Shouldn’t this article be titled “Why Women Are Drifting to the Far Left”? From all the trends displayed, with the exception of South Korea men are just about sticking to the historical average, while women are becoming sharply and dramatically more left-wing.
Perhaps the answer to this question might also have something to do with answering the question asked in the actual article title.
These men haven't gotten the memo that The Future is Female. They are supposed to just shrivel up and die without complaint. How dare they opt for anything else!
The feminization of the curricula in the US K-12 system is in no small part responsible for boys largely being uninterested in school. Ditto the fact that the teachers are mostly women. Even the reading requirements in school fail to identify an array of books that boys can get interested in to grow their literacy. Most young people I know learned to hate reading when they were in school and let's not forget that even many college graduates never read a book again, something referred to as aliteracy. Additionally, many youth sports have become pay-to-play in the US, so boys just get high, play video games, and watch porn. Frankly, at this point, I'd be for boys schools where they can get what they need. Additionally, these desk jobs are not what most boys want. Hard work is often very rewarding for men. I also think not having a garage to work on projects has been a disaster. Apartment living robs so many kids of project spaces including mechanical work and more that can be so formative in a man's life. And with so many families with no men around, even when there is a garage, there's no mentor to get the boys interested. Even so-called maker-spaces are not really accessible to youth for a variety of reasons including pay-to-play. Software subscriptions are exorbitant as well so access to things like Adobe Creative Suite are out of reach which is sad because so many kids would dig that. They're just sleeping in the bed we made for them. I favor Education Savings Accounts so they can access the kind of education they want instead of attending the gang indoctrinating public school system otherwise known as the school to prison pipeline. Ugh. With the vast amount of money being spent on public education, we could do so much better, but the factory education model is walled off and protected politically and it's a real shame.
I live in a part of Canada that has a fairly robust economy. My adult son is a highly skilled tradesman who dropped out of university because it was boring and stupid and found a career that required his type of intelligence. He is thriving. The main thing is there’s an economy that requires his skills.
Jordan Peterson would have a lot to say about this. He would agree that men desperately need meaning and belonging. He thinks men need heavy responsiblity to flourish. Used to be that families depended on the dad to provide. Whether you think that model is good or The Evil Patriarchy, the fact is it gave guys structure, responsibility and the reason to work hard. Now women don't need them any more financially, the educational system is geared toward girls (boys are more active than girls naturally but now recess is scaled back, they are expected to sit in classrooms attentively with insufficient outlet for their energy, etc), if guys aren't supposed to pursue marriage and structure any more, well what then? And they get scant sympathy. The whole sexual revolution may have freed women up to behave like men used to but I can't see that has been the wonderful thing it was meant to be. It has devalued sex into a transactional exchange in too many instances, no one needs to be married to have it. and men and women seem unhappier than ever. In other words what we've torn down, we haven't replaced with anything guys can latch onto. Too often, we have empowered groups that have been marginalized and left out historically, as is absolutely necessary and just, but instead of seeing how we make the world a better place for EVERYONE, we say tough luck. It's more like payback time or something. That is my gripe with intersectionality, if you reduce everything to who has power, then there are two roles, the bug or the windshield. Just switching places is not a recipe for a society that flourishes. It creates resentment, despair and worse. Last time I checked inclusive meant everyone. This author is correct to observe that writing off half your society brings out dark things.
Men are moving to the right, because the dominant left has moved so far to left. By this I mean the identity-politics left, not the economic left. For better or worse, the ‘progressive’ left is virulently anti-male. Men are noticing this and responding accordingly. The phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ is bandied about with zero consequences. Overt lying about men and women (see the Pinker / Spelke debate for a bad example) is highly acceptable in elite / dominant circles.
The DaMore fiasco provides a data point of sorts. DaMore observed that women were underrepresented in tech and that differential interests (probably biological) played a role. It turns out that he was right. The ‘things vs. people’ gap between men and women is very large (the Cohen’s D is over one). Did being right (which was already well known) help him? Of course, not. He trampled a sacred cow and was punished for it.
The useful point (in this context) is that not a single person, made the fairly obvious statement
“Here is a realm where men are thriving and that should be celebrated, not condemned.”
I supported PBS for many decades, sometimes donating a significant (for me) amount of money. That stopped last year. As a white, straight, reasonably successful male, I got tired of being falsely characterized as an oppressor. Fact: I have never oppressed anyone. Why would I want to support an institution that considers me the enemy? I am no right wing extremist, and I would never vote for a despicable - evil- blowhard like Trump, but I sort of understand those who do.
