Well I point the finger at anyone who doesn’t vote Democrat, but my point is, the solution isn’t as simple as voting Democrat.
I don’t think if that’s what Filk meant though.
I agree. Perhaps I should have made it even more obviously sarcastic. The worst argument that Democrats ever put up is “They’re voting against their own interests.”
Men and women are different.
When my husband died, our son was a baby. I tried to find role models but no one wanted to help.
No matter how hard I tried, I could not/can not be a male for him.
There was a wall stopping it. I dont have male hormones; well, less than most men.
Most men I’ve known have a lot more anger than any woman Ive known.
Agree, generally. However, my wife has a lot of anger (most of it justified). I have none.
I meant in general or maybe I attract angry men.
Well that last part is not the case for me. I grew up with a woman who was in many respects the worst stereotype of what a woman is. She had just an enormous amount of rage. But she was also a mechanical engineer. People are complex.
I have a fair amount of rage myself, I just channel it creatively, which is why some people find the violence in my work rather shocking. And for a long time I would only write male characters because in society they are the only ones who get to be angry. I cannot tell you, now that I write female characters, what a hell of a time I have getting people to connect with them.
I was going to mention autism when it comes to social differences in men and women. It’s not uncommon for autistic girls to make friends primarily with boys because the social rules governing boys are a lot more straightforward. I don’t know if I am autistic - I had to break up with my therapist before she decided - but I was definitely drawn toward boys and men more, especially in my early life, because to a lot of us, it looks like girls are playing social 4-D chess. Whether we can’t play the game or choose not to depends on the person. I think for me it was, “Well, I am going to suck at that, so probably should not bother.”
I do agree it feels lopsided that society is giving positive aspirations to women while giving negative aspirations to men. i.e. women are encourage to do more, grow more, be more, and ignore all gender-centric criticism, while men are just asked to accept criticism and be less like men.
Inequality needs to be addressed, and toxic masculinity needs to be eradicated. But if we want society to move forward, it’s hard to see how that works while giving one half all sorts of aspirational goals while telling the other half not to be such jerks.
I’m talking on a societal level of course. I’m deliberately steering my son away from all the toxicity I was thrown into. Guns, military, misogyny is only the beginning of it. But not every boy has a conscientious parent who is trying to send good messages, many can only absorb what they see around them, and it doesn’t look like a great situation to me.
Yes, voting Democratic is what I mean. It certainly isn’t sufficient, but it’s a necessary fist step in the same way that pulling someone who is drowning out of the water is a necessary first step. I can’t even begin to imagine how things would improve under the Republicans. Democratic politicians probably don’t have the answers (see my above comment on LBJ), but at least they aren’t going to stand in the way and actively oppress the people that are trying to find the answers like is currently happening.
I guess an interesting spin-off thread to this, would be to ask men, where does your sense of masculinity come from? Or what made you realize the kind of man you wanted to be? Something like that. Because I think there’s a lot of questioning of that process, how it exists or whether it exists at all, I guess.
To be honestly I don’t even know. After unwinding all the stuff I was raised with, I’m not sure how to say what it is to be a man. I’m mostly past the age where it matters to me, I’ve done the manly things and I’m past it now. The only thing that won’t unwind is that I won’t feel right if I’m not contributing more than half the household income. Also, as far as household work, nothing that involves power tools, yardwork, or anything heavy/dangerous will get done if I don’t do it. But that’s not a source of pride, it’s just how things shake out.
I don’t teach my kids anything about what men do or what women do. They’re fraternal boy/girl twins, so they’ve always done everything together and it never felt right to treat them differently. I don’t worry about their social messaging, my boy won’t need to unlearn anything toxic. It’s others that I’m concerned about.
That is nice, but having more Female teachers and less male teachers in schools in the US, became a thing in the 19th century, before there were traditionally more males then.
