I was one of those little girls with friends who were mostly boys, and I beat the crap out of those kids. I didn’t do it out of malice but that was play to me, and even the boys were like, “ok, time out!" I often took it too far without realizing that’s what I was doing.
I don’t know why I was so aggressive, but probably some modeling from my mother, combined with not really knowing how to relate to other kids.
No. My dad was, growing up, and clawed his way out out of it via some really helpful adults from his church who helped him get on his feet and get an education. He dedicated the rest of his life to making sure that his kids would never, ever have to be working class.
Interesting. I had an uncle who was five years my senior who was effectively one of those lost boys. ADHD, highly oppositional, as an adult mooched off of his mother, didn’t work, slipped into severe depression and addiction, died of a heroin overdose at age 30. The worst thing about this is he had a ten year old son, who went into the custody of my grandparents, who himself died at age 19 of an overdose. Two terrible, preventable tragedies. So when I read about the rise of this sort of thing, I am not surprised.
(I would add to this something that hasn’t been mentioned yet: enabling behavior. You never met a bigger enabler than my grandmother. You can’t get to this point in life very easily unless someone is enabling you.)
That’s part of the atomization of society I’ve mentioned. The extended family is largely dead as an institution, so most kids these days are lucky if they have both parents. Grandparents, uncles, aunts and so on? Rarely seen. And an uncle can’t really do much if he’s halfway across the country.
And you also have higher rates of parental estrangement. My son has asked to meet my parents and I have to keep telling him he can’t. Then on his Dad’s side, my FIL basically abandoned us during COVID to travel the world, didn’t show the slightest interest for years, and now lives out of state and now all of my husband’s immediate family lives far away.
Fortunately he still has about a zillion second (?) cousins - the children of my husband’s cousins. There are eleven so far, all 6 and under. And all of my husband’s adult cousins are addressed as Auntie or Uncle. So he’s far from lonely, I guess.
Yeah. Divorce isn’t really the problem in itself despite how the Right whines about it, but the sheer hostility between many ex husbands and wives is extremely toxic and divisive.
I’ve always given my divorced parents a lot of credit for not trying to turn their children into weapons against each other. But a lot of parents don’t hesitate to do just that.
This is one of my hot button issues. My husband’s parents did weaponize the kids and it was infuriating to live through. Their battles in court went on all the way until my husband’s sister graduated high school. And it took years after that for relations to cool. It’s amazing to me how grown ass adults will behave when their kids’ well-being is at stake.
I don’t have much to add to this discussion – I learned long ago that my opinions as a woman on masculinity don’t mean much to men having a masculinity crisis – but I can share a really nice subreddit for nontoxic masculinity: r/bropill
I lurk there, and it’s really uplifting to me to see men being kind to themselves and each other.
Not to back up too far in the thread, but I’m not sure why a gay man can’t be a good role model for any young person? Just because someone’s gay doesn’t mean they’re not masculine or anything like that. It’s just sometimes a different take on it all.
And honestly there are some gay friends of mine who are far better role models for my children than a lot of straight men I know. They don’t cheat, steal, lie, tolerate mistreatment, or put others down.
Yeah, I think he was mischaracterizing what the author was saying. The author at no point referenced burly, manly men. One of the biggest influences on my young life was an effeminate gay man obsessed with Madonna and the Golden Girls, and I’d certainly hold him up as a model of positive masculinity.
My son recently made the connection that two people of the same sex can get married. He guessed that my SIL and her wife were both my husband’s sisters. My husband explained that they are married just like Dad’s married to Mom. My son excitedly announced, “Cousin has two Moms and no Dad!” Yup. I’m sure he’s scarred for life now. 
I think the author has really missed it with respect to the Scouts. I’m a Scoutmaster for one of the very small number of actual Coed Troops in the country, 99% of troops are single gender.
As of today, and for the last several years, groups are allowed to setup and run Girls Troops. Girls troops are organizationally separate from Boys troops. Girls and Boys troops can choose to be linked and run a more coed experience. The large majority of troops are still boys only and not linked to a Girls troop. These are troops whose scouts are not required to interface with girls at any time other than group events that accept many troops for participation, and they continue to offer the exact same program the author was interested in.
I’ll also say this, he wants a boys only group to help the boys
learn to love, learn to care, learn to be of service, think about other people
as if that can’t be accomplished in a coed environment.
I’ll also have to be amused that he says it’s shameful the US doesn’t invest in vocational training, then points out that men without a degree (i.e. in a vocation) have had stagnant wages since Jimmy Carter was President. That’s without adding millions of workers to those vocations.
Interesting, I didn’t know that. Thanks for pointing that out. And thanks for your positive contributions to society!
Yeah. It’s something that’s come up with robotics and machine intelligence and so on: our brains aren’t pure processors, they are specialised for various tasks, and those objectively difficult tasks seem easy to us as a consequence - except when that specialisation fails in some area, and you are stuck trying to consciously learn something that is supposed to be unconscious. People are complicated!
I do think it’s useful and interesting to get this conscious understanding of social phenomena, but it sucks to deal with.
