>That’s what the void is about the author describes: suffocation by normativity.
Actually I think it's the opposite: we've done away with normativity, leaving most people floundering without a lifemap, and any dating advice you give will be wrong 50% of the time because there are no accepted standards for what is or isn't proper behaviour.
Firstly, most people internalise the values of the society they live in.
Secondly, norms aren't just about what you should want, they're also about how you should try and get what you want. A society in which there are widely-understood norms about topics such as where it is and isn't appropriate for a man to approach a woman with romantic interest, and what the appropriate ways are for a man to signal such interest, is one in which it's much easier to go about finding a girlfriend than a society in which one woman's "Fighting to win me like a man should" is another woman's "Pestering me to go out with you, ugh" is a third woman's "Trying to pressure me into a relationship, you creep" is a fourth woman's...
Absolutely agree. However, as the author stated, when blindly following these external givens, some people do end up in a void. And, if they are men especially, struggle to get others to empathize. Though tbh I see that a lot for non-American women too. So clearly, normativity only works for the (few?) “normal” ones. And in that sense it’s suffocating for the rest.
And your examples line up beautifully with that. “Chase a woman” was probably always suffocating, for both partners. That’s why there are now different expectations, reflecting actual differences in perceptions in different people (gender agnostic btw). It’s more complicated, sure. But it is in that sense also freeing for everybody else finally. Our only problem about all of that is that our understanding and communication skills about it all haven’t caught up yet. As you’d expect for a whole society going through a difficult learning process at the same time. Still doesn’t mean we should just go back to only teaching “elementary school” so that there is “less confusion”, no?
>However, as the author stated, when blindly following these external givens, some people do end up in a void.
People end up in a void because the norms society gives people, and especially men, are unreasonable and self-contradictory. The problem isn't having norms per se -- indeed, it's impossible to have a society without norms -- it's that our current norms aren't very good.
>So clearly, normativity only works for the (few?) “normal” ones.
Normal people make up the majority of society, by definition.
>And your examples line up beautifully with that. “Chase a woman” was probably always suffocating, for both partners.
"Probably"? On what grounds do you say this? Basically every piece of evidence we have, whether statistical or anecdotal, suggests that the dating world is worse, and is perceived as worse by people trying to date, than it was, say, 20 years ago.
My impression is that the effort to make room for non-normative people hasn't been just about treating them decently, but that "polite society"* has been trying to raise the status of non-normative people by lower the status of normative people.
*"Polite society" is like calling dangerous fae "The Good Folk".
Here's what I think the core issue is, though—most men today are brought up by a woman.
Then they are going to school dominated by female traits—such as rule following and socialization—taught mostly by female teachers who are also government employees.
By the time they get out of this system, they have no male role models... they have no direction.
Typically and traditionally, men have always had to prove themselves through rites of passage—and men aren't able to do that today.
Who did they have to prove themselves to? Other men. Men had to compete and win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal.
Nothing like that exists today except the military, and not even that.
I think regarding rule-following and socialization as female traits is an effect not a cause. They've always been a key part of the military, for example.
My feeling based on my experience is not that (some) boys struggle with rule-following in school because rule-following is female coded. They struggle with following rules in school because the rules are enforced by females.
Speaking as a man who's been in the position of trying to enforce school rules and get students to follow and take them seriously, I don't think the boys who struggle with school rules do so because the people who're enforcing them are mostly women.
Some students struggle with following rules, whoever is enforcing them (although some are selective depending on which authority figures they like.) In my experience, there are more boys out on the tails for poor rule following, whoever is enforcing them
I felt that way as a kid, and the rules may actually have been stupid. I don't remember all the specifics, but I was an uncommonly smart kid.
But having also been a teacher, I gained a lot of sympathy for the position of "No, don't try to figure out the point of the rules, just follow them exactly without questioning them." Because I've been in the position of trying to get kids to follow the rules, and I try to explain the reasoning behind the rules to them, because that's how I would have wanted adults to deal with me when I was their age, and then I can see them thinking "Okay, if this is the intended purpose of the rules, then *this* should be a convenient way around them that satisfies their intended purpose." And I'm thinking "No, no it doesn't, you're not that smart, just follow the rules."
Every now and then, they'd encounter a genuinely stupid rule, and I'd be torn about whether I ought to acknowledge "Yes, this rule is stupid, in a well thought out system, you would not have to follow it," and just pushing them to follow it anyway, because 90% of the time, when they *thought* a rule was stupid, it actually wasn't, and they just weren't as smart as whoever came up with the rule, and they couldn't actually tell the difference. And if I acknowledged that sometimes the rules were just badly thought out, they'd feel vindicated in applying their own judgment to deciding whether to follow them or not, and their judgment was usually worse than that of the people coming up with the rules.
Some uncommonly clever students are genuinely smarter than the average person coming up with the rules, sometimes even enough so to bridge the gap in experience of having been on both sides of the situation. But most aren't, and not being smart enough to be able to understand the real intention behind the rule *feels* like being able to tell that it's stupid.
The laptop class can do pretty well online, but the lower half seems to benefit from going to an organized place everyday and having middle class grown-ups talk at them.
I work with kids myself, but I have no sympathy for the notion of "Follow the rules without questioning them". Conventional schools are built upon mountains of stupid rules. The very idea of "Everybody needs to learn the same thing at the same time" is stupid.
In Sudbury Schools, kids are trusted to make the rules themselves. It works out great.
This was an inner city school. Compared to the ones I attended, general levels of order and rule-following were completely different.
I started out with an attitude of "surely these kids will respond positively to being respected and taken seriously enough that I never just fall back on 'because I said so,' and always explain why the rules matter, and only expect them to follow ones that do." And I quickly discovered this was unworkable. Depending on the sort of environment you're teaching in, maintaining a classroom becomes completely different sorts of propositions.
I remember in third grade that boys were not allowed to wear hats inside the cafeteria but girls were. Maybe there was a good reason for it but the basic unfairness of it never let me forget it.
Were there any rules girls had to follow that boys didn't? (No pants or tank tops allowed, shorts/skirt length monitored, etc.--I don't know how old you are & if this was a school with uniforms or not.)
Some kids struggle even with the sensible rules, though.
Like "don't smoke cigarettes"was both a school rule and a really sensible idea (don't wreck your lungs and give yourself an expensive addiction!), but probably a third of my year decided to disobey it anyway... and this was at an academically selective school where everybody was theoretically smart.
That's too abstract for most children. Their reasoning is rather: "well plenty of respectable adults around me do it, so clearly it can't be that bad, and they forbid it to me out of petty tyranny".
I think you are right with this update here. I believe it is due to the different "standard" communication styles. Men tend to be more direct and women indirect and boys will respond more compliantly to direct comms, IMO.
I was briefly a Junior High School science teacher (which turned out to be pretty horrible experience). Of course this was the late 1980s and things may have changed substantially in thirty years. I taught in a wealthy upper-middle-class town, and the school district had one of the best reputations in the state. But the principal and the vice principals were men (the VPs were ex-coaches). As a junior teacher, I got no assistance from them to help me enforce discipline. A group of boys were out of control. My number was listed, and it escalated mid year when I started getting death threats left on my answering machine. One day in class one of my punk students asked, "What if we came to your house and beat you up." Lots of laughter from the punks. Without thinking, I said, "You'd have to deal with me, my gun, and my dog." Next day I was called into a disciplinary hearing. I was smart enough to call my union rep. I brought my tape of the death threats. The rep blew his stack that they weren't doing anything to protect me from this harassment. Administration was embarrassed. I had already done some research and discovered that it was a Class A misdemeanor in my state to make death threats over the phone (one year in prison, with a substantial fine). I had identified the perps because one of the voices in the background said "Shut up, Josh!" I only had one Josh in my classes, and when confronted, he gave up the rest of kids involved (including the one who had threatened me in my class). I had the pleasure of calling each of the parents and reading them the riot act (making it clear they they would be liable for their kids' behavior). And I had perfect discipline from them the rest of the year. My contract was not renewed, though, which was for the best in retrospect.
But the male administrators mostly didn't want to touch discipline with a ten-foot pole.
I don't know if "struggle to obey" is the right framing. They choose to disobey.
Sometimes this is a straight-up cost-begefut calculation. But sometimes it's about the social value of being seen by your peers as brave enough to not submit to authority.
Submitting to the authority of a woman is more shameful than submitting to the authority of a man. A woman needs to actually be fair or likable to make teenage boys obey her, whereas a man can just be intimidating.
> "In my experience, there are more boys out on the tails for poor rule following, whoever is enforcing them"
Sure, there's always going to be a minority of the human population that really can't be socialised, and they're mostly men (partly because of general personality differences and partly because of higher male variability.) The question is whether the other ~90% of boys could be better-socialised with different instructors and gender norms that aren't built on blank-slate idiocy.
Do you know *how* the military historically inculcated obedience the authority in men?
Psychological and physical abuse, summary executions, and the promise of rape and plunder.
Even in modern professional armies, boot camp is about psychologically breaking the recruits to compel discipline and adherence to orders. And those are people who signed up to be there.
I don't think this is quite right, though I'm not sure about Army/USMC boot camp, however, UNS and Air Force have very little in boot camp learning to shoot. You carry a rifle, manly for weight and to learn attention to detail, but there was maybe an hour of shooting. Boot Camp is to shed the old life you had before and become part of the [branch of military] Team. It's bonding through shared adversity, and a lot of other stuff, but too early to focus on killing the enemy. That mostly comes later in "Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) was my understanding from my Army buddies.
Disagree--boot is about adjusting to a new way of life and a new identity, part of which is following orders without question. You cannot "train" people to kill. They have to be indoctrinated. Read Lt. Col David Grossman's "On Killing," a study of how armies get their soldiers to kill. Grossman observes that the ability to kill with relative impunity is not an instinct common to most people.
I'm not saying the military is completely wonderful, and I personally would never function well in it, but I'm saying that this particular path of having to prove oneself as a man is what we need to figure out today.
Are you basing your opinion on being in the military, or on movies? That is not how the US Army operates today. Maybe the Marines. Maybe also ancient Sparta.
Rangers, Airborne, and Special Forces have brutal boot camps, but their intent is not to break spirits, but to cull the weak and to /strengthen/ the spirit of those who make it through. I've never heard anyone who went through any of those training programs speak of them as breaking spirits, but as inspiring and confidence-building.
I looked into the military records of Sparta and Athens, because it seemed implausible to me that Sparta could be a great military force while training its soldiers to be stupid and obedient like horses. And, surprise, Athens had a much better win/loss ratio than Sparta. Sparta lost most of its battles, and most of its battles with Athens; and it usually lost them because their soldiers or officers did something stupid, or because they didn't learn things from their losses because they /didn't write them down/. It took the Spartans 200 years and 3 major Athenians victories just to learn to have some people with ranged weapons.
They only seem to have had one good military commander in their entire history.
"The notoriously grueling Navy SEAL selection course grew so tough in recent years that to attempt it became dangerous, even deadly. With little oversight, instructors pushed their classes to exhaustion. Students began dropping out in large numbers, or turning to illegal drugs to try to keep up.
Unprepared medical personnel often failed to step in when needed. And when the graduation rates plummeted, the commander in charge at the time blamed students, saying that the current generation was too soft."
I would hazard a guess that some of the people who went through all that had their spirits broken. Though granted this is not how the program is supposed to function.
> And, surprise, Athens had a much better win/loss ratio than Sparta
That was a really unconvincing piece, from a usually great blogger. I suspect for the usual politics-is-the-mindkiller reasons. Assumes ancient sources are entirely accurate when it suits him, and then tries to handwave away the fact that the ancient sources all state that the 5th century BC Spartans were extremely good at fighting. Conflates the Spartan record from their (lengthy) heyday with later military losses from a period when no one has ever claimed they were exceptionally competent. Argues that somehow he, based on the very limited evidence that has survived, has managed to penetrate the illusion of Spartan military strength that had fooled the authors responsible for all of the evidence he relies on, and the ancient world in general.
The Spartans were good at fighting. Trying to argue otherwise, in what seems to be an attempt to own your political enemies in the current day, is odd.
The point of military discipline is not that punishment is harsh but that punishment is certain.
In boot camp you learn to do what you're told under penalty of... well, of being shouted at. And potentially of being given an even more unpleasant order. If a recruit outright refuses to obey orders then it's not like they're allowed to shoot him -- the worst they can do is fire you, same as any other job.
But after living with certain punishment for all infractions for six weeks, doing what you're told becomes the default. A soldier who refuses to do what he's told does not gain any status with his peers the way a disobedient school student might.
I mostly agree with this, but it's not true that the worst thing they can do is fire you.
If you refuse to obey orders, they will "fire" you, but they won't do it right away. They'll heap a lot of other unpleasantness on you first, starting with recycling (repeating Basic), and moving on to weeks of what amounts to prison with hard labor. Refusing there will just extend it. Leaving to get away is the crime of desertion, and could potentially land you in real prison. And when you eventually get "fired", you might get away with an administrative discharge (that's definitely what you'll get if you just weather the weeks of informal confinement and labor), but if you pushed it you could end up with a less than honorable or dishonorable, which will impeded your civilian job opportunities.
They struggle with following the rules because the rules are enforced according to female norms. Boys do well with rules and structure as long as those rules and structure provide avenues for competition, are clearly defined such that "unwritten rules" are minimized, and allow for roughhousing slightly more violent than most women are comfortable with.
There's a reason unruly boys are rarely as disruptive and disrespectful toward their coaches as they are toward their teachers. And it's because sports discipline is still built around male social norms. Messing around means physical pain (push-ups, laps, etc ) and letting down your team. And there's plenty of opportunity to burn energy through some safe, structured violence.
My father likes to say that the most important part of our weekly boy scout meetings was the 45 minutes of unstructured sport where we would play things like full contact tackle football. It regularly resulted in scrapes, bruises, and heated arguments, and the occasional mom stopping by would be horrified, but this was a vital part of male bonding that most of us had been largely denied throughout the rest of our lives. Getting our energy out, engaging in good-spirited competition, learning to resolve disputes among ourselves, these were all extremely important aspects of growing up.
And then once we were done and had retucked our now-ripped shirts we immediately fell in line to do our military-style flag salute to beginbthe meeting proper. You can't get the discipline without also providing some kind of outlet for all that boy energy.
Thank you for saying this more eloquently than I would have. As far as I'm concerned numanumapompilius has provided the right answer. The idea that boys and men can't/don't follow rules is just plain wrong.
Watch them, they are extremely good at following the rules for sports/scouts/video games/shop class/the military/etc.
The rules they have trouble with are the kind that require sitting quietly and reading or writing WHILE IN A ROOM FULL OF PEERS! After all, being around peers and ignoring them is rather weird, where else do you find that? Sitting quietly and reading is something boys will do for hours on end, just not reading the school sanctioned material, they just read the comic books, mystery, sci-fi or whatever stories when their peers aren't available.
Similarly, I and many other boys I knew had no problem following rules and strict discipline under female instructors at a martial arts dojo. Or carrying it over into other parts of our lives, when testing for more advanced ranks included needing to get letters from our teachers confirming we were generally exhibiting the virtues they wanted us to have.
Agree--watching my lad play baseball or football, he never had problems playing by the rules, but then again, he sometimes tried to work the ref or the umpire!
> (some) boys struggle with rule-following in school
I really dislike that euphemism (or is it a metaphor?). It might make sense to say that a student struggles with long division, but there is no struggle involved in rule-breaking. A student chooses to flout rules, usually because he gains status with his
peers by doing so. And why is that behavior admired by the peer group? Perhaps because it demonstrates courage - a manly virtue..
Frankly, this is why I feel like things like Boy Scouts are a valuable and underappreciated organization. (I know they admit girls now as Scouting America, but troops are still gender segregated and it's still mostly boys)
It is a way that instills 'masculine values', with a sense of vaguely military-inspired discipline. Scoutmasters (at least if you have a good one) can act as good male role-models. It has a sense of proving themselves and rites of passage (rising in the ranks, especially reaching Eagle Scout). Scout campouts are places where horseplay and just messing around in the woods can happen.
But it also directs these masculine values towards socially good things like community service
100% the erosion of boys-only spaces is a massive shame in my opinion. Before getting into sports in high school, boy scouts was basically the one "safe space" we had to be boys without the judgement of women. The one place where the rules and vibes felt like they were built specifically for us, as opposed to the incredibly feminine norms at school (no running, no hitting, direct competition discouraged). We were able to burn off energy playing capture the flag, football, or sometimes literally just fighting/wrestling, almost completely unsupervised, then were ready to learn valuable life skills and develop civic-mindedness. And the highly structured progression, built around concepts of self-improvement and requiring the seeking out of older male mentors (the only way to earn merit badges was to look up a local person certified as a counselor for that badge and prove to them, to whatever their personal standard was, your mastery of the subject) provided a wonderful road map to manhood, to borrow a phrase from the review.
I very much resent this view that everything good and fun and exciting is thought of as a "masculine trait" and everything boring is thought of as a "female trait." As a young girl, I would have very much loved to have been able to run, rough-house, fight/wrestle, and do all of the supposedly "male" things but I was also not given the opportunity. Why do people think there's anything "feminine" about forced to sit still for 8 hours a day and not be allowed to run or talk? Schools don't allow rough-housing for liability reasons, not because they're trying to make anyone "feminine." People in general just tend to associate everything positive to men and everything negative to women.
And not all boys like "boy-coded" activities like fighting and competition either. If I had to guess, maybe 55% of boys and 45% of girls are into that stuff. If you go by what people say online, you would think that 99% of men like to spend their time punching each other like violent chimps and 99% of women like to sit still all day and graze on grass like a bunch of mentally deficient rabbits.
The issue is that the majority of women/girls don't find these things acceptable and clamp down on them. Disapproval of 'tomboys' also tends to come from women. I think that you are wildly off with your percentages, where it is more like 5/95 or 10/90 for women. Note that I'm not merely talking about girls/women enjoying these things at a much lesser level of intensity, but truly at a similar level (aka tomboy).
And of course, boy scouts or such is not a mandatory thing to do. What people are asking for is to simply have it as an option.
We're gonna have to agree to disagree. I think there's absolutely no way it's 5-10% of women. I think you have also fallen into the societal programming that makes you view all women as stupid/vapid/boring.
And sure, make hiking an option, but for girls as well as boys.
I remember Cub Scouts being a nightmare of bullying, and when we were out on hikes with the Boy Scouts, the Scout Master was a bullying asshole and he made his senior Scouts into little martinets. After one year as a Cub Scout, I never went back. Scouting taught me to *disrespect* authority at an early age. Later, I discovered that Scouting is predominantly run by LDS, and I realized that the bullying is probably a reflection the Mormon patriarchal worldview. Anyway, I didn't let my stepson join Cub Scouts.
I had a very similar experience as a Cub Scout\Webelo, and was hopeful that our local den would be a better experience for my son. The very first day we attended our first meeting, a group of boys tried to "vote my son out" of the group, and I had to use every ounce of emotional reserve to not deck the Scout leader who allowed it to happen. Scouting sucks
I have plenty of problems with Boy Scouts of America, but my experience was drastically different that yours.
The LDS church did sponsor a large number of scout troops, but unless you were involved specifically with an LDS troop, it would be quite unfair to blame them for your troop's poor behavior. The LDS church never sponsored a majority of BSA troops, and the leadership of the national organization was a corporation, not the church.
I have never even heard of a boy scout troop (usually 12-18 year olds) that took cub scouts (usually 8-11 year olds) out on hikes. My troop, and every one I've ever heard of, was age segregated. I was in an LDS troop that had almost none of the problems you experienced.
The LDS church also got out of scouting 6 or 7 years ago, so I didn't have my son in scouting. I can't speak to its current incarnation.
I was a scout in the Northeast and this is the first time I've heard about there being a relationship to LDS. There was definitely some Christian elements (like meeting in churches) but religion was never a focus and when it did come up was always pointedly non-denominational.
> I realized that the bullying is probably a reflection the Mormon patriarchal worldview.
I'm always surprised at the venomousness and frequency with which people bring up Mormonism. I don't know enough to call you out for this specifically, more of a general comment. There seems to be a large amount of reflexive bias that usually comes in the form of pithy one-liners devoid of substance. It's even odder when it comes from people who otherwise consider themselves open minded and pro-diversity (again a general comment, not directed at you specifically).
As an adult, I've always found the LDS members to be helpful and friendly to Gentiles. But having friends who left the Church, they've told me darker stories about ultra-strict, bordering on abusive, upbringings. That's not to say that this is standard for LDS upbringing. These may have just happened to raised in LDS families who were ultra-abusive. But after hearing about the LDS involvement in Scouting and my own experiences with Scouting, I put two and two together. However, I may be jumping to conclusions. But maybe not...
There was that Oregon trial (Lewis v. BSA) that awarded millions in punitive damages and forced the release of the so-called Perversion Files (filled with cases of sexual sexual abuse against minors that the BSA kept secret). That in turn opened the floodgates. And 82,000 abuse claims ultimately forced the BSA into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. I guess I got off lucky. I only got punched. I wasn't raped. But my uncle, who was bisexual, said he and a couple of other boys had sexual relations with his Scout Master. He said it was consensual on his part, but he was underage when it happened.
I'd say you got rather unlucky, not lucky. Others got even more unlucky than you, unfortunately, but I don't think their experience or yours is or was the norm.
I think it depends a great deal on the local pack and leaders. My kids loved cub scouts, my two boys went on to boy scouts, and my daughter would have (she went to most of her brothers' events) if they'd been letting girls in yet.
And LDS never “predominately [ran]” scouting. They comprised at most 20% of members. Even at its height there was zero to minimal LDS presence in the vast majority of councils.
You should have much better evidence than 2 scout leaders (who probably weren’t even LDS) enabling bullying before associating bullying with LDS.
But every LDS ward sponsored a scouting troop. Even though the total LDS-sponsored troops topped out at 20%, the LDS had substantial input into the leadership of the BSA, with LDS church members having disproportionate sway over BSA policies, which was why gay scoutmasters and gay scouts became such a hot-button issue in the 10s.
I agree that Boy Scouts is great. It definitely helped me. The ethos of thinking about how dangerous everything could be and making plans for how to handle the possible danger appealed to my adolescent self, and was probably very good for me.
Boy Scouts is an example though of how this isn't just, or maybe even primarily, a problem of bad people taking away the good institutions that could help boys learn how to be men. There's a general problem in society of good institutions being outcompeted by video games, streaming video, and such.
We had a cub scout pack and By Scout troop that helped my older son a lot.
The program ended up destroyed when we got a new jerk-ass Scoutmaster who deliberately and blatantly sabotaged the program, uninviting my younger son and then, unable to do any more subtle damage, took a handful of Boy Scouts to another troop and announced by himself to the sponsor organization that the troop was over.
I would agree a lack of plentiful (and healthy) male mentors is a large part of the issue.
Without plenty of healthy male role models and mentors, it's very easy for some manosphere creep to convince a fifteen-year-old that getting a woman requires becoming some form of predator.
With more male mentors, it would be easy for boys to see that "being a man" has many definitions, and there are many paths available to becoming an attractive and self-actualized individual.
The character was the father in "The Goode Family", an animated sitcom from the creator of King of the Hill about a liberal California family. The show only lasted one season.
I think what qualities attract women varies a lot. Personally, I'm attracted to warm and gentle men, so I likely would have found that "pussy" character highly attractive. Other women are more attracted to men who are in-your-face masculine, and that's a perfectly legitimate preference as well.
I think this is why it's so important to have many male role models who can model different types of manhood, but reassure boys that all of them are valid expressions of "being a man." Feminists have offered girls similar messaging: a stay-at-home mom is just as valid of a woman as a childless CEO. I think it's time that men cohesively share similar messaging to boys.
I've certainly encountered these types, but I think their sway has waned over the past couple years. I also find them to generally be very young (and thus not understand the amount of skill/sacrifice/effort that goes into being a stay-at-home mom) or deeply mentally ill (to the point where anger and extreme opinions seem to be the only output from their brain.)
These types of feminists certainly exist, and certainly you can find bubbles of them. But I'm pretty sure the average American woman who describes herself as a feminist does *not* have disdain for stay-at-home moms.
I simply *adore* Hiccup and agree that he's an excellent model of healthy masculinity! He's naturally very nerdy, but he's also a typical teen boy who wants to be respected and protect his people. Yet he approaches this from a compassionate, thoughtful manner, and uses empathy and communication to accomplish things raw aggression can't. He ends up being a strong leader not because he's the physically strongest, but because he's the smartest and most thoughtful.
I know several of my nerdy, male engineer friends really relate to him as a character, and have bemoaned being too old to have grown up with Hiccup as a role model. I really hope we continue to see more figures like him in media. :)
Unfortunately, men who want to mentor children are often treated with suspicion. A lot of people just assume that you're a child predator. Every act of kindness can be reinterpreted as "grooming", even if you did nothing wrong.
Of course there are actual predators out there, but it's exhausting being judged just because I happen to be the same gender as some other people who committed horrible crimes.
And this gets back to the idea that the genders are biologically different, by the way. If you promote the idea that testosterone seriously impacts behavior, many people will say "Exactly! That's why most rapists are male and why most pedophiles are male. The only way to protect our kids from pedophiles is to make sure they never have any contact with men"
So I feel like the "Boys need male mentors" part of the argument tends to collide against the "Men are biologically different" part of the argument.
I see your point here, but I would argue this is exactly why we need more nuanced, detailed maps for the various ways to self-actualize as a man.
Right now, the detailed maps available are more conservative ones, which usually emphasize a man's physical strength and authority. If this is the main image people have of a man ("physically dangerous and wanting control"), they're indeed going to shy away from a man being around vulnerable individuals.
If we offer updated maps, where the impacts of testosterone are gracefully acknowledged, but concrete steps are given for channeling it into productive endeavors (ie: sports, political activism, self-defense, speech and debate, etc.), and the idea that "valuable men aren't openly aggressive" is strongly communicated, then the idea of a man with testosterone is no longer inherently a sketchy one.
But I do agree these conversations need to be done carefully, and with compassion and nuance.
What would your proposed map say about men with regards to pedophilia?
Would it say "Testosterone has nothing to do with pedophilia, and those who think that most pedophiles are men are working with biased information, as there are many female pedophiles who simply never get caught"?
Or would it say "Testosterone tends to make people into pedophiles unless they're active in sports, political activism, self-defense, speech and debate etc., in which case pedophilia doesn't develop?"
Why would it need to say anything beyond “a self-actualized man doesn’t diddle kids?” It’s normative.
Correlation is not causation, either, and I think you should bring more evidence if you want to say testosterone “tends” towards anything. There are quite a number of men who fit none of your activities, but didn’t “tend” towards pedophilia.
I say that "rule following and socialization" are not "female traits," they are *human* traits that are absolutely necessary to have any kind of society larger and more complex than a sub-Dunbar-number hunter-gatherer band.
Are you implying that to be male is to be an antisocial rule-breaker? Because if so, that's the problem right there.
And lest you think I'm just writing from some man-hating woke perspective: at the dojo where I practice, the men are very much into rule following and socialization: like, follow the traditional rituals (e.g., bow when entering and leaving the dojo; don't wear shoes in the dojo), listen respectfully to the leader, respect your fellow karateka, don't lash out in anger, etc. Doesn't make them any less manly!
i'm saying that men and boys pan a wider range than female traits, with men more likely to appear at both ends of the spectrum in IQ, independence, rebelliousness, ingenuity, and other characteristics.
Schools under female principal, and female teachers, are much too conformist for a lot of boys.
Schools didn't used to be this extreme towards "girl rules", but they're much worse now with standardized testing and everything. That's why so many boys "need medication."
> Schools under female principal, and female teachers, are much too conformist for a lot of boys.
Seems like conformity is exactly what you'd want for boys if they have a wider range of behaviors. That's what military schools are all about. Do you have any data to support this statement? Or is it based on your opinion?
That would actually be a really neat data point - does the "kill it on standardized testing but have abysmal grades" demographic skew male? If standardized testing codes masculine and good grades feminine that'd make a lot of sense.
You don't need to conform to anything to do well on a "show up, be awesome on your own merits, leave" day. I loved FCAT week back in the day for that.
afaik there is quite a number of data on boys doing better in standardized testing than their grades would predict. In MRA circles it's usually interpreted as female teachers rewarding good behavior by grading
Some rules are necessary for super-Dunbar social groups, but *which* rules are up for grabs and must be continually renegotiated. Some rules were arbitrary from the start and some become obsolete*: challenging those is an extremely valuable service to society.
I believe the individualism/socialization ratio is exactly the opposite of what many comments suggest. On average, women are better individualized—that is, they are more intelligent, talented, conscientious, graceful, intuitive, etc.—than men. By contrast, men are generally more skilled at forming strong communities whose power is greater than the sum of their individual members. Thus, women are on average superior as individuals, whereas men generally form superior communities.
Human beings, as a species, tend to solve their problems socially rather than individually. The difference between men’s and women’s abilities to form strong communities explains the power gap between men and women, observable throughout all historical periods. For example, in antiquity the Germanic barbarians were regarded with a certain disdain by the Romans because they integrated women into their armed forces. But—and this is very important—the integration of women did not make barbarian armies less courageous or less effective in hand-to-hand combat. On the contrary, the barbarian armies that included women were more aggressive and more ferocious. The difference lay in discipline. The Roman army, being more disciplined (i.e., more masculine), generally succeeded in defeating the (feminized) barbarian armies thanks to its superior group strength.
Returning to the present day: women, being on average superior individuals, thrive in Western-style meritocratic societies. These societies have largely passed their dynamic phase of development and are now in a static phase of inevitable, though (apparently) well-managed, decline. In this phase, male communities, being potentially very powerful, are (rightly) regarded as a danger rather than an opportunity. For this reason, the destruction—or at least the prevention of the development—of male communities constitutes an essential condition for the stability of these societies. A secondary effect of this destruction is the poor condition in which individual men find themselves. This, however, is not a pathology that must be cured, but rather the price of social stability in contemporary Western societies, and at the same time a symptom of the fact that these societies are in decline (just as, for example, the proliferation of women in positions of power in the fifth century was a symptom of the decline of the Roman Empire).
Might want to attribute that observation to Chuck Palahniuk, as it's like the second or third most famous quote from Fight Club, and pointedly underlined in both the novel and the film adaptation.
> Men had to compete and win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal.
What about the men who didn't win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal? This is a pretty bizarre statement on the face of it. I don't know what you're claiming as "rites of passage," but there are lots of studies that show that violent teen males have significantly higher rates of criminal behaviors, including rape, as adults.
Historically, men always have performed rites of passage. I mean, it’s kind of obvious.
Men who become adolescents are expected to perform and prove their manhood.
Because once a man grows up, he has in society’s eyes very little value, unless he can do something, and become something.
A woman can have babies, but a man must be something and do something.
I’m not making this up, it’s just how it is.
Anyway, to skeptics, here’s a partial list:
Sparta (Ancient Greece): Boys endured agoge training and had to survive alone in the wild.
Rome: At around 15, a (free, not slave) boy exchanged his childhood toga for the toga virilis, symbolizing full legal adulthood and readiness for civic and military duty.
Maasai (Kenya/Tanzania): Adolescent boys underwent circumcision without showing pain, then lived as warriors (moran) before marrying.
Xhosa (South Africa): Teenage boys were circumcised and sent into seclusion, returning as men after healing and ritual instruction.
Australian Aboriginals: Youths were circumcised, scarified, and sent on a solitary walkabout in the wilderness to connect with ancestral spirits.
Native American Plains Tribes: Boys fasted and isolated themselves on a vision quest until they received a guiding dream or spirit.
Norse/Viking Culture: Young men proved manhood by leaving home to raid, trade, or fight, earning weapons and reputation through danger.
Medieval Europe (Knighthood): A squire kept vigil overnight in a chapel, then was armed and sworn to vows of loyalty before becoming a knight.
Judaism (Bar Mitzvah): At age 13, boys read from the Torah, becoming religiously responsible for Jewish law and community obligations.
Modern Israel: Mandatory military service at 18 functions as a national rite of passage, demanding discipline, endurance, and adult responsibility.
Number 10 is probably why Israelis are so tough.
If you've noticed the Israeli men, don’t they seem kind of tough and masculine to you—they sure do to me.
Maybe that's the reason... They've gone through that rite of passage.
OK. I assumed you were talking about 20th and 21st Century America. I had no rites of passage growing up in 60s and 70s. What's changed since then? The vast majority of elementary school teachers were female back then, and they're still the majority today. There was a smaller percentage of females teaching high school in my day, but they were still the majority. I assume this hasn't changed. AFAICT, nothing has really changed in 50 years except young men are whining about how they can't get a date now. Back in pre-Internet days (late 80s? early 90s), I read a survey that it took the average male about 10 tries to get a date. (which probably explained why women felt they were being pestered all the time). Some men and women were better at hooking up than the average, though. It was the classic 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of dating pool (men or women) were gettin 80 percent of the hookups.
Anyway, I don't see that there's been a feminization of role models in the past half century (at least!), but we've either got a lot more men having trouble figuring out how to get a date—or they're whining more. ;-)
What's changed since the 60s and 70s? Wouldn't you say it's probably the role of religion in society? Staying together because divorce was Bad was, as we hear, very unpleasant for some couples, but it did make it more likely for boys to be raised by a man as well as a woman. Now that "staying together for the kids" is routinely mocked and condemned as pathetic and counterproductive, all bets are off in that regard.
On a completely different note, I really wouldn't call it "whining" if I were you. Have some compassion. Full disclosure, I have no dog in this fight, I'm a 44-yr-old happily married woman, but even I can tell some of these people are in serious pain. And I recall from my own experience that deep loneliness IS serious pain.
Religion can’t be the explanation. Other societies have gone full militant-atheist without following a comparable trajectory.
I’d pick the transition to a service economy and the changing market for labor. I have not fully absorbed stats like [these](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/goldin_cehus.pdf), but it used to be more viable to feed a family via BRUTE STRENGTH.
what society did ever go full-militant atheist except ours? If you mean some scandinavian countries it's not really different society from ours, american pop-culture has spread like a virus since the end of the WW2. I'm Central Europeanand still given the proliferation of it I consider Americans living in the same society just under the government that's far less coddling
I know that's a popular idea, but does anyone have the data to support that thesis? And are you claiming the courtship patterns of teenagers depend on their playground socialization as toddlers and pre-adolescents?
There are a lot of other changes! for example, dating with co-workers was completely fine and expected. Flirting, welcome or not, were more accepted, at worst taken as a bad joke.
This matches my experience. Raised by a mother, taught by teachers and tutors who were all women, "socialized" by many girlfriends who became my closest social circle for years at a time. Desperately craving older male role models my whole life, I would always attach myself to the smallest trickle of "older more experienced cool guy who can teach me about what it's like to be a man". My few guy friends also in the same situation, it's the blind leading the blind, soft, passive men looking around for answers.
Had to figure out "masculinity" from books, movies, Youtube, podcasts, as the article mentions. Skeptical I've gotten any closer, it all feels like a pantomime.
None of this seems adequately justified. Some of it is clearly false (many rites of passage were monogender but many others were not). I call bullshit.
Yes. Although I was brought up in an intact family, my da was working his ass off, so all my dating problems came from me trying to be mama's good boi.
It still exists in western societies, even if it's under active attack. It happen with your peer, your male friends of roughly the same age, during college or even before, at school or in your neighborhood (depending where your main circle of friends is), could even be online nowadays....I don't think the dynamic of male hierarchy building has changed that much since Paleolithic, apart from being less violent on most cases (not all cases - depend on country, social class and neighborhood... It may be exactly the same, with guns instead of spears).
There are 2 main differences: adults are involved less, and when they are, they are trying to oppose the process (partly because educators are mostly women, but trained men will usually not do better - Western society has just lost all sanity regarding expectations for adolescent males interests and behavior). Even out of school, helicopter parenting is delaying the process and/or make it happen online... In a sense, it's not that strange: groups of young men are a problem for all structured societies. But the rules of passages were tackling the issue by (trying to) channel the natural tendencies. Modern western society try to build a dam and pretend the natural tendencies do not exists... It doesn't work, and worse: at one point the dam will burst. It already has started to, with consequences much more serious than dating difficulties. Trump for example...
My following anecdata is somewhat besides the point of this review since I am neither from or in the US, let alone Bay Area. I am definitely a Man Who Opts Out though, except more lucky on the physical attractiveness side, but also more dysfunctional at life in general.
I do not feel at all that the problem in my formative years was being raised by a woman. I was raised mostly by both my parents (somewhat more by my mom than by my dad due to their career paths), and secondarily by my grandparents, and by mostly but not entirely female teachers and school staff. I think this is very normal compared to both present and past generations.
I think the one gender-related problem of my formative (teenage) years was the *lack of female peers* due to no sisters, and junior high and high school at one of the few boys-only catholic schools in the country followed by studying in male-dominated fields. That made me miss miss opportunities to practice socializing with girls (romantically or not), and on some level conceive them for many years as fundamentally foreign; rare and distant at best, dangerous at worst.
Add to that, on the personal side: inclinations toward neuroticism and passivity; on the society-wide side: dating being naturally an uphill battle for men plus all the discourses that can lead a neurotic person into self-hate, including but not limited to toxic feminism; and you get 32 years old virgin me.
That was an admirable review. Thanks a lot to the author.
Reminder that the term "toxic masculinity" was coined by a men's movement in the 80's (the mythopoetic men's movement), not feminism.
Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad? Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing. Going to literally die in a war is not optimal, it's better to protest or donate money. I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people. You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
I can see how these requirements might seem hard to navigate if you're autistic or prone to extremely literal thinking tho, which many people in the Bay Area programming circles probably are.
A lot of this also seems so... American? It's like Americans feel the need to have some Grand Goals and a Purpose and Values, otherwise they feel like shit. Probably disproportionately men. But not everywhere is like this. I've felt the difference, from the US vs Scandinavia.
Also the idea that the patriarchy / sexism hurts men too is not, as the author seems to think, some big revelation that challenges contemporary feminism. It's a very common observation of feminist writers!
It does seem to be very common in higher-quality feminist discourse, but much less so in pop feminism where that part of feminist theory is often ignored completely or only given token acknowledgement.
Pop feminism is in the water supply, while more serious discourse tends to be something that one needs to seek out, so I understand how casual observers can just see the pop feminist memes and not realize the deeper theory is a thing.
Here’s an example that I think is high quality. I don’t know if it is explicitly feminist but I think it is aligned with left wing politics and actual modern gender studies:
I mean, it’s a podcast, it’s meant to be entertaining. I self-describe as a feminist and agree with the broad strokes etc.
I don’t know that there’s an official feminist handbook that says you can never jokingly use the words vagina or pussy to refer to women. Especially when it’s an obvious satire of someone else’s position.
Anything Ozy Brennan has ever written on the topic. Ozy's current blog is http://thingofthings.substack.com/ but most of the feminism-related writings were on older blogs written under the name Ozy Frantz during the heyday of online feminism in the late 00s and early 10s. The immediate predecessor to Ozy's substack was https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/ .
A lot of "the natural" has a tendency to be completely terrible. For example, dying of smallpox is very natural. And it's that kind of nature that Ozy wants to be supplanted - I think you might agree on more than you might expect.
I'd go so far as to say that scholarly feminism is basically a dog on a leash used to make pop feminism seem better and/or assuage an individual feminist's conscience when she starts to see what's going on.
Okay. If you want an idea of where I'm coming from, I'm a 25-year-old man who has faced a lot of hostility, has an English degree, and cares a lot about childrens' entertainment. I typed out a massive six-point response, but it was too long.
It boils down to this- the feminist ecosystem is best observed in terms of what it enables and endorses on the ground, meaning that the theory is the part in danger of being "not real feminism." Furthermore, the ecosystem's parts are best understood by the role they play in it. I have experience dealing with academic feminism in a university environment, as well as with pop feminism. Even beyond the previously mentioned roles, the former treads carefully around the latter, and doesn't really have any reach beyond it.
This is exactly the right observation to make. For determining what's true and good in the world, you may want to (privately) assess the strongest steelman/motte of an idea/ideology, or to look at how its best / most reasonable proponents defend it. At the same time, this does not prevent a very bad "bailey" version of the idea/ideology from getting all the power in the world - the power to actually "do things" outside of the tiny bubble of intellectuals writing long-form blog posts. And the version that actually affects you and the people/things you love - the "realman" - is probably more salient than a good version that, for whatever reasons, is impotent in the wider world.
An unfortunate dynamic then arises where the sophisticated people (who like the motte idea and want it to win) end up unintentionally helping the bad bailey version of the idea flourish. The Good People write a sophisticated motte defence of X-ism, raising its status among reasonable people. Bad People then do something bad in the name of X-ism, and the Good People do everything they can to disavow it - "that's not real X-ism, they don't speak for us". But of course, the Bad People disagree - they *do* think they're the real X-ists and that the Good People are spineless dweebs. However, they're more than happy to take advantage of the status accorded to X-ism by the Good People to do Bad Things under its name with greater ease than they would if everybody agreed that they really were somehow the *true* embodiment of X-ism (and fought back).
The effect is that the Good People end up (unwittingly) prolonging the life of the Bad People's program by obstructing normal observers' predictive powers. When observers notice a pattern - that pushes for more X-ism in their daily lives (or really, anywhere outside of obscure blogs) tend to lead to bad things, and therefore that X-ism needs to be opposed/stopped, the more gullible among them will be persuaded that they somehow made a mistake of identification, and direct their energy against "bad X-ism" - which, I guess, is a much less effective Schelling point than fighting X-ism? For some reason I feel that this de-fangs what could have been effective pushback, and is a mistake.
I'm not sure that it's useful to debate what the "true" version of an idea is. I think the important thing is the version of the idea that actually ends up calling the shots in the world - if the actual consequences of the X-ism concept are bad, then it needs to be opposed under that name - while granting as a technicality that a decent motte version exists somewhere (yet of what relevance is that, when its promoters so consistently fail to make it win where it matters?)
It's a Diet Principle: a diet that only works under heavily-supervised lab conditions is of academic interest, it's not a good diet. Similarly, a meme that can't be trusted to do good things when it enters the general population has to be judged on that basis, not what the meme happens to do in the minds of extremely rigorous thinkers. I really think the two versions should be treated entirely separately, but the bad version should be opposed IRL under whatever name its promoters call it.
I recently sketched some intuitions for why this dynamic might happen: (https://beyondthesymmetry.substack.com/p/useful-idiot) and I was primarily motivated by my own disastrous experiences of feminism, consonant with the stories in the OP and many commenters (and the two Scotts).
I'm drawn to the cases where X-ism is without a formal leader and without formal membership criteria. Anyone can do anything and claim it under the banner of X-ism. Of course, this describes most memeplexes in today's media environment, so it's not a good outlook. (Does this idea prove too much? Does SSC/LW rationalism face the same eventual fate? Does it equally apply to right-coded ideologies as well as left-coded ones, or is there some asymmetry?)
In contrast, if e.g. a member of the US Army commits an atrocity, the Army can officially disavow it *and expel the person*. In this case, people can at least be assured that this was a member of an org going against the wishes of the org itself (which it then enforced). Of course, if members of the army seem to go on committing atrocities, with the same condemnation and expulsion, over and over again, then we might suspect that the army isn't much of a command organisation in the first place - it's not very good at enforcing its official rules on its members. Then, we would be justified in not trusting soldiers to abstain from atrocities, no matter how passionately the generals broadcast their opposition to atrocities.
My basic point is, a political umbrella like feminism or a big religious umbrella like Islam (or Christianity) is nothing like an army - nobody is in control - so we have to expect them to evolve according to their own weird laws, which might be in a reliably bad direction due to entropy or Darwinism or something. To be clear, I also think that e.g. Marxism-Leninism was very bad in its effects, but not for the same reasons of a condemnation/exploitation cycle (it had official leaders, orthodoxy, and party discipline, and it was clear whether someone was in favour or out of favour with that whole system - someone correct me if I'm wrong).
Your answer is interesting, but I want to push back on it.
Speaking of higher-quality feminist discourse, or even in some extent "real" feminism (but less so), isn’t a sort of motte and bailey strategy, and it is more normative than descriptive, it is a way to explicitly specify what we think to be the motte, or the bailey (when you need the ambiguity for a motte and bailey)
We can think of more "neutral" examples, like science and pseudo-science, or doing math, and superficially using the formalism to raise the social status of your completely invalid chain of deductions.
Would you dismiss the idea of science, if some (even if most) people do pseudo-science, and this have real negative impacts, and the pseudo-science theories are using the social status of "real"/"good" science to raise their own ?
Maybe, but I think it would be a mistake, because every good thing could be used to raise the social status of bad ones.
I think it is better say "this is science" and "this is pseudo-science", and try to create explicit criteria to differentiate both.
This is a really good counter-example that brings out a key part of the motte-and-bailey frame for feminism: individual vs group action. Science (and math) can be performed well or poorly at an individual level, and called out there ... and we've got much clearer/objective ways to describe good and bad performance.
x-isms, as social movements, are collective rather than individual. As this thread is discussing, there can be really ambiguous definition of good and bad performance - only a group, through ongoing training, can really push a particular definition forward. An individual performance is harder to call out in isolation.
Social movements are also less objective than the more "neutral" examples. I think socialism and communism are great examples and we should raise them here even more - the argument over whether "real" communism has ever ben implemented rather than just totalitarian pseudo-communism has been going since WWII at least, along with the argument about whether the distinction matters because of the bad effects of the bad implementations.
Generally, I think it is better to differentiate, and to call out good and bad performances of protocols, whether it's science or feminism. I try to do that myself. But with x-isms, we do have several definitional challenges that more objectively-defined protocols don't face.
"Patriarchy hurts men, too" ignores a lot of the problem. While it's true in some ways, it's also a way saying feminists don't have bother with ways that men are mistreated which don't fit into the patriarchy model.
Example of it being sort of true. It's possible that there are more wars because nations are mostly led by men. However, ending patriarchy (if it's possible) doesn't address men being abused by women.
The idea that contemporary feminism might be exhibiting a lot of that sexism is anathema to them, though. But it is - they are - and they deserve nothing but withering contempt for failing to humanize men.
It's justified by the usual articles of faith such as "there is no reverse sexism, sexism is privilege plus power" type of argument. I'm not clear if there's a way to deprogram people from that kind of belief system. Fortunately it seems like most regular folk don't believe that, it's a reasonably extreme, and often "terminally online" position, but one that gets a lot of the social media attention.
To me, the goal of feminism seems to be more about dehumanizing men. When you associate particularly bad behavior with the word “man,” such as in the case of manspreading, then this neologism serves to dehumanize men. Similarly, the false claim that we live in a patriarchy in which men somehow oppress, discriminate against, or exploit women can only lead to women forming negative opinions about men. And yon don't treat bad people well, so women are getting hostile towards men, which you can see on TikTok etc. where women celebrate themselves when they have ruined a random man's day or taken advantage of him. This dehumanization makes it possible for feminists to enforce discrimination against men, such as through women's quotas or DEI programs, because it is no longer considered immoral to treat these bad people, these men, badly.
This is not the goal of feminism, this is a perversion of it.
This is a real thing that happen, and it is quite bad, but it is far from general, and we should not let them take the name, just like we should not let pseudo-science take the name of science.
Dehumanizing men, being spiteful against men, abusing men, trying to hurt men in any way, isn't feminism.
We should gate keep what feminism really is, in the same way we should for science or math. Sure there will be disagreement on what it is and what it should be, but I am convinced the idea of dehumanizing men will completely lose the discourse when things are explicit.
"but it is far from general, and we should not let them take the name, just like we should not let pseudo-science take the name of science."
Really? Show me one text of a feminist, who wrote good about men. For every text written by feminists that says something positive about men, I can probably give you 100 or more texts by feminists where men are portrayed only negatively.
"Dehumanizing men, being spiteful against men, abusing men, trying to hurt men in any way, isn't feminism."
Really? Watch some videos about the history of feminism from Janice Fiamengo (she is an ex-feminist). Even the first feminist wrote texts about men where the protrayed men as genetic garbage or claim the same de-humanizing lies about men, which feminist still tell today. The claim that we live in patriarchy/a society that only discriminates against women is a core believe of feminism.
"We should gate keep what feminism really is" and "I am convinced the idea of dehumanizing men will completely lose the discourse when things are explicit"
Feminism was full of man-hating women since the begining and it indoctrinates one generation of young women after another, by repeaating all their lies again and again (a propganda method). I don't believe this will change and therefore I don't see why feminism should be "rescued". There is already humanism (which is also attacked by feminists because it does not prioritize women above everyone else), which fights for human rights and not for women's privileges and discrimination against men. But as already written, feminist want to change humanism into feminism and then men can't be discriminated against anymore (a claim, which is also a tool to dehumaize people. The Nazi's told this lie about jews).
> Really? Show me one text of a feminist, who wrote good about men. For every text written by feminists that says something positive about men, I can probably give you 100 or more texts by feminists where men are portrayed only negatively.
Maybe I am wrong, but yes really.
I saw a lot of feminism text discriminating against men, but also a lot trying to protect men and women (and I think this review is one of them).
Maybe we should just abandon the word, humanism is all good, but I think it would still be unfair to think anyone calling themselves a feminism is just being spiteful or unfair against men.
Yeah it did feel like it was responding to a caricature of "polite society" rather than actually engaging with what people believe. Which puts it in this weird middle ground because the people who write in sophisticated ways about gender would mostly agree, and the vast majority of median Americans have never even engaged with the question, and still uncritically stick to traditional gender roles. So not sure who it's aimed at.
The general acceptance of the patriarchy amazes me to this day. It's basically the same thing as the illuminati.
There's no test, nor end for it. There is no defined point from which we no longer live in a patriarchy or we don't live under patriarchal rules. As commented here and elsewhere, it is completely normal for a child to have a vast majority of female authority figures until or even after college. Still a patriarchy. The government can be 50/50, women may in general be better off than men, it doesn't seem to matter since as long as anything can be pointed out to possibly be a sign of patriarchy, that's all it takes. This includes the past itself having any of those signs.
Then, it's tautologically evil and omnipresent. There is seemingly not a thing that can't be blamed on the patriarchy. Crime? Well of course. War? Evidently. Beauty standards? The existence of purses? Climate change? If it can be considered a product of society in any way, it surely is a product of patriarchy since male standards rule society. The label of my water bottle being blue is surely a result of the patriarchy, and none can prove otherwise.
Now I don't intend to dismiss the whole concept altogether. It's definitely a healthy thing to consider a perspective and how it explains the world without having to buy into it, I can lean into capitalist thinking and go "Huh, so that's why the job market sucks right now" and I can lean into Christian thinking and go "Huh, maybe the world would be a better place with more piety", what gets me is that there seems to be an unending list of consequences and conclusions related to the concept of patriarchy that have barely anything to back them up at all, and this is in today's age widely expected to be accepted in many circles to such a degree that saying "I don't believe in the patriarchy" gets people to look at you as if you are crazy, even if nobody can give solid arguments on it.
At one point in time I pretty aggressively would hound people for a falsification of patriarchy in online discussions.
Literally half-a-dozen back-and-forths in which I would ask "what would a society without patriarchy look like?" over and over. The most comprehensible answer I got was basically "a society without any sort of gender role, which we will know because everything is split exactly 50/50" (meaning patriarchy is the inverse of that).
The most common responses were that patriarchy is either unfalsifiable, or just a stock vague list of things that disadvantage women.
It's just another face of Moloch. Capitalism, Fascism, Zionism, the Illuminati, Satan, Communism, White Supremacy, Jihadism, Racism, the list of great amorphous powers that can be used to explain all human problems goes on and on.
Also, I think capitalism and communism was a fight against Moloch.
