Men are not doing as well as women in school. If you look in the wrong places on the internet, media, or daily life, all you see is negativity towards masculinity. In addition, there doesn't appear to be any broad social system that is geared towards supporting men. The fact that men don't tend to be a socially adept doesn't help. This all feels like the perfect storm and there are plenty of people who act like "men have had it coming and deserve any ensuing suffering". I don't know how to fix this but I am sure glad I am no longer a young man.
Yup. I've had many conversations about this topic with my son (and on occasion some of his friends -- both male and female), since he was in middle school (a decade ago). They're well aware of how men are portrayed versus women.
We've transitioned from "A women's place is in the home (barefoot, pregnant, and cooking a delicious meal for her husband)" to "A woman's place is whatever she wants, and men are the reason for everything that's wrong with the world today". Whether it's world war or a bad relationship or choosing the right car.
It's not a binary decision, people. We don't need to decide which gender/sex is "better" or "more right".
Moving discourse to social media and click bait has destroyed so much nuance in all discussions. Everything is black and white now, every issue is just a war between 2 sides and you're either "with us or against us".
Social media makes its money on outrage so that's what they're optimizing for. Ban or regulate advertising (which will make it less profitable) and other, less toxic business models will come up.
Yes, this is group psychology. Only individuals can really be rational. Once individuals form a psychological group, individuality is lost, rationality is lost with it and everything is controlled by the emotions of the group.
The group has no room for anything really but for the extreme emotional reactions of in-group/out-group psychology and you see this playing out in our society because of social media.
There is literally no room for nuanced discourse between individuals with the way our social media platforms are structured. Individuals will not drive engagement the way groups do.
I think its mostly groups on social media. Some groups can be rational, like a jury, or a committee full of intelligent people. But for them to be rational, there has to be the correct incentives and culture of discussion (i.e. no social media algorithms, or divisive politics).
Well, decades ago, men did run the world, to all intents and purposes. They're still in most positions of power (politics ceos etc), most things are designed by men, etc. This doesn't mean that it's the fault of every single man, any more than as a Brit who benefits from a legacy of empire that I'm personally responsible for whatever massacres. You can be aware of it without taking the blame.
There is a subtle difference between "men did run the world" and "women didn't run the world". The first one skips over all the men that also didn't run the world.
The point is more that men were the assumed default. Ambition was seen as healthy and positive in men and negative in women (the word “bossy” comes to mind). Large parts of the world and some parts of western societies still see it that way, as a sort of natural imperative.
So the average man certainly had more of an advantage. But there are lots of other factors of course, then and now. Class, race, disability status…
I often wish the public face of feminism was more intersectional. Unfortunately we get undifferentiated pop/choice feminism instead. I’m as tired of it as the next person, considering it usually ignores trans issues (beyond maybe some lip service) all together.
Also I feel like this entire thread seems to ignore the economic component of this discussion. Women are stagnant too. Our system is crumbling, and young people without access to generational wealth are suffering, there is no good path into the middle class anymore, so why bother at all? That is the main takeaway.
I do feel like some of the terf tropes come from people building straw men because they don't like the idea to start. "Maybe we should all be nicer to each other, by the way this group has these problems" doesn't really make news, whereas "politician says all men are rapists" immediately gets outrage shares.
Absolutely. Through all the stats and pronouncements that make it seem as if women are all powerful and are gaining economic and moral power, it's true only on the scale that is dwarfed by the patriarchal capitalism
that is taking everything. For all of us who work hard and take home so little compared to those who hoard so much, we take the bait that the conflict is between us and ourselves, not us and them. Orwell write SO well about this in Animal Farm.
So punish them instead of the young! Drain their bank accounts and fire the CEOs. Why is the focus on blaming the young and the innocent?
Punishing the most vulnerable individuals of a group because of the collective sins of that group, we may as well feed males lead until they're out of the game, it's only really one step further than subjecting them to systemic discrimination. JUSTICE!
An interesting part of this conversation is that there are strong subtexts that often have more weight than the actual words in driving how people actually answer.
Scott Alexander as a nice rationaliization of this dynamic
If you genuinely hold these views, I strongly suggest leaving London for a week, heading to an industrial town in the North and asking them how privileged they feel to be a white British male.
This isn’t about taking the poorest white folks in society, looking at their lack of economic empowerment and calling white privilege a flawed concept. IMHO theres more to it than that, and white privilege does exist.
For example, there have been a number of studies that show having a non-white sounding name during a cv screening process leads to far less callbacks, even if the remainder of the CV is identical. Is this not white privilege?
What about how the media treats different crimes. Take a look at the Daily Mail website, arguably the most popular UK tabloid and tell me it’s not designed to paint migrants and minorities in a negative light. For example, when there are acts of violence perpetrated in the name of islam, terrorism as a phrase is used frequently in the headlines. However when white nationalists do the same thing, the phrasing is completely different. Another example would be the coverage of the royals ie Kate vs Meghan.
Acknowledging white privilege doesn’t mean that those poor white folks in post industrial towns have it easy. It means that there are certain areas of society where being white does afford a privilege. It comes down to the tribal mentality at the end of the day. People still seem to like to favour people similar to them.
I'll admit I could have been more informative and less pithy, but the idea of white privilege being a foreign concept in economically underprivileged communities is more complex than "white people can experience poverty too".
I've lived in working class neighbourhoods for the majority of my adult life, and there are so many observations that fly in the face of white privilege as a theory.
Most of the poorest people I would encounter were white. The people most likely to be long-term unemployed were white. The people whose children were least likely to get an education and escape poverty were white. Almost all of the junkies were white. Every single homeless person was white, no exceptions.
Whether or not HR staff hiring for a white collar job prefer white names is irrelevant when you and the people you are competing against didn't complete high school.
What the Daily Mail think about Meghan Markle or Islam is less important that what the Vietnamese fruit shop owner thinks of you because you share phenotypal characteristics with the homeless ice addict that sleeps three doors down and scares away customers.
