Or, if I may offer an alternative scenario. As one progresses through life, it’s very fucking normal to fall in love with someone and want to raise a family with them.
Sure, there’s nothing abnormal about that whatsoever. But assuming that “normal” implues “nearly universal” is more a reflection of the attitudes of us oldsters than of the reality for today’s young people.
Among Millennials, a full one-quarter of them had never married by age 40:
That’s a sizeable chunk of a generation, especially since I doubt that most of that 25% then got married after age 40. That’s a demographic increase in singlehood that we can’t just shrug off by proclaiming that getting married is “very fucking normal”.
And especially if we want to be addressing the challenges faced by inadvertently unpartnered young men, we won’t help them by just telling them “don’t worry, getting married and having children is very fucking normal”. Thereby implying that there’s something very fucking abnormal about them if they don’t manage to do that.
It’s normal to fall in love with someone and want to raise a family with them, but that’s a different thing from this being considered a marker of success. .
There’s a female version too; I have a slightly older cousin whose dad literally stopped off on the way back from the hospital where she was delivered, to open a bank account to save for her wedding. I remember when she was in her late teens, describing her planned future wedding to me- it was down to the the colour theme, the flowers, the music, the table decorations… and in the whole long description, she never once mentioned a groom.
I have long suspected her wish to get that picture-perfect wedding was a major factor in her string of questionable engagements to some wildly unsuitable guys- including the heroin addict she got engaged to at 19. What she wanted was the wedding, not the marriage [1].
For some guys what they want is the wife, not the relationship, and that sometimes comes with a dose of unhealthy attitudes about what a wife should be. Not all guys, of course, but some.
if you’re wondering, she did marry, had two kids, divorced and is currently engaged to another woman ↩︎
There is a gulf between this statement and generalizing viewing becoming a family manas a goal, as what they want to accomplish in life, view as success, as “a marker for problematic attitudes” - the latter demonizes a large portion of men who share that as what we view as a strong masculine value for ourselves, grew up learning as what being a man meant from both mom and dad.
Just before my wedding I was talking to one of my younger cousins, who said “I just realized - you’re not just having a wedding. You’re going to be married!” (or words to that effect). The wedding is the starting line, not the finish line.
You keep saying ‘become a family man’. I find that very interesting that you refuse to use the wording that I’m specifically talking about.
No, the guys who are obsessed with the idea of leaving a genetic legacy are often an issue. The guys who want a wife because they have unrealistic, often controlling ideas about what they can expect a wife to be or do are an issue. These are subsets of the group who are really focusing on the idea of having children and getting married, but I wouldn’t call either of those groups ‘wanting to become family men’.
The jump from viewing having a partner and a family as expressed goals, as what they would see as success … to that … is the generalization, is the problem, is the broad brushstroke … not all … there are the good ones …
I mean, as a young woman, i also had a goal of getting married and having kids. I don’t think that made me a terrible transactional controlling person, either. I didn’t think of it as part of what i wanted as a woman, i thought of it as what i wanted as part of a member of society and as a member of a family. (I remember telling someone that i really liked being part of a family, and if i wanted to continue doing that, i was going to have to rear another generation of family.) But i, also, bristle a little at the idea that the goal is unhealthy.
A few comments to this
One the desire for marriage and family has become more one that men want than women want, and the men increasingly educated women want are in relative short supply.
Two in the more highly educated group partnership remains about the same. More long term cohabitation instead of marriage than there was but roughly unchanged total. Among the not college educated total partnership down.
There is a very common desire especially among men for this, chances of achieving it are down for those without strong career prospects, historically read as college educated but now them possibly SOL too.
If someone asked you for a definition of your concept of ‘success’ would ‘having children’ or ‘getting married’ top the list? No-one is saying it’s not fine to want a family or kids, but as a key marker of success, it seems… off.
This, again, is in the context that of a poll saying that, among young men who voted for Trump, that having children was the commonest pick as a marker of success, followed by ‘getting married’ paired with the fact that one of the key goals in the ‘manosphere’ for a successful man is ‘maximising their genetic legacy’ which is typically paired with some really unhealthy attitudes about women and what a marriage should be.
I just pointed out that that ‘having kids’ would be a really common response for guys following those beliefs, as well as those who legitimately want a nice, healthy relationship, so approaching the situation by trying to help them by helping them fulfil their goals of having kids may not actually be a great approach without looking a bit more carefully first.
What is success? Everyone has different goals, but yes, it’s on my list. Not at the top, but it’s there.
Let’s, for the sake of discussion, accept your view that these poor career prospects young men who had voted for Trump, haven’t developed their life goals from their parents growing up, or even their real life friends, but from “the manosphere” … They (like many women going through expensive IVF rather than exploring adoption right off, but NM that) are obsessed with their genetic legacy.
Offering policies that help these hypothetical men, whatever real number of them there are, feel less desperate, less hopeless about being able to have children and to be a good father to them, to you may not be a good approach. What do you think is more likely to be a good one?