Hello! Thanks! I am most grateful for all the "likes." I thought I'd mention something else to sort of balance things politically. Until about 10 years ago I donated to the Heritage Foundation. It was once a conservative organization that was to the right of me, but endorsed all of the time honored conservative issues: small government, personal freedom, free markets, etc. Now, it has turned into a raving, election denying, Trump backing, conspiracy spinning loony bin. It's not hard to understand how this happened. It's all about money. To raise money from the right wing, it has had to move further and further out the MAGA spectrum. A sickening race to the bottom on both sides.
Looking at the comments, one sometimes wonders whether Persuasion has any actual progressive members. 😀
I too, for my sins, am conservative, and would paraphrase and condense some of the other comments by mentioning that a) there have been studies purporting to show that the Left has moved further leftwards than the Right has moved rightwards, so the drift of men to the right may be mostly their staying in place while the goalposts move. And b) Patriarchy and Democracy aren't antonyms.
We can start with a blinding glimpse of what is now obvious. The optimal learning environment for boys and men is somewhat different from that of girls and women. Whatever the reason for that, we should at least consider making changes to provide boys/men and girls/women with equal opportunities for education.
A much earlier fiasco provides some additional insight into this issue. Back in 2005, Larry Summers privately (the event was supposed to be private) observed three possible reasons why Harvard hires more men than women for senior positions. One of them was the GMV observation (Greater Male Variability). This observation goes all the way back to Darwin and can be observed in many species.
Feminists went bonkers of course. How dare a man to suggest that biological differences exist between men and women. A good summary of the issue can be found at “Don’t Worry Your Pretty Little Head” in Slate by William Saletan.
The reaction to Summers’s rather tame remarks was sadly predictable. Summers’s was forced out. S. Pinker stated “Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That's the difference between a university and a madrassa.” Sadly, Harvard is a madrassa these days. The anti-male ethos at Harvard both reflects and reinforces the general anti-male bias in Western society.
Here is something to chew on. Go back in history to see if you can find any evidence of any female-dominated society that worked or lasted or even existed. Of course those educated females and their low-T "male" beneficiaries will scream that "that is because men are brutes and historically oppressed all those capable females that should have ruled the world into a mothering utopia."
I have a female board member that lost her cush CEO job because she failed to deliver outcomes. She is a micro-manager that gets into everyone's personal business and thinks that her job should be high employee satisfaction. I have the pleasure of working in my corporate career with female coworkers and bosses that were brighter than me with more job experience, but that could not get out of their own emotional turmoil to make pragmatic decisions. Their mistake would mount and eventually wreck their reputation for advancement. Or in many cases those females that had the reputation and skills would reject assignments and promotions while more valuing the life-side of work-life balance. And this was often females without children or other relatives to care for.
Sorry, but the female human animal is wired differently. And we have never, in the history of humans, had this experiment where women would dominate society and economy. Females tend to value affiliation and cooperation on the service, but also tend to have the dark triad personality disorder describes as vulnerable or covert narcissism. Two men in conflict will fight and then resolve their differences and cooperated. Two women will avoid the direct conflict acting like they like each other, and spend the rest of their lives trying to destroy the reputation of each other.
Maybe on day the human race will evolve to a point where females can effectively dominate, but today we have not had enough time on the Darwin treadmill. Much of what feels chaotic today is that this change is being forced on us and it does not fit and will not work.
Finland and Sweden, two countries with some of the most progressive women's rights... in those countries a high percentage of educated women decide to be stay-at-home mothers. American feminists really hate that.
The issue is that we are becoming a world (economically) that values knowledge and emotional intelligence more than physical labor. (These days, emotional intelligence leads to leadership opportunities. And women are better at this than men are.) Men with knowledge and emotional intelligence will do just fine, as always. The problem is that, these days, right-wing males don't value knowledge and emotional intelligence. In fact, they seem to be in the habit of ridiculing people with knowledge and emotional intelligence––mocking them as the "self-annointed elite who don't really know anything".
I'm a weird duck. I'm a union laborer and an intellectual. (I had a book published on Zen philosophy.) And I think the trades present a lot of great opportunities for a lot of men, and women, and LGBTQ people. You can make enough to have a really nice life if you're smart with your money and you're good at what you do, and you are responsible. And it's rewarding work. You're solving problems for people. You get to be the hero.
We should invest in more trade school opportunities, including apprenticeships. We should also help men understand that having knowledge and being emotionally intelligent is not "stupid and gay". All of the best sports coaches are knowledgable and emotionally intelligent.
Are there any indicators that women actually are better at emotional intelligence than men?
