What Did Men Do to Deserve This?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Young men are still being nailed to the wall with patriarchal standards, such as having good incomes and prestigious careers and owning a house and being (largely) debt-free. Without these, the vast majority of women will consider these men as “non-persons”, and utterly ignore them in terms of potential romantic candidates. Exhibit № 1: the “666 man” rule that now enjoys non-trivial levels of use among young(er) women.
Unfortunately, the tools and paths to achieve these benchmarks are almost completely denied to young men, especially in comparison to prior generations like the boomers and the earlier half of GenX. And then they face twice as much competition for those benchmarks as their grandfathers did. That alone is a massive hammer blow against “success”.
Unless the expectations being piled on young men get radically lowered to be more in-line with actual opportunities, the current chasm will continue to widen, with more and more men being left behind.
What also bothers me about this article is the intellectually bankrupt usage of the so-called “gender wage gap” of 17%, which compares the wages of all men against the wages of all women. That’s no different than comparing a 26yo male junior lawyer to a 26yo female barista and complaining about the barista’s low wage.
Adjusting for the job itself, certifications pursued, hours worked, availability to work and the nature of the work itself, the actual “wage gap” almost vanishes to 1.5-3%, depending on industry. In many larger metro regions - and keeping all other things the same, such as specializations, education, time worked, etc. - young women under the age of 30 actually out-earn men of the same age by up to 20%. And yet, that is always conveniently ignored.
So do I agree with Galloway? Broadly, yes.
And he is worlds better than the 1ncel movement, which has an overarching tendency to blame women instead of focusing on self- improvement.
But while I think that helping men is an important part of the solution, there are insurmountable and systemic societal and economic barriers that young men have no power to affect, and never will.
Helping men will only go so far, and I fear that it will be nowhere near enough.
Dissolve the mythic residue from all of it: cause and effect folk science explanations.
Unfortunately, biology and evolution has seen fit to make the sexes noticeably different, for which some amount of “division of labour” makes absolute rational sense.
And the flip side of the problem involves a majority of women demanding “the patriarchy” when they overwhelmingly choose men who are taller, stronger, wealthier, and in more prestigious positions than they themselves are.
You will rarely ever see a female CEO or well-paid female member of upper manglement date and marry a younger male barista who makes a tiny fraction of what they do, but flip the genders and it happens all the time.
Science disagrees with you there:
• https://stanmed.stanford.edu/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-...
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6418873/
Navigation is just one such major mental difference, where women are far more effective with waypoints and landmarks in familiar spaces, whereas men are better at dead reckoning over unfamiliar land.
But I’m NOT talking about mental differences, but physical ones:
• grip strength,
• overall strength,
• height,
• gait,
• physiological responses to stressors,
• ability to better survive physical (unarmed) combat,
• some forms of physical endurance (each sex has its own specialty),
• reaction time,
• lactation,
• childbirth,
• and many more
All of which confer a distinct advantage to one sex over the other.
For example, the reason why we have the trope of the pickle jar being opened effortlessly by the man and the woman being entirely unable to open it, comes down entirely to gender differences to how collagen exists in the palms of the hand. Women have collagen running in just one direction, which allows extreme forces to begin tearing the skin and causing pain at much lower levels of force applied. Meanwhile, men have cross-linked collagen which allows extreme forces them to impart far more force on something in their grip before experiencing tearing and pain.
Strength is another male feature which completely blows women out of the water: almost all men are stronger than almost all women. It’s why female Olympic athletes can and frequently are trounced by teenage male athletes.
And of course, there is the big doozy: it is impossible for a genetic and physical male to become pregnant and give birth. And while a tiny handful of men have been able to lactate with sufficient stimulation, it is still exceptionally rare to achieve and may rely on non-typical (for a man) hormonal balances to achieve.
So physical differences can and do lend themselves very logically and rationally to a limited range of separation of concerns.
Physical prowess is no longer convincingly conferring a definitive route to dominance unless there’s a patriarchal overreach into coercion that defies growing universal regularities of equalities in bills of rights etc.
The fact women give birth does in no way restrict them into submission.
Please reject all patriarchal myths in order to discus partnership goals.
Humans are not like other primates, we’re a mix of evolutionary and biological factors that result in a continuum rather than a strict dichotomy, humans fall somewhere between "tournament mating" species and "pair-bonding" species. We’re not locked into any certain gender dominant if you know endocrinology and evolution.
There is no true dominant outcome once the mental playing field is leveled. Male aggression is uniquely equalized in feminine control.
Having a physical advantage is not dominance. It is merely capability with regards to the objective in play, which is where the argument of division of labour comes into play.
You want to have people play to their capabilities and (metaphorical) strengths. It’s how a society (or any cohesive unit of people, actually) maximizes its effectiveness and utility for everyone concerned.
To not do so is akin to having two people paint a wall, and for the sake of appearances you have the tall one paint near the floor and the short person paint up near the ceiling. Unless other attributes significantly overcome the massive disadvantages of the height difference, it would be madness to force them to paint the wall like this.
