Oh, I see. I guess I would call that more “responsibility” or “prudence” than “security”. Responsibility and prudence seem to me like character traits, which are valuable to have at whatever income or wealth level. Security seems to me more like a status, which nobody can really guarantee.
I would say that responsibility and prudence can be manifested in that way much farther down the income/wealth scale than might be assumed. Even an outright hobo/drifter who can, say, competently accomplish some casual labor when he wants/needs to earn some cash money, and can legally forage, scavenge, hunt, construct and adapt the rest of his material needs, is demonstrating those traits, in my book.
Maybe he doesn’t pursue those things at all. Maybe the right thing for that particular person to do with his life is something else altogether, and he realizes that.
I want to flip the question around for a moment. Haven’t we all accepted that not every woman HAS to be a wife and mother? What’s it seen as when a woman is “childless by choice” and even spouseless by choice.
As for the career thing, my (male and female) classmates and I were, by every testing standard, academically superior. Only a handful of us went into high-status careers. In fact, many more of the group I’m thinking of went into clerical jobs than law or medicine. No, none of us became hoboes or chose to live on the streets, but all of us had at least one box we didn’t tick.
There’s still a lot of judgement about this, and whining that feminists are tricking women into not having children. I think it’s definitely more accepted in some groups. But there’s still a lot of pushback.
The same kind of judgement exists for men who aren’t working or financially supporting a family.
Some people just can’t stand the idea of living in a society where people don’t have clearly defined gender roles and take it out on anyone who exercises their freedom to step outside those roles.
When I evaluate a man’s suitability or whatever I tend to look at the whole package, not whether they tick some arbitrary boxes.
I mean…you say it’s not society’s business what a man does and then you list all these attributes and activities you think a man should be doing.
I think to a certain extent, a man has to develop a strong framework for right and wrong that he can live by. Basically to let him know when he needs to fit into society and when society should go fuck themselves.
Again - I don’t believe a man HAS to do any of these things (beyond the basics of moving out of their parents house and living on their own as an adult). The problem as I see it isn’t that “society” is judging. I think a lot of men WANT these things and maybe have trouble realizing them in todays society. I know a lot of people struggling to find jobs right now (including myself). A lot of people are complaining about being able to afford homes. Online dating seems like a big mess and the fact that online seems to be one of, if not the biggest channel for dating seems problematic to me. Even having a close circle of friends seems to be a challenge for a lot of men these days.
Maybe these aren’t problems for every man, but they are for enough of them.
Maybe another way to look at it is to take a real-world example from my neighbors kids. Our neighbors have two adult male children who recently graduated college. They’re good kids and at least one of them has a girlfriend. But for one reason or another they still live at home and seem to be having trouble finding steady work so they can leave home. It’s not a matter of “society judging them”. I assume on some level they want to get on with their lives and become functioning adults.
Why this hang up? Multi-generational homes used to be standard. The eldest son would take over his father’s business and home, bring his wife into the home, and they’d support the elderly parents at home.
It went out of fashion when nuclear families became popular, but it’s becoming more common again. Why it’s more common is off-topic to this thread, but I don’t see why a man is any less a man for living with his parents.
It would also be easier for young people to move out of their parents’ homes if American cities still allowed SRO (Single-Room Occupancy) housing, where residents could rent out individual rooms in a dormitory-style arrangement.
The answer to your question is that in THIS day and age and as long as I can remember, young men (and women) do generally want their independence to build a home and family of their own.
I think it’s pretty evident just in this thread that there is little consensus on what constitutes “becoming a man”, let alone how they should define their place in society.
That said, even if I agreed that society should make it “ok” for a grown man to live at home, never find a partner, not pursue any sort of job or career, what sort of purposely existence is that? I wouldn’t even consider them a “good” man as much as I would a “harmless” or “ineffectual” man.
@Q.Q.Switcheroo - plenty of cities offer studio or 1BR apartments. I lived in a studio in Manhattan when I graduated business school. Granted the rent cost as much as the mortgage payment for my friends 4 BR home and most of his monthly living expenses in Indiana at the time.
But those are about traits of individual character and pursuing one’s own individual goals. Not about societally prescribed “life choices” in the sense of how much money you make, or your relationship status, or whether you have children, etc.
Then we seem to be in agreement.
All of these are societal problems, but none of them are specifically problems of men. Everybody’s getting pounded to some extent by the dehumanizing effects of technology-focused late-stage capitalism.
And that’s a bad thing, and we should take measures to ameliorate it. But IMHO, we shouldn’t be doing so exclusively or primarily because it’s doing a number on male self-esteem and happiness.
Just a note, I think a lot of these kinds of expectations perhaps inadvertently exclude people with disabilities. It’s also just less common for kids to leave the nest now that financial hardship is more the norm for middle class people.
I never realized how terrible the nuclear family structure was until I had a child with no logistical support. I’m not surprised that the rise of this family structure birthed the feminist movement. Women have always been taking care of kids, but they were doing it with other women. Other family members. Women in their communities. Everybody took care of everyone else’s kids. That’s just what you did. I’ve seen shades of that in how my husband’s very large family operates, though we don’t generally receive logistical support from them, whenever we go to see them there is an assumed communal responsibility for everyone’s kids (there are eleven little ones right now.) And it’s great. You don’t have to worry every single second where your child is and what they are doing.
