We live in a world dominated by men in pretty much every area of life. Hence anyone who argues that the state of men is in danger has a pretty tough row to hoe. And yet, that is the alarm that some people are sounding, that in our efforts to create gender parity, we are overlooking the fact that many men are currently really struggling to cope in contemporary US society and that the trends for them are not good.
To have a serious discussion about this, we have to first get beyond the more absurd exaggerations of people like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
[W]ho could forget the “Tucker Carlson Originals” special “The End of Men,” which introduced the world to “bromeopathy,” the patriotic practice of bathing one’s testicles in red light? That special also featured hand-wringing about “soy boys,” paeans to raw-egg slonkers, and homoerotic montages, apparently filmed on Alex Jones’s bocce court, that looked like Abercrombie & Fitch ads directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Again, it’s easy to brush all this off as a campy, desperate ploy for attention, which it was. But “The End of Men” also made an argument: American men are being systematically emasculated by some sort of ill-defined global cabal, for the purpose of slowing down birth rates in “the West”; only “well-ordered, disciplined groups of men,” presumably after being armed and restored to testicular health, can “reëstablish order” and restore Western civilization. This is the sort of thing that seems funny until it doesn’t.
The more serious aspects of this issue are discussed by Idrees Kahloon in the January 20, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.
Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. (It was an even split at the start of the nineteen-eighties.) Rage among self-designated “incels” and other elements of the online “manosphere” appears to be steering some impressionable teens toward misogyny. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide. And men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics, premised on a return to better times, when America was great—and, unsubtly, when men could really be men. The question is what to make of the paroxysm. For the revanchist right, the plight of American men is existential. It is an affront to biological (and perhaps Biblical) determinism, a threat to an entire social order. Yet, for all the strides that women have made since gaining the right to vote, the highest echelons of power remain lopsidedly male. The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.
Kahloon discusses the work of Richard Reeves, the author of the book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It who:
argues that the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of what the sociologist David Morgan calls “ontological security.” They now confront the prospect of “cultural redundancy,” Reeves writes. He sees telltale signs in the way that boys are floundering at school and men are leaving work and failing to perform their paternal obligations. All this, he says, has landed hardest on Black men, whose life prospects have been decimated by decades of mass incarceration, and on men without college degrees, whose wages have fallen in real terms, whose life expectancies have dropped markedly, and whose families are fracturing at astonishing rates. Things have become so bad, so quickly, that emergency social repairs are needed. “It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity,” Reeves writes. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls.”
…“Of Boys and Men” argues for a speedy response because the decline in the fortunes of present-day men—not only in comparison with women but in absolute terms—augurs so poorly for men several decades on. “As far as I can tell, nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world,” Reeves writes. He notes that schoolgirls outperform schoolboys both in advanced countries that still struggle with considerable sexism, such as South Korea, and in notably egalitarian countries like Sweden (where researchers say they are confronting a pojkkrisen, or “boy crisis”). In 2009, American high-school students in the top ten per cent of their freshman class were twice as likely to be female. Boys, meanwhile, are at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and twice as likely to be suspended; their dropout rates, too, are considerably higher than those of their female counterparts. Young men are also four times as likely to die from suicide.
While the top echelons of business and most professions are still occupied mostly by men, the current trends favor the emergence of female dominance pretty soon.
An axiom of policymaking is that disparate educational achievement today will manifest in disparate earnings later. Reeves points out that women earn roughly three-fifths of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded. They are the majority of current medical and law students. And they’ve made extraordinary gains in subjects where they had once been highly underrepresented; they now constitute a third of current graduates in stem fields and more than forty per cent of students in business schools.
While the gender gap in earnings is decreasing, which is of course a good thing, the reasons for it are not necessarily because women’s wages are rising faster than men’s.
And so it’s chastening to realize that the substantial decline in the gender earnings gap is partly the result of stagnating wages for working men (which have not grown appreciably in the past half century, adjusting for inflation), and partly of the steady creep in the number of men who drop out of the labor force entirely.
We have some idea of why blue-collar wages have stagnated: a macroeconomic shift that greatly raised the value of a college degree, owing in part to the decimation of manual labor by automation and globalization. White men experienced a specific blow that Black men had felt earlier and even more acutely.
Compounding the problem is that men are withdrawing from the world of work but “most of these hours of free time are spent watching screens rather than doing household labor or caring for family members. Instead of socializing more, men without work are even less involved in their communities than those with jobs. The available data suggest that their lot is not a happy one.”
A few months ago, the radio show On the Media had an interview with Reeves about this issue.