This doesn't even start to cover ethnic tensions (Serb vs. Croat, Indian vs. Pakistani atc.) which exist with no regard for the typical sociological black/white/asian racial boundaries and can cause real violence and discrimination.
I will admit that there are racial groups that have it rough simply because of their skin (black people in America, Aboriginals in Australia, Gypsies in Europe), but the idea that being white grants you privileges over and above all other racial groups ignores the lives and experiences of an enormous segment of the population.
(Just to clarify, I do accept that John Smith has an unfair advantage over Rajesh Kumar when applying for a software job at a FAANG. I also admit that this has worked out well for me. This doesn't extrapolate to the whole population, though; many white people will experience little to no privilege because of their race.)
I would agree with most of what you say above, in my life I have seen the disadvantages you highlight for the white working class (many kids I went to high school fell in this category).
To be clear, I am not claiming disadvantaged white folks don’t have it rough. However, my point is when we take folks from a similar socioeconomic background, being white does confer an advantages in a lot of cases (in western, white majority countries). I would say the majority of the disadvantages for working class whites is not due to their race. Whereas on the other hand, certain ethnicities do have disadvantages due to their precisely their race. Both are disadvantaged but for different reasons imho.
Personally if it were up to me, I would exclude poor working class whites from any notion of privilege as they clearly aren’t. I also think they need more representation in the work place (ie being included in diversity targets rather than excluded).
IMO we need a better term that’s more nuanced and can capture the disadvantages of these groups, but I dont know what that term would be.
>However, my point is when we take folks from a similar socioeconomic background, being white does confer an advantages
This is exactly the point I'm refuting. In all of the working class neighbourhoods I've lived in, poverty seemed to have a greater adverse affect on white people than other racial groups.
Being poor while Indian, for example, doesn't seem to be so closely associated with family breakdown/fatherlessness, drug abuse, malnutrition/bad diet, chronic unemployment, trouble with authority and just this constantly bleak outlook on life in an unbreakable spiral of poverty.
I'm not trying to say that they have it easy. They work bloody hard for what they've got and are an integral part of society. Still, despite their life being tough there's at least light at the end of the tunnel in the form of hope for the next generation. I would much rather be poor and brown than poor and white.
I think UK is a little "special" because of our messed up class system. I think we should include class into diversity definitions.
Being white is also a massive privilege in at least several majority black country that I know of.
> I do accept that John Smith has an unfair advantage over Rajesh Kumar when applying for a software job at a FAANG.
Don’t know about UK, but in the US the advantage quite decisively goes the other way: people of Indian descent are significantly over represented in FAANG relative to their share of population, and people of Anglo descent are significantly underrepresented.
Most indians working in FAANG in USA tend to be immigrants. So comparing them to their share of population is ridiculous. Even if you limit yourselves to second generation indian American, they are not the same socio-economic background. I guess having rich and education focussed parents is now considered unfair brown privilege.
Some areas that apply also to working class types: most products are made by men and tested on men. For example cars: there is 1 female sized car crash dummy in the whole of Europe, which means cars are safer for men in a crash. Medicines are routinely tested only on men, since "hormones interfere with the studies". This means men have better medical outcomes.
Nobody is saying that white privilige means that if you're white, you always have it better than when you're not white.
e.g. if you're white and poor, of course you don't have it better than if you're non-white and rich.
The point is, that ceteris paribus, you have it better being white. And that is what we call privilege.
And this shows in countless studies which correct for all non-ethnic factors such as income, neighbourhood, parents' education etc. You'll find worse outcomes for non-whites in ceteris-paribus studies inn jobs/hiring, healthcare, safety, education, political empowerment etc.
So I'm glad you admit that people have it rough simply because of their skin, that's what white privilege means, you not having it rough because of your skin but because of other reasons which affect everyone else too. That doesn't mean you can't have it rough, it just means it's not related to your skin color, and that's a privilege.
Nobody is saying that white privilige means that if you're white, you always have it better than when you're not white.
Bollocks. Lots of people are saying that, or at the very least saying things that directly imply this with arguments to historical injustices which, though real and serious, have no causal bearing on the specific case being discussed.
"Ceteris paribus" is a wonderful average at which no one lives. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are white. That has zero impact on the earning power of a West Virginia coal miner whose job is never coming back and had gotten hooked on Oxy.
> Bollocks. Lots of people are saying that, or at the very least saying things that directly imply this with arguments to historical injustices which, though real and serious, have no causal bearing on the specific case being discussed.
Lots of people say vaccines cause autism or that the earth is flat. Just because some people are wrong, doesn't mean I am. Just look up the definition of white privilege, read a book about it. It's been an academic concept for decades, just because a bunch of kids on twitter use it in a wrong way doesn't change the concept.
> "Ceteris paribus" is a wonderful average at which no one lives. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are white. That has zero impact on the earning power of a West Virginia coal miner whose job is never coming back and had gotten hooked on Oxy.
I've got no clue what you're talking about. The point isn't to say that all white people have the same lives, it's an absolutely ridiculous claim. It's to say that it's, all else being equal, easier to be white than black. This has been shown in countless studies, which correct for differences and look to isolate the effect of e.g. skin color or ethnic background, but you choose to ignore it.
For example, tons of studies show if you apply for jobs with a black-sounding name, you get fewer responses than with a white sounding name, even if the resume is the same. That's a privilege which you refuse to acknowledge. It doesn't mean you can't be a poor drug addicted ex-coal miner.
I'm not sure why you assumed the poster was male (I would guess otherwise). But it doesn't sound like they're refusing to acknowledge it. Also, what does acknowledging it do? You can't exactly stop being a white British male.
Ding ding we have a winner, though I hope it wouldn't be relevant what gender I am.
This was kind of my point - you can't be penalised for taking the advantages you have in life. But if you are aware of issues facing others you can give them a hand up and we end up with a fairer and more equal society.
