> And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’.
> In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Until mid 20th century, the definition of a man was very clear. While there were changes to customs and fashions across generations, the foundational precepts of the man as a protector and provider, which had been established since prehistoric times, were always enshrined in all cultures. Society has since dismantled those foundational precepts, but crucially, has not offered up a replacement for them. Without a foundation, the rituals and customs become hollow. They either become a cargo cult for some or lose meaning for others. As such, the identity of what it means to be a man is now fragmenting.
Many approaches have been proposed, none of the wrong in their way, and they all work for the ones proposing them. Yet none of them have been agreed upon as a commonly held definition of what makes a man. This is the crux of the problem.
Please note I've phrased this explicitly around the definition of the male gender. The statements do not imply any qualities about, or imbue any attributes on, any of the other genders. Let's keep the discussion civil and focused on men.
We do know that many matriarchal cultures exist and have existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#History_and_distrib...). The degree to which these are truly matriarchal vs. simply egalitarian varies, but to say that male gender roles are historically universal universal is patently untrue. They are clearly culturally specific.
That's a great point, but unfortunately a non-sequiter. In a matriarchy, men have less power in making decisions for the group, but are still responsible for protecting and providing. Putting it more plainly, even in a matriarchy, hunting, farming and fighting are activities predominantly relegated to men.
I'm not sure I am going to articulate this in a way that is clear, but I think that hunting, farming, and fighting have a different cultural meaning in a patriarchal society vs. a matriarchal society. If the act of fighting is tied up with what it means to be a man, I think Englishman fighting and a Hopi man fighting can be said to be taking different actions for the purpose of what you are discussing. So even though Hopis and English people would say "men fight," they would still view that in a very different way/would not have the same definition of a man in their minds.
>Many approaches have been proposed, none of the wrong in their way, and they all work for the ones proposing them. Yet none of them have been agreed upon as a commonly held definition of what makes a man. This is the crux of the problem.
Maybe the problem is the belief that we must have one and only one definition of manhood to which all males should conform. Maybe we should realize the rituals and customs of masculinity are transitory, contextually and culturally fluid, and in a world no longer as rigidly bound by intersectional hierarchies, often not even necessary.
This sounds like, "let people just live however they want to live and it will be okay" the problem with this sentiment is that it is causing exactly what we are seeing, an enormous number of young men just intend to play video games, watch porn, and smoke weed. They contribute nothing to society and get very little in return and we are starting to see the effects of that.
The other side of that is how many people who choose to go that route have unintended effects on others. My own father decided that he want to live his life and reject his traditional role by leaving my mother and going out to party. Now you have six children who ended up without the things a father can provide in their lives.
The problem is that with so much emphasis on the individual we have lost the importance of responsiblity.
>This sounds like, "let people just live however they want to live and it will be okay"
Less that (although yes) and more "let people define manhood however they like."
That's an entirely different argument than individualism versus collectivism. Plenty of men have been bad husbands and fathers within the traditional framework of acting as breadwinner. A lot of men are simply assholes (no specific offense to your father, mine was little different.)
That model of masculinity brings a lot of toxic elements with it, including the premise that men should be sexually promiscuous and aggressive, that it's simply in their nature. It often reinforces and, through popular media, commoditizes harmful behavior.
Sure, that's what we have right now. And some men choose to tap out because they don't like any of the definitions on offer. It's the men who decide there's no point that the article really has a problem with.
One interesting phenomenon relates to family structure.
About 50 years ago most kids were raised by their biological parents, today it’s about half. Boys seem to be thrive less effectively without male role models in the home for a number of reasons (many unknowns).
We are starting to see the downstream effects are that are arising due to this relatively new change/experimentation in family structure.
I honestly believe this is the single biggest driver today of the issues we see with young men, is the lack of positive male role models. My parents divorced when I was about 12 and one of the things that was really difficult for me to figure out as I grew up is what my life was supposed to look like as a man. I mean I had ideas about what I was supposed to do, but what was my day to day life supposed to be like. Luckily I had leaders in my church that helped step up and set me on the right course but I a huge part of the problem is young men now have no where to look to know what it means to be a man, so they just default to do what is easy and fun.
> Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years
Well, why wouldn't they? The historical social expectation of providing for the whole family is long gone. The amount of work required to sustain just one person is considerably lower than the amount of work required to sustain an entire family.