Capitalism was a way to forbid a large class of direct violence and power, a large class which was used quite directly by Moloch.
But Moloch didn't need this direct access to violence, and capitalism was a fertile field for its own power.
Communism was a direct attempt against the power of Moloch inside the capitalist system, but it failed because it didn’t have strong defense against direct and social violence, and Moloch used it, to bring the worst at the top, and in most case, this push back against Moloch was corrupted by him.
Yeah, in my experience, "patriarchy hurts men too" is used by feminists in the sense of "men, stop hurting yourself", not in the sense of "traditional gender norms - quite often also enforced by women - hurt men too".
It is indeed a very common observation of serious feminist thinkers, but I've found there is a massive discrepancy between "serious feminist writers" and "mainstream feminism the average person encounters on a day-to-day basis." The former holds many gems regarding gender relations; the latter tends to be openly hostile toward men, and if it does acknowledge the pain that sexism causes men, it usually does so in a way that blames and shames men. The latter also tends to hold on to the mindset that "men need to quit whining until women solve their issues."
So, yes, you can point to feminist thinkers who bring thoughtful and compassionate nuance to the table. But those are *not* the voices the average young man is hearing, and hence why I didn't center this essay on those voices.
Hi anon writer - I loved this but felt it was two separate essays - one on the collapse of life maps for men, the other on the taxonomy of human unhappiness. Your ideal-type biographies are vivid and believable. But a lot of women have similar trajectories and feelings. And I don't think people were happier in the past. having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
Hey Jeremy, thanks so much for reading it! I would *firmly* agree that women face a lot of very similar challenges, and there's a lot of overlap in taxonomies.
However, I think both genders often face unique challenges from similar circumstances. For example, when my female friends struggle with social awkwardness and dating, I often encourage them to just try chatting with anyone they find attractive. "Just put yourself out there" and "practice makes perfect" is great advice for them.
For my male friends, it's very different: a socially awkward man chatting up any woman he finds attractive is a recipe for getting called a creep and being perceived as a threat, which only worsens their anxieties/insecurities. There is a much more intricate social dance that men must abide by when it comes to approaching a potential partner, and often times there are no healthy male role models available to teach that dance.
It's similar for situations like "I don't find my career fulfilling." This is a super common experience among both genders. However, if a woman leaves her 6-figure job in finance to become a pre-school teacher, there isn't a huge social penalty for this. Whereas for men, if their salary is suddenly cut by 70%, their romantic and even friendship potential is viewed as being very negatively impacted.
These sound like fairly minor things, but when you stack hundreds of these little things together, you end up with pretty different challenges and paths through life. And it's clear that right now men are struggling more than women to figure out healthy paths: American males are doing worse on pretty much every stat involving well-being, from education to incarceration to drug addition to suicide rates.
This is why I decided to tailor these taxonomies specifically to men: there may be lots of overlap with woman's issues, but the map to and from these issues tends to vary quite a bit.
> having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
I don't think I agree with this. Having a purpose and having a community are both strongly linked to happiness, and this connection has been shown by many large-scale studies over the years. Purpose and community may not *protect* you from feeling sadness and emptiness, but they will certainly mitigate the emotions and help you have the confidence/drive to pick yourself up and try again.
Thanks for responding. I concede your point about empirical evidence that community and (probably) uncontested life expectations promote happiness in today’s society, compared with the norm. But as a history professor, I am skeptical of our assumption people in the past were free of the sorrows we associate with modernity. My intuition, or prior, is that many people in dense organic community felt anomie and purposelessness like we do. Those people, born into strong communities today, drift out of them. The others, raised outside of strong communities, maybe drift into them, or thrive without them. (And likely aren’t dating!)
I mean, the specific, extreme personalities you document may not have appeared in anything like the sane form, earlier. (And of course, modern dating didn’t exist.) but in the past, those people may have started out strong in their communities and failed to launch, or to find fulfillment even when successful, and may have ended just as sad as today with similar feelings of being lost, alone in the crowd, etc.
in the past, many men and women did find themselves far from home, or isolated by the death of all their family, all alone in life, unable to rebuild human connection.
“For my male friends, it's very different: a socially awkward man chatting up any woman he finds attractive is a recipe for getting called a creep and being perceived as a threat, which only worsens their anxieties/insecurities.”
Without challenging the overall thesis that men are on average thriving less than women - is “get out there and meet people” actionable advice for women who are overweight, have a face perceived as ugly, or have a mood disorder? (In each of which, women are held to a higher standard than men.) My sense is that a large minority of women are deeply depressed and isolated, feel they have nothing to offer the world.
All this is in the spirit of commentary, not rebuttal. I got a lot out of your essay.
I've read someone's observation that "attractive woman" and "unattractive woman" might as well be different genders because of the different ways they get treated. My wife grew up obese and ended up with the same kinds of resentments and lack of sympathy for women complaining about unwanted attention as some men. Her reaction to Trump's "grab them by the pussy" line was something like "Hell yeah, I'd love it if someone rich and famous wanted to grab my pussy!"
At least the Red Tribe members among my in-laws gave up on Trump after Jan 6.
I'm not the writer of the review, and can't speak for what her commentary would be. But my impression is that there are some women for whom it's a genuine struggle to find anyone who wants or desires them, even when they put themselves forward, but that they're a lot fewer than the number of women who struggle with their self esteem and imagine themselves to be undesirable.
Several months ago, I made friends with a woman who thought herself to be undesirable and lacking any realistic relationship prospects. I thought that she was well within the range of ordinary appearance and relationship appeal, and that plenty of men would be likely to find her desirable as a partner, and I gave her some advice on how to put herself forward and filter for potential relationship partners.
Last I heard from her, a few weeks ago, she and her boyfriend were planning to move in together. They got together less than a month after I first started offering her advice.
All that is to say, I think there are women whose personal attributes leave them genuinely isolated and without good relationship prospects, but a lot of women who think "my personal attributes leave me without good relationship prospects" are mistaken.
I would definitely agree there's a large minority of women struggling with depression and isolation--there isn't enough written about them, and I wish more people would provide them with visibility and empathy. But I would still argue their predicament is fundamentally different.
In my experience of helping friends with dating, even a woman who is overweight and not conventionally attractive can usually land several dates on dating apps and get a certain degree of attention. For my male friends in this category, they can spend hours swiping and hundreds of dollars on "pro plans" on dating apps, and still only match with bots.
My guess is that some of this has to do with an unconscious linking of unattractive men/dangerous men. I think there's an unconscious bias toward believing that if a man is not "socially appealing," that must mean society distrusts them for a reason, and they may be dangerous. This adds an extra layer of struggle toward socializing--they're viewed not just as "ugly", but also as potentially dangerous, hence accusations of being a "creep" and such. Society just doesn't tend to fear women as much, so I think unattractive women aren't impacted to the same degree.
I've found a lot of my female friends who struggle with dating have realized that the biggest issue is that social media warped their idea of what an "ideal woman" looks like, and once they get over their insecurities, they actually have a good chance of finding someone. But for men, it just doesn't seem to be that easy.
So, yes, I have seen "get out there and meet people" actually work fairly well for my female friends who struggle with dating. But not so much for my male friends.
Of course this observation comes with the usual caveats of small sample size, anecdotal evidence, etc, etc.
> Whereas for men, if their salary is suddenly cut by 70%, their romantic and even friendship potential is viewed as being very negatively impacted. These sound like fairly minor things
Considering that you spend 8 hours a day at work, this alone does not seem like a minor thing to me. It is almost half of all the time you are awake.
On top of that (this may depend on country) where I live it is almost impossible for a man to find a part-time job. Even if half of his salary would be sufficient to feed the family.
My wife has a job that she chose freely, and she works part-time. I am happy for her; I just wish I could have the same thing. It almost feels as if we lived in different political regimes; she lives somewhere that is halfway to socialism, I work in a cutthroat capitalism.
Speaking as a middle-aged ex-feminist, I think your essay is one of the most powerful pieces I've read in a long, long time. I will re-Stack it gladly. Thank you for your empathy, depth and intellectual rigor.
You may be wondering why I identify as an "ex-feminist". Long story short: About 10 years ago I realized that the line I'd been taught by my very liberal upbringing and education--"The Patriarchy hurts men too and Feminism will help you"--was a lie.
1st point: "The Patriarchy" doesn't exist in Western society anymore. Not for quite a long time. Patriarchy has become some catch-all Bogeyman to explain away any undesirable behavior or outcome. Want to see a real patriarchy? Go to Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan. What we have is a liberal, post-Enlightenment society that legally recognizes all humans as equal (on paper, anyway). A real patriarchy would not be compatible with democracy. Why would those in power cede control to the unwashed masses, regardless of their gender?
2. Men, on average, in our society, are no more privileged than women are. What is so "privileged" about getting circumcised, being forced to sign up for Selective Service, or being expected to take on most of the dangerous jobs? I've never seen a feminist movement, let alone a feminist individual, address these points satisfactorily, besides snide comments like, "you GUYS created these problems so it's up to you to fix them." The only ones who are truly privileged are the very wealthy. The rest of us fight amongst ourselves over silly issues like pronoun usage instead of fighting the ruling class. This is not an accident.
3. Feminists ask us, practically demand, that we be "good allies." Ok, fine. We try to do that only to discover that they treat allyship as a one-way street. Since they're so "disadvantaged" they don't feel need to reciprocate one whit. (Present company excepted.) It's like Lucy pulling the football out from Linus every time.
4. (And most importantly) Any serious attempt at support for men, by men, is reflexively rejected by most feminists. As your piece points out, they see this as a zero-sum game. They not only lack empathy, they seem gleefully sadistic at the thought of us suffering for all the sins of our forefathers.
So I cannot support a movement that actively encourages hatred towards me because I have XY chromosomes. That would be masochistic. And for anyone reading this thinking, "No true feminist would think that!", I have a Scotsman to introduce you to.
> I've never seen a feminist movement, let alone a feminist individual, address these points satisfactorily, besides snide comments like, "you GUYS created these problems so it's up to you to fix them."
Fortunately, I have. Unfortunately there were also plenty of feminist assholes back in the heyday of Internet feminism - I gave up on reading Amanda Marcotte's blog for pretty much the reasons you cited.
I was also pretty active in feminist communities for quite some time, but I gradually distanced myself, and an experience I had about ten years back with my girlfriend at the time still sticks strongly in my memory when I think about why.
She used to browse feminist websites a lot on her phone during our time together, and would occasionally show me stuff she found funny or interesting. But the content of the sites made me uncomfortable, and I eventually told her that I didn't mind her browsing feminist websites while we were together so much, but it was uncomfortable for me how much of the content of those sites was misandrist in nature. She told me that she didn't think it was, but when I offered examples of the same sort of reasoning and rhetoric gender-flipped, and asked if she'd think that a site with that sort of content was misogynist, she immediately agreed that she would, and that she'd been failing to think of it in the same terms. When I asked her if she'd feel as at-home on sites without that sort of misandrist tone, she said "I don't think there are any."
I don't think she was right, that there were literally none. But it wasn't like she went out of her way to find communities which were hostile to men. She thought she was deliberately filtering out communities which were hostile, and only immersing herself in communities which were supportive and accepting of everyone. But when she broadened her view of what constituted hostility against men to the same sort of criteria that she'd apply when assessing for hostility against women, she genuinely couldn't think of any she was aware of which met those standards.
I still wear my feminist hat sometimes, and I think learning to analyze things through a feminist framework is genuinely valuable. But over time, feminist communities stopped being a place where I felt welcome, or like my contributions were valued. And that makes it hard to think of yourself as being a member of the community.
A trivial point, but it's nails-on-a-chalkboard to me: It wasn't Linus Lucy pulled the football away from, it was Charlie Brown. (43 times; this blogger helpfully collected them all: https://karnicky.blogspot.com/search/label/Lucy)
That may be true, IDK. But I don't think you really support the claim that the disaffection you say you see in men is at all caused by these un-nuanced feminist voices.
I certainly don't think un-nuanced feminist voices are the sole cause of all this disaffection. I *do* however think they've been a powerful force keeping sane, stable men from identifying the problem of floundering men and stepping forward to say, "Hey, I'm a proud man with a great life, these are the unique challenges I faced as a man, here's how I forged my own path, and maybe this path could be beneficial to you as well."
Many feminists have aggressively tried to shut down this type of dialogue, insisting it enforces gender roles. They instead preach that everyone should just "be a good person" and focus on a gender-agnostic identity. And to be clear--this is my ideal world. But it's an ideal that clashes with social and biological realities, and it's left many boys and men feeling deeply lost and disaffected.
So we're left with young men begging for direction tailored to their gender, and right now the only people willing to loudly and publicly respond to them are creeps within the manosphere (because these men have zero respect for feminists, and in fact benefit from their outrage.)
In my own experience, having female mentors and role-models who took a unique life path, discussed the unique challenges of being on that path as a woman, and provided a detailed map for other young women on that path was *absolutely vital* to me becoming a whole, stable, and happy person. I would be a horribly lost person without it.
The fact that many young men are deprived of that same type of mentorship, in the service of some unrealistic ideal of a gender-agnostic society, is frankly rather heart-breaking to me.
Even among serious feminists, I'm not sure the discussion is a productive one. For example, feminists criticize patriarchy for causing men to suppress their emotions, to their apparent detriment (though one could argue that stoicism is psychologically healthy!). But one could ask if it's patriarchy that causes this suppression, or else the apparently common tendency of women to be unattracted to men who express their emotions.
J.K. Rowling is an honorable exception, but the great majority of feminists got badly outsmarted by the small number of M to F transgenders. Feminists should have been serious enough to not fall for transgender ideology, but at least here in America, a huge number of them were shamefully fooled.
> The former holds many gems regarding gender relations; the latter tends to be openly hostile toward men
I strongly disagree that 'serious feminist writers' are not hostile towards men. I once made it my mission to find any non-sexist feminist, but no mainstream feminist has ever pointed me to a writer whose work was not horribly sexist (for example, bell hooks, De Beauvoir, Judith Butler).
The equity feminists are the closest to that, but no feminist ever suggested those writers as their inspiration, and they seem to be almost completely outside of the feminist 'machine,' like the women's studies departments.
"The patriarchy is bad for men, too" is an observation I've heard many times, but the application of this idea never seems to be towards fixing the sort of problems outlined here: it's never about reducing the sort of "men are pigs" sexist attitudes, or thinking about education reform to put boys on more equal footing, or anything of the sort.
Instead it seems to be used aa a sort of "trickle-down social justice" argument where the best thing that men can do for men is to be "allies" for women and minorities and be super embarrassed about their privilege and hyper-vigilant about avoiding anything that can be interpreted as "toxic masculinity". I agree with the authors point that social justice is not zero-sum, but I don't think it's so positive-sum that focusing on women's issues will just fix men's issues, too.
Maybe this does not reflect feminist discourse at its highest levels: maybe high-level feminist discourse is full of concrete suggestions for improving mens lives... but it's not the sort of discourse I've seen 'in the water'.
It's an interesting point. With physical jobs becoming mostly economically irrelevant, male-on-female violence dramatically reduced in the first world middle-class-and-up layers of society, and with economic parity of the sexes, are there any advantages left for men? Even asking this feels heretical.
You mean the majority of congress and every president who's ever lived?
>HR Karens will fire you for not toeing the company line, and then have an affair with the CEO
But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line.
Look, I agree that the term "patriarchy" has been abused. It's often used to imply that just because congress is mostly male that means that every man everywhere is privileged, and that's just not true. But "gynocracy" is nonsensical.
Are you perhaps discussing a group of "midlevel managers" who are markedly different from "managers" more generally? If so, please cite your source.
>If you want to know what the future looks like, imagine a fat 50 year old childless cat lady barely able to rise from her office chair saying "that's against policy," forever. No space for agentic people in the realm of paperwork.
While I agree that bureaucracy is often stifling, I don't think that women bear any more of the blame than men. And I object to your casual disregard for fat people, 50 year old people, people without children and people who have cats.
On the subject of bureaucracy, the book "Bullshit Jobs" has useful insights from an anthropologist. But he didn't mention anything about women bearing any special blame for the mess we're in, and I trust him more than you.
"But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line. But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line."
Yes, but the board outranks the CEO, and can fire *him* for generating bad PR, or discontent among the other employees, or (even if only in their minds) opening the company up to the possibility of discrimination lawsuits, which are much less likely to happen or succeed when the discrimination is against men. Being CEO doesn't put you above corporate political games, it makes you the center of the worst of them.
I'm definitely not agreeing with the 'gynocracy' assertion, which I also think is incorrect. Just making a very narrow observation about the corporate hierarchy claim. I have been surprised many, many times how often a CEO does something and the people that nominally report to them just... go about their business, paying it lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
I can see how a male CEO might be beholden to gender norms which sometimes favor women. But exactly how strong is that effect?
>I'm definitely not agreeing with the 'gynocracy' assertion, which I also think is incorrect.
Thank you.
> have been surprised many, many times how often a CEO does something and the people that nominally report to them just... go about their business, paying it lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
Sure, but doesn't that work both ways? Suppose there's a mostly-male company where most of the workers are sexist against women. Suppose that the board is worried about bad PR or lawsuits or whatever, so they impose an Equality Program to make sure women feel welcomed. Then the various workers all go about their business, paying the Equality Program lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
To give you one concrete example: A common feminist argument is that women are expected to take care of children and so them taking parental leave is more normalized than for men but also this harms their careers because people expect them to leave the workforce and so don't hire or promote them. Spreading a social expectation that childcare is something to be shared by both sexes is feminist in that it addresses this problem, but it also helps men who face less social stigma for taking parental leave.
Or another: sexist ideas that women are the people who have feelings and men are the gruff go-kill-the-bear types harms women but also men, by making it hard for them to deal with their own feelings.
Motte is the narrow, official definition of the term, defensible in arguments but useless for policy.
Bailey is the de facto definition, expansive vagueness of which can be gainfully exploited, but explicit principled defense would sound flagrantly monstrous.
motte = artificial hill with a strong tower on top, easy to defend.
bailey = larger flat area with a variety of useful facilities and lighter fortifications.
moat = water-filled ditch surrounding both the motte and the bailey and separating them from each other.
There is a flying bridge across the moat between motte and bailey, operated from the moat. It makes it easier, in case the bailey has fallen, for the defender to reconquer the bailey from the motte than for the attacker to conquer the motte from the bailey.
I am not aware of the moat, the flying bridge or other details being used in the analogy with rhetorics
The idea that the patriarchy hurts men too is just interpreted by the feminism I see, as men not being allowed do to what is right for women, or to be feminine. It's not at all interpreted in a way where sexism against men exists. It is just a claim that misogyny is part of male culture.
> Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing.
Women are better at reading emotions than men, and demanding men perform with the same skill as women here is akin to demanding that women perform as well in realms of physical strength and endurance.
And aggression *is* a good thing when directed and controlled. It's actively harmful to repress everything from brawling to raised voices.
> Going to literally die in a war is not optimal, it's better to protest or donate money.
Neither of those things are going to protect the people you care about from hostile force.
> I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people.
How much suffering and misery does this have to create before you acknowledge that the real world has an influence on identity and meaning?
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
If you're not going to reward people for being decent, and instead call literally anything they do "the bare minimum", you will not get decent people. You will instead get resentment, hate and rage. And, for a lot of people pushing this line, that seems to be the point.
Women are *slightly* better on average, yeah. The difference is not nearly as stark as physical strenght. If you think men are basically buffoons at reading basic emotions, then you might be in a bubble (ie the Bay Area with its focus on tech).
I'll take the controlled agression point. I guess I'd describe controlled agression with a different adjective.
Being a soldier is most often heroic, but I'd still prefer violence and war not happen. I think it is nice that the human race is less violent now than other time periods.
In my experience, more people are liberated by less focus on rigid gender roles, but that is obviously hard to measure.
How do you suggest we reward people for being decent? I'm a fan of verbally complimenting people I love for doing basic things (the dishes or whatnot), but I'm not sure what you should do on a society-wide basis.
There is a lot I like about Stephen Pinker, but I'm afraid on this one he's full of it. To quote Foseti's review of that book:
---
A while back, I linked to a story about a guy in my neighborhood who’s been arrested over 60 times for breaking into cars. A couple hundred years ago, this guy would have been killed for this sort of vandalism after he got caught the first time. Now, we feed him and shelter him for a while and then we let him back out to do this again. Pinker defines the new practice as a decline in violence – we don’t kill the guy anymore! Someone from a couple hundred years ago would be appalled that we let the guy continue destroying other peoples’ property without consequence. In the mind of those long dead, “violence” has in fact increased. Instead of a decline in violence, this practice seems to me like a decline in justice – nothing more or less.
Here’s another example, Pinker uses creative definitions to show that the conflicts of the 20th Century pale in comparison to previous conflicts. For example, all the Mongol Conquests are considered one event, even though they cover 125 years. If you lump all these various conquests together and you split up WWI, WWII, Mao’s takeover in China, the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, the Russian Civil War, and the Chinese Civil War (yes, he actually considers this a separate event from Mao), you unsurprisingly discover that the events of the 20th Century weren’t all that violent compared to events in the past! Pinker’s third most violent event is the “Mideast Slave Trade” which he says took place between the 7th and 19th Centuries. Seriously. By this standard, all the conflicts of the 20th Century are related. Is the Russian Revolution or the rise of Mao possible without WWII? Is WWII possible without WWI? By this consistent standard, the 20th Century wars of Communism would have seen the worst conflict by far. Of course, if you fiddle with the numbers, you can make any point you like.
[...]
In another section of the book, Pinker has a very long discussion of infanticide. Then he notes that we don’t have infanticide anymore. Then he notes that we do kill almost exactly the same proportion of babies today that infanticidal societies killed, we just do it via abortion. Then he concludes with some fuzzy language that probably satisfies most of the people on both sides of the issue. You can’t criticize him for ignoring the fact that abortion is so common.
The problem, in this case for Pinker, is that we’ve turned the infanticide of old from an unfortunate practice into a fundamental right. Surely this should give pause to someone making an honest argument that violence has declined over time.
Studies on the topic of male vs female emotional intelligence, often also used for testing autism (for example the "reading the mind in the eyes" test) typically show a mild female advantage, not an extreme one. Many show statistically insignificant differences. Although it is more complex to measure than simple grip strenght or whatever, obviously. IIRC, among top performers in some of these tests there's an equal amount of men and women, which is not the case for physical strenght. You're much more likely to meet a male social genius than a woman as strong as an average man.
Anyway, I fully agree with you on abandoning the Twitter brainrot of calling everything the bare minimum. It helps that I've never been on Twitter.
Ad: `among top performers in some of these tests there's an equal amount of men and women, which is not the case for physical strenght.'
One explanation would be that both strength and emotional intelligence in both genders are normally distributed, the mean for strength is higher for men, the mean for emotional intelligence is lower for men, but the variance is higher for men in both cases. Men having higher variance for a wide variety of characteristics has been often suggested and is quite likely; part of it might simply be due to the presence of two different chromosomes (XY) rather than the same ones (XX).
It is less about the human race abandoning violence and more about the fact that industrial wars tend to be extremely destructive and, on the net, a sheer loss of wealth.
As long as it was possible to become wealthier by wars of conquests, people would start them - from the Romans and Hittites to the colonial wars. But the balance turned around in the 20th century. Even today, what Russia gains from Ukraine is a thoroughly destroyed landscape.
Violent crime has also been a lot higher in most societies, people don't watch executions or cat burning for fun anymore etc etc. But yeah this is a huge factor
Though violent crime is higher in contemporary societies than it was about a century ago. E.g., the homicide rate in England in the early 20th century was steady at about half what it is today, and that's not accounting for improvements in medical care.
Also, whilst we're certainly better on animal rights nowadays, I suspect public executions would still draw large audiences if they were still carried out.
Even an intact landscape wouldn't help Russia much, because what generates wealth nowadays is mostly human not natural resources.
(Russia did steal tens of thousands of Ukrainian children in this war, but that's not going to make a noticeable difference to a country with 140 million residents)
The only context in which invasion of Ukraine would make any (evil, but logical and economic) sense was that the Kremlin expected the country to collapse almost without fight. They also hoped for swift decapitation of the leadership, it seems - that is why they tried to invade Kyiv using their airborne troops and landing at Hostomel.
> Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad?
I would firmly agree that many of the values of the current "map to manhood" are indeed good. I would love to live in a society with more emotionally adept individuals, less aggression, less war, etc.
Where the map fails is assuming that it's enough to just state these morals (ie: "don't be aggressive"), and morally shame those who fail. Testosterone is going to naturally cause aggressive tendencies in most young men. Telling them "don't be aggressive" is like telling someone with anxiety "don't be anxious." It usually doesn't work, and if you shame them when your loose guidance fails, it only breeds resentment and a lack of self-esteem.
What's missing is the actual *directions* for the map. The part that says, "You're male, so you're probably going to feel more aggression than most girls. Don't feel ashamed for that! You're not a bad person for it. But you DO need to learn how to properly channel that aggression into good things, like protecting the weak. Let's walk through some concrete steps on how you can do that..."
> I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people.
I would agree that obsession is not a good thing. But there has to be some acknowledgement of the difference of lived experiences, and the fact that the same goals often require different paths/efforts from different genders.
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
I believe being a good person who meets society's expectations is something that does indeed deserve a reward. In fact, I believe if you *don't* reward this, it's very harmful to social cohesion. (That reward, of course, must be within reason. Obviously a man doesn't deserve to sleep with any woman he wants just because he checked off the boxes on the "good person" list. But laying out clear and healthy rewards is a vital part of the map that's currently missing.)
> A lot of this also seems so... American? It's like Americans feel the need to have some Grand Goals and a Purpose and Values, otherwise they feel like shit.
I have no doubt the individualism in America exacerbates these issues. But if you look at other Western countries, you see the same stats that show men are floundering when it comes to education, to careers, to drug abuse, etc. So I don't believe this is entirely an American problem.
I think it's extremely human to crave a purpose and a role, and I think many Westerners currently feel they are lacking those things. Obviously, gender is only one facet of role/purpose, but it's a big one that deserves consideration.
> "You're male, so you're probably going to feel more aggression than most girls. Don't feel ashamed for that! You're not a bad person for it. But you DO need to learn how to properly channel that aggression into good things, like protecting the weak. Let's walk through some concrete steps on how you can do that..."
That just sounds like enforcing gender roles with a coating of evopsych and adding a “probably” in there to soften the blow. Why not just recognise if your child is aggressive, and teach them a lesson regardless of gender? You could get a meek nerdy boy (honestly pretty likely if you’re dating men from the Bay Area) and then he might try to apply the opposite lessons, when what he needs is to be more assertive and put his own needs first. Or what if you have a very aggressive girl?
Statistics are useful, but when you’re dealing with individual children you’re raising, it’s cruel to assign them behavioural stereotypes based on immutable parts of their identity before you witness any evidence of that behaviour. Telling them “you’re probably X because you’re a boy/girl” in fact might make it worse - if they’re not X, they might feel like there’s something wrong with them, or they might amplify those traits because it’s normal for them.
That’s before going into that “protecting the weak” part - a strange throwback to gender roles. If you’re dealing with a child with anger issues, how is that a useful strategy to calm down the anger they feel say, at losing at a video game, or not getting the present they wanted?
I think there’s much better gender agnostic ways to deal with your emotions you could teach your kids.
> I would agree that obsession is not a good thing. But there has to be some acknowledgement of the difference of lived experiences, and the fact that the same goals often require different paths/efforts from different genders.
Very little of the issues you mentioned were gender specific. How would you treat career burn out differently in a man vs a woman? Moving to a new city and not being able to make deep connections? Having a therapist that ignores your concerns?
> Statistics are useful, but when you’re dealing with individual children you’re raising, it’s cruel to assign them behavioural stereotypes based on immutable parts of their identity before you witness any evidence of that behaviour.
I think you and I are looking at this through two very different lenses, and thus discussing different things. I'm viewing this through a "society at large" lens, you're viewing it through the lens of "an individual person parenting an individual child."
I would firmly agree that any good parent should tailor their advice/guidance to their child's individual personality and needs. But not every child has a parent willing or able to do this, and even if they do, children do not look *solely* to their parents for advice/guidance.
Society and community shapes a massive amount of a child's behavior, and that society/community likely will not know/understand a child as well as their parent. Thus the need for more generalized roadmaps. Society can provide young men with a variety of healthy roadmaps to fit a variety of personality types; parents and other more intimate mentors can help them to tailor those generalized maps to suit their own personal needs.
I also would agree that it's cruel to *enforce* gender stereotypes, and I think this is why it's so vital to have a broad spectrum of male role models who have varying definitions of "being a man." Let young men choose which one resonates most with them, or let them decide they don't give a crap about gender at all, if they wish.
But the reality is that the latter rarely happens. Gender is considered a vital part of identity, and ignoring it isn't going to make it go away. Polite society (and hence our education system) has spent the better part of the last couple decades insisting that all children need to be treated/raised the same, regardless of gender. The result for men has been dismal: plummeting education and employment rates, rising suicide rates, rising rates of addiction, etc.
We can't just keep insisting that we ignore gender, when 50% of the population is floundering under that framework.
> Very little of the issues you mentioned were gender specific. How would you treat career burn out differently in a man vs a woman? Moving to a new city and not being able to make deep connections? Having a therapist that ignores your concerns?
The concerns themselves may not be specific to men, but there are unique challenges within them for men (and also for women, of course, although that isn't the focus of this essay). Some examples, based off the things you cited:
- Career burnout: women can shift to a lower-paying but more-fulfilling career and face very little social repercussion. If men choose to take a 70% paycut, this often has massive impact on their romantic potential, and often friendship potential as well.
- Making deep connections in a new city: this becomes more difficult when you're viewed not just as a stranger (as a woman would be), but as a potentially dangerous stranger (as a man would more often be.) There also is more of a taboo amongst men for talking about feelings, which can make forming connections even more difficult.
-Having a therapist who ignores your concerns: Over 75% of therapists are women. A lot of men feel better served by male therapists who can more easily empathize with their lived experiences, but there literally are not enough male therapists for them.
These are just a few quick examples, which all leads back to my original point: ignoring gender was an admirable and understandable attempt by society to improve the lives of everyone. But it turns out it often causes more harm than pain. We need to figure out a middle ground, where gender and its biological and societal impacts isn't dismissed, but gender norms do not become restrictive and aggressively enforced.
> That just sounds like enforcing gender roles with a coating of evopsych and adding a “probably” in there to soften the blow.
these are precisely the sort of critiques lobbed at Bly and the mythopoetic men’s movement by mainstream feminists of the era, and the reason why now there’s Peterson and Andrew Tate instead.
men and women are different. Bly and our commenter above write for men. clearly, if you think “protecting the weak” is cringe and “smells like gender roles” you are not the target of these suggestions and, if the experiences mentioned are extraneous to you, you might not be the best judge of techniques for facing up to then.
They don’t write “for men”, they write for a very specific kind of men and the lived experiences that lead them to follow hateful ideologies like Andrew Tate’s is far from universal.
Men and women are different on average, sure, and you’re absolutely allowed to have your preferences and follow whatever gender roles you see fit. But I draw the line at forcing them on other people, especially kids, and not letting girls do certain things because that’s for boys and you need the right temperament/aggression/etc. and vice versa, or reinforcing the belief that because they’re male/female they have to be X or Y.
I don’t see how my particular gender changes this. The commenter above or whatnot didn’t talk about say, prostate health or whatnot, but about universal human experiences where seeing it as a “male problem” is unhelpful.
You say gender roles like that’s a bad thing in a moderately-highly sexually dimorphic species. Every person I’ve met that was worth emulating embraced the traditional gender roles to a degree, some more some less. Most traditional gender roles are all about encouraging the mean pro social behaviors of a gender and discouraging the antisocial behaviors of that same gender. Every resilient gender role system is not a hard mold but a collection of tools to help form a strong healthy person. To throw it all in the trash because it’s not fair is insanity it’s taking a priceless cultural treasure that we know works more than it doesn’t and throwing in away. And yes I understand that the received gender roles aren’t perfect and they need work but that is no reason to condemn the entire system.
But... how? What reward, on a society-wide level, should we give to decent people? In the past, it was probably "a family/spouse", but I don't like the pressure to "pair up" this puts on people. We can't just promise men a wife or vice-versa without some pretty grim consequences.
I'm all for simply complimenting the people we love a lot, and throwing parties when they reach milestones, but that doesn't seem to be what you're suggesting?
And how does everyone in a modern society channel their agression into protecting the weak? I'm all for martial arts/learning self defense, or becoming a firefighter or even a soldier. But we luckily have a rather limited need for both soldiers and firefighters, and I wouldn't want that to change.
I'd never marry then. I mean it's very common and accepted in most of Europe to live together, have three kids, a house and whatnot and still never legally marry. It's honestly interesting it's still seen as ultra important in the states - health insurance? Or just religiousity?
You can be committed without having a legal contract.
It was so weird when I visited the US (midwest), they always assumed that I as the woman obviously wanted to get married and my boyfriend was being rude to me by not proposing (?). When I said no, it simply isn't important where we're from, they looked at me like "poor thing, making excuses for him :(". So medieval, definitely one of the bigger culture shocks.
It's just a different social context. I know a couple in the US who fits the European pattern (they've been together since college and raised a daughter together, they're now retired, and they never married), but in the US it seems like there is a pretty substantial difference in commitment level between the people who marry and the people who just live together.
Agreed. I've lived in both contexts, and context matters. In Europe, not getting married doesn't mean anything (or much) about the permanence of your relationship; in the US it does. That's how culture often works, after all--it gives you a translation for certain actions. Tells you what a kiss means and doesn't mean, etc--or an "I do."
There are a lot of legal advantages to marriage in the US associated with child guardianship/custody, inheritance, hospital visitation, health insurance benefits, income tax benefits, state tax benefits, retirement benefits and so on.
From what I've seen, European countries often don't need some of these benefits (e.g sharing of employer sponsored health insurance) and have a separate domestic partnership status that grants many of the others without a more formal marriage. (Note for US readers, this is not the same as a civil union and is often granted as a natural consequence of cohabitation.
> And how does everyone in a modern society channel their agression into protecting the weak?
Video games. Seriously. That's like, what you do in a huge number of video games.
Or, you know, doing things like volunteering for charities, working as a public defender or social worker, etc. "Aggression" doesn't have to be physical.
How would you express or deploy aggression as a social worker or volunteer? You seem to throw this off as duh obvious but it just makes me think you've no idea what aggression is.
Well, subjectively, I can channel the same kinds of emotional/mental/physical activation that I would get if I needed to give someone the what-for into doing something like getting the blasted paperwork done properly or trying to stop the doctor in the hospital from cutting my dying wife's pain meds out of a misplaced fear of addiction when she has a motherfucking giant hole in her thigh that won't heal and hurts like hell. (True story, unfortunately.)
I think the main "reward" that is currently missing is welcoming decent people into loving and supportive communities (this also naturally lends itself to pairing up romantically, but doesn't force it or explicitly promise it.)
Historically, people behaved themselves, because if they did, they'd have the support and respect of their tribe; if they didn't, they'd get kicked out of the tribe. In current times, people can perfectly behave themselves and still have a high chance of not having a tribe available to them. This raises the question "why bother being a decent person?", and the manosphere is there to capture all the poor young men who fall into that mental trap.
Of course the question of "how do you grow healthy tribes for modern people to belong to" is a very complex one, and has many more factors than just gender. But I think one of the key parts of healthy tribes is knowing your role and understanding the expectations of that role. And right now many men seem extremely confused about their role, let alone their expectations, so it's no wonder many are struggling to find a tribe.
As for channeling aggression: I agree, I don't want more soldiers, either! But I want more people standing up for the oppressed, more public defenders, more politicians fighting for the common people, etc. These are all things aggression can easily be channeled into. And I do believe that giving young men a physical aggression outlet is very powerful as well. Not all of them need it, but some do, and I think it's very important to provide things like martial arts lessons to those who need to learn how to control aggressive impulses.
>And how does everyone in a modern society channel their aggression into protecting the weak?
This is going to sound facetious but is probably the real answer to your question....
Encouraging the aggressive kid to punch other kids they see bullying weaker kids.
Like full on "Go find someone bullying a weak kid, and punch him in the face. Its fine. You have permission/social sanction to do that" level encouragement, and then rewarding that behaviour afterwards.... ~High Five~ Nice!.....
Society may not like that answer for all sorts of reasons, but its a way of channelling actual aggression into protecting the weak.
I agree, without something like this being socially sanctioned this is a bromide being offered without a practical application. You can channel aggression into other things (competative and physical sports? Video games?) but these aren't really protecting the weak.
Given aggression is a desire to engage in physical/hostile behaviour. Usually to attack or confront someone.... really the only way to tick the "get the aggression out" and "protect weak people" boxes at the same time, is to allow kids to physically attack/confront those kids who are preying on the weak kids.
>>I believe being a good person who meets society's expectations is something that does indeed deserve a reward. In fact, I believe if you *don't* reward this, it's very harmful to social cohesion.
It's not really as much about the reward per se, it's more about consistency. A lot of "Nice guy" shit comes from said guy meeting the minimal requirements, getting repeatedly rejected and receiving only "ok, cool, you do meet the minimal requirements, what, do you expect a cookie for it or something?" as the reason for rejection. But then he looks around in real life and sees a lot of people who DO NOT meet those requirements at all - but who are facing a lot LESS problems with getting laid than he does. Obviously, that means something's up here where what's on paper does not match reality at all - if there are minimal requirements, the last thing you'd expect to see is that whoever fails to meet them, struggles less than someone who has at least met those minimal reqs. And that's generally when the Red Pill, manosphere or whatever other unpleasant company comes into play, offering an answer...
The missing puzzle piece, for the nice guys out there, being that they actually aren't meeting the minimal requirements. They are meeting the minimal requirements on one axis (the "good guy" axis), while not meeting the minimal requirements on the "sexual attraction" axis.
Women want to be treated well... by a man they are attracted to!
Receiving flowers and poems from a guy they are not attracted to tends to squick them out (and potentially fear for their safety).
And if a nice guy asks a feminist for advice on how to meet those other minimum requirements, it tends to be about as productive as asking an FBI agent for nuclear launch codes.
That's because the feminist honestly doesn't understand that stuff (and doesn't know that she doesn't understand etc), while the feminist theory often explicitly contradicts with biology. Attraction generally works on unconscious/body language level, and few people are perceptive/introspective enough to have insight into it, or to notice contradictions with the orthodoxy.
Right - much like how the FBI agent doesn't have the launch codes, wouldn't share them even if it were possible, and is professionally suspicious of any rando's motives for asking.
>Reminder that the term "toxic masculinity" was coined by a men's movement in the 80's (the mythopoetic men's movement), not feminism.
So? The term "Eugenics" was coined by Francis Galton, an Englishman who didn't see much of the 20th century. Are we to attribute responsibility to him for the consequences of the whole field?
I think there's not so much value in deciding whom to blame for the brokenness in society. What's useful is figuring out how to make it better, or at least how to stop making it worse.
I definitely agree that the whole thing where various high-status people say nasty things about men (or whites or white men) is pretty awful. And media culture is both super appealing and super corrosive--you almost can't show most virtues in TV/movie format. Crass, violent people make good stories, loyal, hard-working, honest people mostly don't--it's much harder to make a fun-to-watch story with those people.
> Crass, violent people make good stories, loyal, hard-working, honest people mostly don't--it's much harder to make a fun-to-watch story with those people.
Except that Hollywood is not doing all that well now that they portray most women as crass violent people and men as bumbling losers.
I guess if you want to draw some grand conclusions about men generally from that factoid you can, but I don't know anything about the "mythopoetic men's movement", what they meant by "toxic masculinity", or if it has any connection to what feminists or anyone else means when they say it, and I don't think that almost anyone else knows either. Maybe you do but nobody has explained anything about it in this thread.
I also think that "men haven't always liked traditional masculinity" can mean a lot of things. "Traditional masculinity" isn't a totally fixed idea (to the extent you can give it a precise definition at all), people can like some part of it but not other parts, people can dislike it for different reasons and prefer different alternatives, and I don't actually think "how much do people like traditional masculinity" is a particularly interesting or relevant consideration for any of this discussion.
One of their ideas was that close emotional bonds between men, and men being open about their feelings, was vital. Toxic masculinity was bottling things up, and IIRC being aggressive. Seems pretty in line with the feminist definition to me.
Too much of the map of manhood is focused on what not to do, not what to do. You specifically mentioned protest or donate money, but I have never heard someone say you become a man when you attend X protests or donate Y money. If they did, someone did, it would probably be more fulfilling.
You mentioned in another comment the throwing a party for reaching a milestone, I think this is the best suggestion. Weddings are a good example of this, but so many men don’t reach this milestone. A man can’t ask for a party thrown for them, but they would definitely appreciate it if they got one, it if was tied into their culture.
> Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad? Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing
I think the big problem is that it's all negative: it provides you with a list of things not to do, but lacks a good vision of what to do, or what to be, or why to do that.
In traditional societies, even up to the mid twentieth century, being an ordinary full-grown adult man in good standing with society was respectable and rewarding enough to motivate a boy to grow up. But now all the aspects of normal adult life, especially for men, are derided by society, so what has a boy even got to look forward to? A big house in the suburbs? No, the suburbs are lame, as the media never stops telling us, and suburban dads even more so. Maybe if you work hard and pay off your mortgage you can reward yourself with that nice sports car you've always wanted? No, middle aged men with sports cars are the most shameful possible group of people. The only available role models for young men are people who do not and cannot exist in the real world like Batman and James Bond, and even they are probably problematic. And your Dad can't possibly be a role model, he's uncool and lame because he doesn't like the same things that fourteen-year-old boys like.
We need to put more glory on the life of a normal adult family man who does the right things, gets a job, gets married, buys a house, has kids, does normal suburban dad things, and retires.
> We need to put more glory on the life of a normal adult family man who does the right things, gets a job, gets married, buys a house, has kids, does normal suburban dad things, and retires.
I agree this would be nice, but part of the problem has to be social media.
If boys see men of all ages living a jet setting lifestyle paired up with different hot 20 year olds on a regular rotation, that certainly seems more appealing on it's face than all the boring suburban stuff, especially to men in their formative teenage and early 20's years.
I think at that point it doesn't really matter how much you can glorify suburban dads - much like being a pro athlete or influencer is the career 80%+ of kids want, having this memetic attractor on the landscape will distort things just in and of itself, even if it's unattainable for 99.999...% of them.
>being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing
Yeah, but is "bad at reading emotions" something that you should be ashamed of, or is it a mild flaw that others can help you with, perhaps by explaining how they feel more directly because they know you won't pick up on subtle hints?
The details matter.
>You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
What about demanding a reward for being a *good* person? Doesn't it make sense that a just society would reward virtue in some way?
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
Yes you should. We call this "human rights". There are lots of rewards you should demand, like clean air, clean water, a society to live in that is not at war. Why shouldn't meaningful human interaction be among these other necessities of life? Just because providing it is hard, just because we don't have a viable plan to satisfy that demand?
> We need more high-profile, morally-sound men who openly discuss what it’s like to live with a testosterone-dominated body and how they learned to channel their natural instincts into positive and productive outcomes.
Well, I'm not high-profile yet, but I am taking on challenge made here!
> Which means bringing back a cultural and legal method for men to defend their Honor without suffering 15 years in prison for "assault" when his honor is questioned.
I'd argue that "blue states" such as California and New York are in general doing much better than red states, but fine, we'll do it your way. I propose Super Smash Bros. Melee at dawn. No items, Final Destination. Bring your dueling second and your controller. Loser publicly admits to being the poopyhead.
(Hey, I'm a gamer. How do you expect me to duel someone? 😆)
No way, this is the exact opposite of what is needed. Chivalry was developed specifically to curb violence. Nobles were going to war with each other just for clout and it was wrecking society in the meantime. Bushido... I also can't imagine wanting to implement that! As with chivalry, it's not even for men throughout society but rather for a small warrior caste. And it's extremely maladaptive in modern warfare. If you've got 2 hours to spare, this is a great discussion on how Bushido attitudes affected WWII: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sarah-paine-japan
Sorry, but there's no retvrn worth doing here! There's *a lot* we can learn from historical maps to manhood, but men need something that is adaptive to our culture today. A truce on violence is the greatest gift we've been given by the Enlightenment and I would hate to give that up for a misguided notion of honor.
Hear, hear! Well said. A return to violence is the absolute last thing modern men need; adding a bunch of dead fathers and role models to the list of boys' problems is a terrible idea. And violence between men rarely stays simply between men. Women and children usually end up in the cross-fire, and we rarely have the natural strength to fight back effectively. Not to mention the innocent men who often end up being hurt as well.
Testosterone may be linked to aggression, but that does *not* mean violence is the correct way to channel the aggression many young men experience. Channel it into sports. Channel it into learning self-defense. Channel it into speech and debate. Channel it into starting a business and "fighting" competitors. Channel it into political protest. Channel it into fighting your own instinctual desires for revenge.
But please, for the love of god, do not channel it into violence.
Doesn't this conflict with your desire expressed elsewhere for the map of manhood to include "protecting the weak" ?
Afterall, what do "the weak" have to be protected from if NOT violence or the threat of violence? That is, very specifically, what they need protection from otherwise why would specifically being "weak" make them succeptible to the threat?
The only effective way to counter violence or the threat of violence... is the threat of reciprocal violence.
When violence/threat of violence is on the table you have already cascaded down through the many layers of alternative conflict resolution civilisation offers and are at the base level. If you're here, there is no "higher" level that can be appealed to, you're dealing with someone who has rejected all of that to go with the "base layer of reality" already, the Ultima Ratio Regnum.
Here, if nowhere else, then surely violence is finally justified as non-toxic masculinity? If you want men to channel their aggression into safe outlets, and you want men to "protect the weak".... then surely you must accept channelling that aggression into the use of violence to defend those unable to defend themselves due to their "weakness".
Society already unofficially sanctions this.... even whilst this is officially still forbidden.
Whilst the school will still punish the kids who defend their weaker friends from bullying with violence..... the man who sticks up for the woman being hassled in the movies, and fights off the big muscley creep in the bar fight after warning him "Leave the lady alone", is the hero not the villain.
Perhaps one of the ways society can change to be accepting of maps to real masculinity is to be more accepting of this reality *de jure* as well as *de facto* or, at least *de ficitio".
Maybe part of moving society in a more positive masculinity direction is moving it away from "violence is never justified" to "there are some circumstances where violence is justfied, and men who resort to violence in those circumstances are to be supported in the real world and not just in fictional scenearios"
Honor cultures that conceive masculine (or feminine) honor as something that needs violent defense are anything but a human universal. The law codes you don't like aren't "feminine"; look at history and you'll see constraints on duelling and honor killing imposed in plenty of eras where women lacked any significant degree of influence on the lawmaking system. The limits on violent defense of honor were debated between men.
Move to Afghanistan today, and you'll find a lot more scope for defending your honor with fists, blade, or gun -- and even there, you'll also find men in government trying to limit your ability to resolve honor disputes with your neighbors using violence.
Caricature everywhere--of history, of men and women. The urge to control and limit social violence isn't driven by "den mothers" or "leftists"; it's way older and more widespread than that. Read Norbert Elias's "Civilizing Process" to get a different lens on the process than the narrow lens you're wielding now.
Reasserting a caricature doesn't make it true. One problem with imagining arguments as contests of honor to be won by some combo of brashness, insults, and punchups: you get bad at arguing.
Yeah, well every society til the present lib/fem/tot/whatever first world countries also had no treatment for cancer and a bunch of other godawful diseases that make people
die slowly, in anguish. And most babies didn’t make it to adulthood. And everybody had worms and head lice and smelled like smegma and rotting teeth.
Society (read: women) needs to realize that the positive male role models are going to be someone they *tolerate*, not someone they *like*.
Pre-coma Jordan Peterson was fine. You didn't have to like him, but you could tolerate him, and he was mostly about fixing men so they'd be better for the women in their lives.
Keep on vetoing the lobstermans and eventually you are left with the Tates.
> "Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results."
That's very silly.
Traditional gender roles are based on the pre-industrial necessity of division of labor by gender. As long as there's an economy wherein most jobs can be performed equally well by either gender and which also REQUIRES both genders to be employed in order for the economy to function, women will have equal rights.
Nobody sat up one day and decided, "hey, let's stop oppressing women and give them equal rights." The economy demanded it, that's all.
>Nobody sat up one day and decided, "hey, let's stop oppressing women and give them equal rights."
The death of God certainly contributed to such sentiments. As soon as the Bible stopped being taken seriously as the normative guide in elite circles, the glaring contradiction between Bronze Age views on gender relations and the liberal ethos swiftly got resolved in favor of the latter.
There's that, too, but I would argue that God was likewise killed by industrialization and technology. No need to pray for God to bless the harvest when you have pretty damn good control over the harvest with reliable tech like fertilizers and pesticides and genetically modifying a hardier harvest.
That sounds very marxist (in the philosophical sense). I'm not an idealist and I agree that ideas cannot be the ultimate explanation for anything, but there is no structural force strong enough to not be swayed away from contingencies. In the West, industrialization went hand in hand with women's rights and generally individual liberation from traditional norms. In, say, Japan, it very much did not.
Sure, an industrial society, whether in the market or the command form, probably disrupts traditional patriarchy, simply because neither the market nor the central planner give a damn about what the oldest male in the family thinks is proper (even if, as Pomeranz showed for China, you can very well have efficient markets where the fundamental economic agent is the extended family or even the village, without losing much productivity. Many socialist regimes outside the USSR similarly coordinated traditional social units rather than individuals directly). But disrupting clans does not necessarily mean women's right: a husband can be abusive and despotic, and society broadly tolerant of it, even without the blessing of the patriarch. Again, Japan offers an handy example of a society shifting abruply toward nuclear families and superficially "modern" social structure without women being much better off for it.
Whatever was the cause for women's enfranchisement, and individual liberation in general, we should really not take it for granted and trust the Holy Ghost of historical dialetics to keep delivering it for us. History is littered with countexamples. Liberty is fought for and negotiated each generation. The state, the village, the faith and all the forces that chained individuals are always rearing their ugly head, and when people grow too complacent, or romanticize slavery a bit too much, they succeed.
"Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results.""
I doubt Copernican will see this, but arguing from the future is just silly. We don't actually know what will happen. Claims about the future might be right, but they don't prove anything.
I would actually disagree with this. I think it's true that some women who subscribe to some more extreme brands of feminism would balk at a lot of potential male role models. And I would argue that the potential for those more extreme feminists to start "cancel mobs" is probably one of the main reasons we've had less men step up as public role models for what a "healthy man" can look like.
But I think the average woman (myself included) finds it extremely attractive and admirable when a man has a healthy confidence in their masculinity and is eager to teach others to be positive, healthy influences on society.
(Note: I haven't read much of Jordan Peterson's work, so don't feel comfortable stating whether I would have supported/admired him pre-coma.)
So, yes, I think just about any male role model will trigger some of the more online and vocal feminists. But that certainly doesn't mean all women will dislike them.
I think average people don't pay much attention to this discussion. Mainstream attention is driven in no small part by feminists with extreme views, who drive media narratives that cause average people, with no real exposure, to hear a vague impression about some woman-hater named XYZ, and they think that's plausible and go about their day.
In general I think the gender-focused left is completely out to lunch on what women find attractive. What the average woman, face to face offline, will admit to being attractive to is already inappropriate to discuss in polite society as being what women are actually attracted to.
If you look, for example, at Richard Reeves, he makes a big deal out of how women really just want men to have a job or "not be a loser", instead of being specifically attracted to the idea of a man who makes a lot of money, but there really are a lot of women who specifically equate a man spending money on her, and earning more money he can spend on her, as a literal measurement of love, and even average women have expectations around buying meals, gifts, .etc.
