The shit of the 21st century is demotivating me to do... pretty much anything

[Aeschines]

@Kimstu

Nah, I think a lot of what you (you’re male, right?) perceive as positivity about marriage was rooted in (women’s) fear of singlehood. I’m not sure you can really know just how intense, although subtle, the constant pressure was on single women to save themselves from a lifetime of alleged misery and despair by achieving Picked By A Man status.

I think this is 100% correct. Relationships, for both men and women, and how society manages or tries to manage them have been extremely coercive for millennia (and it was undoubtedly worse for women on the whole). Less coercion is a very good thing.

OTOH, a significant percentage of men and women found the role of parent to be quite meaningful and satisfying. The fertility rate statistics don’t lie: people today around the world are doing parenting less.

The lower percentage of people choosing to be parents at all is due to a variety of factors. Less coercion is one factor, but I think it’s fair to say that economic factors (i.e., having kids is too expensive) is probably a bigger one.

Regardless of that, here is where I think the problem ultimately lies. I think it’s fair to call it scientifically proven to say that men have a higher sex drive than women. Thus, access to sex is a greater motivating factor for men than women in forming a couple. It’s my speculation that, back in the day, being a parent was a greater motivating factor for women than for men in forming a couple (regardless of whether this difference came from coercion or elsewhere).

In short, taking away the motivation to have kids makes women less motivated to be in relationships, while men’s desire to have sex remains unchanged. Ergo, today, men want women more than women want men. This may always have been the case (I suspect it was), but I think it’s particularly egregious today.

Another factor: If it’s true that “women are sex objects, men are success objects” (and, sadly, I think it is largely true), then leveling out men’s and women’s success in the economy reduces men’s value as “success objects” and makes them less appealing to women. You see this playing out in Japan on a disastrous level. If you look at the stats about romantic relationships, it’s all I’m talking about here in stark black and white. (I’d cite some cites, but there are a lot of interlocking factors, and I think it’s a discussion for another time. But the phenomena are not small.)

Of course I’m not saying that there weren’t, or aren’t still, a lot of genuinely happy marriages between couples voluntarily choosing a life together for healthy reasons. I’m just saying that the societal messaging to women that, deep down, they HAD to get married, OR ELSE, ultimately wasn’t really based in positivity.

It wasn’t a positive thing, but the public propaganda was largely positive and intertwined with genuinely positive positivity about families, etc.

That’s why, although I lament the negativity of our time, I still think it’s a good thing that the scales are falling from our eyes. Sometimes I really have to laugh. What things were virtually unknown or, even worse, systematically misunderstood about relationships when I was a kid?

• Sex. (People got married without any sexual knowledge or confirmation that they were sexually compatible? Sounds like a plan!
• Anything LGBTQ+. E.g., your “bachelor uncle” and his “friend.”
• Domestic violence. Anything about abuse, really.
• The concept of “red flags” in a relationship.
• Addiction. “Oh, so he drinks a little.”

I’m probably leaving 10 things off the list. But I’m with you! We had just landed on the moon, but, when it came to understanding and managing romantic relationships, we were doing scarcely better than they had in the Roman Empire (and sadly, I mean that literally).

The fact that many women nowadays are realizing that they don’t actually have to get married, and that a marriage needs to provide something more than Picked By A Man status in order to be a real improvement over happy singledom, is IMHO a healthy development and is going to improve marriage in the long run.

It will help the ones that still come into being! If we truly value people’s autonomy and self-realization as much as we should, then the fact of the matter is that most people aren’t relationship material, and those that are aren’t going to have enough kids to replace the dying. The fertility statistics speak for themselves, and I don’t think they are going to get better based on greater wisdom. It’s a genuine problem that is already ripping societies apart (e.g., Japan).

In the meantime, of course, a lot of men are having to cope with a relatively new anxiety about the prospect of possibly never being Picked By A Woman. It used to be that the societal pressure on women not to become old maids (or to remain lonely widows or divorcees) increased the desirability of men in general as marital prospects. If significantly increased numbers of women no longer dread being single, that will mean that significantly increased numbers of men end up with a more precarious future when it comes to married domesticity.