Not to mention the rewards for doing so are much lesser. If you build a family and at some point your wife decides for whatever reason she no longer wants to be with you, whether that's having an affair, or just getting bored. You will have your children taken away, your wages garnished for the rest of your life, and everyone will always assume it's your fault.
I guess at this point what reason do most young men have to invest in society?
I remember reading Malcom Gladwell describing how the time of year that you were born affected the chances of you ending up as a professional sportsmen.
Yet schools never seem to take into account the different development rates of girls vs boys which massively advantages girls. Then combine it with a majority of female teachers who understand how girls learn much better; and further combine it with the relative decline of play and sports and the school becomes a very hostile place for boys very quickly.
When the boy leaves the school and goes into the workplace and is confronted by all sorts of women in tech organisation but not men in tech (or the like) they immediately are made to feel that there is less space in the workplace for them.
I would honestly hate to be a boy growing up today and am very glad I have a daughter rather than a son.
>When the boy leaves the school and goes into the workplace and is confronted by all sorts of women in tech organisation but not men in tech
Even if there are more women in tech now than before, they are by no means outnumbering men, much less dominant in tech to where you can't find any men.
What you are saying here is, boys need a dad to show them how to be men like their dads, which were told by their dads how to be men - thus to propagate the exact same models as thousand years ago. Assuming that the men of thousand years ago were "true", of course.
The premise of the article is that there is something wrong with men today because they aren't living like men of the past. Within those confines, it very well may be that not having sufficient direct observation of men acting like men of the past is leading today's men to find their own path.
Of course, more broadly, the universe doesn't have feelings and this new shape of man simply is what it is. There is no 'need'.
It’s showing they’re not living like men in the 50s, but I do w wonder how it compares to prior decades. The post war boom is a pretty unique environment
My current hypothesis is that although the average salary and living conditions for men and women are becoming more equal, individual conditions are still not equal. The issue is that we are not dealing with just two groups (men and women) as some may suggest, but rather three: underperforming men, overperforming men, and women. This theory makes sense mathematically and historically, and there is a lot of evidence to support it. The equalization of salaries is in the interest of the women's group, and even if the average is achieved, the overperforming men's group could still have better living conditions and higher salaries by colectively punishing underperforming men.
The answer will not be known until it is too late to be useful.
The trappings of status and qualification on the topic slows the introduction of new perspectives. Here's how:
There are respected and established people who can investigate. They will start their investigations with the same pile of axioms that allowed a blind spot to grow into an issue in the first place.
The alternate is challenging the status quo without pre-existing status to speak on the topic. Which makes it easy to shut down, or at least make sure they're ignored in the official channels.
> His signature idea, though, is to “redshirt” boys and give them all, by default, an extra year of kindergarten. The aim is to compensate for their slower rates of adolescent brain development, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making.
An interesting idea, but the general problem of up to one year of an age gap between classmates still remains. IMHO, it would make more sense to lower the bucket size for classes - stagger school introduction not yearly but half-yearly.
Education designed around sitting quietly in classrooms, which is the opposite of how you get boys to excel (in general), but which is good for girls is a big problem. And there have been some efforts to begin addressing this, in some schools, but we need systemic changes in that area.
Obviously a lot more wrong, but fixing that would go a huge way on its own.
I also have to wonder how much the move from a production economy to a services economy has shifted things. Producing real goods for people tends to favor physical prowess, whereas a service dominant economy would tend to favor those who are more agreeable/able to make people feel good.
People who are unfit for academics having to go through higher education just to stay ahead of everyone else doing the same is going to take a toll also.
University or college isn't easy even for the nerdiest of us. I don't know how it's now but it used to be that straight-A students out of high school could easily turn into C average, all-nighter-pulling neurotics by fourth year university. Now you have the C students pressured into post-secondary study.
I would seriously love to see what happened to boys' school achievement if all we did was double active, outdoor time scheduled in each school day. And add some for higher grades that often have entire days with none of that at all.
We've monkeyed with the details a lot. Multi-grade schoolrooms are all but completely gone now (at least in public schools). Recess time has varied, and took a nose-dive after NCLB (schools were desperate to increase test scores and reckoned more instruction time would help). Recess and free time in general seems more structured and regulated now than it used to be. Fewer kids walk or bike (or ride a horse) to school—the small "neighborhood" school has fallen out of favor for big mega-schools, plus the rise of the 'burbs.
