The elephant in the room here is the massive verbal aptitude gap between boys and girls and our collective reaction to it. It's understandable that this may have been initially greeted as good news by advocates for women's progress; I felt that way at first, too.
But we forget what happened when we once thought boys were so much better than girls at math and science. We looked into it and found that if we changed the way we taught girls we could improve their performance and narrow the gap. Yet we are barely even beginning to think about doing this with boys because we progressives can't get past our smug assertions of male privilege to see that we're failing our boys.
Not so long ago, when Larry Summers suggested the mere *possibly* of men being better at certain fields like math and engineering, to explain the overwhelming male bias in those areas, he was assailed with accusations of sexism. Yet now that the gap in verbal aptitude so clearly favors girls, suddenly we see the limitations of projecting principles of equality onto matters of empirical reality.
But we've also seen how our principles can motivate us to understand the limitations of our own understanding of empirical reality and our ability to draw conclusions about what we learn and act appropriately on them. In this way we've overcome years of writing off women and girls on the basis of seemingly objective and rational observations. We owe our boys the same.
It is simple. School sucks for males. Always has... because it is based on a 150 year old lecture model that rewards compliant clones of discipline and not those with a drive to create, invent and explore.
But what used to happen is that males would finally escape from the confines of school and go out into the working world to make their way. First it was industry that was exported to cheaper labor countries. They told the boys and men that they would find new work in the high-tech manufacturing fields. Then those jobs were outsourced too... and the few remaining were given to robots. The trades were flooded with new immigrants and wages crashed.
And instead of reforming the school system to help make up the deficits for the boys... they did the opposite and Title-nined it to better fit the girls. Combined with the changes in the economy we might as well just handed opioids and bullets to all these boys and men... giving them the message that their toxic masculinity was unneeded and they should just slip away.
So, how do we fix things?
Bring back industry and manufacturing, stop the flood of trade wage-killing illegal immigration, reform the education system and knock the man-hating feminists out of political power.
"men at the top of the economic ladder are mostly doing fine."
Exactly.
So when you say "men and boys are in crisis" you mean POOR & WORKING CLASS men and boys are in crisis.
So why not say that?
Why pretend this is just a gender issue rather than a class issue?
Anyway education is not the problem: It's the wages, stupid.
There are plenty of ways to be brilliant and contribute to society without being able to succeed in school.
Just as fewer women are choosing to go into the STEM professions, fewer men are choosing to go to college. So what?
The only reason this is a "crisis" is that blue collar jobs have either been sent overseas or pay shit wages, which make men who do those jobs feel like shit.
In your book you stated that we should encourage men to do jobs they are not interested in and may be less capable of doing (like being kindergarten teachers and nurse's aides).
Newsflash: those jobs also pay shit wages. If working class men follow your advice they'll feel even WORSE about themselves. Especially if they're held back in school for two years due to an allegedly innate developmental delay.
You complains about the term "toxic masculinity" claiming it implies that men are somehow innately toxic (I agree with you that it's not a useful phrase).
But THEN you go on to defend Jeffrey Toobin for masturbating during a zoom work call!! You actually claimed that "men can't help it" (boys will be boys) so Toobin should get a pass. I'm sorry, but the vast majority of men, no matter how horny they are, can control themselves enough not to masturbate in front of their co workers.
Also in the "boys will be boys" vein, you claim that sex buying should be legalized because men "need" prostitution due to their overwhelmingly high sex drives. Really? Men "need" to rent (usually poor, usually black or brown) women's bodies like appliances or their balls will explode??
To justify your defense of sex buying as "woman friendly" you quoted an extremely limited (and classist) report claiming that when a strip club and escort service opened in a NYC neighborhood ( a rich one or a poor one? Take a wild guess), sex crimes in the neighborhood went down by 13%.
Great! I'm sure the residents of Park Slope will be demanding that strip clubs and brothels start opening up in their neighborhoods so they can be safer, too.
The authors of this dubious study claim the 13% decrease in sex crime "proves" that sex offenders took their aggression out on the "disposable" women in the strip clubs and brothels rather than on the "decent" women who don't work in the sex industry.
How "progressive".
Also, when sex buying is legalized, demand increases. Since there is never enough "willing" supply to meet demand, the gap is filled in by sex traffickers. Guess which women and kids these traffickers victimize? Not middle class white women. They usually target poor women & kids -disproportionately black and Indigenous women and kids.
Your book left me filled with despair, because the "intelligentsia" is so hopelessly out of touch with the poor and working classes, and are either not talking to them or not listening to them when they do.
I truly hope someone writes a book that actually does bring attention to the fact that not being able to earn a breadwinner wage is crushing the souls of millions of men in this country.