Early in the history of emotional intelligence work, there wasn't a robust diagnostic for it -- no way to measure it repeatably that we could use to answer basic questions about the distribution of it, like to show that women are better at it. I did a cursory search and my understanding is that there still isn't one.
I've been reading a lot lately about this crisis among men. I'm not sure I buy some of the explanations and prescriptions and I sense a bit of that old "soft bigotry of low expectations."
Men crave responsibility, Frallen says. All evidence to the contrary. Nobody is stopping young men from putting aside childish things and getting to work on building a life full of responsibility.
"Incels" resent that women don't want them. Maybe if they weren't such raging assholes.
We're instructed that men need manly work. Like what? Lassoing cattle? We live in the 20th, excuse me, the 21st century. Sometimes I hear harkening back to the glory days of domestic manufacturing, when General Motors was the nation's biggest employer, not Walmart. Okay, so it was super-manly to, say, operate a machine that attached a windshield to a '78 Buick all day every day? (Meanwhile, auto technician is a perfectly plausible career path for today's car guys.)
The jobs aren't there? Yes they are. The hobbies aren't there? Sure they are. It's easier than ever to teach yourself anything. The trades aren't there? Yes they are. Everyone still needs plumbers and handymen. Nothing sexier than a fella who can fix a thing or build a thing. Hobbies and such cost money? Yeah, since forever. So get a job and save your money.
I perceive a lot of boo-hooing that life means doing a lot of things that you don't feel like doing right then, that success in any arena isn't handed to you but a long game that requires effort to make yourself attractive and competitive -- in the job market, the dating pool, whatever. In short, I perceive an epidemic of fear-driven laziness, a "men's culture" given over not to gadgets and dressing well as in years past, but to spiteful whining. Very manly.
We're told that young men don't like the books they have to read in school because they're not instantly relatable. And yet the point of education is to pull kids' heads out of their asses. It's called learning. How about this: Do your freakin' homework. It's not so bad. And your teacher will love it if you push back with some interesting insight.
We're told that too many teachers are women, and, in the same breath, that the job market's demand for "feminine" jobs is at the heart of the problem. Oops. How do we get more male teachers then? Teaching involves two things that these men's crisis writers far too easily dismiss as unacceptably girly to the cave boys they are trying to save: (1) caring for others (horrors) and (2) having a brain (even worse).
Moreover, the problem isn't men as such. It's native-born men. My aunt who lives in small-town America knows whom to call to work on her house. Immigrants. The native-born candidates do a crappy job and drink and smoke all day. I don't remember the last time a non-Latino worked on my car.
So, what's the answer? I'm not opposed to sex-segregated adolescent schooling that attempts to instill virtues like discipline and conscientiousness. On the theory that many of these young men just need to get laid, I've even entertained the idea of sex ed that's like real sex ed. To whatever extent it's not already there, young men, young women, everyone, should have vigorous assistance in high school in developing realistic goals for their commencing adulthood and in achieving them.
I'd likewise favor a crackdown on youth access to hardcore pornography, but the truth is that nothing can turn around our digitally-created cultural free-for-all.
At a certain point, you have to think, well, maybe the problem, young man, is you. The world is your oyster and yet you fritter life away on video games and sicko porn and drugs and violence and all the rest -- the pathologies that lay waste to our inner cities and small towns alike, all because, what, women have something to say about their lives now too? I'm supposed to be sympathetic, but I suspect there's no answer but tougher love.
You must live in a well-off coastal liberal community. Spend some time in the rest of the country and much of what you claim are existing opportunities for men to earn a reasonable life are non-existent. There are a lot of labor surplus areas in the country. Immigration has driven down the trade wages.
Yes, there are lazy males that don't want to work at physical labor, but in many parts of the country even those eager to do physical labor cannot find a job that pays well enough to take care of their families.
And then they get hit with TV depicting the coastal liberal upper class lifestyle as the norm.
Well, I'm writing from Chicago. Lots of people of all kinds. If the jobs aren't where you are, what do you do? How about: go where the jobs are. It's not as though you have to cross a deadly jungle to get there or try to claim asylum at the border of greater Cleveland or something. You could just move. People do it all the time -- liberal elites and lowly strivers alike -- and have been doing it since forever ago. Many midwestern metros are losing population or gaining very slowly. They would welcome the newcomers.
You talk as though labor surpluses in this or that location or field of endeavor are a matter of social justice, of entitlement. I don't see that. We need the jobs we need where we need them. I suppose that in a cosmic sense that's unfair to those whose skills or interests or location happen to be oversubscribed. But it strikes me as an inescapable fact of life. The demand, for example, for ball players or violinists who are good but not outstanding just ain't there. Bummer, but whaddya gonna do? Figure something else out, of course.