At home, I can just about guarantee active outdoor time has plummeted in the last 3ish decades, and kids come to school in whatever state home's left them. I'd further bet less work happens around the house than in earlier decades, outside of actual paid WFH stuff (which is mostly screen shit)—working on cars, mending clothes, caring for chickens or other livestock, that sort of thing, so kids are exposed to and participate in less of it.
I dunno if any of those are contributing to this, but it's not like we've held everything the same and just watched boys' achievement fall in isolation.
It didn't work fine. But now that we've noticed, it's a common trope to say "Hey, this system is succeeding for women because it was designed for them", which is most certainly was not.
Fixing that is nontrivial, but it goes from "hard" to "impossible", when so many people start it with "The problem is women".
I am not sure that is fair. The system was designed for women like software was designed for men. Which is to say that the people doing the work bring their own gender experiences and biases which cannot be separated from the design, and as educators are overwhelmingly female that's what you're going to get.
It is not like there is some kind of supervillain sitting in their lair, tenting his fingers, saying "School will be only for women! Muhuhahaha." Indeed, it makes for a great conspiracy theory when you can think that people could actually be that well organized, but back down to reality you really just have a large number of clueless people bumbling around doing the best they can, but the best they can is certainly biased – we all do it.
> Fixing that is nontrivial
The biggest thing is, who cares? Sitting here in what the OECD identifies as the most educated place on earth, and regarded as having one of the highest quality education systems around, I am really not sure what we have gained from it. Once those students become adults they don't seem to amount to much. We don't stand out on the world stage and in many ways lag behind. This is like trying to fix a dam across a canyon that is completely dry. You might be able to fix it, but take a step back...
> but it goes from "hard" to "impossible", when so many people start it with "The problem is women".
The double standard is quite interesting. 5-10 years ago when the software industry was identified as not serving women amid the overwhelming presence of men "The problem is men" was quite ever-present. In return, we got "Oh shit, they're right! We'd better do something to fix this." And, while perhaps there is more work to do, it is undeniable that great strides have been made.
Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide.
..And men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics.
..Yet, for all the strides that women have made since gaining the right to vote, the highest echelons of power remain lopsidedly male. The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.
-- I mean, wow. This is like some Chinese cultural revolution shit.
To be clear, the article isn't endorsing the statement that "sore losers of undeserved privilege don't merit much sympathy." It takes seriously the idea that men are facing real problems.
"The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy."
That was the author, briefly stating, what some progressives think. The author neither endorses or condemns said viewpoint. Before this sentence the author writes briefly what some conservatives think. Right after the sentence the author quotes an expert on the topic whose scholarly work tries to avoid moralizing about the causes of the problem and discuss what is going on. This is all obvious if you actually read the article and can understand that a reporter can write about the views of some people without endorsing those views.
> The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.
That's a really aggressively nasty take on progressives.
I think it is indisputable that the Republican party of today is vastly different than it was in 1980. It is a historical fact that marginalized men are prone to radicalization. It is bad for a society to have so many young men who are not finding sexual partners, or who are not participating in society in normative ways. The radicalization appears to be more on the right leaning side of things than on the left leaning side in terms of absolute numbers in the United States.
> The radicalization appears to be more on the right
Do you have data to support this? And how do you define 'radicalization'? Remember, there was an entire summer of violence in cities across the US after George Floyd. If by radicalization you mean extreme political views, you'll find that those on the left are less likely to date and socialize with people on the right than vice versa.
The center of American politics have very much moved to the right the past 50 years. As such, a small rightward shift from the mean has the appearance of being moderate. What is considered radical left in the U.S. is left of center in European countries.
By quite a large margin more women lean leftward in the U.S. than rightward. Women are more discriminating when than men when looking for partners so it is expected to see the outcome in the link you posted. Tied to the paradox of tolerance, and the definite rightward shift of the center in American politics, we see that it is expected that left leaning people are less likely to associate with right leaning people than vice versa.
We had an insurrection 3 years ago that most people on the right fail to acknowledge as such. It doesn’t get much more radical than that. Far more people think Biden was illegitimately elected than that Trump was illegitimately elected. I could go on with more examples but I think it won’t be productive. Try reading about the historical political trends in the country dispassionately.
> What is considered radical left in the U.S. is left of center in European countries.
Can we just put this lie to rest. Economically maybe, socially very much not, for example abortion is much more restrictive in many parts of the EU than even Roe v Wade allowed. Or immigration, it is much harder to immigrate into Euorpe than it is to get into the US. There are dozens of other social issues Europe is far more conservative on than the US.
