It’s a sign of how bad the problem is, that tendency we have to “drive by looking in the rear view mirror” as McLuhan said, and the reality that the left has become polarized and painted itself into a corner on issues of sex and gender.
No I mean the people who jump to conclusions about what you do or don't agree with. The wacky MRA types, the anti-MRA folks who go so far in the opposite direction that they basically espouse misandry. The bizarre replies about porn that seem to have been deleted by the mods.
I'm actually quite interested in a nuanced conversation. That's the source of my comment about strange times when Jacobin and Brookings agree. That usually signals a real problem.
We are all centrists in denial. It is extremely difficult to enact any truly leftist or rightist policy in the United States (relative to the American definition of the center). I believe it has been critically referred to as the “extreme center,” but it clearly has beneficial moderating effects as well, as we can see from the strange bedfellows responsible for this article being published.
Do you have some links to articles about this topic from the left? I typically hear this from the right and have yet to hear something from the left, and I'm curious about how it's framed and understood.
The primary difference from the most common ways I hear about it from the right is the lack of a "one simple trick to fix it" prescription. It is more limited to a survey of some of the proposed causes and actions.
For context, I wouldn't say I'm left or right, because both parties have good and bad things about them.
That being said, the first thing I noticed with that link was the title. Why is it implying it's Men's fault?
> What's the matter with Men?
Imagine if on a similarly gendered topic, say abortion, someone published an article with the title "What's wrong with Women." Everyone would be up in arms over it.
Similarly, if you saw Johnny or Suzy crying on the playground, you might ask, “what’s the matter?” That’s not implying they did something bad, it’s asking what hurt them or upset them, in a slightly colloquial way.
I think jumping straight to “why are they implying this is men’s fault” is, ultimately, the perspective you’re already bringing to a very benign article title, and the fact you reacted immediately that way instead of assuming good intentions and reading a bit of the content is a reflection on how some folks have decided that “toxic masculinity”, for instance, is a vile attack on men instead of a descriptor for vile things perpetuated on men.
I mean, his point is that the Left doesn't actually drive home all the things they do that benefit men.
> You have an infrastructure bill that will create jobs largely for men. Two-thirds of the jobs in the infrastructure bill will go to men: black men as much as white men, and Hispanic men a little bit more, because they’re so represented in the construction industry. Don’t hide from that fact, as the administration does when they’re challenged on it.
And then also things that are cut and dry worse for men (i.e. suicide rate) you don't see a gender breakdown showing that [1]. And even when the press material has a gender breakdown its part of the "Age" section even though being male is a 3x affect while the age is ~0.25x [2].
Jacobin's point is about messaging and not that "The Left" doesn't do anything.
> And then also things that are cut and dry worse for men (i.e. suicide rate)
Not trying to dilute your point, because if you look at the "Data and Statistics" tab of the page you linked the disparity between male/female is clearly obvious. So I agree that the fact that is not talked about in the disparities is crazy. But, one thing I remember hearing when I was in high school was that suicide attempts were higher amongst women, but the suicide rate was higher amongst men. There is a mention of this in the article for youth, so maybe it was specifically mentioned because of that age group because I can't seem to see if that applies across age groups.
"In 2021, 9% of high school students reported attempting suicide during the previous 12 months. Suicide attempts were reported most frequently among girls compared to boys (12.4% vs. 5.3%)"
First, the infrastructure bill came out of the center, not the left (although it is fairly popular across the entire spectrum). Second, I don't see many people expounding the individual benefit from the infrastructure bill period—seems like a blatant strawman.
> Two-thirds of the jobs in the infrastructure bill will go to men: black men as much as white men, and Hispanic men a little bit more, because they’re so represented in the construction industry.
If I perceived the government as only capable of offering jobs and no other support I would also be pissed and feel alienated. I don't see much evidence that this is how people view the world outside of the Brookings institute.
> When Obama tried creating “My Brothers Keeper” program to help struggling AA boys, who got it shut down?
He didn’t try, he succeeded in 2014, and it remained in place as long as he was President, then it stopped being an Administration priority under Donald Trump and went away in 2017 (though the Obama Foundation then launched a similarly named grant program with similar purpose in 2018 which is still active.)
My recollection is that the program was initiated in 2014, with substantial contributions from private organizations. It was further funded in 2015 with more private sector contributions.
I believe it was shut down when Trump was inaugurated.
Drawing a parallel between "left talking to boys" and "my brother's keeper being originally hyper-targeting AA boys in inner city areas but then being expanded to every group under the sun" calling out why its not effective. Through the 4th wave feminist lens, anything that helps men (or a subgroup of men) alone is by definition evil. Making it all inclusive kept the name only but it lost the ability to help those in need the most. This also ignores the 100s of other interest groups that target the other demographics.
We can always make the claim that why artificially limit it to just that subgroup or why can't these specific group of men find help in the all inclusive programs we have already, but then we get back to where we started, that is "see we are talking to men".
This is also an allagory at every other attempt of the left wing lens trying to help men. Society is very quick to shove in my face "black patient with black doctors and female patient with female doctors have better outcomes" but for some reason an issue faced by men needs to be watered down or not addressed completely.
Kiiiinda, but there's a long way to go; it's a very big ship that has to get turned. For pretty much the entire 2010s, the dominant mainstream narrative about men's issues was set by places like Jezebel and the loudest and most obnoxious voices on Twitter, where talking about this earned you complete derision (ask me how many times I saw attempts to start conversations replied to with "but what about teh menz?!?") and/or accusations of being a covert or not-so-covert right-winger. It's only very recently that this has started to change, and a lot of people in leftist spaces still have a bunch of cult deprogramming left to do. I think Jacobin is doing the right thing by publishing things like this, even if I don't agree with all their solutions.
True, but The Right is way, way better at marketing. Which has been historically true since the beginning of the 20th century, Futurism and their extremely well crafted manly art paved the way for Fascism.
Check the production values of most socialist-inclined (not liberal, big difference) content on youtube/podcasts vs those coming from the right.
I mean, look at those Lex Fridman videos. Like, sure, dude is probably going to support the cause for a new All-American Übermensch or something like that - But he looks coool while doing it, can't deny that.
More than 70 years ago Pasolini explicitly said "The right is back again because they scream louder than us" and we're yet far from fully internalizing this concept.
Yeah. Wage stagnation, gender roles which become increasingly impossible to meet in the modern world, the price of property, commuter town hell, social alienation, lack of third places, even toxic masculinity, all of these are conversations about things that hurt men. And with gender roles expected of men, to be economically successful, to look a certain way and wear certain things and have certain kinds of jobs and a certain kind of car, none of which you can afford anymore, not in a million years – that's a place where maleness, masculinity and despair comes in very explicitly into economic questions and which is talked about a lot.
Maybe don't stick your head in the sand the moment someone says "toxic masculinity". It means something which hurts men, too. Every economic conversation and conversation on gender roles touches on this specific kind of despair and anxiety in the universe. If you look hard enough, even consumerist vanilla and milk-toast pieces like the Barbie movie take on talking about the expectations placed on men by themselves and what it feels like to wake up to a society where nobody meets those anymore.
For Jacobin to write this is absolutely bizarre. It's almost as if it's aimed more towards people on the right than on the left, except it vindicates the idea that the left never touches the concept of men, as if women were the only thing that existed on the left, which just isn't true. It's always been an everyone club, it's always been a club for those who work for their money and for those sympathetic to them. And it's a place where those people talk about those problems which hurt them. That includes and has always included men.
> Maybe don't stick your head in the sand the moment someone says "toxic masculinity". It means something which hurts men, too.
The left however tends to shun the fact that a lot of the toxic masculinity comes from women and their expectations on men and boys. There isn't anything men can do to stop toxic masculinity until women stops propagating it, and the left sees no problem with women and teachers propagating toxic masculinity, at least I've never seen them talk about it as a problem that needs fixing.
> The left however tends to shun the fact that a lot of the toxic masculinity comes from women and their expectations on men and boys
This just isn't true. The fact that men AND women are taught this "manly man" crap by both their mothers and fathers is commonly discussed. It's often reported that women don't self reflect but follow any prominent feminist and you'll hear them talking about this often.
> There isn't anything men can do to stop toxic masculinity until women stops propagating it
This is both false and a poor human excuse for bad behavior. You can have better conversations. You can model better behavior. You can call out misogyny. It's fun or comfortable or do but it's with your control. Don't push all the hard work to others. Do it yourself. (I do. It's not fun but it's important.)
> the left sees no problem with women and teachers propagating toxic masculinity, at least I've never seen them talk about it as a problem that needs fixing.
Be honest with yourself. Where are you looking? Articles like this that make it seem like we should over index on self inflicted wounds or aces where women talk about the difficulties they face because of heavily patriarchal society?
Or - crazy idea - don't politicize mental health at all ??
I don't read the news or social media, so it's bizarre to me when someone tries to divert a basic human concern into a political agenda. Mental health is important no matter what political spectrum you're on, and treatment isn't political, it's healthcare.
You might wonder why the "conservative" answer to men's mental health struggles or joblessness and such suddenly is no longer the traditional traditional masculine "man up and deal with it" but has changed into "this requires politicians getting involved!"
So if you're not a conservative who's picked this up as a thing to push forward your career with, you can't "not politicize" it because once something is politicized you can't put it back in the jar.
EDIT: And if those politicians, however disingenuous, are successful in politicizing it... well doesn't that just mean it resonates with a lot of people and then the left should talk about it because it's important to people?
HackerNews is elevated above regular social media, in no small part thanks to dang's excellent moderation. I wouldn't be surprised if it loses its 'classification' due to this.
The term "social media" became popular with profile-oriented sites like MySpace and Facebook, and for a lot of people like myself, refer to that type of site. They're about being social, not about topics, like forums are (which predate profile-oriented sites). By that standard, HN isn't social media.
A couple of excerpts that summarize Renn's viewpoint:
>> The directional similarity of Reeves’ recommendations to the MRA agenda shows why it won’t get much traction. The MRA vision never inspired a material number of men, and neither will Reeves. In part, this is because he wants men to become more like women, a project that will never appeal to ordinary guys. He cites David Gilmore’s very interesting book Manhood in the Making, which is an anthropological survey of how a diverse set of cultures around the world have defined manhood as a distinctive identity that builds on men’s strengths rather than seeks to minimize them. But Reeves rejects Gilmore’s insights. His agenda would be more compelling to ordinary men if he had worked with the grain of Gilmore’s findings on the common themes of manhood rather than against them.
>> The second half of his book, then, exemplifies a major problem in American public life—one where ideology prevents us from honestly addressing our biggest social issues—that is not specific to Reeves’ book. The same ideological straightjacket affects pretty much every other area of society as well, from opioids to homelessness. Which is why we have not been able to successfully address any of them. As a society, we must find a way to create the space in which the real sources of and potential solutions to serious social issues can be publicly discussed and ultimately confronted if we actually want to make progress in fixing any of them.
> It's in line with the classical definition of masculinity. What is not feminine.
This is not only a very western perspective but a very modern one. Regardless, the principles of liberating people from gender roles applies just as well to a gender role applied only to men.
No, he doesn't. He straight up attacked Bernie on the College for All saying that we all don't need college, which is true. But the College for All bill included non-college related education and secondary education like trade schools and training programs. But he decided to ignore all of that to squeeze his head up Trumps ass and bitch about a program designed to give America blue collar people a fighting chance.
It's possible that College for All was a bad bill overall but happened to have a few good parts.
e.g. CANCELS $1.6 TRILLION IN STUDENT DEBT FOR 45 MILLION AMERICANS
The fact sheet says it would pay for all of this (in total $2.2 trillion) by taxing Wall Street speculation. So, somehow create a tax that represents almost 10% of total US GDP to cancel student debt and allow all future college to be almost free.
I can't imagine any world where that would actually happen. Bernie is living in the clouds.
This isn't giving anyone a fighting chance because it's not an actual, feasible solution.
> In April 2021, when asked about the debate about raising the minimum wage, Rowe said, "I worry that the path to a skilled trade can be compromised when you offer an artificially high wage for, I hate the expression, but an unskilled job."
There's more to that quote if you click through to the source. Before it was this: “I want everybody who works hard and plays fair to prosper," Rowe said. "I want everybody to be able to support themselves. But if you just pull the money out of midair you're going to create other problems.”
“There is a ladder of success that people climb,” he continued. “Some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they're simply not intended to be careers. They're not intended to be full-time jobs. They're rungs on a ladder."
"[Those jobs] are ways for people to get experience in the workforce doing a thing that might not necessarily pay you as much as you'd like, but nevertheless serves a real purpose,"
And picking up where it left off: "So to me, the brightest line needs to be drawn between skilled and unskilled work. We need to encourage more people to learn a skill that's actually in demand."
Given that the minimum wage was last raised in 2009, and even until then was always raised in arrears, I'd argue more that it's irresponsible of business owners to not be saving for an expected increase at some point in the near future (hopefully). It's not "pulling money out of midair" - these employers have been able to effectively "underpay" employees since then.
> Some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they're simply not intended to be careers. They're not intended to be full-time jobs.
This is a huge conservative talking point - the federal minimum wage was intended to be a liveable wage, not "for teenagers/high schoolers/part timers" - this whole spin of "these jobs are not meant to be liveable" is a wholly after-the-fact revisionism.
Well, pitching "dirty jobs" as a solution to the decline in gender roles seems like a shallow effort to get people to accept shitty jobs as some sort of performative masculinity. I can't think of any other reason to do this—I don't know many men who long for dirtier jobs so they're seen as more manly. In fact I'm confident I've never met anyone who felt this way.
Welding is a "shitty job?" I'd disagree entirely, and I think that would be Mike Rowe's position as well, and I think he directly cautions against the mentality you're attempting to take to these careers. You're also seemingly leaving no space for owner operated businesses.
> I can't think of any other reason to do this—I don't know many men who long for dirtier jobs so they're seen as more manly.
Doesn't that just undercut your own thesis, then? Or are you operating on the presumption that the advice being given by Mike Rowe is meant to be universal and you should upend your life in order to chase it? I don't see that at all.
I'm still baffled as to how you'd see any of this as "anti-labor."
The left talks about this all of the time, as do the middle and right. Pretending otherwise makes me question whether the author is actually trying to help or simply sell his book.
I'm curious, can you give examples? I hear this issue pretty loudly from the right, but not really much from the left. I know ordinary people talk about this issue, but it isn't the same as people in positions of power or influence.
First, a president's administration is not "the left" or "the right". In fact, it's frequently just "the lesser of two evils", as we so often hear from the voters, depending on the particular policy topic.
Second, an administration not having "an agenda" for an issue as intractable/abstract as mental health is not a sign that they don't genuinely care.
That said, I certainly agree that the president - in fact, all presidents, left or right - have paid no more than lip service to men's societal struggles, image issues, mental health, etc, but that is clearly not the driving thesis in this thread.
You might want to read the first WaPo piece I linked.
It's precisely about how while liberals are recognizing the negative effects of the crisis of masculinity, they haven't been able to converge on solutions. And how that's a problem.
It's been a liberal publication for a long time. I think you might have it backwards though. If the Overton window shifts right, then The Atlantic would be considered more liberal, wouldn't it? If anything, some of the other journalistic institutions jumped the shark a bit from 2015-2020, which might make The Atlantic look more centrist than it really is, though it remains fundamentally liberal.
Only took a few min to find these. But regardless, it is very loud on the right because they feel its a problem or a source of a problem. Where the left looks at it as just a sign of the times or a progression or even a phase.
Things were pretty non-masculine back in the late 70s and early 80s but nobody seems to care about that. I hate using the catch all of blaming social media but it does play a part in the attention to "issues".
Also the article tries to pin male graduation rates to masculinity but makes no mention of 300% tuition and crippling debt.