I'm in favor of government help for small towns where they face systemic barriers to a reasonably expected quality of life, like bad internet or no nearby hospitals or community colleges. The hospitals and colleges would mean jobs, but of the caring, girly sort, or the brainy sort that we're not supposed to expect of young men who are supposed to be able to provide for a dependent, non-working wife and children by compensation for performing feats of strength, or some such silly fantasy.
I favor a strictly orderly immigration system, but I'm skeptical that immigrants drive down wages by much. The numbers aren't big enough, and immigrants offset their economic downsides by increased economic activity. (Immigrants buy stuff and use stuff and thus produce jobs, i.e., economic growth, and pay taxes besides.) If it weren't for immigrants, our population would be contracting, with our economy to follow, which would be bad for everyone. Immigrants, even illegal ones, are, as a group, more hard-working, more patriotic, and less felonious than the native born. This makes sense. Those who take big risks and go to great lengths to get here comprise a self-selecting group of strivers. The native-born, like those lazy workmen my aunt tells me about from her house in rural North Carolina, would do well to follow their example.
I'm not terribly sympathetic with grave disappointment that you can't live like people on TV. That seems pretty lame. I lived in a closet in New York for a while when Friends was on. I didn't despair. Meanwhile, our standard of living has improved in many ways. For example, even the lowliest among us has a pocket computer about as good as the richest among us.
I agree most of what you say, but I think that labor mobility is a real problem, mostly because the cost of living - especially rent -- in a city like NYC is multiples of that in a place like Wheeling.
Labor is inelastic that way. You can make the case that working class should move to China where their jobs went. People don't migrate for middle-class job unless there is an opportunity to make really good money. An example is the oil fields in North Dakota. Bismarck has seen a form of a gold-rush in population growth. But the oil field jobs pay six figures.
People at middle class wages cannot just pick up and relocate. And as Mr Cranmer points out the cost of living in the places where there is a job surplus means that the economic justification isn't there. Especially for example if having to leave family that provides extra support like to assist with childcare.
This isn't a rational expectation to "move where the jobs are". In fact, government spends billions to try and improve the economic opportunity in areas where it is lacking... they focus on improving the territory and not helping to relocate people... because relocating people is never effective.
Legal immigration is needed and should be reformed to bring in workers that the country needs, but not until and unless all Americans that want to work have reasonable opportunity to have a good-paying job commensurate with their skills and interest to work.
You are doing the big city elite shaming thing... that people have it better than they think... and if only they would turn off Fox News they would recognize it. That is BS and indicative of your bubble existence and lack of knowledge for how 80% of Americans below the elite big city cohort lives.
Kate Manne's "Down Girl" explains this phenomenon quite well. Men were willing to expand the pie -- let women outside the domestic sphere to work in paid labor so long as the male privileged role remained and their women supported them unconditionally. The past few years have seen a challenge in female subordination/male privilege. It isn't that men don't have roles that they could play in society. It is that all the meaningful roles that make life worth living (dismissed as unpaid care work) is seen as beneath their dignity. Any man who attempts to enter that space is belittled as a sissy or worse. Men cannot achieve their full humanity until the patriarchy (including the women who uphold it) is buried. So sure, men can search for meaning and purpose. But so long as society belittles men who aren't "alpha," and those men who are so mocked *feel* inferior, progress can't happen, and the far right will continue to recruit men whose only image of "being a man" is being a disgusting bully. There are lots of roles for men to play, but all those "good girls" have to let them in.
I looked at the Equimundo study, and I have to say that "such as Andrew Tate" is doing quite a lot of work in this article.
I assume the author draws "nearly half" from the figure on page 34? To recreate the math we'd have to either include those who trust Trump (who is a former President and also not really an "influencer") or else perhaps add up Joe Rogan (most popular podcast IN THE WORLD) and Jordan Peterson ("make your bed" guy), neither of whom is exactly "far right" and neither of whom, as far as I know, has been accused of sex trafficking.
The 20% who trust Andrew Tate are obviously missing a few brain cells, but I also think we should allow some elasticity to the lizardman constant when dealing with 18-23 year old males. Sky's not quite falling yet.
Shouldn’t this article be titled “Why Women Are Drifting to the Far Left”? From all the trends displayed, with the exception of South Korea men are just about sticking to the historical average, while women are becoming sharply and dramatically more left-wing.