Hypotheticals regarding where optimums are best expressed are irrelevant in terms of a partnership future, they will be negotiated.
That’s evolution, especially as patriarchy is dismantled far too slowly. When do we demote these male gods? The dinosaur skeleton of patriarchy?
Keep in mind, patriarchy is just a narrative that masculinity can never resurrect.
And the question becomes how do we ensure parity or partnership, otherwise women can possibly implement the pendulum swing matriarchal dominance? The patriarchy (male mono mythic gods, inheritance favorability, dominance, you name it) is slowly coming to an end. And those that sneaked by in the past on the coattails of dominance are not getting into college nor can this plurality compete in an open market.
Retrieving masculinity isn’t bringing back the dominance or self image of it.
What did men do to deserve this? We accepted evolution and the switchover happens.
Lovely pro-female sentiment, but be aware: every time this has happened in history, these “redundant” men have conducted violent revolution because they had had nothing left to lose. It was no different during the dawn of agriculture, where less than one man had offspring for every 17 women who did… those that could not secure wives to produce children ended up burning their societies to the ground just to feel a little warmth.
This is why many religions - led invariably by men - created monogamy and the nuclear family and draconian prohibitions against infidelity: because they knew that men without options were men who had no skin in the game, and so had no compunction against destroying it all in order to gain even a little.
Ancient men were not idiots. They just had to work with what was available to them, which was limiting AF.
We have the benefit of knowing deep history and psychology and sociology and the evolutionary drive behind mate choices to help us change those mating/gender choices that still demand “the patriarchy” from young men, yet force them to do so in a social and economic climate that has almost completely eliminated the opportunities they might have to reach those benchmarks.
Change is needed on both sides of the fence. Issues don’t just leap out of holes in the ground, fully formed; as the old saying goes it takes two to tango.
Partnership males are ready to negotiate, the negotiations are social and online.
Are Gaza, Ukraine, Somalia and ISS in Syria examples of partnership males having social and online negotiations? I ask only because they are examples of the person you are responding to: a group of males deciding the risk of the death and destruction of everything they hold precious is preferable to what they have now.
To me it looks more like two groups of males fighting to near death for the privilege of running some godforsaken plot of land. The policy is scorched earth. Society, farms, food, schools are disposable pawns in the game. The women and their needs and wants are irrelevant, except as a source of children to feed the armies.
Recently we've seen the USA start down the same road, electing a narcissist who openly bragged about how he demeaned women while on the campaign trail. Maybe they like his attitude to women (and many of the other pillars of modern society), but I suspect it was more a case of just wanting change, and those things matter less than the change they were after.
I'd love if it males really did start solving their problems with social and online negotiations. But history, even recent history is not kind to that view. "The Goodness Paradox" proposes a very different theory to how we got to where we are now. It posits that males solved their problems over the millennia by murdering each other. The paradox is that created evolutionary forces leading to males who were kinder and gentler to others in their village. But to males outside that group, it was always scorched earth, winner takes all.
Historians and social scientists widely agree that a significant surplus of unmarried, low-status young males can cause substantial social and political unrest, a pattern observed in ancient societies and documented throughout history.
The core issue stems from an imbalance in the "marriage market" (often referred to as a "marriage squeeze"), where these "surplus men" have little or no prospect of finding a spouse, establishing a family, or gaining a respected place in society. This lack of integration often leads to frustration and alienation, making these individuals more likely to engage in risk-taking behavior, crime, and violence.
Societies have historically dealt with this "bachelor problem" in several ways, and the failure to do so often resulted in conflict:
• Formation of "Bare Branches": In Imperial China, unmarried men were termed guang gun-er ("bare branches" or "bare sticks"). The Ming Code specifically labeled these marginalized individuals as a potential source of illegal activities and unrest. The Nien Rebellion in the mid-19th century has been linked by some scholars to the presence of large numbers of these disaffected, mobile, and unmarried men.
• Redirected Aggression (War and Exploration): Many land-owning societies historically managed excess male populations by sending them away to fight in wars, join the priesthood, or colonize new territories. Examples often cited include:
• Viking raids: Speculated to be partly driven by a system where not all men could inherit land and marry.
• Mongol warbands: United by leaders like Genghis Khan, potentially channeling the energy of unmarried young men into conquest.
• Janissaries: The Ottoman Empire created a military class of forced Christian converts who were kept as unmarried, loyal soldiers, effectively absorbing a potentially destabilizing group.
• Modern Analogy: In modern times, the pattern repeats in fragile states or cities where extremist groups and gangs heavily recruit from large pools of frustrated young men who lack family ties, jobs, or a clear future.
The existence of a large group of unattached men with little to lose is a recognized warning sign for social instability, leading to domestic and international violence.
• https://rhyd.substack.com/p/the-surplus-male-problem
• https://kar.kent.ac.uk/11430/1/surplus_men_IS_article.pdf
• https://magazine.byu.edu/article/the-dangers-of-losing-balan...