Yes. It’s not quite a death spiral, but it is a negative feedback loop in which men get sick of the game or have a genuinely antisocial reaction to it. Hence incels, MGTOW, etc. (not groups I endorse, but they are social phenomena that should be taken seriously and not merely as an opportunity to mock people).

Men are apt to subconsciously perceive such a cultural shift as “geez I have to watch everything I say these days, seems to me this place used to be more relaxed and less uptight somehow.” Women are more apt to subconsciously perceive it as “wow this feels a LOT less stressful than it used to be”.

Oh, I think this place used to be far worse. It was chaos.

[Aeschines]

@Kimstu

I don’t know about quantifiable “worseness”, but ISTM that a lot of the shit that people who weren’t white and middle class had to put up with back then was much less visible to the dominant white middle-class perspective of society.

I think these discussions tend to get derailed by this thinking, the chief fault of which, I think, is the assumption that an absolute ill resulted in relative unhappiness across time periods.

Let’s take the 1950s vs. today. Black people had to put up with much worse racism. Women were stuck more in the home. But my guess is that, on average, Black people and women were happier then than now despite the social ills they faced. Why? For the same reason I think that, on average, all Americans were happier then than now: families were stronger, life was simpler, America seemed on the right track, and the future looked brighter than the present (including for Black people, owing to progress in the Civil Rights Movement). For sure, a lot of the happiness of the time was based on ignorance and other limitations. We can’t go back. But we can still, I think, feel a bit wistful about being able to live a life like that.

So, I think you are making that mistake, but that doesn’t mean I think you don’t have a lot of good points.

The 80s and 90s saw a whole lot of cultural energy put into the effort not to let the social-liberation movements of the 60s and 70s “go too far”. Remember “backlash” “post-feminism”, and anti-affirmative-action crusades, and unironic “greed is good” slogans, and the “Moral Majority”? And the libertarians, omg, remember when the libertarians thought they really had a good idea?

OTOH, at that time, it seemed as though we had largely won the battles against racism and sexism. We didn’t have the internet and Trumpist racists and misogynists to prove us wrong. (I still think we have largely won, but the worms sure have come out of the woodwork…)

A whole bunch of the apparent optimism and “positivity” in the dominant white middle-class viewpoint at the tail end of the 20th century was rooted in reactionism. Civil rights and Women’s Lib and other achievements for minoritized groups had been okay but they had “gone far enough”. They mustn’t change the fundamental reality of white heterosexual men still basically being the people in charge of things, with some comfortably infrequent feel-good exceptions. Now that the Soviet Union had finally crumbled and most people didn’t know enough to be worried about climate change, the future seemed to promise reassuring solidity for conventional privilege and property, leavened with just enough new social freedom to keep things lively.

I think you are mostly correct but the vast majority of people were not conscious of being reactionary, mostly because the fruits of greater equality were not yet apparent to them as they hadn’t happened yet. I think a lot of people embraced equality of race and sex to some extent in their mind with the expectation that the ultimate changes to society would not be that big. I think the election of Obama set a lot of people off.

I’ve seen the change happen in real time. I spent my teen years in a very, very racist city in Indiana (that happens to be close to a very large Black city). No Black people to be seen. I heard stories of Black people having crosses burned on their lawns if they tried to live there. Today, it’s normal–at least a lot more normal! Black people everywhere, as it should be.

But did most people in this city in the 1980s think of themselves as racist? Probably not. But would they have been comfortable with today’s presence of African-Americans? Probably not most!

I think we mostly agree… but my point is that people were largely unaware of–and not acting explicitly on–their prejudices.

I think that’s a huge part of the “shit of the 21st century” anomie that many people in the white middle-class male mainstream are experiencing.

I think you are pointing out a different phenomenon than what I’m talking about. I am a cis/white/straight guy, but dumb MAGA motherfuckers get me down too–as I think they do a lot of other people. I get that a lot of people are threatened by the browning of America, but I am not, and it’s other stuff that bothers me.

For example, Japan is an extremely depressive, directionless society–the main reason I no longer live there. Obviously, the racial dynamics there are completely different from those of the US, but I am talking about the same kind of thing with respect to both societies.