There is evidence that men are struggling even in the social sphere, finding it hard to form stable relationships.
More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women, signaling a larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male.
Men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely. They stand at the vanguard of an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality and relationships that afflicts all of young America.
…Scholars say the new era of gender parity has reshaped relationship dynamics, empowering young women and, in many cases, removing young men from the equation.
“Women don’t need to be in long-term relationships. They don’t need to be married. They’d rather go to brunch with friends than have a horrible date,” said Greg Matos, a couple and family psychologist in Los Angeles, who recently penned a viral article titled “What’s Behind the Rise of Lonely, Single Men.”
…As of 2022, Pew Research Center found, 30 percent of U.S. adults are neither married, living with a partner nor engaged in a committed relationship. Nearly half of all young adults are single: 34 percent of women, and a whopping 63 percent of men.
…Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men. They want a partner who is emotionally open and empathetic, the opposite of the age-old masculine ideal.
“Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”
…“Women form friendships with each other that are emotionally intimate, whereas men do not,” Levant said. Young women “may not be dating, but they have girlfriends they spend time with and gain emotional support from.”
…“Guys are taught to prioritize career,” Karo said. “Also romantic relationships, although it doesn’t seem like they’re doing a very good job at that. Making friends and keeping friends seems to be a lower priority. And once guys get older, they suddenly realize they have no friends.”
Compounding the problem in the US is that disgruntled young men have easy access to high-powered weapons to provide an outlet for their frustrations.
Saturday Night Live had a parody of this lack of ability of men to socialize and form friendships.
The exact same phenomenon has been going on in Japan for over a decade: with the end of “career jobs” and many becoming freelancers, young people chose to be single and not have kids because they can’t afford a home, let alone family. It’s easier and more fulfilling to have a community of friends than it is to strive for marriage.
The key difference being the lack or low rates of toxic masculinity and violence amongst single Japanese men. They’ve learnt to cope rather than lash out.
More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women…
Uh whut? Either I missed some reports about a major sex birth discrepancy around the turn of the century, or older men have started a huge but unremarked trend of polygyny, or the women-haters have succeeded in a stealth campaign of mass femicide, or the lesbians, bless ’em, have been recruiting way more than the wingnuts warned us, or these numbers are just wrong -- or something else I can’t even imagine.
I expected exactly this sort of social stress in nations like China and India where sex-selective abortions threw the gender balance out of whack, but do these stats signify the same happened a generation ago (in the US? the “West”? where?) and nobody noticed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Suicide-deaths-per-100000-trend.jpg
(if you can’t see that, it’s a graph showing the rate of death by suicide in various countries, including the US (bobbling around ten deaths per 100,000 population) and Japan (slightly short of twice as high).)
“Seventy percent of suicides in Japan are male,[9] and it is the leading cause of death in men aged 20–44.[10]”
So, yeah… “coping”.
@Pierce R. Butler:
Younger women dating/marrying older men, while older women and younger men ignore or actively avoid each other would skew the stats pretty handily, I’d imagine. (On my wedding day I was 46, my wife was 29.)
@2, Pierce R. Butler,
According to the linked article, the reason given by the quoted expert is that there is a much higher rate of lesbian identification among the gen Z respondents. Not that I completely trust the quote, the expert could have provided a number of reasons and the reporter (or editor) included only the most provocative one.
However, the article in The Hill is based on a Pew Research article, written last February. Which was itself based on a survey. here, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/facts-single-americans-topline.pdf which doesn’t ask any questions directly related to LBQT+ identification.
The LGBQT+ data was derived from the two sets of people whom they asked questions of. Data set 1 included 4996 people from the general population, data set #2 included 1038 people from a set of people who had previously identified as LGBQT+. The methodology included attempting to re-normalize the second set of data to known LGBQT+ population levels, but that can be a bit tricky. Especially as you would also need to include the random number of LQBTQ+ people who took data set #1 but were not identified. It’s not an impossible bit of math, but the confidence intervals are probably pretty wide.
Looking over some of the numbers. Of the 6034 people in the survey, only 2231 were not in a committed relationship, and had never been in a committed relationship (exclude divorcees and widows/widowers). From that level, there were 1142 people actively looking for a relationship. Of those 1142; 606 were men, and 519 were women. The raw numbers do not look all that different, and these numbers include men (and women) in their 50’s or older who have never been in a committed relationship (by their own definition of “committed”). These raw numbers included the oversampling from the LGBQT+ subset, and it looks like the final percentages were generated by normalizing the LGBQT+ set against the known population. There may be an overabundance of women in the LGBQT+ data, which may be due to self-selection reporting bias. That could explain the difference in the reported numbers.