Reeves and his colleague Galloway are deluded about what women want from men. If just having a job and being emotionally stable, however vague that is, were enough then the topics they keep harping on would never have picked up traction.
I mean, there are already lots of men doing this... E.g., male pastors, conservative thought leaders, Jordan Peterson, it's just that "Polite Society" i.e., elite liberal women i.e., people similar to you reject them.
There's a whole world out there of healthy masculinity. The problem is your culture's (i.e., silicon valley bubble / the people you date) lack of access to it. Not a worldwide absence :p
I grew up conservative, and while there certainly were structured models of masculinity, I find myself balking at the idea of most of them being healthy in the 21st century.
Of course, I'm very biased in this regard--most men who followed those models aren't super friendly toward people like me (ie: opinionated and outspoken bisexual chick who's not fond of rigid monogamy.)
I also found the models too rigid and far too focused on authority and stoicism as necessary for manhood. (Broadcasting these traits seemed to be the focus, rather than proper channeling and handling of them.) The focus on authority and repression of emotion lent itself well to quiet, behind-the-scenes abuse, and there didn't seem to be alternate maps available for my more soft-spoken and sensitive male friends.
(That all being said--I will take the average pastor over Andrew Tate any day.)
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions; not every pastor/conservative thought leader is aggressively anti-LGBT, nor does every one insist that men must be authoritative stoics at all times. And there certainly are elements of these maps that still apply very well to modern life (eg: do hard work, be there to support your community, take responsibility, embrace challenges, etc.)
But I'm also eager for leftists to invest more time developing healthy, coherent maps for those who don't fit in with the right.
Why doesnt the right's path to manhood work for the left?
I believe the "left" (e.g., the left elite mainstream dogma) struggles with men mainly because it fundamentally doesn't like men. It has a number of deluded and false and sexist narratives that are incredibly damaging and hurtful towards men (e.g., believe all women is obviously a mad, harmful and sexist idea, as women can be abusers too).
If you are interested, look up some of this Scott's and the Quantum Computing Scott's early posts about their interactions with feminism.
To me, the problem isn't that the left lacks access to viable maps to manhood, it is that they actively supress and harm men. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not sure what putting out further maps or resources is going to do. It's treating the symptoms not the root cause, and really the movement needs a sea change.
Laying out peer-reviewed viable maps, then challenging leftists to either endorse at least one of them or admit to malicious intent, could be part of how such a change would be implemented.
If you don't know much of Peterson's work (aside from his media presence), and you are interested in the question of maleness in the modern day, I would highly recommend watching one of his university lecture series from before his fame.
If nothing else because his influence has shaped much of the present day terrain, and it's good to know what it's actually about, but the lecture series are also interesting in their own right.
Both Personality and Maps of Meaning are worthwhile listens depending on which topic you find more interesting.
Back in the day, those lectures were very useful for me in working on what Robert Kegan would would have classed stage 4 development. At the time my main mentor figure had been Alan Watts and for all he gave me, I was lacking guidance on how to integrate with society and accept rules and authority.
I really don't think it's "women" as much as it is "feminists", both men and women, and also, I don't think we can blame them.
For one or other reason, we seem to work under an "Opressed v Opressor" framework in terms of social change, and our expectations and demands are different for each side. There is misandry in the feminist movement, for all the "it's about men too", there is no such thing as a "MERF", nobody gets shunned from the movement if they dismiss plights of equality from men and you can rest easy that nobody is going to call you out if you argue that men in general are so horrible that you would rather be left with a bear.
This is by no means specific to feminism, any group which consistently pushes back against X will have people saying "Screw X".
It is then inevitable that when people come along arguing for the other side of the aisle, the same thing is going to happen, which in this case involves having the people who are generally considered on the opressor side calling out the people who are generally considered the opressed, which is of course considered untenable, it shifts the whole power balance, if you are the opressor surely you are not also the opressed.
In practice this means that although it's generally safe to bemoan men on the feminist side, the reverse is pushed back against, shoved into the margins. Nobody who actually cares about feminism or what feminists think stays in that place and all we have is, well, the rest. It's not that the manosphere rejects feminism and that draws men in, it's that nobody who doesn't reject feminism is *allowed* to draw men in to begin with.
I mean it's not as if it wasn't attempted. It didn't go well.
Oh wow! On the substack app, most full length articles can be read out loud by AI generating text-to-voice. There's a male voice and a female voice. Which one is chosen by the writer.
Changing the voice won't rerecord the old articles, so if you want a new article in a female voice, you can switch voices, publish the article, and switch back.
I think this hits the nail on the head. The left doesn't have a clear point at which they tell a man "you did a good job at being a man" and the right basically requires you to either be Christian or an asshole.
Yeah, I mean I think the alt-right manosphere does tend to lead men to be assholes. I am sure that there are some people on the right who fulfill the more traditional male role (provider, father, community pillar) without the adde Christianity, but I would say that the men who are doing that are ovewhelmingly Christian (which is definitely a sampling bias)
Also, I actually think that the left has made a massive mistake by becoming unclear (and often actively negative) on the topic; my time at college was not supportive towards becoming a whole person in that way, while simultaneously seeming ineffective at protecting women from predatory men. I don't think that the left being simply "unclear" about it puts them ahead of the right on this topic; I have a lot more respect for the compassionate Christian groups on helping lost young men figure their lives out.
The only reason the manosphere is on the Right is because the Left hates men. There's nothing inherent in the different movements within that category that's actually right-wing.
> simultaneously seeming ineffective at protecting women from predatory men
This is not an accident. You protect women by 1) Elevating protective men and 2) Teaching women not to make themselves vulnerable. The first is bad because men are bad, and the second is bad because it's "blaming the victim" and suggests that women have agency and responsibility.
There's a reason the "male feminist" is almost always a creep, if not outright a rapist, and that's because the only men who will embrace such a model are men who will exploit it.
I feel like you understand my position a bit more clearly now, so I'm glad of that.
I think there are a few other important steps that my college missed (having rules that say that professors can't sleep with grad students for one, actually taking students seriously when they say that their boss is pushing them into a sexual relationship, etc.) But I do agree that your two points are also good when correctly implemented (what cannot be made bad by poor implementation?)
If you take the sweeping and vague definitions the left typically uses for things like misogyny, or homophobia, but swap the groups out, it is pretty obvious that the left falls into the definition of misandry.
It isn't a "lack of clarity", so much as it is a straight-up adverse reaction to the masculine, and to male-associated things. Even the way that we tend to criticize the "manosphere" while not paying close attention to the bile from the "womanosphere" is pretty clear evidence of this. The manosphere isn't particularly alt-right, it is just that anything which suggests men might not be the cause of all their problems, and doesn't constantly supplicate to women's priorities and issues, immediately codes as right-wing.
If you go listen to the recent podcast from Richard Reeves, Jonathan Haidt, and Governor Newsom, they basically are cheering progressive reform for women, while simultaneously demanding the return of conservative gender roles for men.
This was a strong and thoughtful essay, but I'm always a bit baffled by how many people think that being lost, depressed, and miserable is a universal experience.
Maybe I'm wrong, but most people I know seem pretty ok? Maybe there's some stress or whatever, but for most people I know life is good.
Maybe you're surrounded by people who're mostly okay, but maybe you don't associate with the people around you in contexts that lead them to expose how not-okay they are
I think this is a Different Worlds issue. I have found that, for a number of reasons that are likely somewhat self-evident, whatever my current level of life dysfunction is, I tend to gravitate towards and find people who are in similar positions. Two of my best-adjusted friends come from my first year-and-a-bit of college, when I was at my most energized and hopeful so far; the most dysfunctional people I have been close to have been by and large people I met in times of personal crisis.
Had the same thought. There's probably huge selection bias here: people who are mostly fine are hanging out with other people who are mostly fine, and people who are dysfunctional are more likely to find themselves in dysfunctional communities.
Yes, this. Except a lot of the dysfunctional probably aren't in community at all, so solipsism also plays a role.
There's also a life stages thing going on here. Being in your 20s, adapting to adult life, is disorienting for a lot of people. Probably goes double for people in magnet cities like SF that are likely to have moved away from friends and family.
But I was thinking of the fact that F3 (my workout group) is my most frequent point of socialization with other men. Working out hard outdoors at 0530 multiple times per week has to be an intense selection factor against depression and dysfunction.
> Working out hard outdoors at 0530 multiple times per week has to be an intense selection factor against depression and dysfunction.
I agree but it can also select for things like addiction, it's just that working out is a beneficial outlet for that particular dysfunction. Some people manage their flaws (perceived or real) and some people wallow in them.
Functional communities have resources for functional people. Individuals within them might have resources for dysfunctional people, but the community will almost never have any means of connecting those resources to anyone who needs them. If appropriately-useful resources even exist to be connected to, which is *slightly* better than chance.
I don't know about depressed and miserable, but most people have some problem in their life which prevents them from self-actualising. Depending on the person it can eat them up inside.
The title is "Men in the Bay" and the author has several paragraphs of preface saying this reflects the sort of men who live in the bay, #notallmen. I'd venture to say this sample aren't all men in the Bay, either, just set of men who find enough mutual attraction with the author to end up on a date with her, and of those, probably just a subset who are recognizable as a "type".
I don't know, found myself instinctively trying to put myself into one of the boxes, but I'm a married man and not in the bay, and grew up conservative, so it's probably, as they say, not for me.
And also specifically men who are dating, i.e. single, in their 30s. That filter is definitely picking up more people who aren't doing well compared to the average.
I think there's a pretty basic unifying factor about all these guys; they're still on the dating market. I know a lot of guys who I think are doing great, in a variety of different ways, but pretty much uniformly all the "doing great" guys are married. The handful of dudes I know who are still single (I'm around 40, as are most of my friends)...you can generally identify why that's the case, and these buckets are broad enough that most will fall into one.
Dating at, say, 22 would probably capture a very different population of men than dating at 35, since the 22 year olds who you'd be most excited to date generally aren't gonna still be dating a decade plus later.
I should add, though, that I don't think this invalidates this as an interesting set of observations. "What's up with the men who aren't doing great" is an important question in itself, it's just a different question than "what's up with all men".
I was going to say something very similar but you beat me to it.
>Dating at, say, 22 would probably capture a very different population of men than dating at 35, since the 22 year olds who you'd be most excited to date generally aren't gonna still be dating a decade plus later.
There are a couple other factors here. One is that at 22, you're likely to be fairly immature yourself in such a way that your partners' immaturity is less likely to bother you or to be readily apparent as the root cause when it does lead to problems. Being at least somewhat directionless and immature when you're in your early 20s is so commonplace as to be unremarkable.
Another factor is that people vary in how much and how quickly they grow out of youthful immaturity, and that correlates with finding a healthy relationship in a synergistic way. Being in a healthy relationship anchors you and helps you grow, while people who are more mature tend to be at least somewhat better at finding good partners and forming and sustaining healthy relationships..
It seems like "dating" just sucks. "Doing great" means getting married so you can get the hell out of dating. Being single sucks because you're alone and isolated.
The weird thing is it doesn't have to be that way. There used to be a bachelor/playboy lifestyle that was seen as highly cool and sophisticated. But that sort of lifestyle requirese the existance of an equal number of women willing to play along, and it seems like that's just not the case anymore. Women are dating to look for marriage, *not* for casual fun. It feels like family and dating norms have become much more conservative now than they were in the last 50 years, and that's very strange.
Disagree. I think the conventional wisdom that norms were more conservative 50 years ago is correct, and the "bachelor/playboy lifestyle" that people tell stories about was the province of a small minority.
Yeah if a male friend said most of this stuff to me I'd tell them that their actual problem wasn't with dating and gender but needing antidepressants. Not in a dismissive way, but a lot of this reads like the sort of thing I thought when I was younger and depressed. And I just assumed was normal. But it really isn't.
So definitely some people have chemical imbalances that antidepressants help with, but--I think a lot of people have social problems where antidepressants serve a role much more like "turning off the check engine light"
If someone feels lost because they don't know who they are and what they want, because they don't have real friendships and haven't done real exploration... how the hell is an antidepressant supposed to fix that? And how is you saying "you should get an antidepressant" going to _start_ the conversation wherein you become actually friends, rather than ending the conversation and proving to them that you're just an acquaintance?
> And how is you saying "you should get an antidepressant" going to _start_ the conversation wherein you become actually friends, rather than ending the conversation and proving to them that you're just an acquaintance?
It was fairly obvious from his comment that he was relating what he would say to a close friend. Making unsolicited psych med recommendations to a mere acquaintance would be inappropriate.
I think you missed my point--I think if I opened up to someone I thought was a friend about my struggles, and they responded with "yeah you've misdiagnosed your problem and you need antidepressants", my reaction would be "oh, I thought this person was my friend and they aren't."
If they responded with "I felt that way and then antidepressants turned things around for me"--ok! At least they're opening up about themselves and encouraging me to ask whether or not our situations are similar.
That is--your relationships with other people are determined in part by the actions you take towards them. It's easy to damage your friendships with other people by letting them down!
I mean, canceling your friend because they suggested you try an antidepressant seems a bit excessive. My friends and I are always tossing around drug/medication tips of all sorts, it’s been a very helpful source of info for me. The armchair diagnosis aspect would absolutely set me off though, and I have ended friendships over that.
Btw, everyone will let you down eventually, you might need to recalibrate your expectations of people. Something I learned in therapy, ironically.
Bluntly, antidepressants are a crutch but they are not a substitute for actual connection. And saying you aren’t dismissive does not change the fact that you are in fact being dismissive
I think people compartmentalize well. I found "THE MAN WHO OPTS OUT" to describe my experience eerily well (at least until a few years ago).
I also wouldn't have described myself as depressed or anything. I was resigned to being forever-alone, but also felt like I would still have a fulfilling life given that. I just assumed I would be like a monk or a priest or something, and those people seemed fulfilled to me.
I ended up solving the issue by becoming gay and then lucking into an incredible partner who was patient enough to help me build up my self-confidence, which worked pretty well for me (we're getting married next year!)
In retrospect, looking back on your life so far, would you say that you became gay, or that you were already gay, and just took a while to recognize it? Was that just a quirk of language, or does it specifically reflect how you see yourself as having developed?
Maybe always had the potential? But I never felt like I was “in the closet”, and I have been described by friends as “the straightest gay person they know”
And to be clear, I’m bi, so I *was* attracted to women, I just didn’t realize I was attracted to men as well until later
That makes sense. I've heard many people argue very decisively that nobody becomes gay after their sexuality has already developed; your sexuality is what it is, and it's simply up to you to explore and discover it. But I'm not convinced that people's sexualities consistently develop in the same ways, or that we really understand sexuality on the whole well enough to make such decisive statements in the first place.
I can personally testify that sexuality isn't nearly so neat as some people argue. I think a lot of people experience it clearly from an early age, but it's much more complex for many. Personally, I'm bisexual when off birth control, mostly straight when on birth control, and largely lesbian when I have unbalanced, high estrogen.
I think the narrative of "you are born with a built-in sexuality that never changes" was very helpful and needed when trying to ban conversion therapy. But as Western society leaves behind outdated homophobic ideas, I hope we'll get more nuanced conversations and explorations of sexuality. It's such a fascinating subject!
That's interesting, I don't think I've ever heard from someone who says their sexuality fluctuates so much their hormone levels like that.
I've always been able to tell I liked and was attracted to girls from early childhood, and didn't share that attraction to boys, but I experimented with trying to condition myself into bisexuality in my teens (I thought it would increase my dating pool, and I didn't think anyone I'd want to be in a relationship with would judge me for it.) It didn't work at all, but my hormone levels weren't a lever I had access to, and I wonder if I'd observe changes in my preferences if I were able to manipulate those, or observe myself through major fluctuations.
I've suspected for a long time though that sexuality couldn't be set in stone from birth though, or at least not for every individual, because if that were the case, we'd most likely see identical twins, who share the same genes and uterine environment, always having the same sexuality, and while they're correlated way above chance, that's still a long way from being the case.
Rather than a push to ban conversion camps, which I don't remember being much in the news at the time, I always saw the insistence that your sexuality was fixed and you couldn't change it as having been part of an effort to push back on religious people who thought that various social influences were "turning kids gay."
I don't think anyone knows how to do that on purpose, but I'm agnostic on whether the number of openly queer people in our society seems to be rising because it's become more recognized and acceptable to be out, or if something in our society is actually increasing the prevalence, because it seems like there must be *some* levers apart from just genetics.
This has been my experience as well: a lot of these men compartmentalize very well (especially in the "Opt Out" group), and would describe themselves as stable and not necessarily depressed. But when you encourage them to examine their emotions, they'll often express a sense of disconnection from society and resigned despair at the idea of being alone.
Also--huge congrats to you on finding your way out from that category. It's a tough journey, and I admire you for forging a new, happier path. I wish you and your partner many wonderful years together. :)
I'm a woman who "became gay", too, at 30. I'm now married to a woman. Being queer provided me the life I always wanted but struggled to find within the confines of heterosexuality, and it gave me the community that I craved. I'm glad you found that, too.
If you're nonmonog, you might be surprised at how your dating pool and ability to date women has changed. I'm friends/lovers with a lot of queer men in your position, and they are surprised at how dating women is different once they are partnered with men. It narrows your dating pool, which ends up being a boon. I find this interesting because a lot of hetero men struggling with dating are loathe to limit their dating pool, but I think narrowing it to women (or people) explicitly interested in your peculiarities is a counterintuitive successful strategy.
I also think queerness has given me confidence in my nonconformity, which makes me more attractive across the board.
Surely this is because your sample is your friends (who are people you selected for being mostly OK) and because her sample is from random guys in the dating pool (who are probably not).
I'd be fascinated to know the percentage of people who think most of their are friends are OK vs most are not okay. for me it's "not okay"; my impression is almost everyone in society is doing really badly at much higher rates than when I was younger.
Good question for the next ACX survey, maybe, although I don't want to wait that long.
I think my friends are doing okay but also have mental health disorders, like I'm somehow selecting for 60th percentile mental health very consistently.
I mean, it's not always obvious what someone's going through on the inside. It seems quite common for people to be completely blindsided when a loved one commits suicide, for example.
My sense (tbf from reading articles like this one) that it is not true that most people are ok among the extremely specific slice of people constituting “single men in SF with good jobs, prosocial politics, and very high education.”
I think there could be a lot of reasons for this discrepancy.
- You could lack insight into the people around you. They might seem happy when you interact with them, despite having a deep-seated lack of comfort or fulfillment in their life. Notice that many of these archetypes might project outward happiness in social situations.
- You could meet mostly people who are in relationships due to your social circle. These issues probably apply most to single people (and plausibly single people are struggling more with there lives, if in because struggling people are less likely to get into relationships).
- A lot of these issues lead to social isolation/awkwardness, making it less likely you'll meet people like this.
- You might be older than the author or I (I am 26).
On the first point, as someone who this essay resonated a lot with, I think I don't know many people well enough to identify whether they are going through similar issues. Perhaps I know 10 people well enough. I feel like you have to have a fairly personal conversation or else a lot of experience with someone to get a sense for how they're actually doing.
Of the other men I know well enough to judge, most of the ones in relationships seem pretty happy with their lives, and the single ones are mostly dealing with issues like this (though for many it doesn't dominate to the point where they are miserable).
Isn’t it a mistake to see all this and continue thinking these men need help “becoming a man”? They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
I know women who fell into each one of those archetypes (with a pseudo-feminist, less violent but still sexist gender flipped version substituting for manosphere). This and the “male loneliness crisis” seems to me like the symptoms of an atomised society where community ties are no longer solid, and while perhaps men are a more affected to a certain degree (especially in America perhaps), the causes are not gender specific at all.
I think it makes sense to frame it like that because, at least as the author has experienced it, men at large are struggling to find themselves and occupy a niche that feels right for them I'm society, in a way that's different from what women are experiencing.
If you build a framework for "how to become a person," and find that it's failing half your population, or failing both halves of your population in distinctly different ways, then you'd probably be better off separating out different frameworks.
I don’t see how there’s much about being a man that needs male specific advice with regards to finding fulfilment and happiness. Having deep friendships and a sense of community, hobbies, a well rounded personality, having a job you like, avoiding burn-out, not falling for online communities that preys on your identity (there’s equivalents of the manosphere for being a woman, Asian, gay, trans, white, conservative, anything you can imagine, teaching you to feel angry, victimised and powerless), being able to identify and talk about your feelings. Those are all universal things.
The later seems weirdly contentious but I think men’s unwillingness to talk in depth to their friends about their emotions is largely social. If you look at the historical record, deep emotions, physical affection between friends, strong emotional ties, etc were perfectly normal to have between men. Even in this article, some of the men jumped at the chance to trauma dump and treat their date as a therapist precisely because they were denied that due to social norms.
I agree that men's reservations about talking in-depth with their friends about their emotions is social and historically contingent, but I don't think that makes it less a distinct men's issue. In our modern context, our social environment is one where few men feel like they have appropriate outlets to share their emotional issues, and even if that's not inherent to the experience of being a man throughout history, it manifests for men today in a way that's distinct from what women ordinarily experience in present day society.
Sure, but the solution to that isn’t to bring back rites of passage and a path to manhood, but to free men of stifling gender roles and expectations that make little sense in today’s world, and let them have nurturing male *and* female role models. I’m not blaming individual men for this; this will take a social effort from all genders.
I think the experience of navigating life while being full of testosterone is different enough that you need a path that addresses manhood. It's procrustean to look for a one-size-fits-all solution.
I don't know what the solution is. Scott had an essay, years and years back, where he discussed differences in how strongly people associate with their gender, how much it's important to them as a facet of how they interact with reality, versus how much it feels like an incidental fact about themselves. I think I'm a fair ways towards the side of feeling like my gender is something incidental to myself, and not core to my identity, although I'm not at the far extreme for that. Some people's gender identity seems to matter less to them than mine does, but to a lot of people, it seems to matter much more, and compared to when I was younger, I'd say I'm now more open to the idea that a healthy and stable society might be one which features distinct gender roles and differing expectations around them.
Associating with your sex is one thing; being under influence of sexual hormones is another. I take the fact that I am a man as incidental; nonetheless it is a channel through which the nature has influenced some of my traits, so when the society declares those traits to be evil, that puts me in a conflict with the society, even if otherwise I wouldn't care about being a man at all.
For example, schools should be less about sitting all the time quietly and obediently, and should offer other ways of learning, even ones that include jumping around and yelling. There is nothing about "2+2=4" that requires you to be sitting when you learn it.
So I think that an ideal solution would involve the following:
* different options for different people
* everyone can choose their option freely -- if a boy chooses the option designed for girls, or a girl chooses the option designed for boys, it is okay
* but there should be at least one option designed with stereotypical boys in mind, at least one option designed with stereotypical girls in mind, and maybe a few more other options
I want pushback on this idea because frankly, it's one of the most depressing ones I can't quite shake off.
It seems to me that women were able to somewhat move on from their fixated place regarding gender roles because in the end, society gives value to women themselves. Even if a woman takes up carpentry, wears jeans rather than pants and likes sports, she still holds value as a woman. Women in stereotypically male contexts even hold certain special attractive.
It does not seem to me that men find themselves in the same spot regarding gender. A man that drops all idea of traditional masculinity is generally categorized as a weirdo and will face problems regarding attractiveness compared to one that simply adopts traditional gender roles.
There is value to be found to having *extra*, traditionally femenine qualities, but those are always added value over a traditionally masculine base.
Thank you for pointing this out. As a "non-traditionally masculine" man, this is been my experience, for as long as I've been aware of Boys and Girls. I have always preferred the company of women, and have many close female friends, who value those non-traditional traits and abilities, but they aren't *attracted* to them, thus me, sexually.
I've never opted out, and have always thought I've fallen into the Whole Person category, but it was a wrench a few years ago when my wife, many years and a child into our relationship, confessed to me exactly the above. We're working on it, with the help of a lovely and (slowly) effective therapist, but the idea that a heterosexual woman (in the Bay Area, no less!) might naturally prefer my flavor of masculinity seems foreign to me. I never met anyone like that, and not for lack of trying.
I mentioned this in another comment, but you are missing the fact that "father" and "mother" are distinct social roles.
There are roles that are undifferentiated by sex, such as "employee", "taxpayer", or "tenured professor". There are also roles that can be undifferentiated, but can also have some differentiation by sex or traditional gender roles. For example, obstetricians or novelists. While many of the things that make a good obstetrician are not specific to ones gender, there will be differences in how you interact with many of your patients if you are a man or a woman. Similarly, many of the things that make a great novelist are common, but there are differences between how Hemingway and Jane Austin are great novelists that are not unrelated to their genders.
While there are commonalities in the prerequisites for becoming a good father and becoming a good mother, there are many important differences. Some of these differences will be unique to the individual, but others will be patterns or common to the role of father.
I think that one of the biggest differences in these is that to be a good father, you have to learn how to have a good relationship with your wife, who is a woman, as a man. (And for a mother, you have to learn how to have a good relationship with your husband, who is a man, as a women.)
I don't think that my wife would appreciate it if I treated her "like one of the boys". She doesn't particularly like horsing around, playing video games, competing, or things like that. Similarly, the homies would not appreciate being swept of their feet and being given a gentle kiss on the forehead.
The comment, though, like the article, is about young men and dating.
As a man in his 70’s, I see nothing new to the challenges faced by young men today. Growing up was always a challenge. Dating has always been hard. Gender expectations were stupid then and dumber now.
The “plight of men” was and is the plight of all people: to find their way in a rapidly changing world that is dysfunctional in part because traditional rules and roles don’t map into the realities of living in the present day. The Stoics knew this.
For at least 25 or 30 years, I have been reading article bemoaning how men’s problems are being ignored while women have been supported. This is such bullshit. All this gender-focused, arm-chair pop psychology helps no one. When in my teens and 20’s, no one thought much about gender — everyone was trying to figure life out and were willing to speak about it without dividing according to gender, sexuality, etc.
Want to help young men? Stop telling them they are being ignored, that no one cares about them and that women are the enemy. Instead, encourage them to volunteer in service to whatever cause interests them, to explore spiritual paths, to work hard and to be open and honest. No other life lessons are necessary if these are encouraged.
I call them as I see them. If you don’t see that women’s lived experiences are different from that of men, there’s no point in talking. Men and boys have challenges today but they are different than those of women. I hope some day we are just individuals first and our problems our own.
The difficulty is, "wants to talk about their emotions" is not a universal characteristic, it's a trait that's distributed within the population. I say this as someone who's out on the other tail, and finds the extent to which people constantly prattle about emotions these days hard to tolerate (as in the post-90s UK, far less extreme than the US). Probably more women are on the other side of the curve than men.
> I don’t see how there’s much about being a man that needs male specific advice
I'm not personally familiar with how to diagnose and treat, e.g., internal bleeding, so when it might need to be done, I look for a specialist who does see.
As a man, I find it very weird! I identify with many of the questions about meaning and so on that her exemplars are dealing with, though I think I am mostly happy with my answers, and I do think the lack of community is a huge issue in our society. But as you say, there's nothing particularly male about any of it. I don't deny there are some sex differences in people's experience of our society, but when I think about my role in society my gender is like the tenth most important thing?
Because the last 10,000 years of human history might have more educational value than a self-absorbed academic discipline? Why are you assuming that men and women are the same?
Probably more like 60 million years. We've been evolving from proto-mammals for at least this long. And since we're a social species, it's a fool's errand to try to differentiate between Nature and Nurture. For us, it's exactly the same.
Low effort and incorrect comment. MtF and FtM trans people reinforce gender roles and their differentiation. If you have ever seen FtM people post-transition, you would clearly see that they are deliberately working to learn how to _be a man_, not to "be a person".
If there was no purpose in "learning to be a man" or "learning to be a woman", then _why the fuck would anyone transition in the first place? (excepting nonbinary folks)_
Just think about it for a second. What are trans people transitioning from and transitioning to? Why the fuck do trans people talk about "second puberty" post-transition, and the awkwardness of learning to inhabit the new social role of their adopted gender?
You sound like a markov model who just spits out meaningless platitude and copy-pasted talking points when you pattern match things as "gender-related wrongthing".
And do you think this author would say that trans women are innately biologically built to give birth and raise children? The same as they say of 'women' in general?
Because if you do think that's what they would say, I have a bridge to sell you.
Trust me, I am well-versed and carefully-considered on the relationship between the trans movement and gender ideology, including the role of non-binary trans people which you conveniently neglect to mention. I'll link to my wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview if you want.
But what you're missing is that the *reality* of the relationship between trans people and gender ideology has very little to do with the right-wing *backlash* to trans people.
The right just sees the acceptance of trans people as an assault on traditional gender roles, and responds by reifying and reasserting those traditional strictures.
If they're smart like this author, they do that with a brush of Evo Psych as an 'academic' justification.
>And do you think this author would say that trans women are innately biologically built to give birth and raise children? The same as they say of 'women' in general?
I don't know what the author would say. I don't think that MtF trans women are biologically built to give birth, though. I'm not sure how one could think this, given that MtF trans women don't have a uterus or eggs. I do think that there are probably trans women who could raise children in a relationship that is at least somewhat similar to a traditional monogamous relationship. The relationship would have some differences given the lack of birthing, but could still be substantially similar, especially if the trans woman was inhabiting the social role of a woman and was partnered with someone inhabiting the social role of a man.
> Trust me, I am well-versed and carefully-considered on the relationship between the trans movement and gender ideology, including the role of non-binary trans people which you conveniently neglect to mention. I'll link to my wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview if you want.
As I see it, your made the following comment on a post about the experience of dating men in the bay area:
> >They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
> As far as I can tell, backlash against the trans movement.
The comment that you were responding to said:
> Isn’t it a mistake to see all this and continue thinking these men need help “becoming a man”? They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
As far as I can tell, you were saying that the only reason to frame this article in terms of manhood, instead of framing it in terms of becoming a better person, is because of backlash against the trans movement. I explained why I don't think that backlash against the trans movement explains this framing, and why framing an article about dating men in terms of manhood _actually makes more sense than framing it in terms of being a better gender-neutral person_. I don't think linking a "wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview" would help clarify your original comment, unless it happens to explain why a (presumably) cis-gendered woman's experience dating heterosexual men is actually deeply related to "the trans movement".
> But what you're missing is that the *reality* of the relationship between trans people and gender ideology has very little to do with the right-wing *backlash* to trans people.
> The right just sees the acceptance of trans people as an assault on traditional gender roles, and responds by reifying and reasserting those traditional strictures.
This is an article (presumably) by a cis woman about dating cis heterosexual men. I don't think I'm missing the point, I think you're trying to make this article about your favorite culture war topic which is only very tenuously related to the article itself.
The only relationship I can see is that you think that "traditional gender roles" are bad or something, and think that society would be better if we didn't have them, or something. You haven't actually said this, but this is the only somewhat relevant connection I can see you implying. If you do actually believe something like that and are trying to make some point about that, I think you should explain that more clearly.
I'd ask that you make your comment substantially related to the article (which I think is primarily about postive male role models, the process of becoming a man in modern society, and the relationship of this to heterosexual dating.)
> And do you think this author would say that trans women are innately biologically built to give birth and raise children? The same as they say of 'women' in general?
Not wanting to put words in the author's mouth, but my guess is the author would say that this is an essay of broad generalisations, and transsexuals are a rare edge case not to be worried about too much in this context.
If so, it's a very wrongheaded way to backlash. Very few people are more aware of the significance of gender to identity than trans men and trans women.
I am trans and can promise you that discussion of being a well-adjusted man or woman specifically has very little to do with anti-trans backlash. Well, unless all my close friends and my fiancee secretly harbor some sort of deep-seated ideological distaste towards me, but I really doubt that. I am paranoid enough that I would be very unlikely to miss any such distaste, and I have yet to find any at all in them, who very often discuss such topics.
This is also a very strange opinion because these discussions have been going on since long before the vast majority of people had ever heard of anything trans-related. There's a certain brand of influencer now that will use trans people as a sort of diabolical antithesis to everything a man or woman should be, but those certainly aren't the only people talking about this very real and serious problem.
We're not talking about the discussion of being a well-adjusted man or woman, we're talking about the particular language of biological essentialism and evolutionary psychology used throughout this article.
It's true that those arguments go back further than the trans movement, people on the right have been using some version of them to fight feminism for decades.
But 10 years ago, those arguments and that language would have been very unpopular in a largely academic/intellectual space like this one. The pan-adaptationsist 'just-so-story' version of evolutionary psychology on display in this article had been widely debunked among the intelligentsia, replaced with much more nuanced accounts that considered dynamic evolutionary systems. Biological gender essentialism was seen as one small part of the total picture of gender expression and cultural gender roles, with lots of individual variation and lots of filtering through culture; someone trying to make the broad and extreme claims about 'how men are built' that pervade this article would not be taken seriously.
Why did the audience at 'smart' blogs like this abandon those nuanced and informed views, and start applauding this simplistic and anachronistic rhetoric of 'men are built to be warriors, women and built to birth and raise children, and trying to do anything else will make them miserable'?
Because this space has slid towards anti-woke and towards the right, and accepted arguments-as-soldiers so long as they oppose 'woke ideology.'
On the topic of gender roles and biological gender essentialism, the trans movement has been the primary motivating target of that backlash.
I'm not saying that this article is itself a specific attack on trans people. I'm saying that if people in this space didn't identify as largely anti-woke, and if they didn't identify the trans movement as a 'woke ideology' and spend years arranging arguments against it, the essentialist language used throughout this article would get laughed out of the room instead of widely embraced.
It might be just as easy to say (and in fact, those who tend towards more biological essentialism usually do say) that ten years ago we had dramatically overcorrected following the realization that not everything was determined by sex, to the idea that almost nothing was.
Also, even if you accept that gender roles are entirely socially constructed and have no biological basis, there is a reason to distinguish between the effects of society on those who are expected to occupy the male role and those who are expected to occupy the female role, and a large part of this post had much more to do with society than biology. I agree that the vagueness/lack of positive examples in social expectations for men and the distrust often directed towards them are often bigger problems than the expected role for men being overly feminized, but I do think that expecting everybody regardless of gender and personality to act like a stereotypical woman is a major problem in progressive circles. If you don't buy that it's an issue for men, consider some other cases. Attraction to women being considered as predatory hurts anyone who is attracted to women, and in fact some lesbians have talked about similar feelings of sexual shame to those which straight men immersed in social justice culture often have. The progressive expectation that everyone will always be empathetic, always say the right things, and never show anger or frustration towards others (unless it is righteous anger directed at bigotry) hurts anyone who struggles with anger or with social cues; autistic people as well as neurotypical men often report being bothered by this. I personally have struggled with both of these expectations in ways that are downstream of social justice culture, despite having been born female.
And in my experience of talking about gender differences in a more socially progressive group, I would expect these generalizations about men and women to include more caveats about these traits occurring on average and within-group variation being greater than between-group variation, not to be totally absent.
I think that framing this as "how to become a person" misses some of the important differences between the social role of man and women.
One way to view "becoming a man" and "becoming a woman" is as "becoming a father" and "becoming a mother" (in the context of a stable monogamous heterosexual relationship). If you are a person and want to pair-bond and raise children in a stable heterosexual relationship, you have to inhabit either the role of man/father or woman/mother, and most people only realistically have the potential to inhabit one of these roles given their biological sex.
In her discussion of "the man who opts out", the author clearly describes men who successfully become a person (in the sense that they have friends, do well in the workplace, etc.) but who struggle to become a man/father. The role of "friend" and "employee" are roles that can be relatively sexless and undifferentiated. People can learn to perform these roles very competently and still fail to learn how to be a man/father. While I think you are right that atomization and other problems impact people of all sexes, I think there are distinct impacts and challenges that they pose for biological men trying to become men/fathers and on biological women trying to become women/mothers.
One thing that I think that the author misses is that there are different end-states that can be characterized as "becoming a man". I think that the ideal that she is gesturing towards is that of becoming a father in a pair-bonded long-term stable heterosexual relationship in which children are raised.
Historically, one could also "become a man" by becoming a marauding warrior. This was a somewhat successful strategy at the level of culture for a number of cultures, though I think there's a decent argument that it lost out at the cultural level to the monogamous pair-bonded father model because it is relatively incompatible with modernity and is less capable of sustaining technological production. (The traditional Comanche culture/society could not sustain itself against artillery and rifles. Warlordism still exists in e.g. South Sudan, but there is a reason that these places are not military peers of the great powers.)
Humans are a gendered species. Every human society has sex roles, and they all align with the innate psychological differences between men and women.
Trying to teach broken men to become a 'better person' is going to end up with advice that is too generic to be meaningful. Particularly in the realm of romance. If you want to help a guy end up happily married, then you need to give him advice on dating/life as a man, because the things he is going to have to do and be on the dating market are male-specific. For example, a woman looking for love doesn't need to learn how to ask a guy out on a date, but a man looking for love absolutely does.
My point was that very little of that “brokenness” in this article had to do directly with them being men. Moving to a new city and losing all your old friends, having only superficial friendships, being unfulfilled by a boring if lucrative job, not knowing what you want to do in life… what advice would you give a man that wouldn’t also apply to a woman?
Sure, heterosexual dating has social norms and expectations, but anyone who’s experimented with dating the same sex can recognise how arbitrary and stifling they can be, and how you’re so better off moving on from the framework of “I am the man, so I do X, you are the woman, so you do Y”. Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness. Fathers should be nurturing, warm and emotionally supportive, mothers should teach skills and promote strength and independence.
More to the point, raising your kids differently because of their sex is probably what leads to many kind of neuroses. I know families where only the girls are expected to clean and cook and take care of themselves, and then they wonder why the boys are slovenly manchildren who look to their girlfriends to fulfil the role their mother did.
You should teach your daughters how to change a tire and stand up for themselves, and your sons to clean and talk about their feelings. If they have preferences, that’s absolutely fine, but they should never think that they are forced on a specific path because of their sex , especially from their parents, because sooo much societal message will be working against them.
> Moving to a new city and losing all your old friends, having only superficial friendships, being unfulfilled by a boring if lucrative job, not knowing what you want to do in life… what advice would you give a man that wouldn’t also apply to a woman?
Men take more risk on average and end up in these situations more.
> Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness
Trying to fight tens of thousands of years of sex-differentiated evolutionary-selected preferences won't get you anywhere but misery and unhappiness for the majority of people.
Teach your son how to cook and clean. Teach your daughter how to change a tire or to 3d print if she shows interest in it. But if you're a man, tell your son what standards life and society expects from a man. Society expects a man to be sure of himself, to provide, to always be in control of his emotions.
While those are good traits to have for both sexes, there's (almost) no compromising on those as a man, while a woman who's a housewife, who's a bit shy and hesitant and indecisive, who's frequently emotional - that's socially acceptable. Teach your son that as a man, he should try to never compromise on these.
Is this an outrageous double standard? Is it unfair? It's unhealthy? Not more unfair than it being women who bear children and the risks and burden of childbirth.
> But if you're a man, tell your son what standards life and society expects from a man. Society expects a man to be sure of himself, to provide, to always be in control of his emotions.
Who is society? His close friends? His coworkers? His partner?
I don’t have kids yet, but I wouldn’t want my son to feel like he has to put on a stoic mask for everyone all the time. I wouldn’t want him to grow up with people who preach those same gender roles, and to repeat that kind of stuff.
And it’s absolutely not true anyway, I know a decent number of men on benefits, some where their girlfriend is the primary breadwinner, and women who date emotionally unstable men.
> Who is society? His close friends? His coworkers? His partner?
Yes.
> I don’t have kids yet, but I wouldn’t want my son to feel like he has to put on a stoic mask for everyone all the time
Nothing about what I said requires a stoic mask. But it does require you to be able project confidence in the face of uncertainty, to be able to be decisive, and to be able to lead and reassure. It does require that you master your emotions.
Being a mother is a full-time job. Being a husband and a father is too.
> I know a decent number of men on benefits, some where their girlfriend is the primary breadwinner, and women who date emotionally unstable men.
Exceptions always exist, and those aren't even particularly good exceptions to aspire towards. Do you want your son to be like those emotionally unstable, unemployed men? Do you want your son to be unable to provide for himself and to be dependent on others?
In any case, being a provider doesn't require that you be the primary breadwinner, or to even hold a particularly high paying job. It does, however, require that you are capable of adding value to society, to create or do something that people needs doing.
This is a great comment and I agree with almost all of it. Society is much stricter in response to male failures and it doesn't serve a boy well to not equip him to succeed in masculinity as you've very aptly defined it here.
That said, technology has changed our fundamental evolutionary environment so much that it also does a disservice to a boy not to equip him for this new world. Women don't need men for provision nearly as much as they used to, and teaching a boy how to provide emotional support and be emotionally open is part of our species' continued evolution; they literally are less likely to reproduce otherwise.
I agree, providing emotional support is a large part of the value men bring to a relationship.
However, I think that the advice to be emotionally open is well-intentioned but misleading. The emotional support in a heterosexual relationship needs not be completely one-sided, but it is heavily weighted towards the man providing emotional support for the woman, and not the other way around.
This means that while you can be emotionally honest, as a man you should almost never be using your partner as an emotional support.
That means no trauma dumping. No emotional breakdowns. Don't do, basically, anything that conveys to your partner that you are not emotionally alright and needs help. Even if you genuinely do - go to your friends, not your wife.
But also, don't be an unfeeling robot to your wife. Be honest with your emotions with her, but never, ever, frame them as a problem that you need help with.
You're angry that you got passed over for promotion, but you got it handled, you'll start looking for a new job. You're a bit down sad that you pet can died, but you'll be fine, you'll just need a bit of time.
Never share an emotional problem without a solution.
Does it have to be toxic and unhealthy? No, just put in the work to have friends/family that you can lean on for emotional support. Not your wife or date or girlfriend.
Emotionally dumping on a gf/date show that either you don't have anyone else you can confide with (red flag) or you do and you're still emotionally unstable (also a red flag). Women have a great intuitive sense of this and are almost always turned off by this behavior, even if they can't exactly/won't explain why.
Hm, interesting, that's not how my marriage works. My husband makes tons more money than me, is clearly the leader in terms of which way our household goes, and I think he's a great role male model and respect him as a true man. He is very open with his feelings with me on exactly the topics you describe. For sure I would not like it if he cried or something about his problems daily to me but he wouldn't like it if I did that either; we both use our words to share our frustrations and to problem solve together. He will call me from work to tell me about something that happened, and I'll listen and empathize and he'll ask me for advice.
I agree it's not a good idea to be so open on a first date or in the early stages of a relationship. And I agree he'd have more tolerance for my daily crying than I'd have for any similar behavior from him. There's some truth to what you're saying but it's not the Edenic model where Adam knew his wife and she knew him.
> anyone who’s experimented with dating the same sex can recognise how arbitrary and stifling they can be, and how you’re so better off moving on from the framework of “I am the man, so I do X, you are the woman, so you do Y”. Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness.
That's a wonderful theoretical point to make which has zero connection with the reality of heterosexual dating (app or otherwise). The experience of men and women dating each other is vastly different, and expectations are vastly different. Any model that tries to assume away this difference and reason from the idealized premise that the two genders are in a symmetrical situation isn't a practical advice helpful to anyone, it's an exercise in worldbuilding.
It doesn't, but they don't. Is your proposed solution for a hypothetical man from this post is to wait for women to approach them first? That's just not going to happen.
Oddly enough, that actually is how I started dating my future wife, but that was the only time something like that happened to me after high school, and I was 31 at the time. At least I knew how to cash in my winning lottery ticket when I was offered one. ;)
> how you’re so better off moving on from the framework of “I am the man, so I do X, you are the woman, so you do Y”.
That's the problem with relationships, that it's not enough for you to unilaterally change the framework. You also need to meet someone who accepts the changed framework, otherwise you stay alone (which is okay if that's what you wanted, but some people want to be in a relationship).
And for heterosexual people, if there are thousands of your sex who want to change the framework, there better be thousands of the opposite sex who accept it, otherwise your chances on the dating market are not going to look good.
>Every human society has sex roles, and they all align with the innate psychological differences between men and women.
In Shakespeare's time, women weren't allowed to be actors. All the female roles had to be played by young men. How does *that* align with innate psychological differences between men and women?
There are many more examples like that.
> a woman looking for love doesn't need to learn how to ask a guy out on a date, but a man looking for love absolutely does.
That may be true in the society we have today, but let's not lose sight of the fact that we can change society. I would happily support a movement to encourage women to ask men out more often instead of waiting to be approached.
In my experience, women my age also do these sorts of things, but it seems to happen less often, and when it does it tends to happen to a less extreme extent than with men, and in less destructive ways. As a telling example, I have a brother-sister pair of cousins who are both prone to general dysfunction and mental issues. The sister is very isolated but graduated college and is starting work in the fall; the brother dropped out five or six times, lives in his childhood bedroom, abuses research chemicals, and is so deep into the crevices of strange online ideologies that he can't have normal interactions with people anymore. I certainly don't think my female cousin is on a path to happiness, but my male cousin is on a path to early death.
> They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
They are already a person, they need help developing into final stage of the closest gender path. Hence males would imply the use of "manhood" as most proper.
If nothing else, because they will *notice* that the people around them aren't comfortable when they frame their experiences 'as male.'
You can't expect people to have healthy self-identity if discussing their gender in positive terms gets people looking at them like they just ripped a giant fart in public! If masculinity-qua-masculinity isn't something that you're willing to discuss except as a problem or as a threat to women, then you are by definition stigmatizing men, and the things are going to happen that happen when you stigmatize men.
Thank you. I came out of the essay feeling something profound was missing, and you helped me put my finger on what.
In general, I'm deeply skeptical of narratives about gender and social conditioning, because they often ring as dehumanizing to me.
(Include standard caveats here, societal factors play a huge role on our conception of gender norms and moral norms, etc etc etc.)
I don't feel like a man very much, I feel like a human. When I feel shame for my failures or pride for my successes, they're my failures and successes as a human being and an imperfect rational agent doing the best with the brain he got. We're more than piles of hormones and societal preconceptions.
I agree. Most people are not *intentionally* mean to men and may even be mildly well-disposed-by-default, but this author is (I feel) somewhat rare, among both men and women, in having a level of empathy that makes her put in so much effort into understanding other men from their own perspective.
That is really not evident to me at all. I reckon that if feminists at large (both men and women) were aware of what they are doing to male youth, we wouldn't be seeing them rejecting feminism in the numbers we are seeing.
I keep running across women online who are overtly hostile to men, for example the woman who didn't want to hear about male loneliness because so many gay/transgender/women/etc. are lonely and no one seems to care about that.
I'm not sure how much of it is actually wanting to hurt people who are imagined as real.
There's a lot of free-floating cruelty these days and it does add up.
> There's a lot of free-floating cruelty these days and it does add up.
On the internet, you can be an asshole, and then join a cause that feels righteous. Not only will no one punch you, but you will always find someone to join your side (often the moderators, if you choose the right Reddit forum).
In real life, people like this would soon eliminate themselves... if not from life (by getting into physical conflicts more often than their body can handle), then at least from the society (people will stop inviting them).
I don't really think so, but I'm not from Bay Area so it may resonate less. This also touches a topic that was very frequent in golden age of SSC but was almost never in ACX (is there even any?) that it'll certainly attract lots of old fans. Overall, this'd not be my top 3, but I understand if SSC readers think it is.
A person who is Whole does not obsess about whether they are a 'man'. They don't need detailed instructions on how to be one.
You want men (and women!) to be whole? Teach them to be self-aware and honest with themselves. Teach them basic virtues, and to avoid over-philosophising. It isn't rocket science!
This is exactly the kind of empty non-advice causing the problems the author is talking about. A lot of people do need detailed, specific instructions and are going to be lost and hopeless without them.
Sorry, was typing from a phone, so let me expand my point a bit. Children of both genders do need detailed, specific instruction. My point is that this instruction is not on how to be a man or a woman. It's on how to learn to be themselves, and how to learn to be good.
Men and women do have biological differences, but these are on average. Each individual is unique. Trying to enforce 'male' instruction on a boy whose temperament will reject that instruction will cause that child to become 'lost' and confused.
The issue the author has correctly identified is that we've told too many people that acting in line with their natural inclination is wrong and toxic. But their solution is to do the same at scale - teach all boys to behave like 'men' even when it doesn't suit them, and all girls to behave like 'women'. Why?
Because when your son gets older he's going to be bigger, stronger, faster and more powerful than most of the women he meets, and they are going to look to him in a crisis for that reason, and he will represent a threat to them if he does not have control over himself and a degree of humility.
How often do you encounter crises where your size, strength, and speed matter? Most 'crises' either of my children are likely to encounter will require composure, wisdom, courage, and kindness, and I can try to teach these virtues to both of them.
Character traits (confidence, decisiveness) are much more like to inspire respect than physical traits. And women can exhibit those just as well as men.
Every time there is an insect in my house it is a crisis that requires size, strength, and speed to deal with. Granted it also takes composure and courage.
Jokes aside, I do have a lot less fear and vulnerability when I walk through the world than my wife does. Part of having a good relationship with her is understanding and working with that. I have to look out for her in a way that I don't have to look out for the men in my life.
I empathize with your take, but we live in a mimetic world where most people will follow some fixed narrative (or combination of narratives). For all to self-actualize as individuals is too much to ask for. So I think the author is in search of better mass-narratives (cultures/maps/etc).
I think it's just as much to ask for us to go back to rigid gender roles :) So since we're discussing implausible solutions anyway, let's discuss ones that would actually achieve something.
I've started to resent the rote scientific jargon that people knock down as a strawman on the differences between men and women.
While your attempt to egalitarianism is noble, it completely ignores the fact that men and women navigate the world differently. I am not talking about "men should be able to save a woman from a fire", I am talking practical, everyday differences.
For example, in a social setting, like a bar or party, the man is typically expected approach first. Therefore as a boy you need to be taught that this is a role that exists and how to perform it. If you ignore this reality about courtship you are going to end up confused as a young man. This is just one example, and retorting with "well women should approach too!" isn't useful nor addresses the numerous other ways the genders navigate life. Also, I don't consider this a good or bad thing - but a role that has to be learned.
So yes, people do need detailed, specific, instructions because society is made up of 100 hidden and esoteric rules and "just learn to be good" won't cut it.
That differs a lot in different societies. From what friends have told me, in Spain women often make the first move. But yes, you have a point that people should be taught the realities of the society in which they exist.
I think the author was saying that boys who actively ask "How can I become a good man?" need someone to answer that question for them. Not all boys ask that question. Some boys are less wedded to the notion of gender and instead ask something like "How can I be a good person?" That question also needs answering. The point, I think, was to meet each person where they're at.
Having said that, I admit that I don't like the implication that the genders are fundamentally different. I prefer to emphasize respecting each person individually, and whether or not we see statistical averages diverging from each other is really none of my concern.
I see this in Sudbury Schools, which do a wonderful job of raising children without any particular emphasis on gender (nor is there any emphasis on eliminating gender). Each child is unique, and if they're given respect they will find their own way in life.
So if we're discussing gender at all, my focus is on tearing down the offensive stereotypes that already exist. I'm not interested in propping up new "better" stereotypes.
I'd like to clarify that my solution isn't to "teach all boys to behave like men" in a singular, enforced, or rigid way. My solution is to offer a variety of clear paths that lead to a variety of healthy definitions of manhood. I want paths that fit the shyest, most quiet boys, and paths that benefit the most aggressive and dominant boys, and role models willing to guide them along each path and validate the various healthy expressions of manhood.
I also think these paths should be chosen by boys/men themselves, and never enforced on them. They should be ladders to help someone climb to self-actualization, rather than straightjackets.