Is your argument that you should not acknowledge something you know to be true (for the sake of the argument)?
A possibly trivial example, but I've found that I tended to be ignored in meetings. I'd suggest something, it would be ignored, and 5 minutes later someone else would say it and everyone would say "yeah that's a great idea". So you could call that out (I did but it looked really petty imo) or draw attention to colleagues who area struggling to be heard.
I've heard someone dismiss the idea of employing a woman for a post because the team was all male. For such a situation, a rebuttal would probably be heard more if it came from a man.
These are gender related because I'm white but you would doubtless find equivalents for other groups if you asked. Being aware is important I think
Yeah it's what I find wrong with the way we fix / correct social issues like this. I m a white male european who emigrated to an asian former colony, and while I never heard or supported racism, misogyny, colonisation, white supremacy, nazism and all these things, I'm often associated with them :D
It's fair I guess so I apologize for what I represent to all these people who had oppressed ancestors, but I'm not sure they're actually resolving much of what people who looked like me did to them: poverty, lack of empowerement, inability to operate in a modern world etc, they can spend their time making me acknowledge my associated responsibility but I wish they'd just let me help instead :D
I remember telling a "philipino" (culturally/parents born there) born in the country that I was an immigrant here, he could not even compute it. He felt HE was, while obviously he was born here and a full right citizen, while my associated identity made him believe I was a sort of powerful lord instead of the scraping by immigrant I am, who has mostly the right to shut up and be useful... in HIS country. It's just weird.
“Hey, society and the media and politicians, institutions have all decided your nature is a problem and that you are assumed guilty, to be viewed with suspicion at all times. Oh and for some reason, you should still want to support this structure with your hard work and taxes, and shut up and never mention it.”
Honestly - I don’t know why I would tell him he should accept this society, why he shouldn’t move to another country and why he should stick around. It isn’t showing any signs of changing.
It sickens me, I don’t believe in my own country anymore.
Whoever you are and whatever you do, there's always going to be some group that doesn't like you or "your kind". Running away doesn't teach your kids how to face this; it just changes where they'll face it.
It's the chicken egg problem. Woman birthed man. Who's to blame?
In all seriousness, if we are to succeed as a society, then ignorantly maintaining what are mostly over generalizations and stereotypes related to gender is a failing proposition. And that involves anything that existed pre-the-whole-world-is-now-connected.
That means
> It's not a binary decision, people. We don't need to decide which gender/sex is "better" or "more right".
But, for most of our parents it was binary and decision was obvious.
People fantasize about going back to that. Even the young kids, Gen Z, which is most concerning. Something alarming is that this comes from a feeling of helplessness. That and similar feelings explains the increase in massacres, hatred, and even why terrorists traditionally came from countries in turmoil. The kids need to be feeling hopeful not helpless.
The time series in your link end in 2019, when the trend of falling violence has ended. There has been a huge, unprecedented spike in violence in 2020, and this new normal has wiped decade or two of previous gains.
No, because if you look at data, there has been clear inflection point around Memorial Day last year that shifted us to new regime of higher violence that seems to persist instead of subsiding.
In commercial and entertainment media, it’s the woman in the kitchen, buying the groceries, raising the children, and holding down a 80 hour week job at her law firm. The man is playing ball in the yard, or is doing business in a suit. He definitely expects dinner to be on the table when he gets home from his 1950’s day job.
Then there’s other people. Women get asked “when are you having a baby” and “why is your husband so thin don’t you feed him”, and men get “so what do you do?”.
Women are now in the position where they are expected to do all of the things a woman would traditionally do, and hold down a career. The expectation of men has barely shifted - I know precious few guys who do all the cooking and cleaning and child rearing.
Today, today it's culturally acceptable to ridicule, scorn, and otherwise attack men and manhood; to portray men as arrogant, abusive, and controlling. The word 'masculine' is now a derogatory term that means the same thing as 'toxic'. "Men are trash".
The message is that to be a man is to be lesser, or irrelevant, or harmful to society. That there's something shameful about being a man.
"There's nothing wrong with taking men down a peg or two; after all, they rule pretty much everything". Yeah, now what about the overwhelmingly vast percentage of men who will never have a management position or hold office? Whose life is just mediocre? Is it also okay to tell him he's toxic trash?
And sure, the proper response is "don't listen to the garbage". Doesn't mean it's okay to spew garbage.
As for entertainment media, it's a shit-show on both sides -- women and men are both horribly stereotyped.
> The word 'masculine' is now a derogatory term that means the same thing as 'toxic'.
This whole comment was BS, but I’ll focus on one example. This is the exact opposite of the truth, “toxic masculinity” is a common phrase because “toxic” is an adjective that is seen as *adding significant information to the description which is not already present in ‘masculinity’”.
If masculinity were viewed as inherently toxic, “toxic masculinity” wouldn’t be a needed phrase.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That is a load of bullshit. The phrase is used to shit on all things that make men, men. If it was really a technical term to describe the bad components of masculinity, then there would be an equivalent in terms of femininity, since there are aspects of femininity that can be construed as toxic. I would go out and a lim, and suggest that being overly passive, passive aggressive, and backstabbing are all aspects of femininity that could be considered toxic. You could also consider the perverse side effects of the women are wonderful effect to be toxic femininity
It is dressed up in academic language to mask its misandry.
> The phrase is used to shit on all things that make men, men.
No, its not, and if you think the things it targets “all the thing that make men men”, you have a very sick idea of what being a man is.
> If it was really a technical term to describe the bad components of masculinity, then there would be an equivalent in terms of femininity, since there are aspects of femininity that can be construed as toxic.
The equivalent is, as one might expect, “toxic femininity”. While it gets less attention, the attention it does get is from the exact same people who care the mosf about toxic masculinity.
Please don't do flamewar like this on HN. You normally do an excellent job of avoiding that, even on difficult and divisive topics, so I'm dismayed to see the lapse and I hope it's not a sign of any development in that direction.