The survey also, intentionally, oversampled people who have used on-line dating app and people who were (at the time) actively looking for a romantic partner. Again, cultural bias may lead more men to say yes to a question about looking for a romantic partner than women. Yes, the oversampling was intended to be corrected during the data analysis, but that is not a trivial task.
There are a few other possible confounding variables, even the methodology section says, “one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.”
In other words, while a survey of this nature can be an indicator, and the general findings are probably good, any significant outlier should probably be taken with a grain of salt.
Somebody needs to sit down with Richard Reeves and teach him that correlation is not causation. Women’s income rising is due to their increased rates of education and participation since the 70s. Stagnant wages, lack of workers rights/strong unions, and the destruction of high paying manufacturing jobs are an entirely separate issue that affects all workers.
As for suicide, the US is slightly higher than most European countries, with “deaths of despair” seeing a small but increasing trend
Source: https://www.cwla.org/suicide-rates-are-the-highest-in-the-u-s-compared-to-wealthy-countries
The US healthcare system primarily benefits insurance companies and stockholders. Mental health care primarily consists of prescribing anti-depressants, which does nothing to address the underlying causes and frequently results in suicide.
@6:
My added text in bold. They very deliberately didn’t include the third-richest country (after China and the US), Japan, because that wouldn’t give them the answer they wanted. Nor would including South Korea. So yeah, mental health provision in the US sucks and the country is a shithole, everyone knows that already, but do you have to use dishonest statistics to prove it?
sonofrojblake @ # 4: Younger women dating/marrying older men, while older women and younger men ignore or actively avoid each other…
The first part of that sounds plausible, but the second part…
flex 2 # 5: Thanks for that digging, and for all the caveats about the numbers. The difference between the Pew Research figures and what The Hill reported definitely lowers the confidence we should give the latter.
Well concerning low birthrates, I’d say it is the inevitable consequence of current trends. After all, what has been (deliberately and scrupolously) done is the following (here in Europe and US at least):
-- work has been fucked, with temporary, precarious employement exploding,
-- pay has been fucked, with real wages at 70s levels,
-- college education has been fucked, with graduation costing a king’s ransom,
-- pensions have been fucked, being whittled down and eroded every day.
After all, in recent news it was confirmed that in order to attain that sublime goal, middle-class life in the US, you need to work 53 weeks per annum:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-21/a-year-s-too-short-for-a-u-s-worker-to-earn-a-middle-class-life#xj4y7vzkg
So is it a wonder people don’t feel the urge? Everything being so hunky-dory an’all.
#7
Speaking of shitholes, try reading the report that is linked within the article I linked at #6 instead of making dumbass accusations of cherry picking.
The suicide rate in Japan or Korea aren’t included or actually relevant to the data which is being used to determine the underlying causes of declining life expectancy in the US.
Apples aren’t oranges.
The only problem I see is men (and boys) themselves. They expect (and demand) everything be handed to them on a silver platter, they refuse to apply themselves and actually work, and then they blame hard-working women (and other non-men) for their own failures.
So, men, time to step up and actually put in some effort!
Actually, a lot of men really do apply themselves and actually work…and get screwed and tossed aside anyway.
Men (and women too) are taught that hard work defines both our identity and our worth within our society — so what happens to men who either aren’t given the opportunity to work and get paid for it, or do get to work but don’t get to advance or make ends meet? They’re taught to find someone else to blame for their “failures:” women, furriners, Joos, liberals, commies, George Soros, and, of course, always, THEMSELVES. Anyone at all, in fact, but the few men in power who are either making everyone else’s problems worse or refusing to lift a finger to make anything any better. And of course, when blaming all the wrong people doesn’t solve anything either, men end up doing what we’ve also been taught “real men” do — lash out, punish, vilify and make war.
Meh.
To give some faint credit to the article, I am now aware of the term ‘slonkers’, so my lexicon is that little bit bigger.
“lash out, punish, vilify and make war.”
You forgot “kill ourselves”. Not “attempt”, like women do, but actually do it. We’re the problem for sure, every one of us. Thanks for the insight, Kitty.
Exactly. I recently had to end a long friendship with a women who wanted to discuss the benefits of enrolling her son in kindergarten at age 6 instead of age 5 -- without first ridiculing the Tucker Carlson segment on bathing ones testicles in red light! Needless to say, I reported her to CPS.
Not terribly surprising that the same forces that drive disparity between the classes in an outrageously unequal society also affect men in the lower classes. Anyone my age or younger sees it happening to us.