If a boy decides he wants to ignore the paths and doesn't really care about being a man--sure, that's no problem! I actually really admire that mindset.
But the reality is that "being a man" is often a goal for boys, and leaving them with no clear definition of this term, and no clear path to follow, often leads to confusion and suffering (or simply drives them to the manosphere, where paths do exist, but are horribly toxic.)
I also think this isn't really much different from what feminists have offered women; I can easily find many women across the political spectrum who talk about "what womanhood means to them," and the steps/challenges of their path to become a self-actualized person while navigating life as a woman.
Personally, as a woman, I've benefited massively from women who mentored me and provided me with a clear path for how to function in society as a fiery, bisexual tomboy. My path has been *very* different than most of my female friends, and I can't imagine how lost I would have been without mentors and role models who navigated similar paths, and shared female-specific tips and tricks.
And ultimately that's all I'm asking for here: not a return to rigid gender norms, but rather supportive and optional paths, and role-models to help navigate the steps along the way.
Ok then it's all just semantics. If you offer so many paths that anyone can find their way, why focus on gender at all? Just because some lost boys crave a definition of 'man'? Easier to tell those boys to stop worrying about that, and teach them to find themselves.
Note also that there are hundreds if not thousands of role models and guides out there already. Read and try to live up to the poem If; look at sportsmen like Federer; listen to people like Jimmy Carr; there is no shortage of material to help people. Ultimately, I don't see what specifically you want to do differently.
> If you offer so many paths that anyone can find their way, why focus on gender at all?
Because gender has a large impact on those paths, for many people. And many young people find it extremely helpful and soothing to speak to their specific lived experiences as X gender.
It is indeed easier just to tell people "don't worry about gender." But a lot of young people find this advice confusing or dismissive. Giving specific, actionable advice to young people, and tailoring that advice to their lived experiences, is often received better than vague directions to "just find yourself."
And right now, I think it's extremely important for society to focus on giving young men practical and actionable advice, rather than advice for an idealized world where gender doesn't matter.
I hope we can slowly build toward a world where gender doesn't matter so much. But right now it does matter to most people, and I don't think it's helpful to ignore that, even if it's very well-intended.
I think there's a lot of wishful thinking in all this. Ultimately, I side with Thatcher - there is no such thing as society. The wellbeing of kids depends a lot on their parents, and most parents are doing a bad job raising their kids, teaching them good values, engaging with them, etc. Injecting gender back in won't achieve anything.
>Giving specific, actionable advice to young people, and tailoring that advice to their lived experiences, is often received better than vague directions to "just find yourself."
I agree, but specific actionable advice isn't necessarily gender-specific.
I work with kids myself. I give them advice all the time. But the kids I work with almost never frame their problems in the context of gender, so my advice never needs to be phrased that way. My specific, actionable advice usually involves telling the kid to keep pursuing their interests and to push back against anyone who tells them otherwise.
For instance, if a kid loves to write stories but their parents want them to focus on getting good grades, I'll tell the kid to keep writing stories and to resist the School Industrial Complex as much as they can. I don't say "As a boy, you should keep writing stories" or "As a girl, you should keep writing stories." Gender is irrelevant.
Of course, if a kid comes to me and says "My problem is that people are treating me poorly because of my gender", then we will absolutely discuss gender. I won't pretend that we live in an ideal world where sexism doesn't exist; that would be very bad mentorship on my part. But even then I phrase it in terms of "Here's how to find happiness in life despite the all the sexism weighing you down." I don't phrase it in terms of "Here's how to be a man" or "Here's how to be a woman."
If a kid really needed that phrasing I would go along with it, but thus far I haven't seen the need.
Sorry if I missed it in a different comment, but do you have suggestions for what those clear paths should be? Your post was beautifully written, but it isn't actionable unless somebody suggests such paths.
>I'd like to clarify that my solution isn't to "teach all boys to behave like men" in a singular, enforced, or rigid way.
That's good.
>My solution is to offer a variety of clear paths that lead to a variety of healthy definitions of manhood
And would these healthy definitions of manhood differ from healthy definitions of womanhood? If so, what differences would you expect to see?
Consider Mr. Rogers, for instance. He was a man, but his calling in life was to work with children, and he was extremely gentle and caring. These are all things we might normally expect of a woman, but Mr. Rogers did it as a man. If this is a healthy path to manhood, it's equally a healthy path to womanhood. Seems like we should just say "Being kind to a children is a healthy path to adulthood", and leave gender out of it.
>Personally, as a woman, I've benefited massively from women who mentored me and provided me with a clear path for how to function in society as a fiery, bisexual tomboy.
I'm glad you had those mentors.
>I can't imagine how lost I would have been without mentors and role models who navigated similar paths, and shared female-specific tips and tricks.
What sort of advice does a fiery, bisexual tomboy woman need that wouldn't also apply to a fiery, bisexual tomboy-esque man?
I can think of two categories.
First, there are physical differences between cisgendered women and cisgendered men. If we're talking about the sort of stuff people learn in health class, then obviously it matters which set of body parts you happen to have, as the care and maintenance of the other set is not really applicable in your case.
Second, there are differences in the way men and women are treated in society. A fiery woman can expect to receive pushback from sexist people who think she should be more feminine, whereas a fiery man won't. But crucially, these differences only exist in society's collective imagination, so the advice is more "How to be a woman in this society" (in this case, how to fight off sexist critics) as opposed to "How to be a woman" in some sort of ultimate cosmic sense.
Perhaps that's just semantics, but it seems important to me. If we remember that society is prone to coming up with nonsense ideas about gender, we can push back against those ideas.
Now for argument's sake, let's say that estrogen and testosterone really do influence human personalities in an objective, measurable way. Let's imagine we do some absolute science which somehow isn't tainted by any of society's nonsense and we prove, beyond any doubt, then men tend towards personality type A while women tend towards type B. In that case, it might be useful to talk about the fundamental differences between men and women on a population level, but it would still be nonsensical to push these ideas on an individual level, because so many people differ from the average.
I have deep sympathy for the types of men discussed in this post, in part because I've been through similar experiences myself. And I'm very grateful to you (the author) for articulating these problems. But I don't think the issue in my case was that people failed to teach me how to "be a man". I think the issue is that people judge me without understanding me. (Part of that judgment is based on my gender, and part of it is based on age or bad definitions of "normal".)
I keep coming back to the idea that men and women are equal. As a lonely man, I faced criticism. If I had been a lonely woman, I might have received more support. Likewise if the men in this post weren't locked into the category of "men", that is to say, if society saw them as individuals and not as representatives of their gender, they might have an easier time in life.
You say that men should not be shamed for qualities like "being highly interested in sex", and I agree. (Obviously abuse is wrong but consenting adults is something else, and naturally some people are more sexual than other people.) But again, neither men nor women should be shamed for having that quality.
Gender might magnify these judgements, so that at various points in history it's either men or women who get most of the "stop enjoying sex" criticism, and it's fair to point out "men are being disproportionately judged for experiencing sexual desire" or "women are being disproportionately judged for experiencing sexual desire" (depending on which one is true at that moment), but this "magnification" problem could be solved by adopting a general "stop judging people differently based their gender" rule, at which point all that we need is a general "stop shaming people for being highly sexual" rule.
In summary, I want to discuss the unique problems each gender faces, but I also want to dissolve the concept of gender as much as we can. I want to talk about how we treat various personality traits, for instance, and if turns out that a certain trait is more common in one gender or another, that's not necessarily important. What's important is that we learn to stop shaming people for non-abusive personality traits.
Perhaps I'm biased from my own experiences. Perhaps there a lot of men out there who would say "No, you don't get it. I specifically know how to be a MAN. This genderless stuff is weird and disorienting and I don't like it." If that's really how they feel, I'm willing to accommodate them.
There's a couple of paragraphs in the essay that address your concerns. The author says that there is no one right way or path to be a "man," so a diverse array of different role models is required. The point could be abstracted to the common identititarian-left saying of "representation matters."
Frankly, I don't think we have very many avatars of healthy adulthood in public life, period, regardless of gender.
'Be self-aware and honest with yourself and others about who you are' *is* a detailed, specific instruction.
The fact that we think it's not is an indictment of our atomized consumerist culture, where the only way we can think to know ourselves is in relation to an external archetype or ideological avatar.
Any single sentence is not a detailed list of instructions, yes.
Self-awareness is absolutely an active process, and a skill you can train. At every step, you can interrogate yourself for what you want and what you think, or reach for external validators to tell you what to think and what to do. Introspection is a skill with a very long history of study and development. It's not hard to find detailed instructions for these things if that's what you need.
Again, consumerist culture tries very hard to destroy this skill; it's much more convenient for advertisers to create 12 'types' of person, and then target brands and narratives to each group. Content recommendation engines will filter your content to match a 'type', if you click a bunch of Vtubers it will stop trying to show you sports. Any original thought you might have will have to fight against a hundred eloquent blog posts by persuasive pundits trying to get you on their 'side'.
That makes it hard to 'be yourself', to the extent that some people can't even comprehend what the phrase could be saying. Which brand do I buy to 'be myself'? Which blog do I read to 'be myself'?
This is very much a 'get out of the car' piece of advice, yes. But it's not *that* difficult, you just have to practice the skill of stopping and asking yourself what *you* want to do, what *you* think, before automatically accepting the cultural default.
>Any single sentence is not a detailed list of instructions, yes.
My point is that any 'side' will have a one-sentence motto version of their advice which does not give detailed instructions on its own, and then a variety of different sources with detailed advice for how to follow that motto in practice.
This is not a failing of the left, the same is true for advice from the right, this is just an aspect of how ideas are communicated in full generality.
If your claim is 'the right has lots of resources for their detailed instructions, that says more about where your content algorithms are filtering you than it does about the world. There are plenty of places to read about discovering yourself and being yourself in all the ways I've discussed.
If there is any real criticism here, it would be that the right very explicitly brands its advice as PUA, here's how to get laid, here's how to be a chad all the ladies will simp for, etc, where the left is more typically branding it as 'here is how to be happy and well-rounded person,by the way that's attractive.'
So maybe men who are only looking on advice on how to score are getting filtered to the right and missing the advice on the left. That's potentially a real search engine optimization problem that the left could work on, but it's not a major ideological failing as people keep trying to paint it.
It’s very self-aware and very honest to say “I would like to have sex with you right now” to a woman you’ve just met, but it’s not particularly conducive to that goal
> A person who is Whole does not obsess about whether they are a 'man'. They don't need detailed instructions on how to be one.
That is correct, but it doesn't follow that you don't need to teach people how to be Whole (both in generic and gender-specific way). A proficient driver doesn't need think about how to position the car in the lane, which pedal to press etc, but that's exactly because they've learned it in the past to the point that now it's automatic and natural. Same with being Whole, you absolutely do need to teach it to kids and young people, so eventually they can do it without detailed instructions and guidance.
I think you can (and maybe should) tell everyone everything, but you need to teach boys more about how to handle having a male body, male hormones, and the expectations that our society places on men. For a girl such knowledge may be interesting, but for the boy it is necessary.
I think "the expectations that our society places on men" encompasses quite a lot, and is meaningfully different from the expectations that our society places on women. Lots of people seem to naturally learn (or innately conform to) those expectations, but some of us are prone to take things literally, and I think we would have benefited from a more direct and honest account of the ways in which members of our gender tend to be rewarded for behaving.
But part of the issue that the author highlights is that we don't have defined expectations for each gender anyway. Isn't it better to teach people to deal with ambiguity by building their confidence, outside gender norms?
To add specifically for the "being a whole" angle. You don't just teach things like this via a list of instructions, you teach it by example via role models and such. One of the most critical aspects of life (esp for the teenagers, who are the main recipients of this teaching) where being Whole matters is in romantic relationships, and it's also one of the places where you Whole-ness is most likely to be damaged. So you absolutely need to have those role models showing how to handle such situations. And since heterosexual romantic relationships are very asymmetrical by nature, you have to have different models for boys and girls, since they'll be facing different challenges and so need different approaches to handle them.
And yeah, to directly answer your question, I would probably spend much more effort teaching an (average) boy to manage his aggression, and teach an (average) girl to be more pushy and assertive, because testosterone is a thing. Also, I would teach a boy that if he and his girlfriend are walking down the street and a crazy crackhead jumps on them, he should feel obligated to protect the girlfriend and not the other way around.
Finally, and much more subjectively and controversially, I kind of do think that the optimal ways of processing strong emotions in general are somewhat different for men and women. No I don't have any science to back it up, and yes even if my observations are true it may in principle be a result of nurture rather than nature. Still, that's what I think.
Right but what's the point then - you'll tailor your upbringing to the specific child, which is as it should be. If your claim is that this upbringing will be different on average, then yes fine I agree with that.
Except the pressures upon them, both social and biological, create differing needs that directly implicate their "wholeness" if not managed properly. If a man faces a constant pressure to have sex, he's going to need detailed instruction on how to manage his desires and goals.
What do you think the difference between our positions is, then? Do you imagine that I started by thinking in terms of "man" or "woman", not "person"? If I had laid out my whole thought process and started with "person", then narrowed and said "a man faces constant pressures, and a woman faces difference constant pressures", then focused on men and only talked about them, would you still be objecting to what I say?
At this point I'm not sure what the difference is. The author wrote we need detailed instructions for men. That's what I'm objecting to. I don't want to go around telling anyone what a man is supposed to be like - not in terms of character traits. Should we be telling boys that they'll have some different experiences to girls? Sure, yes, of course. But that's very different to bringing back strict gender roles and expectations.
> I don't want to go around telling anyone what a man is supposed to be like - not in terms of character traits.
Neither do I, but I would go further advocate for separating "man" from "male". The latter is not a category with prescriptions and gatekeeping, the former would be.
For me, it's not about telling people what a man "is supposed to be like" in a normative sense that I endorse. (Or, rather, if I did do this, I would list qualities that I also think are good in women.) But I do think boys/girls deserve to know what a man/woman is "supposed to be like" in the sense that, because our society(/human nature) is still very gender-sensitive, they will in practice tend to be treated differently depending on whether they display certain masculine/feminine virtues in certain contexts.
There's a lot of guys out there who are drinking (metaphorical, and sometimes literal) poison, just because it came in a bottle labeled "detailed instructions for how to be a man." Ordering them to instead cultivate the genderless virtue of not being thirsty hasn't worked.
If I had to guess the age of the author based on the content of their writing, I'd suspect older than twenties, but not so strongly that their say-so about being a twenty-something woman surprises me. I think that a lot of people overestimate the association between age and wisdom or maturity.
As an adult, I've known teenagers who I've considered better sources of good judgment, able to consider situations carefully, draw usefully on their experience and the knowledge they've absorbed, and make good decisions, draw appropriate conclusions, or offer helpful advice, than the majority of adults I've known who were well into the middles of their careers. And I've known plenty of adults, 50+ years old, who showed less maturity and good judgment than the average student I've taught in their teens.
There's a difference between wisdom and raw intelligence, but some people have much more aptitude in cultivating wisdom than others.
I agree that she doesn't feel like a young adult, but I could buy her being in her late 20s, especially if she's dated older men and has compared notes with older friends.
Bingo. I usually date men 5-10 years older than me, and most of my friend group also falls into that range. I had a rocky childhood that forced me into adulthood at a young age, so my social circle reflects that.
The way the author completely crawls inside men's heads is impressive enough that I had the same thought. I'll assume good faith and/or that Scott has done something to vet the author.
No, I wasn't; but if you are, consider that they could be trans, and have some amount of added perspective on biological maleness because of that. (But that's probably less likely, given the unironic affection for gender roles.)
It definitely feels like a lotnof stuff that I've read from men online talking about gender and dating for years. And the author doesn't actually describe the first person experience of dating the men very much (is she attracted to these men? Does she like doing things with them? Etc). But I'd still presume good faith
Yes. But to read this site as a woman you need to have a pretty high tolerance for misogyny and antifeminism so given that baseline it's not crazy that a woman self-selected for that tolerance could have written it.* And to be fair I only skimmed after the first three paragraphs because the beginning seemed like tedious, stereotype-ridden antifeminist drivel and the rest seemed like more of same. I am a woman btw. And tbh I think it's quite likely that Aella wrote it because I have never met a woman in real life who cares as much about what men think as she does.
*To be clear, I am NOT saying the blog itself is misogynist or anti-feminist, but I am saying that there's a lot of misogynist or anti-feminist discourse tolerated in the comments section, blogroll, links posts, etc. and that that drives away actual women readers.
I assure you I do fit the demographics listed in this review (cis-woman, late twenties). I'd be happy to provide proof, once the review contest is over.
To the contrary I have yet to find many men who write this insightfully about men’s issues, sadly. It’s hard to observe a crisis accurately from the inside.
That was my take as well. The writing I've consumed from other men often leaves me wanting something different. The empathy on display here was a breath of fresh air in comparison.
I don't know where my feelings land with respect to the authors conclusions, but I do appreciate that the whole piece relied less on prescription and more on psychologically trying to understand these men.
In my main comment, I said something about the otherworldly qualities that the person who wrote this essay would have to possess to be capable of what it described. A part of me is inclined to think that the author might have taken a tad bit poetic licence with the experiential narrative part of the essay, even if they're a woman and in their twenties. If I'm wrong, and the author is indeed a woman and young, she must be one hell of a kind and someone I'd feel so honored to know.
I don't. Yes, there is a suspiciously high amount of empathy towards men, but hey traits and skills are on a bell curve, someone has to be at the extremely high end. Where else should such exceptional people be found, if not at ACX? :D
I think there are also some minor blind spots. For example, I think the text takes it for granted that all the men are excellent at their careers... that is, until the moment they get depressed or burn out. This seems to me like a typical women's blind spot -- the men who are less excellent are invisible in dating, so they wouldn't be included in the taxonomy of men you can meet while dating.
This is not meant as a criticism; I think the article is still great and in the top percentile of empathy towards men. But a taxonomy written by a man would probably include e.g. the men who feel average and who feel that it disqualifies them at the dating market because of female hypergamy. Plus a few other things that are not talked about in the polite society. I am not going to read the text again now, but I think none of the men in the text has an experience of his girlfriend cheating on him, which happens to be a frequent male experience. Or divorcing him and taking half of his future income. Such things would be very likely mentioned by a man who cares deeply about the problem men face today.
I had the same thought about the absence of men who aren't as successful. To be fair this just the authors perspective from their own dating history; I don't think they were doing anything untoward by only focusing on their own experience. Not to say that's what you're arguing.
But I definitely know a lot of men who fall outside these buckets, and I think I'm probably one of them. I still enjoyed the piece because even if it doesn't capture all the ways men struggle, I think the empathy on display creates the sense that you could talk to them and they'd be able to really hear you. And on the Internet today, that's just such a rare and precious experience.
I'm glad you still found value from the essay. I think you're very right, though--there are many other buckets of men that I failed to describe, because I simply don't interface with them enough to identify/understand them.
This is one of the reasons why I've been trying to diversify my Substack subscriptions lately. There are so many good essays out there written by people very different from the types I usually encounter in my bubbled existence within the Bay.
These are some really interesting blind spots you point out, and I agree with them. The fact is that I'm an absolute sucker for smart and ambitious men, and I'm extremely lucky to live in a very smart and ambitious city, so the overwhelming majority of men I've dated have fallen into the category of "successful by society's standards."
Almost all my male friends also fall into this category, so I just don't have a ton of exposure to men who fall below society's standards, and thus get shunted from the dating market all together. (I grew up around a lot of these men, but haven't spent much time around that demographic since I was a teen, so feel very out of touch with them.)
Cheating is something that I considered including in the essay. But ultimately I just didn't feel I have enough insight/experience in the topic to include it. Divorce is the same; I'm young enough that very few men I've dated have been divorced.
I would love to see more essays written from the perspective of those "invisible" men who are excluded from the dating market. I feel like part of the lack of empathy for them is just simply lack of visibility. I'd like to hear more about their struggles so I can understand them better.
I'd also like more essays about cheating/divorce written by men. I've read a lot of wonderful, insightful essays on this topic from women, but it's rare to find ones written by men (I think they just face more stigma for writing about these things).
First off, respect for writing this. It takes a lot of emotional energy and vulnerability to put this stuff out there for the public. Still, there were a few frustrating sections:
>"Yet realistically, this is a fantasy. A single person can rarely solve issues this severe; it requires the combined strength of an entire community to drag a soul back from such extreme depths. Any attempt at a romantic relationship would crumble under the weight of the void, and only leave the man feeling more hopeless."
This is psychological cope. Of course the best way to bring a man with low self-confidence back "from the void" is to *prove to him that he does have worth by valuing him*.
To be clear, no, you don't have a moral obligation to take it upon yourself to dedicate your life to any particular man-who-is-lost. This is different from believing the factual statement that "one person couldn't do anything."
>"Yet the logical side of me knows I need to judge–ultimately, it’s a necessary part of dating. And a crippling lack of self-esteem is a death blow for the stability of any relationship. If I want a healthy relationship, I simply cannot date someone with that trait."
More psychological cope. You would prefer a relationship with a man who doesn't have self-esteem issues. That's fine. You are allowed to have that preference. But note the language here: "stability," "healthy," preferences which you could choose to compromise on are written as objective dealbreakers. Thought experiment: suppose that 90% of straight women do not want to date men with self-esteem issues, and 30% of men have self-esteem issues. Solve for the equilibrium.
>"So my advice to men who fall into this category is to rip off the bandaid. If they want a partner, they need to start working toward it now. Overcoming insecurities and past traumas takes time and effort."
Time and effort doing what? This sounds deep and biting, but dig a little deeper and we find that this is essentially meaningless. "Just fix all of your unspecified problems bro."
I also want to note the conspicuous absense of rules 1 and 2. It may have been a good idea to leave them out in order to focus on the more intelectually interesting aspects of dating. To paraphrase Scott, I look forward to the, "Here’s Why I Think It’s Good To Have A Glaring Omission Around This Part Of My Argument," follow-up article.
Maybe this differs between men and women on average, but while some people with self esteem issues may find them genuinely resolved by dating someone who values them, dating someone with self esteem issues, and valuing them, is not necessarily going to fix or even help them.
Also, if what the person needs in order to feel reassured is sincere, unreserved positive regard, and the best you can show is empathy and compassion, you can't offer them what they're looking for, even if you want to.
I think interpersonal issues can be grinded out to some extent. You just keep trying to date and make friends even if the process is sometimes painful and unpleasant. I know my social anxiety is lesser now than when I started two and a half years ago, even if it's not fully gone.
I'm not sure that social anxiety is the same thing as serious self-esteem problems. They can be related, but a number of these men have basic social competence.
Their problem is being unmoored about what they want and being unable to look for what satisfies them.
But sometimes the self-esteem problems are being driven by social failure, like in the men who opted out. If that's the case, there's really no option but to grind it out.
Sometimes when you grind it out, you end up hurting people before you get good enough not to. Some of the girls I was interested in when I was in high school felt as though I was stalking them, and not without reason. People tend to be more forgiving of this kind of thing when you're 15 than when you're 30.
I think this is absolutely true; I also think it’s why there’s a small weakness in the authors argument in criticizing “just put yourself out there” right before giving that as advice. It is both extremely unsatisfying and unfortunately uniquely helpful advice, so I get it!
> Time and effort doing what? This sounds deep and biting, but dig a little deeper and we find that this is essentially meaningless. "Just fix all of your unspecified problems bro."
"Just fix all of your unspecified problems" is the pathway! The thing that you do is _get contact with reality_, which will specify some problems, and then you work on them and get more contact with reality, which will specify more problems.
Like--I think lots of people are used to constructing things according to step-by-step rules, like LEGO sets or IKEA furniture. But most things in life look more like repairing something broken, or cultivating plants. For those you need to be frequently inspecting the situation and diagnosing what needs to be done next, which is so simple as to barely count as a step in the IKEA or LEGO case. Kids used to take apart radios and then put them back together, and I think that's better training for a situation like this.
Suppose our hypothetical man goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell whether or not she was having a good time." Then the thing to do is develop the ability to tell whether or not the other person is having a good time--which you can do in the context of dates, but you can also do in other contexts!
Suppose instead he goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell how to show her that I was lovable." Then attack that--both by the angle of being more lovable, being more capable of owning it, and being more receptive of love and interest.
But the core thing here is that he needs to own himself and direct himself. Sure, he can (and probably should!) have mentors and advisors and support, but he's the one on the ground in the dates, and so he needs to understand what's happening and be able to manage it.
"Suppose our hypothetical man goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell whether or not she was having a good time." Then the thing to do is develop the ability to tell whether or not the other person is having a good time"
Another thing that's really effective at solving many of life's problems, including dating problems as a male, is to develop the ability to make billions of dollars. Or to get elected President of the United States. Being a billionaire and/or President, makes lots of things easier.
Don't bother me with details; I'm sure you can figure it all out for yourself.
It is substantially easier to guess other people's emotional state than becoming a billionaire--I think a better analogy is something like making a thousand dollars.
I do think most Americans should try to make a thousand dollars before they can expect to have much success at dating, and this is going to involve a lot of recursive problem-solving.
The trial-and-error method works well for problems where you're not that far from the solution.
The man in your example can apparently get a steady stream of "practice" dates that are not too far off from good dates. Your method probably works well for him.
But many men and boys are far from the "just tweak some details" stage.
"go on an outing with one of your mom's friends" is a way to get training data on whether or not the other person is having a good time and does not require a large supply of dateable prospects (you probably don't want to date your mom's friends!).
Some women have self-esteem issues so deep that no matter how many men hit on them or pursue them they remain insecure their whole lives as to whether they are actually valued. Some men are like that too.
The higher self-esteem someone has the more they will perceive as being valued by others. For individuals with low self-esteem, they question their value as a social partner, often letting their subsequent insecurities devolve onto future relationships.
> This is psychological cope. Of course the best way to bring a man with low self-confidence back "from the void" is to *prove to him that he does have worth by valuing him*.
I don't know about the *best* way, but it did work that way for me.
Yeah, I completely understand why she would not want to date someone with self esteem issues, but I had and still have horrible self-esteem issues, that will never go away, and I just went and found someone with worse self esteem issues and married her in our early 20s. Obviously it would be better to not have self esteem issues, but if you do have them, marrying does make you happier.
I don't really understand the focus on gender-specific Maps honestly. Obviously there are people who might benefit from highly gendered advice in specific circumstances, but in general I'm not sure the gender lens helps very often for whatever problems a person is facing.
The fact that all the posts like this suddenly talk about how there isn't really any one map/path/way/model/etc in reality once it's time to talk concretely and have to resort to meta-describing what manhood should be gives away the game a bit. Like look at this paragraph again:
"There is no one “right way” to be a man, just as there is no one right way to be a woman. But we need to provide young men with varied, concrete examples of manhood, highlight the positivity that each form of manhood brings the world, and provide stepping-stones for becoming each type."
This seems to make it clear to me that if there are no one right ways per gender, then splitting them up by gender seems kind of pointless. Just describe all the cool ways to be a person, and sure maybe some of them are class-locked or have aspects that are class-locked but in general I don't think that describes many of these ways or a large proportion of the features of any of these ways. I think most of the important things that a person might believe or the important things that a person might want to be or aspire to don't really involve gender at all. Even the few roles and identities that are more clearly gendered seem to make this clear to me, e.g. whether you want to be a "mother" type parent or a "father" type parent, the similarities between what would make a good one in each case seem much more numerous and important than the few aspects of those roles that are specific to one or the other.
Perhaps some people live extremely gendered lives where all of their beliefs and actions are highly gender-tinged, and that's fine for those people but it sounds like they don't really need any help. The people who do need help are the people are lost-in-general, and gender isn't really a big part of their issues. At least, all of the types of men described in the post don't seem to me like their problems are very gender-specific at all.
Gender specific maps can be good because there are cool ways to be a person, but the path to get there is very different and can be very gender specific.
For example: A good thing you can do for yourself is be in a loving relationship.
But as a man, I have always had to be a pursuer. I have never had a women come upto me and give me compliments. I always need to take the first step.
Women on the other hand get pursued a lot. Lot of times even when they don't want it.
You can't have the same map for dating for both of us. A woman once called me a creep for asking for a hug. I really wish there were concrete social rules I could follow so that something like this never happened, because it is mortifying.
Everyone’s experience is different and yes there are social norms and expectations and default experiences, but you can absolutely be in an environment where you will be pursued (by women) as a man. I’ve seen it happen, many times. Maybe it’s not the kind of women you want, and you need to present yourself in a certain way, but the same goes for women.
Sure, it happens sometimes. But a man who decides "I'm not going to pursue any women, I'll just wait for them to pursue me" will probably wind up having a worse time than one who decides to follow convention and take the lead somewhat more.
Said man also needs to realise there's a sensible middle ground between never asking anyone out ever and becoming a PUA who cold-approaches every girl in yoga pants at the supermarket.
> At least, all of the types of men described in the post don't seem to me like their problems are very gender-specific at all.
I think for several of these men, a core part of the problem is that they're handed a wrong-gender map. Like, one of the ways to read the "go to college and get a good job then end-of-story" map is that it's the woman's "find a good spouse who will provide for you and then get married and then end-of-story" map, with the spouse swapped out for a job!
I think "end-of-story" is a rarer feature in male maps. The Man With A Plan's map should have involved much more active management of his career; more situational awareness and chasing of opportunities. With much more ownership and authenticity, I think things would've worked out for him.
I can sympathize with this sentiment I really do, but how that would work in the world where gender differences do, in fact, exist?
For example, your role model/map should probably teach something about how to react to avert sexual attention from the opposite gender (assuming heterosexuality). And it's not something minor either, attractiveness is an important part of identity for either gender, particularly as teenagers and young adults. You can adapt your model to the expectation that this person receives entirely too much of such attention, or almost none at all, but it's not realistic to have the same model handling both cases correctly. So which do you chose?
As another example, the parts of your model about handling emotions should probably weigh in on the subject of anger management. Do you tailor it to someone with male or female testosterone profile, muscle mass and tolerance for physical risk and violence? Because I would guess you want about the same level of outward acts and signs of aggression in males and females as the end result, but that means you have (on average) to teach boys to control and suppress their aggressive impulses, and girls to be more assertive and pushy, which I'm not sure how are you going to do with a gender-less model.
And of course parenting is the elephant in the room, because talking about "mother type parent or a father type parent" is nice and well but in real life, depending on the biological sex becoming a parent either does or does not come with a tremendous amount of physical discomfort and pain, and your role model either does or does not account for this.
> I don't really understand the focus on gender-specific Maps honestly. Obviously there are people who might benefit from highly gendered advice in specific circumstances, but in general I'm not sure the gender lens helps very often for whatever problems a person is facing.
At the very least, the failure modes seem different for the two sexes. Surely you'd agree that "Man Who Becomes A Beast" archetype mentioned here is a very real thing, and that the female equivalent is vanishingly rare.
If the ways to get lost are different, the maps should probably be different.
I haven't finished reading this yet, but the first few paragraphs are absolutely why I had difficulty socializing with the women I met in university, who unironically "hate men" and could not explain why they bothered talking to their male relatives, much less went on dates. Despite superficially embracing freedom in gender and sexuality, their view of womanhood was way too narrow to include me: the traits they hated in men were traits I value in myself. My non-Western parents believe in gender roles but my father doesn't believe women's culture has value, so I was raised under what most Canadians and Americans call "toxic masculinity" (though without much of an emphasis on feats of strength: in his culture, the scholar is also a hero). This has turned out to be a much bigger barrier between me and other women than my sex/gender has been between me and men.
Edit: having read more, I am/was the first guy. But I'm a non-Bay Area woman with a completely different experience of dating, and leaning on partners to get me through it made it both a lot worse and a lot better.
>the traits they hated in men were traits I value in myself
This resonates with me a lot. I had a fairly conservative upbringing, and am definitely what you would consider a "tomboy." I'm also fairly opinionated, loud, and assertive. Growing up, I felt like I didn't belong anywhere; conservative women were horrified at how outspoken and fiery I was, and I hated their politics and strict expectations. But the feminists I encountered in college didn't like how terrible I was at reading emotions and how assertive and strictly logical I could be.
I was *extremely* lucky to end up with multiple women mentors who'd had similar paths and took me under their wing. They basically said, "Okay, look, you've got kind of a strange brain compared to most women, but that doesn't mean you're *less* of a woman. Let's figure out how to use your natural tendencies to your advantage." I owe them a great deal for this, and I know I would be a much more confused and lonely person without their guidance.
I still naturally find friendship/romance with men slightly easier, but friendship/romance with women is now much more feasible, and many of my dearest friends are women. But it took quite a bit of work to get there, and there's no way I could have accomplished it without mentors and role models who helped me formulate a path.
Okay, this clarifies a lot of the meta commentary on the authenticity of the identity of the author. I've left a slightly more skeptical comment elsewhere, but I think I'm now more sold on the fact that you're indeed a young woman whose preternatural insight into men's interior landscape was forged during your time as a cultural outcast.
It all makes sense in retrospect why it's someone with your psychological, social, and experiential profile who would write such an essay. The bit about your previous tomboy status also kind of explain the audacity to give a 200 pound man a fist jab.
Yes, spending time as a cultural outcast naturally lends itself to trying to analyze the categories you don't fit into.
I think another key reason I became highly analytical about men is because my father was an addict with Borderline Personality Disorder. Constantly analyzing him, and trying to guess what was going through his deeply complex and unstable brain, was necessary for survival for many years. This habit carried over when I started dating (women always carry the question of "is this a safe man I can trust?" into a date, and I think my brain is just wired to do this 10x as much and 10x as deeply.)
Goodness, having a mentally ill father is something else we have in common. (I don’t know how much of a coincidence that is considering it’s conditioned on what turns out to be rare personality traits.) My father suffered from debilitating paranoid delusions for years, making our home a minefield. A father is only one man, though, and I think his encouragement to prefer male friends (which didn’t do much until I was in high school and boys were leas threatening because the students were selected for academically) did more in this regard.
Very sorry you had to go through a similar tumultuous childhood. Hugs. <3
Hit me up if you're ever in the Bay Area. I'd love to have a new friend with similar life experiences. I'm sure we both walked away with a lot of opinions to compare/contrast.
This is an odd review. The first four male types are basically all the same person - lost, confused, adrift, empty, may or may not be angry about it - but with varying degrees of career or past romantic success. The fifth type is a hazy romantic fantasy of encountering charismatic emotional wholeness in a man. The writer doesn’t seem to be very self-aware about what issues or needs she herself is bringing to the table that shape how she sees people.
Really the issues she is pointing to about lack of community in modern urban life affect both men and women. She hints she has solved them through finding some kind of deeply fulfilling community (although not a romantic partner apparently), but doesn’t go into any detail about how that worked.
Admittedly men and woman deal with these things differently, because we’re hormonally different, may have internalized different gender-related expectations, and also young women are in sexual / romantic demand for biological reasons that young men are not. But the similarities may be greater than the differences
I think the author is aware of this. It's not "here's four different ways society fails men", it's "society fails men consistently in the same way, and here's four different ways men respond to that failure".
I note a distinct lack of emphasis on the role of modern urban life, in particular the Bay Area, that is exacerbating this issue. Other areas can have different failures. Even if the author lives there and thus only has direct experience with it, I would have at least liked to see some speculation on how cities and the hyper-liberal politics of California contribute to these issues.
I guess I don't see that awareness. A lot of the essay is just repeating that she finds most men to be lost and confused, through the framework of repeating a similar description of men in the guise of different 'types'. I suspect she herself has some inner sense of alienation that she wants men to solve for her through romantic relationship -- hence she finishes with a highly romanticized picture of a "whole" and psychologically fully healthy man who will be her happily ever after. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with that, this is one of the reasons we seek romance, even though it's somewhat unrealistic and you eventually learn that. But a lot of what we see in dating is projection or mirroring of our own inner states and concerns.
As a man I appaud her recognition of the troubles men face but I just didn't find this descriptively convincing. It did feel very much like a young person still on their quest.
This is a more accurate critique of the essay as well as a more accurate profiling of the author than you probably realize. Having read more of her follow-up comments, giving a few more details about herself, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment.
However, I think she's still a work in progress ("still on their quest") and I suspect she knows this. She did acknowledge in the essay how much she has had to grow into the version she currently is. But I'm not sure she's aware that the special affinity she feels for "the man who opts out" (the one I term The Nullified Man) is a reflection of who she used to be. In fact, I think her final paragraphs describing the redemption possible for this type is her unknowingly (or perhaps knowingly) describing her own redemptive arc.
Goodness, you are an insightful reader! Yes, I certainly am still "on my quest", and yes, I do indeed feel deep kinship for "The Nullified Man", as you term them.
I was extremely sick for most of my teen years--couldn't walk, constant seizures, almost died. While most of my girl friends were blossoming into attractive young women, I was withering into a half-dead shell of a human in a wheelchair. Fate opted me out of the dating market against my will.
When I was nineteen, I got insanely lucky to find the correct diagnoses and combo of drugs that allowed me to suddenly live a pretty normal life. It was a massively confusing time. In the span of about two months, I went from being invisible and pitied to being an object of attention and attraction for the first time in my life. It took years to properly reprogram my brain on a wide variety of social interactions (and I still feel it's a work in progress at times).
So, yes, I will always feel immense empathy for men who feel locked out of dating. I know what it's like to look wistfully on from the sidelines, and I wouldn't wish that feeling of hopelessness and isolation on anyone.
After reading this particular response and the other one in this thread, I have even more reason to believe that you're way younger than I imagined. My adjusted guess is now something in the region of 24-25 years. If this is true, it's even more impressive what you have demonstrated through this essay!!! It's the difficult to just process the possibility that the mind, the heart, and the soul behind this article is only just a quarter of a century old.
Which leads me to my next speculation/question: you've revealed an important detail about your incapacitated teenage years (that must have been terribly hard to go through) and I can only conclude that the insight you channeled in that essay couldn't have come primarily from your experience. Yes, maybe the knowledge and certain factual specifics did come from your dating experience, but I doubt the wisdom came from them per se. Most people with longer and broader dating experiences don't often possess this level of psychological insight, moreso with respect to the opposite gender.
So here's my theory (subject to your correction): your teenage years may have been miserable, experientially impoverished, and filled with more teenage angst than normal. But I also suspect it was filled with adventures peopeled with literary characters, romantic ideals and disappointments, moments of deep reflections, and the cultivation of your powers of observation. To see without been seen, to watch without been watched, to watch others live while being sidelined is often a reality that hardly anyone would willingly choose, but for those who find themselves in this exact life situation are often possessed with an uncanny spirituality and equanimity that almost nothing in life could perturb much. I guess this is something your dates unwittingly perceive and make them start unburdening (it's a response to perceived superior strength of character and of spirit) to you. You have no idea (or so I'm guessing) how others experience you in certain situations which makes it difficult for you to speculate on why people share with you their deepest vulnerabilities.
So, to the extent that there's a question in what I've written, it is this: what was your cloistered incapacitated teenage years like, especially with respect to your inner life; I couldn't think it was all gloom and doom?
>hence she finishes with a highly romanticized picture of a "whole" and psychologically fully healthy man who will be her happily ever after.
I just want to note that I'm not sure I believe in "psychologically fully healthy" people, and I don't think that should be the end goal for women or men. It strikes me as an impossible standard. Most "Men Who Are Whole" who I know and/or have dated have plenty of their own issues and traumas. But they've managed to develop a strong enough sense of identity and confidence to address those issues and become highly desirable people, despite their shortcomings.
I definitely would describe myself as a young person still on my quest. And frankly, I hope my quest never ends. I'm very different than I was five years ago, and I'd be disappointed in myself if I wasn't very different in five more years. Life is a wild ride, with endless interesting experiences and people to learn from. I don't want that learning to ever end. :)
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my writing and leave some thoughtful feedback!
Yeah I tap out on starting type 3 and skim forward until the epilogue. I have low expectations on any attempt on social categorizing at all so this doesn't really lower my overall score, but I endorse your observation.
I liked the post overall but I want to push back against the trend of reducing broad social trends to gender specific issues.
Most of the personal issues mentioned came down to problems with careers, problems with people's social lives or romantic problems. Which all seem like they're more affected by wider socio-economic forces like how the economy is structured, the issues around communities the Scott has posted about recently etc. than they're affected by gender norms. The basic facts of economic and social life are broadly similar regardless of gender
I'm sceptical changing attitudes around gender can affect how people experience those much.
If someone doesn't have professional or social problems it's probably because they just happen to be attractive, or have psychological traits that are better adapted to modern life than the average person's, or they're lucky and have a desirable job. Rather than because they did or didn't follow a script for being a man or whatever.
perhaps not that far, the leveling the playing field with welfare or ubi, reducing reliance on the car, and enabling policies (LVT, zoning reform) that enable densification and allow people to encounter other people in more casual scenarios might help.
The decisions they made to get to that point still involved significant costs, though. If the Man With A Plan hadn't trivially rejected that early "starving artist" route, since (in a UBI context) it'd involve a lot less risk of literal starving, might have given him an earlier start on other important questions.
>I want to push back against the trend of reducing broad social trends to gender specific issues.
I appreciate this mindset and know it comes from a good place. It was my own mindset for many years.
But ultimately the statistics show that men are struggling to a degree that women are not in many areas. Men are floundering when it comes to education, employment, drug addition, incarceration, being present for their children, suicide rates, etc. The numbers for men are drastically different from women.
I would firmly agree that a lot of the root causes of these issues have heavy overlap with the same issues women face. The economy, lack of community, city planning, and similar issues all have a massive impact here. But the way to address and recover from these issues--and the amount/types of resources and support available-- seem to vary quite drastically across genders.
Interventions that work really well for floundering girls often don't work at all for men. (The book "Of Boys and Men" by Richard Reeves does a fantastic job of exploring this issue in depth. Highly recommend.) We need to be looking more deeply at the question of "why aren't these interventions working" and try to work with young men to find interventions/frameworks/resources that *are* effective for them.
There is currently a loud outcry from men saying they lack purpose and motivation, and don't know what their role in society is. The reality is that "how to be a man" is a question that many (if not most) young men care about. Telling them to stop caring about it hasn't worked, and is only leading them into the arms of truly terrifying figures in the manosphere.
We can continue to tsk-tsk and tell them to not care about gender so much, but that clearly isn't working. Or we can provide them with similar resources women have been given: deep discussions about what it means to be X gender, and outspoken role models who display and celebrate various manifestations of that gender, and share their path to embracing a self-actualized life.
yes.
>That’s what the void is about the author describes: suffocation by normativity.
Actually I think it's the opposite: we've done away with normativity, leaving most people floundering without a lifemap, and any dating advice you give will be wrong 50% of the time because there are no accepted standards for what is or isn't proper behaviour.
Firstly, most people internalise the values of the society they live in.
Secondly, norms aren't just about what you should want, they're also about how you should try and get what you want. A society in which there are widely-understood norms about topics such as where it is and isn't appropriate for a man to approach a woman with romantic interest, and what the appropriate ways are for a man to signal such interest, is one in which it's much easier to go about finding a girlfriend than a society in which one woman's "Fighting to win me like a man should" is another woman's "Pestering me to go out with you, ugh" is a third woman's "Trying to pressure me into a relationship, you creep" is a fourth woman's...
Absolutely agree. However, as the author stated, when blindly following these external givens, some people do end up in a void. And, if they are men especially, struggle to get others to empathize. Though tbh I see that a lot for non-American women too. So clearly, normativity only works for the (few?) “normal” ones. And in that sense it’s suffocating for the rest.
And your examples line up beautifully with that. “Chase a woman” was probably always suffocating, for both partners. That’s why there are now different expectations, reflecting actual differences in perceptions in different people (gender agnostic btw). It’s more complicated, sure. But it is in that sense also freeing for everybody else finally. Our only problem about all of that is that our understanding and communication skills about it all haven’t caught up yet. As you’d expect for a whole society going through a difficult learning process at the same time. Still doesn’t mean we should just go back to only teaching “elementary school” so that there is “less confusion”, no?
>However, as the author stated, when blindly following these external givens, some people do end up in a void.
People end up in a void because the norms society gives people, and especially men, are unreasonable and self-contradictory. The problem isn't having norms per se -- indeed, it's impossible to have a society without norms -- it's that our current norms aren't very good.
>So clearly, normativity only works for the (few?) “normal” ones.
Normal people make up the majority of society, by definition.
>And your examples line up beautifully with that. “Chase a woman” was probably always suffocating, for both partners.
"Probably"? On what grounds do you say this? Basically every piece of evidence we have, whether statistical or anecdotal, suggests that the dating world is worse, and is perceived as worse by people trying to date, than it was, say, 20 years ago.
My impression is that the effort to make room for non-normative people hasn't been just about treating them decently, but that "polite society"* has been trying to raise the status of non-normative people by lower the status of normative people.
*"Polite society" is like calling dangerous fae "The Good Folk".
Maybe someday we can all have our own AI Jeeves.
I wonder if Freemasonry still counts?
I admire you for your journey.
Here's what I think the core issue is, though—most men today are brought up by a woman.
Then they are going to school dominated by female traits—such as rule following and socialization—taught mostly by female teachers who are also government employees.
By the time they get out of this system, they have no male role models... they have no direction.
Typically and traditionally, men have always had to prove themselves through rites of passage—and men aren't able to do that today.
Who did they have to prove themselves to? Other men. Men had to compete and win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal.
Nothing like that exists today except the military, and not even that.
Banned for this comment.
I think regarding rule-following and socialization as female traits is an effect not a cause. They've always been a key part of the military, for example.
My feeling based on my experience is not that (some) boys struggle with rule-following in school because rule-following is female coded. They struggle with following rules in school because the rules are enforced by females.
Speaking as a man who's been in the position of trying to enforce school rules and get students to follow and take them seriously, I don't think the boys who struggle with school rules do so because the people who're enforcing them are mostly women.
Some students struggle with following rules, whoever is enforcing them (although some are selective depending on which authority figures they like.) In my experience, there are more boys out on the tails for poor rule following, whoever is enforcing them
I felt that way as a kid, and the rules may actually have been stupid. I don't remember all the specifics, but I was an uncommonly smart kid.
But having also been a teacher, I gained a lot of sympathy for the position of "No, don't try to figure out the point of the rules, just follow them exactly without questioning them." Because I've been in the position of trying to get kids to follow the rules, and I try to explain the reasoning behind the rules to them, because that's how I would have wanted adults to deal with me when I was their age, and then I can see them thinking "Okay, if this is the intended purpose of the rules, then *this* should be a convenient way around them that satisfies their intended purpose." And I'm thinking "No, no it doesn't, you're not that smart, just follow the rules."
Every now and then, they'd encounter a genuinely stupid rule, and I'd be torn about whether I ought to acknowledge "Yes, this rule is stupid, in a well thought out system, you would not have to follow it," and just pushing them to follow it anyway, because 90% of the time, when they *thought* a rule was stupid, it actually wasn't, and they just weren't as smart as whoever came up with the rule, and they couldn't actually tell the difference. And if I acknowledged that sometimes the rules were just badly thought out, they'd feel vindicated in applying their own judgment to deciding whether to follow them or not, and their judgment was usually worse than that of the people coming up with the rules.
Some uncommonly clever students are genuinely smarter than the average person coming up with the rules, sometimes even enough so to bridge the gap in experience of having been on both sides of the situation. But most aren't, and not being smart enough to be able to understand the real intention behind the rule *feels* like being able to tell that it's stupid.
There was another review on that a few weeks ago.
jesus christ . .yeah that will solve this socialization problem
How'd the lower half of society do during covid?
The laptop class can do pretty well online, but the lower half seems to benefit from going to an organized place everyday and having middle class grown-ups talk at them.
The public school system in 2025 primarily functions as baby sitting while the parents work.
I work with kids myself, but I have no sympathy for the notion of "Follow the rules without questioning them". Conventional schools are built upon mountains of stupid rules. The very idea of "Everybody needs to learn the same thing at the same time" is stupid.
In Sudbury Schools, kids are trusted to make the rules themselves. It works out great.
This was an inner city school. Compared to the ones I attended, general levels of order and rule-following were completely different.
I started out with an attitude of "surely these kids will respond positively to being respected and taken seriously enough that I never just fall back on 'because I said so,' and always explain why the rules matter, and only expect them to follow ones that do." And I quickly discovered this was unworkable. Depending on the sort of environment you're teaching in, maintaining a classroom becomes completely different sorts of propositions.
I remember in third grade that boys were not allowed to wear hats inside the cafeteria but girls were. Maybe there was a good reason for it but the basic unfairness of it never let me forget it.
Men are not allowed to wear hats inside, but women are.
That rule is quite old.
"Good reason": no, just convention.
Were there any rules girls had to follow that boys didn't? (No pants or tank tops allowed, shorts/skirt length monitored, etc.--I don't know how old you are & if this was a school with uniforms or not.)
Some kids struggle even with the sensible rules, though.
Like "don't smoke cigarettes"was both a school rule and a really sensible idea (don't wreck your lungs and give yourself an expensive addiction!), but probably a third of my year decided to disobey it anyway... and this was at an academically selective school where everybody was theoretically smart.
That's too abstract for most children. Their reasoning is rather: "well plenty of respectable adults around me do it, so clearly it can't be that bad, and they forbid it to me out of petty tyranny".
Yes I agree, I expressed myself badly in response to the previous comment.
I don't think they struggle because of women, but I do think they tend to give women a harder time.
I think you are right with this update here. I believe it is due to the different "standard" communication styles. Men tend to be more direct and women indirect and boys will respond more compliantly to direct comms, IMO.
Lol! You've never been a teacher.
True, but I was a boy that was a student
I was briefly a Junior High School science teacher (which turned out to be pretty horrible experience). Of course this was the late 1980s and things may have changed substantially in thirty years. I taught in a wealthy upper-middle-class town, and the school district had one of the best reputations in the state. But the principal and the vice principals were men (the VPs were ex-coaches). As a junior teacher, I got no assistance from them to help me enforce discipline. A group of boys were out of control. My number was listed, and it escalated mid year when I started getting death threats left on my answering machine. One day in class one of my punk students asked, "What if we came to your house and beat you up." Lots of laughter from the punks. Without thinking, I said, "You'd have to deal with me, my gun, and my dog." Next day I was called into a disciplinary hearing. I was smart enough to call my union rep. I brought my tape of the death threats. The rep blew his stack that they weren't doing anything to protect me from this harassment. Administration was embarrassed. I had already done some research and discovered that it was a Class A misdemeanor in my state to make death threats over the phone (one year in prison, with a substantial fine). I had identified the perps because one of the voices in the background said "Shut up, Josh!" I only had one Josh in my classes, and when confronted, he gave up the rest of kids involved (including the one who had threatened me in my class). I had the pleasure of calling each of the parents and reading them the riot act (making it clear they they would be liable for their kids' behavior). And I had perfect discipline from them the rest of the year. My contract was not renewed, though, which was for the best in retrospect.
But the male administrators mostly didn't want to touch discipline with a ten-foot pole.
Wow. Kudos for keeping your cool and using the rules the way they're supposed to be used.
I don't know if "struggle to obey" is the right framing. They choose to disobey.
Sometimes this is a straight-up cost-begefut calculation. But sometimes it's about the social value of being seen by your peers as brave enough to not submit to authority.
Submitting to the authority of a woman is more shameful than submitting to the authority of a man. A woman needs to actually be fair or likable to make teenage boys obey her, whereas a man can just be intimidating.
> "In my experience, there are more boys out on the tails for poor rule following, whoever is enforcing them"
Sure, there's always going to be a minority of the human population that really can't be socialised, and they're mostly men (partly because of general personality differences and partly because of higher male variability.) The question is whether the other ~90% of boys could be better-socialised with different instructors and gender norms that aren't built on blank-slate idiocy.
Do you know *how* the military historically inculcated obedience the authority in men?