There’s a lot of ‘sins of the father’ and collective guilt in the discussion. Older men who benefitted from significant privilege aren’t giving up their jobs to help women and minorities. It’s young men who are expected to pay for historical sins that they didn’t commit. And boy do many of them resent it. It’s not just that men are falling behind in education and feel they lack opportunities, but the fact they are one of the few remaining groups it is socially acceptable to blame for their own problems.
For individuals, there’s a great benefit in accepting responsibility for your problems and trying to find ways to improve your life. Even though everyone is impacted by things that aren’t in their control, and can be affected by systemic issues - your own actions are the only thing you have the power to change. But for institutions, government, society at large, I believe it’s an abdication of responsibility to put all the blame on individuals or groups. We’ve got better as a society at not doing that for marginalised people - maybe too much so sometimes, to the point of encouraging a victim mentality - but we have somehow failed to learn this when it comes to men. Systemic problems require systemic solutions.
I think it’s because men have traditionally derived far more of their status and place in the world from their job, while women have traditionally got more of those things from family. I think this is related to the desire for a return of manufacturing jobs: what they actually want back is a world where you didn’t need a degree to have stable and respected employment that paid enough to live on and contributed to society.
The disappearance of that, and its replacement by part-time minimum wage jobs, and/or gig work, with no career progression, has led some working class men to feel emasculated. Meanwhile college-educated men still have a career path and the prospect of getting a respected and well-paid job, and thus being able to fill the traditional role of provider.
Yes, this; the point isn’t “burly manly men”, but “positive masculinity”. As opposed to either constant bashing or a void. If you listen to a lot of people there’s no such thing as a good man.
And really, if you tell men that they are just born evil, many of them will say “then let me be evil” and go with it.
I told my husband my observation about how women bond and he laughed and said he’s not sure he’d put it exactly like that. (He does have a lot of female friends - see the feminization of psychology.) And I’m worried it seems kind of calculated? Because I genuinely enjoy interacting with these people, they are really my friends, I just can’t help but note the basic mechanics of how it’s all happening.
I think your assessment about male status and self-worth is spot on. And I don’t think it’s a minor thing. I think it’s driving a lot of the extremism we see today. And then there are the tech bros who hold out entrepreneurship and four hour work weeks as the alternative to being a wage laborer. On the flip side of this, women get these pitches too, ranging from “become a trad wife” to “here’s how to make money off your art." (Guys get the art pitch, too.) If you’re a writer, it seems like a fundamental part of your business model has to be coaching other writers. And there are a lot of people out there just repurposing stuff you can learn in a library.
I think the root issue is the lack of blue collar careers in large enough numbers to shift that needle. Manufacturing, farming, mining, and stuff like that used to fulfill that role, but in the last 50-ish years, that’s gone by the wayside, and now we’ve got more people and fewer good jobs. And no real workable way (don’t say UBI, because you might as well say space aliens are going to help us) to solve that problem.
Kids don’t care, unless their parents or other people do. It’s all perfectly normal until someone points something out, and the trick is to preempt people who are going to tell them that being gay is wrong. Just like my parents did with me in the 1970s with people of other races- I was raised and told that they were just like everyone else, so that when I was confronted with racism, the racists automatically seemed like assholes and jerks, because my black and brown friends at school were my friends already, and being racist wasn’t how my family rolled.
Which by the way is why the people saying that “everyone should just figure it out on their own” are wrong. All that happens is that the bigots get in the first word, and have a much better change to convince the kids in question that they are right.
I and other trans people will tell you that hormones have a big effect on the mind, indeed the entire being. Gender will never be gotten rid of (unless we move to Gethen). The realistic and humanistic goal to aim for is to loosen the rigidity of restrictive gender roles to allow each individual to be their true self.
With my childhood family friend, the aforementioned gay man… I was about twelve. I had known this man for six years. My Aunt was visiting her friend and the friend handed my Aunt some book about being gay, and said, “I thought Bobby might like this."
So we get to the car and I’m like, "Auntie… Is Bobby gay?”
My Aunt gave me the biggest ‘are you shitting me?’ look I’d ever seen and said, “You just figured that out now?”
She had a point.
But the thing is, I was a born-again Christian entering a culture that was very homophobic. And people were trying to tell me about how awful gay people were and I was like, “No, you’re actually full of shit."
That’s ultimately what drove me out of the church. This ridiculous distortion of reality and vitriol about what it means to be gay. By that point in my life, most of my closest friends were gay, and I was not having it.
The argument about CEO’s and billionaires has the problem of acting like men are a collective unit. The problems men are having are not being felt by 60 year-old rich white men. They are being felt by 15 and 20 year-old poor and middle class men. The idea that young men should suffer to make up for the success of older men that they don’t even know isn’t a good one.
If you are looking at the past (older men are the result of what the past was like when they were developing) then sure, it looks like men are way ahead. But when you look at the present (what young people are doing today) boys are falling way behind. Now if the argument is that some people have to be losers so that others can be winners, I can support that argument. Not everyone can be successful. But if the argument is that throwing young men under the bus is fair because older men did well and older women did poorly, I don’t agree with argument at all. Young women are already doing vastly superior to young men. They don’t need extra help at the expense of young men.