Perhaps the answer to this question might also have something to do with answering the question asked in the actual article title.
You are right. We should examine both.
These men haven't gotten the memo that The Future is Female. They are supposed to just shrivel up and die without complaint. How dare they opt for anything else!
I think they got the memo.
The feminization of the curricula in the US K-12 system is in no small part responsible for boys largely being uninterested in school. Ditto the fact that the teachers are mostly women. Even the reading requirements in school fail to identify an array of books that boys can get interested in to grow their literacy. Most young people I know learned to hate reading when they were in school and let's not forget that even many college graduates never read a book again, something referred to as aliteracy. Additionally, many youth sports have become pay-to-play in the US, so boys just get high, play video games, and watch porn. Frankly, at this point, I'd be for boys schools where they can get what they need. Additionally, these desk jobs are not what most boys want. Hard work is often very rewarding for men. I also think not having a garage to work on projects has been a disaster. Apartment living robs so many kids of project spaces including mechanical work and more that can be so formative in a man's life. And with so many families with no men around, even when there is a garage, there's no mentor to get the boys interested. Even so-called maker-spaces are not really accessible to youth for a variety of reasons including pay-to-play. Software subscriptions are exorbitant as well so access to things like Adobe Creative Suite are out of reach which is sad because so many kids would dig that. They're just sleeping in the bed we made for them. I favor Education Savings Accounts so they can access the kind of education they want instead of attending the gang indoctrinating public school system otherwise known as the school to prison pipeline. Ugh. With the vast amount of money being spent on public education, we could do so much better, but the factory education model is walled off and protected politically and it's a real shame.
I live in a part of Canada that has a fairly robust economy. My adult son is a highly skilled tradesman who dropped out of university because it was boring and stupid and found a career that required his type of intelligence. He is thriving. The main thing is there’s an economy that requires his skills.
Strange. Rachel Kleinfeld writes about men drifting to the right like it's a bad thing. Is it a bad thing?
Jordan Peterson would have a lot to say about this. He would agree that men desperately need meaning and belonging. He thinks men need heavy responsiblity to flourish. Used to be that families depended on the dad to provide. Whether you think that model is good or The Evil Patriarchy, the fact is it gave guys structure, responsibility and the reason to work hard. Now women don't need them any more financially, the educational system is geared toward girls (boys are more active than girls naturally but now recess is scaled back, they are expected to sit in classrooms attentively with insufficient outlet for their energy, etc), if guys aren't supposed to pursue marriage and structure any more, well what then? And they get scant sympathy. The whole sexual revolution may have freed women up to behave like men used to but I can't see that has been the wonderful thing it was meant to be. It has devalued sex into a transactional exchange in too many instances, no one needs to be married to have it. and men and women seem unhappier than ever. In other words what we've torn down, we haven't replaced with anything guys can latch onto. Too often, we have empowered groups that have been marginalized and left out historically, as is absolutely necessary and just, but instead of seeing how we make the world a better place for EVERYONE, we say tough luck. It's more like payback time or something. That is my gripe with intersectionality, if you reduce everything to who has power, then there are two roles, the bug or the windshield. Just switching places is not a recipe for a society that flourishes. It creates resentment, despair and worse. Last time I checked inclusive meant everyone. This author is correct to observe that writing off half your society brings out dark things.
Men are moving to the right, because the dominant left has moved so far to left. By this I mean the identity-politics left, not the economic left. For better or worse, the ‘progressive’ left is virulently anti-male. Men are noticing this and responding accordingly. The phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ is bandied about with zero consequences. Overt lying about men and women (see the Pinker / Spelke debate for a bad example) is highly acceptable in elite / dominant circles.
The DaMore fiasco provides a data point of sorts. DaMore observed that women were underrepresented in tech and that differential interests (probably biological) played a role. It turns out that he was right. The ‘things vs. people’ gap between men and women is very large (the Cohen’s D is over one). Did being right (which was already well known) help him? Of course, not. He trampled a sacred cow and was punished for it.
The useful point (in this context) is that not a single person, made the fairly obvious statement
“Here is a realm where men are thriving and that should be celebrated, not condemned.”
I supported PBS for many decades, sometimes donating a significant (for me) amount of money. That stopped last year. As a white, straight, reasonably successful male, I got tired of being falsely characterized as an oppressor. Fact: I have never oppressed anyone. Why would I want to support an institution that considers me the enemy? I am no right wing extremist, and I would never vote for a despicable - evil- blowhard like Trump, but I sort of understand those who do.