You broke the site guidelines here. I understand that the topic is provocative and people have good reasons for their strong feelings, on all sides; that makes it more important, not less, to follow the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd be grateful. Note these:
"Please don't fulminate."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Especially a problem because for almost all men a career and supporting family (maybe the hardest thing to figure out in life) is non optional, whereas half the female friends I have from college have abandoned careers to saddle up to a breadwinner ... I mean I kind of want that option but men don't really have it. Does anyone ever really discuss this social reality that makes it different for men v women in real world?
For those lambasting the parent comment, ignore the phrasing and let us go by stats. Count how many women with successful careers you know that are married to unemployed men (to stick to the point the parent makes, let us skip cases where both husband/wife are working). Now do the same count with genders switched. Observe the differential - for the record, it is clear that there are complex reasons behind this difference (children being a big one) but we can't ignore the fact that this choice is much more "socially normal/acceptable" for a woman compared to a married man being unemployed by choice.
What would surprise a person more in today's context in US: hearing that child's parent is divorced/single parent (which by your stats is 60% for young parents, so pretty common) OR hearing about a successful woman with a husband who has chosen to be unemployed? You can keep twisting things but we are talking about what is "typical".
I’ve attempted this discussion all over the internet. It does not go well would be a tame statement. There seems to be a pervasive belief that men do have this option equally available to them.
Only half? My exp is more like 80% shack up with a breadwinner. Even with half of women that means max 25% of men get this option.
My comment was strongly upvoted (50+) so I believe the HN community understands this dynamic.
I mean if you go outside Western bubbles e.g. all of Asia Latam etc. 99% of women seek to marry a breadwinner over having their own career, closer to how it was 50 years ago here in the US, a dynamic that's hard to miss.
The 50% I mentioned is from a competitive ivy league school where you get a major career leg up. If 50% of female friends who went to an ivy have tapped out from career making, yes, it's easy to imagine how it's still the widespread norm even in US
Probably because HN is something like 95%+ male demographic and career focused. The rest of the internet does not seem to agree based on my testing the water. Women (self identified of course) seem especially interested in pushing that men could simply stay at home if they wanted.
I mean if you are calling it "shacking up" that might explain why it doesn't go well.
I don't think most would say men have it equally available but I'd certainly say it's more available than it was in the past just like women having jobs that can allow them to be the primary breadwinner are much more prevalent in 2021 than it was in 1981.
I do know some male stay at home dads but not as many.
Yeah, I proposed the idea to my wife and she called me a lazy loser if I do that. It's interesting how I somewhat agree, but would never call her that if she floated the idea to stop working to raise our daughter.
And she's paid more than me, and has a PhD. She still consider me a breadwinner who must win and herself a disempowered victim who need support :D
What about the breadwinners half the women are saddling up to?
We have never had symmetry as humans in this area. Low status males don't get to fuck as much. That has always been the case for all human history. This is nothing new.
There absolutely is an option to skip career and family. It is 2021, social reality is that women can be breadwinners too. And it will be more and more difficult for women to find a breadwinner.
> Especially a problem because for almost all men a career and supporting family (maybe the hardest thing to figure out in life) is non optional
If you are going to let yourself be hammed in by such a traditionalist view of family and your inability (or maybe: lack of initiative) to get a footing in life, sounds like your setting yourself up as a victim.
I live and work across Europe, and I have never encountered men or women being held back like that. Couples I know stick together because they want to, not because of economic reasons or outdated economic views on family. Hell I've been holding down the fort while my wife was working. And vice versa. I mean, its 2021, our parents were hippies! My dad was out of work for half of his life but my mom not a single day.
My real world seems utterly unrelated to what these men seem to think. Perhaps they just need to get out there a bit more?
> Especially a problem because for almost all men a career and supporting family (maybe the hardest thing to figure out in life) is non optional...
What do you mean? Of course those are optional. If you don't want a career, you're not going to have one. If you don't want to get married and support a family, then you don't have to.
I mean, "saddle up to a breadwinner" is an extremely demeaning thing to say about a whole class of people. The reality is that men dominate all desirable, successful professions, so the probability of a man "saddling up" to a woman that makes significantly more than him is very small.
Without a career or at least some sort of good job, most men are extremely unattractive as long term partners for women. They can't just find a wife to support them while they look after the kids. So they'll end up without a career and without a family, which can be a very sad existence. For women, families are easier to come by regardless of career status.
Ride bicycles and/or motorcycles. Travel. Hike. Read. Learn things. Volunteer. Cooking is fun. Gardening as well.
I'm at a loss for how people can get bored and I don't even game or watch much in the way of movies or television. I think for some people they get attuned to work so much that they don't remember what life is like without it.
Totally agree. I don’t think I’ve been bored since I was a teenager. Every day I think to myself, all the things I could do with extra time in the day, if I didn’t have to work for a living. I am counting down the days until I retire! My nightmare actually is I die the day after I retire, just as I’m getting ready to start living my life!
Have you actually experienced a long period (year or more) with no obligations like work or school? It's much easier to be motivated when you're busy than when there's no real need for your effort or deadline for anything. I know some people manage great and have very active retirements but some just fade into passivity. Keep an eye out for the danger warned by John Mellencamp - "Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone".
>Have you actually experienced a long period (year or more) with no obligations like work or school?
I have. And have had no problems filling it with the above activities. My folks are retired and don't seem to be having much trouble finding creative projects and enjoyable things to do, like hiking and discovering new things.
Honestly I thought my dad would be a prime candidate for the type who gets so used to chasing the rabbit that they have no idea what to do once they retire. I'm glad to see that isn't the case.
Potentially demeaning nomenclature aside, do men and women have a differential opportunity to [better phrase], and if not, is this fair?
And while it might be nice for the men who dominate all desirable, successful professions, does this help the median man? They're all individuals, after all.
