12 ms·

Americans are more worried about their sons than their daughters

139 points by johntfella 6y ago

watwut 6y ago
Tl;dr; the research was about whether people are worried about boys/girls in the United States becoming successful adults. This might to do with parents seeing their own sons as less resilient then their own daughters - which is another finding in the article.
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op03 6y ago
I really worry about my cat. Not that I need him to be a successful cat or anything. There are so many issues these days and I just don't want him to suffer or struggle too much.
- deleted 6y ago
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ponker 6y ago
Why is this surprising? Sons are more likely than daughters to die a violent death, commit suicide, die young from injury, go to prison, or become homeless.
- xenihn 6y ago
  It's not surprising at all. Life in the United States is, on average, better for young women than it is for young men. They simply have more opportunity. I don't have any resentment over it. I'm not even young anymore (let's go ahead and cap it at 26 years old, using the limit for insurance under your parents), but if I was, I wouldn't be resentful. It just is what it is. I am somewhat annoyed by people who refuse to admit it, though. It's not strictly better, but given a choice and typical circumstances, I know which one I would take.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Don't forget that if you bring any of this up most people will try to silence you. Your comment is already grey on HN. In the past men formed brotherhoods to enable them to do great things. Women will never support men, it's simply not in their nature. Speak to any woman and they're not even aware of men below them in society and disgusted by more than half of men. This is where their feeling of inequality comes from. But men now are not looking after each other. We are more divided than ever. Expected to stop our manly activities and forced into a feminine world from the beginning. If you divide men then huge inequality is inevitable. All women are born with the ability to reproduce. Men are born with nothing. Feminism is a return to the jungle where alpha males kill each other on their way to the top and rule over all other males, forcing them into a lonely existence. We have been seeing this for years already. Nobody benefits from this in the long run, but in the short run it's all benefitting that top 1% of men in society. Women are just along for the ride and no amount of feminism or "equality" will make them any more or less happy.
  - Hammershaft 6y ago
    I'm not going to tackle this entire comment, but: > "Women will never support men, it's simply not in their nature. Speak to any woman and they're not even aware of men below them in society and disgusted by more than half of men." This seems like a hugely generalized characterization. Without broad supporting evidence it is more likely this is a reflection of your personal perception of women then an accurate characterization of women as a whole.
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    - globular-toast 6y ago
      There's so much evidence for it you have to be intentionally blind to miss it. - Women consider ~80% of men to be below average: https://web.archive.org/web/20131214162458/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131214162458/http://blog.okcup... - a man of average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females (0.87%) https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... - 70% of all divorces are initiated by women: https://www.asanet.org/press-center/press-releases/women-more-likely-men-initiate-divorces-not-non-marital-breakups https://www.asanet.org/press-center/press-releases/women-mor... - Among college-educated couples, the percentage of divorces initiated by women is approximately 90% https://www.themodernman.com/blog/are-college-educated-women-bad-wife-material.html https://www.themodernman.com/blog/are-college-educated-women... - Virtually all women believe in the "pay gap" despite statistics showing it doesn't exist. Where do you think this belief comes from? From their point of view, the only men they care about all earn more than them.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  Personally, I'm more worried about the increasingly anti-masculine culture gripping our country. As a man, I feel best and most fulfilled when I embrace my masculine side. Young men, especially adolescents, are shamed for doing so.
  - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    I'm unclear what you mean by anti-masculine and masculine side. Can you talk about that a bit more?
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    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      It's hard to describe. I have a competitive energy that drives stereotypically masculine behavior. When it was unfocused and untrained, it led to aggression and hypersexuality. When it's focused, it leads to goal- and status-oriented behavior. When I say anti-masculine, I mean that it seems like society nowadays just seems to try to suppress this energy in boys. Rambunctiousness is shamed and considered ADHD. Competitiveness is looked down upon, replaced instead with cooperation. There was a time when I tried to suppress this side of myself, but it just made me feel bad. Much of my transition to adulthood involved learning how to manage this masculine energy.
    - milchek 6y ago