Psychological and physical abuse, summary executions, and the promise of rape and plunder.
Even in modern professional armies, boot camp is about psychologically breaking the recruits to compel discipline and adherence to orders. And those are people who signed up to be there.
Yes, and the same discipline should work for school as well. What's your point?
That would be oppressive.
I don't think this is quite right, though I'm not sure about Army/USMC boot camp, however, UNS and Air Force have very little in boot camp learning to shoot. You carry a rifle, manly for weight and to learn attention to detail, but there was maybe an hour of shooting. Boot Camp is to shed the old life you had before and become part of the [branch of military] Team. It's bonding through shared adversity, and a lot of other stuff, but too early to focus on killing the enemy. That mostly comes later in "Advanced Infantry Training (AIT) was my understanding from my Army buddies.
Disagree--boot is about adjusting to a new way of life and a new identity, part of which is following orders without question. You cannot "train" people to kill. They have to be indoctrinated. Read Lt. Col David Grossman's "On Killing," a study of how armies get their soldiers to kill. Grossman observes that the ability to kill with relative impunity is not an instinct common to most people.
"debunked" would be putting it too strongly, but some wrinkles have certainly appeared for that thesis.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11mwg7i/the_popular_book_on_killing_makes_the_case_that/
I'm not saying the military is completely wonderful, and I personally would never function well in it, but I'm saying that this particular path of having to prove oneself as a man is what we need to figure out today.
To suggest that boys don’t have trouble “behaving” because the military exists is ignorant. That was my point.
Are you basing your opinion on being in the military, or on movies? That is not how the US Army operates today. Maybe the Marines. Maybe also ancient Sparta.
Rangers, Airborne, and Special Forces have brutal boot camps, but their intent is not to break spirits, but to cull the weak and to /strengthen/ the spirit of those who make it through. I've never heard anyone who went through any of those training programs speak of them as breaking spirits, but as inspiring and confidence-building.
I looked into the military records of Sparta and Athens, because it seemed implausible to me that Sparta could be a great military force while training its soldiers to be stupid and obedient like horses. And, surprise, Athens had a much better win/loss ratio than Sparta. Sparta lost most of its battles, and most of its battles with Athens; and it usually lost them because their soldiers or officers did something stupid, or because they didn't learn things from their losses because they /didn't write them down/. It took the Spartans 200 years and 3 major Athenians victories just to learn to have some people with ranged weapons.
They only seem to have had one good military commander in their entire history.
> I've never heard anyone who went through any of those training programs speak of them as breaking spirits
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/us/navy-report-seal-course-kyle-mullen.html
"The notoriously grueling Navy SEAL selection course grew so tough in recent years that to attempt it became dangerous, even deadly. With little oversight, instructors pushed their classes to exhaustion. Students began dropping out in large numbers, or turning to illegal drugs to try to keep up.
Unprepared medical personnel often failed to step in when needed. And when the graduation rates plummeted, the commander in charge at the time blamed students, saying that the current generation was too soft."
I would hazard a guess that some of the people who went through all that had their spirits broken. Though granted this is not how the program is supposed to function.
> And, surprise, Athens had a much better win/loss ratio than Sparta
Interesting! Source?
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/
That was a really unconvincing piece, from a usually great blogger. I suspect for the usual politics-is-the-mindkiller reasons. Assumes ancient sources are entirely accurate when it suits him, and then tries to handwave away the fact that the ancient sources all state that the 5th century BC Spartans were extremely good at fighting. Conflates the Spartan record from their (lengthy) heyday with later military losses from a period when no one has ever claimed they were exceptionally competent. Argues that somehow he, based on the very limited evidence that has survived, has managed to penetrate the illusion of Spartan military strength that had fooled the authors responsible for all of the evidence he relies on, and the ancient world in general.
The Spartans were good at fighting. Trying to argue otherwise, in what seems to be an attempt to own your political enemies in the current day, is odd.
The point of military discipline is not that punishment is harsh but that punishment is certain.
In boot camp you learn to do what you're told under penalty of... well, of being shouted at. And potentially of being given an even more unpleasant order. If a recruit outright refuses to obey orders then it's not like they're allowed to shoot him -- the worst they can do is fire you, same as any other job.
But after living with certain punishment for all infractions for six weeks, doing what you're told becomes the default. A soldier who refuses to do what he's told does not gain any status with his peers the way a disobedient school student might.
I mostly agree with this, but it's not true that the worst thing they can do is fire you.
If you refuse to obey orders, they will "fire" you, but they won't do it right away. They'll heap a lot of other unpleasantness on you first, starting with recycling (repeating Basic), and moving on to weeks of what amounts to prison with hard labor. Refusing there will just extend it. Leaving to get away is the crime of desertion, and could potentially land you in real prison. And when you eventually get "fired", you might get away with an administrative discharge (that's definitely what you'll get if you just weather the weeks of informal confinement and labor), but if you pushed it you could end up with a less than honorable or dishonorable, which will impeded your civilian job opportunities.
They struggle with following the rules because the rules are enforced according to female norms. Boys do well with rules and structure as long as those rules and structure provide avenues for competition, are clearly defined such that "unwritten rules" are minimized, and allow for roughhousing slightly more violent than most women are comfortable with.
There's a reason unruly boys are rarely as disruptive and disrespectful toward their coaches as they are toward their teachers. And it's because sports discipline is still built around male social norms. Messing around means physical pain (push-ups, laps, etc ) and letting down your team. And there's plenty of opportunity to burn energy through some safe, structured violence.
My father likes to say that the most important part of our weekly boy scout meetings was the 45 minutes of unstructured sport where we would play things like full contact tackle football. It regularly resulted in scrapes, bruises, and heated arguments, and the occasional mom stopping by would be horrified, but this was a vital part of male bonding that most of us had been largely denied throughout the rest of our lives. Getting our energy out, engaging in good-spirited competition, learning to resolve disputes among ourselves, these were all extremely important aspects of growing up.
And then once we were done and had retucked our now-ripped shirts we immediately fell in line to do our military-style flag salute to beginbthe meeting proper. You can't get the discipline without also providing some kind of outlet for all that boy energy.
Thank you for saying this more eloquently than I would have. As far as I'm concerned numanumapompilius has provided the right answer. The idea that boys and men can't/don't follow rules is just plain wrong.
Watch them, they are extremely good at following the rules for sports/scouts/video games/shop class/the military/etc.
The rules they have trouble with are the kind that require sitting quietly and reading or writing WHILE IN A ROOM FULL OF PEERS! After all, being around peers and ignoring them is rather weird, where else do you find that? Sitting quietly and reading is something boys will do for hours on end, just not reading the school sanctioned material, they just read the comic books, mystery, sci-fi or whatever stories when their peers aren't available.
Similarly, I and many other boys I knew had no problem following rules and strict discipline under female instructors at a martial arts dojo. Or carrying it over into other parts of our lives, when testing for more advanced ranks included needing to get letters from our teachers confirming we were generally exhibiting the virtues they wanted us to have.
Agree--watching my lad play baseball or football, he never had problems playing by the rules, but then again, he sometimes tried to work the ref or the umpire!
The modern military is... modern. Warriors of old time were more "unruly".
> (some) boys struggle with rule-following in school
I really dislike that euphemism (or is it a metaphor?). It might make sense to say that a student struggles with long division, but there is no struggle involved in rule-breaking. A student chooses to flout rules, usually because he gains status with his
peers by doing so. And why is that behavior admired by the peer group? Perhaps because it demonstrates courage - a manly virtue..
Frankly, this is why I feel like things like Boy Scouts are a valuable and underappreciated organization. (I know they admit girls now as Scouting America, but troops are still gender segregated and it's still mostly boys)
It is a way that instills 'masculine values', with a sense of vaguely military-inspired discipline. Scoutmasters (at least if you have a good one) can act as good male role-models. It has a sense of proving themselves and rites of passage (rising in the ranks, especially reaching Eagle Scout). Scout campouts are places where horseplay and just messing around in the woods can happen.
But it also directs these masculine values towards socially good things like community service
100% the erosion of boys-only spaces is a massive shame in my opinion. Before getting into sports in high school, boy scouts was basically the one "safe space" we had to be boys without the judgement of women. The one place where the rules and vibes felt like they were built specifically for us, as opposed to the incredibly feminine norms at school (no running, no hitting, direct competition discouraged). We were able to burn off energy playing capture the flag, football, or sometimes literally just fighting/wrestling, almost completely unsupervised, then were ready to learn valuable life skills and develop civic-mindedness. And the highly structured progression, built around concepts of self-improvement and requiring the seeking out of older male mentors (the only way to earn merit badges was to look up a local person certified as a counselor for that badge and prove to them, to whatever their personal standard was, your mastery of the subject) provided a wonderful road map to manhood, to borrow a phrase from the review.
I very much resent this view that everything good and fun and exciting is thought of as a "masculine trait" and everything boring is thought of as a "female trait." As a young girl, I would have very much loved to have been able to run, rough-house, fight/wrestle, and do all of the supposedly "male" things but I was also not given the opportunity. Why do people think there's anything "feminine" about forced to sit still for 8 hours a day and not be allowed to run or talk? Schools don't allow rough-housing for liability reasons, not because they're trying to make anyone "feminine." People in general just tend to associate everything positive to men and everything negative to women.
And not all boys like "boy-coded" activities like fighting and competition either. If I had to guess, maybe 55% of boys and 45% of girls are into that stuff. If you go by what people say online, you would think that 99% of men like to spend their time punching each other like violent chimps and 99% of women like to sit still all day and graze on grass like a bunch of mentally deficient rabbits.
The issue is that the majority of women/girls don't find these things acceptable and clamp down on them. Disapproval of 'tomboys' also tends to come from women. I think that you are wildly off with your percentages, where it is more like 5/95 or 10/90 for women. Note that I'm not merely talking about girls/women enjoying these things at a much lesser level of intensity, but truly at a similar level (aka tomboy).
And of course, boy scouts or such is not a mandatory thing to do. What people are asking for is to simply have it as an option.
We're gonna have to agree to disagree. I think there's absolutely no way it's 5-10% of women. I think you have also fallen into the societal programming that makes you view all women as stupid/vapid/boring.
And sure, make hiking an option, but for girls as well as boys.
I want to point out that I never said that people who are not boisterous are stupid/vapid/boring. That is purely your judgment of these people.
There are many who judge this completely different and consider demure people to be superior.
I don't particularly care for such judgments, but am more concerned about pushing people into an environment that doesn't work for them.
PS. Hiking in itself is not all boisterous.
I remember Cub Scouts being a nightmare of bullying, and when we were out on hikes with the Boy Scouts, the Scout Master was a bullying asshole and he made his senior Scouts into little martinets. After one year as a Cub Scout, I never went back. Scouting taught me to *disrespect* authority at an early age. Later, I discovered that Scouting is predominantly run by LDS, and I realized that the bullying is probably a reflection the Mormon patriarchal worldview. Anyway, I didn't let my stepson join Cub Scouts.
I had a very similar experience as a Cub Scout\Webelo, and was hopeful that our local den would be a better experience for my son. The very first day we attended our first meeting, a group of boys tried to "vote my son out" of the group, and I had to use every ounce of emotional reserve to not deck the Scout leader who allowed it to happen. Scouting sucks
I have plenty of problems with Boy Scouts of America, but my experience was drastically different that yours.
The LDS church did sponsor a large number of scout troops, but unless you were involved specifically with an LDS troop, it would be quite unfair to blame them for your troop's poor behavior. The LDS church never sponsored a majority of BSA troops, and the leadership of the national organization was a corporation, not the church.
I have never even heard of a boy scout troop (usually 12-18 year olds) that took cub scouts (usually 8-11 year olds) out on hikes. My troop, and every one I've ever heard of, was age segregated. I was in an LDS troop that had almost none of the problems you experienced.
The LDS church also got out of scouting 6 or 7 years ago, so I didn't have my son in scouting. I can't speak to its current incarnation.
I was a scout in the Northeast and this is the first time I've heard about there being a relationship to LDS. There was definitely some Christian elements (like meeting in churches) but religion was never a focus and when it did come up was always pointedly non-denominational.
> I realized that the bullying is probably a reflection the Mormon patriarchal worldview.
I'm always surprised at the venomousness and frequency with which people bring up Mormonism. I don't know enough to call you out for this specifically, more of a general comment. There seems to be a large amount of reflexive bias that usually comes in the form of pithy one-liners devoid of substance. It's even odder when it comes from people who otherwise consider themselves open minded and pro-diversity (again a general comment, not directed at you specifically).
As an adult, I've always found the LDS members to be helpful and friendly to Gentiles. But having friends who left the Church, they've told me darker stories about ultra-strict, bordering on abusive, upbringings. That's not to say that this is standard for LDS upbringing. These may have just happened to raised in LDS families who were ultra-abusive. But after hearing about the LDS involvement in Scouting and my own experiences with Scouting, I put two and two together. However, I may be jumping to conclusions. But maybe not...
There was that Oregon trial (Lewis v. BSA) that awarded millions in punitive damages and forced the release of the so-called Perversion Files (filled with cases of sexual sexual abuse against minors that the BSA kept secret). That in turn opened the floodgates. And 82,000 abuse claims ultimately forced the BSA into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. I guess I got off lucky. I only got punched. I wasn't raped. But my uncle, who was bisexual, said he and a couple of other boys had sexual relations with his Scout Master. He said it was consensual on his part, but he was underage when it happened.
I'd say you got rather unlucky, not lucky. Others got even more unlucky than you, unfortunately, but I don't think their experience or yours is or was the norm.
I think it depends a great deal on the local pack and leaders. My kids loved cub scouts, my two boys went on to boy scouts, and my daughter would have (she went to most of her brothers' events) if they'd been letting girls in yet.
IME bullying is rarer in LDS than the mainstream.
And LDS never “predominately [ran]” scouting. They comprised at most 20% of members. Even at its height there was zero to minimal LDS presence in the vast majority of councils.
You should have much better evidence than 2 scout leaders (who probably weren’t even LDS) enabling bullying before associating bullying with LDS.
But every LDS ward sponsored a scouting troop. Even though the total LDS-sponsored troops topped out at 20%, the LDS had substantial input into the leadership of the BSA, with LDS church members having disproportionate sway over BSA policies, which was why gay scoutmasters and gay scouts became such a hot-button issue in the 10s.
I agree that Boy Scouts is great. It definitely helped me. The ethos of thinking about how dangerous everything could be and making plans for how to handle the possible danger appealed to my adolescent self, and was probably very good for me.
Boy Scouts is an example though of how this isn't just, or maybe even primarily, a problem of bad people taking away the good institutions that could help boys learn how to be men. There's a general problem in society of good institutions being outcompeted by video games, streaming video, and such.
We had a cub scout pack and By Scout troop that helped my older son a lot.
The program ended up destroyed when we got a new jerk-ass Scoutmaster who deliberately and blatantly sabotaged the program, uninviting my younger son and then, unable to do any more subtle damage, took a handful of Boy Scouts to another troop and announced by himself to the sponsor organization that the troop was over.
Why?
I don't know. All I have is Bulverism.
[writer of the review here]
I would agree a lack of plentiful (and healthy) male mentors is a large part of the issue.
Without plenty of healthy male role models and mentors, it's very easy for some manosphere creep to convince a fifteen-year-old that getting a woman requires becoming some form of predator.
With more male mentors, it would be easy for boys to see that "being a man" has many definitions, and there are many paths available to becoming an attractive and self-actualized individual.
I once saw a character in a TV show that I thought would be a great role model of what modern masculinity ought to look like.
My wife thought that character was, and I quote, "a pussy."
Can you share the character/show?
The character was the father in "The Goode Family", an animated sitcom from the creator of King of the Hill about a liberal California family. The show only lasted one season.
I think what qualities attract women varies a lot. Personally, I'm attracted to warm and gentle men, so I likely would have found that "pussy" character highly attractive. Other women are more attracted to men who are in-your-face masculine, and that's a perfectly legitimate preference as well.
I think this is why it's so important to have many male role models who can model different types of manhood, but reassure boys that all of them are valid expressions of "being a man." Feminists have offered girls similar messaging: a stay-at-home mom is just as valid of a woman as a childless CEO. I think it's time that men cohesively share similar messaging to boys.
> Feminists have offered girls similar messaging: a stay-at-home mom is just as valid of a woman as a childless CEO.
I guess this depends on bubble, because the feminists near me call stay-at-home moms "domestic women" and it's not supposed to be a compliment.
[writer of the review here]
I've certainly encountered these types, but I think their sway has waned over the past couple years. I also find them to generally be very young (and thus not understand the amount of skill/sacrifice/effort that goes into being a stay-at-home mom) or deeply mentally ill (to the point where anger and extreme opinions seem to be the only output from their brain.)
These types of feminists certainly exist, and certainly you can find bubbles of them. But I'm pretty sure the average American woman who describes herself as a feminist does *not* have disdain for stay-at-home moms.
I admit my information is not up to date. The frequency of feminists I meet in real life has dropped dramatically after university.
I've always thought Hiccup from "How to Train Your Dragon" was a decent role model.
I knew one of my female friends wouldn't be compatible with me when she called him weak.
[writer of the review here]
I simply *adore* Hiccup and agree that he's an excellent model of healthy masculinity! He's naturally very nerdy, but he's also a typical teen boy who wants to be respected and protect his people. Yet he approaches this from a compassionate, thoughtful manner, and uses empathy and communication to accomplish things raw aggression can't. He ends up being a strong leader not because he's the physically strongest, but because he's the smartest and most thoughtful.
I know several of my nerdy, male engineer friends really relate to him as a character, and have bemoaned being too old to have grown up with Hiccup as a role model. I really hope we continue to see more figures like him in media. :)
Unfortunately, men who want to mentor children are often treated with suspicion. A lot of people just assume that you're a child predator. Every act of kindness can be reinterpreted as "grooming", even if you did nothing wrong.
Of course there are actual predators out there, but it's exhausting being judged just because I happen to be the same gender as some other people who committed horrible crimes.
And this gets back to the idea that the genders are biologically different, by the way. If you promote the idea that testosterone seriously impacts behavior, many people will say "Exactly! That's why most rapists are male and why most pedophiles are male. The only way to protect our kids from pedophiles is to make sure they never have any contact with men"
So I feel like the "Boys need male mentors" part of the argument tends to collide against the "Men are biologically different" part of the argument.
[writer of the review here]
I see your point here, but I would argue this is exactly why we need more nuanced, detailed maps for the various ways to self-actualize as a man.
Right now, the detailed maps available are more conservative ones, which usually emphasize a man's physical strength and authority. If this is the main image people have of a man ("physically dangerous and wanting control"), they're indeed going to shy away from a man being around vulnerable individuals.
If we offer updated maps, where the impacts of testosterone are gracefully acknowledged, but concrete steps are given for channeling it into productive endeavors (ie: sports, political activism, self-defense, speech and debate, etc.), and the idea that "valuable men aren't openly aggressive" is strongly communicated, then the idea of a man with testosterone is no longer inherently a sketchy one.
But I do agree these conversations need to be done carefully, and with compassion and nuance.
What would your proposed map say about men with regards to pedophilia?
Would it say "Testosterone has nothing to do with pedophilia, and those who think that most pedophiles are men are working with biased information, as there are many female pedophiles who simply never get caught"?
Or would it say "Testosterone tends to make people into pedophiles unless they're active in sports, political activism, self-defense, speech and debate etc., in which case pedophilia doesn't develop?"
Or would it say something else?
Why would it need to say anything beyond “a self-actualized man doesn’t diddle kids?” It’s normative.
Correlation is not causation, either, and I think you should bring more evidence if you want to say testosterone “tends” towards anything. There are quite a number of men who fit none of your activities, but didn’t “tend” towards pedophilia.
Sorry, there are two ideas at play here:
1. A map to teach men how to be good.
2. A map to teach other people what to expect from men (on average)
Regarding #1, obviously the map just says "Don't molest kids."
I was asking for the author's opinions regarding #2.
> I think you should bring more evidence if you want to say testosterone “tends” towards anything.
I'm not saying that. I was asking the author if they were saying that.
I say that "rule following and socialization" are not "female traits," they are *human* traits that are absolutely necessary to have any kind of society larger and more complex than a sub-Dunbar-number hunter-gatherer band.
Are you implying that to be male is to be an antisocial rule-breaker? Because if so, that's the problem right there.
And lest you think I'm just writing from some man-hating woke perspective: at the dojo where I practice, the men are very much into rule following and socialization: like, follow the traditional rituals (e.g., bow when entering and leaving the dojo; don't wear shoes in the dojo), listen respectfully to the leader, respect your fellow karateka, don't lash out in anger, etc. Doesn't make them any less manly!
i'm saying that men and boys pan a wider range than female traits, with men more likely to appear at both ends of the spectrum in IQ, independence, rebelliousness, ingenuity, and other characteristics.
Schools under female principal, and female teachers, are much too conformist for a lot of boys.
Schools didn't used to be this extreme towards "girl rules", but they're much worse now with standardized testing and everything. That's why so many boys "need medication."
> Schools under female principal, and female teachers, are much too conformist for a lot of boys.
Seems like conformity is exactly what you'd want for boys if they have a wider range of behaviors. That's what military schools are all about. Do you have any data to support this statement? Or is it based on your opinion?
Standardized testing is a kind of competition, which I would expect to be coded masculine if anything.
It's often a "competition" of who can screw up the least, though, coloring inside the lines rather than striving for new heights. Very different vibe.
That would actually be a really neat data point - does the "kill it on standardized testing but have abysmal grades" demographic skew male? If standardized testing codes masculine and good grades feminine that'd make a lot of sense.
You don't need to conform to anything to do well on a "show up, be awesome on your own merits, leave" day. I loved FCAT week back in the day for that.
Grades require discipline, etc.
afaik there is quite a number of data on boys doing better in standardized testing than their grades would predict. In MRA circles it's usually interpreted as female teachers rewarding good behavior by grading
Makes sense. In defense of my female teachers, I was a garbage student, so no fair accusation of grade favoritism.
Some rules are necessary for super-Dunbar social groups, but *which* rules are up for grabs and must be continually renegotiated. Some rules were arbitrary from the start and some become obsolete*: challenging those is an extremely valuable service to society.
* Not an exhaustive list of negatives.
I believe the individualism/socialization ratio is exactly the opposite of what many comments suggest. On average, women are better individualized—that is, they are more intelligent, talented, conscientious, graceful, intuitive, etc.—than men. By contrast, men are generally more skilled at forming strong communities whose power is greater than the sum of their individual members. Thus, women are on average superior as individuals, whereas men generally form superior communities.
Human beings, as a species, tend to solve their problems socially rather than individually. The difference between men’s and women’s abilities to form strong communities explains the power gap between men and women, observable throughout all historical periods. For example, in antiquity the Germanic barbarians were regarded with a certain disdain by the Romans because they integrated women into their armed forces. But—and this is very important—the integration of women did not make barbarian armies less courageous or less effective in hand-to-hand combat. On the contrary, the barbarian armies that included women were more aggressive and more ferocious. The difference lay in discipline. The Roman army, being more disciplined (i.e., more masculine), generally succeeded in defeating the (feminized) barbarian armies thanks to its superior group strength.
Returning to the present day: women, being on average superior individuals, thrive in Western-style meritocratic societies. These societies have largely passed their dynamic phase of development and are now in a static phase of inevitable, though (apparently) well-managed, decline. In this phase, male communities, being potentially very powerful, are (rightly) regarded as a danger rather than an opportunity. For this reason, the destruction—or at least the prevention of the development—of male communities constitutes an essential condition for the stability of these societies. A secondary effect of this destruction is the poor condition in which individual men find themselves. This, however, is not a pathology that must be cured, but rather the price of social stability in contemporary Western societies, and at the same time a symptom of the fact that these societies are in decline (just as, for example, the proliferation of women in positions of power in the fifth century was a symptom of the decline of the Roman Empire).
Pretty much every cat was raised by a single mom, sometimes with some (entirely female) help.
I can't imagine approaching any mother cat and offering to provide a role model for her kittens and expecting to keep my ears intact.
Is the behavior of a feral tomcat something we want human males to emulate?
Or perhaps, the behavior of male lions?
Might want to attribute that observation to Chuck Palahniuk, as it's like the second or third most famous quote from Fight Club, and pointedly underlined in both the novel and the film adaptation.
https://youtu.be/bBSvlTYfUrs?si=fb4Oa2_gaX3EgMYB
> Men had to compete and win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal.
What about the men who didn't win the right to be in the presence of other men as an equal? This is a pretty bizarre statement on the face of it. I don't know what you're claiming as "rites of passage," but there are lots of studies that show that violent teen males have significantly higher rates of criminal behaviors, including rape, as adults.
Historically, men always have performed rites of passage. I mean, it’s kind of obvious.
Men who become adolescents are expected to perform and prove their manhood.
Because once a man grows up, he has in society’s eyes very little value, unless he can do something, and become something.
A woman can have babies, but a man must be something and do something.
I’m not making this up, it’s just how it is.
Anyway, to skeptics, here’s a partial list:
Sparta (Ancient Greece): Boys endured agoge training and had to survive alone in the wild.
Rome: At around 15, a (free, not slave) boy exchanged his childhood toga for the toga virilis, symbolizing full legal adulthood and readiness for civic and military duty.
Maasai (Kenya/Tanzania): Adolescent boys underwent circumcision without showing pain, then lived as warriors (moran) before marrying.
Xhosa (South Africa): Teenage boys were circumcised and sent into seclusion, returning as men after healing and ritual instruction.
Australian Aboriginals: Youths were circumcised, scarified, and sent on a solitary walkabout in the wilderness to connect with ancestral spirits.
Native American Plains Tribes: Boys fasted and isolated themselves on a vision quest until they received a guiding dream or spirit.
Norse/Viking Culture: Young men proved manhood by leaving home to raid, trade, or fight, earning weapons and reputation through danger.
Medieval Europe (Knighthood): A squire kept vigil overnight in a chapel, then was armed and sworn to vows of loyalty before becoming a knight.
Judaism (Bar Mitzvah): At age 13, boys read from the Torah, becoming religiously responsible for Jewish law and community obligations.
Modern Israel: Mandatory military service at 18 functions as a national rite of passage, demanding discipline, endurance, and adult responsibility.
Number 10 is probably why Israelis are so tough.
If you've noticed the Israeli men, don’t they seem kind of tough and masculine to you—they sure do to me.
Maybe that's the reason... They've gone through that rite of passage.
OK. I assumed you were talking about 20th and 21st Century America. I had no rites of passage growing up in 60s and 70s. What's changed since then? The vast majority of elementary school teachers were female back then, and they're still the majority today. There was a smaller percentage of females teaching high school in my day, but they were still the majority. I assume this hasn't changed. AFAICT, nothing has really changed in 50 years except young men are whining about how they can't get a date now. Back in pre-Internet days (late 80s? early 90s), I read a survey that it took the average male about 10 tries to get a date. (which probably explained why women felt they were being pestered all the time). Some men and women were better at hooking up than the average, though. It was the classic 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of dating pool (men or women) were gettin 80 percent of the hookups.
Anyway, I don't see that there's been a feminization of role models in the past half century (at least!), but we've either got a lot more men having trouble figuring out how to get a date—or they're whining more. ;-)
What's changed since the 60s and 70s? Wouldn't you say it's probably the role of religion in society? Staying together because divorce was Bad was, as we hear, very unpleasant for some couples, but it did make it more likely for boys to be raised by a man as well as a woman. Now that "staying together for the kids" is routinely mocked and condemned as pathetic and counterproductive, all bets are off in that regard.
On a completely different note, I really wouldn't call it "whining" if I were you. Have some compassion. Full disclosure, I have no dog in this fight, I'm a 44-yr-old happily married woman, but even I can tell some of these people are in serious pain. And I recall from my own experience that deep loneliness IS serious pain.
Religion can’t be the explanation. Other societies have gone full militant-atheist without following a comparable trajectory.
I’d pick the transition to a service economy and the changing market for labor. I have not fully absorbed stats like [these](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/goldin_cehus.pdf), but it used to be more viable to feed a family via BRUTE STRENGTH.
what society did ever go full-militant atheist except ours? If you mean some scandinavian countries it's not really different society from ours, american pop-culture has spread like a virus since the end of the WW2. I'm Central Europeanand still given the proliferation of it I consider Americans living in the same society just under the government that's far less coddling
You really can't see what changed?
For example, kids had much more freedom.
Even in the 90s, kids used to go outside and play without any parent near.
I know that's a popular idea, but does anyone have the data to support that thesis? And are you claiming the courtship patterns of teenagers depend on their playground socialization as toddlers and pre-adolescents?
Not quite the same claim, but it was normal for kids to be outside in a suburb without adults in the 70s.
There are a lot of other changes! for example, dating with co-workers was completely fine and expected. Flirting, welcome or not, were more accepted, at worst taken as a bad joke.
This matches my experience. Raised by a mother, taught by teachers and tutors who were all women, "socialized" by many girlfriends who became my closest social circle for years at a time. Desperately craving older male role models my whole life, I would always attach myself to the smallest trickle of "older more experienced cool guy who can teach me about what it's like to be a man". My few guy friends also in the same situation, it's the blind leading the blind, soft, passive men looking around for answers.
Had to figure out "masculinity" from books, movies, Youtube, podcasts, as the article mentions. Skeptical I've gotten any closer, it all feels like a pantomime.
this is so well put. I wrote a blog post and quoted your comment and a few others.
I completely get it. This was me. But I grew up before social media, and before high speed porn. So my brain wired differently.
https://open.substack.com/pub/idealmale/p/how-can-you-be-a-man-today
None of this seems adequately justified. Some of it is clearly false (many rites of passage were monogender but many others were not). I call bullshit.
Yes. Although I was brought up in an intact family, my da was working his ass off, so all my dating problems came from me trying to be mama's good boi.
It still exists in western societies, even if it's under active attack. It happen with your peer, your male friends of roughly the same age, during college or even before, at school or in your neighborhood (depending where your main circle of friends is), could even be online nowadays....I don't think the dynamic of male hierarchy building has changed that much since Paleolithic, apart from being less violent on most cases (not all cases - depend on country, social class and neighborhood... It may be exactly the same, with guns instead of spears).
There are 2 main differences: adults are involved less, and when they are, they are trying to oppose the process (partly because educators are mostly women, but trained men will usually not do better - Western society has just lost all sanity regarding expectations for adolescent males interests and behavior). Even out of school, helicopter parenting is delaying the process and/or make it happen online... In a sense, it's not that strange: groups of young men are a problem for all structured societies. But the rules of passages were tackling the issue by (trying to) channel the natural tendencies. Modern western society try to build a dam and pretend the natural tendencies do not exists... It doesn't work, and worse: at one point the dam will burst. It already has started to, with consequences much more serious than dating difficulties. Trump for example...
My following anecdata is somewhat besides the point of this review since I am neither from or in the US, let alone Bay Area. I am definitely a Man Who Opts Out though, except more lucky on the physical attractiveness side, but also more dysfunctional at life in general.
I do not feel at all that the problem in my formative years was being raised by a woman. I was raised mostly by both my parents (somewhat more by my mom than by my dad due to their career paths), and secondarily by my grandparents, and by mostly but not entirely female teachers and school staff. I think this is very normal compared to both present and past generations.
I think the one gender-related problem of my formative (teenage) years was the *lack of female peers* due to no sisters, and junior high and high school at one of the few boys-only catholic schools in the country followed by studying in male-dominated fields. That made me miss miss opportunities to practice socializing with girls (romantically or not), and on some level conceive them for many years as fundamentally foreign; rare and distant at best, dangerous at worst.
Add to that, on the personal side: inclinations toward neuroticism and passivity; on the society-wide side: dating being naturally an uphill battle for men plus all the discourses that can lead a neurotic person into self-hate, including but not limited to toxic feminism; and you get 32 years old virgin me.
That was an admirable review. Thanks a lot to the author.
Reminder that the term "toxic masculinity" was coined by a men's movement in the 80's (the mythopoetic men's movement), not feminism.
Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad? Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing. Going to literally die in a war is not optimal, it's better to protest or donate money. I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people. You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
I can see how these requirements might seem hard to navigate if you're autistic or prone to extremely literal thinking tho, which many people in the Bay Area programming circles probably are.
A lot of this also seems so... American? It's like Americans feel the need to have some Grand Goals and a Purpose and Values, otherwise they feel like shit. Probably disproportionately men. But not everywhere is like this. I've felt the difference, from the US vs Scandinavia.
Also the idea that the patriarchy / sexism hurts men too is not, as the author seems to think, some big revelation that challenges contemporary feminism. It's a very common observation of feminist writers!
It does seem to be very common in higher-quality feminist discourse, but much less so in pop feminism where that part of feminist theory is often ignored completely or only given token acknowledgement.
Pop feminism is in the water supply, while more serious discourse tends to be something that one needs to seek out, so I understand how casual observers can just see the pop feminist memes and not realize the deeper theory is a thing.
Wtf is 'higher-quality feminist discourse'? I've just GOTTA know.
Here’s an example that I think is high quality. I don’t know if it is explicitly feminist but I think it is aligned with left wing politics and actual modern gender studies:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/16742776-of-boys-and-men
That one's *definitely* not feminist. Sure, they say they can be passionate about women's rights, but they also call women pussies and vaginas.
I mean, it’s a podcast, it’s meant to be entertaining. I self-describe as a feminist and agree with the broad strokes etc.
I don’t know that there’s an official feminist handbook that says you can never jokingly use the words vagina or pussy to refer to women. Especially when it’s an obvious satire of someone else’s position.
Anything Ozy Brennan has ever written on the topic. Ozy's current blog is http://thingofthings.substack.com/ but most of the feminism-related writings were on older blogs written under the name Ozy Frantz during the heyday of online feminism in the late 00s and early 10s. The immediate predecessor to Ozy's substack was https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/ .
"supplanting the natural with the just'...yeah, no thanks
A lot of "the natural" has a tendency to be completely terrible. For example, dying of smallpox is very natural. And it's that kind of nature that Ozy wants to be supplanted - I think you might agree on more than you might expect.
Great answer! But I wonder how quickly would Ozy get banned in a typical feminist Reddit forum.
imo, this article is a good example of it (I mean, the review).
read the book will to change by bell hooks, she's more intersectional feminist, and does great work to define patriarchy and how it hurts everyone.
I'd go so far as to say that scholarly feminism is basically a dog on a leash used to make pop feminism seem better and/or assuage an individual feminist's conscience when she starts to see what's going on.
Why do you think that?
Okay. If you want an idea of where I'm coming from, I'm a 25-year-old man who has faced a lot of hostility, has an English degree, and cares a lot about childrens' entertainment. I typed out a massive six-point response, but it was too long.
It boils down to this- the feminist ecosystem is best observed in terms of what it enables and endorses on the ground, meaning that the theory is the part in danger of being "not real feminism." Furthermore, the ecosystem's parts are best understood by the role they play in it. I have experience dealing with academic feminism in a university environment, as well as with pop feminism. Even beyond the previously mentioned roles, the former treads carefully around the latter, and doesn't really have any reach beyond it.
This is exactly the right observation to make. For determining what's true and good in the world, you may want to (privately) assess the strongest steelman/motte of an idea/ideology, or to look at how its best / most reasonable proponents defend it. At the same time, this does not prevent a very bad "bailey" version of the idea/ideology from getting all the power in the world - the power to actually "do things" outside of the tiny bubble of intellectuals writing long-form blog posts. And the version that actually affects you and the people/things you love - the "realman" - is probably more salient than a good version that, for whatever reasons, is impotent in the wider world.
An unfortunate dynamic then arises where the sophisticated people (who like the motte idea and want it to win) end up unintentionally helping the bad bailey version of the idea flourish. The Good People write a sophisticated motte defence of X-ism, raising its status among reasonable people. Bad People then do something bad in the name of X-ism, and the Good People do everything they can to disavow it - "that's not real X-ism, they don't speak for us". But of course, the Bad People disagree - they *do* think they're the real X-ists and that the Good People are spineless dweebs. However, they're more than happy to take advantage of the status accorded to X-ism by the Good People to do Bad Things under its name with greater ease than they would if everybody agreed that they really were somehow the *true* embodiment of X-ism (and fought back).
The effect is that the Good People end up (unwittingly) prolonging the life of the Bad People's program by obstructing normal observers' predictive powers. When observers notice a pattern - that pushes for more X-ism in their daily lives (or really, anywhere outside of obscure blogs) tend to lead to bad things, and therefore that X-ism needs to be opposed/stopped, the more gullible among them will be persuaded that they somehow made a mistake of identification, and direct their energy against "bad X-ism" - which, I guess, is a much less effective Schelling point than fighting X-ism? For some reason I feel that this de-fangs what could have been effective pushback, and is a mistake.
I'm not sure that it's useful to debate what the "true" version of an idea is. I think the important thing is the version of the idea that actually ends up calling the shots in the world - if the actual consequences of the X-ism concept are bad, then it needs to be opposed under that name - while granting as a technicality that a decent motte version exists somewhere (yet of what relevance is that, when its promoters so consistently fail to make it win where it matters?)
It's a Diet Principle: a diet that only works under heavily-supervised lab conditions is of academic interest, it's not a good diet. Similarly, a meme that can't be trusted to do good things when it enters the general population has to be judged on that basis, not what the meme happens to do in the minds of extremely rigorous thinkers. I really think the two versions should be treated entirely separately, but the bad version should be opposed IRL under whatever name its promoters call it.
I recently sketched some intuitions for why this dynamic might happen: (https://beyondthesymmetry.substack.com/p/useful-idiot) and I was primarily motivated by my own disastrous experiences of feminism, consonant with the stories in the OP and many commenters (and the two Scotts).
I'm drawn to the cases where X-ism is without a formal leader and without formal membership criteria. Anyone can do anything and claim it under the banner of X-ism. Of course, this describes most memeplexes in today's media environment, so it's not a good outlook. (Does this idea prove too much? Does SSC/LW rationalism face the same eventual fate? Does it equally apply to right-coded ideologies as well as left-coded ones, or is there some asymmetry?)
In contrast, if e.g. a member of the US Army commits an atrocity, the Army can officially disavow it *and expel the person*. In this case, people can at least be assured that this was a member of an org going against the wishes of the org itself (which it then enforced). Of course, if members of the army seem to go on committing atrocities, with the same condemnation and expulsion, over and over again, then we might suspect that the army isn't much of a command organisation in the first place - it's not very good at enforcing its official rules on its members. Then, we would be justified in not trusting soldiers to abstain from atrocities, no matter how passionately the generals broadcast their opposition to atrocities.
My basic point is, a political umbrella like feminism or a big religious umbrella like Islam (or Christianity) is nothing like an army - nobody is in control - so we have to expect them to evolve according to their own weird laws, which might be in a reliably bad direction due to entropy or Darwinism or something. To be clear, I also think that e.g. Marxism-Leninism was very bad in its effects, but not for the same reasons of a condemnation/exploitation cycle (it had official leaders, orthodoxy, and party discipline, and it was clear whether someone was in favour or out of favour with that whole system - someone correct me if I'm wrong).
Your answer is interesting, but I want to push back on it.
Speaking of higher-quality feminist discourse, or even in some extent "real" feminism (but less so), isn’t a sort of motte and bailey strategy, and it is more normative than descriptive, it is a way to explicitly specify what we think to be the motte, or the bailey (when you need the ambiguity for a motte and bailey)
We can think of more "neutral" examples, like science and pseudo-science, or doing math, and superficially using the formalism to raise the social status of your completely invalid chain of deductions.
Would you dismiss the idea of science, if some (even if most) people do pseudo-science, and this have real negative impacts, and the pseudo-science theories are using the social status of "real"/"good" science to raise their own ?
Maybe, but I think it would be a mistake, because every good thing could be used to raise the social status of bad ones.
I think it is better say "this is science" and "this is pseudo-science", and try to create explicit criteria to differentiate both.
This is a really good counter-example that brings out a key part of the motte-and-bailey frame for feminism: individual vs group action. Science (and math) can be performed well or poorly at an individual level, and called out there ... and we've got much clearer/objective ways to describe good and bad performance.
x-isms, as social movements, are collective rather than individual. As this thread is discussing, there can be really ambiguous definition of good and bad performance - only a group, through ongoing training, can really push a particular definition forward. An individual performance is harder to call out in isolation.
Social movements are also less objective than the more "neutral" examples. I think socialism and communism are great examples and we should raise them here even more - the argument over whether "real" communism has ever ben implemented rather than just totalitarian pseudo-communism has been going since WWII at least, along with the argument about whether the distinction matters because of the bad effects of the bad implementations.
Generally, I think it is better to differentiate, and to call out good and bad performances of protocols, whether it's science or feminism. I try to do that myself. But with x-isms, we do have several definitional challenges that more objectively-defined protocols don't face.
"Patriarchy hurts men, too" ignores a lot of the problem. While it's true in some ways, it's also a way saying feminists don't have bother with ways that men are mistreated which don't fit into the patriarchy model.
Example of it being sort of true. It's possible that there are more wars because nations are mostly led by men. However, ending patriarchy (if it's possible) doesn't address men being abused by women.
Yes, I think both are true.
Patriarchy hurts men too (and I think, quite badly), but no patriarchy doesn't imply no sexism against men or against women.
And no sexism toward men or women, doesn't imply, no violence and abuse between men and women.
And the contrapositive is obviously true, not all violence or abuse is caused by sexism, and not all sexism is caused by the patriarchy.
I feel like I am saying something really obvious and not interesting at all, but also, maybe it needs to be said explicitly.
The idea that contemporary feminism might be exhibiting a lot of that sexism is anathema to them, though. But it is - they are - and they deserve nothing but withering contempt for failing to humanize men.
It's justified by the usual articles of faith such as "there is no reverse sexism, sexism is privilege plus power" type of argument. I'm not clear if there's a way to deprogram people from that kind of belief system. Fortunately it seems like most regular folk don't believe that, it's a reasonably extreme, and often "terminally online" position, but one that gets a lot of the social media attention.
“that they have failed to humanize men.”
To me, the goal of feminism seems to be more about dehumanizing men. When you associate particularly bad behavior with the word “man,” such as in the case of manspreading, then this neologism serves to dehumanize men. Similarly, the false claim that we live in a patriarchy in which men somehow oppress, discriminate against, or exploit women can only lead to women forming negative opinions about men. And yon don't treat bad people well, so women are getting hostile towards men, which you can see on TikTok etc. where women celebrate themselves when they have ruined a random man's day or taken advantage of him. This dehumanization makes it possible for feminists to enforce discrimination against men, such as through women's quotas or DEI programs, because it is no longer considered immoral to treat these bad people, these men, badly.
This is not the goal of feminism, this is a perversion of it.
This is a real thing that happen, and it is quite bad, but it is far from general, and we should not let them take the name, just like we should not let pseudo-science take the name of science.
Dehumanizing men, being spiteful against men, abusing men, trying to hurt men in any way, isn't feminism.
We should gate keep what feminism really is, in the same way we should for science or math. Sure there will be disagreement on what it is and what it should be, but I am convinced the idea of dehumanizing men will completely lose the discourse when things are explicit.
"but it is far from general, and we should not let them take the name, just like we should not let pseudo-science take the name of science."
Really? Show me one text of a feminist, who wrote good about men. For every text written by feminists that says something positive about men, I can probably give you 100 or more texts by feminists where men are portrayed only negatively.
"Dehumanizing men, being spiteful against men, abusing men, trying to hurt men in any way, isn't feminism."
Really? Watch some videos about the history of feminism from Janice Fiamengo (she is an ex-feminist). Even the first feminist wrote texts about men where the protrayed men as genetic garbage or claim the same de-humanizing lies about men, which feminist still tell today. The claim that we live in patriarchy/a society that only discriminates against women is a core believe of feminism.
"We should gate keep what feminism really is" and "I am convinced the idea of dehumanizing men will completely lose the discourse when things are explicit"
Feminism was full of man-hating women since the begining and it indoctrinates one generation of young women after another, by repeaating all their lies again and again (a propganda method). I don't believe this will change and therefore I don't see why feminism should be "rescued". There is already humanism (which is also attacked by feminists because it does not prioritize women above everyone else), which fights for human rights and not for women's privileges and discrimination against men. But as already written, feminist want to change humanism into feminism and then men can't be discriminated against anymore (a claim, which is also a tool to dehumaize people. The Nazi's told this lie about jews).
I feel like you are exaggerating things here.
> Really? Show me one text of a feminist, who wrote good about men. For every text written by feminists that says something positive about men, I can probably give you 100 or more texts by feminists where men are portrayed only negatively.
Maybe I am wrong, but yes really.
I saw a lot of feminism text discriminating against men, but also a lot trying to protect men and women (and I think this review is one of them).
Maybe we should just abandon the word, humanism is all good, but I think it would still be unfair to think anyone calling themselves a feminism is just being spiteful or unfair against men.
Yeah it did feel like it was responding to a caricature of "polite society" rather than actually engaging with what people believe. Which puts it in this weird middle ground because the people who write in sophisticated ways about gender would mostly agree, and the vast majority of median Americans have never even engaged with the question, and still uncritically stick to traditional gender roles. So not sure who it's aimed at.
i think the bay area dating scene is probably bizarre and distorted enough to *specifically* be well-targeted by this essay?
or at least, i'd keep this possibility open
Except that the patriarchy is usually conceptualized as some abstract social force which is enforced by fellow men.
I have seen very few critical insights into how women's free choices might reenforce and/or reify patriarchal expectations for men.
The general acceptance of the patriarchy amazes me to this day. It's basically the same thing as the illuminati.
There's no test, nor end for it. There is no defined point from which we no longer live in a patriarchy or we don't live under patriarchal rules. As commented here and elsewhere, it is completely normal for a child to have a vast majority of female authority figures until or even after college. Still a patriarchy. The government can be 50/50, women may in general be better off than men, it doesn't seem to matter since as long as anything can be pointed out to possibly be a sign of patriarchy, that's all it takes. This includes the past itself having any of those signs.
Then, it's tautologically evil and omnipresent. There is seemingly not a thing that can't be blamed on the patriarchy. Crime? Well of course. War? Evidently. Beauty standards? The existence of purses? Climate change? If it can be considered a product of society in any way, it surely is a product of patriarchy since male standards rule society. The label of my water bottle being blue is surely a result of the patriarchy, and none can prove otherwise.
Now I don't intend to dismiss the whole concept altogether. It's definitely a healthy thing to consider a perspective and how it explains the world without having to buy into it, I can lean into capitalist thinking and go "Huh, so that's why the job market sucks right now" and I can lean into Christian thinking and go "Huh, maybe the world would be a better place with more piety", what gets me is that there seems to be an unending list of consequences and conclusions related to the concept of patriarchy that have barely anything to back them up at all, and this is in today's age widely expected to be accepted in many circles to such a degree that saying "I don't believe in the patriarchy" gets people to look at you as if you are crazy, even if nobody can give solid arguments on it.
At one point in time I pretty aggressively would hound people for a falsification of patriarchy in online discussions.
Literally half-a-dozen back-and-forths in which I would ask "what would a society without patriarchy look like?" over and over. The most comprehensible answer I got was basically "a society without any sort of gender role, which we will know because everything is split exactly 50/50" (meaning patriarchy is the inverse of that).
The most common responses were that patriarchy is either unfalsifiable, or just a stock vague list of things that disadvantage women.
It's just another face of Moloch. Capitalism, Fascism, Zionism, the Illuminati, Satan, Communism, White Supremacy, Jihadism, Racism, the list of great amorphous powers that can be used to explain all human problems goes on and on.
I don't understand how this is Moloch. To me, it seems like over generalization or mistakes, not coordination problems nor tragedies of common goods.
Moloch sure doesn't help, but I don't think it is the main actor here, there are other evil gods.
Also, I think capitalism and communism was a fight against Moloch.
Capitalism was a way to forbid a large class of direct violence and power, a large class which was used quite directly by Moloch.
But Moloch didn't need this direct access to violence, and capitalism was a fertile field for its own power.
Communism was a direct attempt against the power of Moloch inside the capitalist system, but it failed because it didn’t have strong defense against direct and social violence, and Moloch used it, to bring the worst at the top, and in most case, this push back against Moloch was corrupted by him.
"How do you measure that?" is often a great question for supposedly existing phenomenons.
If you claim something is real, there must be a way to observe and measure it. Which means there is a way to know when it's gone.
This whole 'invisible psychology that rules the world' schtick is so dimeitted its LITERALLY unbelievable. And it codes soooo female.
The "gender goon squad" is often female.
Yeah, in my experience, "patriarchy hurts men too" is used by feminists in the sense of "men, stop hurting yourself", not in the sense of "traditional gender norms - quite often also enforced by women - hurt men too".
"I'd gladly stop hitting myself, if you would be so kind as to let go of my arm."
"But then you might start hitting me! Don't I have a right to always feel safe?"
[writer of the review here]
It is indeed a very common observation of serious feminist thinkers, but I've found there is a massive discrepancy between "serious feminist writers" and "mainstream feminism the average person encounters on a day-to-day basis." The former holds many gems regarding gender relations; the latter tends to be openly hostile toward men, and if it does acknowledge the pain that sexism causes men, it usually does so in a way that blames and shames men. The latter also tends to hold on to the mindset that "men need to quit whining until women solve their issues."
The reality is that most young Western men do not support mainstream feminism in its current form. The polls that have been done on this topic are frankly terrifying (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/gen-z-men-and-women-most-divided-on-gender-equality-global-study-shows , https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/why-young-men-are-turning-against-feminism/) There are now less Gen Z men who support feminism than Millennials, which I find extremely concerning as a woman.
So, yes, you can point to feminist thinkers who bring thoughtful and compassionate nuance to the table. But those are *not* the voices the average young man is hearing, and hence why I didn't center this essay on those voices.
Hi anon writer - I loved this but felt it was two separate essays - one on the collapse of life maps for men, the other on the taxonomy of human unhappiness. Your ideal-type biographies are vivid and believable. But a lot of women have similar trajectories and feelings. And I don't think people were happier in the past. having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
Hey Jeremy, thanks so much for reading it! I would *firmly* agree that women face a lot of very similar challenges, and there's a lot of overlap in taxonomies.
However, I think both genders often face unique challenges from similar circumstances. For example, when my female friends struggle with social awkwardness and dating, I often encourage them to just try chatting with anyone they find attractive. "Just put yourself out there" and "practice makes perfect" is great advice for them.
For my male friends, it's very different: a socially awkward man chatting up any woman he finds attractive is a recipe for getting called a creep and being perceived as a threat, which only worsens their anxieties/insecurities. There is a much more intricate social dance that men must abide by when it comes to approaching a potential partner, and often times there are no healthy male role models available to teach that dance.
It's similar for situations like "I don't find my career fulfilling." This is a super common experience among both genders. However, if a woman leaves her 6-figure job in finance to become a pre-school teacher, there isn't a huge social penalty for this. Whereas for men, if their salary is suddenly cut by 70%, their romantic and even friendship potential is viewed as being very negatively impacted.
These sound like fairly minor things, but when you stack hundreds of these little things together, you end up with pretty different challenges and paths through life. And it's clear that right now men are struggling more than women to figure out healthy paths: American males are doing worse on pretty much every stat involving well-being, from education to incarceration to drug addition to suicide rates.
This is why I decided to tailor these taxonomies specifically to men: there may be lots of overlap with woman's issues, but the map to and from these issues tends to vary quite a bit.
> having a coherent life map and organic community do not protect you from the sadness and emptiness that come from 1. not succeeding in your life path and/or 2. succeeding in it.