Based on my experience, I do not believe women have a better or easier "differential opportunity" when it comes to finding a partner and starting a family than men. I think "everything is easier for women because they're sexy" is an old trope that should be put to rest. Women on the whole do not want to "be sexy" any more, or less, than men do. I think women want to be taken seriously, and on their own terms, just like men.
> And while it might be nice for the men who dominate all desirable, successful professions, does this help the median man? They're all individuals, after all.
No, it doesn't. The fact that Jeff Bezos is a man or a woman does not affect my life at all. But, as a man, I have an easier time networking and working with other men in my field.
>think "everything is easier for women because they're sexy" is an old trope
Pretending that this is a trope is harmful to discussion. Women can easily make it to 30yo without ever personally having to deal with solving any problems they have if they are pretty.
This does not however mean women don't have legit
problems. However the gap of assistance options men have vs women is incredibly vast.
Men are not even helped if they are hot. My wife will often not acknowledge the physical qualities of men she thinks little of. As if they are not hot just because they are assholes. Women are strange like that often. Men might decide a woman is not as hot as she is crazy but they will not simply pretend she is not hot.
Newsflash: the majority of women are not pretty, the same way most men are not attractive, this is why attractive people stand out in society, and we put them on billboards and in movies.
What gap of assistance options are you talking about? What class of women are benefiting from this? Seriously, a lot of women on Bourbon Street would like to know.
This is not true for women under 30yo. Men overwhelming rate women as attractive for the under 30yo demographic. Upwards of 80% of women are "attractive" to men. Look up the okcupid studies or others if you are really curious.
Here's an excerpt from the first hit on Google for "percentage of fortune 500 companies run by women".
> During the first quarter of 2021, 41 women will lead Fortune 500 companies. That’s just 8.2 percent, but an improvement from the 33 companies in 2019 and 24 in 2018. Going back 20 years, there were just two companies on the list that were run by women, according to Fortune.
There's more women doctors, but that percentage hovers around 35%, which is about the same as the number of women in leadership positions in U.S. federal and state government.
That's purely a US figure. In western Europe, 60% of medical graduate are women (It's almost 66% in my country). Then more women drop out of this carrer path because they can, not because they are forced out.
If I take a personal example, when studying at my university (in the top 15 QS global ranking), I had 6 girl friends that studied different fields, from physics to material science. Only one of them is still an engineer today. All by choice are now, yoga teachers, home consultant, mom at home, school teacher, etc. For my male friends maybe one decided to do something completely unrelated. I'm getting more and more suspicious about this world (at least in Europe) is unequal because of men. Women are making choice too.
One day we'll wake up and realize we've been groomed into an oppressed position by women while being shamed and accused of this very same crime hehehe.
That'd be funny in 2000 years to see the woke crowd fight for men's equal right to be trophy husband and yoga teachers too.
Did you really just call out the parent comment for being demeaning when you yourself are sitting here saying that women, as a group, choose undesirable and unsuccessful professions? Please stop.
I did not say that "women, as a group, choose undesirable and unsuccessful professions". I would say that as a group, women are doing the best they can, it is just that men tend to have greater opportunities than women, even though the capabilities of women and men are comparable. I believe that women have a harder, longer road to professional success in our society, and that this is plainly evident.
Yes. And there were comments [1] in this thread [2] where some parents shared similar concern. There were at least two other threads on the subject in the past two years. ( Which I should have bookmarked but as usual bookmarks in general is quite useless and I cant find it )
This view isn't even mainstream yet. We are already seeing lots of parents worrying much more about their son than their daughters. It will likely take another 10 years until everything is seriously fucked up before it hit mainstream media and widespread concern, another 10 years for some ( or not ) discussions, then another 10 years before something is done. Basically a whole generation of Male.
And I will probably get downvoted for mentioning it, but I do think Jordan Peterson has a point about young male lacking motivation in modern Society.
Interestingly I have a daughter and I really have 0 fear: she'll be raised like a boy as far as we make choices, at best she'll have a meaningful empowering career at worst she'll have a husband and kids and we'll help her if she needs.
I'd be weirdly worried about a boy feeling like crap without a big career or needing our help. I know a daughter would be much less humiliated at the prospect.
At a recent scholarship awards ceremony I attended the woman gathered much more scholarships than the men. Of course they probably very well deserved it. However there were many women-only scholarships that I am assuming were setup to increase college admissions of women. Which is of course also perfectly okay. However, there is a huge growing gender gap [1] in college admissions that favors women.
If an equality program is so successful that it creates an equality imbalance in the other direction what do we do?
We could cancel the programs and call it's goal completed, but this seems wrong.
We could create new programs that target raising admissions of men, but that also seems wrong, at least in the current climate.
Maybe it's just the case that men don't prefer college as much or perhaps it's too expensive when you can't get scholarships because your not the right identity.
Aren't women-only projects and things inherently discriminatory, since it disallows participation or use based on gender?
I know that whenever I've seen women only projects I did feel a sting in my heart, because what if I wanted to participate?
The only way to be able to participate would be to abandon manhood and transition into womanhood...
Where as there are no 'men-only' projects and things. Not that there should be. We all should have the freedom to whatever we desire (as long as it's not hurting others of course).
Having doors closed to me just because of the factors over which I have no control is very painful and maybe I've been exposed to that more due to having stunted growth and being born with cleft lip. Luckily I can speak without any troubles which is quite uncommon. But because my mustache does grow around where the stitching is, it's still somewhat noticeable and due to the nose also being affected I've also received my share of beating and being called a goblin in schools.
I've been without a goal for most of my life, and have thus tried to take my life multiple times, but after reading about finance I've decided to work and invest as much as I can, so that I can reach a point where I can live from the passive income so that I'll finally have peace (and in a way be able to reduce my interactions with the society to the bare minimum).
((Please don't tell me that my goal isn't achievable because I already get enough of that from my father and pretty much anyone I talk to about finances, and it's really disheartening...))
