I hadn’t heard about it before, but yeah, I’ve always been a slacker, so I subscribe to the principle.
I would disagree. I think we have access to more news and news is designed to capture attention by triggering an emotional response. People are aroused by bad news and when it’s almost inescapable it can have a negative effect on how the world is perceived.
What I have found perplexing is that there is a method to mitigate the worst effects but as simple as it sounds the reality has proven difficult for many. The solution is to, if you find you are being seriously negatively effected by a particular medium, is to limit engagement. If, as an example, AM talk radio is a drag on your life turn the dial.
I already mostly do this. I agree that the media has found a way to monetize negativity much better than it used to do. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is old, but today’s methods are much, much more sophisticated. We have a vast system of feeding outrage on both the left and right, although the right is far guiltier in this respect.
This is like telling someone who is fat to just eat less. These systems are seriously exploitative of human neurology and they are hard to ignore. I have struggled with addiction (for lack of better word) to social media and this very board for most of my adult life. I actually saw a therapist about it once, but they didn’t really consider it a major concern compared to say, a heroin addiction. I did break away from almost all social media and now this is really my only outlet for expressing how I feel Ways About Stuff.
And the news cycle is still hard to avoid. I do okay at that these days, but I scroll my news feed more than I would like.
For people who are seriously habituated, you will get a ton of rationalizing about how vitally important it is to Know Things. My Aunt has this addiction to news even though it exacerbates her mental health problems and I wanna say… It’s not like you would accidentally vote Republican if you were to limit news for a year. Are you petitioning your legislature to provide arms to Ukraine? Then maybe quit worrying about things you have no intention of doing anything about.
Easier said than done, I know. My intent is not to judge so much to explain… It’s complicated.
I kind of question those assumptions, except for the basic-biology one of men having on average stronger testosterone-fueled physical sexual impulses than women. I think you are projecting modern social expectations of “men want humpies while women want mommyhood” back onto premodern societies without sufficient evidence. In very many premodern societies, it was considered EXTREMELY important for a man to father a son, for example.
Now that marital rape is less tolerated in modern societies, I think men in general are much less likely to see marriage as an unlimited season pass for sex. I think men are choosing to marry mostly for other reasons. (Consider trends among gay men, for example, who tend to have far more casual nonmarital sex than straight men do, but who nonetheless in many cases get married.)
Yeah, but again, this all kind of comes down to the same basic fact that in patriarchal societies, marriage is set up to be, as the saying is, “beneficial for men, mandatory for women”. Of course, countless individual marriages throughout history have been very happy ones for men and women alike, or more beneficial for the wife than for the husband, etc. But overall, women’s participation in marriage has been fundamentally skewed by the fact that most premodern cultures socialized women to believe that they HAD to get married, because any unmarried life they could realistically aspire to was going to be considerably worse than marriage.
You’re right that since modern societies now offer more real autonomy (as well as more expectations of lifelong paid-workforce participation) for women, the “success object” status of most men is substantially diminished.
I sorta? sympathize with their dismay at having fewer marital options in a world where women have more non-marital options. But I’m not sure they realize the psychological price that women used to pay for that “marriage-friendly” setup.
AKA the modern gender-swapped reboot of the “bitter old maid” stereotypes, now with more mass shootings and other gender-based violence.
I think this speculation is very suspect. Definitely does not seem to align with, for example, the findings of this 2010 study going back as far as 1975:
It was also strongly shaped by the recent past. Americans in the 1950s had come through the Great Depression and WWII, and naturally, to white Americans at least, the future looked brighter.
I dunno. Who was it who actually had a “life like that”? What was it that made “families stronger”? How much of it was genuine contentment and how much was women’s lack of options, social normalization of sexism, and social repression of deviance? Consider this article, for example:
I believe you. But my point is that I think your nostalgic, “wistful” romanticization of the recent past as a “happier” time is to some extent shaped by your perspective as a straight white man. You are claiming that “we” as a society feel a certain way because of certain changes, but your “we” is doing a lot of work there.