Sorry, my reply to you was diffuse and perhaps not very on target, but I did appreciate what you had to say.

[FlikTheBlue]

@Kimstu

I don’t know about quantifiable “worseness”, but ISTM that a lot of the shit that people who weren’t white and middle class had to put up with back then was much less visible to the dominant white middle-class perspective of society.

The 80s and 90s saw a whole lot of cultural energy put into the effort not to let the social-liberation movements of the 60s and 70s “go too far”. Remember “backlash” “post-feminism”, and anti-affirmative-action crusades, and unironic “greed is good” slogans, and the “Moral Majority”? And the libertarians, omg, remember when the libertarians thought they really had a good idea?

A whole bunch of the apparent optimism and “positivity” in the dominant white middle-class viewpoint at the tail end of the 20th century was rooted in reactionism. Civil rights and Women’s Lib and other achievements for minoritized groups had been okay but they had “gone far enough”. They mustn’t change the fundamental reality of white heterosexual men still basically being the people in charge of things, with some comfortably infrequent feel-good exceptions. Now that the Soviet Union had finally crumbled and most people didn’t know enough to be worried about climate change, the future seemed to promise reassuring solidity for conventional privilege and property, leavened with just enough new social freedom to keep things lively.

A state of society in which a black man or a woman can actually be elected President, or where girls routinely outrank boys academically, or where white people are on track to become a minority of the population, or where the ability to speak Spanish is a requisite for lots of jobs, or where the Chinese economy can massively impact the American one, or where women aren’t frightened to despair at the prospect of remaining single, feels to many, many, many Americans like a society that has “gone too far”. I think that’s a huge part of the “shit of the 21st century” anomie that many people in the white middle-class male mainstream are experiencing.

Not to downplay the very real impacts of 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID pandemic, and so forth. All of that stuff is enough to get anybody down. But I opine that a lot of the hopelessness currently felt by a lot of the people who used to take it for granted that they somehow “mattered more” in society—and that applies to all us white middle-class cishet English-speakers, for example, not just the male ones—is a side effect of the realization that the world doesn’t actually revolve around us as much as we used to think it did. As the saying goes, “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

I think you’re broadly correct. And yes, there has been a lot of progress since the 1990s. On the other hand, the oppression that I sense from society at large isn’t just a matter of loss of privilege. The bigger issue (putting aside global warming) is that those people who are now pissed off at losing privilege are a more serious threat.

Back in the 90s we could point and laugh at the old fuddy duddys who got themselves all worked up about whether or not the president was receiving oral sex under the Oval Office desk. We didn’t have to take them seriously. Now we have to worry about whether those same people are going to attempt to overthrow the government in a violent uprising.

[EinsteinsHund]

@Aeschines

I think it’s fair to call it scientifically proven to say that men have a higher sex drive than women.

Is it? I’m unaware of that, so do you have a cite?

[Aeschines]

Unaware or doubt that it’s true?

There is a ton of research out there:

Testosterone and sexual desire in healthy women and men - PubMed

[Aeschines]

@FlikTheBlue

Now we have to worry about whether those same people are going to attempt to overthrow the government in a violent uprising.

Or go on a shooting rampage. I think it’s mostly the same type of people.

[EinsteinsHund]

@Aeschines

Unaware or doubt that it’s true?

Unaware of studies that make it a scientific fact. Thanks for the link.

ETA: I don’t want to make it a hijack, but just for the record, from personal experience and a gut feeling, I doubted the premise. I’m also wondering about methods and metrics to prove it, but I’ll look into the studies.

[Aeschines]

Here’s another cite, or cite of cites:

Sex Drive: How Do Men and Women Compare? on MedicineNet.com

I find this quite interesting:

“Nuns do a better job of fulfilling their vows of chastity than priests. Baumeister cites a survey of several hundred clergy by Sheila Murphy in which 62% of priests admitted to sexual activity, compared to 49% of nuns. The men reported more partners on average than the women.”