Hello! Thanks! I am most grateful for all the "likes." I thought I'd mention something else to sort of balance things politically. Until about 10 years ago I donated to the Heritage Foundation. It was once a conservative organization that was to the right of me, but endorsed all of the time honored conservative issues: small government, personal freedom, free markets, etc. Now, it has turned into a raving, election denying, Trump backing, conspiracy spinning loony bin. It's not hard to understand how this happened. It's all about money. To raise money from the right wing, it has had to move further and further out the MAGA spectrum. A sickening race to the bottom on both sides.
I see that a few folks "liked" my comment. You might also like my Substack "The Tribe has Spoken" in which I discuss this stuff in more depth.
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/the-tribe-has-spoken
Looking at the comments, one sometimes wonders whether Persuasion has any actual progressive members. 😀
I too, for my sins, am conservative, and would paraphrase and condense some of the other comments by mentioning that a) there have been studies purporting to show that the Left has moved further leftwards than the Right has moved rightwards, so the drift of men to the right may be mostly their staying in place while the goalposts move. And b) Patriarchy and Democracy aren't antonyms.
Real men have nothing to gain by joining the Femocrat party. In fact, that party now represents their social and economic enemy.
We can start with a blinding glimpse of what is now obvious. The optimal learning environment for boys and men is somewhat different from that of girls and women. Whatever the reason for that, we should at least consider making changes to provide boys/men and girls/women with equal opportunities for education.
A much earlier fiasco provides some additional insight into this issue. Back in 2005, Larry Summers privately (the event was supposed to be private) observed three possible reasons why Harvard hires more men than women for senior positions. One of them was the GMV observation (Greater Male Variability). This observation goes all the way back to Darwin and can be observed in many species.
Feminists went bonkers of course. How dare a man to suggest that biological differences exist between men and women. A good summary of the issue can be found at “Don’t Worry Your Pretty Little Head” in Slate by William Saletan.
The reaction to Summers’s rather tame remarks was sadly predictable. Summers’s was forced out. S. Pinker stated “Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That's the difference between a university and a madrassa.” Sadly, Harvard is a madrassa these days. The anti-male ethos at Harvard both reflects and reinforces the general anti-male bias in Western society.
Here is something to chew on. Go back in history to see if you can find any evidence of any female-dominated society that worked or lasted or even existed. Of course those educated females and their low-T "male" beneficiaries will scream that "that is because men are brutes and historically oppressed all those capable females that should have ruled the world into a mothering utopia."
I have a female board member that lost her cush CEO job because she failed to deliver outcomes. She is a micro-manager that gets into everyone's personal business and thinks that her job should be high employee satisfaction. I have the pleasure of working in my corporate career with female coworkers and bosses that were brighter than me with more job experience, but that could not get out of their own emotional turmoil to make pragmatic decisions. Their mistake would mount and eventually wreck their reputation for advancement. Or in many cases those females that had the reputation and skills would reject assignments and promotions while more valuing the life-side of work-life balance. And this was often females without children or other relatives to care for.
Sorry, but the female human animal is wired differently. And we have never, in the history of humans, had this experiment where women would dominate society and economy. Females tend to value affiliation and cooperation on the service, but also tend to have the dark triad personality disorder describes as vulnerable or covert narcissism. Two men in conflict will fight and then resolve their differences and cooperated. Two women will avoid the direct conflict acting like they like each other, and spend the rest of their lives trying to destroy the reputation of each other.
Maybe on day the human race will evolve to a point where females can effectively dominate, but today we have not had enough time on the Darwin treadmill. Much of what feels chaotic today is that this change is being forced on us and it does not fit and will not work.
Finland and Sweden, two countries with some of the most progressive women's rights... in those countries a high percentage of educated women decide to be stay-at-home mothers. American feminists really hate that.
The issue is that we are becoming a world (economically) that values knowledge and emotional intelligence more than physical labor. (These days, emotional intelligence leads to leadership opportunities. And women are better at this than men are.) Men with knowledge and emotional intelligence will do just fine, as always. The problem is that, these days, right-wing males don't value knowledge and emotional intelligence. In fact, they seem to be in the habit of ridiculing people with knowledge and emotional intelligence––mocking them as the "self-annointed elite who don't really know anything".
I'm a weird duck. I'm a union laborer and an intellectual. (I had a book published on Zen philosophy.) And I think the trades present a lot of great opportunities for a lot of men, and women, and LGBTQ people. You can make enough to have a really nice life if you're smart with your money and you're good at what you do, and you are responsible. And it's rewarding work. You're solving problems for people. You get to be the hero.
