7 ms·

...how have things gotten objectively worse for young men?

charlchi 7y ago
If you think the male suicide rate and mass shootings have anything to do with some kind of "objectively worse" metric you're not thinking about this in the right way...
- mieseratte 7y ago
  Instead of telling folks that they’re wrong, how about you explain why.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  The problem with low-awareness is that it think's its high-awareness.
noobermin 7y ago
Men are half the population. Many men are poor, have lack of job opportunities, just like poor women. Identity politics that completely ignores economic conditions people face will always be flat and can't explain the depth of complexity different people in society face.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  What causes the much higher incidence of homelessness in males compared to females?
  - watwut 7y ago
    They are more likely to fit into risk factor profile: more likely to have mental disease. They are more likely to be veterans. More likely to be addicted addictions or disabled. Also more likely to be violent or aggressive and thus kicked from legit places to live. More likely to have criminal record. The whole "on average men take their aggression against others women again themselves" in this aspect hurt men more. Some of the above are related to each other, obviously.
    - belorn 7y ago
      So many myths. In order: "Overall rates of psychiatric disorder are almost identical for men and women" - https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/ https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/ "Women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder". - Anthony JC, Warner LA, Kessler RC. Comparative epidemiology of dependence on tobacco, alcohol, controlled substances, and inhalants "But when subsequent surveys asked who struck first, it turned out that women were as likely as men to initiate violence—a finding confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence" - https://web.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm https://web.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm The only wholy true points is that men tend to be more likely veterans, for which accounts for 10% of the homeless, and more likely criminals, but the majority of offenses for which they are arrested are for public intoxication, followed by theft/shoplifting, violation of city ordinances, and burglary. "The findings challenge the depiction of homeless men as serious predatory criminals, and suggest a number of theoretical and policy implications." - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3096817?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/3096817?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
      - watwut 7y ago
        1.) Interesting that you changed violence to intimate violence. As if there were equal number of women killing people (it is not) or being gang members (nope violent gangs are not dome kind of equality panacea). As if women were equally likely to get into fight in bars, clubs, schools you name it. Whether biological or social, men are more likely to be violent. And they are more likely to cause higher damage due to bigger strength. 2.) Crime record makes it harder to find housing and job and access social services. That includes shoplifting and other similar records. 3.) And of course, you use study that casts addiction so wide, that it is compeletely irrelevant. Smoking is not relevant addiction to homelessness. Here is study about substances - you used last sentence of paragraph, but it is preceeded by: Men are more likely than women to use almost all types of illicit drugs,13 and illicit drug use is more likely to result in emergency department visits or overdose deaths for men than for women. "Illicit" refers to use of illegal drugs, including marijuana (according to federal law) and misuse of prescription drugs. For most age groups, men have higher rates of use or dependence on illicit drugs and alcohol than do women. However, women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder. So like, totally.
MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
This was just in my Twitter feed, „Drug, Alcohol and Suicide Mortality in white non-Hispanics by Birth Cohort“: https://twitter.com/zachwahls/status/910282384297349120?s=21 https://twitter.com/zachwahls/status/910282384297349120?s=21
- dfcmt 7y ago
  What's the vertical axis? What's BA?
  - sct202 7y ago
    BA is if the person has a 4 year college degree. The vertical is deaths per 100k. It was sourced from page 49 of this: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/6_casedeaton.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/6_cased...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
iamben 7y ago
In many cases I don't think social media helps young men OR women at all. To summarise a discussion I had with a friend who has teenager kids recently - when we were growing up we had magazines telling us what was 'cool'. Music, movies, clothes. They appeared once a week or month. Television and film 'cool' was behind real life. The Daily Mail was a paper your parents read - that as odious as it may have been - didn't have to space to point out every young actress/model/instagrammer's beach cellulite. You might have been bullied at school for not wearing Nike sneakers, but you could buy _any_ Nike sneakers and largely escape attention. Now social media blasts kids with "this is what's cool" on an hourly basis. Not got the latest Off-White? Uncool. Jordan Mids? Uncool. Still wearing [brand here]? Uncool. On top of that, everyone promoted is wealthy, beautiful and photoshopped. And on top of that it's all insanely addictive. So not only are you told over and over you're behind with the latest trends, and not only are you made to feel over and over that you're not pretty/wealthy/happy/cultured/whatever enough, but you're addicted to seeing it. And then everyone has a platform to bully you for it 24 hours a day. It's not even like you have that 12 hour respite where you're not at school. I can't begin to imagine how as a fragile teenager this sort of thing would have affected me. Props to anyone young that keeps their head together. Anyway, just my 2c.
- pas 7y ago
  Couple it with the exaggerated standards for dating, which leads to lonely frustrated/depressed people. And for some reason it's even harder to make friends today. (Probably because people drift away from each other faster. Better global mobility, you can have a job anywhere, you can study anywhere, your work might include a lots of travel. You switch jobs faster than people used to. There are a lot more things to do even on a budget, so individual differences get an emphasis, but then those things to do don't provide with new friends. You can do yoga, hiking, biking, sailing, paragliding, and whatever for a few months then switch to the next, the years go by, and you haven't formed a lasting connection. Plus add the whole experience industry - you don't have to do the hiking with the local enthusiasts, you can simply pick a guided/organized event every week, and meet new people every week. And there are even more things to do online - which are again not the typical friends making venue.) Oh, and don't forget those beautiful echo chambers on the Internet. That helps to radicalize people. (Just go to a gun enthusiast site after any/each shooting and look at the comments. Then look at an anti-gun whatever site, maybe HufPo?)
bossybeagle 7y ago