It is disappointing that some commenters who really should know better are saying it’s our fault we’re poor, though. I’ve heard it enough from right-wing talk radio, I don’t need to hear it from you.
Deaths of despair are rising for the US population as a whole, and are over 1.5 more likely in US veterans. Having experienced the nightmare that is VA healthcare, I would say that their lack of effective mental health care actually drives that despair.
The problem is NOT caused by women having more equitable access to education or jobs.
From the OP
There is zero evidence for the assertion that men are being overlooked due to gender parity.
This isn’t limited to men. Many people are currently struggling to cope with a society that prioritized the interests of corporations and wealthy asshats over living wages, workers rights, and the economic security of the 99%.
Tethys,
I don’t think you’re reading that at all charitably. Or even correctly.
The overlooking is “in our efforts to create gender parity”, not “due to gender parity.”
The overlooking is “in our efforts to create gender parity”, not “due to gender parity.”
That doesn’t make the assertion any more correct. “Efforts to create gender parity” aren’t the problem; “overlooking the fact that many men are currently really struggling to cope” is the problem, with or without any efforts to create gender parity.
Raging Bee:
I don’t care about its putative correctness; also, you too are misreading it.
Way you see it:
“Efforts to create gender parity” aren’t the problem; “overlooking the fact that many men are currently really struggling to cope” is the problem, with or without any efforts to create gender parity.
See, it’s
clearlycommunicating that during the process of achieving X, Y is being overlooked. Implication, as such, is that if Y ceases to be overlooked, then during the process of achieving X, Y won’t be overlooked.Left unsaid explicitly is the insinuation that overlooking Y when endeavoring to achieve X is not an optimal strategy.
@ 20 Morales
We are aware, Juan Ramón. That is what makes you a troll.
As always, BabblingBot, you are wrongity-wrong-wrong.
I don’t care (in this case) about whether the proposition can be assigned a value of true or false, but rather whether it has been understood correctly.
It it not ambiguous or malformed, yet two commenters hitherto (you don’t count) have got it wrong.
But I do care when someone misrepresents another’s claim and argues about that misrepresentation rather than the claim itself.
I understand it’s not a deliberate misreading, but still.
Intellectual honesty matters.
(I was wondering what took you so long to venture another misadventure)
The Book is ‘Of Boys and Men. Why the Modern Male is Struggling’.
It then claims
The author clearly believes that gender equality is something that benefits only one gender at a time, and that the gains of feminism have resulted in this supposed crisis of bereft men.
I’ve linked a study of the very real problem of decreased longevity in the US, which listed multiple socioeconomic factors and causes for the overall trend.
Gender parity is not one of those factors.
Tethys, your comment directly followed what you quoted.
I noted that your reading was not charitable.
—
Neither is your most recent one.
The salient bit: “Things have become so bad, so quickly, that emergency social repairs are needed. “It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity,” Reeves writes. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls.” ”
Adumbration: In the current circumstances, it is necessary to focus on boys rather than girls.
To be pre-emptive, I think that’s incorrect as much as you do, but your contention that “The author clearly believes that gender equality is something that benefits only one gender at a time” is unfounded. In fact, it’s incoherent because it’s contradictory.
Seriously, look at your claim: do you really think it’s in any way possible for equality of genders to entail only benefiting one gender at a time?
If you don’t (as you shouldn’t) then why do you imagine whoever wrote what you quoted thinks that?
Nobody has made that claim.
Read this again (you quoted it!):
“It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity,” Reeves writes. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls.”
What it’s clearly expressing is that gender equality does not exist, because the balance has swung in favour of girls who are now the superior gender, and therefore to restore the balance boys need special affirmative action taken on their behalf.
Now, again to be pre-emptive, I reckon that’s a silly and counterfactual claim, but that’s what it is, not that only one gender at a time can possibly benefit from gender equality.
(sheesh!)
I think focusing on whether men or women have it worse is a zero sum game. It’s a lose-lose and all the back and forth about it is just deciding who loses more. It’s playing king of the hill atop a dung heap that exists in the shadow of mountains of resources. Enough resources to solve every single problem that’s causing this strife in the first place if only it wasn’t being squatted upon by useless, intensely selfish parasites.
Being so selfish you’re willing to destroy the world around you to achieve some minor increase in wealth you’ll never have a real use for has been normalized. So much so that around half the US seems to think it’s as natural as putting one foot in front of the other to walk out your front door. They certainly don’t see it as a problem. At best they seem to think it’s an unremarkable part of the background of their lives.
