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“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” ― Franklin Leonard
Article mentioning suicide is the leading cause of deaths in young men in the opening paragraph.

You: probably due to their past privilege

Suicide is the leading cause of death among young men because a combination of medical science and safety regulations have made all the other causes incredibly unlikely.
Why is it not the leading cause of death for young women then?
Because something else kills more of them.
I don't see how this kind of truism helps the discussion.
Honestly, looking at the ONS data I grabbed, it's not even a truism. Male suicide is the top (non-accidental, which isn't mentioned in the article) cause of death among all people aged 15-45 in England and Wales. Boys and Men in that age category just do twice as much dying overall, and the only significant categories (of my arbitrary cutoff) that women are doing worse in is cancer and childbirth.
Oh I was specifically talking about onion2k's statement that essentially boiled down to "X is not the leading cause of death for young women because something else is", which is a truism and not useful in any way.

The interesting information here would be why it is for one cohort but not the other.

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One thing I've noticed about this line is it gets used from all sorts of groups feel like they are the ones which were oppressed / the other group is the oppressor.
I don't think it's a particularly useful thing to say about yourself because, as you say, lots of people use it to try to claim they're being oppressed when really they're just losing their privilege.

It's very accurate when you're looking from the outside inwards though, such as this case where someone is claiming men are becoming irrelevant when obviously it's just that others are being seen more equally.

> lots of people use it to try to claim they're being oppressed when really they're just losing their privilege.

FWIW, "those people are oppressors, and are now being treated equally" is just as emotionally charged.

I generally think it's not a particularly useful thing for anyone to say.

I find it ironic when people say that, the quote could easily be used in the opposite direction.
This quote only works for those who experienced both sides of the change. And the problems brought up in the article is mostly about the younger generations.
Has culture become culturally redundant?
> Suicide is now the number one cause of death among British men under forty-five.

Wow.

What else do you expect them to die of?

This statistic on its own says very little. It could mean that suicide is rampant, or it could mean that we live in an incredibly safe society with very good health care.

The statistic on its own says very little, but it says a lot when you compare it to the same statistic for young women.
Consistently for almost a century (world war stats altered things) young male suicides rates have been approx 4x that of young women (IIRC).

That itself is of note and worth discussion, but in the context of "this is happening here and now!!" it's not anything new, sudden or different.

Drug overdose, alcoholism, or car crashes
Well, for example, the leading cause of death of children in the United States is guns. That is certainly not something I would’ve expected, but it’s true. So I guess in this case, it was equally surprising.

There are a lot of things that can cause people to die, so it just seemed like an odd one to be at the top.

> As a result, many men are struggling to fulfill their own outmoded expectations of what a man should be. “The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it has ‘gone too far,’” Reeves writes. “It is that it has not gone far enough”—that is, it has not succeeded in replacing traditional models of masculinity with something more adequate to our current circumstances. The Western male is stuck in a culture of masculinity that is now desperately mismatched with his material reality. “Women’s lives have been recast,” Reeves writes. “Men’s lives have not.” Men have been consigned to “cultural redundancy.”

It’s pretty simple. Adapt or perish. Big generational change is not uncommon.

Big generational change is uncommon. And on this scale it is completely unprecedented
Adapt or perish or (re)shape the world. Current state where saying „kill all men“ does not raise eyebrows is a pretty sad state. Too many pseudo-feminist lunatics are tolerated.
I never saw that sentence anywhere, and seeing you quote it definitely raises my eyebrow. Are you aware that not everyone posting on the web is who they say they represent? The quotes looks more like inflammatory tactics than anything a feminist would write.
It is inflammatory tactics. But it's interesting how such posts on social media wouldn't get auto-ban. Is feminists inflammatory tactics fine? Especially when people get in trouble for what could be swept under the rug as „inflammatory tactics“ in the opposite directions?

While at the same time very tame things get accounts suspended. Personally I got a ban on Facebook for calling Russians „Muscovites“ in my native tongue. Which is not even a derogatory term (we have different words for that). Yet „kill all men“ posts on Twitter or FB stay up.

It was a trending hash tag on Twitter cca 2019. #KillAllMen
Most of the time I've clicked on a weird trending tag on twitter, it's a bajillion people going "Oh no, why is #thing trending? :O"

I recommend against taking it at all seriously.

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Or perhaps it’s unwise to try to deny/suppress all differences between the sexes. Yes there are some masculine behaviors one might consider “toxic”, but masculinity itself isn’t inherently toxic or something that should be eliminated.

