences don't flip in a single human generation. But social-culturally, absolutely -- when the right incentives are there. In-power groups (e.g., current churches and religion with male deities vs ancient matriarchal religion/societies with female deities) will be able to change the owner of an "identity" type to whatever they want, including gendered Identity badges (example: boys prefer to be programmers and scientist, girls prefer to be care-takers and english majors/writers yet so many of the classic books I read in school were written by male authors) and then sell people on it being a biological sex difference. This includes making it difficult for males who want to be care-takers and nurses, they are harassed for choosing a profession not in their current gendered-approved work Identity lane. It's lose-lose all around, but not always equally.
On paper it’s going to look that they “chose” the hospitality industry or real estate - wonder how many are out there like that
Haha you must be a woman. Men are more severely punished in court for the same crimes, disproportionately lose assets and custody in divorce, get discriminated against at work on DEI terms, go to college less than ever (maybe a good idea, but opposite stats would trigger outrage), and yes they even get less sex on average. They are constantly told that women don't need or want them, they have a ton of privilege (even as they struggle). If you stand up for yourself as a man, people call you a lot of nasty names like "incel" or "Nazi".
>This author has been making the rounds in popular culture lately and I can't help but feel like it's because he's offering an oversimplified solution to a problem that runs much deeper than how we treat men and young boys.
Honestly I could not get through this article. This guy is being promoted by somebody. There are far better voices for men out there who don't mince words when describing the problems men face.
>Society consistently asks women and non-White people to take ownership of their own problems, why can't we ask the same of men?
Overwhelmingly women and minorities have been promoted literally at the expense of men. Companies give bonuses for checking off boxes, and skirt the law to put white men down. Society is not one monolithic voice. While some people have told everyone to take responsibility for themselves, the dominant political regime for perhaps the past 30-50 years (and by far much worse in the past 15 or so) has been favoring women over men on average. You can't talk about men's issues without first apologizing to women who have never seen anything but positive favoritism from the system, yet think they are oppressed. The same statement applies to the everyone vs. white men dynamic.
At some point, being mean to specific groups such as white men, or men in general, is going to backfire. But I expect the system to try to preempt that and force the issue, to further vilify the actual victims here.
Not the Op, but this is simply wrong for domestic killings
The majority of women who kill their partner do so in self-defense after having endured abuse from that partner. After the system fails them and the abuse finally breaks them the courts hand down ~15 year sentences[*]. When the guy's abuse end's up killing a female partner/family member, he gets around 2-6 years, because the female made him super mad and he lost control.
Agreed on the custody and asset cases needing an overhaul years ago.
But saying men have it unfair because females are defaulted to in (civil, not criminal) custody cases screwing over the guys that actually want to show up, and ignoring how women are screwed in criminal self-defense domestic killings compared to mens rage/hate/power-trip domestic killings -- is really stretching that unfair tag
[*] Don't have time to find a stat link, but its widely known and published in news articles on the topic, studies etc that come up in a basic search
While I admit that there are some men who abuse women and get attacked for it, plenty of other crimes and plenty of situations exist where being a man is a distinct legal disadvantage. Lots of places have a policy that forces police to assume that the man in the relationship is the offender/instigator in any domestic violence dispute. If you hit a woman in self-defense and don't have reliable witnesses or video evidence to back you up, you're probably going to have a hard time. There is a very clear pattern in most of society: if a woman does something to a man, they ask "what did he do to deserve it?" There are no shelters for men to leave abusive relationships, and feminists have literally campaigned to keep it that way.
I don't have a ton of links to establish my point here but this one seems to have relevant citations. https://www.mcgrathtraining.com/post/offenders-and-sentencin...
Frankly I would be shocked if you could find a single crime for which women would get a more harsh sentence than men on average.
>Don't have time to find a stat link, but its widely known and published in news articles on the topic, studies etc that come up in a basic search
Basic search is not very helpful lol. You need to look past the headlines to find this kind of stuff. Women have excellent PR and everyone tries to pander to them. Government, academia, marketing, religion, Hollywood, etc. are all on women's side for the most part and cling to half-truths that paint women in the best light (while smearing men).
There are countless other statistics that paint a clear picture that men are struggling. At what point will you actually care?
It is very clear that public image has a huge impact on what people choose. For example, people who consider themselves introvert choose, in majority, to avoid fields that have a strong extrovert vibe. Similarly, people will tend to not choose fields if the field "gives a vibe" they don't feel they belong to. So, if there is an initial bias toward men, the fact that some people don't choose the field is in no way a proof that there is no bias.
I agree that the 10% number is not the best, but the "corrected" number where you take the samples in same job and position does the same mistake. In fact, there are arguments that in these cases, you have a selection bias (some of the men in the field are seeing this field as their calling, but some of the men are just doing it as a job without being overly passionated, while the women that are not overly passionated just don't choose this job) and that using this methodology, women should overperform because there is a gap. The "real" number is probably in between.