Cop City. The Mueller report leading to nothing. So many tax cuts for the rich I can’t keep track of which asshole’s name should be stamped on them. The highly engineered Sackler family bankruptcy that was an escape hatch and not a bankruptcy at all. Alex Jones and his legal theatrics. Gun violence. Thoughts and prayers. Bigotry. A corrupt US Supreme Court. Anti-abortion fanatics willing to kill real people over imaginary healthy babies they like to pretend they’re saving. Antivaxers. Anti-mask crusaders in the middle of a pandemic. It’s all one big parade of selfishness and the means to keep it going.
One problem man just died; Pat Robertson, 93.
And the Ukrainan offensive has just started, so we may be rid of a problematic man in Kremlin.
“While the gender gap in earnings is decreasing, which is of course a good thing,…”
.
Question: Why the statement? Is the statement based on ideology? Is the statement based on pragmatics? Given that Mr Singham is a theorist, not an experimentalist, the statement is likely based on ideology, not on facts.
.
The gender pay gap is fiction. If it were real, capitalists (who are solely focused on profits) would fire all male employees. Only females would be hired. That is not happening and has not happened.
.
One industry where women are paid a lot more than men: pornography. With women being paid about 10 times more than men, is the pornography product of high quality? of high value?
.
Is the feminization of an industry a good thing?
.
For the past 100 years, K-12 teaching has been feminized. Has the american public HS graduates been of higher caliber? Evidence says: NO!!! Looking at BH Obama, private school is not in fine form.
.
The average California teacher salary was $82,746 for the 2019-2020 school year. This is over $20,000 higher than the national average.
.
In 2017 dollars, (yearly teacher salary from 2000-2017):
CA…..68K…to…78K
AR…..48K…to…48K
NY…..73K…to…79K
NJ…..74K…to…69K
.
Meanwhile, let us look at construction, a male-dominated field. Construction Workers made a median salary of $37,890 in 2020. The best-paid 25 percent made $50,330 that year, while the lowest-paid 25 percent made $30,690. The rate of physical injury and death is higher in construction than in teaching.
.
Female teachers need a lot a cheese to go with their whine.
.
In the years of the USSR, medicine has been feminized. Was the quality of Soviet Medicine improved from the feminization? During Soviet times, being an engineer was more prestigious than being a medical doctor.
.
Mr Singham’s mindset is typical of a Communist. Communism is based on ideology, not pragmatism. If you do not submit to the Communist ideal, it is to the gulag you go!!! Is Mr Singham taking secret pleasure from the misfortunes of young men? May the young men suffer for being subconsciously misogynists!!! Too bad if they are incels!!! In Mr Singham’s mind, is the Triumph of Ideology more important, more relevant to Cosmic Truth than the health of society (and young men are a necessary part of said society)?
.
The feminization of Universities augures nothing good. Besides, the academic faculty is at least 90% dead wood. Entry and graduation standards are declining. The feminization is only accelerating the decline.
.
Meanwhile, many young are not stupid. Many eschew college and going straight to Entrepreneurship. And Vocational training. A young man running a combine on a farm can make > 200K/yr. Amazon is offering 95K/yr to new truck drivers.
.
Where are the female counterparts to Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Both were college dropouts. Revelevant question: does it matter? When you buy a product, do you ask “was this item invented by a woman?”.
.
There is a study of mothers of titans of industry and politics. It is a worthwhile read.
Friedfish, you misunderstand the nature of the pay gap. The claim is not that women are paid less than men for the same job*, rather the claim is that the more lucrative jobs and promotions have a higher chance of being given to male applicants and hence more money overall is taken home by men than by women.
This male preference has been well established with studies involving job applications that are identical in all qualifications, differing only in having a traditionally male or female name for the applicants. The male-named applications get more replies inviting the applicant to an interview than those with female names.
More demand. More female-attracted people (heterosexual men, bi- and homosexual women) than male-attracted people (heterosexual women, bi-and homosexual men) are willing to pay for pornography. I cannot answer why demand is this way, but demand is the answer.
You ignore the real reason behind failing schooling -- starvation of funding. Also, define feminised.
Bad example if your point is degraded quality of education. Even before he became a political figure, he was a successful lawyer.
The average Californian public teacher salary is $62,469. Blame the rich private schools catering to Hollywood types for the discrepancy. And as far as that list of state averages goes -- a whopping four (4) states!! -- notice it is the conservative state with by far the lowest teacher remuneration.
And then you bring in more and more statistics, all unsourced. Not worth delving into any further.
Another dubious claim with an undefined descriptor.
Blah blah Mano communist. All remaining claims are drivel. Why do you bother?