I don't think I agree with this. Having a purpose and having a community are both strongly linked to happiness, and this connection has been shown by many large-scale studies over the years. Purpose and community may not *protect* you from feeling sadness and emptiness, but they will certainly mitigate the emotions and help you have the confidence/drive to pick yourself up and try again.
Thanks for responding. I concede your point about empirical evidence that community and (probably) uncontested life expectations promote happiness in today’s society, compared with the norm. But as a history professor, I am skeptical of our assumption people in the past were free of the sorrows we associate with modernity. My intuition, or prior, is that many people in dense organic community felt anomie and purposelessness like we do. Those people, born into strong communities today, drift out of them. The others, raised outside of strong communities, maybe drift into them, or thrive without them. (And likely aren’t dating!)
I mean, the specific, extreme personalities you document may not have appeared in anything like the sane form, earlier. (And of course, modern dating didn’t exist.) but in the past, those people may have started out strong in their communities and failed to launch, or to find fulfillment even when successful, and may have ended just as sad as today with similar feelings of being lost, alone in the crowd, etc.
in the past, many men and women did find themselves far from home, or isolated by the death of all their family, all alone in life, unable to rebuild human connection.
“For my male friends, it's very different: a socially awkward man chatting up any woman he finds attractive is a recipe for getting called a creep and being perceived as a threat, which only worsens their anxieties/insecurities.”
Without challenging the overall thesis that men are on average thriving less than women - is “get out there and meet people” actionable advice for women who are overweight, have a face perceived as ugly, or have a mood disorder? (In each of which, women are held to a higher standard than men.) My sense is that a large minority of women are deeply depressed and isolated, feel they have nothing to offer the world.
All this is in the spirit of commentary, not rebuttal. I got a lot out of your essay.
I've read someone's observation that "attractive woman" and "unattractive woman" might as well be different genders because of the different ways they get treated. My wife grew up obese and ended up with the same kinds of resentments and lack of sympathy for women complaining about unwanted attention as some men. Her reaction to Trump's "grab them by the pussy" line was something like "Hell yeah, I'd love it if someone rich and famous wanted to grab my pussy!"
At least the Red Tribe members among my in-laws gave up on Trump after Jan 6.
I'm not the writer of the review, and can't speak for what her commentary would be. But my impression is that there are some women for whom it's a genuine struggle to find anyone who wants or desires them, even when they put themselves forward, but that they're a lot fewer than the number of women who struggle with their self esteem and imagine themselves to be undesirable.
Several months ago, I made friends with a woman who thought herself to be undesirable and lacking any realistic relationship prospects. I thought that she was well within the range of ordinary appearance and relationship appeal, and that plenty of men would be likely to find her desirable as a partner, and I gave her some advice on how to put herself forward and filter for potential relationship partners.
Last I heard from her, a few weeks ago, she and her boyfriend were planning to move in together. They got together less than a month after I first started offering her advice.
All that is to say, I think there are women whose personal attributes leave them genuinely isolated and without good relationship prospects, but a lot of women who think "my personal attributes leave me without good relationship prospects" are mistaken.
I would definitely agree there's a large minority of women struggling with depression and isolation--there isn't enough written about them, and I wish more people would provide them with visibility and empathy. But I would still argue their predicament is fundamentally different.
In my experience of helping friends with dating, even a woman who is overweight and not conventionally attractive can usually land several dates on dating apps and get a certain degree of attention. For my male friends in this category, they can spend hours swiping and hundreds of dollars on "pro plans" on dating apps, and still only match with bots.
My guess is that some of this has to do with an unconscious linking of unattractive men/dangerous men. I think there's an unconscious bias toward believing that if a man is not "socially appealing," that must mean society distrusts them for a reason, and they may be dangerous. This adds an extra layer of struggle toward socializing--they're viewed not just as "ugly", but also as potentially dangerous, hence accusations of being a "creep" and such. Society just doesn't tend to fear women as much, so I think unattractive women aren't impacted to the same degree.
I've found a lot of my female friends who struggle with dating have realized that the biggest issue is that social media warped their idea of what an "ideal woman" looks like, and once they get over their insecurities, they actually have a good chance of finding someone. But for men, it just doesn't seem to be that easy.
So, yes, I have seen "get out there and meet people" actually work fairly well for my female friends who struggle with dating. But not so much for my male friends.
Of course this observation comes with the usual caveats of small sample size, anecdotal evidence, etc, etc.
> Whereas for men, if their salary is suddenly cut by 70%, their romantic and even friendship potential is viewed as being very negatively impacted. These sound like fairly minor things
Considering that you spend 8 hours a day at work, this alone does not seem like a minor thing to me. It is almost half of all the time you are awake.
On top of that (this may depend on country) where I live it is almost impossible for a man to find a part-time job. Even if half of his salary would be sufficient to feed the family.
My wife has a job that she chose freely, and she works part-time. I am happy for her; I just wish I could have the same thing. It almost feels as if we lived in different political regimes; she lives somewhere that is halfway to socialism, I work in a cutthroat capitalism.
Speaking as a middle-aged ex-feminist, I think your essay is one of the most powerful pieces I've read in a long, long time. I will re-Stack it gladly. Thank you for your empathy, depth and intellectual rigor.
You may be wondering why I identify as an "ex-feminist". Long story short: About 10 years ago I realized that the line I'd been taught by my very liberal upbringing and education--"The Patriarchy hurts men too and Feminism will help you"--was a lie.
1st point: "The Patriarchy" doesn't exist in Western society anymore. Not for quite a long time. Patriarchy has become some catch-all Bogeyman to explain away any undesirable behavior or outcome. Want to see a real patriarchy? Go to Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan. What we have is a liberal, post-Enlightenment society that legally recognizes all humans as equal (on paper, anyway). A real patriarchy would not be compatible with democracy. Why would those in power cede control to the unwashed masses, regardless of their gender?
2. Men, on average, in our society, are no more privileged than women are. What is so "privileged" about getting circumcised, being forced to sign up for Selective Service, or being expected to take on most of the dangerous jobs? I've never seen a feminist movement, let alone a feminist individual, address these points satisfactorily, besides snide comments like, "you GUYS created these problems so it's up to you to fix them." The only ones who are truly privileged are the very wealthy. The rest of us fight amongst ourselves over silly issues like pronoun usage instead of fighting the ruling class. This is not an accident.
3. Feminists ask us, practically demand, that we be "good allies." Ok, fine. We try to do that only to discover that they treat allyship as a one-way street. Since they're so "disadvantaged" they don't feel need to reciprocate one whit. (Present company excepted.) It's like Lucy pulling the football out from Linus every time.
4. (And most importantly) Any serious attempt at support for men, by men, is reflexively rejected by most feminists. As your piece points out, they see this as a zero-sum game. They not only lack empathy, they seem gleefully sadistic at the thought of us suffering for all the sins of our forefathers.
So I cannot support a movement that actively encourages hatred towards me because I have XY chromosomes. That would be masochistic. And for anyone reading this thinking, "No true feminist would think that!", I have a Scotsman to introduce you to.
> I've never seen a feminist movement, let alone a feminist individual, address these points satisfactorily, besides snide comments like, "you GUYS created these problems so it's up to you to fix them."
Fortunately, I have. Unfortunately there were also plenty of feminist assholes back in the heyday of Internet feminism - I gave up on reading Amanda Marcotte's blog for pretty much the reasons you cited.
I was also pretty active in feminist communities for quite some time, but I gradually distanced myself, and an experience I had about ten years back with my girlfriend at the time still sticks strongly in my memory when I think about why.
She used to browse feminist websites a lot on her phone during our time together, and would occasionally show me stuff she found funny or interesting. But the content of the sites made me uncomfortable, and I eventually told her that I didn't mind her browsing feminist websites while we were together so much, but it was uncomfortable for me how much of the content of those sites was misandrist in nature. She told me that she didn't think it was, but when I offered examples of the same sort of reasoning and rhetoric gender-flipped, and asked if she'd think that a site with that sort of content was misogynist, she immediately agreed that she would, and that she'd been failing to think of it in the same terms. When I asked her if she'd feel as at-home on sites without that sort of misandrist tone, she said "I don't think there are any."
I don't think she was right, that there were literally none. But it wasn't like she went out of her way to find communities which were hostile to men. She thought she was deliberately filtering out communities which were hostile, and only immersing herself in communities which were supportive and accepting of everyone. But when she broadened her view of what constituted hostility against men to the same sort of criteria that she'd apply when assessing for hostility against women, she genuinely couldn't think of any she was aware of which met those standards.
I still wear my feminist hat sometimes, and I think learning to analyze things through a feminist framework is genuinely valuable. But over time, feminist communities stopped being a place where I felt welcome, or like my contributions were valued. And that makes it hard to think of yourself as being a member of the community.
I’ve been in feminist forums that unironically stated “misandry does not exist.” SMH.
A trivial point, but it's nails-on-a-chalkboard to me: It wasn't Linus Lucy pulled the football away from, it was Charlie Brown. (43 times; this blogger helpfully collected them all: https://karnicky.blogspot.com/search/label/Lucy)
Oh right! Thanks, it’s been a long time since I’ve watched those.
That may be true, IDK. But I don't think you really support the claim that the disaffection you say you see in men is at all caused by these un-nuanced feminist voices.
[writer of the review here]
I certainly don't think un-nuanced feminist voices are the sole cause of all this disaffection. I *do* however think they've been a powerful force keeping sane, stable men from identifying the problem of floundering men and stepping forward to say, "Hey, I'm a proud man with a great life, these are the unique challenges I faced as a man, here's how I forged my own path, and maybe this path could be beneficial to you as well."
Many feminists have aggressively tried to shut down this type of dialogue, insisting it enforces gender roles. They instead preach that everyone should just "be a good person" and focus on a gender-agnostic identity. And to be clear--this is my ideal world. But it's an ideal that clashes with social and biological realities, and it's left many boys and men feeling deeply lost and disaffected.
So we're left with young men begging for direction tailored to their gender, and right now the only people willing to loudly and publicly respond to them are creeps within the manosphere (because these men have zero respect for feminists, and in fact benefit from their outrage.)
In my own experience, having female mentors and role-models who took a unique life path, discussed the unique challenges of being on that path as a woman, and provided a detailed map for other young women on that path was *absolutely vital* to me becoming a whole, stable, and happy person. I would be a horribly lost person without it.
The fact that many young men are deprived of that same type of mentorship, in the service of some unrealistic ideal of a gender-agnostic society, is frankly rather heart-breaking to me.
Even among serious feminists, I'm not sure the discussion is a productive one. For example, feminists criticize patriarchy for causing men to suppress their emotions, to their apparent detriment (though one could argue that stoicism is psychologically healthy!). But one could ask if it's patriarchy that causes this suppression, or else the apparently common tendency of women to be unattracted to men who express their emotions.
Are there "serious feminist thinkers?"
J.K. Rowling is an honorable exception, but the great majority of feminists got badly outsmarted by the small number of M to F transgenders. Feminists should have been serious enough to not fall for transgender ideology, but at least here in America, a huge number of them were shamefully fooled.
> The former holds many gems regarding gender relations; the latter tends to be openly hostile toward men
I strongly disagree that 'serious feminist writers' are not hostile towards men. I once made it my mission to find any non-sexist feminist, but no mainstream feminist has ever pointed me to a writer whose work was not horribly sexist (for example, bell hooks, De Beauvoir, Judith Butler).
The equity feminists are the closest to that, but no feminist ever suggested those writers as their inspiration, and they seem to be almost completely outside of the feminist 'machine,' like the women's studies departments.
"The patriarchy is bad for men, too" is an observation I've heard many times, but the application of this idea never seems to be towards fixing the sort of problems outlined here: it's never about reducing the sort of "men are pigs" sexist attitudes, or thinking about education reform to put boys on more equal footing, or anything of the sort.
Instead it seems to be used aa a sort of "trickle-down social justice" argument where the best thing that men can do for men is to be "allies" for women and minorities and be super embarrassed about their privilege and hyper-vigilant about avoiding anything that can be interpreted as "toxic masculinity". I agree with the authors point that social justice is not zero-sum, but I don't think it's so positive-sum that focusing on women's issues will just fix men's issues, too.
Maybe this does not reflect feminist discourse at its highest levels: maybe high-level feminist discourse is full of concrete suggestions for improving mens lives... but it's not the sort of discourse I've seen 'in the water'.
It's an interesting point. With physical jobs becoming mostly economically irrelevant, male-on-female violence dramatically reduced in the first world middle-class-and-up layers of society, and with economic parity of the sexes, are there any advantages left for men? Even asking this feels heretical.
We are not living in a gynocracy.
>Outside of a few hyper-high-performers
You mean the majority of congress and every president who's ever lived?
>HR Karens will fire you for not toeing the company line, and then have an affair with the CEO
But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line.
Look, I agree that the term "patriarchy" has been abused. It's often used to imply that just because congress is mostly male that means that every man everywhere is privileged, and that's just not true. But "gynocracy" is nonsensical.
>unaccountable faceless group of midlevel managers that are predominantly women
Do you have any statistics to back that up? From what I can tell, women are still a minority of managers. 42% to be precise: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106320
Are you perhaps discussing a group of "midlevel managers" who are markedly different from "managers" more generally? If so, please cite your source.
>If you want to know what the future looks like, imagine a fat 50 year old childless cat lady barely able to rise from her office chair saying "that's against policy," forever. No space for agentic people in the realm of paperwork.
While I agree that bureaucracy is often stifling, I don't think that women bear any more of the blame than men. And I object to your casual disregard for fat people, 50 year old people, people without children and people who have cats.
On the subject of bureaucracy, the book "Bullshit Jobs" has useful insights from an anthropologist. But he didn't mention anything about women bearing any special blame for the mess we're in, and I trust him more than you.
"But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line. But the CEO, who outranks the HR Karen, is very likely male. He can fire *her* for not toeing the company line."
Yes, but the board outranks the CEO, and can fire *him* for generating bad PR, or discontent among the other employees, or (even if only in their minds) opening the company up to the possibility of discrimination lawsuits, which are much less likely to happen or succeed when the discrimination is against men. Being CEO doesn't put you above corporate political games, it makes you the center of the worst of them.
I'm definitely not agreeing with the 'gynocracy' assertion, which I also think is incorrect. Just making a very narrow observation about the corporate hierarchy claim. I have been surprised many, many times how often a CEO does something and the people that nominally report to them just... go about their business, paying it lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
I can see how a male CEO might be beholden to gender norms which sometimes favor women. But exactly how strong is that effect?
>I'm definitely not agreeing with the 'gynocracy' assertion, which I also think is incorrect.
Thank you.
> have been surprised many, many times how often a CEO does something and the people that nominally report to them just... go about their business, paying it lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
Sure, but doesn't that work both ways? Suppose there's a mostly-male company where most of the workers are sexist against women. Suppose that the board is worried about bad PR or lawsuits or whatever, so they impose an Equality Program to make sure women feel welcomed. Then the various workers all go about their business, paying the Equality Program lip service at best and not facing any consequences for quite a long time.
The phrase "trickle-down social justice" is really helpful. Thank you.
To give you one concrete example: A common feminist argument is that women are expected to take care of children and so them taking parental leave is more normalized than for men but also this harms their careers because people expect them to leave the workforce and so don't hire or promote them. Spreading a social expectation that childcare is something to be shared by both sexes is feminist in that it addresses this problem, but it also helps men who face less social stigma for taking parental leave.
Or another: sexist ideas that women are the people who have feelings and men are the gruff go-kill-the-bear types harms women but also men, by making it hard for them to deal with their own feelings.
In my experience, it's an observation that's almost always made as the motte part of a motte-and-bailey routine.
I can never remember: Which one is the motte and which one is the bailey?
Motte is the narrow, official definition of the term, defensible in arguments but useless for policy.
Bailey is the de facto definition, expansive vagueness of which can be gainfully exploited, but explicit principled defense would sound flagrantly monstrous.
Motte = Moat = thing that makes it very easy to defend but gets in the way when you try to do anything useful.
No, motte != moat.
motte = artificial hill with a strong tower on top, easy to defend.
bailey = larger flat area with a variety of useful facilities and lighter fortifications.
moat = water-filled ditch surrounding both the motte and the bailey and separating them from each other.
There is a flying bridge across the moat between motte and bailey, operated from the moat. It makes it easier, in case the bailey has fallen, for the defender to reconquer the bailey from the motte than for the attacker to conquer the motte from the bailey.
I am not aware of the moat, the flying bridge or other details being used in the analogy with rhetorics
The idea that the patriarchy hurts men too is just interpreted by the feminism I see, as men not being allowed do to what is right for women, or to be feminine. It's not at all interpreted in a way where sexism against men exists. It is just a claim that misogyny is part of male culture.
> Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing.
Women are better at reading emotions than men, and demanding men perform with the same skill as women here is akin to demanding that women perform as well in realms of physical strength and endurance.
And aggression *is* a good thing when directed and controlled. It's actively harmful to repress everything from brawling to raised voices.
> Going to literally die in a war is not optimal, it's better to protest or donate money.
Neither of those things are going to protect the people you care about from hostile force.
> I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people.
How much suffering and misery does this have to create before you acknowledge that the real world has an influence on identity and meaning?
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
If you're not going to reward people for being decent, and instead call literally anything they do "the bare minimum", you will not get decent people. You will instead get resentment, hate and rage. And, for a lot of people pushing this line, that seems to be the point.
Women are *slightly* better on average, yeah. The difference is not nearly as stark as physical strenght. If you think men are basically buffoons at reading basic emotions, then you might be in a bubble (ie the Bay Area with its focus on tech).
I'll take the controlled agression point. I guess I'd describe controlled agression with a different adjective.
Being a soldier is most often heroic, but I'd still prefer violence and war not happen. I think it is nice that the human race is less violent now than other time periods.
In my experience, more people are liberated by less focus on rigid gender roles, but that is obviously hard to measure.
How do you suggest we reward people for being decent? I'm a fan of verbally complimenting people I love for doing basic things (the dishes or whatnot), but I'm not sure what you should do on a society-wide basis.
> Women are *slightly* better on average, yeah. The difference is not nearly as stark as physical strength.
On what grounds do you come to that conclusion?
> If you think men are basically buffoons at reading basic emotions, then you might be in a bubble (ie the Bay Area with its focus on tech).
You're wrong on the facts because there's nothing I said that could support that reading.
> Being a soldier is most often heroic, but I'd still prefer violence and war not happen.
That's nice. It also doesn't matter.
> I think it is nice that the human race is less violent now than other time periods.
This is really, really, wrong.
> In my experience, more people are liberated by less focus on rigid gender roles
When you take the structure away from something, it collapses. That's not liberation.
> How do you suggest we reward people for being decent?
We could start by not saying "You don't get any fucking credit for doing the bare minimum, you stupid entitled troll."
>> I think it is nice that the human race is less violent now than other time periods.
> This is really, really, wrong.
Stephen Pinker would say otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature
There is a lot I like about Stephen Pinker, but I'm afraid on this one he's full of it. To quote Foseti's review of that book:
---
A while back, I linked to a story about a guy in my neighborhood who’s been arrested over 60 times for breaking into cars. A couple hundred years ago, this guy would have been killed for this sort of vandalism after he got caught the first time. Now, we feed him and shelter him for a while and then we let him back out to do this again. Pinker defines the new practice as a decline in violence – we don’t kill the guy anymore! Someone from a couple hundred years ago would be appalled that we let the guy continue destroying other peoples’ property without consequence. In the mind of those long dead, “violence” has in fact increased. Instead of a decline in violence, this practice seems to me like a decline in justice – nothing more or less.
Here’s another example, Pinker uses creative definitions to show that the conflicts of the 20th Century pale in comparison to previous conflicts. For example, all the Mongol Conquests are considered one event, even though they cover 125 years. If you lump all these various conquests together and you split up WWI, WWII, Mao’s takeover in China, the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, the Russian Civil War, and the Chinese Civil War (yes, he actually considers this a separate event from Mao), you unsurprisingly discover that the events of the 20th Century weren’t all that violent compared to events in the past! Pinker’s third most violent event is the “Mideast Slave Trade” which he says took place between the 7th and 19th Centuries. Seriously. By this standard, all the conflicts of the 20th Century are related. Is the Russian Revolution or the rise of Mao possible without WWII? Is WWII possible without WWI? By this consistent standard, the 20th Century wars of Communism would have seen the worst conflict by far. Of course, if you fiddle with the numbers, you can make any point you like.
[...]
In another section of the book, Pinker has a very long discussion of infanticide. Then he notes that we don’t have infanticide anymore. Then he notes that we do kill almost exactly the same proportion of babies today that infanticidal societies killed, we just do it via abortion. Then he concludes with some fuzzy language that probably satisfies most of the people on both sides of the issue. You can’t criticize him for ignoring the fact that abortion is so common.
The problem, in this case for Pinker, is that we’ve turned the infanticide of old from an unfortunate practice into a fundamental right. Surely this should give pause to someone making an honest argument that violence has declined over time.
---
https://foseti.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/review-of-the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker/
Studies on the topic of male vs female emotional intelligence, often also used for testing autism (for example the "reading the mind in the eyes" test) typically show a mild female advantage, not an extreme one. Many show statistically insignificant differences. Although it is more complex to measure than simple grip strenght or whatever, obviously. IIRC, among top performers in some of these tests there's an equal amount of men and women, which is not the case for physical strenght. You're much more likely to meet a male social genius than a woman as strong as an average man.
Anyway, I fully agree with you on abandoning the Twitter brainrot of calling everything the bare minimum. It helps that I've never been on Twitter.
Ad: `among top performers in some of these tests there's an equal amount of men and women, which is not the case for physical strenght.'
One explanation would be that both strength and emotional intelligence in both genders are normally distributed, the mean for strength is higher for men, the mean for emotional intelligence is lower for men, but the variance is higher for men in both cases. Men having higher variance for a wide variety of characteristics has been often suggested and is quite likely; part of it might simply be due to the presence of two different chromosomes (XY) rather than the same ones (XX).
Seconding. This was also my interpretation.
It is less about the human race abandoning violence and more about the fact that industrial wars tend to be extremely destructive and, on the net, a sheer loss of wealth.
As long as it was possible to become wealthier by wars of conquests, people would start them - from the Romans and Hittites to the colonial wars. But the balance turned around in the 20th century. Even today, what Russia gains from Ukraine is a thoroughly destroyed landscape.
Violent crime has also been a lot higher in most societies, people don't watch executions or cat burning for fun anymore etc etc. But yeah this is a huge factor
Though violent crime is higher in contemporary societies than it was about a century ago. E.g., the homicide rate in England in the early 20th century was steady at about half what it is today, and that's not accounting for improvements in medical care.
Also, whilst we're certainly better on animal rights nowadays, I suspect public executions would still draw large audiences if they were still carried out.
Huh, interesting about the first part. Though I suspect it was much easier to get away with murder and not have it flagged as such back then.
Even an intact landscape wouldn't help Russia much, because what generates wealth nowadays is mostly human not natural resources.
(Russia did steal tens of thousands of Ukrainian children in this war, but that's not going to make a noticeable difference to a country with 140 million residents)
The only context in which invasion of Ukraine would make any (evil, but logical and economic) sense was that the Kremlin expected the country to collapse almost without fight. They also hoped for swift decapitation of the leadership, it seems - that is why they tried to invade Kyiv using their airborne troops and landing at Hostomel.
Didn't work out and Plan B is nowhere as good.
[writer of the review here]
> Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad?
I would firmly agree that many of the values of the current "map to manhood" are indeed good. I would love to live in a society with more emotionally adept individuals, less aggression, less war, etc.
Where the map fails is assuming that it's enough to just state these morals (ie: "don't be aggressive"), and morally shame those who fail. Testosterone is going to naturally cause aggressive tendencies in most young men. Telling them "don't be aggressive" is like telling someone with anxiety "don't be anxious." It usually doesn't work, and if you shame them when your loose guidance fails, it only breeds resentment and a lack of self-esteem.
What's missing is the actual *directions* for the map. The part that says, "You're male, so you're probably going to feel more aggression than most girls. Don't feel ashamed for that! You're not a bad person for it. But you DO need to learn how to properly channel that aggression into good things, like protecting the weak. Let's walk through some concrete steps on how you can do that..."
> I think obsessing over gender roles or "being a man"/woman is stupid and repressive for most people.
I would agree that obsession is not a good thing. But there has to be some acknowledgement of the difference of lived experiences, and the fact that the same goals often require different paths/efforts from different genders.
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
I believe being a good person who meets society's expectations is something that does indeed deserve a reward. In fact, I believe if you *don't* reward this, it's very harmful to social cohesion. (That reward, of course, must be within reason. Obviously a man doesn't deserve to sleep with any woman he wants just because he checked off the boxes on the "good person" list. But laying out clear and healthy rewards is a vital part of the map that's currently missing.)
> A lot of this also seems so... American? It's like Americans feel the need to have some Grand Goals and a Purpose and Values, otherwise they feel like shit.
I have no doubt the individualism in America exacerbates these issues. But if you look at other Western countries, you see the same stats that show men are floundering when it comes to education, to careers, to drug abuse, etc. So I don't believe this is entirely an American problem.
I think it's extremely human to crave a purpose and a role, and I think many Westerners currently feel they are lacking those things. Obviously, gender is only one facet of role/purpose, but it's a big one that deserves consideration.
> "You're male, so you're probably going to feel more aggression than most girls. Don't feel ashamed for that! You're not a bad person for it. But you DO need to learn how to properly channel that aggression into good things, like protecting the weak. Let's walk through some concrete steps on how you can do that..."
That just sounds like enforcing gender roles with a coating of evopsych and adding a “probably” in there to soften the blow. Why not just recognise if your child is aggressive, and teach them a lesson regardless of gender? You could get a meek nerdy boy (honestly pretty likely if you’re dating men from the Bay Area) and then he might try to apply the opposite lessons, when what he needs is to be more assertive and put his own needs first. Or what if you have a very aggressive girl?
Statistics are useful, but when you’re dealing with individual children you’re raising, it’s cruel to assign them behavioural stereotypes based on immutable parts of their identity before you witness any evidence of that behaviour. Telling them “you’re probably X because you’re a boy/girl” in fact might make it worse - if they’re not X, they might feel like there’s something wrong with them, or they might amplify those traits because it’s normal for them.
That’s before going into that “protecting the weak” part - a strange throwback to gender roles. If you’re dealing with a child with anger issues, how is that a useful strategy to calm down the anger they feel say, at losing at a video game, or not getting the present they wanted?
I think there’s much better gender agnostic ways to deal with your emotions you could teach your kids.
> I would agree that obsession is not a good thing. But there has to be some acknowledgement of the difference of lived experiences, and the fact that the same goals often require different paths/efforts from different genders.
Very little of the issues you mentioned were gender specific. How would you treat career burn out differently in a man vs a woman? Moving to a new city and not being able to make deep connections? Having a therapist that ignores your concerns?
> Statistics are useful, but when you’re dealing with individual children you’re raising, it’s cruel to assign them behavioural stereotypes based on immutable parts of their identity before you witness any evidence of that behaviour.
I think you and I are looking at this through two very different lenses, and thus discussing different things. I'm viewing this through a "society at large" lens, you're viewing it through the lens of "an individual person parenting an individual child."
I would firmly agree that any good parent should tailor their advice/guidance to their child's individual personality and needs. But not every child has a parent willing or able to do this, and even if they do, children do not look *solely* to their parents for advice/guidance.
Society and community shapes a massive amount of a child's behavior, and that society/community likely will not know/understand a child as well as their parent. Thus the need for more generalized roadmaps. Society can provide young men with a variety of healthy roadmaps to fit a variety of personality types; parents and other more intimate mentors can help them to tailor those generalized maps to suit their own personal needs.
I also would agree that it's cruel to *enforce* gender stereotypes, and I think this is why it's so vital to have a broad spectrum of male role models who have varying definitions of "being a man." Let young men choose which one resonates most with them, or let them decide they don't give a crap about gender at all, if they wish.
But the reality is that the latter rarely happens. Gender is considered a vital part of identity, and ignoring it isn't going to make it go away. Polite society (and hence our education system) has spent the better part of the last couple decades insisting that all children need to be treated/raised the same, regardless of gender. The result for men has been dismal: plummeting education and employment rates, rising suicide rates, rising rates of addiction, etc.
We can't just keep insisting that we ignore gender, when 50% of the population is floundering under that framework.
> Very little of the issues you mentioned were gender specific. How would you treat career burn out differently in a man vs a woman? Moving to a new city and not being able to make deep connections? Having a therapist that ignores your concerns?
The concerns themselves may not be specific to men, but there are unique challenges within them for men (and also for women, of course, although that isn't the focus of this essay). Some examples, based off the things you cited:
- Career burnout: women can shift to a lower-paying but more-fulfilling career and face very little social repercussion. If men choose to take a 70% paycut, this often has massive impact on their romantic potential, and often friendship potential as well.
- Making deep connections in a new city: this becomes more difficult when you're viewed not just as a stranger (as a woman would be), but as a potentially dangerous stranger (as a man would more often be.) There also is more of a taboo amongst men for talking about feelings, which can make forming connections even more difficult.
-Having a therapist who ignores your concerns: Over 75% of therapists are women. A lot of men feel better served by male therapists who can more easily empathize with their lived experiences, but there literally are not enough male therapists for them.
These are just a few quick examples, which all leads back to my original point: ignoring gender was an admirable and understandable attempt by society to improve the lives of everyone. But it turns out it often causes more harm than pain. We need to figure out a middle ground, where gender and its biological and societal impacts isn't dismissed, but gender norms do not become restrictive and aggressively enforced.
Can I get a tl;dr from some one that isn't trying to have a reddit tier back-n-forth here on substack?
I'm reporting this. If you're not going to put in the effort to participate in this community, leave.
How very feminine of you: "I'm gonna call hall monitor Karen to report you because you asked for clarification and I don't like it."
Astral Codex Ten is famous for being many things, but a tl;dr place is not one of them. :D
> That just sounds like enforcing gender roles with a coating of evopsych and adding a “probably” in there to soften the blow.
these are precisely the sort of critiques lobbed at Bly and the mythopoetic men’s movement by mainstream feminists of the era, and the reason why now there’s Peterson and Andrew Tate instead.
men and women are different. Bly and our commenter above write for men. clearly, if you think “protecting the weak” is cringe and “smells like gender roles” you are not the target of these suggestions and, if the experiences mentioned are extraneous to you, you might not be the best judge of techniques for facing up to then.
Peterson and Tate are worlds apart.
sure. but both are what happens when you don’t allow people to appreciate Bly
They don’t write “for men”, they write for a very specific kind of men and the lived experiences that lead them to follow hateful ideologies like Andrew Tate’s is far from universal.
Men and women are different on average, sure, and you’re absolutely allowed to have your preferences and follow whatever gender roles you see fit. But I draw the line at forcing them on other people, especially kids, and not letting girls do certain things because that’s for boys and you need the right temperament/aggression/etc. and vice versa, or reinforcing the belief that because they’re male/female they have to be X or Y.
I don’t see how my particular gender changes this. The commenter above or whatnot didn’t talk about say, prostate health or whatnot, but about universal human experiences where seeing it as a “male problem” is unhelpful.
that’s a bit of a strawman you’re fighting there—who said anything about forcing anyone
You say gender roles like that’s a bad thing in a moderately-highly sexually dimorphic species. Every person I’ve met that was worth emulating embraced the traditional gender roles to a degree, some more some less. Most traditional gender roles are all about encouraging the mean pro social behaviors of a gender and discouraging the antisocial behaviors of that same gender. Every resilient gender role system is not a hard mold but a collection of tools to help form a strong healthy person. To throw it all in the trash because it’s not fair is insanity it’s taking a priceless cultural treasure that we know works more than it doesn’t and throwing in away. And yes I understand that the received gender roles aren’t perfect and they need work but that is no reason to condemn the entire system.
But... how? What reward, on a society-wide level, should we give to decent people? In the past, it was probably "a family/spouse", but I don't like the pressure to "pair up" this puts on people. We can't just promise men a wife or vice-versa without some pretty grim consequences.
I'm all for simply complimenting the people we love a lot, and throwing parties when they reach milestones, but that doesn't seem to be what you're suggesting?
And how does everyone in a modern society channel their agression into protecting the weak? I'm all for martial arts/learning self defense, or becoming a firefighter or even a soldier. But we luckily have a rather limited need for both soldiers and firefighters, and I wouldn't want that to change.
I'd never marry then. I mean it's very common and accepted in most of Europe to live together, have three kids, a house and whatnot and still never legally marry. It's honestly interesting it's still seen as ultra important in the states - health insurance? Or just religiousity?
You can be committed without having a legal contract.
It was so weird when I visited the US (midwest), they always assumed that I as the woman obviously wanted to get married and my boyfriend was being rude to me by not proposing (?). When I said no, it simply isn't important where we're from, they looked at me like "poor thing, making excuses for him :(". So medieval, definitely one of the bigger culture shocks.
It's just a different social context. I know a couple in the US who fits the European pattern (they've been together since college and raised a daughter together, they're now retired, and they never married), but in the US it seems like there is a pretty substantial difference in commitment level between the people who marry and the people who just live together.
Agreed. I've lived in both contexts, and context matters. In Europe, not getting married doesn't mean anything (or much) about the permanence of your relationship; in the US it does. That's how culture often works, after all--it gives you a translation for certain actions. Tells you what a kiss means and doesn't mean, etc--or an "I do."
There are a lot of legal advantages to marriage in the US associated with child guardianship/custody, inheritance, hospital visitation, health insurance benefits, income tax benefits, state tax benefits, retirement benefits and so on.
From what I've seen, European countries often don't need some of these benefits (e.g sharing of employer sponsored health insurance) and have a separate domestic partnership status that grants many of the others without a more formal marriage. (Note for US readers, this is not the same as a civil union and is often granted as a natural consequence of cohabitation.
> And how does everyone in a modern society channel their agression into protecting the weak?
Video games. Seriously. That's like, what you do in a huge number of video games.
Or, you know, doing things like volunteering for charities, working as a public defender or social worker, etc. "Aggression" doesn't have to be physical.
How would you express or deploy aggression as a social worker or volunteer? You seem to throw this off as duh obvious but it just makes me think you've no idea what aggression is.
Well, subjectively, I can channel the same kinds of emotional/mental/physical activation that I would get if I needed to give someone the what-for into doing something like getting the blasted paperwork done properly or trying to stop the doctor in the hospital from cutting my dying wife's pain meds out of a misplaced fear of addiction when she has a motherfucking giant hole in her thigh that won't heal and hurts like hell. (True story, unfortunately.)
I think the main "reward" that is currently missing is welcoming decent people into loving and supportive communities (this also naturally lends itself to pairing up romantically, but doesn't force it or explicitly promise it.)
Historically, people behaved themselves, because if they did, they'd have the support and respect of their tribe; if they didn't, they'd get kicked out of the tribe. In current times, people can perfectly behave themselves and still have a high chance of not having a tribe available to them. This raises the question "why bother being a decent person?", and the manosphere is there to capture all the poor young men who fall into that mental trap.
Of course the question of "how do you grow healthy tribes for modern people to belong to" is a very complex one, and has many more factors than just gender. But I think one of the key parts of healthy tribes is knowing your role and understanding the expectations of that role. And right now many men seem extremely confused about their role, let alone their expectations, so it's no wonder many are struggling to find a tribe.
As for channeling aggression: I agree, I don't want more soldiers, either! But I want more people standing up for the oppressed, more public defenders, more politicians fighting for the common people, etc. These are all things aggression can easily be channeled into. And I do believe that giving young men a physical aggression outlet is very powerful as well. Not all of them need it, but some do, and I think it's very important to provide things like martial arts lessons to those who need to learn how to control aggressive impulses.
Reputation and appreciation, mainly. That would pretty much solve everything by re-tethering the accepted value of men and what they do.
>And how does everyone in a modern society channel their aggression into protecting the weak?
This is going to sound facetious but is probably the real answer to your question....
Encouraging the aggressive kid to punch other kids they see bullying weaker kids.
Like full on "Go find someone bullying a weak kid, and punch him in the face. Its fine. You have permission/social sanction to do that" level encouragement, and then rewarding that behaviour afterwards.... ~High Five~ Nice!.....
Society may not like that answer for all sorts of reasons, but its a way of channelling actual aggression into protecting the weak.
I agree, without something like this being socially sanctioned this is a bromide being offered without a practical application. You can channel aggression into other things (competative and physical sports? Video games?) but these aren't really protecting the weak.
Given aggression is a desire to engage in physical/hostile behaviour. Usually to attack or confront someone.... really the only way to tick the "get the aggression out" and "protect weak people" boxes at the same time, is to allow kids to physically attack/confront those kids who are preying on the weak kids.
>>I believe being a good person who meets society's expectations is something that does indeed deserve a reward. In fact, I believe if you *don't* reward this, it's very harmful to social cohesion.
It's not really as much about the reward per se, it's more about consistency. A lot of "Nice guy" shit comes from said guy meeting the minimal requirements, getting repeatedly rejected and receiving only "ok, cool, you do meet the minimal requirements, what, do you expect a cookie for it or something?" as the reason for rejection. But then he looks around in real life and sees a lot of people who DO NOT meet those requirements at all - but who are facing a lot LESS problems with getting laid than he does. Obviously, that means something's up here where what's on paper does not match reality at all - if there are minimal requirements, the last thing you'd expect to see is that whoever fails to meet them, struggles less than someone who has at least met those minimal reqs. And that's generally when the Red Pill, manosphere or whatever other unpleasant company comes into play, offering an answer...
The missing puzzle piece, for the nice guys out there, being that they actually aren't meeting the minimal requirements. They are meeting the minimal requirements on one axis (the "good guy" axis), while not meeting the minimal requirements on the "sexual attraction" axis.
Women want to be treated well... by a man they are attracted to!
Receiving flowers and poems from a guy they are not attracted to tends to squick them out (and potentially fear for their safety).
And if a nice guy asks a feminist for advice on how to meet those other minimum requirements, it tends to be about as productive as asking an FBI agent for nuclear launch codes.
That's because the feminist honestly doesn't understand that stuff (and doesn't know that she doesn't understand etc), while the feminist theory often explicitly contradicts with biology. Attraction generally works on unconscious/body language level, and few people are perceptive/introspective enough to have insight into it, or to notice contradictions with the orthodoxy.
Right - much like how the FBI agent doesn't have the launch codes, wouldn't share them even if it were possible, and is professionally suspicious of any rando's motives for asking.
>Reminder that the term "toxic masculinity" was coined by a men's movement in the 80's (the mythopoetic men's movement), not feminism.
So? The term "Eugenics" was coined by Francis Galton, an Englishman who didn't see much of the 20th century. Are we to attribute responsibility to him for the consequences of the whole field?
Lots of people do.
Galton is a better scapegoat than his half-cousin Darwin for religious reasons.
What is supposed to be the significance of the idea that "toxic masculinity" was coined by something called the "mythopoetic men's movement"?
I think there's not so much value in deciding whom to blame for the brokenness in society. What's useful is figuring out how to make it better, or at least how to stop making it worse.
I definitely agree that the whole thing where various high-status people say nasty things about men (or whites or white men) is pretty awful. And media culture is both super appealing and super corrosive--you almost can't show most virtues in TV/movie format. Crass, violent people make good stories, loyal, hard-working, honest people mostly don't--it's much harder to make a fun-to-watch story with those people.
> Crass, violent people make good stories, loyal, hard-working, honest people mostly don't--it's much harder to make a fun-to-watch story with those people.
Except that Hollywood is not doing all that well now that they portray most women as crass violent people and men as bumbling losers.
I guess if you want to draw some grand conclusions about men generally from that factoid you can, but I don't know anything about the "mythopoetic men's movement", what they meant by "toxic masculinity", or if it has any connection to what feminists or anyone else means when they say it, and I don't think that almost anyone else knows either. Maybe you do but nobody has explained anything about it in this thread.
I also think that "men haven't always liked traditional masculinity" can mean a lot of things. "Traditional masculinity" isn't a totally fixed idea (to the extent you can give it a precise definition at all), people can like some part of it but not other parts, people can dislike it for different reasons and prefer different alternatives, and I don't actually think "how much do people like traditional masculinity" is a particularly interesting or relevant consideration for any of this discussion.
One of their ideas was that close emotional bonds between men, and men being open about their feelings, was vital. Toxic masculinity was bottling things up, and IIRC being aggressive. Seems pretty in line with the feminist definition to me.
Too much of the map of manhood is focused on what not to do, not what to do. You specifically mentioned protest or donate money, but I have never heard someone say you become a man when you attend X protests or donate Y money. If they did, someone did, it would probably be more fulfilling.
You mentioned in another comment the throwing a party for reaching a milestone, I think this is the best suggestion. Weddings are a good example of this, but so many men don’t reach this milestone. A man can’t ask for a party thrown for them, but they would definitely appreciate it if they got one, it if was tied into their culture.
> Also am I the only one who thinks much of the "map to manhood" is not that bad? Like yeah, being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing
I think the big problem is that it's all negative: it provides you with a list of things not to do, but lacks a good vision of what to do, or what to be, or why to do that.
In traditional societies, even up to the mid twentieth century, being an ordinary full-grown adult man in good standing with society was respectable and rewarding enough to motivate a boy to grow up. But now all the aspects of normal adult life, especially for men, are derided by society, so what has a boy even got to look forward to? A big house in the suburbs? No, the suburbs are lame, as the media never stops telling us, and suburban dads even more so. Maybe if you work hard and pay off your mortgage you can reward yourself with that nice sports car you've always wanted? No, middle aged men with sports cars are the most shameful possible group of people. The only available role models for young men are people who do not and cannot exist in the real world like Batman and James Bond, and even they are probably problematic. And your Dad can't possibly be a role model, he's uncool and lame because he doesn't like the same things that fourteen-year-old boys like.
We need to put more glory on the life of a normal adult family man who does the right things, gets a job, gets married, buys a house, has kids, does normal suburban dad things, and retires.
> We need to put more glory on the life of a normal adult family man who does the right things, gets a job, gets married, buys a house, has kids, does normal suburban dad things, and retires.
I agree this would be nice, but part of the problem has to be social media.
If boys see men of all ages living a jet setting lifestyle paired up with different hot 20 year olds on a regular rotation, that certainly seems more appealing on it's face than all the boring suburban stuff, especially to men in their formative teenage and early 20's years.
I think at that point it doesn't really matter how much you can glorify suburban dads - much like being a pro athlete or influencer is the career 80%+ of kids want, having this memetic attractor on the landscape will distort things just in and of itself, even if it's unattainable for 99.999...% of them.
>being bad at reading emotions or being agressive is not a good thing
Yeah, but is "bad at reading emotions" something that you should be ashamed of, or is it a mild flaw that others can help you with, perhaps by explaining how they feel more directly because they know you won't pick up on subtle hints?
The details matter.
>You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
What about demanding a reward for being a *good* person? Doesn't it make sense that a just society would reward virtue in some way?
Even leaving aside questions of justice, a sensible society would reward virtue, because having lots of virtuous people is good for society.
> You shouldn't demand a reward for simply being a person.
Yes you should. We call this "human rights". There are lots of rewards you should demand, like clean air, clean water, a society to live in that is not at war. Why shouldn't meaningful human interaction be among these other necessities of life? Just because providing it is hard, just because we don't have a viable plan to satisfy that demand?
> We need more high-profile, morally-sound men who openly discuss what it’s like to live with a testosterone-dominated body and how they learned to channel their natural instincts into positive and productive outcomes.
Well, I'm not high-profile yet, but I am taking on challenge made here!
https://maptomanhood.substack.com/p/a-map-to-manhood
> Which means bringing back a cultural and legal method for men to defend their Honor without suffering 15 years in prison for "assault" when his honor is questioned.
Isn't this called a defamation lawsuit?
I'd argue that "blue states" such as California and New York are in general doing much better than red states, but fine, we'll do it your way. I propose Super Smash Bros. Melee at dawn. No items, Final Destination. Bring your dueling second and your controller. Loser publicly admits to being the poopyhead.
(Hey, I'm a gamer. How do you expect me to duel someone? 😆)
Ah yes, what men need is more violence!
No way, this is the exact opposite of what is needed. Chivalry was developed specifically to curb violence. Nobles were going to war with each other just for clout and it was wrecking society in the meantime. Bushido... I also can't imagine wanting to implement that! As with chivalry, it's not even for men throughout society but rather for a small warrior caste. And it's extremely maladaptive in modern warfare. If you've got 2 hours to spare, this is a great discussion on how Bushido attitudes affected WWII: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sarah-paine-japan
Sorry, but there's no retvrn worth doing here! There's *a lot* we can learn from historical maps to manhood, but men need something that is adaptive to our culture today. A truce on violence is the greatest gift we've been given by the Enlightenment and I would hate to give that up for a misguided notion of honor.
[writer of the review here]
Hear, hear! Well said. A return to violence is the absolute last thing modern men need; adding a bunch of dead fathers and role models to the list of boys' problems is a terrible idea. And violence between men rarely stays simply between men. Women and children usually end up in the cross-fire, and we rarely have the natural strength to fight back effectively. Not to mention the innocent men who often end up being hurt as well.
Testosterone may be linked to aggression, but that does *not* mean violence is the correct way to channel the aggression many young men experience. Channel it into sports. Channel it into learning self-defense. Channel it into speech and debate. Channel it into starting a business and "fighting" competitors. Channel it into political protest. Channel it into fighting your own instinctual desires for revenge.
But please, for the love of god, do not channel it into violence.
Doesn't this conflict with your desire expressed elsewhere for the map of manhood to include "protecting the weak" ?
Afterall, what do "the weak" have to be protected from if NOT violence or the threat of violence? That is, very specifically, what they need protection from otherwise why would specifically being "weak" make them succeptible to the threat?
The only effective way to counter violence or the threat of violence... is the threat of reciprocal violence.
When violence/threat of violence is on the table you have already cascaded down through the many layers of alternative conflict resolution civilisation offers and are at the base level. If you're here, there is no "higher" level that can be appealed to, you're dealing with someone who has rejected all of that to go with the "base layer of reality" already, the Ultima Ratio Regnum.
Here, if nowhere else, then surely violence is finally justified as non-toxic masculinity? If you want men to channel their aggression into safe outlets, and you want men to "protect the weak".... then surely you must accept channelling that aggression into the use of violence to defend those unable to defend themselves due to their "weakness".
Society already unofficially sanctions this.... even whilst this is officially still forbidden.
Whilst the school will still punish the kids who defend their weaker friends from bullying with violence..... the man who sticks up for the woman being hassled in the movies, and fights off the big muscley creep in the bar fight after warning him "Leave the lady alone", is the hero not the villain.
Perhaps one of the ways society can change to be accepting of maps to real masculinity is to be more accepting of this reality *de jure* as well as *de facto* or, at least *de ficitio".
Maybe part of moving society in a more positive masculinity direction is moving it away from "violence is never justified" to "there are some circumstances where violence is justfied, and men who resort to violence in those circumstances are to be supported in the real world and not just in fictional scenearios"
Honor cultures that conceive masculine (or feminine) honor as something that needs violent defense are anything but a human universal. The law codes you don't like aren't "feminine"; look at history and you'll see constraints on duelling and honor killing imposed in plenty of eras where women lacked any significant degree of influence on the lawmaking system. The limits on violent defense of honor were debated between men.
Move to Afghanistan today, and you'll find a lot more scope for defending your honor with fists, blade, or gun -- and even there, you'll also find men in government trying to limit your ability to resolve honor disputes with your neighbors using violence.
Caricature everywhere--of history, of men and women. The urge to control and limit social violence isn't driven by "den mothers" or "leftists"; it's way older and more widespread than that. Read Norbert Elias's "Civilizing Process" to get a different lens on the process than the narrow lens you're wielding now.
Reasserting a caricature doesn't make it true. One problem with imagining arguments as contests of honor to be won by some combo of brashness, insults, and punchups: you get bad at arguing.
Yeah, well every society til the present lib/fem/tot/whatever first world countries also had no treatment for cancer and a bunch of other godawful diseases that make people
die slowly, in anguish. And most babies didn’t make it to adulthood. And everybody had worms and head lice and smelled like smegma and rotting teeth.
Society (read: women) needs to realize that the positive male role models are going to be someone they *tolerate*, not someone they *like*.
Pre-coma Jordan Peterson was fine. You didn't have to like him, but you could tolerate him, and he was mostly about fixing men so they'd be better for the women in their lives.
Keep on vetoing the lobstermans and eventually you are left with the Tates.
> "Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results."
That's very silly.
Traditional gender roles are based on the pre-industrial necessity of division of labor by gender. As long as there's an economy wherein most jobs can be performed equally well by either gender and which also REQUIRES both genders to be employed in order for the economy to function, women will have equal rights.
Nobody sat up one day and decided, "hey, let's stop oppressing women and give them equal rights." The economy demanded it, that's all.
>Nobody sat up one day and decided, "hey, let's stop oppressing women and give them equal rights."
The death of God certainly contributed to such sentiments. As soon as the Bible stopped being taken seriously as the normative guide in elite circles, the glaring contradiction between Bronze Age views on gender relations and the liberal ethos swiftly got resolved in favor of the latter.
There's that, too, but I would argue that God was likewise killed by industrialization and technology. No need to pray for God to bless the harvest when you have pretty damn good control over the harvest with reliable tech like fertilizers and pesticides and genetically modifying a hardier harvest.
I agree that all of this is correlated, but I'd still say that it was Darwin who dealt God the killing blow.
That sounds very marxist (in the philosophical sense). I'm not an idealist and I agree that ideas cannot be the ultimate explanation for anything, but there is no structural force strong enough to not be swayed away from contingencies. In the West, industrialization went hand in hand with women's rights and generally individual liberation from traditional norms. In, say, Japan, it very much did not.
Sure, an industrial society, whether in the market or the command form, probably disrupts traditional patriarchy, simply because neither the market nor the central planner give a damn about what the oldest male in the family thinks is proper (even if, as Pomeranz showed for China, you can very well have efficient markets where the fundamental economic agent is the extended family or even the village, without losing much productivity. Many socialist regimes outside the USSR similarly coordinated traditional social units rather than individuals directly). But disrupting clans does not necessarily mean women's right: a husband can be abusive and despotic, and society broadly tolerant of it, even without the blessing of the patriarch. Again, Japan offers an handy example of a society shifting abruply toward nuclear families and superficially "modern" social structure without women being much better off for it.
Whatever was the cause for women's enfranchisement, and individual liberation in general, we should really not take it for granted and trust the Holy Ghost of historical dialetics to keep delivering it for us. History is littered with countexamples. Liberty is fought for and negotiated each generation. The state, the village, the faith and all the forces that chained individuals are always rearing their ugly head, and when people grow too complacent, or romanticize slavery a bit too much, they succeed.
"Fortunately, this state of affairs is highly temporary. It will be a 150-year-long blip in human history held up for thousands of years as an example: "that one time we tried giving women equal rights, and the inevitable results.""
I doubt Copernican will see this, but arguing from the future is just silly. We don't actually know what will happen. Claims about the future might be right, but they don't prove anything.
[writer of the review here]
I would actually disagree with this. I think it's true that some women who subscribe to some more extreme brands of feminism would balk at a lot of potential male role models. And I would argue that the potential for those more extreme feminists to start "cancel mobs" is probably one of the main reasons we've had less men step up as public role models for what a "healthy man" can look like.
But I think the average woman (myself included) finds it extremely attractive and admirable when a man has a healthy confidence in their masculinity and is eager to teach others to be positive, healthy influences on society.
(Note: I haven't read much of Jordan Peterson's work, so don't feel comfortable stating whether I would have supported/admired him pre-coma.)
So, yes, I think just about any male role model will trigger some of the more online and vocal feminists. But that certainly doesn't mean all women will dislike them.