Why are you assuming they want to be good fathers? You keep adding things to make this poor group of maligned manosphere followers sound sympathetic. They just want a little help to be family men. Poor things, just wanting a baby to cuddle.
You are aware there is a real, large, global phenomenon of extreme sexism spreading through online spaces, and from there into every day life, right? Where an obsession with genetic legacy and Darwinian ‘success’ is a really common theme? There are organisations devoted to reducing the issue. Ask them. It’s a complex issue, and partly it relies on men taking sexism seriously and not minimising it.
For many young people now, online spaces are where their friends are. It is real life to them. And they have access to all the appalling attitudes in the world, right there, pushed by algorithms which maximise response and are notorious for pushing people further and further into extreme views. That’s probably the best place to start- campaign to prevent social media companies pushing more extreme material for clicks, restrict access to it for kids and realise that kids now treat the online world as a normal part of their lives, not a separate thing that isn’t really serious or important.
You wouldn’t try to fix racist attitudes by simply making things better for white people, why are you assuming that would work for for sexist ones?
No, but i might address sexist attitudes in part by pushing a narrative that a good man is a nurturing father. Find positive examples of masculine behavior, and model and advertise those. I assume the goal isn’t to abandon sexist young men and hope they go away, but to convert some of them to more constructive attitudes.
I’m going to circle back to something I said in post #184:
Women as a group, with the recognition of systemic sexism and second-wave feminism, have gone through a process of large-scale pushback against the social scorn traditionally directed at “old maids”, “unmarriageable girls”, and other disparaged categories of single women.
Most women have to at least some extent got the message that even though it’s fine and good to want marriage and family, and even though society still looks down on women who “can’t get married”, singlehood is nonetheless preferable to miserable marriages. At least some people are out there telling women that they’re still entitled to respect as human beings, and the opportunity to lead a happy independent life, even if no man wants to marry them.
But are men being encouraged to take this message on board too? I don’t think so; at least, not to the same extent. On the surface and in theory, in a historically male-supremacist culture, men are the independent autonomous ones who get to make their own choices about how to live. In practice, though, society is pushing a lot of gendered expectations of “acceptable” life patterns for men, and scorning men who don’t conform to them. And most non-wealthy men don’t have a lot of real personal power or autonomy to help them resist the social pressure.
So it’s not surprising that we’re starting to see the emergence of a male version of the “bitter old maid” stereotype. Namely, unwillingly single people who know that they were “supposed” to get married and have families, and that society thinks less of them for not managing to get married and have families, but who feel baffled and helpless (and then resentful and angry) about what they were supposed to do to change a situation that wasn’t really within their control.
The first definitely. To every day life not as much as the media sensationalization makes out.
Why do you assume they don’t? Shit even Nazis and KKK members loved their kids and wanted to do right by them, as twisted and evil as their understandings of “do right” was.
Most often the same friends they also interact with in the rest of the world. It is another meeting place, no less than meeting at the mall was, or a host of other places. According to the Yale Youth poll cited in the other thread:
In fact, most voters–including young, male, and female respondents–reported confidence in their support system of friends. Among the overall sample, vast majorities reported having a friend that would talk to them about a difficult personal situation (87%), drop off food when they’re sick (84%), help them move into a new apartment or house (82%), or come to a last-minute social event or hangout (72%).
Yes those who are socially isolated are spending their time in virtual social spaces and can find bad places there. And Covid did not help socialization skills. I’m completely on board with reforms of those spaces even as I am pessimistic they will happen.
I don’t?
Neither have I ever thought that the way to fix racist attitudes is to make things worse for white people, or to ignore real issues that sub groups of white people have. Hillary Clinton could have included rural white people in her list of groups that she would build bridges to … not doing that did not help fix racist attitudes. Proving to people that you really don’t give a shit about them only cements grievances.
Ignoring the legitimate concerns that this group has, making their lives worse, drives more to those fringe spaces.
Again. You don’t want to do anything to help their lots in life, what DO you think will help, beyond telling them how evil they are and how they disgust you, what horrible parents they would be so better they don’t find partners?
Honestly I do not see it happening. I don’t see unpartnered or childless men being scorned.
You do? Really?
Yeah, I’d say so, to some extent. Scorned for “not being able to get a date”, certainly.
Happily single men still get more social respect than single women, as a rule, because default assumption of male autonomy. But as I said, I think the stereotypical image of the unpartnered man these days is more the unhappily single guy, often smeared as an “incel loser” or similar.
I don’t see it, either. And i know lots of unpartnered men, who are not despairing, and not social outcasts. I also see people move from coupled to uncoupled and vice versa.
That being said, it doesn’t shock me if there are men getting that message.
To this point, I do see a lot of unpartnered or childless men scorning random women, or women in their totality, who are not partnering up with them and “giving” them children.