But I guess we’ll find out in another generation or two if suicide rates continue to increase.

The other interesting thing is that „toxic femininity“ is not talked much.
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> Adapt or perish

So they should be a man, basically. You can put the same message in different words, but the meaning stays the same.

I think this is a bit naive and also insulting to say the topic would be about self-image in the first place. The economic realities have changed, sure. Former skills became irrelevant, others more important.

Still, in the grand scheme of things, for the relevant group not much has changed. Go to work or perish is as as true today as it was in 1970. Just that the middle class shrank considerably and people are not able to afford housing or significant luxury. That has indeed changed and has nothing to do with men/women in particular.

> Now, unlike many men working in factory jobs, the male nurse is solidly middle-class.

Not really. Nurses are not paid very well for the work they do. The article claims they would be middle-class. But only if you change the definition from the definition 50 years ago. Again just a worsened economic development.

>That has indeed changed and has nothing to do with men/women in particular.

That's where you are wrong. The cultural expectations are still very similar to 1970, but the means to achieve them have worsened considerably. Something like unable to afford housing hits men far harder than women when it comes to social aspects. Language reflects this, with words demonizing men who still live at home or living in a bad place being far more prevalent than the other way around.

Men and women work on different formulae. You can't simply say 'oh we give both the same input so the effect is the same'.

I can only speak for myself but living at home is not desirable to me. I love my family, but this is not some cultural expectation that is put on me. It is my own desire to be independent and form my own household. I prefer to stay in the vicinity for visits of course, although travel today is quite convenient.

Sure, it is more difficult and more expensive in comparison, but if they have the economic means, neither men nor women tend to stay with their parents.

I don't deny differences in interest between men and women. Some interests will stay exceptions for one or the other sex.

Cool. Now go on a few forums and ask it in public, to large numbers, and see who responds more favorably and who responds less favorably. Hint: it is almost always women who are far more unaccepting of it than men, with a pretty significant margin.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Once you actually delve into the differences, who says them in what stages of life and why, you'll quickly see how deep this rabbit hole goes and what a gross oversimplification "well men and women both don't like it" is, and why these kind of articles do nothing but harm both men and women in the long term.

Well, that is their opinion then. If you mean they expect such independence to consider romantic engagements, there are numerous very practical reasons here to make it a requirement or at least something to be desired more.

I think women are indeed judged less if they still live at home. Maybe just some different preference like you said.

"We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: in the first 10 years after passage of a duty-to-bargain law, male earnings decline by $2,134 (or 3.93%) per year and hours worked decrease by 0.42 hours per week. The earnings estimates for men indicate that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $213.8 billion in the US annually. We also find evidence of lower male employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation. Exposure to collective bargaining laws leads to reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which male workers sort as well. Effects are largest among black and Hispanic men."

https://www.nber.org/papers/w24782

This article quotes a bunch of statistics and then jumps to conclusions without analyzing why (some) men do worse than (most) women.

Given that most men still outearn most women and that more women attempt to commit suicide and the ongoing (predominantly female) teenage mental health crisis this whole article reads like a case study of how to lie with statistics and jump to (bad) conclusions.

Men have problems, women have problems and instead of framing it as a gender issue and arguing that either men or women have to change I think it would be more productive to zoom in and analyse why less men graduate from college or why (young) women have seen such a rapid decline in wellbeing in the past ten years.

>more women attempt to commit suicide

My understanding is women attempt suicide but more men succeed at it.

in the US. because guns.
It's the same in Germany. Without guns. Men commit suicide approximately 3 times as often as women with the exception of children under the age of 15, where there's slightly more girls than boys. [1]

At the same time, women more frequently "try". The common explanation is that most of those aren't serious tries but rather cries for help and attention, while men will try to commit suicide when they positively want to die. Before you protest, here's an article describing multiple studies suggesting such (in German), which adds that male suicide is a sign of toxic masculinity, so it should be above suspicion of being misogynistic. [2]

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Gesund...

[2] https://www.spektrum.de/news/suizid-paradox-toedliche-geschl...

Clickbait headline used to advertise book that refutes clickbait headline. Next sports.
If you are male: Learn to adequately feed yourself. Don't make that the responsibility of some woman.

There are many more things that need to happen to address these issues, but that's a place to start and it will make a difference in your life in an immediate and material fashion.