The nuclear family put the sole responsibility for child care onto one single woman and apparently it broke us. I’d like to tell those assholes who blame feminists for women not wanting to have kids, actually it’s your “ideal” nuclear family that makes women not want to have kids, because the burden falls disproportionately on women in a way it never has throughout history - at least not that I’m aware of. Oh, and my husband feels it too, given that he’s a highly engaged parent himself. It seems like anything we’ve ever gone through in the decades we’ve been together we’ve gone through alone, and parenting is no different.
Revisiting the (rather problematic although in some respects enlightening) linked article in this thread’s OP, I think the elephant in the room about the challenges that men in particular are facing is the societal phenomenon that I call “girl cooties”.
I.e., once an activity, or interest, or career field, etc., becomes significantly associated with women, men start getting societal pressure to avoid it. Because it’s seen as “unmanly” for men to be participating in activities that are socially “female-coded”.
The OP’s linked article keeps bumping up against this phenomenon time and again, without ever acknowledging it, or, probably, realizing it:
(Remember, teaching male students or mixed groups of students was primarily a male profession, at least up through the late 19th or early 20th century. Then more bureaucratized and institutional public schools, with male administrators to handle the leadership and disciplinary roles, overwhelmingly shifted to hiring women, who would work cheaper. And nowadays almost all forms of juvenile education have “girl cooties” all over them.)
Why is it hard for the “only guy”? Does he have female classmates and professors patronizingly telling him that he’s pretty smart “for a boy”, ignoring his questions and contributions to focus on those of the female participants, embarrassing him by checking out his body and making smutty and/or degrading jokes about men? Because let me tell you, having been a young woman in STEM in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I know what that experience is like, and no, I don’t think men these days in female-dominated fields like psychology and social work and education are going through the same sort of things.
What’s killing male participation in female-coded fields, as I said, is mostly the “girl cooties” effect. Men are strongly pressured to avoid stuff that is widely seen as “something women do”. That’s why a man finds it hard to be “the only guy” in an otherwise all-female class.
Again: girl cooties (and the accompanying downward pressure on pay) is largely to blame for this. Any job that mostly women do is seen as a lower-status, and certainly less “manly”, job. So men will default to avoiding it.
I don’t blame men themselves for being caught between this socially evolved rock and a hard place, where the emancipation of women has resulted in more and more activities and professions becoming more “female-coded”, but men are still pressured to abstain from female-coded things because they’re not “manly” enough.
And as a side effect, we also see widespread sexist discrimination against women who try to participate in fields that are still heavily “male-coded”, such as video gaming and skilled-trades occupations. “This is one of the few things left for us men, why do women have to try to take it over too?” Consequences: misogynistic harassment and “joking”, obstructionism and discouragement of female entry-level workers, etc.
I sympathize with individual men who feel they’re trapped in a shrinking terrain where women are “invading” more and more of “their” traditionally male-dominated spaces, but they themselves can’t expand into female-dominated spaces because it would be “unmanly”. That societal Catch-22 is not the fault of individual men.
In the last analysis, though, sympathy’s not enough. We’re going to have to fix our society’s “girl cooties” problem, so men are no longer encouraged to feel embarrassed or resentful about participating in things that are now widely considered “what women do”.
Here you ascribe the things that you believe gives someone a purpose, but there are many things outside of what you list that do so. Someone might decide to live at home because either one or both of their parents need special care. Or they might like doing all the house work (cleaning, cooking, etc) thus freeing others in their household from doing so. Without knowing the circumstances, I could not say that not pursuing a job or career makes them less of man, or person.
I have friend who after discussing it with his wife decided to stop working. They have no children and she makes enough money for the both of them. He is not pursuing a career, and even though he could return to his profession if he wanted to, so far has not decided to do so. Yes, it is a bit different from what others have described because he did have a career that he chose to give up, but the fact he does not have a job and depends on his wife for their income does not make him any less of a man in my eyes, or his.
In one of his college classes my brother (and all the men in his class) were told to their collective face that they were going to be given lower grades simply because they were men, to punish them for it. There wasn’t any attempt to pretend there was any other reason, either.
Women are generally comparatively prudish and disinterested in sex, so of course you aren’t going to see much in the way of ogling or smutty jokes. As for being told they are “smart for a man”, women tend to look at men as evil, not stupid. It’s not a simple matter of the genders being hostile to each other in identical ways, they hate one another differently. Men tend to look at women as inferior, women tend to look at men as demonic.
When I was a teen, classical piano was generally regarded as a women’s field in Asia. To the point that I played in many concerts and competitions where I was either the only guy, or in a small minority of guys with 70-90% of the other pianists being girls.
It was never portrayed as any sort of drawback. If anything, being a male pianist was considered to be an advantage in that kind of situation since men were often thought of as being less capable of conveying emotion in music, and that if a man could indeed play well, he’d get more performance points in the minds of the judges than a woman would.
I’m going to guess that one factor discouraging many men from going into K-12 education is not “girl cooties,” but rather, the worry of being perceived as a threat and/or viewed with suspicion, given the numerous teacher-student scandals in the news these days. Even if innocent, they’d worry.