When a young woman has trouble with life she's given sympathy and resources. When a young man has trouble he's told to stop being such a wimp. Not surprisingly some of them snap.
- stefco_ 7y ago
  Yeah. Men are still, to a huge extent, discouraged from sharing and expressing their emotions as much as women (since that behavior is seen as inherently feminine). People still make fun of guys for crying and other healthy ways of expressing distress. The "strong silent type" still seems to be many people's masculine ideal. This is exacerbated on hate-filled sites like 4chan and 8chan, where guys who express feelings nonviolently are regularly mocked as "soyboys" or whatever; putting that sort of rhetoric alongside racist propaganda is, as other people have commented, an effective way to promote racial resentment and, in turn, violent outbursts. The problem of discouraging men from expressing their emotions nonviolently is definitely not confined to these boards, however. I see tons of characters in media and people in real life who model the idea that anger or violence, while bad, are understandable ways for a man to express feelings (the same sentiment for women is much rarer). It might be bad that a man did something violent, but it doesn't undermine his very identity by eroding his masculinity in the same way that weeping and sobbing and being sensitive might. I can't count the number of times I saw guys punching walls in movies growing up, often in circumstances where their characters were really feeling sad or hopeless or hurt. Women in movies under the same circumstances would often cry or be consoled. Or to put it another way, in a movie scene with a man and woman under extreme stress in a room together, I've never seen the woman punching holes in her own walls while the man sits on the bed crying. There are tons of other examples of stress reactions that are usually modeled in media along gender lines in this same way. I think this stuff is self-fulfilling. Guys are discouraged from acknowledging difficult feelings except through stoicism or anger, and in turn people continue to associate that behavior with guys. When men on 8chan start buying into racist ideology and feeling like they can only express their distress through anger and violence, it seems inevitable that things like shootings will follow. The copycat effect with shootings that already happened only encourages it (see how this shooter cited the NZ shooter as inspiration). I think things are improving, but I think that until guys are trained to express a full spectrum of emotions openly and without shame, and people in general are acclimated to supporting and validating men's feelings, it's going to keep encouraging this sort of snapping behavior.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
It's very hard to find a partner nowadays. In the past, people dated within the local community, so women were limited to their local dating pool. With the advent of online dating, women can afford to be choosy and pick from guys all over the country, if not even all over the world. As a result, many men that would have found someone in the past are going to be lonely nowadays. Now, the obvious reply to that is "but online dating is for men too, look at all these guys meeting a different girl every day". This applies to a very small minority of men. The confident, attractive types with great bodies. An average woman will still get lots of attention on dating website and have a lot of guys to pick from, an average guy won't really get any attention on such websites.
- cdata 7y ago
  Self-confidence (or lack of it) is at least partially (some might say majorly) an artifact of upbringing and socialization. Women are more empowered to choose their own partners today than at other times in history, for sure. For much of human history, the privilege to choose one's partner was reserved for men (at times exclusively). You can certainly remark that today things are relatively worse for men (for some narrow definition of worse), but hopefully we can agree that it would be best if everyone enjoyed an equal opportunity to choose their partner regardless of gender.
  - solidsnack9000 7y ago
    For much of human history, the privilege to choose one's partner was reserved for men (at times exclusively). Realistically, no -- parents and family were far more determinative than individual men. The just-so story where men have been free for tens of thousands of years while women were in bondage doesn't hold up. Most people in the middle ages were serfs. Men mostly didn't choose their professions or have preferential access to education because pretty much everyone carried forward the life of their parents and education was not widely available. The "men were free and women were restricted" narrative, in the specifics, compares the rights and privileges of women 500 years ago with those of the men of the 1980s.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
tathougies 7y ago
There's a huge wage gap with young women outearning men. The number of poor young men is getting higher. Men are increasingly less educated relatively. https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/B03E1C0B-B635-456F-A3FE-2BC49AE1F56F https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/B03E1C0B-B635-456... Oh and literally everything is mens fault. Now actually I agree that a lot of this is individual mens faults but theres also something cultural and societal that we need to address as a society
- codysan 7y ago
  I think part of the problem here is when articles like that like to use titles such as: "Young women are getting richer, as young men get poorer- More millennial men are earning less, even with the gender pay gap in their favor, the U.S. Census Bureau reports" This isn't a men vs women thing. It's a young adult thing, and like you said it's something cultural and societal. The fact that young women are getting educated is a victory for everyone, but MarketWatch would rather use it as social justice bait.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    Thats not how I read it at all. It is of course great young women are being educated. However, if you women are more educated than young men then it is possible for the 'average years of education' stat to be going up while the corresponding stat for men is going down. It would be odd to say that 'young men are less educated than the average young person' because men and women essentially completely partition the space of persons. It is obvious if young men are less educated than the average young person that women would have to be more educated than them.
    - codysan 7y ago
      I just think coming at it from the angle that article did (re: the article title) is framing things the wrong way. The census report they used is more in line with what I think we're both saying here: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/demo/p20-579.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
gingabriska 7y ago
I want to post Reddit link here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW If you want to learn about young man's plight. While there is no problem in someone going their way but they are doing it a wrong way and some men are going to fall in wrong line of thinking.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> ...how have things gotten objectively worse for young men? "1 in 5 millennials are lonely and have ‘no friends’: survey" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606825
dang 7y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20605073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20605073 and marked it off-topic.