      Not OP, but I think what OP is referring to is the whole 'men are trash' narrative that we see in media and social media sometimes. The Gillette ad comes to mind as, to me at least, it legitimises and maybe even exaggerates how many males are toxic or have issues - to the point where a razor brand feels they need to step in and tell all men, "hey guys, be better." (could you imagine the backlash if a tampon brand did something like this to females?) Let's be critical about this, maybe those particularly toxic males are actually exhibiting tendencies that are more to do with some sort of sociopathy rather than it being their a product purely of their gender? On top of this, men are also given a lot of conflicting messaging - particularly as far as media and pop culture is concerned - on how they should behave. Couple this with the usual stats about the troubles men face and I can understand why parents are worried.
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FreshFries 6y ago
Father of 4 here: I am too. For me the difficulty for a boy starts at school where today (and rightly so) boyish behaviour (fighting, being rough etc.) is not tolerated and dealt with in rather feminin ways (not so rightly). Schools lacking male teachers does not help either. This trend is visible all over society as well. Where I grew up with semi regular bar fights, today every physical alteration involves the police. Not saying "the old days where better" at all. Just that society has changed to honour the feminine treats much more then the male treats, so I too worry more about the success of my son then about the success of my three daughters (who are in effect, socially & financially significantly better off, although slightly younger).
- dlp211 6y ago
  What does physical violence have to do with the success of your son?
  - watwut 6y ago
    This will sound tongue in cheek, but presumably, if a boy is allowed to beat other boys, then he feels better about school. I had the "opportunity" to watch how fighting and being rough played out in class where my daughter was. There were like two boys who attacked other boys, verbally or physically. Majority of boys were unhappy about the situation, did not liked being insulted or pushed or being attacked. Their parents complained about issue, because their boys stopped liking going to school for that reason. I really don't think the solution should be "boys are boys and therefore more aggressive one should be allowed to attack other boys". That literally harms boys that done nothing wrong. The thing about "boys fighting among themselves" is that pretty often, it is not consensual, it is one boy attacking another.
    - xd 6y ago
      Sounds like they were bullying the other kids. I've never been a fan of violence but as a kid I loved playing rough, especially wrestling and these days enjoy a bit of a judo; but have zero desire to get into a pub brawl. When it comes to kids I think people confuse unwanted and mutual roughhousing.
0xy 6y ago
More females go to the university these days, and according to OECD reports girls received higher marks than boys for identical work (the deck is stacked against boys from the outset). [1] Then they're more likely to go to jail and more likely to get a higher sentence for an identical crime. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672 https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672
- nxc18 6y ago
  If you read the article the suggestion is that grading for classes includes things like not misbehaving, following the rules, and paying attention to the parameters of the rules. This all sounds like a cultural issue of how we socialize boys. Why is it just expected that boys can’t pay attention or not break out into fist fights constantly? Reading that article it sounds like boys are graded fairly when you consider that it’s not just doing the work that counts, but doing the right work, the right way, at the right time, while not being an asshole. I don’t know why society bakes in the idea that boys should be jerks by default, but that’s probably a separate conversation. Ability to get along with a team is crucial in modern workplaces just as it is in the classroom.
  - damnencryption 6y ago
    I have observed the same but I don't get why we treat kids as slave labourers in school where they need permission to drink water, go to washroom or speak up and have mandatory work they can't refuse.
    - watwut 6y ago
      It is fascinating, because I remember conservative objections to feminization of schools being that women are too soft and wont be able to demand enough discipline. Which turned into women are too strict in demanding discipline. I am inclined to agree with proposals to give kids more space for running around and generally using their energy. But then again, the test obseesed system which sees free time for kids as "wasting time" and "being just childcare" is enforced by politicians rather then something that school teachers themselves wanted.
globular-toast 6y ago
Well they should be worried about their daughters too. Being a "successful" single woman is not a fulfilling path for the vast majority of women [1]. Most of them will want children and a physical human male [0] to care for them, not the government. Feminism is equal opportunity. It's bad for everyone. [0] I initially wrote a trigger word here, "real man". [1] Here's a top HN article from a "successful woman" showing how unhappy it makes them: https://tracy.posthaven.com/reflections-on-being-a-female-founder https://tracy.posthaven.com/reflections-on-being-a-female-fo...
- rimliu 6y ago
  I have never seen the definition of the "real man", let alone an explanation what makes him "real" and the other men not real.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Real as in not the government. A real person who can hug you and stroke your hair.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  What about all those men who cannot reach your ideal of what a "real man" should be? Should we worry about them or dismiss them as unadapted to the society norm du jour? There will always be people who don't fit. Nerdy types were losers a few years ago; now macho types are. The word "progress" is quite insidius. It seems to imply there is a direction where "better" is located and we're heading towards it. Instead we're relentlessly and half-blindly exploring the vast multidimensional space of possibility of the human condition. And this walk happens at different time-scales which are hard to fit in our everyday experience.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Please read my edit. I do not mean Real Man(TM) in that sense. I never use those two words as a fixed term, they just accidentally ended up together in my comment.