I hate these types of articles that try take one issue and make it the scapegoat for all these complex problems. This over simplification of lifes complexities and how much things suck really need to stop.
They're referencing the common "toxic masculinity" talking points. I, personally, have always seen that more as displacing/blaming versus addressing legitimate issues.
A common example would be the topic of male suicide, which is usually addressed as either "well, women try to kill themselves more often and that's totally not an indicator of attention seeking behavior versus genuine depression and fatigue with life" or "toxic masculinity and the patriarchy creates all of the problems for men". Both of which ignore pangender expectations and influences on the average (versus in-power) male experience.
There's no doubt that the American left (and other Western nations' equivalents) diminishes male issues or treats them as unimportant due to the perspective that men created and control all of those issues. Useful for political influence, but useless for discourse or problem solving.
I have a book on toxic masculinity on my shelf, and it is written as a deep exploration of psychology, archetypes, etc.
The usual rhetoric I hear about toxic masculinity is very far away from the contents of that book. It is really easy to use that phrase in an aggressive way. Though, interestingly enough, Pixar’s Buzz Lightyear movie was written by someone who has thoroughly studied this. By that token, so can the contrast between Iron Man and Captain America in the MCU.
Ironically enough, some of the very problems brought up by the right can be understood in an insightful way with this lens.
>it isn't the same as people in positions of power
This is the crux of 90% of fallacious criticisms of political parties. A lot of people in power are immoral and don't care about certain issues for identity-politics reasons, but as well there are reasonable people in power who can only give so much attention to so many topics at any given time, and some issues naturally become more associated with one party than another. In a perfect world that would be fine and everybody would understand that just because the news articles and speeches concerning a particular party don't divvy their focus on particular issues in the same manner as one personally would given one's own specific politics, that doesn't mean "the left" or "the right" "don't care" about X issue or are "silent on" issue X. That phrasing is usually an oversimplification used as an excuse to bash a party disliked by the writer/speaker for other reasons. The two specifics reasons this pattern is fallacious is:
A. It implies that the people in power generally don't care about the issue, which may only appear true if you do not have a holistic sample of their opinions and policies, which is not something the media facilitates.
B. It implies that the voter base of those people must generally agree with them on the particular issue.
The left talks about stagnate wages, rising costs of college, and healthcare all the time. They talk about it as issues for everyone and not just men. Raising minimum wage helps everyone including men. Making college cheaper and easier to access helps everyone including men. Free healthcare helps everyone including men.
They do, but they also vote in politicians who don't really do much to help those issues beyond giving them lip service.
Multiple Democratic presidents have not done anything substantial to address some of the issues you mentioned. Not saying that the GOP is better, they are objectively far worse. But the Democrats have squandered every chance to really help this country in meaningful drastic ways.
Shit, Biden was THE biggest friend to Corporate America while he was in the senate, and that didn't stop while he was VP, nor as President. You think someone who was completely bought and paid for by the healthcare lobby was going to allow Obama to deploy a government-backed healthcare option, instead of the mess we got with the ACA?
> You think someone who was completely bought and paid for by the healthcare lobby was going to allow Obama to deploy a government-backed healthcare option, instead of the mess we got with the ACA?
Are you talking about Biden, or every single Republican here?
I'm well aware that the GOP sucks, but the corporate wing of the Democratic party has put their foot down and voted with the GOP for way too long...especially on issues that are popular across the country even among different political demographics. Drug reform, immigration, education, healthcare, gun control, etc... Corporations donate lavishly to both parties because it's just too easy and cheap to do so, plus the promise of having whatever party is in power completely subservient to your interests is quite appealing if you're a CEO.
I'd love a president who actively goes out of their way to fuck Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Healthcare, Bio Oil, etc... but the last politician to attempt to do that on the national level was Bernie, and he got shafted.
I mean, from what I heard from west Virginia, you have the most pro-union, pro-work president since the New Deal, so hopefully that fucks up corporate America a little?
But it's not a binary choice. You can point out the right is irrational about the situation of women and at the same time agree with them on certain points regarding the situation of boys and men.
I believe what the OP is getting at is the masculinity discussion on the left is predominantly about what not to do while the discussion on the right is more often about what to do. If the left doesn’t provide a framework and examples of what positive masculinity looks like it presents a risk of young impressionable people draping themselves over the framework that is being provided by others.
My dad would tell other men "don't be a pussy," an attitude that is far from dead on the right. I've read a lot of advice from left, "men, seek therapy." I'm not sure that either side has a monopoly on positive/negative framing.
I'm confident that attitude is directionally agnostic. Most of the guys I'm surrounded by lean heavily left and still use "don't be a pussy" regularly.
Well, I was trying to avoid pointing out the wide gulf between "the left" and "feminism" which are being equated here, but your anecdote does a great job of that.
There are pronounced differences in the behaviors and how they manifest. That doesn’t mean one is better or worse in absolute terms, but it does mean that you need different approaches for different problems.
This is so full of crap it’s nothing but sheer fantasy.
Majority of male health issues?
By your own description you had a personally bad experience (sample of one) during childhood that you compare to your wife, someone you chose likely BECAUSE of your experiences during adulthood.
Your comparison is so off-base and sample size so small as to be meaningless.
I'm surprised my comment triggered you so easily. Obviously my personal experience will be sample size of one and I'm not invested enough in an internet discussion to try to support my comment but trying to deny things that are easily observable is just laughable.
My problem besides pure misandrists hiding behind feminism is the quasi-marxist idea that men are a separate species that exploits women. As opposed to the reality that ordinary men are exploited as much but different.
In particular you see pointless bashing of young men. Who are actually at the very bottom of the patriarcal order, completely disposable and a seen mostly as fodder. So punching at young men is actually punching down and reinforcing the patriarcal order.
One of Marxism's core tenets is class struggle: The bourgeois vs the proletariat. Feminism offers a similar narrative, only the proletariat is patriarchy. A group or institution that allegedly serves to advance the interests of men at the expense of women; placing men into positions of power and leadership so that they can enjoy social benefits and privileges intentionally not offered to women.
Most "*-isms" offer this type of narrative. The only thing that changes are the particular power groups vs oppressed. It's not a "left" or "right" phenomenon. Nazism offered the same story and used its ideological bullshit to justify persecution of the Jews: by painting them as a self-serving group that was occupying institutions of power.
The most effective way to get people to hate others is to make the others look both powerful and self-interested.
People use masculinity and femininity as excuses to be toxic. Neither masculinity nor femininity is toxic; the adjective serves a purpose. "Don't do ____, it makes you less of a [gender]" is toxic. "It's okay that you hurt somebody by ____, it's in your nature as a [gender]" is toxic.
Why is everyone in this thread falling over themselves and starting every response with "as a liberal" or something similar? People are so afraid of talking openly about how insane the left has become that they don't see how their very responses are indicative of how the left will try to harm them in some way e.g. "how insane the left has become".
Sure 20 years ago the sides were reversed but now the hypocrisy is mostly on the left ( I didnt say all), specifically when it comes to how we treat both sexes.
Only because there's barely any RFIC or FPGA threads anymore. How do you know its badmouthing? Could it not be self-criticality? Assumptions, assumptions... your comments aren't so technical either.
"Toxic masculinity" was a perfectly reasonable concept when it was originally defined as a kind of social norm. If we interpret "masculinity" as "behavior socially expected from men", then this trivially extends to "toxic masculinity" as "toxic behavior socially expected from men". For sociologists in the early 2010s, this was a great idea and collected a lot of harmful social expectations under a convenient label.
The problem is that a lot of people, many of them journalists and "influencers" writing for a lay audience, decided they could just cross out the "socially expected" part, which results in a completely different concept that puts the onus for the behavior entirely on the individual — hardly a socially enlightened perspective — and that amounts to the appropriation of academic jargon for the speaker's use as a rhetorical bludgeon. And sure, a lot of these writers were left-leaning self-described feminists who may have assumed they could do no wrong. And yes, many of these term-abusers would go on to propagate real toxic masculinity while decrying the failures of the target of the week from their position of presumed revolutionary thought.
But don't blame the sociologists. They used a reasonable term to describe a real problem. And now they've had to go pick a new term — I think it's something like "male role behavior syndrome" but I don't remember exactly.
This is what many feminist say. But when you look at what they actually do, most of the time they focus on female issues. It's not wrong, they're feminists after all. But taking care of male issues deserves due attention, too.
They absolutely do NOT. The right has Jordan Peterson and a raft of people discussing men's issues. The left has NO equivalent. The silence is deafening. If you dare to bring up men's issues in education, parental rights, etc, you get lumped in with the MRA wackadoodles. The left is especially harsh in silencing dissent, and frankly every time it happens, you're pushing people further into the arms of the right wing.
Edit: exhibit A. This is the fastest I've had an innocuous comment go negative on hackernews. Tow the party line or be silenced I guess...
> The left is all about addressing minorities and feminism.
they are all about addressing feminists and female minorities. I can tell you from my own experience, the vast majority of the left don't give a shit about minority men either.
This just doesn’t line up with my experience whatsoever. For my friends on the left it’s a common topic, and I see it discussed in left leaning publications all the time.
I wonder when I see these characterizations of the left if they are coming from social media. I’m not on any social media aside from this site I guess, so I’m not sure if that’s what’s going on. The folks on the left that I interact with in real life are definitely a very big tent group.
What you're seeing is the support amongst your bros. That's great. That doesn't equate to discussion on 'the left'. You don't see it being discussed much in books, podcasts, blog posts, documentaries etc, except on the right.
But I see it discussed in left leaning media all the time. Topics like male suicide rates, loneliness, and social pressure against showing emotion come up over and over again.
But the diagnosis of what causes those ills will be some variant of "men just suck and bring it on themselves, how can we help them be more like women?"
What people mean here is talking about problems imposed on men by society and how to fix that, not discussion that merely boils down to repeating feminist talking points. For example, one issue affecting men is the way they are vulnerable to immediate and vicious punishment if any woman anywhere makes allegations regardless of whether they are substantiated or even eventually proven false. Try bringing that up with your friends and see what happens.
> If you dare to bring up men's issues in education, parental rights, etc, you get lumped in with the MRA wackadoodles
The only time I’ve seen that happen is when the proposed solutions are things like rolling back women’s independence or trying to excuse things like harassment as “boys will be boys”. I’ve otherwise read tons of things about helping build healthy relationships, having non-sexual friendships, improving educational options, bolstering employment options which don’t require college degrees, helping with unreasonable expectations and mental health/substance abuse traps, etc. and have never seen the dynamic you describe.
I'm not trying to be disagreeable or abrasive, but this does not track with my experience. Bring up a women's issue, and it's societies problem. Bring up a men's issue and you'll quickly be invalidated or told 'men need to fix this issue themselves!'
That’s vague but it sounds like there may be differences in scope: if the problem you’re talking about is, for example, women not being hired at the same pay as equally-skilled men, that is a structural problem requiring systemic solutions. If on the other hand the problem is something like men not getting therapy because their peers will mock them (repeat for drinking too much, disrespecting women, etc.) there is some room for governmental action but a lot of it does have to be social change at a smaller scale. All the DARE posters in the world didn’t stop anyone from using drugs - but addressing economic and healthcare issues do, and that’s pretty frequently mentioned in conversations I’m part of.
Just as much the Right doesn't listen when you suggest anything other than the status quo of past history. It is its own form of neo-luddism (the luddites had reasons to be mad, but it burning the looms didn't change automation occurring). The right these days typically sells the strong man idea of a glorious past that we must reach back for, while living in complete denial that technology/modern life has changed the world in a way there is no going back.
Modern capitalistic practices are terrible for mens health. The previous paradigm was terrible for women. Any real solution has to address both.
There is an overwhelming amount of noise from both sides on all issues. That atmosphere essentially dictates two high-level outlooks you can have: Define parties by their reasonable people (benefit of the doubt), or define parties by their unreasonable people ("look at what this leftwing/rightwing nutjob said").
> The right has Jordan Peterson and a raft of people discussing men's issues. The left has NO equivalent. The silence is deafening.
And this is a great pity. The left needs someone understanding male problems, able to discuss them and offer some concrete plan forward. The deafening silence you mentioned causes the gap go wider and decreases the chances of mutual understanding, as exemplified by many comments under this article.
> They absolutely do NOT. The right has Jordan Peterson and a raft of people discussing men's issues. The left has NO equivalent.
The left doesn't have an equivalent of Jordan Peterson in general—there aren't any well-known celebrity spokespeople on the left. It's just not how they do things. So if that's what you're looking for, to understand what people on the left think about anything, really, you're going to be disappointed.
Obviously there is a big disconnect between what we think and what you do from your comment. It's fair to ask why and examine it so we can get common ground here. Like seriously, we can't be living in different realities so there must be more to it.
There's enormously more focus within the left on the struggles of women and girls. Which makes a certain amount of sense, but boys and men certainly have their own serious problems.
as someone who has largely progressive values, I hesitate to call myself liberal anymore because of a lot of the downright embarrasing shit comming from the left these days.
> The left talks about this all of the time,
every time I've seen leftists talk about this. its always in the form of gaslighting men into blaming themselves for their failures. as if the k-12 educational system isn't currently stacked against them.
> But overall, young men hit the labor market or college or whatever less well-prepared as a result of the education system.
No facts about it, just some random assertion. Schools aren't going to change the way males relate to playing games, sports, and farting around in general compared with actually studying.
What other part of the article did I miss? Oh, this:
> the education system isn’t doing very well by lots of our boys and men now. We have a ten percentage point drop in the share of male teachers, incredible underinvestment in apprenticeships and vocational forms of learning, and all kinds of changes in school environments that mean that we’re not serving them very well.
What changes in environments? Vocational means simply that boys don't do desks and paper well- is that true? Do male teachers make that much difference? The thrust here is that the economy has left men behind. Maybe that's true, which is more important.
You would be surprised. A boy having a male mentor is extremely helpful. Oftentimes an adult male can connect with boys in ways that an adult female might have trouble with. Teachers, for better or worse, are mentors. They are who kids spend the most time around during school semesters, and where they receive the most instruction, outside of parents.
Now don't get me wrong. Boys can absolutely succeed without a male teacher in their lives, and it's great that we have lots of female teachers. But it is absolutely helpful for a boy to have a man to look up to in some fashion.
This article makes a lot of good points about it, though its more about mentorship in general instead of male mentorship:
It's also a factor that many boys are growing up without a present father whether it is a single parent family or a multiple parent family where the father is working all the time, not emotionally available, etc. If they are not getting that role model it is all the more important that they get another role model.
lets flip this around. lets say we live in an alternative universe where primary school is primarily male dominated. just drawing from your own life experience, would you ask if not having female teachers affects female students?
No fault divorces are absolutely necessary. If the judges disproportionately favor the woman instead of the man, it's a issue with the justice system, not the law.
My great grandmother, Marie-Madeleine, and her sister Mercedes were both married/promised to their older cousins (2nd degree, so quite close) to make sure the family business stayed in the family (no brothers, only 3 sisters). My great-grandmother probably poisoned her husband shortly after their 2 children, making him unable to carry loads, and that killed him in 39/40 while he was forced to go work in Germany, and Mercedes was known in the village to prostitute herself during the war and tell everyone how her husband was unsatisfying. I think their parents didn't dare to push the 3rd sister (I know her name starts with 'M' too but I'm unable to remember), because she was the hard-headed one.
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
Girls mature faster, and learn differently. Frankly, a lot of boys simply cannot sit still in a classroom and listen to a boring lecture. They're going to be inattentive and they're going to have more behavioral issues. The solution is more hands on learning, and more physical activity. Gym class isn't even available to many kids anymore. Pretty much everyone should be getting an hour of physical activity a day and you could split that up into two 30 minute periods and have boys that are far more ready to actually pay attention in class. I'm speaking from my own experience with ADHD but I think it would generally help everyone.