It has taken longer than I thought until somebody came up with a reply to Aeschines theses in that post: I had the urge to do it myself, but I refrained because I thought somebody would express it better than I could. I second what Kimstu writes. Thank you for that and your pertinent quotes, Kimstu.
In general, this sociological stuff is hard to prove. I recognize that. But I think it cuts both ways.
Yes, and we’re not going to get pre-20th century polling on almost anything. It’s also hard to say how people felt in an extremely coercive environment, inasmuch as most people bought into what society preached.
It depends on the society, but I think more and more people in the US and Europe don’t get married at all unless they are having kids, and now in Europe apparently that is becoming less common as well.
I think the unspoken deal when people are in romantic relationships is that they can expect to be sexually satisfied within reason. If that gets taken away, then that is a big impetus to leave the relationship, right?
Pretty much all historical societies are patriarchal, no? So that would mean that marriage was always the case for women, everywhere. I think here you are back-projecting (again, cuts both ways) our modern umbrage at how shit things were for women onto how women felt at the time. My guess is the vast majority of people until relatively modern times were happy with their societies and their place and role in them. But I can’t prove that scientifically.
Also, both ancient Rome and China used to fine men for being unmarried. It could be quite coercive for men, too.
This is perhaps a bit unfair to those societies in that survival was much more difficult than it was today, and the relatively greater strength of men was of genuine value (it still is, though it is often ignored or even denigrated today). Plus, societies had to reproduce in order to survive. The coercive nature of marriage in those times is not something to celebrate, but it is understandable.
I’m not sure their not realizing that really affects what they deserve in the present day, or that balancing out the suffering of the women of the past and the men of today has any value. Not that you said exactly that, but it seemed somewhat implied.
For real tho.
I said the 1950s. I would not hold up the 1970s as being a great era for Black families, etc. White people (and I would say other people also, though no doubt not all people) were nostalgic for the 1950s in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s why Back to the Future had such resonance in 1985.
Yep, but as I said, Japan was a defeated, bombed-out wreck at the dawn of the 1950s, and yet it was an extremely positive society.
Are you doubting that people have had a lot of nostalgia for that time and cite their own reasons? That includes women, too.
That is interesting but a bit hard to digest on the fly. It does recall the specter of Freudian psychology that was soaked into the media narrative. (That’s another point of “positivity”: the utter confidence that science had figured everything out already, even if a bunch of it was dubious stuff like Freud. We can look back at it now and go “smh,” but I think it’s easy to forget the incredible confidence with which TPTB used to speak, and that could be comforting to people.)
Yeah… this gets a bit too “identity politics” for my taste. I am a straight white man who has been known to wear makeup and skirts in public and who lived in Japan for eight years and makes a living bridging two languages and culture. Like anyone else, I don’t like being reduced to surface-level qualities. That said, I think white privilege is a thing, and I’ve benefited from it. But I don’t think you can look at the surface of someone and instantly calculate their influences, etc.
In a messy convo like this, various claims will be made with varying levels of certainty and justification (cites, etc.). But anything outside of lab science is pretty hard to prove, as I said. I hardly think I’ve made rock-solid arguments here.
I didn’t know I had a thesis!
Thanks! I feel okay beating up on Catholicism because I experienced it directly. I am also not too enamored of evangelical Christians these days. I certainly have issues with other expressions of organized religion, but I mostly just go for the Jesus types.
I think the hope was that women, gays, minorities, and other marginalized groups would experience the same benefits that white straight men traditionally enjoyed. Instead it seems like everyone who isn’t a billionaire gets shit on these days.
I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone speak of marriage as an “unlimited season pass for sex”. Quite the opposite usually. 
We are all unequal in our un-billionaire-hood.
It was actually Kimtsu who said that, not I.
My problem hasn’t been partners refusing sex (including my actual ex-wife). They’ve flaked out in other ways.
I bet a lot of people felt the same way in Dec. '41.
I’m curious whether you really believe this or thought about it at all.
Of course not. People were angry at Japan and wanted to fight back. That’s it.