If you think the male suicide rate and mass shootings have anything to do with some kind of "objectively worse" metric you're not thinking about this in the right way...

mieseratte 7y ago
Instead of telling folks that they’re wrong, how about you explain why.
mikelyons 7y ago
The problem with low-awareness is that it think's its high-awareness.

noobermin 7y ago

Men are half the population. Many men are poor, have lack of job opportunities, just like poor women. Identity politics that completely ignores economic conditions people face will always be flat and can't explain the depth of complexity different people in society face.

mikelyons 7y ago
What causes the much higher incidence of homelessness in males compared to females?
- watwut 7y ago
  They are more likely to fit into risk factor profile: more likely to have mental disease. They are more likely to be veterans. More likely to be addicted addictions or disabled. Also more likely to be violent or aggressive and thus kicked from legit places to live. More likely to have criminal record. The whole "on average men take their aggression against others women again themselves" in this aspect hurt men more. Some of the above are related to each other, obviously.
  - belorn 7y ago
    So many myths. In order: "Overall rates of psychiatric disorder are almost identical for men and women" - https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/ https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/ "Women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder". - Anthony JC, Warner LA, Kessler RC. Comparative epidemiology of dependence on tobacco, alcohol, controlled substances, and inhalants "But when subsequent surveys asked who struck first, it turned out that women were as likely as men to initiate violence—a finding confirmed by more than 200 studies of intimate violence" - https://web.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm https://web.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm The only wholy true points is that men tend to be more likely veterans, for which accounts for 10% of the homeless, and more likely criminals, but the majority of offenses for which they are arrested are for public intoxication, followed by theft/shoplifting, violation of city ordinances, and burglary. "The findings challenge the depiction of homeless men as serious predatory criminals, and suggest a number of theoretical and policy implications." - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3096817?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/3096817?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
    - watwut 7y ago
      1.) Interesting that you changed violence to intimate violence. As if there were equal number of women killing people (it is not) or being gang members (nope violent gangs are not dome kind of equality panacea). As if women were equally likely to get into fight in bars, clubs, schools you name it. Whether biological or social, men are more likely to be violent. And they are more likely to cause higher damage due to bigger strength. 2.) Crime record makes it harder to find housing and job and access social services. That includes shoplifting and other similar records. 3.) And of course, you use study that casts addiction so wide, that it is compeletely irrelevant. Smoking is not relevant addiction to homelessness. Here is study about substances - you used last sentence of paragraph, but it is preceeded by: Men are more likely than women to use almost all types of illicit drugs,13 and illicit drug use is more likely to result in emergency department visits or overdose deaths for men than for women. "Illicit" refers to use of illegal drugs, including marijuana (according to federal law) and misuse of prescription drugs. For most age groups, men have higher rates of use or dependence on illicit drugs and alcohol than do women. However, women are just as likely as men to develop a substance use disorder. So like, totally.

