And thanks to the anti-vaxx crowd, an alarming number of people are refusing their cootie shot. Circle. Circle. Dot. Dot. I got my cootie shot.
Girl cooties is one of the reasons I never considered going into education. Though I had a few male teachers, it was so overwhelming dominated by women it never really registered that it was a field for someone like me. I’ve heard some arguing we might be approaching the point where young men in America will view the college experience as festering with cooties.
I watched an interview with a woman who had gone into a male dominated stem field in the 1970s (I wish I could remember which one). She said her experience was largely positive in that her male coworkers didn’t give her a hard time, treated her with respect, and didn’t deliberately isolate her, but she felt isolated just by virtue of being one of the few women at the professional level, the topics her male coworkers spoke about, and even how they expressed themselves.
I can relate to that a bit. I work in HR, a field heavily dominated by women, at a company where about 70% of our employees are women, before that I worked at a library, which was also overwhelming dominated by women, and there have been a few times where I’ve felt like the odd man out. Admittedly such feelings are infrequent and quite fleeting. I can see why it might be difficult for the “only guy.”
You’ve told this anecdote before, and while I agree it was unconscionable treatment, it’s clearly not anything like the norm in mostly-female classrooms. It’s not really comparable to the traditional sexism that made (and to a much lesser extent can still make) life as the one woman in a mostly-male classroom unpleasant.
I get that you’re trying to emphasize that neither men nor women are innately better people than the other sex, which is true. But this artificial bothsidesism doesn’t really work when it comes to societal sexist discrimination, which really is significantly one-sided.
I think that when we try to pretend that the impacts of sexist discrimination against men in female-dominated environments really are just as bad, honest!, as traditional sexist discrimination against women in male-dominated environments except in different ways, we’re ignoring the “girl cooties” phenomenon again.
No. In the vast majority of cases, men are not avoiding female-majority fields and activities because they’re afraid that women are going to subject them to sexist harassment and discrimination. They’re avoiding them because they’re getting societal messages that those things have “girl cooties”, and will cause them to be perceived as less manly.
The fuh, dude??!? Why on earth would a man have to have that kind of “excuse” to give up his career, if he and his wife are both fine with that decision and can still maintain their household and family in a financially responsible way? Were you being sarcastic and I’m whooshed, or something?
Back around 2000 I had a middle aged male friend in St. Louis who career-changed into elementary education. Or rather tried to.
He jumped through all the hoops to get the requisite degree in teaching and the practical student teaching experience and the licenses. Then he discovered that none of the school districts within a day’s drive of where he lived and his wife worked would hire a male elementary school teacher. None. As in zero. Not even the poor inner city district that was dying for teachers.
After a high profile pedophile case a couple years previously, nobody there in the crotch of the bible belt was willing to take the PR risk of gasp, there’s a man in there with the kids.
Yeah, I agree that in the specific case of work with small children, there really is an overt anti-male discrimination effect that is even more salient than “girl cooties” when it comes to suppressing male participation.
Yet here I am in a profession that works with kids from just born on up. Was once upon a time nearly all male. By the time I started maybe 50 50. Now new pediatricians coming out of residency are nearly all women.
The men choosing residencies are not avoiding it out of fear of molestation accusations. Sure it pays less than most other choices but women have student loans too … it just hit more than 50% women in residency classes and young men were simply not secure enough in their masculinity to keep choosing it.
As to @icon ’s story - male or female I personally have less respect for someone who has no ambition to make a difference? Able and not working outside the home, not taking care of dependent loved ones, and doing other activities of good for the world (and I’ll include creating art as good for the world if is shared)? Not down a notch in my estimation as a man but down a notch as a person. Hell even in retirement I respect those doing good works gratis more than those just watching tv.
I am sorry what? Would you say the same thing of a woman if she decides to stay at home and take care of all the chores at home? Or does this apply only to a man?
What does making a difference mean? Is there some list of things that make a difference, while others don’t count? My in-laws are spending time growing vegetables in their retirement. Does what they are doing, which only impacts them and their neighbors not count? Or do they have to give it away to a food bank for it to count?
We have gone from, deciding not to pursue a career to watching tv. Are those they only two possible outcomes?
I think the larger point that has been mentioned is that certain roles have been given less importance than others, perhaps in part because in a male dominated society they were traditionally done by women. As more women take on roles that men used to inhabit, I agree with @Kimstu they are seen as less valuable and less worthy of a man.