Having grown up Catholic, I can’t find the hypocrisy of these people surprising. I am kinda surprised that the number for nuns is so high, though.

[Spice_Weasel]

Both of those figures surprise me. What a stupid rule if most people can’t even follow it.

[Aeschines]

That’s Catholicism in a nutshell!

[Spice_Weasel]

Haha my husband was raised Catholic and we have a friend who is a conservative theologian (Presbyterian) and it cracks me up how often they get into conversations where they dump on Catholicism for completely different reasons.

I once worked for a nonprofit staffed by progressive Catholic elderly nuns. They were pretty cool. I did not inquire about their sex lives.

[msmith537]

I’m roughly the same age as the OP (born 1972). If you had told me growing up that, in the future, the USA would be dealing with massive income inequality, terrorism, global pandemics, fascism, intrusive and pervasive dangerous technology, out of control media, Donald Trump would be President and the world would be on the verge of nuclear war with Russia…well, I would have believed you.

I mean look at the stories we grew up with - Mad Max, Terminator, Soylant Green, Logan’s Run, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Death Race 2000, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, Red Dawn, Wargames, Escape From New York, They Live, Akira, The Running Man, Robocop, Brazil, so on and so forth.

I really thought the world would be a wasteland ruled by biker mutants by this point,

[Pardel-Lux]

Having being raised a Catholic myself and therefore being extremely anticlerical in general I wonder if limiting this critique of religion’s hypocrisy only to Catholicism is not a bit too restrictive. I can think of a couple of sects or denominations from the other Abrahamic religions that are based mainly on hypocrisy too.
But if you’re not careful Aspenglow will come and warn you for hijacking your own thread! A very interesting thread, btw.

[John_Bredin]

@Aeschines

For the same reason I think that, on average, all Americans were happier then than now: families were stronger, life was simpler, America seemed on the right track, and the future looked brighter than the present (including for Black people, owing to progress in the Civil Rights Movement).

In 1950s theaters: The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story (on the stage), The Delinquents (to get right to the point), Stakeout on Dope Street (even more to the point!), and for something a bit different but still dysfunctional, Peyton Place.

On (late) 1950s television: Twilight Zone episodes chock-a-block full with wholesale angst about the end of the world, the evils of technology, and the disintegration of families and society. (With some light comedies mixed in.)

[enipla]

@Dung_Beetle

I admit it was a factor in my choice of handle also.

And myself as well.

[Wesley_Clark]

@Velocity

What keeps me going is that while society may be crappier and crappier today with each passing decade, the technology just gets better and better. That inevitably floats all boats for standard of living even as people get nastier.

Thats pretty much my view. Even though we are seeing issues like a rise in fascism and climate change, we’re also seeing a lot of new and better technologies and science come out at the same time. Medical problems I’ve struggled with my whole life, I am hoping my nieces and nephews will have easy solutions to in case they develop those same issues as adults.

I do have hope for younger generations though. I think younger generations are less prone to being divided by race or religion, and as a result there will hopefully be more cooperation when younger people become the mainstream majority in civics.

[Aeschines]

@msmith537

I mean look at the stories we grew up with - Mad Max, Terminator, Soylant Green, Logan’s Run, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Death Race 2000, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, Red Dawn, Wargames, Escape From New York, They Live, Akira, The Running Man, Robocop, Brazil, so on and so forth.

I really thought the world would be a wasteland ruled by biker mutants by this point,

Logan’s Run…

Yes, the dystopian streak was also with us.

I do think that 9/11 was stranger than fiction, however.

[Aeschines]

@Wesley_Clark

I do have hope for younger generations though. I think younger generations are less prone to being divided by race or religion, and as a result there will hopefully be more cooperation when younger people become the mainstream majority in civics.

I agree. I think the younger generations are looking pretty solid at this point.

[JRDelirious]

@Aeschines

I think the younger generations are looking pretty solid at this point.

Here’s hoping this time y’all are right.

[Pardel-Lux]

@Aeschines

I think the younger generations are looking pretty solid at this point.

Have you heard about the Mediocrity Principle? I’d be surprised, plesantly surprised but surprised nevertheless, if the younger generations were any better than mine.