ralusek 6y ago
It's interesting that left leaning people are worried less about boys in general, but when it comes to their own sons, are more worried about boys. I suspect that this has something to do with gender politics, which most prominently falls within the sphere of the left wing, predominantly focusing on issues affecting women. It makes sense that if you're tuned into spheres primarily amplifying issues impacting women, and not men, that you would assume that your own son's issues aren't necessarily representative of the population at large. Over 60% of college graduates are women, and up until the age that many women choose to have a family (early 30s), women actually out-earn men. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but certain models in our collective understanding of society need to be more cognizant of these facts, among others. People that speak about the problems with the way we conceptualize gender issues, people like Warren Farrell, Karen Straughan, Janice Fiamengo, and Christina Hoff-Sommers, actually face an embarrassing amount of vitriol from institutions, when invited to speak on these topics.
- jimmygrapes 6y ago
  I listen to NPR a lot while driving. For several years now, I have been keeping a sort of mental rally of the topics discussed, after noticing a trend. At least 9 out of 10 segments (other than news or programs like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me) are about women, black, or homosexual success/suffering. For a straight white male there is only education of others; there is no real sense of sympathy, only empathy. I wonder what effects this may have in the long term.
  - distant_hat 6y ago
    The audience of NPR is fairly small, there's a lot of other channels that cater to white males.
    - ikt 6y ago
      The same is for the ABC in Australia and BBC in the UK. His comment resonated strongly with me.
berryworm 6y ago
It's not difficult to "succeed" as a woman. Sure if you want a fancy career and so on, it is difficult. But you can always fall back to simply having children and letting somebody else take care of you. Even if you flunk all your exams and job interviews, you can still find somebody to get you pregnant. Men, on the other hand, have to succeed. Nobody else will take care of them if they fail, and they won't have the option for children or a family as easily (some chaos monkeys exist, but still). Even if they succeed at having a career or family, both can be taken away from them at a whim, no matter what they do. That's mostly a result of biology (and feminist laws), to the point that daughters are more likely to be born in times of crisis (nature playing it safe). I'm surprised the article even speculates about complicated reasons for why people might worry more about their sons than their daughters.
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JacobSuperslav 6y ago
i was just about to have another kid recently. to be honest, my thoughts were: please let it be a girl. like some other people mentioned - i also grew up around bar fights, drugs, football fans, etc. as a parent, i can only influence the kid to a certain degree. i believe most of the work is done by the environment, school, society. i just feel there's a higher chance for a boy to become an aggressive/pathological individual and hurt other people, because girls are not exposed to as much bullshit and toxicity.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  >because girls are not exposed to as much bullshit and toxicity Based on most people I know with girls, teenagers or pre-teens, as men we are no where near ready for the absolute onslaught of female bullshit and psychological terror girls will inflict on each other (and other women in general, including their mothers). Boys apparently are less bad, sure many of them will get into trouble, but it's manageable. Most just turns goofy for 10 years.
  - damnencryption 6y ago
    I think boys in general are just too unaware of subtle differences in status, face, clothes, words, etc. That makes huge difference in how you converse and behave with each other. Generic bad word insult is probably not going to affect me even if targeted. I am not going to remember it but I have noticed women do and for a long time even if minor or as a joke. My female cousin had a journal where she entered things about people and scored them.
  - JacobSuperslav 6y ago
    I'd say that you're right, but in the end the outcome is there's a high chance of a girl becoming a person that gets hurt but is more or less empathetic to others, and boys becoming aggressive and hurting others. Just my subjective opinion that I came to after looking at kids growing up where I live(Spain). I'm sure it varies a lot based on where you are too. We still have a lot of thus "machismo" thing going on here.
- milchek 6y ago
zapdrive 6y ago
Rightfully so. The gynocentric society that we live in provides much more opportunities and privileges to young girls as compared to young boys. Eg: - There is a wage gap in favor of women for people younger than 30, that absolutely no one talks about. - Young men are more likely to be victims of false accusations, because women are never reprimanded for falsely accusing anyone. - Men get longer sentences for similar crimes as compared to women. - Young men who want to start families are in tough luck because more and more women do not want to bear children until early to late thirties.
- ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 6y ago
  Men are more likely to be victims of sexual abuse by women that goes politically unacknowledged as well. The numbers [1] are actually quite astonishing if you look at them: [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-victimization-by-women-is-more-common-than-previously-known/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-victimizat...
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  >- Young men are more likely to be victims of false accusations, because women are never reprimanded for falsely accusing anyone. If we were to compare this statistic honestly with what women experience, we'd find that women experience sexual assault at a much higher rate than men are falsely accused of it. It's hard for me to see this as a 'privilege' we afford "young women". >because more and more women do not want to bear children until early to late thirties. Why is "tough luck" always a bad thing? Why did you list this as a 'privilege' that women have when it's just a case of exercising reproductive agency? I'm sure we can name a myriad of things women also look for in relationships but don't get.
  - michaelscott 6y ago
    > If we were to compare this statistic honestly with what women experience, we'd find that women experience sexual assault at a much higher rate than men are falsely accused of it. It's hard for me to see this as a 'privilege' we afford "young women". This is a related, but separate problem. I'm not personally a fan of Injustice Olympics so I'm not going to compare the two and see which is worse; they're both terrible and they both need to be solved (as much as any such societal problems can be "solved"), but OP was specifically referring to false accusations against men which, granted, are asymmetrically punished. Consider the punishment a man receives when he is found to have sexually harassed a woman (both societally and legally) vs. the punishment a woman receives when she is discovered to have falsely accused someone (again, both societally and legally).
getlawgdon 6y ago
Come on. From Brookings, a think tank known weill for its conservative ideology. This concept ("fear for boys) is also framed as fear for white boys" by other conservatives, and both are exponents of a core radical conservative bogeyman: "the growing extinction of the white man."
- ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 6y ago
  I'm not going to stop caring about issues faced by boys just because unsavory people try to exploit them. Bonus: Conservatives would have a harder time exploiting those issues if we fixed the issues to start with.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > From Brookings, a think tank known weill for its conservative ideology. Not really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Institution
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > From Brookings, a think tank known weill for its conservative ideology. Brookings is a center-right neoliberal think tank, aligned with the currently-dominant faction of the Democratic Party. It is economically conservative, but usually not known for being socially conservative. Indeed, the direct conclusion presented by the piece is more in line with liberal (even progressive) than conservative social thought, invoking intersectionality fairly explicitly.
- rbecker 6y ago
  It must be very convenient to be able to dismiss research done by anyone that might be remotely interested in publishing findings you dislike. When a left-leaning institution publishes findings that broadly align with the left, do you also dismiss them?
damnencryption 6y ago
Here's a theory to explain this. Older couples birth more daughters so as a result of their maturity and life experiences, they are less worried. For couples with both daughters and sons, it might be due to biological differences in progress in maturity and resilience in kids. Girls are more mature at age 10-11 than boys and the trends remain the same till early adulthood.
adaml_623 6y ago
I worry about any survey that excludes results: "We do not show results for respondents who describe themselves as “moderate” or “not sure.” Is there any chance that this brookings institute has an agenda to push the idea of the liberal vs conservative totally polarised society?
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I don't know this institute but I don't see why this would be the case as the result points as both liberals and conservatives being more worried about their sons than their daughters.
fit2rule 6y ago
Ctrl-F: "War" Well, this is a useless article, then. America is a war-fighting nation. Any discussion of the 'fate of our children' which doesn't account for America's extravagant war industry, is incomplete. Men are being sent off to fight wars. That percolates through all strata.
pubby 6y ago
My observation is that in the adult business world, masculine traits can be advantageous. But before that, in schooling and such, masculine traits have few benefits outside of sports, and are frequently discouraged and suppressed. This causes dissonance, where men are being raised to be gentle, only to reach adulthood and realize that male privilege as advertised does not benefit them. Women, especially attractive women, seem to receive more support, attention, and sympathy than men. In general, they have less pressure to succeed, and more options to fall back on. I suspect this leads to an easier transition from teenager to adult, though this advantage fades as they age, and they deal with unfair disadvantages otherwise. As an aside, I'll mention that in recent years the internet has greatly magnified the amount of attention young women receive. Few talk about it, but they should, for it's the biggest change to gender differences in years.
known 6y ago