Both things can be true.
To use an exaggerated example, if you pay the top 20% of people six figures and leave the bottom 80% to starve, the average earnings would look great, but you’ll soon have an angry mob on your hands.
Now imagine if your average man used to be able to do skilled factory work and support a family, but those jobs have gone and growth sectors like care don’t pay enough to support a family.
Then imagine an electoral system where a 4% margin separates the winner and the loser. Doesn’t take 80% of the population being disaffected to flip the results.
- 70% of men being allowed to get 20$ and 30% being excluded from this opportunity and getting only 5$
- 100% of women being excluded from the opportunity to get 20$ and getting only 12$
Sure, the excluded women gets more than the excluded men, but it is also very unfair that men have 70% chance to "make it" while women have 0% chance to "make it".
Not saying one is worse than the other (and it is illustrative numbers anyway), but just to illustrate that 1. in both cases, looking at only one metric is not enough, 2. at the end, the answer is not really "objective" or "mathematical", and two persons can reach different conclusions based on their values.
I remember reading an article [0] a few years ago that was surprising at first and then when I looked around it wasn’t so surprising anymore.
>The problems of boys and men are structural in nature, rather than individual; but are rarely treated as such.
This is why shame does nothing productive, whether it's shaming boys for displaying "masculine" traits or displaying "feminine" traits. We can't address a social problem by asking every individual to change. That's just not feasible, even if there weren't a "man-o-sphere" and "radical feminism movement" working against it. Heck, even if the root problem was a personal one that each man could solve for himself, our options would still be a society-wide solution or tossing our hands up in resignation and hoping for the best.
Men and women must work together to dismantle systems of domination, embrace feminist thought, and foster genuine selfhood rooted in love and connection.
This means transforming the cultural architecture that defines gender roles and power, because the crisis facing men is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity, and the only resolution is the ending of patriarchy. "Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit," and men cannot be truly free as long as its underlying principles are in place. To end patriarchy, we must challenge both its psychological and concrete manifestations in daily life.
Everywhere we must replace the dominator model with a partnership model that humbly recognizes interbeing and interdependency as the organic relationship of all living beings.
Given theses requirements, Feminist thinking and practice are the only way to truly address the crisis of masculinity. A feminist vision embraces a masculinity rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. Feminism teaches men how to love justice and freedom in ways that affirm life, so we can choose loyalty to justice over manhood.
The deepest wound of patriarchy is psychic, so the solution involves internal recovery and the rejection of the "false self".
To heal, men must learn to feel again. We must break the silence and speak the pain that patriarchal culture has forced us to suppress. If men cannot feel, we cannot connect or be intimate. If we cannot connect, we cannot operate in a society.
Feminist masculinity defines strength not as "power over" others, but as one's capacity to be responsible for self and others. Its core constituents include integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.
Men must be valued for simply being, rather than having our value determined by what we do or perform (which is the patriarchal standard). We must reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.
I have no idea that "patriarchal standards" are, but we absolutely should value people based on what they perform and do. That's not to say that people don't have an inherent value, or that we shouldn't care for people who need help. We value people who help those around them to the best of their abilities, and we denigrate those who use their abilities to hurt others. Regardless of gender.
> We must reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.
There is an extremist element that roughly hews to this notion of masculinity, and this is something that Galloway warns against. I don't think that definition of masculinity that was ever mainstream. It's always been on the fringe, and rightly so.
Masculinity has been traditionally constructed in many societies as a set of norms that emphasize strength, dominance, emotional stoicism, and aggressive behavior. These traits are often framed as essential markers of being "a real man," which creates societal pressure for men to conform to this ideal. This cultural scripting associates masculinity closely with control, competition, and the capacity for violence as a means of asserting power and status. The phrase "boys will be boys" is often used to normalize aggressive or violent male behavior, reinforcing the idea that violence is natural and expected in masculine identity.
From a young age, boys are socialized to suppress vulnerability and express strength and aggression as a pathway to social acceptance and identity affirmation. This pressure creates a continuum of behavior where even subtle forms of dominance (e.g., mansplaining or macho banter) are normalized as expressions of masculinity, potentially escalating to more severe violence like domestic abuse or mass shootings.