Interestingly enough, elder people were always the most kind to me, maybe because they judge less by the looks or because many mistook me for a woman. (Or maybe they just don't see as well and thought that I was a kid)
Unrelated to your larger point, your financial goal is a good one. The FI/RE community is an odd one, but very welcoming and supportive overall. I'm currently on a similar path, and as I've started to near the end I've found that I needed non-financial goals to get me sanely through the journey. Planning for a life where you don't have to work is wonderful, but the reality is that it leads to a lot of free time - if you find the void hard to fill now it'll be miserable then.
I say this because you said that being without a life goal was so difficult that you attempted to take your own life. Just setting an (often achievable) financial goal is kicking that can down the road. It's something I fear for myself quite a bit, so I've been picking up lots of hobbies to plant the seeds for when I have an abundance of free time. For me, this is a combination of travel, camping, guitar, surfing, reading (hopefully one day writing), and most recently geocaching. Each hobby has its own set of goals that I hope can occupy me indefinitely.
From what I've seen, minority targeted scholarships tend to be created by minorities rather than the college itself. For example, the Women in Computing group will organize and fundraise for a scholarship towards their school. A successful black man may donate money back to the school with the stipulation that it goes towards helping other black kids like him. The school itself is happy to look progressive and point to all its targeted scholarships, but I'm curious how many of them are explicitly created by the school itself.
It changes the narrative around financial aid when you view it as communities putting in the work to ease the burdens of folks who are like them. Maybe it says something about how difficult it is to "make it" for them that they're disproportionately more willing to donate back to their community.
The gender gap in education is observed all around the world, including in virtually all countries in Europe where university is free or subsidised to the point of being free-ish and there's no real scholarship culture to speak of.
your link brings up an interesting statistic that I wasn't aware of. However, you can tell by the language that the author of the article is very clearly biased and I wonder what the actual reality of the situation is. Some questions that might help with revealing the full picture:
1. What would be the ratio of male vs. female degrees if everyone had the access to higher education? Maybe by their own volition men would choose to get a higher education less often than woman? The writer seems to think 50/50 is "fair" but I don't think he would agree that equality of outcome is a metric we should strive for.
2. How much of the shift in the ratio has been due to Woman's Centers? There are a huge number of relevant societal/economic/logistical factors that have changed in the last 40 years that would have an impact on woman having the means/desire/permission to attend college.
3. How many woman are there that previously did not go to college (for the reasons above) that are now making that choice? Could these woman's centers still be relevant for assisting woman in "making up for lost time"?
I don't claim to have the answers to these questions but I think anyone who isn't considering them is probably missing something from the larger picture - this is a complex issue after all.
> If an equality program is so successful that it creates an equality imbalance in the other direction what do we do?
Equality of outcome is not possible or even desirable. That is the problem. The more people try to force some completely unnatural result, the more terrible things they'll have to do (e.g., discrimination on the basis of body attributes, as if there is some good way to do it) and the worse things will get.
Schools are not performing as well for men as they do for women.
I'm not just playing with words; it is really important to frame the share of responsibility correctly.
It is the school's job to educate the kid, not kid's job to compensate for the dysfunctions of an education system. I'll generalize because I don't have any detailed data; anyone from the front-line educator to the curriculum designer to the budget maker is potentially responsible for this failure. On this particular issue, they are the ones not doing well, not the kids.
> Schools are not performing as well for men as they do for women.
Maybe men are just not inherently less suited to academic success, which is being made more clear now that systematic discrimination in their favor isn’t preventing equal-terms comparisons with women in that domain.
Equality of opportunity doesn't mean equality of outcomes, after all.
> Maybe men are just not inherently less suited to academic success
Maybe. A strong essentialist proposition requires an equally strong evidence, though. Have you got any?
> systematic discrimination in their favor isn’t preventing equal-terms comparisons with women in that domain
What positive systemic discrimination do boys receive in education? Since we are not observing a sudden drop after K-12 but a longitudinal effect, please explain starting from K, if any.
If that were true then why wouldn’t you want to change academia so that it works well for both men and women? Wouldn’t that be the obvious ethical path to take?
I agree with you that changing academia so it works well for both men and women is the right thing to do. Find ways to help men improve reading and writing skills so they aren't left behind, and help women improve math and computer skills so they aren't left behind. The purpose of education is to uplift. Sometimes we get too caught up in it as a competition.
Men run most governments. Men own most companies. Men dominate the higher levels of corporations. Most engineers, doctors, lawyers, investors, and other highly paid professionals are men. Men simply own more capital than women, by a huge margin.
It looks like schools are performing better for men than women.
Allow me to correct the two logical distortions in your proposition.
Distortion 1) You can't take the outliers of a flatter distribution and generalize that to the entire population. You can't even compare the averages of two separate distributions without qualifiers.
It is true, most of the people who run governments are men. Most of the people who own companies are men. Most of the people who dominate C levels are men. Most highly paid professionals are mostly held by men. Most of the top outliers of capital ownership are men.
But it is also true most men don't run governments. Most men are not even remotely close to running companies. Most men are not C level execs. Most men don't have high paying jobs. Most men don't have any capital (if not negative).
Distortion 2) Even if it was true that it was exclusively powerful men's fault that boys are failing, it is completely irrelevant to bring it up when talking about men as victims, unless one would also suggest that boys somehow deserve to suffer educational disadvantages because of those men have a lot of capital, or there is some hidden variable that connects the two events.
So, what is your take on this? Do we ignore the fact that the top of our society is dominated by men and only focus on the men in the 40th to 60th percentile of income? Even then, you would see a similar pattern between the earning potential between men and women. I just fail to see where men are getting a raw deal here.
Why is there no push for women to be equally represented in the jobs that SUCK? Where are the feminists advocating for 50% of coal miners and loggers to be female? Nowhere to be found....because they want to secure the benefits that accrue to a small fraction of men, produced by the whole civilization (C-level positions, etc.) without sharing the bone-crushing burdens endured by the larger swathe of the male population that actually enables it.