Those kinds of issues are interesting from a sociology standpoint, but regardless, society will generally look down upon men who don’t fit the traditional male mold. If a man wants to be a stay-at-home-husband, there’s nothing wrong with it, but society will generally look down on it. There will be more snide comments, gossip behind his back, etc. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be a SAHH if he wants, but we can’t just pretend that there won’t be a negative stigma to that. Someone deciding to take on that kind of role should have the understanding that’s something they’ll have to deal with. If it’s the reverse where the wife wants to stay home, there will be little or no negative stigma to that. People will generally admire the wife for her choice and think better of the man for being the provider.
What year did this happen, and at what school? Did none of the students think of going to the dean? I can’t imagine this flying anywhere in recent decades, and while I can conceive of a tenured professor with radical-feminist views trying such a thing in years past, any competent administrator would nip it in the bud once they got wind of it. At any rate, it was certainly never a common enough scenario for it to be a major factor turning male students away from female-dominated fields.
Yeah, I remember as a child in the ‘60s and ‘70s I never had a female pediatrician, nor even knew of any. Being a doctor was still very much a Thing for Men in the cultural background radiation, and being a kids’ doctor was no exception.
Nowadays many people are retconning the preponderance of women in pediatrics (with, unsurprisingly, its lower pay) as simply a “natural outcome” of women “naturally gravitating towards kids” in their choice of medical field. But this is an extremely recent cultural shift.
I really can’t totally agree with this. Sure, everyone has a responsibility to work on being a good person and leading a fulfilling and non-harmful life, irrespective of whether they need to earn a living or not. But I’m not convinced that everyone needs to spend the entire pre-geriatric portion of their adult lives having a specific Mission in Life.
However, I guess it’s a bit OT for me to get into the weeds of debating whether or not opting out of an identifiable career/avocation/Mission in Life diminishes somebody as a person. The issue here is the unfairness and toxicity of society’s treating it primarily as something that diminishes a man as a man, because men are “supposed” to be doing things that tick societal “achivement” boxes.
At the risk of further muddying the forensic waters by explicitly bringing class into it, there used to be a countervailing cultural expectation that the social role of a “gentleman of leisure” was admirable for a man in and of itself. Many non-wealthy aspiring men worked their asses off for a couple decades with the goal of being able to afford “gentleman of leisure” status starting in early middle age at the latest. Where they could simply devote themselves to social activities and personal interests and amusements, with no further goal of personal aggrandizement or Making a Contribution in any earnest civic or sociological sense.
Sure, there was always a strain of social thought that scorned “gentlemen of leisure” as a sort of self-indulgent slackers avant la lettre, but it wasn’t because their choice was perceived as in any way feminine or tainted by “girl cooties”.
Why should those sorts of things be the only acceptable options?
Maybe he’s studying Torah. Maybe he’s doing volunteer work. Maybe he’s the person in their social network who’s available to help when somebody’s in the hospital or their car breaks down or their kid is sick but they’ve got to go to work. Maybe he keeps the garden which provides that network with half their produce. Maybe he’s the one who noticed that invasive plant, poisonous to the touch, starting to grow in the public playground, because he spends his time going around the neighborhood, noticing things, and when needed doing something about them. I could go on. And on.
ETA: And for some households, keeping house properly is a full time job.I left that one out the first time because for a city apartment or small house which gets its food at the store and/or restaurants, with neither children nor significant numbers of pets nor the kind of social life that includes frequent large and/or fancy parties, it isn’t, and the example read to me as that sort of situation; but it was only really clear about no kids.
I do see, though, how there’s a potential slippery slope from the “girl cooties” effect to outright anti-male discrimination.
As in:
A certain career field is originally male-coded, because in traditional patriarchy almost all independent career paths are by default male-coded.
With women’s emancipation, more women start entering that field, which may be more penetrable because it involves children and/or caregiving and/or a domestic context and/or routine tasks that are perceived as aligning with women’s “natural interests”.
Women begin to dominate the field numerically, and it begins to be perceived as something “for women”. Men begin to avoid it because of the “girl cooties”.
Women are overwhelmingly numerically dominant in the field, which is now firmly lower-status (and lower-paying) than male-dominated fields that it used to be perceived as comparable to. Social folklore emerges about why this field is intrinsically suited to “women’s nature”. The girl-cooties barrier to male participation is solidly established.