They act more mature because they're pressured to by society. I won't bombard you with articles but I urge you to look into the causes behind that saying.
It is one of the reasons I self-identify as an independent now, instead of a lifelong liberal. Somewhere along the line the left decided that the best way to achieve equality was to drag down the 'privileged' rather than elevating the disadvantaged.
And they continue to wonder why the right has enjoyed such a resurgence across the world. Looking for any reason, any explanation that does not require a mirror.
That just doesn't match my reality. Maybe I run in the wrong circles, but I've never heard any leftists I know discuss societal issues with sympathy towards men in general. There's sympathy for individuals facing their problems, but nothing like the article.
What discourse I've seen that focuses on men's issues from the left tends to not really get it. If they just tsk tsk harder at Jordan Peterson and criticize toxic masculinity harder, surely the incels will realize the error of their ways. Meanwhile, other groups are offering a sense of purpose in life that doesn't require feeling ashamed of yourself. Even if that purpose is not a good one, don't be surprised that people sign up for it.
It's hard to think that even centrists are interested in fixing the problem when there's headlines like this:
> Biden criticizes ‘white man’s culture’ as he talks violence against women
That's just a random example. The article adds a bit more color, but not much. Do you think rhetoric like that will draw in any white men that don't have a shame kink? I don't, and a few weak hand-wringing articles here and there don't make up for it.
The litmus test is whether the issues are being treated like an (apocryphal?) Medieval witch test, where you are a witch regardless of the outcome.
For example, the fact that males disproportionately commit suicide is blamed on toxic masculinity - lack of vulnerability, cultural self esteem issues or whatever. Ok, fair enough; now the counterfactual is, what if females disproportionately committed suicide? It's pretty clear that it would be diagnosed on the left as related to toxic masculinity too (like e.g. women being less assertive asking for raises is).
The left talks about these issues like that, all the time, indeed - that makes it easier to dismiss the issues or to blame them on the "victim". It appears that the author thinks some other approach is needed.
Do you have any real examples? As written, it sounds like you’re criticizing non-specific hypothetical leftists for doing something hypocritical which doesn’t seem likely to lead anywhere productive without identifying who you’re talking about or providing examples of real things they said.
I provided a real example of an issue where men do worse being diagnosed on the left as a problem with men. I don't think I need to provide examples of issues where women do worse and it's diagnosed on the left as a problem with men.
I argue that's the whole of the left discourse.. any new issues would be handled similarly regardless of the outcomes to be discussed. Can you provide any issues as counter-examples?
You mentioned an issue (suicide) but simply asserted how it would be treated. You didn’t mention a single real person taking a position on the issue, establish that they were broadly representative of a group, or even establish which group you’re talking about (i.e. are you using “left” in the Fox News sense, general mainstream American sense, or European sense? Those are very different.)
> Ok, fair enough; now the counterfactual is, what if females disproportionately committed suicide? It's pretty clear that it would be diagnosed on the left as related to toxic masculinity too.
This is not at all clear to me.
Women are actually more likely to attempt suicide then men, yet men are more likely to succeed. If what you say is true we should already be able to observe the phenomenon you describe. So where is it?
Looks like this issue in particular is not being discussed politically. The closest I can find is that it's explained by depression in women, which in turn is partially explained (search for culture) as I've expected: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in...
That's.... quite a reach your making. Both writing off the causes in that article as just "toxic masculinity", and describing a mayo clinic article on depression as "the left"
The article lists potential societal causes, among other things. The fact that Mayo is not "the left" if anything makes my point stronger. If this is the "institutional" view, imagine the actual left-wing view (that I was too lazy to google)!
An institution that is barely left leaning describes one of the major causes of female depression (in turn a major cause of suicide) as being, to use a shorthand, patriarchy - i.e. some problem with men. The causes of increased suicides in men, as far as I've read, are also various problems with men.
Which is exactly the point I was making... see also, violence and incarceration, etc.
> The article lists potential societal causes, among other things. The fact that Mayo is not "the left" if anything makes my point stronger.
If so then I must have missed your point. Because it seemed like you were making a point about the left jumping to conclusions. Not accepting studied medical literature. Does "the right" not think any of the causes the Mayo clinic lists are legitimate causes? Which ones? Where can I learn about this?
> If this is the "institutional" view, imagine the actual left-wing view
No. Plenty of people spend lots of time imaging what "the others" believe. It's rarely leads to an accurate view.
Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological battle. I'm sure that wasn't your intention and also that the title is provocative in that direction, but when the topic is inflammatory, it takes a conscious effort not to feed flamewar. We ended up with a bad one here and your comment was the root of it.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Feel free to delete the thread. The only reason I left a comment was because people often complain about stories being flagged without explanation and I didn’t think an intentionally provocative article would lead to a positive discussion.
They immediately talk, twice!, about poorer people's wages stagnating compared with the rich, and just skate on past that to talk about men.
I'm not sure I'd say i'd expect better from Jacobin, but it's still kind of weird to just let that slide past without comment.
> My overall understanding of these labor market trends over the last few decades is that we’ve seen a narrowing of the gender wage gap, for the reasons we just discussed, and _a sharp widening of the class wage gap_. They’re pulling in different directions. So _the gap between the median and the top has gotten much wider_, but the gap between men and women at each level has gotten narrower.
That's the "centrist" (maybe, by US standards) think tank guy (with my emphasis) and the Jacobin guy complaining about what the left isn't talking about replies with:
> I want to ask about the maleness part of this...
That’s partly because of associative mating. High income people are more likely to pair up with other high income people (than they were in the past, for various reasons). This exacerbates inequality
Using the "culture wars" to 1) sell books and 2) hide the real problem: which is class warfare.
Billionares sucking the life out of our planet and people and are happy that we're squabbling over how "the left treats men" instead of looking up to ones that are causing a global mental health crisis
What you are talking about are communities. Communities of people who help each other and cooperate, instead of competing because the goal isn't to win, it's to coexist.
Communities aren't profitable for corporations. You must be a rugged individual that does everything themselves (including buying our self help program and set of tools to make your life better).
> What I really want, is women to show they can overpower a society of competitive values (which is typically male), with more values of mutual help, and I mean this in the political realm, as in socialism and a society made of collectives, not a society made of owners.
Wouldn't "overpowering" those "competitive values" be using a competitive mindset and sabotage the effort for "values of mutual help"?
the competitive mindset pits every individual against every other individual. this is different from a group of people combining their forces to push out an unwanted trait.
Characterizing competition as exclusively individualistic is I think, a very limiting and overly simplistic way to see this. There is such a thing as collectives and institutions being competitive.
Both cooperation and competition is part of the human psyche, and there is a place for competition as well (such as the refinement of personal character and development of capabilities). More problematically are such things as, exploitation, rent-seeking, status-seeking, etc. There are also problems when people in cooperation are not mature or capable enough to take care of themselves and cannot then adequately contribute, and others who contribute to the point of undermining their own health and development.
i agree, but that was not my point. this subthread started with a nitpick that overpowering competitive values would be self sabotaging as it would be employing the very thing it tries to get rid of.
competition is if course not exclusively individualistic. but overpowering competitive values in my mind needs to mainly happen on the individual level. that is, individuals need to learn to be cooperative. there is still room for healthy competition, like in sports and what not, but only if competition is not permeating through every level of society can we benefit from cooperation to build greater things.
there is maybe one more aspect here: i see "overpowering" as a metaphor not meant to be taken literally. i mean how would that even work? i see only one way to get rid of a competitive mindset: to teach children to be cooperative. the "overpowering" aspect would simply be that more people do that than people who teach their children to be competitive, and that women convince their husbands that teaching children to be competitive is not a good idea. unless we then start scoring who got more kids and husbands to stop being competitive, how is this "overpowering" competitive in itself? it's just strength in numbers.
I see even a metaphor of “overpowering”, “strength in numbers” as deeply problematic because it is indicative of paradigm and world view. This goes beyond signaling and messaging. It’s difficult to be aware of one’s own paradigm, let alone to change it.
It’s not as if I have a good solution to this. If I did, I would be writing about it.
So far, the person who seems to be able to articulate and implement this I have seen is Carol Sanford.
She does not talk about overpowering, or strength in numbers.
i am seriously interested, because i am more interested in achieving the desired result, not how we get there (unless there is a problem with the approach, like you seem to see here, so i would like to explore alternatives)
She talks about paradigms and world views, about how those can build on each other. This is important because often times, the really difficult problems are found outside of the current paradigm. It's when one can think in the other paradigm, that some things become possible ... but it also makes communication difficult because it takes a long time for someone's paradigm and world view to shift. Once that is in place, there are things like "nodal interventions" to help accelerate things.
Most of her writings and podcasts are geared towards business, but she wrote one book called _Regenerative Life_.
I don't know how exactly that applies to social structures, but "beat to fit, paint to match" is not it.
I'm approaching my understanding of it from the ecology and permaculture side of things. It's really easy to think in terms of, kill all the weeds, kill all the pests, maximize yields, etc. because that is part of the normative, mainstream paradigm. It requires a big shift into becoming a part of the ecology and designing things in that way. But letting the ecology grow, live, die, and heal on its own without as much direct intervention is how you get to a place where the system is resilient and adaptive, and yields something for humans along with all the other participant of the ecology.
Women always had different kinds of rights, like expressing themselves more with emotions and clothing and cosmetics, etc., and taking care of children. Men don't have these rights. A man working in daycare is frowned upon. A man wearing eyeshadow is frowned upon, a man sending heart ♥ emoticons in WhatsApp is frowned upon, etc. It seems fair that if women claim more rights, then men can claim some of these "soft" rights too.
> It seems fair that if women claim more rights, then men can claim some of these "soft" rights too.
So it seems the argument is that because men prevent other men from exercising their rights, women deserve to be stripped of rights? Interesting logic. If men are stopping you from exercising your rights perhaps you should listen to the folks talking about toxic masculinity -- which is exactly what you're describing -- rather than trying to punish women.
Somebody else may be saying something else in this thread but I am not saying anything about women, I'm talking about the burden of being a man and the way "the patriarchy" or whatever it is can very much kick your ass. That is, it is not a system that works to the benefit of all men but rather a system that privileges some men and uses violence to keep the rest in line.
It's not like the DC universe where you can launch a space shuttle off a commercial airliner and Superman saves your ass. There is plenty of violent behavior where it comes down to "he said, she said" and the police and legal system practically do nothing.
For example at my undergrad school I made fun of some gay bashers so they came after me instead of going after gay people because this was the 1990s and they probably thought if they actually bashed gays they'd get AIDS or something. Their reign of terror against me and other people like the president of the paint pellet gun club continued for a year until they finally smashed somebody in the face with a rock at point blank range from a water balloon catapult in front of tens of witnesses.
I am still sore to this day at the dean of students who made excuses instead of busting the people involved. A gay man and a lesbian women committed suicide when this was going and I blame that dean of student more than anyone because the key thing about bullying is how the whole institution rallies to the support of the bully (e.g. if the institution can't protect you from that kind of abuse it is showing you you are worthless, not just *telling you.) I heard the ringleader of that gang did time and if he got out and went "straight" and put his life together and stayed out of trouble I would want to shake his hand because I know how hard that is, but that dean of students is celebrated as a hero for all the good things he's done for that school and I think never held to account for his role in that incident. When I really think about it I felt that I belonged there much more than many places in my life but I have not given money, been to reunions, or anything like that.
I'm guessing that by far the majority of children in a typical year are from "traditional" families, which kinda makes this question irrelevant unless I'm misunderstanding.
The article is about how men need help. Gp stated men can’t even get jobs teaching children. But men also participate in the decision to keep men out of schools
i have seen families where the male parents absolutely didn't want to have anything to do with childcare. so i don't believe that it is a far stretch that some people come to the conclusion that this is normal and they shouldn't do childcare, and any man who is caring about children would be suspicious.
Do you have more information about that? I know there’s a big gender skew but that’s nowhere near as simple as “men can’t get a job” and has multiple causes.
not really, i got this from a friend who is the director of a private school. he told me that he was unable to hire any male staff because parents would not accept that, and even he himself had to stay far away from the kids.
also i believe that this director surely checked if other nearby schools had male staff when evaluating the feedback he got from parents before making a general claim. (because if parents complain about male staff then i'd want to know if they would be able to find any schools that didn't have male teachers.) so i do not believe that this was an isolated incident.
it is possible that this was a regional phenomenon and not indicative for the whole country, but it certainly shows that the sentiment "man working in daycare is frowned upon" is definitely a thing and not something made up nor an exaggeration of reality.
i believe the only way to counter that is to demand gender parity among teachers. children need male and female role models and gender parity or something close to it is the only way to achieve that.
I didn’t know you could get away with emoticons in HN comments at all.
I do post the growing heart and broken heart emoticons all the time on Mastodon but I can’t really talk about my gender much but I am sure people would guess it right.
Those aren't political rights, those are social norms. If a man does any of those things, it's frowned upon, but if a woman tried to vote in the 19th century she'd be thrown in jail.
I'm totally on board with people wearing whatever, it's a free country, but equating political rights with social norms is a false dichotomy.
it's not as black and white as you make it out to be. those social norms affect men's ability to endure hardship, find community, and empathize with the struggles of others. The article is not just talking about written rights, it is talking about achievement and happiness, which are emergent from a combination of written policy and social norms.
I disagree with the headline that "the left needs to talk about it" because fundamentally we do every day. The problem is that men tense up when we talk about things like "patriarchy" and "feminism", despite every piece of literature that explains that patriarchy and traditional (toxic) masculinity are actively harmful for men too. So men aren't listening to leftist talk about these issues and need to be baby-fed them using different words.
> equating political rights with social norms is a false dichotomy.
But one begets the other, no? See also all this noise from TN and FL about crossdressing being a sex offense. People are more okay with women looking masculine than men looking feminine, and now we're seeing laws that reflect that.
Similarly, because men aren't viewed as nurturing or whatever, they're far more likely to lose custody cases in court. There's absolutely tight bindings between political rights and social norms, and similarly I think there's a lot to be learned from the contrast between men and women's distinct challenges.
Are any of those things what people care about when they talk about "men's rights" or higher male suicide rates, jobless rates, etc, and the resulting need for "traditional masculinity" though... they mostly seem like the opposite!
I dunno if there are any countries with gender equality if you're using a relatively strict definition, as even ones known for greater gender equality still have stark differences in some areas, like occupational choice.
This has gone back as far as the 90s. My school, and many in my state, offered coed math and coed science classes, and female-only math, science classes.
A few years of this and they found boys grades had decreased and at an alarming rate. Surprise was expressed by some.
> Are they struggling, but as opposed to what when compared to women
It is not required to achieve maximum level of struggling. All that is required, is that Men’s issues are distinct, for instance they die younger, and advice given to women isn’t applicable.
> patriarchal values are compatible with capitalism
Perhaps, but I don’t think Christian values are really compatible with it and yet no one seems to die of the cognitive dissonance. People have a surprising ability to believe in mutually exclusive things at the same time.
There were much more clearly defined gender roles but this wasn't the same as fewer rights. For example lots of people claim that in the past men all had the vote and no women did, in reality the franchise in the past was mostly determined by land ownership and similar. Lots of men also didn't have it.
One obvious right women had in the past that men did not was the right to not be drafted into the army.
The article is interesting but overall the conclusions don't pass muster to me. Women are also suffering and many of the things in the article are just facts about men such as method of suicide. For example, women are more likely to attempt suicide but fail when men choose more violent means so they often succeed more often. I'm sorry that men choose more violent suicide methods but that doesn't reflect anything on society or women other than men are more violent by nature. Which is a fact.
