De facto segregation was common at my university. If you walked into a cafetaria or the common areas, you’d see clumps of white students and clumps of Black students sitting with one another. It wasn’t remarkable to see some Black and white students sitting with one another as a group, but clumpings based on race was more common.
I do wonder though how many of young men who give that as a measure of success actually want to be husbands and fathers and how many are have been sucked into the ‘manosphere’ concept of a ‘tradwife’- the wife that devotes themselves to you, does all your life admin, cooks, cleans, has as many kids as you want and raises them per your instructions, is financially dependent on you, doesn’t talk to other guys without your permission and never argues back. Guys looking for some variant of that are worryingly common in some online spaces.
Those are two different issues needing different solutions.
Helping young men get their life financially stable enough for a serious relationship and eventually afford the kids them and their partner both want is a good goal, while helping deluded misogynist guys try to find a ‘tradwife’ isn’t. Maybe some got there because their life is bad in other ways and would drop the misogyny and look for actual relationships if they were in a better situation financially, but I’m not sure that can be assumed.
You don’t have to wonder too hard. Polling data exists. Even among its most popular demographic subgroups, even when they agree with the bits that complain about being ignored, even when they follow the feeds, the Tate style misogyny is disapproved of by overwhelming margins. That’s a portion of the thread that this came out of.
One example:
When asked whether men or women should take the lead on various roles in heterosexual relationships—such as making more money, handling household chores like cooking and cleaning, and providing childcare—voters mostly have gender egalitarian views. The youngest voters (aged 18-22) are slightly more likely than the overall electorate to express conservative views on gender roles. However, when asked whether they agree or disagree with several statements associated with the ‘manosphere’—such as “these days, men have it worse than women on average” or “traditional masculinity is under attack in society these days”—young voters’ views did not differ substantially from those of the overall electorate.
Ignore them, deny that they do have legitimate issues, offer them nothing, and they are ripe to move away from you, maybe even to the fringes. Offer them real solutions, a variety of educational pathways to careers, stability, eventually being partners and even dads, and they may move to you. Include the jobs that have not been classically “manly”, teaching and nursing, as solid careers that need men there, and other college pathways, but recognize that generic college as the meal ticket is probably less true than it was, and that more investment in expanding the trades training pipeline may provide another path to a stable career (for all genders).
You were talking about ‘Young men who voted for Trump’ who gave ‘Being married’ and ‘Having children’ as their important definitions of success, I’m confused as to why you’re now pointing at a general poll as anything to do with that. I’m suggesting that that specific group is likely to disproportionately have issues with manosphere attitudes that are not going to be fixed by purely increased wages. In fact, looking at that poll, there’s multiple options that amount to ‘have more money’ but they’re lower down the list.
Listing getting married and having kids as a marker of ‘success’, especially among people without a potential spouse in mind, can be a marker for problematic attitudes in my experience. Yeah, they may mean it’s a part of the overall life they envisage, but treating it as ‘success’ can very much overlap with the ‘treat women as fungible objects’ attitudes.
Also, that cite says the rate of for young people agreeing strongly or somewhat with the statement to ‘A woman’s place is in the home’ is 18% for respondents age 18-34, with 13% for overall responses, with no breakdown by who they voted for. That’s a lot more people than I would want to ignore as a small margin.
Politically I am talking about the demographic of young men, in particular young men who, rationally, were and are insecure about their economic futures, which increasingly includes young men college as well as those not on any education path.
The article was timely about how some of them felt that the Democratic Party didn’t especially care about them (and there was little evidence to the contrary) and their current move away from Trump as well.
Can, will, the Democratic Party be able to get them to move to them? Will they offer them any recognition that they and their problems also matter?
Huh. My experience has been that was pretty normative. It certainly was in my mind as a man. I wasn’t just dating to hook up, I was interested in finding a partner. Really though that’s another thread’s discussion. For the context of this thread, your fears that young men who view becoming family men with careers as a goal may be misogynists and you don’t want to possibly help them, is duly noted. The fact however remains that young men’s votes, especially those who went to Trump last time out of frustration that their concerns over their futures were not being addressed, are up for grabs.
Trump is doing his part to drive them away from him; the Democratic side has to do its part to pull them in as well. Offering solutions like paths to careers that are less likely subject to AI obsolescence in a near to moderate term is good politics as well as good for our economy.
Please don’t put words into my mouth. I specifically said young men who view ‘getting married and having kids as a marker of ‘success’, especially among people without a potential spouse in minds’.
Not finding a partner, not being ‘family men with careers’, viewing the acts of marriage and having children as ‘success’.
If you want to make up an argument and argue against it, go right ahead, but please don’t make up things that I said.
Pulled into the Male Inequality thread.
For here - let us assume that some of these young male voters have “traditional” views of masculinity. That some of that includes being the breadwinner in a household, which right now is far outside their reach. And a sexist view of some jobs as manly and some as … not.