A man who wants to work in the field, disregarding the cultural pressures of the girl-cooties barrier, is perceived as not only less “manly” but also anomalous in a potentially suspect way. “Why does he want to do this thing that is ‘naturally’ a female activity? What nefarious purpose might be motivating him?” Training programs, employers, and clients/patients tend to consciously avoid the male participant because of such suspicions. Outright discriminatory policies may be implemented.
Men considering participation in the field now experience not only the demotivating impacts of the cultural girl-cooties barrier, but also concerns about these more overt policy and preference barriers based on suspicion and lack of trust. Male participation in the field is even further suppressed, and the feedback cycle continues.
This has very much been the pattern for men in elementary education (at the classroom level, at least: men can still be school principals), and to some extent in nursing; I wouldn’t be surprised if pediatrics at the MD level eventually ends up there too.
I have never participated in online dating, but have heard plenty of (antidotal) criticisms from men who have. They complain that almost all the women on the dating sites are competing for the top 5% of men, i.e. those that are at least 6 feet tall and make 6-figures, leaving the rest of them high-n-dry. By contrast, they claim they are not going after the “hottest” women but are messaging “average” women, and not getting a response because they don’t meet the aforementioned criteria. But again, this is just what I’ve heard from a number of men, and am not sure if it reflects reality.
A couple of thoughts. First, dating apps skew male, on average something like 70%. So, yeah, there will be selection biases, and differing levels of competition for attention.
Second, at least one study shows something unsurprising to me, which is that men are more aspirational swipers than women, meaning that when they say “10% of the men are getting the attention…”, for many of them there is the unspoken corollary “…from the awesome women I keep trying to attract.”
Don’t we generally call a woman like that a “gold digger”? No job, no kids, just sitting around the house entertaining herself while living off the man’s income?
I have an unemployed friend whose been delaying his job search because both his parents are ill. I’ve been unemployed for the past several months leaving my wife as the main source of income but I’m not making it a lifestyle choice. I’m trying to find a job ASAP.
Some of my wife’s friends actually married guys like that at various points. We just called them “lazy pieces of shit”.
I ask because the way you phrased it your friend just basically decided he just wants to sit around the house while his wife works. Like was there a reason he gave up his career or he just didn’t feel like working anymore?
We’re taking about two different things I think. You (and others) seem to be arguing for a society that accepts should accept men who don’t really feel like working or raising kids or really have any sort of purpose or responsibilities beyond what they conveniently set for themselves. That’s how a child behaves. I know this because I have two of them.
My observation is that men DO want and need those sort of responsibilities to give them purpose. But society is making it much harder for them to actually achieve them due to economic barriers, radical leftist social pressures, general societal isolation, and excessive availability of nonproductive distractions.
We should be concerned about this because history has shown that large numbers of idle, angry men aren’t great for any society. When you don’t support strong, capable men who can act as positive role models, you end up where we are now. In a society where men look to our current crop of shithead politicians, techbros, and social media personalities who make them think it’s ok to lash out like narcissistic man-babies.
No, a gold digger is a woman who goes way beyond that. For instance, someone who specifically chases after rich celebrities or rich men to gouge their wealth.
Your view of “stay at home” people is way more charitable than mine.
You can stay at home when you’re dealing with shit, but after a year or so I want to see a doctor’s note.
In my childhood nobody was “stay at home”, everybody worked for a living. The closest thing to a “stay at home” mom I knew was my aunt, who “stayed at home” at their farm. She was one of the hardest working people I knew. AND made breakfast, lunch and dinner for whoever was working with them.
If you live in suburbia “stay at home” is another word for “useless”.
P.S. taking care of a newborn/toddler is fine of course.
I mean, surely spousal consensus is the crucial issue here?
No we shouldn’t excuse anyone of any gender who just unilaterally decides to quit income-earning and make their spouse carry all the breadwinning, when the spouse didn’t agree to that.
But if a couple decides that yeah, actually, we have enough money with just this one income, and we’re both fine with Spouse A ceasing to earn: Then, great! Knock yourselves out! Why on earth should anybody else care, or judge?
?? I’m rather dubious that anything that could seriously be described as “radical leftist social pressures” is having any kind of significant impact on men’s real-world ability to access meaningful responsibilities in their lives, at least in mainstream society in developed countries. Got an example?