For the first time in history, men aren't the end-all-be-all of economic impact and I don't think this is a problem. Women have been getting the short end of the economic stick for awhile. The fact is the economy is changing and the traditional jobs that men have had in the past are no longer as high paid or necessary due to advancements in technology. Here's a perfect example:
"You have an infrastructure bill that will create jobs largely for men. Two-thirds of the jobs in the infrastructure bill will go to men: black men as much as white men, and Hispanic men a little bit more, because they’re so represented in the construction industry. Don’t hide from that fact, as the administration does when they’re challenged on it."
I think is just wrong. We shouldn't be making bills for men we should be making bills for _people_ that _need work done_. If "shovel jobs" aren't economically valuable and men want to pick up shovels and women want to pick up computer keyboards, does that mean we have some kind of crisis of the gender that happens to pick up shovels more often? I don't buy it. We have a crisis where _people_ are picking up the wrong tools if their goal is to make maximum economic output. Men should pick a lane. Either they are content with doing "shovel jobs" or they can go to school like everyone else and get a non-shovel job that pays well. We don't support the horse economy anymore other than niche areas because horses are, besides ranching or farming, useless for economic output. Why would we subsidize an entire class of jobs which don't make economic sense for the benefit of men only? That's against the market forces that run our economy and it's also against equality women have been fighting for for _generations_
“Only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally” ~ Chris Rock
Lots of yakking it up about how sad men are but it's all so disingenuous. My experience leads to me to believe that the moment a man asks for help is the moment he has lost the respect of his peers and, should he be so lucky, his female partner. Evolutionarily, men are disposable, and the workplaces and dating arenas we must inhabit reinforce it at every step. For a long time, we were given a medal for our sacrifices which read "You Are A Good Man" but now even that worthless consolation prize is gone. They may fret over lost economic output or the dearth of marriable men, but make no mistake, they care far more about what you could provide than how you feel.
>My experience leads to me to believe that the moment a man asks for help is the moment he has lost the respect of his peers and, should he be so lucky, his female partner.
Honestly, it sounds like you need some new friends and to stop listening to Jordan Peterson. When I was going through a divorce, my closest friends were there day or night to take a call and let me vent. Heck my current wife actually was a sounding board as I navigated shared custody later on.
If the people around you are shunning you for asking for help and expressing your emotional trauma, you need to surround yourself with new people. And I say that with genuine concern for you, not out of spite or judgement.
I will also add the people I worked with eventually heard what was going on and were more supportive than I ever could have asked for.
Need a day off? Take it. Need more time to get that project done? We understand. Never a word of judgement from any of them and quite frankly the whole experience turned a few of those relationships from "just coworkers" to close friends.
>Honestly, it sounds like you need some new friends and to stop listening to Jordan Peterson.
And what about those who experience this effect, and have always actively avoided Peterson and his ilk?
When you find out rumours are spreading about you after you've opened up, you can separate yourself from that community, but where does that leave a person? What do you think happens when someone tries to join a new community, who has rumours circulating about their “mental health”?
It's much easier said than done, but get the hell away. So far away that your past relationships cannot in any way taint your future ones. Move to a new job, new city preferably. Rebuild your friend network.
I've been lucky for the most part with good friends, but periodically rebooting your life situation has other benefits too. I recommend it heartily, if you're in a position to do so. Keep your old friends if they're good, in that case.
That's been my approach but still, look at that advice and think about what it says about a society that necessitates it.
For both obvious and non-obvious reasons, I don't want to get into specifics in order to provide an existence proof that this is a problem, but consider that switching jobs/moving city/rebuilding a social network is something that depends a great deal on having resources available to do that with, not having obligations preventing that, having the means to evade the pervasive social media that encourages exactly the sort of “reconnection” that is anathema to the task.
Oh, I 100% agree. It's not feasible in a lot of situations, arguably in the vast majority of cases people are stuck. And even when it works, there are bound to be complications.
But I do recommend it when appropriate and feasible. Some of the best changes I've made to my life came because I was able to shake things up and go somewhere with no ruts.
I assume from the "rumors are spreading" you're talking about a high school situation - in which case that'll stop pretty quickly when you get to college (or full time work), so just tough it out.
If you're a grown adult and have rumors following you around, just find a new friends group. If your town is so small that you can't escape that, seriously just move? If it's a job and the culture is gossip, it's probably time to just find a new job.
I get that uprooting your whole life is a VERY BIG DEAL but you only live once. There's no way you're ever going to be happy dealing with constant gossip, and that isn't normal. That's a very, very abnormal situation you're in if you're a grown adult.
I literally have said that to a woman who was having a tough time her sr. year of high school with catty girls in her grade. There was no avoiding them, the behavior didn't rise to the level the school was going to do anything, and she wasn't in a position to transfer.
in addition, there are ways to share this message that is not belittling. people read "tough it out" as: "be a man, tough it out, haha", but it could also be: "yeah, i am sorry you are in a rough spot. unfortunately, there is no way you can avoid it, so you are going to have to protect yourself in other ways. here are a few things you can do.... don't give up and loose hope, this will go away."
>Congrats, you have just advocated for what's called "toxic masculinity".
No, I've just advocated for: high school sucks. It has literally nothing to do with being a guy. I would and have said the same thing to girls dealing with asshole classmates. At some point your options are find a new school, or just grin and bear it because your life is a different place after HS. Most high schoolers don't have the option of a different school.
I guess if a country invades another, you're saying that the men in the invading force have themselves to blame? Although sometimes they're threatened and forced, get shot if refusing.
But there's also the ones defending their own people. They didn't start any war
> they care far more about what you could provide than how you feel.
This is real, it does happen. But for the sake of anyone reading this, please be aware. There are plenty of women who are not like this. Finding them can feel overwhelming, but when you land the right one, it makes life so much better.
I'm kidding, but only slightly, when I say this: I think the best advice for young men is to skip the dating scene altogether until you're about 30. Things settle down, everyone more mature and less mercenary, and women will look at you more for your good manly qualities rather than the shallow ones.
i am always advocating for getting married early, before we are settled into our habits and expectations. however that is dependent on a supportive society, one that teaches young people what qualities they should look for in a partner, and one that that nurtures these good qualities from childhood.
Anyone who isn't a religious fundamentalist needs to find a non-combative way to talk about it that doesn't make it into a zero-sum game between boys and girls because the far-right evangelicals approach this as a means to an end: "here's this thing that will be easy to point at as a justification for the reversion to traditional gender roles that we already wanted."
So anyone who wants to advance the experience of people regardless of gender has got to fight that framing as well as advance possible solutions.
Honestly, although I don't agree with everything the article says, it does have a very good point.
Trump won in 2016 due to populism, on the belief that the American male was forgotten and left behind. As too, was rural America.
The left could easily win election after election by coming out and saying "yeah, we've done a lot for women, for people of color, for sexual minorities, etc...but here's a bunch of things we're doing for men, for the lower class, for the middle class, for rural America. Feminism is great, and masculinity is great too.".
If you get out in front of the messaging, and control it, right wing shock-jock culture warriors have no ammo. The GOP has won lots of elections simply because their media messaging is on point, consistent as hell, and repetitive. The left has ignored all their successful tactics instead of copying them, for some odd reason. I don't quite get it.
> If you get out in front of the messaging, and control it, right wing shock-jock culture warriors have no ammo. The GOP has won lots of elections simply because their media messaging is on point, consistent as hell, and repetitive.
I don't think those 2 points match up. You can get out in front of the messaging but you will not deprive right wing shock jock culture warriors of ammo. As you say, their messaging is consistent and repetitive, and it doesn't really matter if it's true or counteracted by reality. It'll get repeated often enough that it's assumed to be true. (For a tiny example, consider the "Sleepy Joe" meme. It has been clearly disproven by anybody paying attention to the last few years, but nevertheless it keeps getting trotted out as if it were obviously true).
Where the left goes wrong with their narrative is when they present issues like the gender pay gap in a way that implies that men and women are two separate groups competing against each other. That is not at all what happens in reality.
In reality you have families or aspiring families competing against each other. It is good that women get better career options, but it would be entirely self-defeating if this comes at the expense of men's career options. The wife does not want to steal her husband's job. She is not going to be happy with a husband who earns less or has worse career options than her. She is not going to cheer for feminism when her husband gets out-competed for a promotion by a woman.
People here are mentioning that “the left” (ambiguous as to what that is) does talk about men’s issues. They then cite an article or two. I’m not sure if one article every three to six months by some publication is really “talking” about it.
For the severity of issues that men are facing, it is not getting anywhere near the coverage that it needs to be fixed. They barely scratched the surface with this article and it hardly gets into how hopeless so many young men feel. The deaths of despair being so much higher for men should be an indication of why things are not going so well for men and how they feel overall.
It doesn’t help that the resources available are also not catered towards men either. 60-70% of therapists are women and most therapists use talk therapy - which was developed to treat women. Yes, it can still help men but many therapists are under equipped to deal with how men think and act. Talk therapy is often about listening to someone talk but many men want/need therapy that involves active direction and problem solving. Talking it out just doesn’t work for many men.
Does this get talked about in the media or by “the left”? Nope. People will just parrot “go to therapy” without realizing it’s not going to help many men because the methodology doesn’t fit how men currently work.
“Talk therapists” will literally do what you want them to do, including “problem solving”. You might need to go through a few to find your ideal therapist - and yeah, we could use more male therapists - but the idea that talk therapy is broken for men is just out there.
I’ve dealt with plenty of therapists who ask how I want to work, then they slot in around that. If I tell them that just talking about something isn’t working, they almost always move to “okay, well what can we do about this?”.
Don’t ever go into a therapy session without knowing what you’re trying to do.
IMO this article is in response to the controversy generated as a result of the August 7 YouTube video by Shoe0nHead, The Male Loneliness Epidemic[0]. The video got a lot of heat on Twitter and other social media places. Right wing commentators on YouTube had a lot of positive responses. A follow-up [1] was uploaded 2 days prior to the article.
I find this a bit hard, the author is clearly framing this from an anti left prospective but I also think isn't 100% wrong in some of the discussion around men from the left.
However, I also think it is complicated. We can't talk about progressive policies while ignoring the very real advantages that men (largely white men, which I am one) have had for many years.
That doesn't mean that men should suffer while we work towards a more equal society. But to some degree there may be a need to take a back seat and there will be some unavoidable pain along the way especially while what you have been conditioned towards changes.
But there are pieces that I agree with. Mental health being a big one. There is still a lot of stigma around mental health for men. A lot of this comes from a toxic masculinity view (which to be clear I have seen some women contribute to this view as well) that it makes you "less of a man" or whatever and men not getting the help that they need. This does go beyond just mental health but just the idea of asking for help making it seem like you are some sort of failure.
I feel like a lot of us here are likely in a more progressive environment. I mean just Monday I was out with dinner with friends, I happened to have a psych evaluation and got my results that day and I mentioned it because I was curious about others thoughts and opinions. I can say the same thing about coworkers or even my Boss. But having family and friends in far less progressive parts of this country does make me believe that attitudes like this are still the exception in the US.
We still have a long way to go for mental health for everyone in this country and (based on my experience) there is still a ton of stigma for men and it really is ignored my the left for the most part.
We're wrung out by society, every drip of productivity or money grabbed by a mad free for all struggle to... be comfortable and not have to struggle.
Men and women in the USA are used up by industry and capital to the point of damaging their bodies. People turn to mood-altering substances to try to dull the mental, emotional, and physical pain.
In parallel to the efforts to make society better for both men and women, we should be attacking the root causes of oppression. We can only fix that by attacking inequality, poverty, lack of access to mental/physical healthcare, and injustice. If you reduce the stressors, fewer people will turn to the toxic aspects of society that promise easy answers and simple actions.
We do need to be listening to everyone, with no exceptions. However there's no guarantee that those ideas will be good or moral, and some segments or ideologies forget that. There's no right to have your ideas accepted or to never receive criticism.
Certainly some "interesting" voting and flagging going on here. With topics like this, which get a lot of comments that are flagged and hidden, I'd love to see a report on the page. Such a report could show whether multiple IPs/users are coordinating on hiding comments they find objectionable.
Sadly this is the case in many politically charged discussions here and it doesn't look like much is being done about it. In a submission about banning XL bully dogs in the UK opinions that went against one particularly active commenter were instantly down-voted and flagged. And that submission wasn't even popular. Just brigaded hard.
Richard Reeves is originally from the left, and there is a podcast interview of him by Ezra Klein (titled "the boys are not alright"). In the interview he describes how he was drawn to feminism and looking at gender inequality, and by looking at the data became convinced that boys and men were a neglected cause. He was then frustrated as other researchers and policy people had no interest in that form of inequality.
This experience of a researcher starting by caring deeply about inequality, and starting with feminism, and then identifying male issues and finding a total lack of community interest has occurred before. This is exactly what happened to Warren Farrell, who a was once a major figure in feminism (and then largely ignored once he started talking about the issues facing men) (see his Wikipedia page for details).
I think part of what makes getting sociatal buy in on men's issues is that one of the biases men face is a lack of care for men in need of help, and this relates to the idea of male disposability.
For reference, there is a quite shocking list of statistics where men have significantly worse outcomes than women: longer jail for the same crime, higher rates of homelessness, higher rates of suicide, lower educational outcomes, shorter life spans, less friends on average, ...
Obviously women suffer from other issues, but as Ezra Klein is keen to emphasize to any listeners of the interview, empathy is not a zero sum game.
But we are biased to empathize more with women than men, both women and men are biased that way. That is the core of "toxic masculinity", we need everyone to empathize more with men, but instead due to low empathy for men all they say is "just work on your own problems, it isn't that bad for you!!".
There isn't much you can do in that situation, the low empathy burden men are shouldered with isn't something society wants to deal with, neither the left nor the right.
Indeed! When I see ultra-wealthy-but-emotionally-isolated people (the trio pointed out by Jaron Lanier comes to mind [1]), all I feel is pity at their condition.
What they need is to be emotionally "nursed" back to wellness, but their sheer wealth has isolated them so much that nobody can connect with them on a "normal" human level anymore.
Can we have an example of toxic masculinity? I've never once received a real definition in a debate like this and when I'm close to it, the other side tries to make it sound like they are sympathetic to toxic masculinity.
For example, I've had it told to me that I shouldnt have my son help me with changing my car's oil because thats putting some sort of burden on him at an early age. Does this sound like something a sane person would say? I would go as far to give the benefit of the doubt and say no, most people are sane and the ones that would make this type of argument are drawn into a social mania.
Exactly this. But even worse, this is frequently not said aloud. It is implicit in all of our interactions. Express too much emotion outside of certain narrow contexts, and other people (men and women alike) will look at you like you are a wimp. Nobody has to say a word.
That's just the crass version of the actually good advice that goes as follows: Don't react to your emotions, instead notice your emotions wash over you, identify the why and respond rationally instead of emotionally to the why. It's basically good advice given in the worst possible way with deceptive context
Why is that good advice? If my father dies, why is it bad to be sad about it? Why is it wrong to cry when I’m sad?
I think you’re completely off base in trying to make “respond rationally and with no emotion, ever” a universal rule, especially with regards to interacting with other people. It’s weird and robotic.
I am going to assume you are misunderstanding what I said rather than intentionally responding to what I didn't say, so here it goes:
I did not say don't be sad. I sad don't react emotionally, instead understand the emotion you are feeling, identify the why and respond rationally to the why. It's not bad to be sad, it's bad to allow the sadness to force you into a stupid reaction. In your example the actual good advice dictates it's fine to cry, but don't let your sadness dictate doing something stupid like drinking too much, getting behind the wheel and getting a dui or worse.
In my reply I acknowledged that someone saying what the op posted was almost always trying to communicate what I have said above and failing at it.