Aggressive male heroes, competitive sports culture, macho music themes, dominant male advertising, militarized masculinity, violent video game characters, combat-focused boys’ toys, "man up" language, male peer dominance, domestic violence perpetration, strongman political rhetoric, warrior archetypes, stoic male socialization, patriarchal religious teachings, protector family roles, aggressive workplace culture, male legal authority, heroic folklore violence, hypermasculine social media, objectifying female sexualization... the list goes on, and the phenomenon is further evidenced by elements of rape culture, which normalizes and excuses sexual aggression and violence against women as linked to masculine identity and power:
Victim-blaming attitudes, trivializing sexual assault, sexually explicit jokes, tolerance of sexual harassment, inflating false rape report statistics, public scrutiny of victims’ dress and history, media normalization of male sexual entitlement, degrading jokes and language, underreporting of sexual violence, peer pressure for sexual conquests, institutional failure to protect survivors, sexist stereotypes of male aggression, hyper-sexualized media portrayals, normalization of violent sexual behavior, systemic misogyny.
You must've thought I was talking about something else, because the evidence for domination masculinity narratives is overwhelmingly ubiquitous.
Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany (APPD) [1] had the solution: Isolated Gewalterlebnisparks, i. e. violent theme parks! Sort of a Disneyland of Gore on a jungle island or somesuch. There, the true POWER of one's inner ALPHA can be UNLEASHED in televised FIGHTS over scraps of MEAT... and willing TRADWIVES. Just like in the OLD days, the TRAD days.
1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_Pogo_Party_of_German...]
Outside of that context, Mitfickzentralen already exist, albeit under different branding, namely swinger clubs.
Let's have a war.
Is it really surprising that men are opting out?
But there wasn't a highly motivated and profitable enterprise targeted at me telling me I was a victim. If the "manosphere" existed back then and I was plugged into all the podcasts telling me how the modern world hates men and treats us all unfairly I might have never left that bubble and would have probably spiraled into bitterness. I can't help but feel like we've cursed younger generations (both genders, different effects) with social media and the influencer economy that has a financial interest in their continued isolation.
The American government is picking winners at very high rates. If you are a native American, here's money and jobs and special rights. If you're a black woman, here is a paid for down payment and mortgage, highly paid jobs, etc.
We need to shrink the government dramatically to get back our individual rights and freedoms. Or young men will continue to opt out of the unfair game.
The article lists a number of issues, and 90% of them apply to everyone in our society, not just men, not just the young, not just white people. Why do these young white men read "we the people" and not see it literally applying to all humans? Martin Luther King Jr's speech was as much about little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls. This isn't exclusion.
Because we live in a society in which white supremacy still holds real political and cultural power due to the the structures of systemic racism and colonialism on which it was founded, and because we've accepted the asinine "pendulum" premise that implies both sides (in this case, pro and anti racist) of any political axis are equally valid.
No one is claiming that men or white men are the problem per se except maybe some rage baiters online. Patriarchy and white supremacy are problems, however. Rape culture and toxic masculinity are problems. There are many aspects of our modern capitalist society in which the success of someone comes at the cost of another's failure, because it was designed to be so. And often, although not always, the current of oppression to power leads from female to male, and non-white to white. That's just a fact.
Speaking of MLK Jr, read what he had to say about well meaning white liberals. He thought they were worse than the Klan. The last thing he would have advocated was a "color-blind" way of seeing the world.
Where did you get that idea? Retcon much?
Doctor King said[0]:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content
of their character. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with
its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and
nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black
girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as
sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.
Edit: Added the missing link
Reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850539 as I'm rate limited at the moment:
You said:
The last thing he would have advocated was a "color-
blind" way of seeing the world.
Claiming that since we weren't there in 1963 and still aren't there -- meaning there's still work to be done -- doesn't invalidate or diminish the aspirational content of that speech, nor does it reduce the power and value of that aspiration.
While the article you linked claims that bigoted assholes have tried to hijack the words I quoted as "arguments" against efforts to bring real equality to all humans in the US, that doesn't make Dr. King's aspirations any less important or valuable.
I am nonplussed by your shallow dismissal of Dr. King -- whatever the reason. For shame!
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinseale/2020/01/20/mlks-i-ha...
Further replying to "Uncle Meat's comment" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850601
>If you only read this one thing then you might come away with this misunderstanding.
>MLK supported reparations and other policies that explicitly provided for black people.
What misunderstanding? Of course MLK supported (and rightly so) a variety of things to make those who'd been oppressed, spit on, beaten, enslaved and murdered for centuries de facto full citizens and members of US society, not just de jure.
Once we've achieved that, then Doctor King's dream will be fulfilled. That I refer to his aspirations (which, sadly, GP blithely dismissed) isn't in conflict with the idea that until such a de facto state is achieved positive steps toward that (including, but not limited to, those advocated by Dr. King) are still required.
There is no dichotomy or cognitive dissonance here -- at least not for me.
====
Continuing the colloquy with krapp (specifically this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850591 )
>The tl;dr is that we aren't there yet, and pretending otherwise allows the status quo of systemic racism to persist unchallenged.