We should invest in more trade school opportunities, including apprenticeships. We should also help men understand that having knowledge and being emotionally intelligent is not "stupid and gay". All of the best sports coaches are knowledgable and emotionally intelligent.
Are there any indicators that women actually are better at emotional intelligence than men?
Early in the history of emotional intelligence work, there wasn't a robust diagnostic for it -- no way to measure it repeatably that we could use to answer basic questions about the distribution of it, like to show that women are better at it. I did a cursory search and my understanding is that there still isn't one.
I've been reading a lot lately about this crisis among men. I'm not sure I buy some of the explanations and prescriptions and I sense a bit of that old "soft bigotry of low expectations."
Men crave responsibility, Frallen says. All evidence to the contrary. Nobody is stopping young men from putting aside childish things and getting to work on building a life full of responsibility.
"Incels" resent that women don't want them. Maybe if they weren't such raging assholes.
We're instructed that men need manly work. Like what? Lassoing cattle? We live in the 20th, excuse me, the 21st century. Sometimes I hear harkening back to the glory days of domestic manufacturing, when General Motors was the nation's biggest employer, not Walmart. Okay, so it was super-manly to, say, operate a machine that attached a windshield to a '78 Buick all day every day? (Meanwhile, auto technician is a perfectly plausible career path for today's car guys.)
The jobs aren't there? Yes they are. The hobbies aren't there? Sure they are. It's easier than ever to teach yourself anything. The trades aren't there? Yes they are. Everyone still needs plumbers and handymen. Nothing sexier than a fella who can fix a thing or build a thing. Hobbies and such cost money? Yeah, since forever. So get a job and save your money.
I perceive a lot of boo-hooing that life means doing a lot of things that you don't feel like doing right then, that success in any arena isn't handed to you but a long game that requires effort to make yourself attractive and competitive -- in the job market, the dating pool, whatever. In short, I perceive an epidemic of fear-driven laziness, a "men's culture" given over not to gadgets and dressing well as in years past, but to spiteful whining. Very manly.
We're told that young men don't like the books they have to read in school because they're not instantly relatable. And yet the point of education is to pull kids' heads out of their asses. It's called learning. How about this: Do your freakin' homework. It's not so bad. And your teacher will love it if you push back with some interesting insight.
We're told that too many teachers are women, and, in the same breath, that the job market's demand for "feminine" jobs is at the heart of the problem. Oops. How do we get more male teachers then? Teaching involves two things that these men's crisis writers far too easily dismiss as unacceptably girly to the cave boys they are trying to save: (1) caring for others (horrors) and (2) having a brain (even worse).
Moreover, the problem isn't men as such. It's native-born men. My aunt who lives in small-town America knows whom to call to work on her house. Immigrants. The native-born candidates do a crappy job and drink and smoke all day. I don't remember the last time a non-Latino worked on my car.
So, what's the answer? I'm not opposed to sex-segregated adolescent schooling that attempts to instill virtues like discipline and conscientiousness. On the theory that many of these young men just need to get laid, I've even entertained the idea of sex ed that's like real sex ed. To whatever extent it's not already there, young men, young women, everyone, should have vigorous assistance in high school in developing realistic goals for their commencing adulthood and in achieving them.
I'd likewise favor a crackdown on youth access to hardcore pornography, but the truth is that nothing can turn around our digitally-created cultural free-for-all.
At a certain point, you have to think, well, maybe the problem, young man, is you. The world is your oyster and yet you fritter life away on video games and sicko porn and drugs and violence and all the rest -- the pathologies that lay waste to our inner cities and small towns alike, all because, what, women have something to say about their lives now too? I'm supposed to be sympathetic, but I suspect there's no answer but tougher love.
You must live in a well-off coastal liberal community. Spend some time in the rest of the country and much of what you claim are existing opportunities for men to earn a reasonable life are non-existent. There are a lot of labor surplus areas in the country. Immigration has driven down the trade wages.
Yes, there are lazy males that don't want to work at physical labor, but in many parts of the country even those eager to do physical labor cannot find a job that pays well enough to take care of their families.
And then they get hit with TV depicting the coastal liberal upper class lifestyle as the norm.
Well, I'm writing from Chicago. Lots of people of all kinds. If the jobs aren't where you are, what do you do? How about: go where the jobs are. It's not as though you have to cross a deadly jungle to get there or try to claim asylum at the border of greater Cleveland or something. You could just move. People do it all the time -- liberal elites and lowly strivers alike -- and have been doing it since forever ago. Many midwestern metros are losing population or gaining very slowly. They would welcome the newcomers.