But that’s very much not what you responded to, nor is it even similar. What you responded to was “real men don’t cry.”
Whatever you were trying to add was within that context, thus my reply. “Real men don’t cry” is not well-intentioned, nor is it just a poorly worded version of good advice.
I called it the crass version of good advice given in the worst possible way with deceptive context, which is true. I cannot recall a single instance of someone saying the original statement and not meaning some form of what I provided for context in my personal life outside of hollywood movies, where it seems to have become this toxic masculinity trope rather than a failure of explanation likely caused by a failure at heeding the actual advice themselves and reacting emotionally.
When all the men got together and voted for women to also have the vote, that was toxic masculinity at work. (this is a joke, but also not really. Women shifting the political map towards larger government and more socialism seems to be the root of most of our current problems. It's kind of a big problem because women should very clearly be allowed to vote but at the same time I don't know how to reconcile that with the also very clear harm it is causing)
> When all the men got together and voted for women to also have the vote, that was toxic masculinity at work. (this is a joke, but also not really. Women shifting the political map towards larger government and more socialism seems to be the root of most of our current problems.
This seems like a really flawed and backwards take. What evidence do you have that supports your incredibly vague statement that women’s ability to vote is “the root of most of our current problems.”
The American socialist movement began in the early 19th century and peaked in the early 20th. 1900-1920 saw the height of socialist sentiment in the US. The Socialist Party of America began to lose it’s influence in the 1920’s as socialism began to decline in popularity. Women gained the right to vote in 1920.
Would that not then indicate that women gaining the right to vote led to a decline in socialist sentiment? Saying this is just as disingenuous as saying that women gaining the right to vote massively shifted the political spectrum towards socialism.
A rise in socialism is historically very often a reaction to some sort of societal upheaval (i.e. war, economic crises, high levels of inequality, exploitation, etc).
Forgive me if I’m wrong in assuming that you’re speaking about the US, but my point stands regardless of what country you’re referring to because blaming a century’s worth of problems on women gaining the right to vote (regardless of the country) is not a serious nor intelligent argument.
The claim was that big government was the root of most of our current problems and women in turn tend to vote for bigger government (and socialism but I used the lower case s on socialism which does not mean the Socialist party, it means a diverse group of potential policies that are all characterized by some group that isn't an individual and is usually the government owning some subset of assets and providing some subset of services)
Go look at the polling records across time and you see women voting for bigger government by way of voting for groups that have policies that ensure larger government (they are not the only group doing this, they are just the group we are talking about now. Single men also lean problematic in their voting patterns for example).
Talking about the Socialist party here is the wrong metric to use because it encompassed truly nutty groups that had no chance of being elected (from agricultural commune supporters to straight up communists). If you look at the subsets that actually got elected (i.e. the sewer socialists) they ran on policies like old age pensions, employment insurance, public housing, public health care and other big government welfare programs. Pretty much all this stuff had been subsumed into the big parties by the 1960's and was actually being implemented, so why would you ever expect the Socialist party to continue existing? All their electable policies (that became much more electable with women gaining the right to vote) were adopted by mainstream, usually democrat candidates who subsequently were elected. Subsequently all these programs form part of the big government problem we have today.
You see the above in the USA but you also see it in my home country of Canada, most recently with the current oaf running things federally, who has been kept in power by women voters not changing their vote when it became obvious he was doing likely criminal things while pursuing a suicidal spending platform at home and making us the laughing stock of the world stage with his antics.
Anyways, this is not to say women shouldn't have the vote, they very clearly should have the vote. My original post was mostly about how we integrate the clearly correct idea that women should be able to vote with the clearly correct idea that their voting patterns are causing a lot of our current problems. I think the actual correct solution is some other system of limiting suffrage to only those who clearly have long term skin in the game, as to what that would look like I am not certain. It could take the form of limiting voting to citizens who currently have at least 50 % custody/responsibility for a child of theirs or have X number of years of at least 50% custody/responsibility for a child of their under their belts. Or perhaps requiring citizens to post an income adjust long term bond to vote and have that bond be the first risk of loss if the government runs a deficit of a certain amount for more than 1 year. The challenge with limiting suffrage is having the rule be simple enough that gaming it is very difficult, while being strong enough to actually cut out enough of the people with no incentive to think long term about the country that they can't drive us into bureaucratic ruin.
>The claim was that big government was the root of most of our current problems and women in turn tend to vote for bigger government
>When all the men got together and voted for women to also have the vote, that was toxic masculinity at work. (this is a joke, but also not really. Women shifting the political map towards larger government and more socialism seems to be the root of most of our current problems.
Not sure how your statements (and “joke”)above and my statement below are all that much different. Ultimately you’re saying that women gaining the right vote led to the “issues” we have today. What issues? You don’t really say.
>What evidence do you have that supports your incredibly vague statement that women's ability to vote is "the root of most of our current problems.'
It’s not exactly a wonder why women might prefer socialist policies. Women couldn’t even open their own bank account until 1974 (1964 in Canada). If someone’s only recourse from a bad situation is to rely on the state, then socialist policies are going to look all that more appealing.
But that’s even if the premise is true that Canada (or the US for that matter),
is being ruined by socialist policy. And I’m sure many would debate you on that.
I can tell you from experience from living large portions of my life in both the US and Canada, having access to universal healthcare is a net benefit.
>You see the above in the USA but you also see it in my home country of Canada, most recently with the current oaf running things federally, who has been kept in power by women voters not changing their vote when it became obvious he was doing likely criminal things while pursuing a suicidal spending platform at home and making us the laughing stock of the world stage with his antics.
>Anyways, this is not to say women shouldn't have the vote, they very clearly should have the vote. My original post was mostly about how we integrate the clearly correct idea that women should be able to vote with the clearly correct idea that their voting patterns are causing a lot of our current problems. I think the actual correct solution is some other system of limiting suffrage to only those who clearly have long term skin in the game, as to what that would look like I am not certain.
You seem to me a bit biased here. You use the term correct a lot here, but just because this position is you’re opinion does not in fact make it “correct.”
>It could take the form of limiting voting to citizens who currently have at least 50 % custody/responsibility for a child of theirs or have X number of years of at least 50% custody/responsibility for a child of their under their belts. Or perhaps requiring citizens to post an income adjust long term bond to vote and have that bond be the first risk of loss if the government runs a deficit of a certain amount for more than 1 year.The challenge with limiting suffrage is having the rule be simple enough that gaming it is very difficult, while being strong enough to actually cut out enough of the people with no incentive to think long term about the country that they can't drive us into bureaucratic ruin.
You are advocating that only parents and rich people should be allowed to vote. Believe it or not, you can, in fact be poor and childless and still care about the future of your country. This scheme would essentially cut out the voices of young people, arguably the people with the most skin in the game in regards to the future.
Your bond scheme would likely result in people (even those who have the means) to not bother with voting. Or the government cutting spending, even when it’s needed.
Do you have to pay every time you vote, in this pay-to-vote scheme of yours? What if the party you voted for loses, do you still have to give up your bond if the other party runs a deficit? What if every party no matter who you vote for runs a deficit? What’s to keep the parties accountable if the citizens are now solely responsible to fund ...
Extreme "pranks"? Hazing culture? Omerta? Gang culture? Wolf of Wall Street / Boiler Room culture?The thin blue line? Church scandals? Basically every domestic terrorist group in history?
Four common patterns
* Recruitment techniques based around achieving worth by emulating some "alpha" male, usually physical and financial, sometimes spiritual
* Complicity through witness and increasing levels of participation
And especially
* Code of silence
A heinous fifth pattern is commingling this behavior with family / work culture, creating tension between "the code" and actual codes and relationships.
Ultimately these systems let sociopaths, narcissists, and other mentally unwell men to flourish and prosper precisely because they can easily adhere to these artificial "codes" and power structures vs traditional ones.
Edit: at the risk of coming across of overanalyzing, asking your son to help with the oil potentially contributes to this behavior. You as a male he looks up to is "recruiting" him to do something he has no interest in doing otherwise.
In a vacuum it's benign of course and not toxic but some awareness of the power dynamics and making sure your son knows the difference between a "good" ask and a "bad" ask and how to say no is important.
I can come up with just as many harmful actions perpetuated by women and yet we don't have "toxic femininity". Thats the key difference.
This line is complete trash: "recruiting him to do something he has no interest in doing otherwise". This is probably the greatest example of the lefts insanity nowadays. How do you know he isn't interested? You know nothing about my family but you assume and then push for policy using said assumptions. And you try to absolve yourself from criticism by saying "I'm just overanalyzing"!
We have toxic feminism. It doesn’t get as much air time, perhaps because of the power imbalances between men and women in society. But it’s there and it is discussed.
if he wasn't interested, my son would tell me. i might still try to motivate him by suggesting that if he helps me then i'll be done faster and we have time to do something else together that he wants.
Many people (especially men) translate "toxic masculinity" as "masculinity is toxic", which is not the message. Rather, certain aspects of masculinity can be toxic. "Don't share/express your feelings", "Discard/disparage the weak", "real men don't need help", etc. A big part of toxic masculinity is taking aspects of masculinity too far. Teaching your son (or daughter!) how to change the oil and having them help you is fantastic. Calling them a wuss if they don't want to do it and forcing them to do it while they are crying because they are so upset is toxic masculinity. I have a teenage son, and if he was upset about doing chores, I would stop and talk about it with him. Help him understand, by sharing my feelings, that I, too, often hate doing chores, but that if you can figure out the right approach, you can make it an ok thing to do.
Having feelings is natural and good, learning to feel the feelings without reacting without thought is something you can do. Talking about life is good, but complaining about everything is bad.
Independence is great, but relying on others in a community is also great! Being tough is awesome, ignoring others feelings all the time and making fun of people who are struggling is bad.
If you want to find out what toxic masculinity is, why haven't you read about it or watch any of the numerous videos about the subject?
> longer jail for the same crime, higher rates of homelessness, higher rates of suicide, lower educational outcomes, shorter life spans, less friends on average, ...
And outcomes are worse for Black men in almost all categories and have been so for some time. Yet the response to negative outcomes for Black people is to blame "black culture." Yet there's no blaming of white culture. Instead this is a crisis we have to do something about. C.f. crack vs fentanyl epidemics.
Richard Reeves would agree that black men and boys are disadvantaged (with outcomes significantly worse than black girls say). In the interview with Ezra Klein he focuses quite bit on this disenfranchisement, and says how the political right neglects disadvantages that uniquely impact race, and the political left neglects disadvantages to men, and the end result is that neither care about the plight of black men.
That both parties neglect the cause of black men is (in my opinion) an outcome of a two party system that is so divisive that it leaves no space for nuance (and poor policies and extra needless human misery is the result).
Another good resource for this would be Stiffed by Susan Faludi ( https://susanfaludi.com/stiffed.html ) . Similarly, she started off saying "why are guys resisting the women's movement?" and that lead her to some great insights about the situation of men. I think she has some fantastic insights into why it is hard for progress to be made here. (her observation about the "masculine" approach taken by civil rights and women's rights and being a process that can't be taken to 100% completion has sat with me for years). highly recommended as another thoughtful reflection on the situation.
Read bell hooks' "The Will to Change" to start. As someone on the far-left, we talk about positive masculinity all the time.
The whole concept of intersectional feminism is that there are different classes of privilege and exploitation that are relative to each other. To say that modern feminism doesn't think men are exploited is to misunderstand modern feminism.
Are young men exploited? Absolutely. They are exploited by capitalists to extract as much value out of their labor, their bodies be damned.
Are they exploited by people in power? Absolutely. The entire manosphere exploits their loneliness and keeps them isolated as emotionless rugged individuals.
Men are humans just as women are humans, and men have the same human need to connect and socialize. Toxic masculinity strips them of fulfilling that need.
Feminism gets caricatured so much by people who have something to benefit from that lampooning. Rather than dogpiling on the "feminism is mean to men" bandwagon, actually read modern feminist literature on masculinity.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 416 ms ] threadI'm actually quite interested in a nuanced conversation. That's the source of my comment about strange times when Jacobin and Brookings agree. That usually signals a real problem.
Here's an example from earlier this year.
The primary difference from the most common ways I hear about it from the right is the lack of a "one simple trick to fix it" prescription. It is more limited to a survey of some of the proposed causes and actions.
That being said, the first thing I noticed with that link was the title. Why is it implying it's Men's fault?
> What's the matter with Men?
Imagine if on a similarly gendered topic, say abortion, someone published an article with the title "What's wrong with Women." Everyone would be up in arms over it.
Similarly, if you saw Johnny or Suzy crying on the playground, you might ask, “what’s the matter?” That’s not implying they did something bad, it’s asking what hurt them or upset them, in a slightly colloquial way.
I think jumping straight to “why are they implying this is men’s fault” is, ultimately, the perspective you’re already bringing to a very benign article title, and the fact you reacted immediately that way instead of assuming good intentions and reading a bit of the content is a reflection on how some folks have decided that “toxic masculinity”, for instance, is a vile attack on men instead of a descriptor for vile things perpetuated on men.
Here is one: https://youtu.be/dxdlR_ESJFA?si=tGaUPLTzoh5oNQCh
> You have an infrastructure bill that will create jobs largely for men. Two-thirds of the jobs in the infrastructure bill will go to men: black men as much as white men, and Hispanic men a little bit more, because they’re so represented in the construction industry. Don’t hide from that fact, as the administration does when they’re challenged on it.
And then also things that are cut and dry worse for men (i.e. suicide rate) you don't see a gender breakdown showing that [1]. And even when the press material has a gender breakdown its part of the "Age" section even though being male is a 3x affect while the age is ~0.25x [2].
Jacobin's point is about messaging and not that "The Left" doesn't do anything.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/index.html
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/disparities-in-suicide.htm...
Not trying to dilute your point, because if you look at the "Data and Statistics" tab of the page you linked the disparity between male/female is clearly obvious. So I agree that the fact that is not talked about in the disparities is crazy. But, one thing I remember hearing when I was in high school was that suicide attempts were higher amongst women, but the suicide rate was higher amongst men. There is a mention of this in the article for youth, so maybe it was specifically mentioned because of that age group because I can't seem to see if that applies across age groups.
"In 2021, 9% of high school students reported attempting suicide during the previous 12 months. Suicide attempts were reported most frequently among girls compared to boys (12.4% vs. 5.3%)"
> Two-thirds of the jobs in the infrastructure bill will go to men: black men as much as white men, and Hispanic men a little bit more, because they’re so represented in the construction industry.
If I perceived the government as only capable of offering jobs and no other support I would also be pissed and feel alienated. I don't see much evidence that this is how people view the world outside of the Brookings institute.
When Obama tried creating "My Brothers Keeper" program to help struggling AA boys, who got it shut down? Certainly wasn't the right wing.
He didn’t try, he succeeded in 2014, and it remained in place as long as he was President, then it stopped being an Administration priority under Donald Trump and went away in 2017 (though the Obama Foundation then launched a similarly named grant program with similar purpose in 2018 which is still active.)
> Certainly wasn’t the right wing.
Except it absolutely was.
My recollection is that the program was initiated in 2014, with substantial contributions from private organizations. It was further funded in 2015 with more private sector contributions.
I believe it was shut down when Trump was inaugurated.
We can always make the claim that why artificially limit it to just that subgroup or why can't these specific group of men find help in the all inclusive programs we have already, but then we get back to where we started, that is "see we are talking to men".
This is also an allagory at every other attempt of the left wing lens trying to help men. Society is very quick to shove in my face "black patient with black doctors and female patient with female doctors have better outcomes" but for some reason an issue faced by men needs to be watered down or not addressed completely.
This is absolutely absurd nonsense. Good god.
Check the production values of most socialist-inclined (not liberal, big difference) content on youtube/podcasts vs those coming from the right.