Only telling them that their answer is to become teachers and nurses (etc.) will not pull them in as much as also offering them help on paths consistent with their view of manliness. The fact that those paths are also being offered to and encouraged for women to is something they may deal with, even if they scoff at women handling the work.
My WAG is that college broadening their minds is a less effective way to reduce the appeal of authoritarianism than having rising economic prospects is.
But if you want economic security, we have the collective wealth to give everyone a $50,000 cushion to start life with. Turn 18, get a check. We could restrict that so that it could, say, ONLY be used to pay rent / mortgage, but we could easily buy people the cushion of a couple of years to sort themselves out. We choose not to for a variety of reasons, practical, fiscal, and moral.
I think you really need to frame your parameters more closely as to what you’re ruling out, because a lot of the problems raised here have solutions, just not solutions that are ever going to happen in the USA. Here, we expect people’s families to set them up and launch them, and if your family is poor or crazy, well, sucks to be you.
High school guidance is (A) almost nonexistent, and (B) overly focused on the high-school-to-college pipeline.
To my mind, a lot of what is needed has nothing to do with education or the trades, but in making high school more varied, more rigorous, and more focused on giving youth the tools to be successful adults, regardless of their path. A lot of men don’t see a path to success because they have a limited option. They know being a famous (musician, influencer, sports dude, celebrity); they’ve heard of doctors, lawyers, whatever their family does, and fast food / barista / retail. They have no idea of the variety of jobs out there, nor the paths to get there. They have no idea how to leverage connections and education to get somewhere.
People figure it out, but we could really do a much better job of communicating the options and the necessary skills much earlier.
Let’s be clear here. I have worked in a college. The worst were the agriculture students. The entire class was male.I had some literally barge into me to shove me out of their way and then clearly complain to another student that ‘That bitch cleaner got in my way’ (I was brushing some of the mud off the floor). The same students would refuse to do any assignments set by female staff members. Eventually, the - female - head of department who had been there well over a decade had to assign them all male teachers or the whole class was going to fail. She quit the same week I did, in most part, as she told me because she couldn’t deal with the sudden appalling increase of sexism she was having to deal with.
I didn’t teach that class, but did work in two different Horticulture classes, less male coded; in the lower level class the sexism was reduced form the agriculture class, but the sole female student was still subject to a constant barrage of plausible deniability sexual jokes and half the students were constantly trying to slip in sexual meme references when talking to me as well. The higher level class, on the other hand, was a 50/50 mix by gender and I don’t think I heard more than the odd slightly questionable joke, between friends.
So no, you are not going to convince me that there has not been an issue with extreme sexism in young men in recent years. I also think it’s both adding to and often connected with their lack of education and attainment. I’ve literally seen it, reported it, watched female colleagues have breakdowns trying to figure out how to do anything about it and it was a major factor in me quitting that job.
Any solution to the male education attainment gap, or the lack of job options, simply has to take account the fact that some of this is driven by manosphere bullshit and the young men concerned need some major help in getting away from that before anything else is going to help. It’s not doing anyone any favours to pretend that it it’s not a problem.
It is certainly not going to be helped by trying to focusing on helping guys like that get wives and children, even if that is what they say they want.
A strong counterpoint to the argument that college attendance opens minds and creates good neighbors!
Did you read me trying to? There has been an issue with extreme sexism in young men in recent years … as there has been in past years. Pretty sure the men of that Ag college were as frequently sexist jerks 20 or 30 years ago as now. I will go farther - the have been a marginal few who have felt abandoned by society who have been successfully recruited to the incel and manosphere mentalities. Not “by manosphere bullshit”; driven into it. But honestly given the complete disregard of them by the Democratic side, by progressivism and liberalism in general, a group that celebrates them as great is of course going to win a few.
I don’t think Trump won over these non-college educated and career anxious in college men, many of whom had been Democratic voters in the past; I think the Democratic side actively lost them.
Taking those Ag assholes - do you think intentionally choosing policies that relatively impede their “sort” finding partners and having families will do either of helping Democrats win elections, or, more importantly, help American society. Those specific assholes were in college albeit not studying philosophy, but probably were on track for careers in the agricultural industry, but consider a similar asshole not in college.
Well, according to the multiple staff members who had worked there for over 20 years, one of whom was female and had been there nearly 30, no. They’d encountered jokes and a bit of dismissiveness, especially when it came to the machinery section of the course, but no one there had ever experienced a student who refused to listen to or complete assignments set by female staff until recently, let alone an entire class. That was an entirely new phenomenon. Students who were willing to fail a class rather than do what a woman told them to do.
Agriculture has long had a bit of a reputation for old fashioned attitudes, because farm kids can grow up isolated in rural areas with only family members to talk to, but these kids weren’t isolated, they were chronically online. They didn’t think men should be the main breadwinners or even that women were worse at technical subjects or similar- they thought women were subhumans there for them to have sex with them and serve them and if they weren’t attractive they were worthless.They weren’t hiding this.