MrBuddyCasino 7y ago

This was just in my Twitter feed, „Drug, Alcohol and Suicide Mortality in white non-Hispanics by Birth Cohort“: https://twitter.com/zachwahls/status/910282384297349120?s=21 https://twitter.com/zachwahls/status/910282384297349120?s=21

dfcmt 7y ago
What's the vertical axis? What's BA?
- sct202 7y ago
  BA is if the person has a 4 year college degree. The vertical is deaths per 100k. It was sourced from page 49 of this: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/6_casedeaton.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/6_cased...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

iamben 7y ago

In many cases I don't think social media helps young men OR women at all. To summarise a discussion I had with a friend who has teenager kids recently - when we were growing up we had magazines telling us what was 'cool'. Music, movies, clothes. They appeared once a week or month. Television and film 'cool' was behind real life. The Daily Mail was a paper your parents read - that as odious as it may have been - didn't have to space to point out every young actress/model/instagrammer's beach cellulite. You might have been bullied at school for not wearing Nike sneakers, but you could buy _any_ Nike sneakers and largely escape attention. Now social media blasts kids with "this is what's cool" on an hourly basis. Not got the latest Off-White? Uncool. Jordan Mids? Uncool. Still wearing [brand here]? Uncool. On top of that, everyone promoted is wealthy, beautiful and photoshopped. And on top of that it's all insanely addictive. So not only are you told over and over you're behind with the latest trends, and not only are you made to feel over and over that you're not pretty/wealthy/happy/cultured/whatever enough, but you're addicted to seeing it. And then everyone has a platform to bully you for it 24 hours a day. It's not even like you have that 12 hour respite where you're not at school. I can't begin to imagine how as a fragile teenager this sort of thing would have affected me. Props to anyone young that keeps their head together. Anyway, just my 2c.

pas 7y ago
Couple it with the exaggerated standards for dating, which leads to lonely frustrated/depressed people. And for some reason it's even harder to make friends today. (Probably because people drift away from each other faster. Better global mobility, you can have a job anywhere, you can study anywhere, your work might include a lots of travel. You switch jobs faster than people used to. There are a lot more things to do even on a budget, so individual differences get an emphasis, but then those things to do don't provide with new friends. You can do yoga, hiking, biking, sailing, paragliding, and whatever for a few months then switch to the next, the years go by, and you haven't formed a lasting connection. Plus add the whole experience industry - you don't have to do the hiking with the local enthusiasts, you can simply pick a guided/organized event every week, and meet new people every week. And there are even more things to do online - which are again not the typical friends making venue.) Oh, and don't forget those beautiful echo chambers on the Internet. That helps to radicalize people. (Just go to a gun enthusiast site after any/each shooting and look at the comments. Then look at an anti-gun whatever site, maybe HufPo?)

bossybeagle 7y ago

When a young woman has trouble with life she's given sympathy and resources. When a young man has trouble he's told to stop being such a wimp. Not surprisingly some of them snap.