I mean, look at those Lex Fridman videos. Like, sure, dude is probably going to support the cause for a new All-American Übermensch or something like that - But he looks coool while doing it, can't deny that.
More than 70 years ago Pasolini explicitly said "The right is back again because they scream louder than us" and we're yet far from fully internalizing this concept.
Maybe don't stick your head in the sand the moment someone says "toxic masculinity". It means something which hurts men, too. Every economic conversation and conversation on gender roles touches on this specific kind of despair and anxiety in the universe. If you look hard enough, even consumerist vanilla and milk-toast pieces like the Barbie movie take on talking about the expectations placed on men by themselves and what it feels like to wake up to a society where nobody meets those anymore.
For Jacobin to write this is absolutely bizarre. It's almost as if it's aimed more towards people on the right than on the left, except it vindicates the idea that the left never touches the concept of men, as if women were the only thing that existed on the left, which just isn't true. It's always been an everyone club, it's always been a club for those who work for their money and for those sympathetic to them. And it's a place where those people talk about those problems which hurt them. That includes and has always included men.
The left however tends to shun the fact that a lot of the toxic masculinity comes from women and their expectations on men and boys. There isn't anything men can do to stop toxic masculinity until women stops propagating it, and the left sees no problem with women and teachers propagating toxic masculinity, at least I've never seen them talk about it as a problem that needs fixing.
For example women and queer in armed forces are routinely mocked by the right as feminization and weakening of the military
Of course the gate is rising
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove though. It seems like whataboutism
This just isn't true. The fact that men AND women are taught this "manly man" crap by both their mothers and fathers is commonly discussed. It's often reported that women don't self reflect but follow any prominent feminist and you'll hear them talking about this often.
> There isn't anything men can do to stop toxic masculinity until women stops propagating it
This is both false and a poor human excuse for bad behavior. You can have better conversations. You can model better behavior. You can call out misogyny. It's fun or comfortable or do but it's with your control. Don't push all the hard work to others. Do it yourself. (I do. It's not fun but it's important.)
> the left sees no problem with women and teachers propagating toxic masculinity, at least I've never seen them talk about it as a problem that needs fixing.
Be honest with yourself. Where are you looking? Articles like this that make it seem like we should over index on self inflicted wounds or aces where women talk about the difficulties they face because of heavily patriarchal society?
I don't read the news or social media, so it's bizarre to me when someone tries to divert a basic human concern into a political agenda. Mental health is important no matter what political spectrum you're on, and treatment isn't political, it's healthcare.
"The personal is political." It's a phrase originating in second-wave feminism and continuing onwards in current cultural issues.
So if you're not a conservative who's picked this up as a thing to push forward your career with, you can't "not politicize" it because once something is politicized you can't put it back in the jar.
EDIT: And if those politicians, however disingenuous, are successful in politicizing it... well doesn't that just mean it resonates with a lot of people and then the left should talk about it because it's important to people?
Not that Wikipedia is authoritative or anything but it seems to meet their definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Why (ethically) would a political agenda be based on anything else?
And healthcare is NEVER politicized.
A couple of excerpts that summarize Renn's viewpoint:
>> The directional similarity of Reeves’ recommendations to the MRA agenda shows why it won’t get much traction. The MRA vision never inspired a material number of men, and neither will Reeves. In part, this is because he wants men to become more like women, a project that will never appeal to ordinary guys. He cites David Gilmore’s very interesting book Manhood in the Making, which is an anthropological survey of how a diverse set of cultures around the world have defined manhood as a distinctive identity that builds on men’s strengths rather than seeks to minimize them. But Reeves rejects Gilmore’s insights. His agenda would be more compelling to ordinary men if he had worked with the grain of Gilmore’s findings on the common themes of manhood rather than against them.
>> The second half of his book, then, exemplifies a major problem in American public life—one where ideology prevents us from honestly addressing our biggest social issues—that is not specific to Reeves’ book. The same ideological straightjacket affects pretty much every other area of society as well, from opioids to homelessness. Which is why we have not been able to successfully address any of them. As a society, we must find a way to create the space in which the real sources of and potential solutions to serious social issues can be publicly discussed and ultimately confronted if we actually want to make progress in fixing any of them.
Is it just me or does this reduce to the idea that ordinary men are stupid? Not on board with that at all.
This is not only a very western perspective but a very modern one. Regardless, the principles of liberating people from gender roles applies just as well to a gender role applied only to men.
This is not commonly known. If they had emphasized trade school and training, I feel like it would have had much less pushback from the right.
e.g. CANCELS $1.6 TRILLION IN STUDENT DEBT FOR 45 MILLION AMERICANS
The fact sheet says it would pay for all of this (in total $2.2 trillion) by taxing Wall Street speculation. So, somehow create a tax that represents almost 10% of total US GDP to cancel student debt and allow all future college to be almost free.
I can't imagine any world where that would actually happen. Bernie is living in the clouds.
This isn't giving anyone a fighting chance because it's not an actual, feasible solution.
Ref: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/college-fo...
Very much an advocate for the working man, there.
“There is a ladder of success that people climb,” he continued. “Some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they're simply not intended to be careers. They're not intended to be full-time jobs. They're rungs on a ladder."
"[Those jobs] are ways for people to get experience in the workforce doing a thing that might not necessarily pay you as much as you'd like, but nevertheless serves a real purpose,"
And picking up where it left off: "So to me, the brightest line needs to be drawn between skilled and unskilled work. We need to encourage more people to learn a skill that's actually in demand."
> Some of those jobs that are out there for seven, eight, nine dollars an hour, in my view, they're simply not intended to be careers. They're not intended to be full-time jobs.
This is a huge conservative talking point - the federal minimum wage was intended to be a liveable wage, not "for teenagers/high schoolers/part timers" - this whole spin of "these jobs are not meant to be liveable" is a wholly after-the-fact revisionism.
jobs that are not meant to be livable should never be fulltime.
people stuck in a fulltime non-livable job don't have the time or resources to upgrade.
Welding is a "shitty job?" I'd disagree entirely, and I think that would be Mike Rowe's position as well, and I think he directly cautions against the mentality you're attempting to take to these careers. You're also seemingly leaving no space for owner operated businesses.
> I can't think of any other reason to do this—I don't know many men who long for dirtier jobs so they're seen as more manly.
Doesn't that just undercut your own thesis, then? Or are you operating on the presumption that the advice being given by Mike Rowe is meant to be universal and you should upend your life in order to chase it? I don't see that at all.
I'm still baffled as to how you'd see any of this as "anti-labor."
I can't think of many other public figures that have spent as much time as him, advocating for blue collar work.
The trick is not advocating for the work but the worker. Employment, without fail, sucks ass.
A hugely shared article from 2 months ago in WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine...
Also in the Atlantic last year:
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/21-r...
This is just off the top of my head, but it's easy to do a Google search.
Second, an administration not having "an agenda" for an issue as intractable/abstract as mental health is not a sign that they don't genuinely care.
That said, I certainly agree that the president - in fact, all presidents, left or right - have paid no more than lip service to men's societal struggles, image issues, mental health, etc, but that is clearly not the driving thesis in this thread.
It's precisely about how while liberals are recognizing the negative effects of the crisis of masculinity, they haven't been able to converge on solutions. And how that's a problem.
Disclaimer, I'm not very familiar with either The Atlantic, nor who runs allsides.com and whatever biases they may have.
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart
Things were pretty non-masculine back in the late 70s and early 80s but nobody seems to care about that. I hate using the catch all of blaming social media but it does play a part in the attention to "issues".
I could post a bunch of links but here are two relevant ones: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/masculinity-for-the-modern... https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/boys-arent-growi...
Also the article tries to pin male graduation rates to masculinity but makes no mention of 300% tuition and crippling debt.
I hate these types of articles that try take one issue and make it the scapegoat for all these complex problems. This over simplification of lifes complexities and how much things suck really need to stop.
A common example would be the topic of male suicide, which is usually addressed as either "well, women try to kill themselves more often and that's totally not an indicator of attention seeking behavior versus genuine depression and fatigue with life" or "toxic masculinity and the patriarchy creates all of the problems for men". Both of which ignore pangender expectations and influences on the average (versus in-power) male experience.
There's no doubt that the American left (and other Western nations' equivalents) diminishes male issues or treats them as unimportant due to the perspective that men created and control all of those issues. Useful for political influence, but useless for discourse or problem solving.
The usual rhetoric I hear about toxic masculinity is very far away from the contents of that book. It is really easy to use that phrase in an aggressive way. Though, interestingly enough, Pixar’s Buzz Lightyear movie was written by someone who has thoroughly studied this. By that token, so can the contrast between Iron Man and Captain America in the MCU.
Ironically enough, some of the very problems brought up by the right can be understood in an insightful way with this lens.
Why this is relevant to the discussion:
The gun suicide rate is up for teens: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/07/27/guns-s...
Men are far more likely commit suicide by gun: https://preventfirearmsuicide.efsgv.org/about-firearm-suicid...
Unfortunately, the news tends to focus hard on the "mass shooting" angle instead of the suicide rate when discussing safe storage and red flag laws.
This is the crux of 90% of fallacious criticisms of political parties. A lot of people in power are immoral and don't care about certain issues for identity-politics reasons, but as well there are reasonable people in power who can only give so much attention to so many topics at any given time, and some issues naturally become more associated with one party than another. In a perfect world that would be fine and everybody would understand that just because the news articles and speeches concerning a particular party don't divvy their focus on particular issues in the same manner as one personally would given one's own specific politics, that doesn't mean "the left" or "the right" "don't care" about X issue or are "silent on" issue X. That phrasing is usually an oversimplification used as an excuse to bash a party disliked by the writer/speaker for other reasons. The two specifics reasons this pattern is fallacious is:
A. It implies that the people in power generally don't care about the issue, which may only appear true if you do not have a holistic sample of their opinions and policies, which is not something the media facilitates.
B. It implies that the voter base of those people must generally agree with them on the particular issue.
Multiple Democratic presidents have not done anything substantial to address some of the issues you mentioned. Not saying that the GOP is better, they are objectively far worse. But the Democrats have squandered every chance to really help this country in meaningful drastic ways.
Shit, Biden was THE biggest friend to Corporate America while he was in the senate, and that didn't stop while he was VP, nor as President. You think someone who was completely bought and paid for by the healthcare lobby was going to allow Obama to deploy a government-backed healthcare option, instead of the mess we got with the ACA?
Are you talking about Biden, or every single Republican here?
I'm well aware that the GOP sucks, but the corporate wing of the Democratic party has put their foot down and voted with the GOP for way too long...especially on issues that are popular across the country even among different political demographics. Drug reform, immigration, education, healthcare, gun control, etc... Corporations donate lavishly to both parties because it's just too easy and cheap to do so, plus the promise of having whatever party is in power completely subservient to your interests is quite appealing if you're a CEO.
I'd love a president who actively goes out of their way to fuck Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Healthcare, Bio Oil, etc... but the last politician to attempt to do that on the national level was Bernie, and he got shafted.
The latter is a valid perspective, but dominates the discourse which is hardly a balanced approach.
Majority of male health issues?
By your own description you had a personally bad experience (sample of one) during childhood that you compare to your wife, someone you chose likely BECAUSE of your experiences during adulthood.
Your comparison is so off-base and sample size so small as to be meaningless.
In particular you see pointless bashing of young men. Who are actually at the very bottom of the patriarcal order, completely disposable and a seen mostly as fodder. So punching at young men is actually punching down and reinforcing the patriarcal order.
Examples?
>the quasi-marxist idea that men are a separate species that exploits women
How is that quasi-marxist?
One of Marxism's core tenets is class struggle: The bourgeois vs the proletariat. Feminism offers a similar narrative, only the proletariat is patriarchy. A group or institution that allegedly serves to advance the interests of men at the expense of women; placing men into positions of power and leadership so that they can enjoy social benefits and privileges intentionally not offered to women.
Most "*-isms" offer this type of narrative. The only thing that changes are the particular power groups vs oppressed. It's not a "left" or "right" phenomenon. Nazism offered the same story and used its ideological bullshit to justify persecution of the Jews: by painting them as a self-serving group that was occupying institutions of power.
The most effective way to get people to hate others is to make the others look both powerful and self-interested.
Sure 20 years ago the sides were reversed but now the hypocrisy is mostly on the left ( I didnt say all), specifically when it comes to how we treat both sexes.
The problem is that a lot of people, many of them journalists and "influencers" writing for a lay audience, decided they could just cross out the "socially expected" part, which results in a completely different concept that puts the onus for the behavior entirely on the individual — hardly a socially enlightened perspective — and that amounts to the appropriation of academic jargon for the speaker's use as a rhetorical bludgeon. And sure, a lot of these writers were left-leaning self-described feminists who may have assumed they could do no wrong. And yes, many of these term-abusers would go on to propagate real toxic masculinity while decrying the failures of the target of the week from their position of presumed revolutionary thought.
But don't blame the sociologists. They used a reasonable term to describe a real problem. And now they've had to go pick a new term — I think it's something like "male role behavior syndrome" but I don't remember exactly.
They absolutely do NOT. The right has Jordan Peterson and a raft of people discussing men's issues. The left has NO equivalent. The silence is deafening. If you dare to bring up men's issues in education, parental rights, etc, you get lumped in with the MRA wackadoodles. The left is especially harsh in silencing dissent, and frankly every time it happens, you're pushing people further into the arms of the right wing.
Edit: exhibit A. This is the fastest I've had an innocuous comment go negative on hackernews. Tow the party line or be silenced I guess...
they are all about addressing feminists and female minorities. I can tell you from my own experience, the vast majority of the left don't give a shit about minority men either.
I wonder when I see these characterizations of the left if they are coming from social media. I’m not on any social media aside from this site I guess, so I’m not sure if that’s what’s going on. The folks on the left that I interact with in real life are definitely a very big tent group.
What people mean here is talking about problems imposed on men by society and how to fix that, not discussion that merely boils down to repeating feminist talking points. For example, one issue affecting men is the way they are vulnerable to immediate and vicious punishment if any woman anywhere makes allegations regardless of whether they are substantiated or even eventually proven false. Try bringing that up with your friends and see what happens.
The only time I’ve seen that happen is when the proposed solutions are things like rolling back women’s independence or trying to excuse things like harassment as “boys will be boys”. I’ve otherwise read tons of things about helping build healthy relationships, having non-sexual friendships, improving educational options, bolstering employment options which don’t require college degrees, helping with unreasonable expectations and mental health/substance abuse traps, etc. and have never seen the dynamic you describe.
Modern capitalistic practices are terrible for mens health. The previous paradigm was terrible for women. Any real solution has to address both.
I'm not rushing towards the right, I'm being pushed away from the left.
And this is a great pity. The left needs someone understanding male problems, able to discuss them and offer some concrete plan forward. The deafening silence you mentioned causes the gap go wider and decreases the chances of mutual understanding, as exemplified by many comments under this article.
The left doesn't have an equivalent of Jordan Peterson in general—there aren't any well-known celebrity spokespeople on the left. It's just not how they do things. So if that's what you're looking for, to understand what people on the left think about anything, really, you're going to be disappointed.
> The left talks about this all of the time,
every time I've seen leftists talk about this. its always in the form of gaslighting men into blaming themselves for their failures. as if the k-12 educational system isn't currently stacked against them.
No facts about it, just some random assertion. Schools aren't going to change the way males relate to playing games, sports, and farting around in general compared with actually studying.
What other part of the article did I miss? Oh, this:
> the education system isn’t doing very well by lots of our boys and men now. We have a ten percentage point drop in the share of male teachers, incredible underinvestment in apprenticeships and vocational forms of learning, and all kinds of changes in school environments that mean that we’re not serving them very well.