Universal healthcare, paid parenting leave, much more subsidized higher education, more investments made into social programs, higher investment in infrastructure, much better environmental programs, much less militaristic, much lower incarceration rate, jails that are more humane, mandatory paid time off, much better worker protections, much better union participation and protections for unions, better consumer protections, much more sane regulations and laws regarding funding of elections. Should I write more?
In terms of what the purpose and role of government is, Europe is far more classically liberal minded than the U.S.
EDIT: Now that Roe has been gutted by the very conservative Supreme Court your point about abortion is very much wrong. Outside of Poland and Malta, I think Europe has much more liberal views on abortion. Especially when you consider that healthcare is generally free at the point of service there.
> The radicalization appears to be more on the right leaning side of things than on the left leaning side in terms of absolute numbers in the United States.
Holding mostly centrist views from my childhood makes me "radical left" now as politics have swung hard to the right. I don't believe your notion of what radicalization means to be correct.
We are in agreement then. What typical Americans label radical left is not at all radical in most other rich nations and what we call right wing is considered extreme right wing in most other nations. You haven’t been radicalized, what has changed is the views of the average voter. When I talk about radicalization of white men I mean in terms of where they are in absolute terms, not how far from the center they are.
You got to break a few eggs to make an omelette you know?
The detoxification of masculinity is a messy and necessary process after all. Some may die but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make as the ends justify the means. Do not pity them, they deserve it. They are reactionary radicals.
I have no idea what you wrote means and it certainly does not pertain to what I wrote. There is a very real crisis going on with men in the U.S. (and the world according to the article). It needs to be addressed. One consequence of marginalization of men is their tendency to radicalize politically. Amongst white men in the U.S. this radicalization is far more likely to be right leaning than left leaning. Regardless of the political direction this radicalization leans toward it is an issue and one should not let ideology blind us to reality. Wars, civil strife, etc. often times lead to totalitarianism (both left and right leaning) and all of its accompanying evils.
I'm simply repeating to you mostly verbatim the article from The New Yorker espousing current progressive views. Forgive me but the radicalization appears to be every which way you look, marginalized men and women, just presenting itself differently.
What some progressives say. In the U.S. no dispassionate person can believe that the radicalization of white men isn’t overwhelming right leaning.
Right after the quotes you have is written:
Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar of inequality and social mobility, and a self-described “conscientious objector in the culture wars,” would like to skip past the moralizing and analyze men in the state that he finds them in.
> In the U.S. no dispassionate person can believe that the radicalization of white men isn’t overwhelming right leaning.
I suppose it fundamentally has to be that way? My understanding is that this radicalization stems from the "they took er jerbs"-type belief about economic struggle, which only applies if you believe in capitalism in the first place. Those on the left believe in the government (or similar model of shared ownership of capital) providing them a living and would be happy to see their job go to someone else. Any economic struggle they face is naturally blamed on that shared ownership model not being realized.
Hi recuter.
You wrote: "Some may die but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make".
That is super weird: in what way would some person dying involve you making a sacrifice?
- Do you include yourself in the list of the persons that would die?
- Is it a sacrifice because you own these persons?
- or is it something else I can't understand?
At the bitter bottles bottom waits the truths for those who seek. Socrates the greek.
All situation stakeholders involved want to escalate, thinking themselves the winner ones the smoke clears. Romantic narratives replace situational awareness, as the generation who experienced a similar escalation leaves the stage.
Decades from now historians will examine and determine that one of the biggest factors that led to change was the fact that there were so many young men that were disengaged from society as one of the most powerful forces in shaping modern America.
>What is strange is that more and more women actually do not like the equal trajectory of things to come. They want to live in a White Knight Syndrome Disney Fairy Tale where Mr Brawny the lumberjack takes care of all the shit they choose to not want to do. Sort of like reverse indentured servitude using emotion as currency.
I've heard things that support this.
We need men to be more expressive, so they can be emotionally functional and kill themselves less. But, the story goes, it turns out that people (especially women) don't really like it when men are more expressive and vulnerable, in practice. They do want a stoic rock that they can lean on.
It's all so tiresome.
I think we, as a species, just need to go post-human already and leave all this bullshit behind us.
No it doesn't. It does talk about how black men are heavily incarcerated. It also talks about how white men are now experiencing wage stagnation similar to that which impacted black men post-WWII.
> In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
-- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man