Only 24 hours in a day after all.
Unless all men are dominant over all women, you can’t have a society where all men are dominant. To be dominant, by definition, you have to be dominant over at least one other person. Men being dominant over women is becoming less acceptable. Before we decide this is bad and needs to be fixed, let’s maybe ask some women what we think.
Read the Darwin Awards sometime for an argument for how men being less “macho” might not be entirely a bad thing, even for the men.
+1
I’m pretty sure Adam and Eve sat around bitching about how their kids had it easy, and how lazy and disrespectful the kids were these days.
Not pursuing women is only one aspect of the herbivore lifestyle. I think these Japanese men have seen the kind of life their ‘salaryman’ fathers lead and decided that it sucks.
Long hours working at a boring corporate job. You are expected to hand over your whole paycheck to the wife and if you want to work yourself literally to death, that’s cool.
Opting out of that lifestyle seems to be a pretty rational choice.
It does. Especially if there is less promise of job security if you do that, the way there is in the US. (I don’t know if this is the case in Japan) Or if wives are less interested in staying at home and handling all the household chores, as would probably be necessary to support that lifestyle.
It may be confirmation bias, but it seems like all of the roughly college-aged men I’ve met at work have been more effeminate than I remember me and my peers being back when I was in school. It even seems like their voices have become softer, kind of like the stereotypical gay voice without the lisp.
I’ve also read where it’s been noted that the average male’s testosterone is lower than it once was.
I wonder if it’s due to the demonization of school-yard violence / zero-tolerance policies that seemed to start back in the late 80s/early 90s and the anti-bullying wave that started around the 2000s. Or maybe it’s due to easy to access porn. Who knows.
Maybe dominance and submissiveness is not what we are really looking at here. Being an alpha male doesn’t mean he has to carry his superiority into all areas of his life. We talk about dick waving macho males. I believe it is more subtle than that. We can wave our dick by simply establishing that we are qualified at a high level at something, nearly anything. It only has to satisfy the guy wanting to wave his dick.
If John feels like he can hold his own in the social circle of gardeners he chooses to hang out with that might be enough to satisfy his need to be successful. Or if Robert feels like his big truck with big tires somehow qualifies him thats all that counts even though it may be pretty shallow and short lived.
Rupert on the other hand may not feel like he is particularly good at anything even though he is ok at most everything he does. He may not have any area of his life where he feels particularly emboldened to speak his mind or express his opinions. He simply blends in at work, blends in at home and blends in socially. I believe this could impact a persons testosterone levels and possible reduce his level of general motivation to advance or improve himself. In todays society it is harder to stand out and their are fewr places at the top to divy up. I believe we need to actively seek out things we can excel at.I’ve re-read that final sentence a few times, but let me get this straight: are you saying that you think that perceived changes in social structures (gender roles, equal rights, etc.) are causing physical changes in human bodies (blood hormone levels, testosterone vs. estrogen balance, vocal cord pitch/decibel, etc.) or did I misunderstand you?
What’s effeminate and what isn’t is determined at least partly by culture, and culture can change over time. If being violent is less culturally acceptable now than it was when you were in school, of course you’re going to see less of it now.
If you’re in the US and went to school sometime between the mid-60’s and the 90’s, violent crime is lower than it was when you went to school. There are a number of theories as to why, one that I particularly like is that it’s because we don’t have leaded gasoline any more. We know that average blood lead levels are down, and we know that there is an association between aggressive and delinquent behavior and high blood lead levels. In this case, average blood lead levels spiked in the mid-twentieth century, so they’re going down toward more like what they were historically. It’s a common fallacy to think that whatever conditions were when you were a kid were normal or ideal.
I am not saying that to be an absolute fact but yes I suspect that it is. It is true in other species, to one degree or another it could be true in humans.
We effeminates are taking over. (In a gentle non-bellicose way, of course, and alongside of the women also taking over).
Yeah, I’ve long considered the personality to be political; that the set of characteristics called “masculine” are themselves all intertwined with the social-political system called patriarchy, and that, in turn, being the response of the species to certain conditions (mostly pertaining to scarcity of resources). ETA: and that kind of scarcity of resources hasn’t been applicable in a long time, so all that’s gradually on its way out.
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Is this something we should recognise and take steps to combat?
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What on earth for??
How about we just set up a macho-men testosterone preserve or something. Y’all can have Idaho. It’s pretty and has nice mountains and hiking trails and stuff.
If bananas or pineapples are less rare in Japan now than they were at one time, it’s entirely sensible to be less excited about getting one than people were when they were rare. One of the problems that some hoarders have is that they treat something that isn’t a valuable resource as if it were. This doesn’t have good results for them.
This sounds to me like low(er) testosterone, or at least less testosterone-controlled.
This reverses the old cliché that every generation believes it’s the one that discovered sex. Now here’s one that claims to have forgotten it.
Could Herbivore Men be just another moniker for Sensitive New Age Guys?
Christine Lavin came up with that in 1991, by the way.
The only thing I’d say about this is that it seems (to me) there’s a contradiction between the official version of what women want - the Sensitive New Age Guy, to use Sam’s phrase - and what women actually want: assertive, confident, and (yes, I’m saying it) dangerous guys.
Reading up on it, I don’t think the concept of “herbavore men” really has a non-Japanese parallel.
The very song I was thinking of, in fact.
Japan is chock-full of unique terms that don’t seem to apply anywhere else. Even the mundane-seeming “salaryman” has all sorts of cultural connotations unique to the Japanese milieu.
Y’know, if there’s one person on this board whom I would expect to know the distinction between “lose” and “loose”…