The issue is whether our educational system discriminates against boys and men because they learn differently than girls and women. I think that the answer has always been "yes", but that it was not obvious until the barriers preventing girls and woman from reaching their educational potential were removed and male-dominated, good-paying, challenging, blue collar jobs disappeared.
No discussion of affirmative action programs that favor girls over boys -- in school, in university, in entry-level jobs, and all the way to Boards of Directors.
This article is just more liberal political blather....
Women make more than men in all high paying jobs. A college educated woman makes significantly more than a high school educated male. Are women complaining? No! Men make more in high risk jobs because women don’t want to do that type of work. What a shock...
What the author is worried about is how to buy the votes of males.... and that is the problem we all face. The Government’s job is not to give people free stuff -- it’s to fight fires, fight crime and fight wars. Anything more is government over reach...
A huge part of the problem here is the way ppl talk about these issues. Most (not all) people on the left really do care about stopping many of these harms men are facing (at least as individuals) but when they use the socially acceptable phrasing on left about particular burdens by marginalized groups etc etc it *feels* to many like they are saying your problems aren't as big a deal as a few mean words some highly educated, rich, and connected woman or minority heard.
Part of that is just the tendency on the left to lose sight of the individuals for the groups. And that's important.
But I think the linguistic barriers are just as important. If the men who aren't doing well thought of themselves as underprivileged individuals based on their lack of education, poor background, their mental disabilities of depression, drug use etc then the left would be much more verbally supportive (tho face the stupid nasty fight over who belongs to most underprivileged group).
But that's never going to work. For blacis and Hispanics and gay ppl etc members of those groups naturally identify as members. Outside of a very weird pocket of educated leftists most ppl don't want to identify (even tho they know it's true) as undereducated, suffering from drug addiction, depression etc etc... The structure the left offers of: just give us an identity for ppl who have it bad like you and them claim your concern/help by proclaiming that membership just isn't going to work.
Having said that I also think it's not the best strategy to phrase it as a problem for men. Sure it may be true but it feels like repeating the overly identitarian focus of some bad things on the left and just isn't necessary. Just subdivide the group more so it feels less like a broadside against the feminist tribe (terminology signals intent).
This is so sad and so true. The Damore memo provides just one data point. Literally, no one made the rather obvious point “here is a realm where young men are thriving and that should be celebrated, not condemned”.
The elephant in the room here is the massive verbal aptitude gap between boys and girls and our collective reaction to it. It's understandable that this may have been initially greeted as good news by advocates for women's progress; I felt that way at first, too.
But we forget what happened when we once thought boys were so much better than girls at math and science. We looked into it and found that if we changed the way we taught girls we could improve their performance and narrow the gap. Yet we are barely even beginning to think about doing this with boys because we progressives can't get past our smug assertions of male privilege to see that we're failing our boys.
Not so long ago, when Larry Summers suggested the mere *possibly* of men being better at certain fields like math and engineering, to explain the overwhelming male bias in those areas, he was assailed with accusations of sexism. Yet now that the gap in verbal aptitude so clearly favors girls, suddenly we see the limitations of projecting principles of equality onto matters of empirical reality.
But we've also seen how our principles can motivate us to understand the limitations of our own understanding of empirical reality and our ability to draw conclusions about what we learn and act appropriately on them. In this way we've overcome years of writing off women and girls on the basis of seemingly objective and rational observations. We owe our boys the same.
It is simple. School sucks for males. Always has... because it is based on a 150 year old lecture model that rewards compliant clones of discipline and not those with a drive to create, invent and explore.
But what used to happen is that males would finally escape from the confines of school and go out into the working world to make their way. First it was industry that was exported to cheaper labor countries. They told the boys and men that they would find new work in the high-tech manufacturing fields. Then those jobs were outsourced too... and the few remaining were given to robots. The trades were flooded with new immigrants and wages crashed.
And instead of reforming the school system to help make up the deficits for the boys... they did the opposite and Title-nined it to better fit the girls. Combined with the changes in the economy we might as well just handed opioids and bullets to all these boys and men... giving them the message that their toxic masculinity was unneeded and they should just slip away.
So, how do we fix things?
Bring back industry and manufacturing, stop the flood of trade wage-killing illegal immigration, reform the education system and knock the man-hating feminists out of political power.
"men at the top of the economic ladder are mostly doing fine."
Exactly.
So when you say "men and boys are in crisis" you mean POOR & WORKING CLASS men and boys are in crisis.
So why not say that?
Why pretend this is just a gender issue rather than a class issue?
Anyway education is not the problem: It's the wages, stupid.
There are plenty of ways to be brilliant and contribute to society without being able to succeed in school.
Just as fewer women are choosing to go into the STEM professions, fewer men are choosing to go to college. So what?
The only reason this is a "crisis" is that blue collar jobs have either been sent overseas or pay shit wages, which make men who do those jobs feel like shit.