I am guessing it’s about more than sex for the men. I’m not saying that’s not important to them, but I think it’s also important for them to feel taken care of, and to not have to do so much housework. Because one thing we know is that men still expect women to do most of it. To be able to come home to a clean house and just relax is, I imagine, very appealing, and I mean that in the more profound sense of providing a sense of security.
When I was pregnant, I hung out on a lot of mommy boards and it was a very eye opening experience. It was common for Dad to immediately dump all the childcare burden on Mom, sometimes within days of childbirth. I’m sure it was more common in the past, but those attitudes have not died. I’m incredibly grateful to have an equal partner in this regard. The only time I really feel the strain is when something unexpected happens and I have to be the one to cover. He tries, but the nature of his job makes it difficult. He often has clients in crisis. My main issue is that it triggers a feeling of abandonment and loneliness stemming from my childhood. It’s my issue and not his.
The question I often ask myself is whether these women bear any responsibility for marrying selfish jerks. I’m not talking about abusive relationships, but cases where the red flags were there that they would not receive any support, and they ignored them. Sometimes I feel like they are rewarding these men for being chauvinist, which encourages other men to behave the same way. Other times I feel like I shouldn’t blame them for their own oppression. Many women still have economic hardship without a partner. We see this all the time at my agency (where women actually are abused) one of the biggest obstacles is financial independence. Especially if they are home taking care of the kids, it’s very easy for them to become trapped.
But at the same time… Man, I see a lot of women make stupid relationships decisions. Starting with my Mom who is on her fifth marriage. I decided I would rather be alone than end up like that.
NIH Lead paragraph:
Sexual desire is typically higher in men than in women, with testosterone (T) thought to account for this difference as well as within-sex variation in desire in both women and men. However, few studies have incorporated both hormonal and social or psychological factors in studies of sexual desire.
Emphasis mine. If one takes as evidence that both gay men and women report much better sexual satisfaction than straight women, I’d say this last sentence is pertinent.
What violence isn’t gender-based? Over 90% of all physical violence, including rape and sexual harassment, is by men. Mass shootings are close to 100%.
Ya think?
I was a child impacted profoundly by the terrible relationship decisions of my mother. And yes, I do hold her accountable for those decisions. Knowing the social context of those decisions does not absolve her of responsibility for making my childhood a revolving door of men due to her consistent inability to have a stable relationship with any halfway decent man. I don’t ascribe to the idea that all women are always forced into relationships with losers, not in this day and age, sorry.
You were quoting a phrase a didn’t write. But this is something I wanted to talk about.
In current feminism, and in the world of the left in general (of which I am a part), it isn’t clear whether it is politically correct to believe that men and women are, if not physically, then mentally a “blank slate”: i.e., they would behave exactly alike except for conditioning by the Patriarchy, and no mental differences come down to biology.
There seems to be a kind of Schroedinger’s politics in which one is required to believe both things and deny both things at once.
On the one hand, men are worse people, as you point out, and most violence can be attributed to them. I’ve argued with someone on this board before who was advocating the blank slate theory. I pointed out that societies are not in the business of turning men into bigger criminals than women; on the contrary, one of the big issues that any society must deal with is men’s violence and violent men.
On the other hand, while men are worse, it’s kinda sorta still wrong to believe in mental differences that are due to biology! Any suggestion that men might be better at something cognitively (take chess for example) is shot down–can’t be true!
So yeah, I want to see the Feminist Manifesto and know what I’m supposed to believe on this point…
Purring my cards on the table: I’m Liberal and believe in sexual equality. I think men and women are quite variable and overlap a lot in terms of behavior but still exhibit significant cognitive and behavioral differences that cannot be attributed to social conditioning alone. And I think feminism is in a rather inchoate state these days. This is a good time to point out, per my original post, I don’t see feminists in the media who really seem to lead and paint a vision for the future. I don’t even know who are considered to be the leaders these days. I don’t see Liberals point them out or cite them.
It just means that straight women are a lousy lay. j/k