(Crickets chirp -- very loudly)

"Suicide is now the number one cause of death among British men under forty-five" - "Hey, it would really help if you learnt to cook sophisticated meals"

I'm not sure that's the answer.

I said nothing about cooking, much less sophisticated meals.
Did you think men are starving because they don't know how to eat, or that they only ever eat Ramen noodles? I can assure you: they don't, and self-starvation is very rare form of suicide.

I'm sorry, maybe there's some context I'm missing or you're quoting from some book or something else, but it sounds like telling someone who's legs were amputated that they should get a new haircut because that will immediately change their life.

I know quite a lot about being suicidal. Taking care of yourself is the best antidote there is.
Then what are you saying? That men shouldn't rely on a woman to be the main provider? That men should inform themselves on nutrition? I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say.
I believe they're making a broader statement: learn to take care of yourself, and don't view yourself as incomplete without a partner. Doing so will make you emotionally more healthy. Food is the most obvious, daily example of that, one that's often overlooked.

Incidentally, being emotionally stable will also make you more attractive to the opposite sex. But if you do it for that reason, it won't work. You have to do it for yourself first.

Yes, but it gets harder the more the odds get stacked against you.

The school system and university system is increasingly run by females for females.

Critical theories designed to dismantle the 'patriachy' both attack males and put in place gender quotas and limits to men.

Males are told that their very essence of being is toxic.

I really don't envy boys growing up these days and an very glad I have a daughter.

Make sure you teach her to reject feminism as we are teaching ours to.

Manufacturing a pseudo-marxist class war between the sexes is utterly insane.

I wonder why we don't have quotas for men throughout education system. Kindergartens, schools, universities...
> “The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it has ‘gone too far,’” Reeves writes. “It is that it has not gone far enough”—that is, it has not succeeded in replacing traditional models of masculinity with something more adequate to our current circumstances

What if the problem we’re facing is that men actually need traditional models of masculinity?

Looking at the bit you quote, I'd say the problem is much bigger and worse than that. Have you seen any sign that the modern feminism movement either cares about such things, or is "mentally coherent" enough to devise workable models? (Vs. performative ideological and rah-rah exercises.)
"Traditional models of masculinity" have been different traditions in different times and different places. Men cannot possibly "need" the "traditional models" of twentieth century America.

The twenty-first century is unprecedented, and everybody (men and women) will adapt to it. The individuals will adapt, and new traditions will arise based on them. They should be inspired by what we know of the past, but claims that "it was better the way things were" fails to acknowledge that things were really, really bad for women (among many others) for a very long time. They demanded change because they hated it.

> What if the problem we’re facing is that men actually need traditional models of masculinity?

I'm not sure what you mean by traditional, but it's painfully obvious to me that boys and young men need positive male role models.

Feminism offers no solution to this, and never will, since its focus lies elsewhere. Hence, we must acknowledge that as an ideology its incomplete (at best).

You can be masculine without being "toxic". They rarely, if ever, write articles about the positive aspects of masculinity.

Given the amount of suffering reported in the article, its very telling how little sympathy the author has for those it reports on.

The author champions an ideology that is doing immense harm, but the author never stops to examine their beliefs.

Remember that what is bad for men is also bad for women, especially because women are innately hypergamous - wishing to marry across or up status hierarchies.

At some point a young woman will want to find a man she can respect to marry.

But the penny hasn't dropped with the author. Maybe the great achievements of feminism aren't all they are cracked up to be. How can they be? - when the world they have relentlessly demanded is making both men and women so desperately lonely and unhappy.

Are women desperately lonely and unhappy?

Teenage mental health aside (probably not caused by lack of desirable marriage partners), loneliness and desperation, and the drug abuse and suicide that follows, seem to be primarily male problems.

Maybe enough women don't want to get married, or they have another way of dealing with that not happening, but I'm not sure there's a crisis there. Granted, I don't follow surveys closely, but generally if women are affected, it will be a widely known story and the news will pick it up. It's not, so I assume they aren't.

The news hacks bear significant responsibility for many of the problems western society currently faces. They're not going to save either men or women.

The birth rate has fallen off a cliff. The rate of family formation falls lower and lower.

Older millennial women are coming to terms with the reality that they will likely never have children.

Gen Z women are still young enough to engage in extreme promiscuity via the dating apps, without yet feeling the consequences.

This isn't going to end anywhere good.