stefco_ 7y ago
Yeah. Men are still, to a huge extent, discouraged from sharing and expressing their emotions as much as women (since that behavior is seen as inherently feminine). People still make fun of guys for crying and other healthy ways of expressing distress. The "strong silent type" still seems to be many people's masculine ideal. This is exacerbated on hate-filled sites like 4chan and 8chan, where guys who express feelings nonviolently are regularly mocked as "soyboys" or whatever; putting that sort of rhetoric alongside racist propaganda is, as other people have commented, an effective way to promote racial resentment and, in turn, violent outbursts. The problem of discouraging men from expressing their emotions nonviolently is definitely not confined to these boards, however. I see tons of characters in media and people in real life who model the idea that anger or violence, while bad, are understandable ways for a man to express feelings (the same sentiment for women is much rarer). It might be bad that a man did something violent, but it doesn't undermine his very identity by eroding his masculinity in the same way that weeping and sobbing and being sensitive might. I can't count the number of times I saw guys punching walls in movies growing up, often in circumstances where their characters were really feeling sad or hopeless or hurt. Women in movies under the same circumstances would often cry or be consoled. Or to put it another way, in a movie scene with a man and woman under extreme stress in a room together, I've never seen the woman punching holes in her own walls while the man sits on the bed crying. There are tons of other examples of stress reactions that are usually modeled in media along gender lines in this same way. I think this stuff is self-fulfilling. Guys are discouraged from acknowledging difficult feelings except through stoicism or anger, and in turn people continue to associate that behavior with guys. When men on 8chan start buying into racist ideology and feeling like they can only express their distress through anger and violence, it seems inevitable that things like shootings will follow. The copycat effect with shootings that already happened only encourages it (see how this shooter cited the NZ shooter as inspiration). I think things are improving, but I think that until guys are trained to express a full spectrum of emotions openly and without shame, and people in general are acclimated to supporting and validating men's feelings, it's going to keep encouraging this sort of snapping behavior.

skocznymroczny 7y ago

It's very hard to find a partner nowadays. In the past, people dated within the local community, so women were limited to their local dating pool. With the advent of online dating, women can afford to be choosy and pick from guys all over the country, if not even all over the world. As a result, many men that would have found someone in the past are going to be lonely nowadays. Now, the obvious reply to that is "but online dating is for men too, look at all these guys meeting a different girl every day". This applies to a very small minority of men. The confident, attractive types with great bodies. An average woman will still get lots of attention on dating website and have a lot of guys to pick from, an average guy won't really get any attention on such websites.

cdata 7y ago
Self-confidence (or lack of it) is at least partially (some might say majorly) an artifact of upbringing and socialization. Women are more empowered to choose their own partners today than at other times in history, for sure. For much of human history, the privilege to choose one's partner was reserved for men (at times exclusively). You can certainly remark that today things are relatively worse for men (for some narrow definition of worse), but hopefully we can agree that it would be best if everyone enjoyed an equal opportunity to choose their partner regardless of gender.
- solidsnack9000 7y ago
  For much of human history, the privilege to choose one's partner was reserved for men (at times exclusively). Realistically, no -- parents and family were far more determinative than individual men. The just-so story where men have been free for tens of thousands of years while women were in bondage doesn't hold up. Most people in the middle ages were serfs. Men mostly didn't choose their professions or have preferential access to education because pretty much everyone carried forward the life of their parents and education was not widely available. The "men were free and women were restricted" narrative, in the specifics, compares the rights and privileges of women 500 years ago with those of the men of the 1980s.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

tathougies 7y ago

There's a huge wage gap with young women outearning men. The number of poor young men is getting higher. Men are increasingly less educated relatively. https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/B03E1C0B-B635-456F-A3FE-2BC49AE1F56F https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/B03E1C0B-B635-456... Oh and literally everything is mens fault. Now actually I agree that a lot of this is individual mens faults but theres also something cultural and societal that we need to address as a society

codysan 7y ago
I think part of the problem here is when articles like that like to use titles such as: "Young women are getting richer, as young men get poorer- More millennial men are earning less, even with the gender pay gap in their favor, the U.S. Census Bureau reports" This isn't a men vs women thing. It's a young adult thing, and like you said it's something cultural and societal. The fact that young women are getting educated is a victory for everyone, but MarketWatch would rather use it as social justice bait.
- tathougies 7y ago
  Thats not how I read it at all. It is of course great young women are being educated. However, if you women are more educated than young men then it is possible for the 'average years of education' stat to be going up while the corresponding stat for men is going down. It would be odd to say that 'young men are less educated than the average young person' because men and women essentially completely partition the space of persons. It is obvious if young men are less educated than the average young person that women would have to be more educated than them.
  - codysan 7y ago
    I just think coming at it from the angle that article did (re: the article title) is framing things the wrong way. The census report they used is more in line with what I think we're both saying here: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2017/demo/p20-579.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

gingabriska 7y ago

I want to post Reddit link here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW https://www.reddit.com/r/MGTOW If you want to learn about young man's plight. While there is no problem in someone going their way but they are doing it a wrong way and some men are going to fall in wrong line of thinking.

ThrowawayR2 7y ago

> ...how have things gotten objectively worse for young men? "1 in 5 millennials are lonely and have ‘no friends’: survey" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606825

dang 7y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20605073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20605073 and marked it off-topic.