100% of the males who get naturally pregnant. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer. It's almost like there are biological differences between men and women, and that these organisms are largely optimized for distinct roles in the human system.
>>>Men have a choice to take dangerous jobs.
If men flat-out refused to do dangerous work....our entire industrialized economy would collapse, because at the end of the day all of it is built on top of natural resource extraction. Are you suggesting that all those men digging rare earth metals out of the ground should just #learntocode?
>>>Women don’t have a choice to have medical complications during labour.
But they DO have choice to not get pregnant at all, right? If men are accountable for their choice of profession and the inherent risks, are women not accountable for their reproductive choices and inherent risks? If reducing (obviously gender-skewed) labor complications is a valid societal concern, than shouldn't reducing (also gender-skewed) workplace fatalities also be a valid societal concern? I'm not really sure what you are arguing here with the pregnancy angle.
My take is that we ought to be careful about framing biases. I don't think "men" is the most useful variable to formulate every problem with. Unless we have evidence that there is an essence to every man that manifests itself in every one of these instances, we can't reduce solving these problems to "solving men".
> Do we ignore the fact that the top of our society is dominated by men and only focus on the men in the 40th to 60th percentile of income?
Like I said, we have to be careful not to treat them as joint issues. Unless proven otherwise, problems regarding a lack diversity of representation at executive classes is not related to economic problems of lower income percentiles, or educational prospects of young boys for that matter.
The other framing bias is to treat as if can only fix one problem and we can only focus on that. It is actually a blessing that these are disjoint issues and we can multitask as a society and make incremental progress.
> I just fail to see where men are getting a raw deal here.
I think again this is because of attaching too much valence to category "men". You sound like a compassionate person and I think you wouldn't disagree if we formulated the problem as "any individual who is suffering raw deals should be treated fairly", even if those individuals happened to be low-income men or undereducated boys. I think true justice can only happen if no one is left behind. And treating men as a monolithic category will have the consequence of leaving some behind that shouldn't have been.
Today there are more women graduating medical and law school than men. Given the trends the current imbalance (of sheer numbers) will be a thing of the past in a decade or two.
> It looks like schools are performing better for men than women.
Or school isn't the only factor? Schools could be failing boys, and society could be failing women in other ways.
I think it starts early and the little things compound throughout most domains in childhood development which leads to these men feeling completely lost and unable to navigate the current society that doesn't really care about them unless they are the antagonist to some narrative. Outside of family, nobody really cares when they are falling through the cracks, and nobody really cares to try and pick them up afterwards.
Just look at the behaviors of people who are participating in society, why are they on average getting married less, later in life, having less kids, and buying homes later if ever, when these are all supposed to be important stepping stones of adulthood. The incentives that used to be there are harder to reach for people that actually have it together, and getting further out of reach for average people. When life sucks, might as well drop out.
Masculinity can create its own suffering. Men and boys have been brutally mocked for showing emotion or wearing pink. Men have an insecurity about buying products or services that are too femininely branded, so an asthetic procedure is called a detail or an oil change or some garbage. My dad would only give me manly hugs with a forceful pat because kissing your son goodnight on the head just isn’t right. I’ve found forum threads where men agonize about wearing a women’s sized version of their favorite running shoe, and even the ones willing to do so may only do it if the colorway exactly matches the men’s version.
I know women who have little choice but to say they have a boyfriend when they want to turn someone down at a bar, because saying ‘sorry no thanks’ gets them insulted, harassed, covered in beer or assaulted. Women that turn a guy down on a dating app will be called names and told they were actually unattractive the whole time.
Yes, women are not immune to being violent, petty, deceitful and cruel, but men are terrifying on an entirely different level. If you consider yourself a nice guy, you might be somewhat oblivious to how pervasive it is.
> If you look in the wrong places on the internet, media, or daily life, all you see is negativity towards masculinity.
This line surprised me, because I find it _far_ easier to stumble over mysogyny, casual or not. In the latter case, comitted by some of the men discussed here.
Ultimately, I think a lot of this is, on both 'sides', is people mistaking their toxic little corner of the internet for the real world. It is important not to be dragged into their worldview, because it is utterly incorrect. (Men are not any less supported than women, also, men do not have anything coming. In fact, men are not a singular group! So stop identifying with 'men', where we imagine some lucky billionaire as exemplar of men.)
When I've spoken to people about this i get a "that's because they dont try as hard" (anecdote not data).
Which has always struck me as odd. When women didn't do well it was because the institutions weren't designed to accommodate them or their educational needs.
I think for young people in school a solution could be some evaluation on how that student learns and put them into a class that caters to that style. One size fits all education doesn't work. It didn't work for young women in the past and it doesnt work young men today.
I do agree that there are a lot of internet and media headlines that portray men in a negative light. Yes, writers generate Internet/media content with provocative headlines declaring "The End of Men". But in real life I see plenty of men getting good jobs, having families, winning awards, changing the world. Everywhere I look there are positive examples of men killing it: in business, sports, politics. So I feel like you would have to ignore all of the male political leaders, sports super stars, highly regarded thinkers and scientists, business leaders, entrepreneurs, religious clergy, and just focus only on stupid things people on the internet said to feel like the world is bleak for men. Yes, women are getting higher grades in school and graduating in higher numbers than men. I don't think that one metric by itself spells a doom and gloom future for men. Men don't have to be better than women in every metric to have a bright future.
Men do 90% of everything. Start world wars, end world wars, save people’s lives, murder people, invent lifesaving technologies, invent murderous technologies. Women seem to want a world where they are 50% of the CEOs but not 50% of the prisoners and that’s not how “maleness” works.
Yeah, I can appreciate certain complaints about the way men are portrayed in media and popular discourse, but it seems like a leap from there to phenomenon in question. We criticize men for telling women to smile, or whatever ... and somehow the end result is that they give up on their career ambitions?