Some women don't want any children, so while birth rate might be a societal problem, it's not one for individual women, I think. For those that do, there are options, even if they don't want to have a partner. There's the exception of those who want biological children but are infertile. I'm sure there's a lot of suffering (evidenced by them being ready to pay quite a lot of money for help), but I don't think it's a social issue.

Maybe there will be a huge explosion 10 years from now and it'll be a complete surprise. Today I don't see any signs of it, and I'm pretty confident that the signs would be very hard to overlook because of the focus on women's health, so any expressed unhappiness that goes beyond rare individual cases will be picked up.

Yes, old cultural expressions of masculinity have outlived their usefulness and become toxic in modern environments. One example, we no longer need to fight off predators, so what used to be valued as protective bravado now gets expressed as violence and aggression directed toward our frustrations. Yet, mainstream feminism has become so anti-masculinity that it leaves very little room for new, healthy versions of masculinity to develop. Our evolved impulses as men are left with little space for healthy expression. My ideals are very egalitarian, I'd love to see a world in which men and women are equal and living in harmony. At the same time, I don't think a new, positive vision for masculinity can come from feminism. Feminists are telling men to act more female: don't be competitive, get in touch with the softer emotions, cry more, etc. And while there is definitely a place for men to get in touch with their feminine emotions, we are still evolutionarily predisposed to have masculine emotions. How can we express our innate emotions like frustration, anger and aggression and channel them into healthy expressions that fit in modern life? I believe that we can do that. We need men's movements that cultivate positive masculinity. Movements that tell us what to do with our natural impulses to be physically strong and fight against threats with our bodies. Not feminine visions of masculinity, but neither victim-based visions like incels or men's rights activists.
> My ideals are very egalitarian, I'd love to see a world in which men and women are equal and living in harmony.

But we're not equal - by definition. We're diverse and complementary.

What is it that drives the ravenous appetite of liberalism to flatten all diversity out of the world into a homogenous mass of goo?

> What is it that drives the ravenous appetite of liberalism to flatten all diversity out of the world into a homogenous mass of goo?

If it’s (classic) liberalism that does that I’d say it’s probably because that’s what people individually want.

But I think it’s in many cases the other way around. For example, gender differences in career choices tend to increase with economic prosperity and liberalism.

But we're not more prosperous. Most families couldn't afford to have a stay-at-home parent even if they wanted to.

Women have simply had servitude to the corporate machine packaged up as some kind of freedom. To say this represents any form of progress is delusional.

They have the same economic mobility as men now.

At least your corporate overlord lets you leave and has an HR department; a domestic overlord can be less kind.

That is progress.

The fact that it's also become an economic necessity is orthogonal and regretable. Bernie wuda won &c

Also, talking about differences, it turns out they may be more cut out for work than men, since they seem to be graduating from college at higher rates and are thus eligible for higher paying jobs than the majority of men! Maybe the old order was stuck in a local minimum, and giving women the opportunity to learn and work shook us out of it, leading us to tumble into deeper minima. :D (On topic with this thread kek)

Extended family and community is your „domestic overlord“ HR department. As well as legal and welfare systems.

Same corporate overlords would be less kind without oversight of the above.

> Also, talking about differences, it turns out they may be more cut out for work than men, since they seem to be graduating from college at higher rates and are thus eligible for higher paying jobs than the majority of men!

Lots of jobs do not require degree and many degrees are useless. Or even negative in some societies with student debt.

University degree does not guarantee a higher pay. Many jobs requiring a degree pay little. While many tradesmen jobs pay good money.

> What is it that drives the ravenous appetite of liberalism to flatten all diversity out of the world into a homogenous mass of goo?

Fear mostly. But that isn't liberalism, it is much more the opposite. Self identification of political parties doesn't mean anything.

I don't mean equal in the strict programming sense. Clearly men and women are very different. I mean equally balanced, yin and yang.
We did not need to defend against predators since at least a thousand years, very likely for a much longer time frame. The latest enemies weren't some wild beast, it was famine and infighting. I doubt we have really moved beyond either to be honest.

But still, the point I was trying to make is that if this is relevant to shape behavior and didn't happen yet, it doesn't have to happen between 1970 and 2023.

> since at least a thousand years

A thousand years is nothing on an evolutionary timescale. If you traveled back in time 1000 years you'd be amazed to find that humans were identical to how they are now.

That question frames it in reverse. The right question is whether gender should be culturally important. And I can't think of a single reason why it's good for anyone for cultural roles to be predicated on gender. It hurts men just as much to tell them that they're not supposed to be a nurturing full-time parent as it hurts women to tell them they're not supposed to be a breadwinner.

