Despite it's dubious underpinnings and specious applications, the theory of the disposable male seems to fit this.
The only thing the majority of men are useful to in society is work/production. If you take that away, then the other function of men (reproduction/fertilization) can be accomplished by a much smaller fraction of the male population.
We are taking away the only thing that justifies the existence of most men, and we are reminding them of it every day with the society we are creating with no safety net or healthcare.
Well said, i am so frustrated for how much value american culture puts on work but not life for men. I think all Americans could benefit from a better balance between the two...
I've always been off-put by the fact that the hyper-focus on getting women into higher paying jobs isn't paired with a cultural push to not see traditionally women-dominated occupations (nurses, teachers, caretakers) as lesser ones, a big reason IMO that men self-select away from them
Obviously economic power is tied closely with overall respect, power, and influence, but it seems to me that more work (heh) should be done challenging the assumed correlation of economic value and human value. Instead we see an accelerating of capitalism's implicit devaluing of all value that isn't financial, by unconsciously further denigrating the (again, imo) important but lower-paid jobs traditionally occupied by women.
I find it strange that the occupations you mentioned (nurses, teachers, caretakers) are lowely paid. Let's take nursing as an example. I keep hearing there is a shortage of nurses, and if that is so, shouldn't nursing salaries skyrocket? It's basic economics. A shortage of supply in a particular industry coupled with increasing demand should result in higher salaries. In fact, I've seen a similar phenomenon in a number of other industries (caretaking is one of them), where there is not an adequate supply of labor yet salaries are still low. Few people seem to raise this point, and I would love to know what is going on.
Back 15 years ago the spouse of one of my coworkers was a registered nurse and there was a shortage and I think nurses could compensation higher than an average software engineer. But later on, he said there was a lot of recruitment of nurses from the Philippines which brought the salaries down. Atleast that is what he used to tell me.
Say what? Why should increasing opportunity for one person imply some sort of diminution for another? Seems pretty sadly zero-sum to me, and the very opposite of a capitalist society.
The idea that the measure of. A person is their job is a relatively new idea, really back to the industrial revolution. Something that recent should be relatively easy to flush out of society (“relatively” meaning only a few decades.
This kind of reductionist world view is what screws up efforts to provide UBI, universal health care etc.
> The idea that the measure of. A person is their job is a relatively new idea, really back to the industrial revolution.
Only in the sense that specialized “jobs” are a product of the industrial revolution. But the idea that people are defined by their work goes back basically to the dawn of time. Many English last names come from peoples’ trades (Smith, Miller, etc.). In hunter gatherer societies, rituals for adolescent males often revolve around hunting and war. Men who couldn’t do those things were a burden on their community, unless they fit some other social niche (spiritual leader, etc.).
There were "professions" (i.e. religious calling) and of course aristocratic rank and power, but these village jobs typically did not connote social rank.
Yes though we are talking about Europe, not, say, India.
Source: I have a degree in European history and specifically studied non-aristocratic social systems of late feudal France and England. But my assertion is just as applicable to the non-landholders of the American colonies and early United States, as is well attested in the contemporaneous literature.
No, all human groups of almost any size have hierarchies of one sort or another though they can be fluid or dynamic. That appears to be a property of higher primates anyway.
Ignoring the De Jure (or De Bello) aristocratic and 2e Estate ranks, jobs were pretty loosely connected at best to one's "rank" in medieval society, in particular in the countryside. Certain jobs had a cap ex element (miller in particular, but smith too) but that would likely have been the property (and investment) of the local squire or lord, not the property of the operator.
Even the jobs you named such as cooper, baker etc tended to be tied to urban societies (towns really), and a farrier was sufficiently specialized to be in the court, but not to have any sort of special grade or rank.
In the later Middle Ages as the growth of the guilds and cities began to challenge the aristocracy, rank still depended more on wealth than job (an inversion of the aristocratic order, and that of the Roman republic and empire, where you became wealthy though power rather than the other way around as today). But even there we're talking about a small number of people; being a baker or miller wasn't really a self identity in the way we think of it today.
And there were people assigned job-related surnames as a tool of scorn (Goldschmidt -- goldsmith) where there were jobs reserved for specific outcasts (i.e. jewish people in Europe): again they had those jobs as part of bing an outcaste group; they didn't become outcastes by having those jobs.
The article mentions younger female age groups are also experiencing marked increases in ODs and suicide rates, albeit not as quickly. It is not just men dying more often from despair.
Additionally, the female age-adjusted obesity rate is higher than men's (41%! vs 38%) which can lead to larger health problems later in life, so we may only just be seeing the S-curve for equivalently increased female mortality rates.
I think if you ask most women, they’ll disagree with this hypothesis. I doubt very many women aspire to be single parents. Fewer still aspire to polygyny with one high status man.
The data shows that educated women seek men of similar means and status (Men happily date down due to different optimizations), which are in short supply. What option women settle on because of that isn’t yet clear.
With regards to poly whatever, it’s frequently mentioned that the top 80% of women are competing for the top 20% of men on dating apps. What happens as cohorts age will be the interesting part.
If I had to wildly speculate, a whole lot of folks are going to end up unhappy, and those who can will settle for whatever partner they can find once they meet the point of emotional exhaustion (ie loneliness, etc).
"What option women settle on because of that isn’t yet clear".
Well from my experience it isn't settling for an older man.
When I was in my 30's and making $100K+ I tried on-line dating and was pleased at how many desirable women responded to my profile. Assuming that would always be the case, I decided to focus on my career and postpone getting into a serious relationship.
At 47 I decided to "settle down" and resume on-line dating. With a target age range of 34 to 40 since I would like to have children. I am millionaire, tall, good looking, muscular, high-income, etc. But the only responses I received are from women 50+. Not sure how this ends for me but at the moment I feel a sense dread.
I'm not interested in starting an American women flamewar.. but I've traveled extensively in the developing world for work, and I'm pretty sure that women in other countries would be much more inclined to accept an age gap with that type of net worth.
I don't have hard statistics and won't try to look them up.
In your situation, I would seek out the services of a professional matchmaker. Online dating is going to garbage considering the resources available to you. If kids are important, I’d even move the lower age bound to 27.
Just my two cents, I’m a bit younger than you but similar means, married but in an open relationship and date. Be picky, but cast a wide net.
I would imagine a safety net and subsidized healthcare actually diminishes the traditional biological functions of males in human populations. With a safety net e.g., the males don't need to necessarily be the breadwinners/hunters to the same degree and so their traditional function is less required.
It explains so many parts of what seems to happen on online dating, but like many theories it's probably waiting for a better one, or a better version of this one.
It definitely gets oversimplified/overapplied and abused in service of more extreme MRO/Incel people, but last I looked there were actual biological evidence from other species.
The only thing the majority of men are useful to in society is work/production. If you take that away, then the other function of men (reproduction/fertilization) can be accomplished by a much smaller fraction of the male population.
We are taking away the only thing that justifies the existence of most men, and we are reminding them of it every day with the society we are creating with no safety net or healthcare.
But after the last election, I stopped caring.