In your book you stated that we should encourage men to do jobs they are not interested in and may be less capable of doing (like being kindergarten teachers and nurse's aides).
Newsflash: those jobs also pay shit wages. If working class men follow your advice they'll feel even WORSE about themselves. Especially if they're held back in school for two years due to an allegedly innate developmental delay.
You complains about the term "toxic masculinity" claiming it implies that men are somehow innately toxic (I agree with you that it's not a useful phrase).
But THEN you go on to defend Jeffrey Toobin for masturbating during a zoom work call!! You actually claimed that "men can't help it" (boys will be boys) so Toobin should get a pass. I'm sorry, but the vast majority of men, no matter how horny they are, can control themselves enough not to masturbate in front of their co workers.
Also in the "boys will be boys" vein, you claim that sex buying should be legalized because men "need" prostitution due to their overwhelmingly high sex drives. Really? Men "need" to rent (usually poor, usually black or brown) women's bodies like appliances or their balls will explode??
To justify your defense of sex buying as "woman friendly" you quoted an extremely limited (and classist) report claiming that when a strip club and escort service opened in a NYC neighborhood ( a rich one or a poor one? Take a wild guess), sex crimes in the neighborhood went down by 13%.
Great! I'm sure the residents of Park Slope will be demanding that strip clubs and brothels start opening up in their neighborhoods so they can be safer, too.
The authors of this dubious study claim the 13% decrease in sex crime "proves" that sex offenders took their aggression out on the "disposable" women in the strip clubs and brothels rather than on the "decent" women who don't work in the sex industry.
How "progressive".
Also, when sex buying is legalized, demand increases. Since there is never enough "willing" supply to meet demand, the gap is filled in by sex traffickers. Guess which women and kids these traffickers victimize? Not middle class white women. They usually target poor women & kids -disproportionately black and Indigenous women and kids.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/45198/1/Neumayer_Legalized_Prostitution_Increase_2012.pdf
Your book left me filled with despair, because the "intelligentsia" is so hopelessly out of touch with the poor and working classes, and are either not talking to them or not listening to them when they do.
I truly hope someone writes a book that actually does bring attention to the fact that not being able to earn a breadwinner wage is crushing the souls of millions of men in this country.
Your book is NOT it.
The issue is whether our educational system discriminates against boys and men because they learn differently than girls and women. I think that the answer has always been "yes", but that it was not obvious until the barriers preventing girls and woman from reaching their educational potential were removed and male-dominated, good-paying, challenging, blue collar jobs disappeared.
"Women are moving left, men are moving right. This leaves the men vulnerable to skilled populists like Donald Trump."
By this reasoning, doesn't this leave women vulnerable to skilled populists like Elizabeth Waren and AOC?
No discussion of affirmative action programs that favor girls over boys -- in school, in university, in entry-level jobs, and all the way to Boards of Directors.
This article is just more liberal political blather....
Women make more than men in all high paying jobs. A college educated woman makes significantly more than a high school educated male. Are women complaining? No! Men make more in high risk jobs because women don’t want to do that type of work. What a shock...
What the author is worried about is how to buy the votes of males.... and that is the problem we all face. The Government’s job is not to give people free stuff -- it’s to fight fires, fight crime and fight wars. Anything more is government over reach...
A huge part of the problem here is the way ppl talk about these issues. Most (not all) people on the left really do care about stopping many of these harms men are facing (at least as individuals) but when they use the socially acceptable phrasing on left about particular burdens by marginalized groups etc etc it *feels* to many like they are saying your problems aren't as big a deal as a few mean words some highly educated, rich, and connected woman or minority heard.
Part of that is just the tendency on the left to lose sight of the individuals for the groups. And that's important.
But I think the linguistic barriers are just as important. If the men who aren't doing well thought of themselves as underprivileged individuals based on their lack of education, poor background, their mental disabilities of depression, drug use etc then the left would be much more verbally supportive (tho face the stupid nasty fight over who belongs to most underprivileged group).
But that's never going to work. For blacis and Hispanics and gay ppl etc members of those groups naturally identify as members. Outside of a very weird pocket of educated leftists most ppl don't want to identify (even tho they know it's true) as undereducated, suffering from drug addiction, depression etc etc... The structure the left offers of: just give us an identity for ppl who have it bad like you and them claim your concern/help by proclaiming that membership just isn't going to work.
Having said that I also think it's not the best strategy to phrase it as a problem for men. Sure it may be true but it feels like repeating the overly identitarian focus of some bad things on the left and just isn't necessary. Just subdivide the group more so it feels less like a broadside against the feminist tribe (terminology signals intent).
This is so sad and so true. The Damore memo provides just one data point. Literally, no one made the rather obvious point “here is a realm where young men are thriving and that should be celebrated, not condemned”.
Another solution could be basic income guarantee