Sure, it’s rare to get a class where it’s basically all of them, so right out in the open, but young men with these attitudes are commoner than you think. They’re obviously a minority, and maybe the overall number of sexists hasn’t increased that much in the last 30 years, but the attitudes are far more extreme than those of the sexists around 20 or 30 years ago. I was a teenager myself 30 years ago, and I never came across anything like that.
I’m sure there were some isolated jerks, but now they’re not isolated, there’s a whole group encouraging those attitudes and pulling teenagers down the slope from discontent into extreme misogyny. Andrew Tate is the one people have heard of, but he’s only one face of it, and I don’t think he’s actually the most popular any more, after making claims like ‘it’s gay to have sex with women for fun’.
Oh, and as it happens, the college campus I was based at had fewer students than many high schools, all students were local, and with very very little diversity. The site used to be an agricultural college which had merged with another local college. Most courses had been moved to main site, leaving just the land-based courses and veterinary science, so our students rarely mixed with students from the main campus. Our department and the veterinary sciences department each had our own self contained mini-campus near the facilities we used, so apart from on the bus there and the canteen, they didn’t mix much either. Not really demonstrating much.
I mean, what’s the problem with just failing them? Don’t want to do the work - flunk out of school. Problem solved. I mean, not for them. But, fuck them (metaphorically). They sound like assholes and the universe smiles on assholes getting their comeuppance.
Over the last ~20 years our society has gone from “saying the quiet part out loud”, to “shouting the quiet part out loud” to “the quiet part is now official federal government (or at least regime) policy”.
That progression is usually trotted out in reference to racism. But it also seems to apply to sexism. The worst case behaviors and attitudes of single specific individuals are not much different than they ever were. But the number of such worst-case people went from a rounding error within the population to a hefty fraction. They are now very much out and proud.
This has been going on long enough now that all children and young adults have lived their entire lives in this hate-celebrating era. They have not all embraced it, but they’ve all surely been steeped in it.
Figuring out how to solve economic malaise is real different from solving hate. But they’re deeply intertwined problems that I doubt can be tackled separately. And solving an education system that’s mired in teaching the wrong things for the wrong reasons to the wrong people probably has to come before either of the other problems.
Agree with @Tamerlane , the whole class refuses to do the work fail the whole class. Now her “had to” may have been pressure from above. And that enabling is unconscionable.
I remain unconvinced that it was ever much better … in the '50s my father had to go on sales leads pretending to be of Italian descent and in 1960 couldn’t buy a lot to build a house in one suburb because we were Jewish. Explicit racism has never disappeared and coded has continued as a major part of politics throughout. Yes the Trump era has more saying it out loud again, but that’s not young adults entire lives.
If it’s one or two students, it’s easy enough to just let them fail, but realistically, if virtually a whole class gets failed, that’s going to be viewed as a failure of the system, and the students know it.
Also, if a female department head has to defend a whole class failing because they were just too damn sexist to listen to her or the other female staff, her career is toast.
Aside from anything else, they were an approved institution for some national qualifications, including in agriculture, so some courses led to exams set by external bodies. I’m not 100% sure which those students were doing- a qualification authorised by the college or an externally set exam, but whole classes fail an externally set exam and I’m going to guess you lose your approval to teach the course pretty fast.
I mean, we figured that one out in high school, in a much less toxic way- the whole cohort agreed to set off party streamers on the last teaching day before the final exams, in sync, immediately after the speech the head insisted on giving about how these exams were going to define our future. The supplier of them was kept a dead secret, because, we figured, if they had one culprit they could punish them, but they couldn’t realistically do anything to the whole cohort at that point. They needed us to sit and mostly pass the exams.
I’m not an educator but it seems straightforward to me. The dean calls in one who has done something specific and gives them a warning and an action plan. They fail the action plan, they had the warning, they are failed, the next one brought in … maybe that time three given the same warning and action plan. Highly doubt you get past student one.
Employees are easier to replace than revenue-generating students. This is particularly true when you factor in alumni donations. I think you’re 100% correct here, but also that such a sensible plan would never be implemented.
Thinking on this … I get the reasons the small university higher ups would have to just ignore the situation, especially in a time in which any hint of vilified DEI risks major conservative MAGAsphere outrage. Especially if your specific pool of students and alumni are skewed in that direction. But would an administration doing the same be as … accepted … as pragmatic necessity, if this was unwillingness to do the work assigned by Black or Jewish professors?
Connecting back to the OP - I was of course joking in my “so much for expanding minds” … but seriously … I don’t think college is going to vastly change MAGA people into model citizens of liberalism. Yes, exposures that contradict your stereotypes helps, but a trade education can accomplish that just as well.
I don’t think you experience teaching at a small agricultural college is representative of the higher education system in general. In fact, I feel like some of that behavior might actually get you expelled from most colleges (ie shoving a teacher).
The “hick (often racist/sexist) jock douchebag” has been a stock character since at least the 80s, it’s something that most people would seem to be familiar with IRL. But I wonder what it is about these rural communities that produces these attitudes.