You talk as though labor surpluses in this or that location or field of endeavor are a matter of social justice, of entitlement. I don't see that. We need the jobs we need where we need them. I suppose that in a cosmic sense that's unfair to those whose skills or interests or location happen to be oversubscribed. But it strikes me as an inescapable fact of life. The demand, for example, for ball players or violinists who are good but not outstanding just ain't there. Bummer, but whaddya gonna do? Figure something else out, of course.
I'm in favor of government help for small towns where they face systemic barriers to a reasonably expected quality of life, like bad internet or no nearby hospitals or community colleges. The hospitals and colleges would mean jobs, but of the caring, girly sort, or the brainy sort that we're not supposed to expect of young men who are supposed to be able to provide for a dependent, non-working wife and children by compensation for performing feats of strength, or some such silly fantasy.
I favor a strictly orderly immigration system, but I'm skeptical that immigrants drive down wages by much. The numbers aren't big enough, and immigrants offset their economic downsides by increased economic activity. (Immigrants buy stuff and use stuff and thus produce jobs, i.e., economic growth, and pay taxes besides.) If it weren't for immigrants, our population would be contracting, with our economy to follow, which would be bad for everyone. Immigrants, even illegal ones, are, as a group, more hard-working, more patriotic, and less felonious than the native born. This makes sense. Those who take big risks and go to great lengths to get here comprise a self-selecting group of strivers. The native-born, like those lazy workmen my aunt tells me about from her house in rural North Carolina, would do well to follow their example.
I'm not terribly sympathetic with grave disappointment that you can't live like people on TV. That seems pretty lame. I lived in a closet in New York for a while when Friends was on. I didn't despair. Meanwhile, our standard of living has improved in many ways. For example, even the lowliest among us has a pocket computer about as good as the richest among us.
I agree most of what you say, but I think that labor mobility is a real problem, mostly because the cost of living - especially rent -- in a city like NYC is multiples of that in a place like Wheeling.
Labor is inelastic that way. You can make the case that working class should move to China where their jobs went. People don't migrate for middle-class job unless there is an opportunity to make really good money. An example is the oil fields in North Dakota. Bismarck has seen a form of a gold-rush in population growth. But the oil field jobs pay six figures.
People at middle class wages cannot just pick up and relocate. And as Mr Cranmer points out the cost of living in the places where there is a job surplus means that the economic justification isn't there. Especially for example if having to leave family that provides extra support like to assist with childcare.
This isn't a rational expectation to "move where the jobs are". In fact, government spends billions to try and improve the economic opportunity in areas where it is lacking... they focus on improving the territory and not helping to relocate people... because relocating people is never effective.
Legal immigration is needed and should be reformed to bring in workers that the country needs, but not until and unless all Americans that want to work have reasonable opportunity to have a good-paying job commensurate with their skills and interest to work.
You are doing the big city elite shaming thing... that people have it better than they think... and if only they would turn off Fox News they would recognize it. That is BS and indicative of your bubble existence and lack of knowledge for how 80% of Americans below the elite big city cohort lives.
Kate Manne's "Down Girl" explains this phenomenon quite well. Men were willing to expand the pie -- let women outside the domestic sphere to work in paid labor so long as the male privileged role remained and their women supported them unconditionally. The past few years have seen a challenge in female subordination/male privilege. It isn't that men don't have roles that they could play in society. It is that all the meaningful roles that make life worth living (dismissed as unpaid care work) is seen as beneath their dignity. Any man who attempts to enter that space is belittled as a sissy or worse. Men cannot achieve their full humanity until the patriarchy (including the women who uphold it) is buried. So sure, men can search for meaning and purpose. But so long as society belittles men who aren't "alpha," and those men who are so mocked *feel* inferior, progress can't happen, and the far right will continue to recruit men whose only image of "being a man" is being a disgusting bully. There are lots of roles for men to play, but all those "good girls" have to let them in.
I looked at the Equimundo study, and I have to say that "such as Andrew Tate" is doing quite a lot of work in this article.
I assume the author draws "nearly half" from the figure on page 34? To recreate the math we'd have to either include those who trust Trump (who is a former President and also not really an "influencer") or else perhaps add up Joe Rogan (most popular podcast IN THE WORLD) and Jordan Peterson ("make your bed" guy), neither of whom is exactly "far right" and neither of whom, as far as I know, has been accused of sex trafficking.
The 20% who trust Andrew Tate are obviously missing a few brain cells, but I also think we should allow some elasticity to the lizardman constant when dealing with 18-23 year old males. Sky's not quite falling yet.