I think you're right that the real issues are economic. In fact I'd say that this is part of a larger, more general tendency to use cultural conflict to distract from class conflict.
I've had numerous conversations about this with my son, starting when he told me he didn't want to grow up to be a "man". Because of what he had absorbed from culture/society.
Today, men are told that we are disposable; Neanderthals; a legacy of the last century and the cause of everything that's wrong in the country/world; that we're patriarchal oppressors; that we're unnecessary and obsolete. The word "masculine" is at best a negative connotation, and usually meant as an attack.
So, yeah, I have first-hand experience with this. On the flip side, from talking with a couple of my son's female friends, they feel the pressure of being told that they can do and be everything. All at the same time. That's not great either.
The best response is to disengage from media and just be yourself. Easier said than done sometimes, for sure, but that's the longterm win.
So the internet is confusing and your son has some questions. It seems like a big jump to explain why men aren't getting jobs. Do men want to live with their parents simply because they don't feel as manly? Or is it because rent growth outpaces wages?
I think this is incomplete by itself. Taking a couple of points from the article:
- Women are less likely than men to live at home with their parents.
- The increase in men living at home with their parents is primarily driven by those without college degrees (15->25% among those without college degrees over the last 25 years, 10->13% among those with college degrees).
Per [0], in 2019, there was a 8 point gender gap among young adults (25-29) for college degrees (associate's and above).
A guess at a fuller explanation might then be that wage growth for jobs that don't require a college degree haven't kept up with rent growth, and the gender gap here is driven by the gender gap in educational attainment.
One other thing that I observed:
If you look at the labor force participation graph in the article, it slowly trended downwards from the 60s, and then suddenly jumped down around 2008-2011, and since then stayed mostly flat until last year.
Meanwhile, the fraction of young men living at home rose steadily from the 60s until the mid-90s, dropped for a few years, and then resumed climbing after 2000 (with no such jumps around 2009 or 2020).
On one hand, we have these economic shocks (Great Recession, pandemic) that force a bunch of men out of the labor market, but at the same time, more men are living at home even as labor force participation remained largely constant throughout most of the 2010s. That reads to me like it refutes the article's central claim of correlation between these two variables.
The education system has turned into the equivalent of those kindergarten karate classes where if you show up and do the fake moves and pay the money; they give you an ever increasing number of belts (degrees).
For whatever reason, women will go into debt or be allowed to go into debt to get useless degrees and there is no countervailing force to say: “uh marine biology is cool but…$500,000?”
This has lead to a situation where women have gotten 13 million more colleges degrees than men over the last few decades.
> If you look in the wrong places on the internet, media, or daily life, all you see is negativity towards masculinity.
In my eyes it is just that masculinity that often is the problem. The problem is not that kids live in an environment that doesn't like it if they e.g. resort to violent and/or foreceful behaviour to assure themselves of their masculinity — the problem is, that the kids think their worth as a human being depends on fulfilling these outdated male ideals. And who can blame them? It is all a matter of having the right role models in your life.
Having worked with teens from troubled social backgrounds I can assure you that the behaviour and expectations of the parents feed into this in a powerful (and often very destructive!) way.
Your task as a parent is to prepare your kids for the world they will live in. If the world changed and males are expected to be more empathetic, less aggressive, etc. then don't scold your boy for crying, playing with puppets or other things you perceive as "unmanly". Be critical about the way you as a parent deal with your own feelings of sadness, anger, etc in front of your kids.
I had the luck to have had a very caring father, and I never had the feeling that my masculinity was endangered. If anything I felt sorry for all the guys in my surrounding who tried so hard to hide their feelings that they started to forget they had any.
So in short: the problem with masculinity is that many boys learn from their surroundings that the self worth of a man is connected how masculine he acts and can be reduced if he acts feminine. This is utter bullshit. Your kid should be allwoed to explore their feelings without constant judgment about them.
>"men have had it coming and deserve any ensuing suffering"
I find the irony to all this is the sons are getting punished for the sins of the father. Every "equity" program I can name, every single one primarily punishes the young while leaving the old, who presumably would have been the ones who setup a rigged game, alone. People lose their chances to enter the labour market, they don't lose their existing jobs. I mostly see the innocent getting punished because they were born guilty.
Regarding school, men mature more slowly than women and do worse in certain intellectual enterprises like memory and seem to get a third of a grade point lower grades when their tests are scored unblinded. If you really wanted to make men and women score equally you could by blinding tests and tilting them more to skills men tend to do better on and not expecting equality between their age cohorts until they hit at least their late teens. There is simply no interest in doing such a thing and instead I hear outrage that men are the majority in any academic discipline even if on the aggregate they're behind.
I think it’s easy to conflate the two since news articles tend to not make a clear distinction unfortunately. Try searching “men buzzfeed” and then “women buzzfeed”. Go to news section on Google. One search will result in positive/uplifting for one gender and quite the opposite for the other
Toxic masculinity in the media has now come to encompass any quality in a person they don’t like. A weight lifter is an asshole? It’s because of a toxic masculinity problem in weight lifting. Positive traits in men as a broad population are regularly cast to toxic masculinity in individuals by lazy writers.
> In addition, there doesn't appear to be any broad social system that is geared towards supporting men.
What planet are you on? The whole social system is geared towards supporting men. 70% of the U.S. government is men. Most companies are owned by men. Most of the C-suite of most companies are men. Most engineers, doctors, lawyers, investors, and all other desirable, high-paying jobs are dominated by men. Just look around.
I'm betting OP is talking about supporting men emotionally, or generally supporting mens' well being.
Everything you listed is correct, but I think both of your statements can be true. Men aren't in need of societal advantages, but they are in need of some societal support. And that doesn't have to compete with very real things women require either.
If OP is talking about a broad social system to support men emotionally, then no, that doesn't exist in America. Nor does it exist for women, or minorities, or anyone else.
That’s not a social system, that’s a rat race of men fiercely competing against each other. There’s opportunity there, but not much psychological support.