As with all these kind of articles IMO. They completely bury the lede, and it’s not really very related to gender*. Namely this…
So if you think about men without a college degree, for example, their wages are no highertoday than they were in 1979. That’s almost half a century of stagnant wages for most men without a college degree
That is completely insane! Given (as other articles of this vein stated) everyone else’s wages have increased in real terms many fold in that time (i forget the exact number 2x, 5x?)
That kind of inequality was always going to cause massive instability and threaten democracy, regardless of any other factors
‘*’ - it’s a little bit related to gender as the reason only non-college educated men not women have seen that stagnation is women in that social group went from being overwhelmingly stay at home mums, to overwhelmingly working. But their jobs have also seen that wage stagnation, but when you are starting from zero it’s easy to see growth statistically
I disagree. It’s a very good argument; they just seriously overestimated how much people care about their own self interest, and how much more they care about indulging their hate. They didn’t realize (and still don’t want to acknowledge) just how vicious and self destructive many people are.
Yeah; I can’t read minds, but I’m pretty sure women get angry just as much as men. There’s just a social expectation that they don’t show their anger. Along with a number of other impulses like ambition. Kind of a mirror image of how men aren’t supposed to show pain, sadness, “weakness” in general.
“Toxic femininity” is also a thing, I think. And just like toxic masculinity, traditional.
Generally, such a statement by Democrats only takes practical-pragmatic interest into account, and ignores emotion, anger or other factors. Which are often even more powerful than practical-pragmatic factors.
I’m 64 years old, and until this thread I never gave it a moment’s thought. I acknowledge I may be an outlier though. I don’t think I have a “sense of masculinity.” I do have a sense of the kind of person I want to be. But those traits would work for women too.
It would be interesting to discuss this. I often learn here that there is a wide range of variation in the human experience.
Same with me. I often think about how I don’t feel adult like, these days more than ever now that the world has seemingly gone crazy. I have a very strong sense of what it means to be grown up rather than immature. That’s why I placed so much emphasis about my role models growing up teaching me about adulting as opposed to masculinity. As far as masculine vs. feminine, I just don’t give much thought about what, if any, feelings I have about that distinction. It just doesn’t matter to me.
But that brings us back to the article formed the OP around. People are complex, and as such, so are the societies they create. Nature, nurture, all have a huge role to play.
IMHO, the article is correct in identifying a problem - where it goes wrong is the causation, and therefore their solutions are very wrongheaded in part.
It ain’t simple.
I could write a book of a post, but I’ll stick to a single topic not much mentioned, but how the roles in questions are often defined by the media we take in (including social media which has been mentioned, but also pop culture shows, movies and music).
Speaking from my personal experience (grain of salt time!) with my formative years being the 80s and 90s, our culture as reflected in our media was sending supremely mixed messages.
Sure, women were “equal” but how that was depicted in media totally played to two different and harmful stereotypes.
You were either smart, and successful, but ultimately unfulfilled into you had a romance (M-F always) and wanted kids, which was always a “better” choice. Or you 100% played the rules as a man - you were aggressive, controlling, no-nonsense, win-at-all-costs sort (there’s another word I’m specifically not using, but you all know what it is). Which STILL didn’t mean that if the story calls for it, you wouldn’t immediately turn back to the first stereotype.
Here we are, 30-40 years later, and those stereotypes still exist, but there are/were better options, more flexible options, being shown all around.
Is the view of what men can be, should be, or ought to be in flux? Certainly! But thinking we’re able to immediately find one, single, simple solution to it that can be emplaced with the right political/social will and power - well, maybe if you want the Handmaid’s Tale (and there are plenty who do!), but otherwise hell no IMHO.
It’s going to take a lot of time, and most people (not all) who are driving for a specific view of what should BE the right role, are trying to sell you something.
TLDR; It’s not one thing, it’s all of the things, and it’s going to take a long time to sort out what is workable, not best (massive questions about who decides such) absent considerable force of all sorts being applied.
That’s also addressed. I’ll just try to include the quotes.
