> What we can do, however, is start talking more about the specific problem of dangerous male immaturity without falling into endless loops about gun control, public health, or “toxic masculinity.” We can, in schools and colleges, pay closer attention to the boys and young men who seem to be sliding toward darkness, perhaps with more attempts to pull them toward a community or into mentorship with older men.
>If we recognize, however, that our current arguments are dead ends, we can start anew, and become more creative about finding solutions before we produce yet another generation of silent time bombs.
This touches on one of the most overlooked points. Blame is deflected to everything and everyone else while the troubled boys are ignored long before they explode. The 'angry men/boys' are responsible for their own feelings and actions - not anyone else's for changing the paradigm - it's their job (and every other person's) to adapt functionally to the world around them. But it's also our job to not dismiss them as 'boys going through growing pains' and after reading comments on similar topics, it seems everyone is blaming feminist for it somehow and expecting them to fix it. Where are the other men (yes I know there are some, but it seems not enough) helping these boys adapt and become secure thriving members of society, we can't just expect women to do all the work and then complain when they aren't focusing all their attention towards propping up boys who are pissed that the illusion (guaranteed success and family) they were promised was taken away.
There's an asymmetry here that I don't know how to defeat.
There are plenty of people encouraging the angry men to be angry. It's a good topic for demagoguery. It's readily amenable to a wide variety of rhetorical tactics: appeals to tradition, tying anti-feminism to a variety of other prejudices, exploiting individual stories into persecution complexes, etc.
It's hard to be bombastic about adapting to society. There are a great many positive examples of men who have done very well by being decent human beings -- and they are demonized by people who benefit from having a large, angry contingent of men. Even many women can buy into that -- the men in their lives accept a deformed caricature of feminism, and it's in their interests to accept that characterization.
It's hard to do positive things for them when they're so busy making it worse for themselves -- and following people who urge them on to it. It doesn't mean we won't keep trying, but the single biggest jump would be have people stop encouraging a deluded version of the world where everybody is against them. Without that it is, at best, a long road ahead.
Anyone else do a double-take when they got to the part about Edward Snowden?
The author of this article must either really love the NSA or really hate Snowden if he's willing to undermine his entire thesis just to get that jab in.
"We can lament some of those changes—I certainly do, particularly the collapse of a kind of mature sense of stoicism and self-control among men. But we cannot reverse them, not least because that would, in effect, require turning back time and unraveling years of social progress."
There it is! Thank you Feminism, Very Cool.
Hopefully I will make enough money to keep my wife happy at home and OUT of the workforce.
>If we recognize, however, that our current arguments are dead ends, we can start anew, and become more creative about finding solutions before we produce yet another generation of silent time bombs.
This touches on one of the most overlooked points. Blame is deflected to everything and everyone else while the troubled boys are ignored long before they explode. The 'angry men/boys' are responsible for their own feelings and actions - not anyone else's for changing the paradigm - it's their job (and every other person's) to adapt functionally to the world around them. But it's also our job to not dismiss them as 'boys going through growing pains' and after reading comments on similar topics, it seems everyone is blaming feminist for it somehow and expecting them to fix it. Where are the other men (yes I know there are some, but it seems not enough) helping these boys adapt and become secure thriving members of society, we can't just expect women to do all the work and then complain when they aren't focusing all their attention towards propping up boys who are pissed that the illusion (guaranteed success and family) they were promised was taken away.