Where, exactly, did I say anything of the sort? I won't leave you in suspense -- I said nothing of the kind, nor did I imply anything like it.
Rather, I took issue with (my perception of at least) your shallow dismissal of Dr. King's aspiration. Especially as I share that aspiration and am quite in favor of achieving the goal he set out there.
No, we're not there yet. But that doesn't mean Dr. King was lying. It just means we have more work to do.
>This part of the conversation is always tedious so I'll just post some articles and bow out.
Yes, this is quite tedious. Have a good day.
The tl;dr is that we aren't there yet, and pretending otherwise allows the status quo of systemic racism to persist unchallenged.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/colinseale/2020/01/20/mlks-i-ha...
https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
https://theconversation.com/ketanji-brown-jackson-and-the-co...
https://www.aaihs.org/critical-race-theory-and-the-misapprop...
MLK supported reparations and other policies that explicitly provided for black people.
There's no meaningful "Left" policy in the US. We only have two Neoliberal parties. There's no "Leftist" Heritage Foundation, say. There's no PAC promoting socialized healthcare, for example.
This, frankly, strengthens your argument—the Democrats and mainstream liberalism don't espouse any feminist antipatriarchal ideology.
You may have preferences about what certain words or phrases are used to mean, and that’s legitimate, and it furthermore is legitimate for you to pursue those preferences.
However, the previous commenter was not incorrect in using the phrase “the left” as they did. They were using it in a way that is a well established and understood way of using the phrase.
Now, I admit that I’ll sometimes feign misunderstanding when someone uses the word “literally” in ways counter to my preferences, so I’m noticing that my behavior might be slightly hypocritical. I could argue that I don’t say that their usage is “incorrect” or that they shouldn’t use the word as they do (indeed, I will typically state the opposite, that they aren’t “incorrect” or doing anything wrong by using it as they are), and therefore am not being hypocritical, but I’m not sure that’s compelling.
In any case, everyone knew what that person meant by “the left”, and I personally find this insistence on “correcting” that use of the term, to be a bit annoying. Though, of course, I recognize that you likely find the use in question of the phrase “the left” annoying. So, uh. Hm.
I’m not sure where that leaves us. I guess we’ll both just have to live with being occasionally annoyed, because I don't think we’ll be able to coordinate to change either behavior?
Unfortunately, I am not included in "everyone". Could you describe what they meant?
Then I shall annoy you further. I, as an American, am clear on the fact that there is no serious "left-wing" party or movement in the US. The farthest we may get is Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are in point of fact centrists who lean slightly left.
The US Democratic Party runs from center-right to center-left, but much more on the center-right side.
Calling a center-right party "the left" is disingenuous in the extreme, IMNSHO.
That they're "left" of the far-right Republican Party isn't saying much. The Republican Party today would reject folks like Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan as communists, given their respective foci on environment regulation, universal healthcare, immigration and a raft of other issues that were never "leftist."
I get it. It's nice to have the cover of "conservative" as that presents the idea that the views of those who call themselves that are trying to "conserve" the good things about our society.
But the Republican Party of today isn't conservative. It is a far right (think Nigel Farage/Reform, AfD, etc.) radical reactionary party uninterested in democratic norms unless they try to use them to beat their opponents over the head with them to win political points.
U mad now bro? I hope so. The problem is that you're mad at the wrong folks.
If you break exit poll data down by race [1], Black men 18-29 supported Harris by a whopping 55 percentage points. So even though Scott pays lip service to Black male educators being particularly underrepresented, he can't explain why this alleged phenomenon affecting young men is so vastly different between demographics.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-result...
Men as a whole didn't reject Kamala because she was a woman. Her entire party embodies anti-man, anti-white policies. She had no definite principles and would have said anything to get power. Our best guess at her actual principles is that she is a communist. The Democrat machine basically forced her on voters, which says a lot about the party as well.
1. blue collar jobs (mostly men) aren’t abundant. Simply put, we’re not building much of anything in the US. So, why would they be. Tech is mostly men but is importing most of the labor (at least for Silicon Valley). So, tech isn’t helping American men.
2. Dating norms have completely changed. Looks have become a much bigger percentage of the reason why women choose their partner than ever before. Dating apps being the main way for educated grads to meet partners is just a symptom - not the cause. Looksism was taking off before apps caught fire - the apps just accelerated it.
3. Costs have skyrocketed while expectations around men being providers have not changed. While there are a decent amount of men who probably are toxically attached to some idea of being a provider - most men I’ve met would kill for a wife who made significantly more than them. Men typically hate working too. Almost all have resigned and have just accepted that the only way she will contribute is either by her parents giving a ton of money or she will work her job that pays nowhere near as much as his. There are, of course, a good amount of similarly earning couples but for single men - you’re not often choosing your equal when out dating. Hypergamy, etc.