One of the most difficult things about my current role is I spend some time persuading someone, a policy maker, a governor or someone who works in a school, school district, mental health care professional, persuading them that this is an issue. Then they get it, they sometimes get it really fast. They’re like, “Okay, I got it. What should I do?” And sometimes my answer is, “I don’t know.” We don’t know enough yet to know how to tackle this problem.
We have to do more research, and more research required is the least sexy sentence probably in the English language, especially to policy makers who are frustrated, and they wanna act. That’s what they’re wanting. They want to act, and there are some things where I’m pretty clear we should be doing more, like more vocational training, more male teachers, et cetera. But there are many other areas where I think we have to be honest and say, “Look, we’ve gotta figure this out. We’re in the early days of this.”
That’s interesting because I’ve given my identity as a woman a lot of thought. It was certainly influenced by my Aunt, but also, like, Madonna. I’m not kidding. I was hugely into Madonna as a teen, where I saw a woman who was approaching sexuality on her own terms, who snapped back in response to slut shaming. She was strategic, professional, assertive – and, most interesting - vulnerable. I’ve been thinking some about social differences in men and women and it seems to me, at least in my current social context, the willingness to be vulnerable is a big factor in how much trust and respect you get if you are a woman. Most people really only know the songs that made Madonna popular, and are not really familiar with how vulnerable she was as an artist. I don’t think she’s a great person or anything, but she put a lot of herself into her work.
Now the kind of person I want to be, a lot of that was influenced by men if not more by men than women - my role models are people like Viktor Frankl, Nelson Mandela, and I’ve been affected a lot by existential thinkers such as Nietzsche (who had a lot of terrible shit to say about women, btw - but he at least recognized how disempowered women were and didn’t see it as an innate difference so much as women using whatever tools they had to compensate for their lack of direct agency. For all his misogyny, he saw the oppression of women.)
Anyway. For sure I got an idea in my head of the kind of woman I wanted to be. It was part based on the media, Madonna but also just, like, women in movies and stuff. In the 1990s there were a lot of working women on TV, which signaled to me: women were supposed to be strong professionals with big shoulder pads who took no shit from men. And my ideas about women were also partly based on women I knew. The women in my family are kinda different. We tend to be very direct and pragmatic and have a hard time with the social game. My mother eschewed the trappings of femininity and I had to overcome that before I stopped feeling like, oh, you know, I’m not like other girls. I had to learn to view feminine traits as valid and kind of push against this idea that women are into stupid, vapid things. And I’ve had to wade through that as a romance writer, as an adult. In fact a lot of my ideas about being a woman have been informed by adult experiences.
I guess I’m surprised that’s not the case for everyone.
(Oh, and the person who made me love Madonna was a gay man, my Aunt’s best friend. He’s the one who explained all the subtext to me. LOL)
I wonder what the source of that is. From the late 70s on there was a decline in industrial jobs, which muddies the waters when a word like “stagnant wages” is thrown around, since that’s not job-for-job (but does reflect an overall trend). Either way, the past 10 years has seen something different for men aged 25-34 w/out a college degree.
[ omitting the quoted section ]
I’m glad to see there’s additional reasoning, and as I said earlier, I agree that they’ve identified a valid problem, but…
They’re like US (the SDMB). As seen in the snips of the article shared, they can and do identify part of the problem, they point to places where efforts to create good options have failed, and show a (justified) worry about how things will pan out if the political polarization of gender continues.
Again, reads a lot like what WE talk about (and is a fine example of a discussion for GD) - but, and again IMHO, I and several other posters here have been talking about this in various related discussions. We don’t have a fix either. I’m also quite worried about the language of “male inequality” (the writer’s, not yours to be clear @Spice_Weasel) because that is a rather loaded way of putting it.
Still, it’s a great piece for conversation and discussion. I think the current climate though is one that’s already so polarized that even having this conversation with socially conservative individuals is dead on arrival. So only socially liberal individuals are going to discuss it, which those conservatives will by default, react to as further reason to reactively avoid.