"You don't have to be famous; You just have to make your parents proud of you" --Meryl Streep
taylodl 6y ago
I have two daughters and a son aged 18-24. My son is 24 and is working on his Ph.D. in computer science, so he's doing alright. But my wife and I worried about him the most while he was growing up. For starters, an alarmingly high number of his friends and classmates were diagnosed with ADHD and so were drugged. Boys need more physical engagement - especially when they're younger. Yet schools are reducing time for recess. I taught my kids to take care of their own business and not tattle so long as: nobody was seriously hurt (no blood), no one was in immediate danger, and property wasn't being destroyed. Those aren't the rules they use at school. Kids continually tell on one another to try to get each other in trouble. Boys tend to be more "ornery" and so tend to get in trouble a lot. This creates an atmosphere where boys are viewed as being "just bad." Sadly, boys learn that girls are "sneaky." That has its own issues but that's for another post. Bullies are another matter. I was raised to not start fights but finish them. I raised my son the same way. That's not AT ALL how schools work. They do nothing about bullies. Their "no tolerance" policies for bullies are laughable because they don't do anything about bullies. Teachers have told me their hands are tied. They know who the bullies are, but now there's such a stigma with being branded a "bully" the administrators won't let them do anything about it. Eventually the bully will get their just reward and their parents will raise holy hell with the school and the tables get reversed: the bully is the victim. It's disgusting. I've seen that happen time and time and time again. I did see a teacher once stand up to the bully's parents and the school administrators and inform them the bully was, in fact, a bully and learned an important lesson in life. Thank goodness she had a paper trail tracking parents' complaints and had the backing of all the other parents. As part of all this is parents today won't accept that their children aren't perfect little angels. I knew my kids weren't perfect - they're kids. Their teachers appreciated that they could work with my wife and I if they were having issues. They lamented that so many parents simply wouldn't accept that their children weren't perfect and refused to work with teachers to rectify a situation. Finally, when my son went to college he had to contend with all the so-called Social Justice Warriors blaming all men, especially white men, for all the world's ills. Never mind that my son and his friends had nothing to do with making the world what it is - just like the SJWs. The sad irony is in their eagerness to blame these young men for all the world's problems they were undermining what I was teaching him about how we came to be in the mess we're in and what steps we can take to get out. I was trying to raise my son to be a good man and the SJWs were making it clear that their world view didn't include the concept of a "good man."I could go on and on and on regarding this issue, but that would be for another post. My daughters? They never had any of these problems. None. Obviously things turned out okay and grad school has been completely different for my son than undergraduate school but - the whole point is my wife and I worried about him a lot more than we ever worried about our daughters. The good news? Yes, you're going to worry more about your sons. That's just a fact of the times in which we're living. Raising kids has never been easy and raising sons has become harder. My advice is to persevere and raise them to be a good man: a man who respects all people regardless of sex, race, religion, or sexual orientation; a man who knows it takes many different perspectives to solve today's problems. It's not easy and it never has been - but the rewards are worth it!
LatteLazy 6y ago
Go look at outcomes and you can see why.
notJim 6y ago
What's striking in this thread is the equation of masculine toughness with unhealthy things like getting in bar fights and doing drugs. Reading the report, men think their sons are less tough than their daughters. Putting these two together suggests that the way we define toughness for men in anti-social ways may be the problem. Perhaps we need to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy ways of building toughness, and seek healthy ways for men/boys to build toughness. As one example, I (a man) have never been in a fight, but I have found that challenging myself physically, and going camping have built toughness for me. Neither of those things required me to hurt myself or other people. There is something deeply toxic to me about a definition of toughness that requires men to hurt others, or to hurt themselves.
milchek 6y ago
Not an American, but I do agree and am seeing a perhaps a 'knee jerk' reaction in society where we've neglected girls for so long that now the pendulum has swung the other way very quickly. Think of all the initiatives to get girls into STEM, to give them positive role models, to enrich their lives, to give them more heros and icons in media (consider every hero in recent CGI and cartoon films). We, humans, do this a lot. We see something wrong, and we overcorrect. So, what happens then is that boys start to get left behind again. I think we're going to need to correct the correction in some way down the road to ensure we really have balance and equality. I have a daughter and son, I'd love for them to grow up in a world where they have equal opportunity to live lives that are meaningful to them.
octokatt 6y ago
I forgot how much I hate the comments section of any mention of gender on Hacker News.
notaspecialist 6y ago
26 pages of comments and all of you don't get it. You don't get the point of it now, the why and only two of you actually see a part of the coming storm.