Now, you can certainly find a few places where men and women tend to have different biological capabilities due to how the body develops during puberty. Given that both height and strength have significantly non-overlapping distributions between men and women, it's unlikely you'll see a woman in the NBA. But that doesn't need to result in a cultural expectation regarding the acceptable gender of an NBA player. It's perfectly acceptable to say "most are men, but it's cool if a woman makes it" instead of "you can't do that, you're a woman."

So as to the question asked in the article? Well, you've got to be a little careful. Men, the individual people to whom the label "man" is applied, are absolutely not culturally redundant. They can participate in culture as much or as little as they desire. But it would be nice if the label "man" stopped carrying unique cultural expectations. Although as Betteridge's law would suggest, that's sure not a description of the present state of the world.

Because it is important.

The more egalitarian countries show more differentiation across career choices than less egalitarian ones. I.e. men show a greater prefence for thing based careers and women show a greater prefence for people based careers.

If you've ever watched kids playing you'll realise how self evident it is, from a very early age before kids are remotely aware of cultural norms.

This flies in the face of all predictions that roles of sex are purely cultural.

That's a complete non-sequitor. I said that cultural roles should not be gendered. You responded that people have things they prefer to do. That is 100% orthogonal. People absolutely should be able to follow their preference so long as they take direct responsibility for the results of their actions. And cultural norms shouldn't add expectations for what people do based on their genders.

No conflict. These things work together in harmony.

Apologies if I misunderstood your post.

If I understand you correctly now, then we are in agreement.

> Given that both height and strength have significantly non-overlapping distributions between men and women, it's unlikely you'll see a woman in the NBA.

Doesn't NBA have a women's category? One would assume that you see only women there (in 1990s terms), right?

> As certain structural barriers that used to hinder women have been removed, women have proven their “natural advantage” in several areas, including in our colleges and universities.

This is part of the problem. You always hear of things that supposedly women are naturally better at than men, but nobody would dare say that the opposite might be true in some aspects.

Also it's completely lacking what those "natural advantages" are are supposed to be. After all, men still make up most of graduates in MINT as opposed to women who mainly graduate in humanities, except for medicine. Looking at it that way you might as well say women are better at obediently reading and learning by heart and men are better at actually thinking and figuring things out. I'm not trying to be inflammatory here, just pointing out how the point the article makes is generally considered acceptable, while framing it differently would be considered sexist.

> Reeves presents a cocktail of public policies that include longer and more generous paid leave for new dads, a reformed child-support system that no longer makes excessive demands of mothers, and more father-friendly employment opportunities (working from home, working part-time, or working flexible hours). This would help alleviate the gender-wage gap while also promoting a healthier model of fatherhood.

As always, the solution is government-mandated social change. And why, all of a sudden, when presenting solutions, is nature completely disregarded?

> many men are struggling to fulfill their own outmoded expectations of what a man should be

Why do we men have to be anything? Why does a woman? Can we just be ourselves and not worry about it? I never have. I've never aspired to be a masculine man's man all grr and .. go camping? Not be able to cook? Those are the traits of a couple of guys I know whose wives left them because they were fucking useless as parents and were aggressive about it. I don't feel like any less of a man because I can cook my kids a meal and would rather book a hotel.

I think the problem is constant messaging that we should be something or other and that impresses on kids. Then they feel disappointed that's not how things are for them and unmotivated to find their own path.

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Whole science is culturally redundant. You don't need to know what is an atom to be able to dance around the fire.
For a somewhat narrow definition of culture, sure. For western culture, not at all since it is partly defined by the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. The scientific method, for good or bad, is part of the western cultural heritage. I think it is mostly for good as long as we re talking about actual science - based on the scientific method - and not The Science™ or one of the many 'critical' offshoots which are mostly intent on deconstruction. In short, science over religion whether that be one of the theistic religions or the "progressive" gnostic ones which are running havoc through academia at this moment. Objective theories over 'critical theories', scientific knowledge over 'other ways of knowing'.
Occasionally I see articles like this that seem to have decent perspective and conversation, but they get flagged. What would be the reason for that? Is it just a lot of people here hitting the flag button? Is it because the article is not liked?
It should be clarified in this kind of articles that they are talking about Single men, not married men. And that those articles are a covert attempt to shame men into 'doing more' to catch up with some kind of standard that is even unspecified