I think average people don't pay much attention to this discussion. Mainstream attention is driven in no small part by feminists with extreme views, who drive media narratives that cause average people, with no real exposure, to hear a vague impression about some woman-hater named XYZ, and they think that's plausible and go about their day.
In general I think the gender-focused left is completely out to lunch on what women find attractive. What the average woman, face to face offline, will admit to being attractive to is already inappropriate to discuss in polite society as being what women are actually attracted to.
If you look, for example, at Richard Reeves, he makes a big deal out of how women really just want men to have a job or "not be a loser", instead of being specifically attracted to the idea of a man who makes a lot of money, but there really are a lot of women who specifically equate a man spending money on her, and earning more money he can spend on her, as a literal measurement of love, and even average women have expectations around buying meals, gifts, .etc.
Reeves and his colleague Galloway are deluded about what women want from men. If just having a job and being emotionally stable, however vague that is, were enough then the topics they keep harping on would never have picked up traction.
I mean, there are already lots of men doing this... E.g., male pastors, conservative thought leaders, Jordan Peterson, it's just that "Polite Society" i.e., elite liberal women i.e., people similar to you reject them.
There's a whole world out there of healthy masculinity. The problem is your culture's (i.e., silicon valley bubble / the people you date) lack of access to it. Not a worldwide absence :p
[writer of the review here]
I grew up conservative, and while there certainly were structured models of masculinity, I find myself balking at the idea of most of them being healthy in the 21st century.
Of course, I'm very biased in this regard--most men who followed those models aren't super friendly toward people like me (ie: opinionated and outspoken bisexual chick who's not fond of rigid monogamy.)
I also found the models too rigid and far too focused on authority and stoicism as necessary for manhood. (Broadcasting these traits seemed to be the focus, rather than proper channeling and handling of them.) The focus on authority and repression of emotion lent itself well to quiet, behind-the-scenes abuse, and there didn't seem to be alternate maps available for my more soft-spoken and sensitive male friends.
(That all being said--I will take the average pastor over Andrew Tate any day.)
Of course, there are plenty of exceptions; not every pastor/conservative thought leader is aggressively anti-LGBT, nor does every one insist that men must be authoritative stoics at all times. And there certainly are elements of these maps that still apply very well to modern life (eg: do hard work, be there to support your community, take responsibility, embrace challenges, etc.)
But I'm also eager for leftists to invest more time developing healthy, coherent maps for those who don't fit in with the right.
Why doesnt the right's path to manhood work for the left?
I believe the "left" (e.g., the left elite mainstream dogma) struggles with men mainly because it fundamentally doesn't like men. It has a number of deluded and false and sexist narratives that are incredibly damaging and hurtful towards men (e.g., believe all women is obviously a mad, harmful and sexist idea, as women can be abusers too).
If you are interested, look up some of this Scott's and the Quantum Computing Scott's early posts about their interactions with feminism.
To me, the problem isn't that the left lacks access to viable maps to manhood, it is that they actively supress and harm men. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not sure what putting out further maps or resources is going to do. It's treating the symptoms not the root cause, and really the movement needs a sea change.
Laying out peer-reviewed viable maps, then challenging leftists to either endorse at least one of them or admit to malicious intent, could be part of how such a change would be implemented.
If you don't know much of Peterson's work (aside from his media presence), and you are interested in the question of maleness in the modern day, I would highly recommend watching one of his university lecture series from before his fame.
If nothing else because his influence has shaped much of the present day terrain, and it's good to know what it's actually about, but the lecture series are also interesting in their own right.
Both Personality and Maps of Meaning are worthwhile listens depending on which topic you find more interesting.
Back in the day, those lectures were very useful for me in working on what Robert Kegan would would have classed stage 4 development. At the time my main mentor figure had been Alan Watts and for all he gave me, I was lacking guidance on how to integrate with society and accept rules and authority.
I really don't think it's "women" as much as it is "feminists", both men and women, and also, I don't think we can blame them.
For one or other reason, we seem to work under an "Opressed v Opressor" framework in terms of social change, and our expectations and demands are different for each side. There is misandry in the feminist movement, for all the "it's about men too", there is no such thing as a "MERF", nobody gets shunned from the movement if they dismiss plights of equality from men and you can rest easy that nobody is going to call you out if you argue that men in general are so horrible that you would rather be left with a bear.
This is by no means specific to feminism, any group which consistently pushes back against X will have people saying "Screw X".
It is then inevitable that when people come along arguing for the other side of the aisle, the same thing is going to happen, which in this case involves having the people who are generally considered on the opressor side calling out the people who are generally considered the opressed, which is of course considered untenable, it shifts the whole power balance, if you are the opressor surely you are not also the opressed.
In practice this means that although it's generally safe to bemoan men on the feminist side, the reverse is pushed back against, shoved into the margins. Nobody who actually cares about feminism or what feminists think stays in that place and all we have is, well, the rest. It's not that the manosphere rejects feminism and that draws men in, it's that nobody who doesn't reject feminism is *allowed* to draw men in to begin with.
I mean it's not as if it wasn't attempted. It didn't go well.
This was a wonderful read. Thank you for putting in time to write it
Incredibly minor point, but, is there any reason you selected a male voice to read an article by a woman? Any chance you can change that?
What do you mean "a male voice to read an article by a woman"? Is there a voice reading this article? In what sense?
Oh wow! On the substack app, most full length articles can be read out loud by AI generating text-to-voice. There's a male voice and a female voice. Which one is chosen by the writer.
More information on this page. https://on.substack.com/p/new-read-aloud-voices-quote-restacks
Sorry, I didn't mean to drag you into a whole feature you were in blissful ignorance of. I find the podcast-ification of these pieces very helpful.
I can't find a way to change this on a less-than-site-wide basis.
I want a goddam non-binary reader and I want it right now.
Changing the voice won't rerecord the old articles, so if you want a new article in a female voice, you can switch voices, publish the article, and switch back.
[writer of the review here]
Hearing my writing read in this voice had me in stitches. :') Thanks for the unintended comedy, Scott.
I think this hits the nail on the head. The left doesn't have a clear point at which they tell a man "you did a good job at being a man" and the right basically requires you to either be Christian or an asshole.
"The Left isn't clear but the Right is evil"
You don't live in the Bay Area, do you?
No, grew up in a tiny conservative town, went to an ultra-liberal university and now live in a moderate-left mid-sized city.
Also, wouldn't call needing to be Christian bad per se, just not for everybody (just to be clear)
"Or an asshole"
Yeah, I mean I think the alt-right manosphere does tend to lead men to be assholes. I am sure that there are some people on the right who fulfill the more traditional male role (provider, father, community pillar) without the adde Christianity, but I would say that the men who are doing that are ovewhelmingly Christian (which is definitely a sampling bias)
Also, I actually think that the left has made a massive mistake by becoming unclear (and often actively negative) on the topic; my time at college was not supportive towards becoming a whole person in that way, while simultaneously seeming ineffective at protecting women from predatory men. I don't think that the left being simply "unclear" about it puts them ahead of the right on this topic; I have a lot more respect for the compassionate Christian groups on helping lost young men figure their lives out.
The only reason the manosphere is on the Right is because the Left hates men. There's nothing inherent in the different movements within that category that's actually right-wing.
> simultaneously seeming ineffective at protecting women from predatory men
This is not an accident. You protect women by 1) Elevating protective men and 2) Teaching women not to make themselves vulnerable. The first is bad because men are bad, and the second is bad because it's "blaming the victim" and suggests that women have agency and responsibility.
There's a reason the "male feminist" is almost always a creep, if not outright a rapist, and that's because the only men who will embrace such a model are men who will exploit it.
I feel like you understand my position a bit more clearly now, so I'm glad of that.
I think there are a few other important steps that my college missed (having rules that say that professors can't sleep with grad students for one, actually taking students seriously when they say that their boss is pushing them into a sexual relationship, etc.) But I do agree that your two points are also good when correctly implemented (what cannot be made bad by poor implementation?)
If you take the sweeping and vague definitions the left typically uses for things like misogyny, or homophobia, but swap the groups out, it is pretty obvious that the left falls into the definition of misandry.
It isn't a "lack of clarity", so much as it is a straight-up adverse reaction to the masculine, and to male-associated things. Even the way that we tend to criticize the "manosphere" while not paying close attention to the bile from the "womanosphere" is pretty clear evidence of this. The manosphere isn't particularly alt-right, it is just that anything which suggests men might not be the cause of all their problems, and doesn't constantly supplicate to women's priorities and issues, immediately codes as right-wing.
If you go listen to the recent podcast from Richard Reeves, Jonathan Haidt, and Governor Newsom, they basically are cheering progressive reform for women, while simultaneously demanding the return of conservative gender roles for men.
[writer of the review here]
Thanks for taking the time to read my review. I'm glad it resonated with you!
This was a strong and thoughtful essay, but I'm always a bit baffled by how many people think that being lost, depressed, and miserable is a universal experience.
Maybe I'm wrong, but most people I know seem pretty ok? Maybe there's some stress or whatever, but for most people I know life is good.
Maybe you're surrounded by people who're mostly okay, but maybe you don't associate with the people around you in contexts that lead them to expose how not-okay they are
I think this is a Different Worlds issue. I have found that, for a number of reasons that are likely somewhat self-evident, whatever my current level of life dysfunction is, I tend to gravitate towards and find people who are in similar positions. Two of my best-adjusted friends come from my first year-and-a-bit of college, when I was at my most energized and hopeful so far; the most dysfunctional people I have been close to have been by and large people I met in times of personal crisis.
Had the same thought. There's probably huge selection bias here: people who are mostly fine are hanging out with other people who are mostly fine, and people who are dysfunctional are more likely to find themselves in dysfunctional communities.
Yes, this. Except a lot of the dysfunctional probably aren't in community at all, so solipsism also plays a role.
There's also a life stages thing going on here. Being in your 20s, adapting to adult life, is disorienting for a lot of people. Probably goes double for people in magnet cities like SF that are likely to have moved away from friends and family.
But I was thinking of the fact that F3 (my workout group) is my most frequent point of socialization with other men. Working out hard outdoors at 0530 multiple times per week has to be an intense selection factor against depression and dysfunction.
> Working out hard outdoors at 0530 multiple times per week has to be an intense selection factor against depression and dysfunction.
I agree but it can also select for things like addiction, it's just that working out is a beneficial outlet for that particular dysfunction. Some people manage their flaws (perceived or real) and some people wallow in them.
Not to mention that an injury (or just changing up your workout regimen) means you risk losing your friend group.
Haha I'd have thought the opposite: there *must* be something wrong with you to be up at 5:30.
Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.
Dysfunctional people in more functional communities either screw up and get pushed out, or know it and hide it.
Or successfully tap community resources and become less dysfunctional.
Lol. Lmao, even. Like they can get them even if they exist.
...you did specify *functional* communities, no?
Functional communities have resources for functional people. Individuals within them might have resources for dysfunctional people, but the community will almost never have any means of connecting those resources to anyone who needs them. If appropriately-useful resources even exist to be connected to, which is *slightly* better than chance.
I don't know about depressed and miserable, but most people have some problem in their life which prevents them from self-actualising. Depending on the person it can eat them up inside.
The title is "Men in the Bay" and the author has several paragraphs of preface saying this reflects the sort of men who live in the bay, #notallmen. I'd venture to say this sample aren't all men in the Bay, either, just set of men who find enough mutual attraction with the author to end up on a date with her, and of those, probably just a subset who are recognizable as a "type".
I don't know, found myself instinctively trying to put myself into one of the boxes, but I'm a married man and not in the bay, and grew up conservative, so it's probably, as they say, not for me.
And also specifically men who are dating, i.e. single, in their 30s. That filter is definitely picking up more people who aren't doing well compared to the average.
It's most men in the Bay area. Can't imagine a red blooded man choosing to live in that wretched place. Absolutely disgusting; a hive city of locusts.
I do think it’s very well observed. I can see where my issues would probably line up if I were in this context.
I think there's a pretty basic unifying factor about all these guys; they're still on the dating market. I know a lot of guys who I think are doing great, in a variety of different ways, but pretty much uniformly all the "doing great" guys are married. The handful of dudes I know who are still single (I'm around 40, as are most of my friends)...you can generally identify why that's the case, and these buckets are broad enough that most will fall into one.
Dating at, say, 22 would probably capture a very different population of men than dating at 35, since the 22 year olds who you'd be most excited to date generally aren't gonna still be dating a decade plus later.
I should add, though, that I don't think this invalidates this as an interesting set of observations. "What's up with the men who aren't doing great" is an important question in itself, it's just a different question than "what's up with all men".
I was going to say something very similar but you beat me to it.
>Dating at, say, 22 would probably capture a very different population of men than dating at 35, since the 22 year olds who you'd be most excited to date generally aren't gonna still be dating a decade plus later.
There are a couple other factors here. One is that at 22, you're likely to be fairly immature yourself in such a way that your partners' immaturity is less likely to bother you or to be readily apparent as the root cause when it does lead to problems. Being at least somewhat directionless and immature when you're in your early 20s is so commonplace as to be unremarkable.
Another factor is that people vary in how much and how quickly they grow out of youthful immaturity, and that correlates with finding a healthy relationship in a synergistic way. Being in a healthy relationship anchors you and helps you grow, while people who are more mature tend to be at least somewhat better at finding good partners and forming and sustaining healthy relationships..
> pretty much uniformly all the "doing great" guys are married
I would guess that having children also plays a role. If men lack purpose, direction, hope for the future, etc - having children helps with all that.
It seems like "dating" just sucks. "Doing great" means getting married so you can get the hell out of dating. Being single sucks because you're alone and isolated.
The weird thing is it doesn't have to be that way. There used to be a bachelor/playboy lifestyle that was seen as highly cool and sophisticated. But that sort of lifestyle requirese the existance of an equal number of women willing to play along, and it seems like that's just not the case anymore. Women are dating to look for marriage, *not* for casual fun. It feels like family and dating norms have become much more conservative now than they were in the last 50 years, and that's very strange.
Disagree. I think the conventional wisdom that norms were more conservative 50 years ago is correct, and the "bachelor/playboy lifestyle" that people tell stories about was the province of a small minority.
She's dated a lot more men than you have.
Yeah if a male friend said most of this stuff to me I'd tell them that their actual problem wasn't with dating and gender but needing antidepressants. Not in a dismissive way, but a lot of this reads like the sort of thing I thought when I was younger and depressed. And I just assumed was normal. But it really isn't.
So definitely some people have chemical imbalances that antidepressants help with, but--I think a lot of people have social problems where antidepressants serve a role much more like "turning off the check engine light"
If someone feels lost because they don't know who they are and what they want, because they don't have real friendships and haven't done real exploration... how the hell is an antidepressant supposed to fix that? And how is you saying "you should get an antidepressant" going to _start_ the conversation wherein you become actually friends, rather than ending the conversation and proving to them that you're just an acquaintance?
> And how is you saying "you should get an antidepressant" going to _start_ the conversation wherein you become actually friends, rather than ending the conversation and proving to them that you're just an acquaintance?
It was fairly obvious from his comment that he was relating what he would say to a close friend. Making unsolicited psych med recommendations to a mere acquaintance would be inappropriate.
I think you missed my point--I think if I opened up to someone I thought was a friend about my struggles, and they responded with "yeah you've misdiagnosed your problem and you need antidepressants", my reaction would be "oh, I thought this person was my friend and they aren't."
If they responded with "I felt that way and then antidepressants turned things around for me"--ok! At least they're opening up about themselves and encouraging me to ask whether or not our situations are similar.
That is--your relationships with other people are determined in part by the actions you take towards them. It's easy to damage your friendships with other people by letting them down!
I mean, canceling your friend because they suggested you try an antidepressant seems a bit excessive. My friends and I are always tossing around drug/medication tips of all sorts, it’s been a very helpful source of info for me. The armchair diagnosis aspect would absolutely set me off though, and I have ended friendships over that.
Btw, everyone will let you down eventually, you might need to recalibrate your expectations of people. Something I learned in therapy, ironically.
Bluntly, antidepressants are a crutch but they are not a substitute for actual connection. And saying you aren’t dismissive does not change the fact that you are in fact being dismissive
I think people compartmentalize well. I found "THE MAN WHO OPTS OUT" to describe my experience eerily well (at least until a few years ago).
I also wouldn't have described myself as depressed or anything. I was resigned to being forever-alone, but also felt like I would still have a fulfilling life given that. I just assumed I would be like a monk or a priest or something, and those people seemed fulfilled to me.
I ended up solving the issue by becoming gay and then lucking into an incredible partner who was patient enough to help me build up my self-confidence, which worked pretty well for me (we're getting married next year!)
In retrospect, looking back on your life so far, would you say that you became gay, or that you were already gay, and just took a while to recognize it? Was that just a quirk of language, or does it specifically reflect how you see yourself as having developed?
Maybe always had the potential? But I never felt like I was “in the closet”, and I have been described by friends as “the straightest gay person they know”
And to be clear, I’m bi, so I *was* attracted to women, I just didn’t realize I was attracted to men as well until later
That makes sense. I've heard many people argue very decisively that nobody becomes gay after their sexuality has already developed; your sexuality is what it is, and it's simply up to you to explore and discover it. But I'm not convinced that people's sexualities consistently develop in the same ways, or that we really understand sexuality on the whole well enough to make such decisive statements in the first place.
[writer of the review here]
I can personally testify that sexuality isn't nearly so neat as some people argue. I think a lot of people experience it clearly from an early age, but it's much more complex for many. Personally, I'm bisexual when off birth control, mostly straight when on birth control, and largely lesbian when I have unbalanced, high estrogen.
I think the narrative of "you are born with a built-in sexuality that never changes" was very helpful and needed when trying to ban conversion therapy. But as Western society leaves behind outdated homophobic ideas, I hope we'll get more nuanced conversations and explorations of sexuality. It's such a fascinating subject!
That's interesting, I don't think I've ever heard from someone who says their sexuality fluctuates so much their hormone levels like that.
I've always been able to tell I liked and was attracted to girls from early childhood, and didn't share that attraction to boys, but I experimented with trying to condition myself into bisexuality in my teens (I thought it would increase my dating pool, and I didn't think anyone I'd want to be in a relationship with would judge me for it.) It didn't work at all, but my hormone levels weren't a lever I had access to, and I wonder if I'd observe changes in my preferences if I were able to manipulate those, or observe myself through major fluctuations.
I've suspected for a long time though that sexuality couldn't be set in stone from birth though, or at least not for every individual, because if that were the case, we'd most likely see identical twins, who share the same genes and uterine environment, always having the same sexuality, and while they're correlated way above chance, that's still a long way from being the case.
Rather than a push to ban conversion camps, which I don't remember being much in the news at the time, I always saw the insistence that your sexuality was fixed and you couldn't change it as having been part of an effort to push back on religious people who thought that various social influences were "turning kids gay."
I don't think anyone knows how to do that on purpose, but I'm agnostic on whether the number of openly queer people in our society seems to be rising because it's become more recognized and acceptable to be out, or if something in our society is actually increasing the prevalence, because it seems like there must be *some* levers apart from just genetics.
Very similar experience here, except instead of getting married I broke up and slipped back into opting out.
zamn
[writer of the review here]
This has been my experience as well: a lot of these men compartmentalize very well (especially in the "Opt Out" group), and would describe themselves as stable and not necessarily depressed. But when you encourage them to examine their emotions, they'll often express a sense of disconnection from society and resigned despair at the idea of being alone.
Also--huge congrats to you on finding your way out from that category. It's a tough journey, and I admire you for forging a new, happier path. I wish you and your partner many wonderful years together. :)
I'm a woman who "became gay", too, at 30. I'm now married to a woman. Being queer provided me the life I always wanted but struggled to find within the confines of heterosexuality, and it gave me the community that I craved. I'm glad you found that, too.
If you're nonmonog, you might be surprised at how your dating pool and ability to date women has changed. I'm friends/lovers with a lot of queer men in your position, and they are surprised at how dating women is different once they are partnered with men. It narrows your dating pool, which ends up being a boon. I find this interesting because a lot of hetero men struggling with dating are loathe to limit their dating pool, but I think narrowing it to women (or people) explicitly interested in your peculiarities is a counterintuitive successful strategy.
I also think queerness has given me confidence in my nonconformity, which makes me more attractive across the board.
Surely this is because your sample is your friends (who are people you selected for being mostly OK) and because her sample is from random guys in the dating pool (who are probably not).
I'd be fascinated to know the percentage of people who think most of their are friends are OK vs most are not okay. for me it's "not okay"; my impression is almost everyone in society is doing really badly at much higher rates than when I was younger.
Good question for the next ACX survey, maybe, although I don't want to wait that long.
I think my friends are doing okay but also have mental health disorders, like I'm somehow selecting for 60th percentile mental health very consistently.
Feels like there's some law that says you and all your friends have to be around the same mental health percentile in equilibrium
I mean, it's not always obvious what someone's going through on the inside. It seems quite common for people to be completely blindsided when a loved one commits suicide, for example.
My sense (tbf from reading articles like this one) that it is not true that most people are ok among the extremely specific slice of people constituting “single men in SF with good jobs, prosocial politics, and very high education.”
I think there could be a lot of reasons for this discrepancy.
- You could lack insight into the people around you. They might seem happy when you interact with them, despite having a deep-seated lack of comfort or fulfillment in their life. Notice that many of these archetypes might project outward happiness in social situations.
- You could meet mostly people who are in relationships due to your social circle. These issues probably apply most to single people (and plausibly single people are struggling more with there lives, if in because struggling people are less likely to get into relationships).
- A lot of these issues lead to social isolation/awkwardness, making it less likely you'll meet people like this.
- You might be older than the author or I (I am 26).
On the first point, as someone who this essay resonated a lot with, I think I don't know many people well enough to identify whether they are going through similar issues. Perhaps I know 10 people well enough. I feel like you have to have a fairly personal conversation or else a lot of experience with someone to get a sense for how they're actually doing.
Of the other men I know well enough to judge, most of the ones in relationships seem pretty happy with their lives, and the single ones are mostly dealing with issues like this (though for many it doesn't dominate to the point where they are miserable).
No I’d say lost depressed and miserable is a pretty good description for your average American.
Isn’t it a mistake to see all this and continue thinking these men need help “becoming a man”? They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
I know women who fell into each one of those archetypes (with a pseudo-feminist, less violent but still sexist gender flipped version substituting for manosphere). This and the “male loneliness crisis” seems to me like the symptoms of an atomised society where community ties are no longer solid, and while perhaps men are a more affected to a certain degree (especially in America perhaps), the causes are not gender specific at all.
I think it makes sense to frame it like that because, at least as the author has experienced it, men at large are struggling to find themselves and occupy a niche that feels right for them I'm society, in a way that's different from what women are experiencing.
If you build a framework for "how to become a person," and find that it's failing half your population, or failing both halves of your population in distinctly different ways, then you'd probably be better off separating out different frameworks.
I don’t see how there’s much about being a man that needs male specific advice with regards to finding fulfilment and happiness. Having deep friendships and a sense of community, hobbies, a well rounded personality, having a job you like, avoiding burn-out, not falling for online communities that preys on your identity (there’s equivalents of the manosphere for being a woman, Asian, gay, trans, white, conservative, anything you can imagine, teaching you to feel angry, victimised and powerless), being able to identify and talk about your feelings. Those are all universal things.
The later seems weirdly contentious but I think men’s unwillingness to talk in depth to their friends about their emotions is largely social. If you look at the historical record, deep emotions, physical affection between friends, strong emotional ties, etc were perfectly normal to have between men. Even in this article, some of the men jumped at the chance to trauma dump and treat their date as a therapist precisely because they were denied that due to social norms.
I agree that men's reservations about talking in-depth with their friends about their emotions is social and historically contingent, but I don't think that makes it less a distinct men's issue. In our modern context, our social environment is one where few men feel like they have appropriate outlets to share their emotional issues, and even if that's not inherent to the experience of being a man throughout history, it manifests for men today in a way that's distinct from what women ordinarily experience in present day society.
Sure, but the solution to that isn’t to bring back rites of passage and a path to manhood, but to free men of stifling gender roles and expectations that make little sense in today’s world, and let them have nurturing male *and* female role models. I’m not blaming individual men for this; this will take a social effort from all genders.
I think the experience of navigating life while being full of testosterone is different enough that you need a path that addresses manhood. It's procrustean to look for a one-size-fits-all solution.
I don't know what the solution is. Scott had an essay, years and years back, where he discussed differences in how strongly people associate with their gender, how much it's important to them as a facet of how they interact with reality, versus how much it feels like an incidental fact about themselves. I think I'm a fair ways towards the side of feeling like my gender is something incidental to myself, and not core to my identity, although I'm not at the far extreme for that. Some people's gender identity seems to matter less to them than mine does, but to a lot of people, it seems to matter much more, and compared to when I was younger, I'd say I'm now more open to the idea that a healthy and stable society might be one which features distinct gender roles and differing expectations around them.
Associating with your sex is one thing; being under influence of sexual hormones is another. I take the fact that I am a man as incidental; nonetheless it is a channel through which the nature has influenced some of my traits, so when the society declares those traits to be evil, that puts me in a conflict with the society, even if otherwise I wouldn't care about being a man at all.
For example, schools should be less about sitting all the time quietly and obediently, and should offer other ways of learning, even ones that include jumping around and yelling. There is nothing about "2+2=4" that requires you to be sitting when you learn it.
So I think that an ideal solution would involve the following:
* different options for different people
* everyone can choose their option freely -- if a boy chooses the option designed for girls, or a girl chooses the option designed for boys, it is okay
* but there should be at least one option designed with stereotypical boys in mind, at least one option designed with stereotypical girls in mind, and maybe a few more other options
I want pushback on this idea because frankly, it's one of the most depressing ones I can't quite shake off.
It seems to me that women were able to somewhat move on from their fixated place regarding gender roles because in the end, society gives value to women themselves. Even if a woman takes up carpentry, wears jeans rather than pants and likes sports, she still holds value as a woman. Women in stereotypically male contexts even hold certain special attractive.
It does not seem to me that men find themselves in the same spot regarding gender. A man that drops all idea of traditional masculinity is generally categorized as a weirdo and will face problems regarding attractiveness compared to one that simply adopts traditional gender roles.
There is value to be found to having *extra*, traditionally femenine qualities, but those are always added value over a traditionally masculine base.
Thank you for pointing this out. As a "non-traditionally masculine" man, this is been my experience, for as long as I've been aware of Boys and Girls. I have always preferred the company of women, and have many close female friends, who value those non-traditional traits and abilities, but they aren't *attracted* to them, thus me, sexually.
I've never opted out, and have always thought I've fallen into the Whole Person category, but it was a wrench a few years ago when my wife, many years and a child into our relationship, confessed to me exactly the above. We're working on it, with the help of a lovely and (slowly) effective therapist, but the idea that a heterosexual woman (in the Bay Area, no less!) might naturally prefer my flavor of masculinity seems foreign to me. I never met anyone like that, and not for lack of trying.
Well said.
"Freeing" a snail from its traditional shell isn't doing it a favor.
I trauma dump my emotional issues on the Internet. Sometimes it even helps!
I mentioned this in another comment, but you are missing the fact that "father" and "mother" are distinct social roles.
There are roles that are undifferentiated by sex, such as "employee", "taxpayer", or "tenured professor". There are also roles that can be undifferentiated, but can also have some differentiation by sex or traditional gender roles. For example, obstetricians or novelists. While many of the things that make a good obstetrician are not specific to ones gender, there will be differences in how you interact with many of your patients if you are a man or a woman. Similarly, many of the things that make a great novelist are common, but there are differences between how Hemingway and Jane Austin are great novelists that are not unrelated to their genders.
While there are commonalities in the prerequisites for becoming a good father and becoming a good mother, there are many important differences. Some of these differences will be unique to the individual, but others will be patterns or common to the role of father.
I think that one of the biggest differences in these is that to be a good father, you have to learn how to have a good relationship with your wife, who is a woman, as a man. (And for a mother, you have to learn how to have a good relationship with your husband, who is a man, as a women.)
I don't think that my wife would appreciate it if I treated her "like one of the boys". She doesn't particularly like horsing around, playing video games, competing, or things like that. Similarly, the homies would not appreciate being swept of their feet and being given a gentle kiss on the forehead.
General agreement except that you can, in fact, kiss the homies goodnight (as a bit)
ok but that's only after I tuck the homies into bed and read them a bedtime story
I know some people who like to fall asleep to podcasts, so "read [the homies] a bedtime story" might not be as ridiculous as it sounds...
The comment, though, like the article, is about young men and dating.
As a man in his 70’s, I see nothing new to the challenges faced by young men today. Growing up was always a challenge. Dating has always been hard. Gender expectations were stupid then and dumber now.
The “plight of men” was and is the plight of all people: to find their way in a rapidly changing world that is dysfunctional in part because traditional rules and roles don’t map into the realities of living in the present day. The Stoics knew this.
For at least 25 or 30 years, I have been reading article bemoaning how men’s problems are being ignored while women have been supported. This is such bullshit. All this gender-focused, arm-chair pop psychology helps no one. When in my teens and 20’s, no one thought much about gender — everyone was trying to figure life out and were willing to speak about it without dividing according to gender, sexuality, etc.
Want to help young men? Stop telling them they are being ignored, that no one cares about them and that women are the enemy. Instead, encourage them to volunteer in service to whatever cause interests them, to explore spiritual paths, to work hard and to be open and honest. No other life lessons are necessary if these are encouraged.
Would you say the same to women about their struggles? My bet is that you would not and that you can safely be ignored.
I call them as I see them. If you don’t see that women’s lived experiences are different from that of men, there’s no point in talking. Men and boys have challenges today but they are different than those of women. I hope some day we are just individuals first and our problems our own.
The difficulty is, "wants to talk about their emotions" is not a universal characteristic, it's a trait that's distributed within the population. I say this as someone who's out on the other tail, and finds the extent to which people constantly prattle about emotions these days hard to tolerate (as in the post-90s UK, far less extreme than the US). Probably more women are on the other side of the curve than men.
> I don’t see how there’s much about being a man that needs male specific advice
I'm not personally familiar with how to diagnose and treat, e.g., internal bleeding, so when it might need to be done, I look for a specialist who does see.
As a man, I find it very weird! I identify with many of the questions about meaning and so on that her exemplars are dealing with, though I think I am mostly happy with my answers, and I do think the lack of community is a huge issue in our society. But as you say, there's nothing particularly male about any of it. I don't deny there are some sex differences in people's experience of our society, but when I think about my role in society my gender is like the tenth most important thing?
Because the last 10,000 years of human history might have more educational value than a self-absorbed academic discipline? Why are you assuming that men and women are the same?
Probably more like 60 million years. We've been evolving from proto-mammals for at least this long. And since we're a social species, it's a fool's errand to try to differentiate between Nature and Nurture. For us, it's exactly the same.
>They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
As far as I can tell, backlash against the trans movement.
Low effort and incorrect comment. MtF and FtM trans people reinforce gender roles and their differentiation. If you have ever seen FtM people post-transition, you would clearly see that they are deliberately working to learn how to _be a man_, not to "be a person".
If there was no purpose in "learning to be a man" or "learning to be a woman", then _why the fuck would anyone transition in the first place? (excepting nonbinary folks)_
Just think about it for a second. What are trans people transitioning from and transitioning to? Why the fuck do trans people talk about "second puberty" post-transition, and the awkwardness of learning to inhabit the new social role of their adopted gender?
You sound like a markov model who just spits out meaningless platitude and copy-pasted talking points when you pattern match things as "gender-related wrongthing".
Uh-huh.
And do you think this author would say that trans women are innately biologically built to give birth and raise children? The same as they say of 'women' in general?
Because if you do think that's what they would say, I have a bridge to sell you.
Trust me, I am well-versed and carefully-considered on the relationship between the trans movement and gender ideology, including the role of non-binary trans people which you conveniently neglect to mention. I'll link to my wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview if you want.
But what you're missing is that the *reality* of the relationship between trans people and gender ideology has very little to do with the right-wing *backlash* to trans people.
The right just sees the acceptance of trans people as an assault on traditional gender roles, and responds by reifying and reasserting those traditional strictures.
If they're smart like this author, they do that with a brush of Evo Psych as an 'academic' justification.
>And do you think this author would say that trans women are innately biologically built to give birth and raise children? The same as they say of 'women' in general?
I don't know what the author would say. I don't think that MtF trans women are biologically built to give birth, though. I'm not sure how one could think this, given that MtF trans women don't have a uterus or eggs. I do think that there are probably trans women who could raise children in a relationship that is at least somewhat similar to a traditional monogamous relationship. The relationship would have some differences given the lack of birthing, but could still be substantially similar, especially if the trans woman was inhabiting the social role of a woman and was partnered with someone inhabiting the social role of a man.
> Trust me, I am well-versed and carefully-considered on the relationship between the trans movement and gender ideology, including the role of non-binary trans people which you conveniently neglect to mention. I'll link to my wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview if you want.
As I see it, your made the following comment on a post about the experience of dating men in the bay area:
> >They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
> As far as I can tell, backlash against the trans movement.
The comment that you were responding to said:
> Isn’t it a mistake to see all this and continue thinking these men need help “becoming a man”? They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
As far as I can tell, you were saying that the only reason to frame this article in terms of manhood, instead of framing it in terms of becoming a better person, is because of backlash against the trans movement. I explained why I don't think that backlash against the trans movement explains this framing, and why framing an article about dating men in terms of manhood _actually makes more sense than framing it in terms of being a better gender-neutral person_. I don't think linking a "wall-of-text explainer from r/changemyview" would help clarify your original comment, unless it happens to explain why a (presumably) cis-gendered woman's experience dating heterosexual men is actually deeply related to "the trans movement".
> But what you're missing is that the *reality* of the relationship between trans people and gender ideology has very little to do with the right-wing *backlash* to trans people.
> The right just sees the acceptance of trans people as an assault on traditional gender roles, and responds by reifying and reasserting those traditional strictures.
This is an article (presumably) by a cis woman about dating cis heterosexual men. I don't think I'm missing the point, I think you're trying to make this article about your favorite culture war topic which is only very tenuously related to the article itself.
The only relationship I can see is that you think that "traditional gender roles" are bad or something, and think that society would be better if we didn't have them, or something. You haven't actually said this, but this is the only somewhat relevant connection I can see you implying. If you do actually believe something like that and are trying to make some point about that, I think you should explain that more clearly.
I'd ask that you make your comment substantially related to the article (which I think is primarily about postive male role models, the process of becoming a man in modern society, and the relationship of this to heterosexual dating.)
See my response to Victor Thorne, covers the same topics.
> And do you think this author would say that trans women are innately biologically built to give birth and raise children? The same as they say of 'women' in general?
Not wanting to put words in the author's mouth, but my guess is the author would say that this is an essay of broad generalisations, and transsexuals are a rare edge case not to be worried about too much in this context.
If so, it's a very wrongheaded way to backlash. Very few people are more aware of the significance of gender to identity than trans men and trans women.
Yes, but they are also foremost in recognizing gender roles as social constructs and gender expression as performative.
Which is what the right rejects, and is why they bring up discredited evo psych platitudes to justify their claims of biological gender essentialism.
I am trans and can promise you that discussion of being a well-adjusted man or woman specifically has very little to do with anti-trans backlash. Well, unless all my close friends and my fiancee secretly harbor some sort of deep-seated ideological distaste towards me, but I really doubt that. I am paranoid enough that I would be very unlikely to miss any such distaste, and I have yet to find any at all in them, who very often discuss such topics.
This is also a very strange opinion because these discussions have been going on since long before the vast majority of people had ever heard of anything trans-related. There's a certain brand of influencer now that will use trans people as a sort of diabolical antithesis to everything a man or woman should be, but those certainly aren't the only people talking about this very real and serious problem.
We're not talking about the discussion of being a well-adjusted man or woman, we're talking about the particular language of biological essentialism and evolutionary psychology used throughout this article.
It's true that those arguments go back further than the trans movement, people on the right have been using some version of them to fight feminism for decades.
But 10 years ago, those arguments and that language would have been very unpopular in a largely academic/intellectual space like this one. The pan-adaptationsist 'just-so-story' version of evolutionary psychology on display in this article had been widely debunked among the intelligentsia, replaced with much more nuanced accounts that considered dynamic evolutionary systems. Biological gender essentialism was seen as one small part of the total picture of gender expression and cultural gender roles, with lots of individual variation and lots of filtering through culture; someone trying to make the broad and extreme claims about 'how men are built' that pervade this article would not be taken seriously.
Why did the audience at 'smart' blogs like this abandon those nuanced and informed views, and start applauding this simplistic and anachronistic rhetoric of 'men are built to be warriors, women and built to birth and raise children, and trying to do anything else will make them miserable'?
Because this space has slid towards anti-woke and towards the right, and accepted arguments-as-soldiers so long as they oppose 'woke ideology.'
On the topic of gender roles and biological gender essentialism, the trans movement has been the primary motivating target of that backlash.
I'm not saying that this article is itself a specific attack on trans people. I'm saying that if people in this space didn't identify as largely anti-woke, and if they didn't identify the trans movement as a 'woke ideology' and spend years arranging arguments against it, the essentialist language used throughout this article would get laughed out of the room instead of widely embraced.
It might be just as easy to say (and in fact, those who tend towards more biological essentialism usually do say) that ten years ago we had dramatically overcorrected following the realization that not everything was determined by sex, to the idea that almost nothing was.
Also, even if you accept that gender roles are entirely socially constructed and have no biological basis, there is a reason to distinguish between the effects of society on those who are expected to occupy the male role and those who are expected to occupy the female role, and a large part of this post had much more to do with society than biology. I agree that the vagueness/lack of positive examples in social expectations for men and the distrust often directed towards them are often bigger problems than the expected role for men being overly feminized, but I do think that expecting everybody regardless of gender and personality to act like a stereotypical woman is a major problem in progressive circles. If you don't buy that it's an issue for men, consider some other cases. Attraction to women being considered as predatory hurts anyone who is attracted to women, and in fact some lesbians have talked about similar feelings of sexual shame to those which straight men immersed in social justice culture often have. The progressive expectation that everyone will always be empathetic, always say the right things, and never show anger or frustration towards others (unless it is righteous anger directed at bigotry) hurts anyone who struggles with anger or with social cues; autistic people as well as neurotypical men often report being bothered by this. I personally have struggled with both of these expectations in ways that are downstream of social justice culture, despite having been born female.
And in my experience of talking about gender differences in a more socially progressive group, I would expect these generalizations about men and women to include more caveats about these traits occurring on average and within-group variation being greater than between-group variation, not to be totally absent.
I think that framing this as "how to become a person" misses some of the important differences between the social role of man and women.
One way to view "becoming a man" and "becoming a woman" is as "becoming a father" and "becoming a mother" (in the context of a stable monogamous heterosexual relationship). If you are a person and want to pair-bond and raise children in a stable heterosexual relationship, you have to inhabit either the role of man/father or woman/mother, and most people only realistically have the potential to inhabit one of these roles given their biological sex.
In her discussion of "the man who opts out", the author clearly describes men who successfully become a person (in the sense that they have friends, do well in the workplace, etc.) but who struggle to become a man/father. The role of "friend" and "employee" are roles that can be relatively sexless and undifferentiated. People can learn to perform these roles very competently and still fail to learn how to be a man/father. While I think you are right that atomization and other problems impact people of all sexes, I think there are distinct impacts and challenges that they pose for biological men trying to become men/fathers and on biological women trying to become women/mothers.
One thing that I think that the author misses is that there are different end-states that can be characterized as "becoming a man". I think that the ideal that she is gesturing towards is that of becoming a father in a pair-bonded long-term stable heterosexual relationship in which children are raised.
Historically, one could also "become a man" by becoming a marauding warrior. This was a somewhat successful strategy at the level of culture for a number of cultures, though I think there's a decent argument that it lost out at the cultural level to the monogamous pair-bonded father model because it is relatively incompatible with modernity and is less capable of sustaining technological production. (The traditional Comanche culture/society could not sustain itself against artillery and rifles. Warlordism still exists in e.g. South Sudan, but there is a reason that these places are not military peers of the great powers.)
Humans are a gendered species. Every human society has sex roles, and they all align with the innate psychological differences between men and women.
Trying to teach broken men to become a 'better person' is going to end up with advice that is too generic to be meaningful. Particularly in the realm of romance. If you want to help a guy end up happily married, then you need to give him advice on dating/life as a man, because the things he is going to have to do and be on the dating market are male-specific. For example, a woman looking for love doesn't need to learn how to ask a guy out on a date, but a man looking for love absolutely does.
My point was that very little of that “brokenness” in this article had to do directly with them being men. Moving to a new city and losing all your old friends, having only superficial friendships, being unfulfilled by a boring if lucrative job, not knowing what you want to do in life… what advice would you give a man that wouldn’t also apply to a woman?
Sure, heterosexual dating has social norms and expectations, but anyone who’s experimented with dating the same sex can recognise how arbitrary and stifling they can be, and how you’re so better off moving on from the framework of “I am the man, so I do X, you are the woman, so you do Y”. Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness. Fathers should be nurturing, warm and emotionally supportive, mothers should teach skills and promote strength and independence.
More to the point, raising your kids differently because of their sex is probably what leads to many kind of neuroses. I know families where only the girls are expected to clean and cook and take care of themselves, and then they wonder why the boys are slovenly manchildren who look to their girlfriends to fulfil the role their mother did.
You should teach your daughters how to change a tire and stand up for themselves, and your sons to clean and talk about their feelings. If they have preferences, that’s absolutely fine, but they should never think that they are forced on a specific path because of their sex , especially from their parents, because sooo much societal message will be working against them.
A+ excellent comment
> Moving to a new city and losing all your old friends, having only superficial friendships, being unfulfilled by a boring if lucrative job, not knowing what you want to do in life… what advice would you give a man that wouldn’t also apply to a woman?
Men take more risk on average and end up in these situations more.
> Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness
Trying to fight tens of thousands of years of sex-differentiated evolutionary-selected preferences won't get you anywhere but misery and unhappiness for the majority of people.
Teach your son how to cook and clean. Teach your daughter how to change a tire or to 3d print if she shows interest in it. But if you're a man, tell your son what standards life and society expects from a man. Society expects a man to be sure of himself, to provide, to always be in control of his emotions.
While those are good traits to have for both sexes, there's (almost) no compromising on those as a man, while a woman who's a housewife, who's a bit shy and hesitant and indecisive, who's frequently emotional - that's socially acceptable. Teach your son that as a man, he should try to never compromise on these.
Is this an outrageous double standard? Is it unfair? It's unhealthy? Not more unfair than it being women who bear children and the risks and burden of childbirth.
> But if you're a man, tell your son what standards life and society expects from a man. Society expects a man to be sure of himself, to provide, to always be in control of his emotions.
Who is society? His close friends? His coworkers? His partner?
I don’t have kids yet, but I wouldn’t want my son to feel like he has to put on a stoic mask for everyone all the time. I wouldn’t want him to grow up with people who preach those same gender roles, and to repeat that kind of stuff.
And it’s absolutely not true anyway, I know a decent number of men on benefits, some where their girlfriend is the primary breadwinner, and women who date emotionally unstable men.
> Who is society? His close friends? His coworkers? His partner?
Yes.
> I don’t have kids yet, but I wouldn’t want my son to feel like he has to put on a stoic mask for everyone all the time
Nothing about what I said requires a stoic mask. But it does require you to be able project confidence in the face of uncertainty, to be able to be decisive, and to be able to lead and reassure. It does require that you master your emotions.
Being a mother is a full-time job. Being a husband and a father is too.
> I know a decent number of men on benefits, some where their girlfriend is the primary breadwinner, and women who date emotionally unstable men.
Exceptions always exist, and those aren't even particularly good exceptions to aspire towards. Do you want your son to be like those emotionally unstable, unemployed men? Do you want your son to be unable to provide for himself and to be dependent on others?
In any case, being a provider doesn't require that you be the primary breadwinner, or to even hold a particularly high paying job. It does, however, require that you are capable of adding value to society, to create or do something that people needs doing.
Are the exceptions *respected* men, though? Even if they're not partnered?
This is a great comment and I agree with almost all of it. Society is much stricter in response to male failures and it doesn't serve a boy well to not equip him to succeed in masculinity as you've very aptly defined it here.
That said, technology has changed our fundamental evolutionary environment so much that it also does a disservice to a boy not to equip him for this new world. Women don't need men for provision nearly as much as they used to, and teaching a boy how to provide emotional support and be emotionally open is part of our species' continued evolution; they literally are less likely to reproduce otherwise.
I agree, providing emotional support is a large part of the value men bring to a relationship.
However, I think that the advice to be emotionally open is well-intentioned but misleading. The emotional support in a heterosexual relationship needs not be completely one-sided, but it is heavily weighted towards the man providing emotional support for the woman, and not the other way around.
This means that while you can be emotionally honest, as a man you should almost never be using your partner as an emotional support.
That means no trauma dumping. No emotional breakdowns. Don't do, basically, anything that conveys to your partner that you are not emotionally alright and needs help. Even if you genuinely do - go to your friends, not your wife.
But also, don't be an unfeeling robot to your wife. Be honest with your emotions with her, but never, ever, frame them as a problem that you need help with.
You're angry that you got passed over for promotion, but you got it handled, you'll start looking for a new job. You're a bit down sad that you pet can died, but you'll be fine, you'll just need a bit of time.
Never share an emotional problem without a solution.
Does it have to be toxic and unhealthy? No, just put in the work to have friends/family that you can lean on for emotional support. Not your wife or date or girlfriend.
Emotionally dumping on a gf/date show that either you don't have anyone else you can confide with (red flag) or you do and you're still emotionally unstable (also a red flag). Women have a great intuitive sense of this and are almost always turned off by this behavior, even if they can't exactly/won't explain why.
Hm, interesting, that's not how my marriage works. My husband makes tons more money than me, is clearly the leader in terms of which way our household goes, and I think he's a great role male model and respect him as a true man. He is very open with his feelings with me on exactly the topics you describe. For sure I would not like it if he cried or something about his problems daily to me but he wouldn't like it if I did that either; we both use our words to share our frustrations and to problem solve together. He will call me from work to tell me about something that happened, and I'll listen and empathize and he'll ask me for advice.
I agree it's not a good idea to be so open on a first date or in the early stages of a relationship. And I agree he'd have more tolerance for my daily crying than I'd have for any similar behavior from him. There's some truth to what you're saying but it's not the Edenic model where Adam knew his wife and she knew him.
Sounds correct. (Men should not get confused by all the talk about equality and being emotionally open -- the rules are not the same.)
> anyone who’s experimented with dating the same sex can recognise how arbitrary and stifling they can be, and how you’re so better off moving on from the framework of “I am the man, so I do X, you are the woman, so you do Y”. Women can benefit from being the initiator and pursuer, men can benefit from emotional openness.
That's a wonderful theoretical point to make which has zero connection with the reality of heterosexual dating (app or otherwise). The experience of men and women dating each other is vastly different, and expectations are vastly different. Any model that tries to assume away this difference and reason from the idealized premise that the two genders are in a symmetrical situation isn't a practical advice helpful to anyone, it's an exercise in worldbuilding.
How does that prevent a woman from initiating? And once you’re in a relationship, from having a frank conversation about gender roles?
It doesn't, but they don't. Is your proposed solution for a hypothetical man from this post is to wait for women to approach them first? That's just not going to happen.
Oddly enough, that actually is how I started dating my future wife, but that was the only time something like that happened to me after high school, and I was 31 at the time. At least I knew how to cash in my winning lottery ticket when I was offered one. ;)
It doesn't, but as a man there is little you can do to get women in general to initiate more.
> how you’re so better off moving on from the framework of “I am the man, so I do X, you are the woman, so you do Y”.
That's the problem with relationships, that it's not enough for you to unilaterally change the framework. You also need to meet someone who accepts the changed framework, otherwise you stay alone (which is okay if that's what you wanted, but some people want to be in a relationship).
And for heterosexual people, if there are thousands of your sex who want to change the framework, there better be thousands of the opposite sex who accept it, otherwise your chances on the dating market are not going to look good.
>Every human society has sex roles, and they all align with the innate psychological differences between men and women.
In Shakespeare's time, women weren't allowed to be actors. All the female roles had to be played by young men. How does *that* align with innate psychological differences between men and women?
There are many more examples like that.
> a woman looking for love doesn't need to learn how to ask a guy out on a date, but a man looking for love absolutely does.
That may be true in the society we have today, but let's not lose sight of the fact that we can change society. I would happily support a movement to encourage women to ask men out more often instead of waiting to be approached.
Context of previous attempts would need to be considered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadie_Hawkins_Day
In my experience, women my age also do these sorts of things, but it seems to happen less often, and when it does it tends to happen to a less extreme extent than with men, and in less destructive ways. As a telling example, I have a brother-sister pair of cousins who are both prone to general dysfunction and mental issues. The sister is very isolated but graduated college and is starting work in the fall; the brother dropped out five or six times, lives in his childhood bedroom, abuses research chemicals, and is so deep into the crevices of strange online ideologies that he can't have normal interactions with people anymore. I certainly don't think my female cousin is on a path to happiness, but my male cousin is on a path to early death.
> They need help becoming a *person*. Why frame it in terms of manhood?
They are already a person, they need help developing into final stage of the closest gender path. Hence males would imply the use of "manhood" as most proper.
If nothing else, because they will *notice* that the people around them aren't comfortable when they frame their experiences 'as male.'
You can't expect people to have healthy self-identity if discussing their gender in positive terms gets people looking at them like they just ripped a giant fart in public! If masculinity-qua-masculinity isn't something that you're willing to discuss except as a problem or as a threat to women, then you are by definition stigmatizing men, and the things are going to happen that happen when you stigmatize men.
Thank you. I came out of the essay feeling something profound was missing, and you helped me put my finger on what.
In general, I'm deeply skeptical of narratives about gender and social conditioning, because they often ring as dehumanizing to me.
(Include standard caveats here, societal factors play a huge role on our conception of gender norms and moral norms, etc etc etc.)
I don't feel like a man very much, I feel like a human. When I feel shame for my failures or pride for my successes, they're my failures and successes as a human being and an imperfect rational agent doing the best with the brain he got. We're more than piles of hormones and societal preconceptions.
This is one of the best articles I've read on substack
I agree. Most people are not *intentionally* mean to men and may even be mildly well-disposed-by-default, but this author is (I feel) somewhat rare, among both men and women, in having a level of empathy that makes her put in so much effort into understanding other men from their own perspective.
That is really not evident to me at all. I reckon that if feminists at large (both men and women) were aware of what they are doing to male youth, we wouldn't be seeing them rejecting feminism in the numbers we are seeing.
What exactly are feminist mothers doing to their sons? Would be good with some examples here.
Having a son has been a huge wake up call for feminists I know. They found out a lot of what they thought was socialization was innate after all!
I think most people underestimate the damage they can do.
Assuming people intend all the damage they cause is also a social justice thing, and a good way to have a life of rage and resentment.
Also, there are misandrist mothers who do a lot of damage, and they aren't necessarily feminists. They just don't like boys/men.
I keep running across women online who are overtly hostile to men, for example the woman who didn't want to hear about male loneliness because so many gay/transgender/women/etc. are lonely and no one seems to care about that.
I'm not sure how much of it is actually wanting to hurt people who are imagined as real.
There's a lot of free-floating cruelty these days and it does add up.
> There's a lot of free-floating cruelty these days and it does add up.
On the internet, you can be an asshole, and then join a cause that feels righteous. Not only will no one punch you, but you will always find someone to join your side (often the moderators, if you choose the right Reddit forum).
In real life, people like this would soon eliminate themselves... if not from life (by getting into physical conflicts more often than their body can handle), then at least from the society (people will stop inviting them).