What changes in environments? Vocational means simply that boys don't do desks and paper well- is that true? Do male teachers make that much difference? The thrust here is that the economy has left men behind. Maybe that's true, which is more important.
You would be surprised. A boy having a male mentor is extremely helpful. Oftentimes an adult male can connect with boys in ways that an adult female might have trouble with. Teachers, for better or worse, are mentors. They are who kids spend the most time around during school semesters, and where they receive the most instruction, outside of parents.
Now don't get me wrong. Boys can absolutely succeed without a male teacher in their lives, and it's great that we have lots of female teachers. But it is absolutely helpful for a boy to have a man to look up to in some fashion.
This article makes a lot of good points about it, though its more about mentorship in general instead of male mentorship:
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/boys-need-power-of-mentoring-b...
Sounds like you have already thought about this and came to a sexist conclusion.
lets flip this around. lets say we live in an alternative universe where primary school is primarily male dominated. just drawing from your own life experience, would you ask if not having female teachers affects female students?
My great grandmother, Marie-Madeleine, and her sister Mercedes were both married/promised to their older cousins (2nd degree, so quite close) to make sure the family business stayed in the family (no brothers, only 3 sisters). My great-grandmother probably poisoned her husband shortly after their 2 children, making him unable to carry loads, and that killed him in 39/40 while he was forced to go work in Germany, and Mercedes was known in the village to prostitute herself during the war and tell everyone how her husband was unsatisfying. I think their parents didn't dare to push the 3rd sister (I know her name starts with 'M' too but I'm unable to remember), because she was the hard-headed one.
I'd rather be divorced than poisoned, tbh.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They act more mature because they're pressured to by society. I won't bombard you with articles but I urge you to look into the causes behind that saying.
And they continue to wonder why the right has enjoyed such a resurgence across the world. Looking for any reason, any explanation that does not require a mirror.
I grew up in Europe and was ultra liberal most of my youth.
Sentence structure man, sentence structure!
What discourse I've seen that focuses on men's issues from the left tends to not really get it. If they just tsk tsk harder at Jordan Peterson and criticize toxic masculinity harder, surely the incels will realize the error of their ways. Meanwhile, other groups are offering a sense of purpose in life that doesn't require feeling ashamed of yourself. Even if that purpose is not a good one, don't be surprised that people sign up for it.
It's hard to think that even centrists are interested in fixing the problem when there's headlines like this:
> Biden criticizes ‘white man’s culture’ as he talks violence against women
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/27/politics/joe-biden-white-mans...
That's just a random example. The article adds a bit more color, but not much. Do you think rhetoric like that will draw in any white men that don't have a shame kink? I don't, and a few weak hand-wringing articles here and there don't make up for it.
For example, the fact that males disproportionately commit suicide is blamed on toxic masculinity - lack of vulnerability, cultural self esteem issues or whatever. Ok, fair enough; now the counterfactual is, what if females disproportionately committed suicide? It's pretty clear that it would be diagnosed on the left as related to toxic masculinity too (like e.g. women being less assertive asking for raises is).
The left talks about these issues like that, all the time, indeed - that makes it easier to dismiss the issues or to blame them on the "victim". It appears that the author thinks some other approach is needed.
I argue that's the whole of the left discourse.. any new issues would be handled similarly regardless of the outcomes to be discussed. Can you provide any issues as counter-examples?
I mean left in US context. The further to the left, the more issues/the more the issues are diagnosed like this, as far as I can tell
This is not at all clear to me.
Women are actually more likely to attempt suicide then men, yet men are more likely to succeed. If what you say is true we should already be able to observe the phenomenon you describe. So where is it?
An institution that is barely left leaning describes one of the major causes of female depression (in turn a major cause of suicide) as being, to use a shorthand, patriarchy - i.e. some problem with men. The causes of increased suicides in men, as far as I've read, are also various problems with men.
Which is exactly the point I was making... see also, violence and incarceration, etc.
If so then I must have missed your point. Because it seemed like you were making a point about the left jumping to conclusions. Not accepting studied medical literature. Does "the right" not think any of the causes the Mayo clinic lists are legitimate causes? Which ones? Where can I learn about this?
> If this is the "institutional" view, imagine the actual left-wing view
No. Plenty of people spend lots of time imaging what "the others" believe. It's rarely leads to an accurate view.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not sure I'd say i'd expect better from Jacobin, but it's still kind of weird to just let that slide past without comment.
> My overall understanding of these labor market trends over the last few decades is that we’ve seen a narrowing of the gender wage gap, for the reasons we just discussed, and _a sharp widening of the class wage gap_. They’re pulling in different directions. So _the gap between the median and the top has gotten much wider_, but the gap between men and women at each level has gotten narrower.
That's the "centrist" (maybe, by US standards) think tank guy (with my emphasis) and the Jacobin guy complaining about what the left isn't talking about replies with:
> I want to ask about the maleness part of this...
Billionares sucking the life out of our planet and people and are happy that we're squabbling over how "the left treats men" instead of looking up to ones that are causing a global mental health crisis
Wouldn't "overpowering" those "competitive values" be using a competitive mindset and sabotage the effort for "values of mutual help"?
Both cooperation and competition is part of the human psyche, and there is a place for competition as well (such as the refinement of personal character and development of capabilities). More problematically are such things as, exploitation, rent-seeking, status-seeking, etc. There are also problems when people in cooperation are not mature or capable enough to take care of themselves and cannot then adequately contribute, and others who contribute to the point of undermining their own health and development.
competition is if course not exclusively individualistic. but overpowering competitive values in my mind needs to mainly happen on the individual level. that is, individuals need to learn to be cooperative. there is still room for healthy competition, like in sports and what not, but only if competition is not permeating through every level of society can we benefit from cooperation to build greater things.
It’s not as if I have a good solution to this. If I did, I would be writing about it.
So far, the person who seems to be able to articulate and implement this I have seen is Carol Sanford.
She does not talk about overpowering, or strength in numbers.
i am seriously interested, because i am more interested in achieving the desired result, not how we get there (unless there is a problem with the approach, like you seem to see here, so i would like to explore alternatives)
Most of her writings and podcasts are geared towards business, but she wrote one book called _Regenerative Life_.
I don't know how exactly that applies to social structures, but "beat to fit, paint to match" is not it.
I'm approaching my understanding of it from the ecology and permaculture side of things. It's really easy to think in terms of, kill all the weeds, kill all the pests, maximize yields, etc. because that is part of the normative, mainstream paradigm. It requires a big shift into becoming a part of the ecology and designing things in that way. But letting the ecology grow, live, die, and heal on its own without as much direct intervention is how you get to a place where the system is resilient and adaptive, and yields something for humans along with all the other participant of the ecology.
Women always had different kinds of rights, like expressing themselves more with emotions and clothing and cosmetics, etc., and taking care of children. Men don't have these rights. A man working in daycare is frowned upon. A man wearing eyeshadow is frowned upon, a man sending heart ♥ emoticons in WhatsApp is frowned upon, etc. It seems fair that if women claim more rights, then men can claim some of these "soft" rights too.
> It seems fair that if women claim more rights, then men can claim some of these "soft" rights too.
So it seems the argument is that because men prevent other men from exercising their rights, women deserve to be stripped of rights? Interesting logic. If men are stopping you from exercising your rights perhaps you should listen to the folks talking about toxic masculinity -- which is exactly what you're describing -- rather than trying to punish women.
For example at my undergrad school I made fun of some gay bashers so they came after me instead of going after gay people because this was the 1990s and they probably thought if they actually bashed gays they'd get AIDS or something. Their reign of terror against me and other people like the president of the paint pellet gun club continued for a year until they finally smashed somebody in the face with a rock at point blank range from a water balloon catapult in front of tens of witnesses.
I am still sore to this day at the dean of students who made excuses instead of busting the people involved. A gay man and a lesbian women committed suicide when this was going and I blame that dean of student more than anyone because the key thing about bullying is how the whole institution rallies to the support of the bully (e.g. if the institution can't protect you from that kind of abuse it is showing you you are worthless, not just *telling you.) I heard the ringleader of that gang did time and if he got out and went "straight" and put his life together and stayed out of trouble I would want to shake his hand because I know how hard that is, but that dean of students is celebrated as a hero for all the good things he's done for that school and I think never held to account for his role in that incident. When I really think about it I felt that I belonged there much more than many places in my life but I have not given money, been to reunions, or anything like that.
Gender seems to cancel out here
also i believe that this director surely checked if other nearby schools had male staff when evaluating the feedback he got from parents before making a general claim. (because if parents complain about male staff then i'd want to know if they would be able to find any schools that didn't have male teachers.) so i do not believe that this was an isolated incident.
it is possible that this was a regional phenomenon and not indicative for the whole country, but it certainly shows that the sentiment "man working in daycare is frowned upon" is definitely a thing and not something made up nor an exaggeration of reality.
i believe the only way to counter that is to demand gender parity among teachers. children need male and female role models and gender parity or something close to it is the only way to achieve that.
I do post the growing heart and broken heart emoticons all the time on Mastodon but I can’t really talk about my gender much but I am sure people would guess it right.
I'm totally on board with people wearing whatever, it's a free country, but equating political rights with social norms is a false dichotomy.
I disagree with the headline that "the left needs to talk about it" because fundamentally we do every day. The problem is that men tense up when we talk about things like "patriarchy" and "feminism", despite every piece of literature that explains that patriarchy and traditional (toxic) masculinity are actively harmful for men too. So men aren't listening to leftist talk about these issues and need to be baby-fed them using different words.
But one begets the other, no? See also all this noise from TN and FL about crossdressing being a sex offense. People are more okay with women looking masculine than men looking feminine, and now we're seeing laws that reflect that.
Similarly, because men aren't viewed as nurturing or whatever, they're far more likely to lose custody cases in court. There's absolutely tight bindings between political rights and social norms, and similarly I think there's a lot to be learned from the contrast between men and women's distinct challenges.
Boys and men do worse on a number of things compared to girls and women within, say, US society:
* Worse grades in school
* More frequently disciplined in school
* Lower college attendance and graduation rates
* Weaker friend networks/less emotional support for adult men
* More likely to be imprisoned/found guilty of crimes (especially violent ones)
* More likely to be homeless
* More likely to have dangerous jobs
* Lower life expectancy
* Less likely to have a real relationship with their kids
This has gone back as far as the 90s. My school, and many in my state, offered coed math and coed science classes, and female-only math, science classes.
A few years of this and they found boys grades had decreased and at an alarming rate. Surprise was expressed by some.
It is not required to achieve maximum level of struggling. All that is required, is that Men’s issues are distinct, for instance they die younger, and advice given to women isn’t applicable.
> patriarchal values are compatible with capitalism
Perhaps, but I don’t think Christian values are really compatible with it and yet no one seems to die of the cognitive dissonance. People have a surprising ability to believe in mutually exclusive things at the same time.
There were much more clearly defined gender roles but this wasn't the same as fewer rights. For example lots of people claim that in the past men all had the vote and no women did, in reality the franchise in the past was mostly determined by land ownership and similar. Lots of men also didn't have it.
One obvious right women had in the past that men did not was the right to not be drafted into the army.
For the first time in history, men aren't the end-all-be-all of economic impact and I don't think this is a problem. Women have been getting the short end of the economic stick for awhile. The fact is the economy is changing and the traditional jobs that men have had in the past are no longer as high paid or necessary due to advancements in technology. Here's a perfect example:
"You have an infrastructure bill that will create jobs largely for men. Two-thirds of the jobs in the infrastructure bill will go to men: black men as much as white men, and Hispanic men a little bit more, because they’re so represented in the construction industry. Don’t hide from that fact, as the administration does when they’re challenged on it."
I think is just wrong. We shouldn't be making bills for men we should be making bills for _people_ that _need work done_. If "shovel jobs" aren't economically valuable and men want to pick up shovels and women want to pick up computer keyboards, does that mean we have some kind of crisis of the gender that happens to pick up shovels more often? I don't buy it. We have a crisis where _people_ are picking up the wrong tools if their goal is to make maximum economic output. Men should pick a lane. Either they are content with doing "shovel jobs" or they can go to school like everyone else and get a non-shovel job that pays well. We don't support the horse economy anymore other than niche areas because horses are, besides ranching or farming, useless for economic output. Why would we subsidize an entire class of jobs which don't make economic sense for the benefit of men only? That's against the market forces that run our economy and it's also against equality women have been fighting for for _generations_
Lots of yakking it up about how sad men are but it's all so disingenuous. My experience leads to me to believe that the moment a man asks for help is the moment he has lost the respect of his peers and, should he be so lucky, his female partner. Evolutionarily, men are disposable, and the workplaces and dating arenas we must inhabit reinforce it at every step. For a long time, we were given a medal for our sacrifices which read "You Are A Good Man" but now even that worthless consolation prize is gone. They may fret over lost economic output or the dearth of marriable men, but make no mistake, they care far more about what you could provide than how you feel.
Honestly, it sounds like you need some new friends and to stop listening to Jordan Peterson. When I was going through a divorce, my closest friends were there day or night to take a call and let me vent. Heck my current wife actually was a sounding board as I navigated shared custody later on.
If the people around you are shunning you for asking for help and expressing your emotional trauma, you need to surround yourself with new people. And I say that with genuine concern for you, not out of spite or judgement.
I will also add the people I worked with eventually heard what was going on and were more supportive than I ever could have asked for.
Need a day off? Take it. Need more time to get that project done? We understand. Never a word of judgement from any of them and quite frankly the whole experience turned a few of those relationships from "just coworkers" to close friends.
And what about those who experience this effect, and have always actively avoided Peterson and his ilk?
When you find out rumours are spreading about you after you've opened up, you can separate yourself from that community, but where does that leave a person? What do you think happens when someone tries to join a new community, who has rumours circulating about their “mental health”?
I've been lucky for the most part with good friends, but periodically rebooting your life situation has other benefits too. I recommend it heartily, if you're in a position to do so. Keep your old friends if they're good, in that case.
For both obvious and non-obvious reasons, I don't want to get into specifics in order to provide an existence proof that this is a problem, but consider that switching jobs/moving city/rebuilding a social network is something that depends a great deal on having resources available to do that with, not having obligations preventing that, having the means to evade the pervasive social media that encourages exactly the sort of “reconnection” that is anathema to the task.
But I do recommend it when appropriate and feasible. Some of the best changes I've made to my life came because I was able to shake things up and go somewhere with no ruts.
If you're a grown adult and have rumors following you around, just find a new friends group. If your town is so small that you can't escape that, seriously just move? If it's a job and the culture is gossip, it's probably time to just find a new job.
I get that uprooting your whole life is a VERY BIG DEAL but you only live once. There's no way you're ever going to be happy dealing with constant gossip, and that isn't normal. That's a very, very abnormal situation you're in if you're a grown adult.
However, the funny thing about people like you is
you would never say "though it up" to a woman
yet you would claim "women and men are equal"
disingenuous
Congrats, you have just advocated for what's called "toxic masculinity".
No, I've just advocated for: high school sucks. It has literally nothing to do with being a guy. I would and have said the same thing to girls dealing with asshole classmates. At some point your options are find a new school, or just grin and bear it because your life is a different place after HS. Most high schoolers don't have the option of a different school.
"Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." - Hillary Clinton
Men: not even the primary victims of their own gruesome battlefield deaths.
I guess if a country invades another, you're saying that the men in the invading force have themselves to blame? Although sometimes they're threatened and forced, get shot if refusing.
But there's also the ones defending their own people. They didn't start any war
Blatantly ignoring the 80% of men of course.
Not to mention, who are they talking to anyway? Do you think people killing journalists will now say: OK, sorry, I'll stop. Or maybe pick only men?
This is real, it does happen. But for the sake of anyone reading this, please be aware. There are plenty of women who are not like this. Finding them can feel overwhelming, but when you land the right one, it makes life so much better.