In fact, I think this will turn out to be one of the best articles ever posted on ACX10.
[writer of the review here]
Thank you, this means a lot to me. Thanks for taking the time to read my writing. :)
I don't really think so, but I'm not from Bay Area so it may resonate less. This also touches a topic that was very frequent in golden age of SSC but was almost never in ACX (is there even any?) that it'll certainly attract lots of old fans. Overall, this'd not be my top 3, but I understand if SSC readers think it is.
A person who is Whole does not obsess about whether they are a 'man'. They don't need detailed instructions on how to be one.
You want men (and women!) to be whole? Teach them to be self-aware and honest with themselves. Teach them basic virtues, and to avoid over-philosophising. It isn't rocket science!
This is exactly the kind of empty non-advice causing the problems the author is talking about. A lot of people do need detailed, specific instructions and are going to be lost and hopeless without them.
Sorry, was typing from a phone, so let me expand my point a bit. Children of both genders do need detailed, specific instruction. My point is that this instruction is not on how to be a man or a woman. It's on how to learn to be themselves, and how to learn to be good.
Men and women do have biological differences, but these are on average. Each individual is unique. Trying to enforce 'male' instruction on a boy whose temperament will reject that instruction will cause that child to become 'lost' and confused.
The issue the author has correctly identified is that we've told too many people that acting in line with their natural inclination is wrong and toxic. But their solution is to do the same at scale - teach all boys to behave like 'men' even when it doesn't suit them, and all girls to behave like 'women'. Why?
Because when your son gets older he's going to be bigger, stronger, faster and more powerful than most of the women he meets, and they are going to look to him in a crisis for that reason, and he will represent a threat to them if he does not have control over himself and a degree of humility.
How often do you encounter crises where your size, strength, and speed matter? Most 'crises' either of my children are likely to encounter will require composure, wisdom, courage, and kindness, and I can try to teach these virtues to both of them.
You missed the point. If they know they cannot look to him in a crisis, they will not respect him.
Character traits (confidence, decisiveness) are much more like to inspire respect than physical traits. And women can exhibit those just as well as men.
Every time there is an insect in my house it is a crisis that requires size, strength, and speed to deal with. Granted it also takes composure and courage.
Jokes aside, I do have a lot less fear and vulnerability when I walk through the world than my wife does. Part of having a good relationship with her is understanding and working with that. I have to look out for her in a way that I don't have to look out for the men in my life.
Haha do you know how many couples I know where it's the woman who takes care of bugs...
I empathize with your take, but we live in a mimetic world where most people will follow some fixed narrative (or combination of narratives). For all to self-actualize as individuals is too much to ask for. So I think the author is in search of better mass-narratives (cultures/maps/etc).
I think it's just as much to ask for us to go back to rigid gender roles :) So since we're discussing implausible solutions anyway, let's discuss ones that would actually achieve something.
You are acting like rigid gender roles don't exist, but they do.
I've started to resent the rote scientific jargon that people knock down as a strawman on the differences between men and women.
While your attempt to egalitarianism is noble, it completely ignores the fact that men and women navigate the world differently. I am not talking about "men should be able to save a woman from a fire", I am talking practical, everyday differences.
For example, in a social setting, like a bar or party, the man is typically expected approach first. Therefore as a boy you need to be taught that this is a role that exists and how to perform it. If you ignore this reality about courtship you are going to end up confused as a young man. This is just one example, and retorting with "well women should approach too!" isn't useful nor addresses the numerous other ways the genders navigate life. Also, I don't consider this a good or bad thing - but a role that has to be learned.
So yes, people do need detailed, specific, instructions because society is made up of 100 hidden and esoteric rules and "just learn to be good" won't cut it.
That differs a lot in different societies. From what friends have told me, in Spain women often make the first move. But yes, you have a point that people should be taught the realities of the society in which they exist.
Here in Spain, I've heard this said about Finland. Maybe it always happens somewhere far away...
Utopia is always far enough away that there is no one who knows what actual reality is over there.
How much men are expected to approach first varies, but it is the norm everywhere.
I think the author was saying that boys who actively ask "How can I become a good man?" need someone to answer that question for them. Not all boys ask that question. Some boys are less wedded to the notion of gender and instead ask something like "How can I be a good person?" That question also needs answering. The point, I think, was to meet each person where they're at.
Having said that, I admit that I don't like the implication that the genders are fundamentally different. I prefer to emphasize respecting each person individually, and whether or not we see statistical averages diverging from each other is really none of my concern.
I see this in Sudbury Schools, which do a wonderful job of raising children without any particular emphasis on gender (nor is there any emphasis on eliminating gender). Each child is unique, and if they're given respect they will find their own way in life.
So if we're discussing gender at all, my focus is on tearing down the offensive stereotypes that already exist. I'm not interested in propping up new "better" stereotypes.
[writer of the review here]
I'd like to clarify that my solution isn't to "teach all boys to behave like men" in a singular, enforced, or rigid way. My solution is to offer a variety of clear paths that lead to a variety of healthy definitions of manhood. I want paths that fit the shyest, most quiet boys, and paths that benefit the most aggressive and dominant boys, and role models willing to guide them along each path and validate the various healthy expressions of manhood.
I also think these paths should be chosen by boys/men themselves, and never enforced on them. They should be ladders to help someone climb to self-actualization, rather than straightjackets.
If a boy decides he wants to ignore the paths and doesn't really care about being a man--sure, that's no problem! I actually really admire that mindset.
But the reality is that "being a man" is often a goal for boys, and leaving them with no clear definition of this term, and no clear path to follow, often leads to confusion and suffering (or simply drives them to the manosphere, where paths do exist, but are horribly toxic.)
I also think this isn't really much different from what feminists have offered women; I can easily find many women across the political spectrum who talk about "what womanhood means to them," and the steps/challenges of their path to become a self-actualized person while navigating life as a woman.
Personally, as a woman, I've benefited massively from women who mentored me and provided me with a clear path for how to function in society as a fiery, bisexual tomboy. My path has been *very* different than most of my female friends, and I can't imagine how lost I would have been without mentors and role models who navigated similar paths, and shared female-specific tips and tricks.
And ultimately that's all I'm asking for here: not a return to rigid gender norms, but rather supportive and optional paths, and role-models to help navigate the steps along the way.
Ok then it's all just semantics. If you offer so many paths that anyone can find their way, why focus on gender at all? Just because some lost boys crave a definition of 'man'? Easier to tell those boys to stop worrying about that, and teach them to find themselves.
Note also that there are hundreds if not thousands of role models and guides out there already. Read and try to live up to the poem If; look at sportsmen like Federer; listen to people like Jimmy Carr; there is no shortage of material to help people. Ultimately, I don't see what specifically you want to do differently.
> If you offer so many paths that anyone can find their way, why focus on gender at all?
Because gender has a large impact on those paths, for many people. And many young people find it extremely helpful and soothing to speak to their specific lived experiences as X gender.
It is indeed easier just to tell people "don't worry about gender." But a lot of young people find this advice confusing or dismissive. Giving specific, actionable advice to young people, and tailoring that advice to their lived experiences, is often received better than vague directions to "just find yourself."
And right now, I think it's extremely important for society to focus on giving young men practical and actionable advice, rather than advice for an idealized world where gender doesn't matter.
I hope we can slowly build toward a world where gender doesn't matter so much. But right now it does matter to most people, and I don't think it's helpful to ignore that, even if it's very well-intended.
I think there's a lot of wishful thinking in all this. Ultimately, I side with Thatcher - there is no such thing as society. The wellbeing of kids depends a lot on their parents, and most parents are doing a bad job raising their kids, teaching them good values, engaging with them, etc. Injecting gender back in won't achieve anything.
>Giving specific, actionable advice to young people, and tailoring that advice to their lived experiences, is often received better than vague directions to "just find yourself."
I agree, but specific actionable advice isn't necessarily gender-specific.
I work with kids myself. I give them advice all the time. But the kids I work with almost never frame their problems in the context of gender, so my advice never needs to be phrased that way. My specific, actionable advice usually involves telling the kid to keep pursuing their interests and to push back against anyone who tells them otherwise.
For instance, if a kid loves to write stories but their parents want them to focus on getting good grades, I'll tell the kid to keep writing stories and to resist the School Industrial Complex as much as they can. I don't say "As a boy, you should keep writing stories" or "As a girl, you should keep writing stories." Gender is irrelevant.
Of course, if a kid comes to me and says "My problem is that people are treating me poorly because of my gender", then we will absolutely discuss gender. I won't pretend that we live in an ideal world where sexism doesn't exist; that would be very bad mentorship on my part. But even then I phrase it in terms of "Here's how to find happiness in life despite the all the sexism weighing you down." I don't phrase it in terms of "Here's how to be a man" or "Here's how to be a woman."
If a kid really needed that phrasing I would go along with it, but thus far I haven't seen the need.
Sure, lots of things that don't work are easier than doing it right, if you consider the long-term results to be somebody else's problem.
Sorry if I missed it in a different comment, but do you have suggestions for what those clear paths should be? Your post was beautifully written, but it isn't actionable unless somebody suggests such paths.
>I'd like to clarify that my solution isn't to "teach all boys to behave like men" in a singular, enforced, or rigid way.
That's good.
>My solution is to offer a variety of clear paths that lead to a variety of healthy definitions of manhood
And would these healthy definitions of manhood differ from healthy definitions of womanhood? If so, what differences would you expect to see?
Consider Mr. Rogers, for instance. He was a man, but his calling in life was to work with children, and he was extremely gentle and caring. These are all things we might normally expect of a woman, but Mr. Rogers did it as a man. If this is a healthy path to manhood, it's equally a healthy path to womanhood. Seems like we should just say "Being kind to a children is a healthy path to adulthood", and leave gender out of it.
>Personally, as a woman, I've benefited massively from women who mentored me and provided me with a clear path for how to function in society as a fiery, bisexual tomboy.
I'm glad you had those mentors.
>I can't imagine how lost I would have been without mentors and role models who navigated similar paths, and shared female-specific tips and tricks.
What sort of advice does a fiery, bisexual tomboy woman need that wouldn't also apply to a fiery, bisexual tomboy-esque man?
I can think of two categories.
First, there are physical differences between cisgendered women and cisgendered men. If we're talking about the sort of stuff people learn in health class, then obviously it matters which set of body parts you happen to have, as the care and maintenance of the other set is not really applicable in your case.
Second, there are differences in the way men and women are treated in society. A fiery woman can expect to receive pushback from sexist people who think she should be more feminine, whereas a fiery man won't. But crucially, these differences only exist in society's collective imagination, so the advice is more "How to be a woman in this society" (in this case, how to fight off sexist critics) as opposed to "How to be a woman" in some sort of ultimate cosmic sense.
Perhaps that's just semantics, but it seems important to me. If we remember that society is prone to coming up with nonsense ideas about gender, we can push back against those ideas.
Now for argument's sake, let's say that estrogen and testosterone really do influence human personalities in an objective, measurable way. Let's imagine we do some absolute science which somehow isn't tainted by any of society's nonsense and we prove, beyond any doubt, then men tend towards personality type A while women tend towards type B. In that case, it might be useful to talk about the fundamental differences between men and women on a population level, but it would still be nonsensical to push these ideas on an individual level, because so many people differ from the average.
I have deep sympathy for the types of men discussed in this post, in part because I've been through similar experiences myself. And I'm very grateful to you (the author) for articulating these problems. But I don't think the issue in my case was that people failed to teach me how to "be a man". I think the issue is that people judge me without understanding me. (Part of that judgment is based on my gender, and part of it is based on age or bad definitions of "normal".)
I keep coming back to the idea that men and women are equal. As a lonely man, I faced criticism. If I had been a lonely woman, I might have received more support. Likewise if the men in this post weren't locked into the category of "men", that is to say, if society saw them as individuals and not as representatives of their gender, they might have an easier time in life.
You say that men should not be shamed for qualities like "being highly interested in sex", and I agree. (Obviously abuse is wrong but consenting adults is something else, and naturally some people are more sexual than other people.) But again, neither men nor women should be shamed for having that quality.
Gender might magnify these judgements, so that at various points in history it's either men or women who get most of the "stop enjoying sex" criticism, and it's fair to point out "men are being disproportionately judged for experiencing sexual desire" or "women are being disproportionately judged for experiencing sexual desire" (depending on which one is true at that moment), but this "magnification" problem could be solved by adopting a general "stop judging people differently based their gender" rule, at which point all that we need is a general "stop shaming people for being highly sexual" rule.
In summary, I want to discuss the unique problems each gender faces, but I also want to dissolve the concept of gender as much as we can. I want to talk about how we treat various personality traits, for instance, and if turns out that a certain trait is more common in one gender or another, that's not necessarily important. What's important is that we learn to stop shaming people for non-abusive personality traits.
Perhaps I'm biased from my own experiences. Perhaps there a lot of men out there who would say "No, you don't get it. I specifically know how to be a MAN. This genderless stuff is weird and disorienting and I don't like it." If that's really how they feel, I'm willing to accommodate them.
Teaching everyone to be Fred Rogers doesn't seem like a scalable solution, when considering all those averages.
I never said that we should teach everyone to be Fred Rogers. I said:
>Seems like we should just say "Being kind to a children is a healthy path to adulthood", and leave gender out of it.
It's "a" path, not "the" path.
There's a couple of paragraphs in the essay that address your concerns. The author says that there is no one right way or path to be a "man," so a diverse array of different role models is required. The point could be abstracted to the common identititarian-left saying of "representation matters."
Frankly, I don't think we have very many avatars of healthy adulthood in public life, period, regardless of gender.
'Be self-aware and honest with yourself and others about who you are' *is* a detailed, specific instruction.
The fact that we think it's not is an indictment of our atomized consumerist culture, where the only way we can think to know ourselves is in relation to an external archetype or ideological avatar.
Any single sentence is not a detailed list of instructions, yes.
Self-awareness is absolutely an active process, and a skill you can train. At every step, you can interrogate yourself for what you want and what you think, or reach for external validators to tell you what to think and what to do. Introspection is a skill with a very long history of study and development. It's not hard to find detailed instructions for these things if that's what you need.
Again, consumerist culture tries very hard to destroy this skill; it's much more convenient for advertisers to create 12 'types' of person, and then target brands and narratives to each group. Content recommendation engines will filter your content to match a 'type', if you click a bunch of Vtubers it will stop trying to show you sports. Any original thought you might have will have to fight against a hundred eloquent blog posts by persuasive pundits trying to get you on their 'side'.
That makes it hard to 'be yourself', to the extent that some people can't even comprehend what the phrase could be saying. Which brand do I buy to 'be myself'? Which blog do I read to 'be myself'?
This is very much a 'get out of the car' piece of advice, yes. But it's not *that* difficult, you just have to practice the skill of stopping and asking yourself what *you* want to do, what *you* think, before automatically accepting the cultural default.
Please re-read the first sentence of my post:
>Any single sentence is not a detailed list of instructions, yes.
My point is that any 'side' will have a one-sentence motto version of their advice which does not give detailed instructions on its own, and then a variety of different sources with detailed advice for how to follow that motto in practice.
This is not a failing of the left, the same is true for advice from the right, this is just an aspect of how ideas are communicated in full generality.
If your claim is 'the right has lots of resources for their detailed instructions, that says more about where your content algorithms are filtering you than it does about the world. There are plenty of places to read about discovering yourself and being yourself in all the ways I've discussed.
If there is any real criticism here, it would be that the right very explicitly brands its advice as PUA, here's how to get laid, here's how to be a chad all the ladies will simp for, etc, where the left is more typically branding it as 'here is how to be happy and well-rounded person,by the way that's attractive.'
So maybe men who are only looking on advice on how to score are getting filtered to the right and missing the advice on the left. That's potentially a real search engine optimization problem that the left could work on, but it's not a major ideological failing as people keep trying to paint it.
It’s very self-aware and very honest to say “I would like to have sex with you right now” to a woman you’ve just met, but it’s not particularly conducive to that goal
Don't confuse honesty with candour!
So the instruction is at best incomplete and at worst misleading
Do you really need detailed, gender-specific scripts for every possible situation you may encounter? This is life, not a call centre!
I think any 13-word instruction on a topic like this will be at best incomplete and at worst misleading, it's just too short for nuance.
> A person who is Whole does not obsess about whether they are a 'man'. They don't need detailed instructions on how to be one.
That is correct, but it doesn't follow that you don't need to teach people how to be Whole (both in generic and gender-specific way). A proficient driver doesn't need think about how to position the car in the lane, which pedal to press etc, but that's exactly because they've learned it in the past to the point that now it's automatic and natural. Same with being Whole, you absolutely do need to teach it to kids and young people, so eventually they can do it without detailed instructions and guidance.
Can you give an example of a gender-specific way of being whole? What would you teach a boy that you wouldn't teach a girl?
I think you can (and maybe should) tell everyone everything, but you need to teach boys more about how to handle having a male body, male hormones, and the expectations that our society places on men. For a girl such knowledge may be interesting, but for the boy it is necessary.
Ok yea sure, and you need to talk to girls about menstruation. If that's what we're talking about here, fine.
I think "the expectations that our society places on men" encompasses quite a lot, and is meaningfully different from the expectations that our society places on women. Lots of people seem to naturally learn (or innately conform to) those expectations, but some of us are prone to take things literally, and I think we would have benefited from a more direct and honest account of the ways in which members of our gender tend to be rewarded for behaving.
But part of the issue that the author highlights is that we don't have defined expectations for each gender anyway. Isn't it better to teach people to deal with ambiguity by building their confidence, outside gender norms?
Sure, I actually already gave examples in another reply, to a slightly different question but the first 2 would apply here as well: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-dating-men-in-the-bay/comment/145834086
To add specifically for the "being a whole" angle. You don't just teach things like this via a list of instructions, you teach it by example via role models and such. One of the most critical aspects of life (esp for the teenagers, who are the main recipients of this teaching) where being Whole matters is in romantic relationships, and it's also one of the places where you Whole-ness is most likely to be damaged. So you absolutely need to have those role models showing how to handle such situations. And since heterosexual romantic relationships are very asymmetrical by nature, you have to have different models for boys and girls, since they'll be facing different challenges and so need different approaches to handle them.
And yeah, to directly answer your question, I would probably spend much more effort teaching an (average) boy to manage his aggression, and teach an (average) girl to be more pushy and assertive, because testosterone is a thing. Also, I would teach a boy that if he and his girlfriend are walking down the street and a crazy crackhead jumps on them, he should feel obligated to protect the girlfriend and not the other way around.
Finally, and much more subjectively and controversially, I kind of do think that the optimal ways of processing strong emotions in general are somewhat different for men and women. No I don't have any science to back it up, and yes even if my observations are true it may in principle be a result of nurture rather than nature. Still, that's what I think.
What if you have a sensitive boy who is not aggressive? Would you still teach them to manage aggression? And what if your girl is already bossy?
I specifically added the word "average" in parenthesis to avoid this kind of nitpicking.
Right but what's the point then - you'll tailor your upbringing to the specific child, which is as it should be. If your claim is that this upbringing will be different on average, then yes fine I agree with that.
Except the pressures upon them, both social and biological, create differing needs that directly implicate their "wholeness" if not managed properly. If a man faces a constant pressure to have sex, he's going to need detailed instruction on how to manage his desires and goals.
Women will face similar pressures. You should teach a *person* how to handle pressure in general.
What do you think the difference between our positions is, then? Do you imagine that I started by thinking in terms of "man" or "woman", not "person"? If I had laid out my whole thought process and started with "person", then narrowed and said "a man faces constant pressures, and a woman faces difference constant pressures", then focused on men and only talked about them, would you still be objecting to what I say?
At this point I'm not sure what the difference is. The author wrote we need detailed instructions for men. That's what I'm objecting to. I don't want to go around telling anyone what a man is supposed to be like - not in terms of character traits. Should we be telling boys that they'll have some different experiences to girls? Sure, yes, of course. But that's very different to bringing back strict gender roles and expectations.
> I don't want to go around telling anyone what a man is supposed to be like - not in terms of character traits.
Neither do I, but I would go further advocate for separating "man" from "male". The latter is not a category with prescriptions and gatekeeping, the former would be.
For me, it's not about telling people what a man "is supposed to be like" in a normative sense that I endorse. (Or, rather, if I did do this, I would list qualities that I also think are good in women.) But I do think boys/girls deserve to know what a man/woman is "supposed to be like" in the sense that, because our society(/human nature) is still very gender-sensitive, they will in practice tend to be treated differently depending on whether they display certain masculine/feminine virtues in certain contexts.
There's a lot of guys out there who are drinking (metaphorical, and sometimes literal) poison, just because it came in a bottle labeled "detailed instructions for how to be a man." Ordering them to instead cultivate the genderless virtue of not being thirsty hasn't worked.
I disagree.
With what part, and why?
Is anyone else doubting this is actually written by a woman?
I'm mostly doubting the age not the gender. It feels like it was written by someone older than in their twenties.
If I had to guess the age of the author based on the content of their writing, I'd suspect older than twenties, but not so strongly that their say-so about being a twenty-something woman surprises me. I think that a lot of people overestimate the association between age and wisdom or maturity.
As an adult, I've known teenagers who I've considered better sources of good judgment, able to consider situations carefully, draw usefully on their experience and the knowledge they've absorbed, and make good decisions, draw appropriate conclusions, or offer helpful advice, than the majority of adults I've known who were well into the middles of their careers. And I've known plenty of adults, 50+ years old, who showed less maturity and good judgment than the average student I've taught in their teens.
There's a difference between wisdom and raw intelligence, but some people have much more aptitude in cultivating wisdom than others.
I agree that she doesn't feel like a young adult, but I could buy her being in her late 20s, especially if she's dated older men and has compared notes with older friends.
[writer of the review here]
Bingo. I usually date men 5-10 years older than me, and most of my friend group also falls into that range. I had a rocky childhood that forced me into adulthood at a young age, so my social circle reflects that.
If she's dating people who are senior directors or CEOs in the Bay Area, then she's likely to be in her 30s.
Even in the Bay Area, there aren't a lot of accomplished CEOs/Senior-directors under 35.
I'm wondering how old she'd have to be to have dated that many men.
One doesn't have to be old to have gone on a lot of first dates that didn't turn into second dates.
Especially as a woman.
The way the author completely crawls inside men's heads is impressive enough that I had the same thought. I'll assume good faith and/or that Scott has done something to vet the author.
No, I wasn't; but if you are, consider that they could be trans, and have some amount of added perspective on biological maleness because of that. (But that's probably less likely, given the unironic affection for gender roles.)
Intensely psycho-analysing the men she dates and doing a good job of it is exactly what I would expect from a woman who works in the Bay Area.
It definitely feels like a lotnof stuff that I've read from men online talking about gender and dating for years. And the author doesn't actually describe the first person experience of dating the men very much (is she attracted to these men? Does she like doing things with them? Etc). But I'd still presume good faith
Yes. But to read this site as a woman you need to have a pretty high tolerance for misogyny and antifeminism so given that baseline it's not crazy that a woman self-selected for that tolerance could have written it.* And to be fair I only skimmed after the first three paragraphs because the beginning seemed like tedious, stereotype-ridden antifeminist drivel and the rest seemed like more of same. I am a woman btw. And tbh I think it's quite likely that Aella wrote it because I have never met a woman in real life who cares as much about what men think as she does.
*To be clear, I am NOT saying the blog itself is misogynist or anti-feminist, but I am saying that there's a lot of misogynist or anti-feminist discourse tolerated in the comments section, blogroll, links posts, etc. and that that drives away actual women readers.
> I only skimmed after the first three paragraphs because the beginning seemed like tedious, stereotype-ridden antifeminist drivel
not a woman, but... same...
[writer of the review here]
I assure you I do fit the demographics listed in this review (cis-woman, late twenties). I'd be happy to provide proof, once the review contest is over.
To the contrary I have yet to find many men who write this insightfully about men’s issues, sadly. It’s hard to observe a crisis accurately from the inside.
That was my take as well. The writing I've consumed from other men often leaves me wanting something different. The empathy on display here was a breath of fresh air in comparison.
I don't know where my feelings land with respect to the authors conclusions, but I do appreciate that the whole piece relied less on prescription and more on psychologically trying to understand these men.
💯
In my main comment, I said something about the otherworldly qualities that the person who wrote this essay would have to possess to be capable of what it described. A part of me is inclined to think that the author might have taken a tad bit poetic licence with the experiential narrative part of the essay, even if they're a woman and in their twenties. If I'm wrong, and the author is indeed a woman and young, she must be one hell of a kind and someone I'd feel so honored to know.
I don't. Yes, there is a suspiciously high amount of empathy towards men, but hey traits and skills are on a bell curve, someone has to be at the extremely high end. Where else should such exceptional people be found, if not at ACX? :D
I think there are also some minor blind spots. For example, I think the text takes it for granted that all the men are excellent at their careers... that is, until the moment they get depressed or burn out. This seems to me like a typical women's blind spot -- the men who are less excellent are invisible in dating, so they wouldn't be included in the taxonomy of men you can meet while dating.
This is not meant as a criticism; I think the article is still great and in the top percentile of empathy towards men. But a taxonomy written by a man would probably include e.g. the men who feel average and who feel that it disqualifies them at the dating market because of female hypergamy. Plus a few other things that are not talked about in the polite society. I am not going to read the text again now, but I think none of the men in the text has an experience of his girlfriend cheating on him, which happens to be a frequent male experience. Or divorcing him and taking half of his future income. Such things would be very likely mentioned by a man who cares deeply about the problem men face today.
I had the same thought about the absence of men who aren't as successful. To be fair this just the authors perspective from their own dating history; I don't think they were doing anything untoward by only focusing on their own experience. Not to say that's what you're arguing.
But I definitely know a lot of men who fall outside these buckets, and I think I'm probably one of them. I still enjoyed the piece because even if it doesn't capture all the ways men struggle, I think the empathy on display creates the sense that you could talk to them and they'd be able to really hear you. And on the Internet today, that's just such a rare and precious experience.
[writer of the review here]
I'm glad you still found value from the essay. I think you're very right, though--there are many other buckets of men that I failed to describe, because I simply don't interface with them enough to identify/understand them.
This is one of the reasons why I've been trying to diversify my Substack subscriptions lately. There are so many good essays out there written by people very different from the types I usually encounter in my bubbled existence within the Bay.
[writer of the review here]
These are some really interesting blind spots you point out, and I agree with them. The fact is that I'm an absolute sucker for smart and ambitious men, and I'm extremely lucky to live in a very smart and ambitious city, so the overwhelming majority of men I've dated have fallen into the category of "successful by society's standards."
Almost all my male friends also fall into this category, so I just don't have a ton of exposure to men who fall below society's standards, and thus get shunted from the dating market all together. (I grew up around a lot of these men, but haven't spent much time around that demographic since I was a teen, so feel very out of touch with them.)
Cheating is something that I considered including in the essay. But ultimately I just didn't feel I have enough insight/experience in the topic to include it. Divorce is the same; I'm young enough that very few men I've dated have been divorced.
I would love to see more essays written from the perspective of those "invisible" men who are excluded from the dating market. I feel like part of the lack of empathy for them is just simply lack of visibility. I'd like to hear more about their struggles so I can understand them better.
I'd also like more essays about cheating/divorce written by men. I've read a lot of wonderful, insightful essays on this topic from women, but it's rare to find ones written by men (I think they just face more stigma for writing about these things).
First off, respect for writing this. It takes a lot of emotional energy and vulnerability to put this stuff out there for the public. Still, there were a few frustrating sections:
>"Yet realistically, this is a fantasy. A single person can rarely solve issues this severe; it requires the combined strength of an entire community to drag a soul back from such extreme depths. Any attempt at a romantic relationship would crumble under the weight of the void, and only leave the man feeling more hopeless."
This is psychological cope. Of course the best way to bring a man with low self-confidence back "from the void" is to *prove to him that he does have worth by valuing him*.
To be clear, no, you don't have a moral obligation to take it upon yourself to dedicate your life to any particular man-who-is-lost. This is different from believing the factual statement that "one person couldn't do anything."
>"Yet the logical side of me knows I need to judge–ultimately, it’s a necessary part of dating. And a crippling lack of self-esteem is a death blow for the stability of any relationship. If I want a healthy relationship, I simply cannot date someone with that trait."
More psychological cope. You would prefer a relationship with a man who doesn't have self-esteem issues. That's fine. You are allowed to have that preference. But note the language here: "stability," "healthy," preferences which you could choose to compromise on are written as objective dealbreakers. Thought experiment: suppose that 90% of straight women do not want to date men with self-esteem issues, and 30% of men have self-esteem issues. Solve for the equilibrium.
>"So my advice to men who fall into this category is to rip off the bandaid. If they want a partner, they need to start working toward it now. Overcoming insecurities and past traumas takes time and effort."
Time and effort doing what? This sounds deep and biting, but dig a little deeper and we find that this is essentially meaningless. "Just fix all of your unspecified problems bro."
I also want to note the conspicuous absense of rules 1 and 2. It may have been a good idea to leave them out in order to focus on the more intelectually interesting aspects of dating. To paraphrase Scott, I look forward to the, "Here’s Why I Think It’s Good To Have A Glaring Omission Around This Part Of My Argument," follow-up article.
How is that paraphrasing Scott?
It's a reference to his "The Origins of Woke" review. Ctrl+F "Here’s Why I Think It’s Good To Have A Glaring Omission Around This Part Of My Argument"
Ah, that's at https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/144030929/the-origins-of-inequality
Maybe this differs between men and women on average, but while some people with self esteem issues may find them genuinely resolved by dating someone who values them, dating someone with self esteem issues, and valuing them, is not necessarily going to fix or even help them.
Also, if what the person needs in order to feel reassured is sincere, unreserved positive regard, and the best you can show is empathy and compassion, you can't offer them what they're looking for, even if you want to.
Hang on, what are Rules 1 and 2?
I assume this is a reference to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/be-attractive-dont-be-unattractive.
> Time and effort doing what?
I think interpersonal issues can be grinded out to some extent. You just keep trying to date and make friends even if the process is sometimes painful and unpleasant. I know my social anxiety is lesser now than when I started two and a half years ago, even if it's not fully gone.
I'm not sure that social anxiety is the same thing as serious self-esteem problems. They can be related, but a number of these men have basic social competence.
Their problem is being unmoored about what they want and being unable to look for what satisfies them.
But sometimes the self-esteem problems are being driven by social failure, like in the men who opted out. If that's the case, there's really no option but to grind it out.
Sometimes when you grind it out, you end up hurting people before you get good enough not to. Some of the girls I was interested in when I was in high school felt as though I was stalking them, and not without reason. People tend to be more forgiving of this kind of thing when you're 15 than when you're 30.
This is a late reply, but I would like to ask you to clarify this.
You don't say serious self-esteem problems consist in being unmoored about what one wants and being unable to look for what satisfies one, or are you?
No, I'm saying (or at least thinking) that if you can't tell what you want, or have been ignoring what you want, it's one sort of self-esteem problem.
I think this is absolutely true; I also think it’s why there’s a small weakness in the authors argument in criticizing “just put yourself out there” right before giving that as advice. It is both extremely unsatisfying and unfortunately uniquely helpful advice, so I get it!
> Time and effort doing what? This sounds deep and biting, but dig a little deeper and we find that this is essentially meaningless. "Just fix all of your unspecified problems bro."
"Just fix all of your unspecified problems" is the pathway! The thing that you do is _get contact with reality_, which will specify some problems, and then you work on them and get more contact with reality, which will specify more problems.
Like--I think lots of people are used to constructing things according to step-by-step rules, like LEGO sets or IKEA furniture. But most things in life look more like repairing something broken, or cultivating plants. For those you need to be frequently inspecting the situation and diagnosing what needs to be done next, which is so simple as to barely count as a step in the IKEA or LEGO case. Kids used to take apart radios and then put them back together, and I think that's better training for a situation like this.
Suppose our hypothetical man goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell whether or not she was having a good time." Then the thing to do is develop the ability to tell whether or not the other person is having a good time--which you can do in the context of dates, but you can also do in other contexts!
Suppose instead he goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell how to show her that I was lovable." Then attack that--both by the angle of being more lovable, being more capable of owning it, and being more receptive of love and interest.
But the core thing here is that he needs to own himself and direct himself. Sure, he can (and probably should!) have mentors and advisors and support, but he's the one on the ground in the dates, and so he needs to understand what's happening and be able to manage it.
"Suppose our hypothetical man goes on a date and comes back going "man, I was anxious the whole time; I couldn't tell whether or not she was having a good time." Then the thing to do is develop the ability to tell whether or not the other person is having a good time"
Another thing that's really effective at solving many of life's problems, including dating problems as a male, is to develop the ability to make billions of dollars. Or to get elected President of the United States. Being a billionaire and/or President, makes lots of things easier.
Don't bother me with details; I'm sure you can figure it all out for yourself.
It is substantially easier to guess other people's emotional state than becoming a billionaire--I think a better analogy is something like making a thousand dollars.
I do think most Americans should try to make a thousand dollars before they can expect to have much success at dating, and this is going to involve a lot of recursive problem-solving.
The trial-and-error method works well for problems where you're not that far from the solution.
The man in your example can apparently get a steady stream of "practice" dates that are not too far off from good dates. Your method probably works well for him.
But many men and boys are far from the "just tweak some details" stage.
"go on an outing with one of your mom's friends" is a way to get training data on whether or not the other person is having a good time and does not require a large supply of dateable prospects (you probably don't want to date your mom's friends!).
What if you don't have a mom that has friends?
You really think one woman could love a man into having confidence and self-worth? I'm skeptical. Women are just people.
Well yeah. I do think that when someone is valued and loved that makes that person feel valued and loved.
Some women have self-esteem issues so deep that no matter how many men hit on them or pursue them they remain insecure their whole lives as to whether they are actually valued. Some men are like that too.
And others are not.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociometer
From your link:
The higher self-esteem someone has the more they will perceive as being valued by others. For individuals with low self-esteem, they question their value as a social partner, often letting their subsequent insecurities devolve onto future relationships.
::raises hand:: Living example here!
Not every such man, no. But some men, certainly.
Zero to one, as Peter Thiel said in a very different context. It can make a huge difference.
> This is psychological cope. Of course the best way to bring a man with low self-confidence back "from the void" is to *prove to him that he does have worth by valuing him*.
I don't know about the *best* way, but it did work that way for me.
Yeah, I completely understand why she would not want to date someone with self esteem issues, but I had and still have horrible self-esteem issues, that will never go away, and I just went and found someone with worse self esteem issues and married her in our early 20s. Obviously it would be better to not have self esteem issues, but if you do have them, marrying does make you happier.
"Of course the best way to bring a man with low self-confidence back "from the void" is to *prove to him that he does have worth by valuing him*."
I would say that "I can fix him" is not a reliable way of bringing back even a single man.
I don't really understand the focus on gender-specific Maps honestly. Obviously there are people who might benefit from highly gendered advice in specific circumstances, but in general I'm not sure the gender lens helps very often for whatever problems a person is facing.
The fact that all the posts like this suddenly talk about how there isn't really any one map/path/way/model/etc in reality once it's time to talk concretely and have to resort to meta-describing what manhood should be gives away the game a bit. Like look at this paragraph again:
"There is no one “right way” to be a man, just as there is no one right way to be a woman. But we need to provide young men with varied, concrete examples of manhood, highlight the positivity that each form of manhood brings the world, and provide stepping-stones for becoming each type."
This seems to make it clear to me that if there are no one right ways per gender, then splitting them up by gender seems kind of pointless. Just describe all the cool ways to be a person, and sure maybe some of them are class-locked or have aspects that are class-locked but in general I don't think that describes many of these ways or a large proportion of the features of any of these ways. I think most of the important things that a person might believe or the important things that a person might want to be or aspire to don't really involve gender at all. Even the few roles and identities that are more clearly gendered seem to make this clear to me, e.g. whether you want to be a "mother" type parent or a "father" type parent, the similarities between what would make a good one in each case seem much more numerous and important than the few aspects of those roles that are specific to one or the other.
Perhaps some people live extremely gendered lives where all of their beliefs and actions are highly gender-tinged, and that's fine for those people but it sounds like they don't really need any help. The people who do need help are the people are lost-in-general, and gender isn't really a big part of their issues. At least, all of the types of men described in the post don't seem to me like their problems are very gender-specific at all.
Gender specific maps can be good because there are cool ways to be a person, but the path to get there is very different and can be very gender specific.
For example: A good thing you can do for yourself is be in a loving relationship.
But as a man, I have always had to be a pursuer. I have never had a women come upto me and give me compliments. I always need to take the first step.
Women on the other hand get pursued a lot. Lot of times even when they don't want it.
You can't have the same map for dating for both of us. A woman once called me a creep for asking for a hug. I really wish there were concrete social rules I could follow so that something like this never happened, because it is mortifying.
Everyone’s experience is different and yes there are social norms and expectations and default experiences, but you can absolutely be in an environment where you will be pursued (by women) as a man. I’ve seen it happen, many times. Maybe it’s not the kind of women you want, and you need to present yourself in a certain way, but the same goes for women.
> Maybe it’s not the kind of women you want, and you need to present yourself in a certain way, but the same goes for women.
Examples?
Sure, it happens sometimes. But a man who decides "I'm not going to pursue any women, I'll just wait for them to pursue me" will probably wind up having a worse time than one who decides to follow convention and take the lead somewhat more.
Said man also needs to realise there's a sensible middle ground between never asking anyone out ever and becoming a PUA who cold-approaches every girl in yoga pants at the supermarket.
> At least, all of the types of men described in the post don't seem to me like their problems are very gender-specific at all.
I think for several of these men, a core part of the problem is that they're handed a wrong-gender map. Like, one of the ways to read the "go to college and get a good job then end-of-story" map is that it's the woman's "find a good spouse who will provide for you and then get married and then end-of-story" map, with the spouse swapped out for a job!
I think "end-of-story" is a rarer feature in male maps. The Man With A Plan's map should have involved much more active management of his career; more situational awareness and chasing of opportunities. With much more ownership and authenticity, I think things would've worked out for him.
I can sympathize with this sentiment I really do, but how that would work in the world where gender differences do, in fact, exist?
For example, your role model/map should probably teach something about how to react to avert sexual attention from the opposite gender (assuming heterosexuality). And it's not something minor either, attractiveness is an important part of identity for either gender, particularly as teenagers and young adults. You can adapt your model to the expectation that this person receives entirely too much of such attention, or almost none at all, but it's not realistic to have the same model handling both cases correctly. So which do you chose?
As another example, the parts of your model about handling emotions should probably weigh in on the subject of anger management. Do you tailor it to someone with male or female testosterone profile, muscle mass and tolerance for physical risk and violence? Because I would guess you want about the same level of outward acts and signs of aggression in males and females as the end result, but that means you have (on average) to teach boys to control and suppress their aggressive impulses, and girls to be more assertive and pushy, which I'm not sure how are you going to do with a gender-less model.
And of course parenting is the elephant in the room, because talking about "mother type parent or a father type parent" is nice and well but in real life, depending on the biological sex becoming a parent either does or does not come with a tremendous amount of physical discomfort and pain, and your role model either does or does not account for this.
Not all women who become mothers did so by becoming pregnant; both adoption and surrogacy exist.
> I don't really understand the focus on gender-specific Maps honestly. Obviously there are people who might benefit from highly gendered advice in specific circumstances, but in general I'm not sure the gender lens helps very often for whatever problems a person is facing.
At the very least, the failure modes seem different for the two sexes. Surely you'd agree that "Man Who Becomes A Beast" archetype mentioned here is a very real thing, and that the female equivalent is vanishingly rare.
If the ways to get lost are different, the maps should probably be different.
I haven't finished reading this yet, but the first few paragraphs are absolutely why I had difficulty socializing with the women I met in university, who unironically "hate men" and could not explain why they bothered talking to their male relatives, much less went on dates. Despite superficially embracing freedom in gender and sexuality, their view of womanhood was way too narrow to include me: the traits they hated in men were traits I value in myself. My non-Western parents believe in gender roles but my father doesn't believe women's culture has value, so I was raised under what most Canadians and Americans call "toxic masculinity" (though without much of an emphasis on feats of strength: in his culture, the scholar is also a hero). This has turned out to be a much bigger barrier between me and other women than my sex/gender has been between me and men.
Edit: having read more, I am/was the first guy. But I'm a non-Bay Area woman with a completely different experience of dating, and leaning on partners to get me through it made it both a lot worse and a lot better.
[writer of the review here]
>the traits they hated in men were traits I value in myself
This resonates with me a lot. I had a fairly conservative upbringing, and am definitely what you would consider a "tomboy." I'm also fairly opinionated, loud, and assertive. Growing up, I felt like I didn't belong anywhere; conservative women were horrified at how outspoken and fiery I was, and I hated their politics and strict expectations. But the feminists I encountered in college didn't like how terrible I was at reading emotions and how assertive and strictly logical I could be.
I was *extremely* lucky to end up with multiple women mentors who'd had similar paths and took me under their wing. They basically said, "Okay, look, you've got kind of a strange brain compared to most women, but that doesn't mean you're *less* of a woman. Let's figure out how to use your natural tendencies to your advantage." I owe them a great deal for this, and I know I would be a much more confused and lonely person without their guidance.
I still naturally find friendship/romance with men slightly easier, but friendship/romance with women is now much more feasible, and many of my dearest friends are women. But it took quite a bit of work to get there, and there's no way I could have accomplished it without mentors and role models who helped me formulate a path.
Okay, this clarifies a lot of the meta commentary on the authenticity of the identity of the author. I've left a slightly more skeptical comment elsewhere, but I think I'm now more sold on the fact that you're indeed a young woman whose preternatural insight into men's interior landscape was forged during your time as a cultural outcast.
It all makes sense in retrospect why it's someone with your psychological, social, and experiential profile who would write such an essay. The bit about your previous tomboy status also kind of explain the audacity to give a 200 pound man a fist jab.
[writer of the review here]
Yes, spending time as a cultural outcast naturally lends itself to trying to analyze the categories you don't fit into.
I think another key reason I became highly analytical about men is because my father was an addict with Borderline Personality Disorder. Constantly analyzing him, and trying to guess what was going through his deeply complex and unstable brain, was necessary for survival for many years. This habit carried over when I started dating (women always carry the question of "is this a safe man I can trust?" into a date, and I think my brain is just wired to do this 10x as much and 10x as deeply.)
Goodness, having a mentally ill father is something else we have in common. (I don’t know how much of a coincidence that is considering it’s conditioned on what turns out to be rare personality traits.) My father suffered from debilitating paranoid delusions for years, making our home a minefield. A father is only one man, though, and I think his encouragement to prefer male friends (which didn’t do much until I was in high school and boys were leas threatening because the students were selected for academically) did more in this regard.
Very sorry you had to go through a similar tumultuous childhood. Hugs. <3
Hit me up if you're ever in the Bay Area. I'd love to have a new friend with similar life experiences. I'm sure we both walked away with a lot of opinions to compare/contrast.
This is an odd review. The first four male types are basically all the same person - lost, confused, adrift, empty, may or may not be angry about it - but with varying degrees of career or past romantic success. The fifth type is a hazy romantic fantasy of encountering charismatic emotional wholeness in a man. The writer doesn’t seem to be very self-aware about what issues or needs she herself is bringing to the table that shape how she sees people.
Really the issues she is pointing to about lack of community in modern urban life affect both men and women. She hints she has solved them through finding some kind of deeply fulfilling community (although not a romantic partner apparently), but doesn’t go into any detail about how that worked.
Admittedly men and woman deal with these things differently, because we’re hormonally different, may have internalized different gender-related expectations, and also young women are in sexual / romantic demand for biological reasons that young men are not. But the similarities may be greater than the differences
I think the author is aware of this. It's not "here's four different ways society fails men", it's "society fails men consistently in the same way, and here's four different ways men respond to that failure".
I note a distinct lack of emphasis on the role of modern urban life, in particular the Bay Area, that is exacerbating this issue. Other areas can have different failures. Even if the author lives there and thus only has direct experience with it, I would have at least liked to see some speculation on how cities and the hyper-liberal politics of California contribute to these issues.
I guess I don't see that awareness. A lot of the essay is just repeating that she finds most men to be lost and confused, through the framework of repeating a similar description of men in the guise of different 'types'. I suspect she herself has some inner sense of alienation that she wants men to solve for her through romantic relationship -- hence she finishes with a highly romanticized picture of a "whole" and psychologically fully healthy man who will be her happily ever after. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with that, this is one of the reasons we seek romance, even though it's somewhat unrealistic and you eventually learn that. But a lot of what we see in dating is projection or mirroring of our own inner states and concerns.
As a man I appaud her recognition of the troubles men face but I just didn't find this descriptively convincing. It did feel very much like a young person still on their quest.
This is a more accurate critique of the essay as well as a more accurate profiling of the author than you probably realize. Having read more of her follow-up comments, giving a few more details about herself, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment.
However, I think she's still a work in progress ("still on their quest") and I suspect she knows this. She did acknowledge in the essay how much she has had to grow into the version she currently is. But I'm not sure she's aware that the special affinity she feels for "the man who opts out" (the one I term The Nullified Man) is a reflection of who she used to be. In fact, I think her final paragraphs describing the redemption possible for this type is her unknowingly (or perhaps knowingly) describing her own redemptive arc.
[writer of the review here]
Goodness, you are an insightful reader! Yes, I certainly am still "on my quest", and yes, I do indeed feel deep kinship for "The Nullified Man", as you term them.
I was extremely sick for most of my teen years--couldn't walk, constant seizures, almost died. While most of my girl friends were blossoming into attractive young women, I was withering into a half-dead shell of a human in a wheelchair. Fate opted me out of the dating market against my will.
When I was nineteen, I got insanely lucky to find the correct diagnoses and combo of drugs that allowed me to suddenly live a pretty normal life. It was a massively confusing time. In the span of about two months, I went from being invisible and pitied to being an object of attention and attraction for the first time in my life. It took years to properly reprogram my brain on a wide variety of social interactions (and I still feel it's a work in progress at times).
So, yes, I will always feel immense empathy for men who feel locked out of dating. I know what it's like to look wistfully on from the sidelines, and I wouldn't wish that feeling of hopelessness and isolation on anyone.
After reading this particular response and the other one in this thread, I have even more reason to believe that you're way younger than I imagined. My adjusted guess is now something in the region of 24-25 years. If this is true, it's even more impressive what you have demonstrated through this essay!!! It's the difficult to just process the possibility that the mind, the heart, and the soul behind this article is only just a quarter of a century old.
Which leads me to my next speculation/question: you've revealed an important detail about your incapacitated teenage years (that must have been terribly hard to go through) and I can only conclude that the insight you channeled in that essay couldn't have come primarily from your experience. Yes, maybe the knowledge and certain factual specifics did come from your dating experience, but I doubt the wisdom came from them per se. Most people with longer and broader dating experiences don't often possess this level of psychological insight, moreso with respect to the opposite gender.
So here's my theory (subject to your correction): your teenage years may have been miserable, experientially impoverished, and filled with more teenage angst than normal. But I also suspect it was filled with adventures peopeled with literary characters, romantic ideals and disappointments, moments of deep reflections, and the cultivation of your powers of observation. To see without been seen, to watch without been watched, to watch others live while being sidelined is often a reality that hardly anyone would willingly choose, but for those who find themselves in this exact life situation are often possessed with an uncanny spirituality and equanimity that almost nothing in life could perturb much. I guess this is something your dates unwittingly perceive and make them start unburdening (it's a response to perceived superior strength of character and of spirit) to you. You have no idea (or so I'm guessing) how others experience you in certain situations which makes it difficult for you to speculate on why people share with you their deepest vulnerabilities.
So, to the extent that there's a question in what I've written, it is this: what was your cloistered incapacitated teenage years like, especially with respect to your inner life; I couldn't think it was all gloom and doom?
[writer of the review here]
>hence she finishes with a highly romanticized picture of a "whole" and psychologically fully healthy man who will be her happily ever after.
I just want to note that I'm not sure I believe in "psychologically fully healthy" people, and I don't think that should be the end goal for women or men. It strikes me as an impossible standard. Most "Men Who Are Whole" who I know and/or have dated have plenty of their own issues and traumas. But they've managed to develop a strong enough sense of identity and confidence to address those issues and become highly desirable people, despite their shortcomings.
I definitely would describe myself as a young person still on my quest. And frankly, I hope my quest never ends. I'm very different than I was five years ago, and I'd be disappointed in myself if I wasn't very different in five more years. Life is a wild ride, with endless interesting experiences and people to learn from. I don't want that learning to ever end. :)
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my writing and leave some thoughtful feedback!
I believe that being "whole"-- not having the problems of disorientation and alienation-- isn't the same thing as being virtuous.
Yeah I tap out on starting type 3 and skim forward until the epilogue. I have low expectations on any attempt on social categorizing at all so this doesn't really lower my overall score, but I endorse your observation.
I liked the post overall but I want to push back against the trend of reducing broad social trends to gender specific issues.
Most of the personal issues mentioned came down to problems with careers, problems with people's social lives or romantic problems. Which all seem like they're more affected by wider socio-economic forces like how the economy is structured, the issues around communities the Scott has posted about recently etc. than they're affected by gender norms. The basic facts of economic and social life are broadly similar regardless of gender
I'm sceptical changing attitudes around gender can affect how people experience those much.
If someone doesn't have professional or social problems it's probably because they just happen to be attractive, or have psychological traits that are better adapted to modern life than the average person's, or they're lucky and have a desirable job. Rather than because they did or didn't follow a script for being a man or whatever.
...romantic problems aren't gendered, but instead are economic? I notice I am confused. Would the issue be improved by raising class consciousness?
perhaps not that far, the leveling the playing field with welfare or ubi, reducing reliance on the car, and enabling policies (LVT, zoning reform) that enable densification and allow people to encounter other people in more casual scenarios might help.
Did you miss the part where over half of the people mentioned in this post have successful jobs, zero economic insecurity, and live in dense cities?
The decisions they made to get to that point still involved significant costs, though. If the Man With A Plan hadn't trivially rejected that early "starving artist" route, since (in a UBI context) it'd involve a lot less risk of literal starving, might have given him an earlier start on other important questions.
[writer of the review here]
>I want to push back against the trend of reducing broad social trends to gender specific issues.
I appreciate this mindset and know it comes from a good place. It was my own mindset for many years.
But ultimately the statistics show that men are struggling to a degree that women are not in many areas. Men are floundering when it comes to education, employment, drug addition, incarceration, being present for their children, suicide rates, etc. The numbers for men are drastically different from women.
I would firmly agree that a lot of the root causes of these issues have heavy overlap with the same issues women face. The economy, lack of community, city planning, and similar issues all have a massive impact here. But the way to address and recover from these issues--and the amount/types of resources and support available-- seem to vary quite drastically across genders.
Interventions that work really well for floundering girls often don't work at all for men. (The book "Of Boys and Men" by Richard Reeves does a fantastic job of exploring this issue in depth. Highly recommend.) We need to be looking more deeply at the question of "why aren't these interventions working" and try to work with young men to find interventions/frameworks/resources that *are* effective for them.
There is currently a loud outcry from men saying they lack purpose and motivation, and don't know what their role in society is. The reality is that "how to be a man" is a question that many (if not most) young men care about. Telling them to stop caring about it hasn't worked, and is only leading them into the arms of truly terrifying figures in the manosphere.
We can continue to tsk-tsk and tell them to not care about gender so much, but that clearly isn't working. Or we can provide them with similar resources women have been given: deep discussions about what it means to be X gender, and outspoken role models who display and celebrate various manifestations of that gender, and share their path to embracing a self-actualized life.