I'm kidding, but only slightly, when I say this: I think the best advice for young men is to skip the dating scene altogether until you're about 30. Things settle down, everyone more mature and less mercenary, and women will look at you more for your good manly qualities rather than the shallow ones.
until then, i would very much agree with you.
So anyone who wants to advance the experience of people regardless of gender has got to fight that framing as well as advance possible solutions.
Stopping referring to traditional gender roles as a far-right evangelical viewpoint is a good start.
Do you have a better way to phrase that, based on your own suggestion?
Trump won in 2016 due to populism, on the belief that the American male was forgotten and left behind. As too, was rural America.
The left could easily win election after election by coming out and saying "yeah, we've done a lot for women, for people of color, for sexual minorities, etc...but here's a bunch of things we're doing for men, for the lower class, for the middle class, for rural America. Feminism is great, and masculinity is great too.".
If you get out in front of the messaging, and control it, right wing shock-jock culture warriors have no ammo. The GOP has won lots of elections simply because their media messaging is on point, consistent as hell, and repetitive. The left has ignored all their successful tactics instead of copying them, for some odd reason. I don't quite get it.
I don't think those 2 points match up. You can get out in front of the messaging but you will not deprive right wing shock jock culture warriors of ammo. As you say, their messaging is consistent and repetitive, and it doesn't really matter if it's true or counteracted by reality. It'll get repeated often enough that it's assumed to be true. (For a tiny example, consider the "Sleepy Joe" meme. It has been clearly disproven by anybody paying attention to the last few years, but nevertheless it keeps getting trotted out as if it were obviously true).
In reality you have families or aspiring families competing against each other. It is good that women get better career options, but it would be entirely self-defeating if this comes at the expense of men's career options. The wife does not want to steal her husband's job. She is not going to be happy with a husband who earns less or has worse career options than her. She is not going to cheer for feminism when her husband gets out-competed for a promotion by a woman.
For the severity of issues that men are facing, it is not getting anywhere near the coverage that it needs to be fixed. They barely scratched the surface with this article and it hardly gets into how hopeless so many young men feel. The deaths of despair being so much higher for men should be an indication of why things are not going so well for men and how they feel overall.
It doesn’t help that the resources available are also not catered towards men either. 60-70% of therapists are women and most therapists use talk therapy - which was developed to treat women. Yes, it can still help men but many therapists are under equipped to deal with how men think and act. Talk therapy is often about listening to someone talk but many men want/need therapy that involves active direction and problem solving. Talking it out just doesn’t work for many men.
Does this get talked about in the media or by “the left”? Nope. People will just parrot “go to therapy” without realizing it’s not going to help many men because the methodology doesn’t fit how men currently work.
I’ve dealt with plenty of therapists who ask how I want to work, then they slot in around that. If I tell them that just talking about something isn’t working, they almost always move to “okay, well what can we do about this?”.
Don’t ever go into a therapy session without knowing what you’re trying to do.
[0] https://youtu.be/rQv8VuLpKN4
[1] https://youtu.be/qVKvEaokV6I
However, I also think it is complicated. We can't talk about progressive policies while ignoring the very real advantages that men (largely white men, which I am one) have had for many years.
That doesn't mean that men should suffer while we work towards a more equal society. But to some degree there may be a need to take a back seat and there will be some unavoidable pain along the way especially while what you have been conditioned towards changes.
But there are pieces that I agree with. Mental health being a big one. There is still a lot of stigma around mental health for men. A lot of this comes from a toxic masculinity view (which to be clear I have seen some women contribute to this view as well) that it makes you "less of a man" or whatever and men not getting the help that they need. This does go beyond just mental health but just the idea of asking for help making it seem like you are some sort of failure.
I feel like a lot of us here are likely in a more progressive environment. I mean just Monday I was out with dinner with friends, I happened to have a psych evaluation and got my results that day and I mentioned it because I was curious about others thoughts and opinions. I can say the same thing about coworkers or even my Boss. But having family and friends in far less progressive parts of this country does make me believe that attitudes like this are still the exception in the US.
We still have a long way to go for mental health for everyone in this country and (based on my experience) there is still a ton of stigma for men and it really is ignored my the left for the most part.
Men and women in the USA are used up by industry and capital to the point of damaging their bodies. People turn to mood-altering substances to try to dull the mental, emotional, and physical pain.
In parallel to the efforts to make society better for both men and women, we should be attacking the root causes of oppression. We can only fix that by attacking inequality, poverty, lack of access to mental/physical healthcare, and injustice. If you reduce the stressors, fewer people will turn to the toxic aspects of society that promise easy answers and simple actions.
We do need to be listening to everyone, with no exceptions. However there's no guarantee that those ideas will be good or moral, and some segments or ideologies forget that. There's no right to have your ideas accepted or to never receive criticism.
If I have any advice for men, it’s a watertight prenup drafted by a lawyer who knows what he is doing.
This experience of a researcher starting by caring deeply about inequality, and starting with feminism, and then identifying male issues and finding a total lack of community interest has occurred before. This is exactly what happened to Warren Farrell, who a was once a major figure in feminism (and then largely ignored once he started talking about the issues facing men) (see his Wikipedia page for details).
I think part of what makes getting sociatal buy in on men's issues is that one of the biases men face is a lack of care for men in need of help, and this relates to the idea of male disposability.
For reference, there is a quite shocking list of statistics where men have significantly worse outcomes than women: longer jail for the same crime, higher rates of homelessness, higher rates of suicide, lower educational outcomes, shorter life spans, less friends on average, ...
Obviously women suffer from other issues, but as Ezra Klein is keen to emphasize to any listeners of the interview, empathy is not a zero sum game.
But we are biased to empathize more with women than men, both women and men are biased that way. That is the core of "toxic masculinity", we need everyone to empathize more with men, but instead due to low empathy for men all they say is "just work on your own problems, it isn't that bad for you!!".
There isn't much you can do in that situation, the low empathy burden men are shouldered with isn't something society wants to deal with, neither the left nor the right.
What they need is to be emotionally "nursed" back to wellness, but their sheer wealth has isolated them so much that nobody can connect with them on a "normal" human level anymore.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
For example, I've had it told to me that I shouldnt have my son help me with changing my car's oil because thats putting some sort of burden on him at an early age. Does this sound like something a sane person would say? I would go as far to give the benefit of the doubt and say no, most people are sane and the ones that would make this type of argument are drawn into a social mania.
I think you’re completely off base in trying to make “respond rationally and with no emotion, ever” a universal rule, especially with regards to interacting with other people. It’s weird and robotic.
I did not say don't be sad. I sad don't react emotionally, instead understand the emotion you are feeling, identify the why and respond rationally to the why. It's not bad to be sad, it's bad to allow the sadness to force you into a stupid reaction. In your example the actual good advice dictates it's fine to cry, but don't let your sadness dictate doing something stupid like drinking too much, getting behind the wheel and getting a dui or worse.
In my reply I acknowledged that someone saying what the op posted was almost always trying to communicate what I have said above and failing at it.
Whatever you were trying to add was within that context, thus my reply. “Real men don’t cry” is not well-intentioned, nor is it just a poorly worded version of good advice.
This seems like a really flawed and backwards take. What evidence do you have that supports your incredibly vague statement that women’s ability to vote is “the root of most of our current problems.”
The American socialist movement began in the early 19th century and peaked in the early 20th. 1900-1920 saw the height of socialist sentiment in the US. The Socialist Party of America began to lose it’s influence in the 1920’s as socialism began to decline in popularity. Women gained the right to vote in 1920.
Would that not then indicate that women gaining the right to vote led to a decline in socialist sentiment? Saying this is just as disingenuous as saying that women gaining the right to vote massively shifted the political spectrum towards socialism.
A rise in socialism is historically very often a reaction to some sort of societal upheaval (i.e. war, economic crises, high levels of inequality, exploitation, etc).
Forgive me if I’m wrong in assuming that you’re speaking about the US, but my point stands regardless of what country you’re referring to because blaming a century’s worth of problems on women gaining the right to vote (regardless of the country) is not a serious nor intelligent argument.
Go look at the polling records across time and you see women voting for bigger government by way of voting for groups that have policies that ensure larger government (they are not the only group doing this, they are just the group we are talking about now. Single men also lean problematic in their voting patterns for example).
Talking about the Socialist party here is the wrong metric to use because it encompassed truly nutty groups that had no chance of being elected (from agricultural commune supporters to straight up communists). If you look at the subsets that actually got elected (i.e. the sewer socialists) they ran on policies like old age pensions, employment insurance, public housing, public health care and other big government welfare programs. Pretty much all this stuff had been subsumed into the big parties by the 1960's and was actually being implemented, so why would you ever expect the Socialist party to continue existing? All their electable policies (that became much more electable with women gaining the right to vote) were adopted by mainstream, usually democrat candidates who subsequently were elected. Subsequently all these programs form part of the big government problem we have today.
You see the above in the USA but you also see it in my home country of Canada, most recently with the current oaf running things federally, who has been kept in power by women voters not changing their vote when it became obvious he was doing likely criminal things while pursuing a suicidal spending platform at home and making us the laughing stock of the world stage with his antics.
Anyways, this is not to say women shouldn't have the vote, they very clearly should have the vote. My original post was mostly about how we integrate the clearly correct idea that women should be able to vote with the clearly correct idea that their voting patterns are causing a lot of our current problems. I think the actual correct solution is some other system of limiting suffrage to only those who clearly have long term skin in the game, as to what that would look like I am not certain. It could take the form of limiting voting to citizens who currently have at least 50 % custody/responsibility for a child of theirs or have X number of years of at least 50% custody/responsibility for a child of their under their belts. Or perhaps requiring citizens to post an income adjust long term bond to vote and have that bond be the first risk of loss if the government runs a deficit of a certain amount for more than 1 year. The challenge with limiting suffrage is having the rule be simple enough that gaming it is very difficult, while being strong enough to actually cut out enough of the people with no incentive to think long term about the country that they can't drive us into bureaucratic ruin.
>When all the men got together and voted for women to also have the vote, that was toxic masculinity at work. (this is a joke, but also not really. Women shifting the political map towards larger government and more socialism seems to be the root of most of our current problems.
Not sure how your statements (and “joke”)above and my statement below are all that much different. Ultimately you’re saying that women gaining the right vote led to the “issues” we have today. What issues? You don’t really say.
>What evidence do you have that supports your incredibly vague statement that women's ability to vote is "the root of most of our current problems.'
It’s not exactly a wonder why women might prefer socialist policies. Women couldn’t even open their own bank account until 1974 (1964 in Canada). If someone’s only recourse from a bad situation is to rely on the state, then socialist policies are going to look all that more appealing.
But that’s even if the premise is true that Canada (or the US for that matter), is being ruined by socialist policy. And I’m sure many would debate you on that.
I can tell you from experience from living large portions of my life in both the US and Canada, having access to universal healthcare is a net benefit.
>You see the above in the USA but you also see it in my home country of Canada, most recently with the current oaf running things federally, who has been kept in power by women voters not changing their vote when it became obvious he was doing likely criminal things while pursuing a suicidal spending platform at home and making us the laughing stock of the world stage with his antics.
>Anyways, this is not to say women shouldn't have the vote, they very clearly should have the vote. My original post was mostly about how we integrate the clearly correct idea that women should be able to vote with the clearly correct idea that their voting patterns are causing a lot of our current problems. I think the actual correct solution is some other system of limiting suffrage to only those who clearly have long term skin in the game, as to what that would look like I am not certain.
You seem to me a bit biased here. You use the term correct a lot here, but just because this position is you’re opinion does not in fact make it “correct.”
>It could take the form of limiting voting to citizens who currently have at least 50 % custody/responsibility for a child of theirs or have X number of years of at least 50% custody/responsibility for a child of their under their belts. Or perhaps requiring citizens to post an income adjust long term bond to vote and have that bond be the first risk of loss if the government runs a deficit of a certain amount for more than 1 year.The challenge with limiting suffrage is having the rule be simple enough that gaming it is very difficult, while being strong enough to actually cut out enough of the people with no incentive to think long term about the country that they can't drive us into bureaucratic ruin.
You are advocating that only parents and rich people should be allowed to vote. Believe it or not, you can, in fact be poor and childless and still care about the future of your country. This scheme would essentially cut out the voices of young people, arguably the people with the most skin in the game in regards to the future.
Your bond scheme would likely result in people (even those who have the means) to not bother with voting. Or the government cutting spending, even when it’s needed.
Do you have to pay every time you vote, in this pay-to-vote scheme of yours? What if the party you voted for loses, do you still have to give up your bond if the other party runs a deficit? What if every party no matter who you vote for runs a deficit? What’s to keep the parties accountable if the citizens are now solely responsible to fund ...
A good example is if you your son is allowed help change the oil but you don't allow your daughter or wife to help because it's "man's work".
Or if you force your son to help because it's expect of him as a man.
But, if little dude is curious/eager and wants to hold the flashlight and maybe turn a wrench, go for it.
Four common patterns
* Recruitment techniques based around achieving worth by emulating some "alpha" male, usually physical and financial, sometimes spiritual
* Approval associated with risk taking behavior. Binge drinking, criminal activity, extrajudicial punishment, etc
* Complicity through witness and increasing levels of participation
And especially
* Code of silence
A heinous fifth pattern is commingling this behavior with family / work culture, creating tension between "the code" and actual codes and relationships.
Ultimately these systems let sociopaths, narcissists, and other mentally unwell men to flourish and prosper precisely because they can easily adhere to these artificial "codes" and power structures vs traditional ones.
Edit: at the risk of coming across of overanalyzing, asking your son to help with the oil potentially contributes to this behavior. You as a male he looks up to is "recruiting" him to do something he has no interest in doing otherwise.
In a vacuum it's benign of course and not toxic but some awareness of the power dynamics and making sure your son knows the difference between a "good" ask and a "bad" ask and how to say no is important.
This line is complete trash: "recruiting him to do something he has no interest in doing otherwise". This is probably the greatest example of the lefts insanity nowadays. How do you know he isn't interested? You know nothing about my family but you assume and then push for policy using said assumptions. And you try to absolve yourself from criticism by saying "I'm just overanalyzing"!
Having feelings is natural and good, learning to feel the feelings without reacting without thought is something you can do. Talking about life is good, but complaining about everything is bad.
Independence is great, but relying on others in a community is also great! Being tough is awesome, ignoring others feelings all the time and making fun of people who are struggling is bad.
If you want to find out what toxic masculinity is, why haven't you read about it or watch any of the numerous videos about the subject?
And outcomes are worse for Black men in almost all categories and have been so for some time. Yet the response to negative outcomes for Black people is to blame "black culture." Yet there's no blaming of white culture. Instead this is a crisis we have to do something about. C.f. crack vs fentanyl epidemics.
That both parties neglect the cause of black men is (in my opinion) an outcome of a two party system that is so divisive that it leaves no space for nuance (and poor policies and extra needless human misery is the result).
Liberals don’t talk about these issues because liberals aren’t the left. Democrats are not the left. At best they are center-right.
The whole concept of intersectional feminism is that there are different classes of privilege and exploitation that are relative to each other. To say that modern feminism doesn't think men are exploited is to misunderstand modern feminism.
Are young men exploited? Absolutely. They are exploited by capitalists to extract as much value out of their labor, their bodies be damned.
Are they exploited by people in power? Absolutely. The entire manosphere exploits their loneliness and keeps them isolated as emotionless rugged individuals.
Men are humans just as women are humans, and men have the same human need to connect and socialize. Toxic masculinity strips them of fulfilling that need.
Feminism gets caricatured so much by people who have something to benefit from that lampooning. Rather than dogpiling on the "feminism is mean to men" bandwagon, actually read modern feminist literature on masculinity.