139 points by johntfella 6y ago

Tl;dr; the research was about whether people are worried about boys/girls in the United States becoming successful adults. This might to do with parents seeing their own sons as less resilient then their own daughters - which is another finding in the article.

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op03 6y ago

I really worry about my cat. Not that I need him to be a successful cat or anything. There are so many issues these days and I just don't want him to suffer or struggle too much.

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ponker 6y ago

Why is this surprising? Sons are more likely than daughters to die a violent death, commit suicide, die young from injury, go to prison, or become homeless.

xenihn 6y ago
It's not surprising at all. Life in the United States is, on average, better for young women than it is for young men. They simply have more opportunity. I don't have any resentment over it. I'm not even young anymore (let's go ahead and cap it at 26 years old, using the limit for insurance under your parents), but if I was, I wouldn't be resentful. It just is what it is. I am somewhat annoyed by people who refuse to admit it, though. It's not strictly better, but given a choice and typical circumstances, I know which one I would take.
globular-toast 6y ago
Don't forget that if you bring any of this up most people will try to silence you. Your comment is already grey on HN. In the past men formed brotherhoods to enable them to do great things. Women will never support men, it's simply not in their nature. Speak to any woman and they're not even aware of men below them in society and disgusted by more than half of men. This is where their feeling of inequality comes from. But men now are not looking after each other. We are more divided than ever. Expected to stop our manly activities and forced into a feminine world from the beginning. If you divide men then huge inequality is inevitable. All women are born with the ability to reproduce. Men are born with nothing. Feminism is a return to the jungle where alpha males kill each other on their way to the top and rule over all other males, forcing them into a lonely existence. We have been seeing this for years already. Nobody benefits from this in the long run, but in the short run it's all benefitting that top 1% of men in society. Women are just along for the ride and no amount of feminism or "equality" will make them any more or less happy.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  I'm not going to tackle this entire comment, but: > "Women will never support men, it's simply not in their nature. Speak to any woman and they're not even aware of men below them in society and disgusted by more than half of men." This seems like a hugely generalized characterization. Without broad supporting evidence it is more likely this is a reflection of your personal perception of women then an accurate characterization of women as a whole.
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  - globular-toast 6y ago
    There's so much evidence for it you have to be intentionally blind to miss it. - Women consider ~80% of men to be below average: https://web.archive.org/web/20131214162458/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131214162458/http://blog.okcup... - a man of average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females (0.87%) https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... - 70% of all divorces are initiated by women: https://www.asanet.org/press-center/press-releases/women-more-likely-men-initiate-divorces-not-non-marital-breakups https://www.asanet.org/press-center/press-releases/women-mor... - Among college-educated couples, the percentage of divorces initiated by women is approximately 90% https://www.themodernman.com/blog/are-college-educated-women-bad-wife-material.html https://www.themodernman.com/blog/are-college-educated-women... - Virtually all women believe in the "pay gap" despite statistics showing it doesn't exist. Where do you think this belief comes from? From their point of view, the only men they care about all earn more than them.
TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
Personally, I'm more worried about the increasingly anti-masculine culture gripping our country. As a man, I feel best and most fulfilled when I embrace my masculine side. Young men, especially adolescents, are shamed for doing so.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  I'm unclear what you mean by anti-masculine and masculine side. Can you talk about that a bit more?
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  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    It's hard to describe. I have a competitive energy that drives stereotypically masculine behavior. When it was unfocused and untrained, it led to aggression and hypersexuality. When it's focused, it leads to goal- and status-oriented behavior. When I say anti-masculine, I mean that it seems like society nowadays just seems to try to suppress this energy in boys. Rambunctiousness is shamed and considered ADHD. Competitiveness is looked down upon, replaced instead with cooperation. There was a time when I tried to suppress this side of myself, but it just made me feel bad. Much of my transition to adulthood involved learning how to manage this masculine energy.
  - milchek 6y ago
    Not OP, but I think what OP is referring to is the whole 'men are trash' narrative that we see in media and social media sometimes. The Gillette ad comes to mind as, to me at least, it legitimises and maybe even exaggerates how many males are toxic or have issues - to the point where a razor brand feels they need to step in and tell all men, "hey guys, be better." (could you imagine the backlash if a tampon brand did something like this to females?) Let's be critical about this, maybe those particularly toxic males are actually exhibiting tendencies that are more to do with some sort of sociopathy rather than it being their a product purely of their gender? On top of this, men are also given a lot of conflicting messaging - particularly as far as media and pop culture is concerned - on how they should behave. Couple this with the usual stats about the troubles men face and I can understand why parents are worried.

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FreshFries 6y ago

Father of 4 here: I am too. For me the difficulty for a boy starts at school where today (and rightly so) boyish behaviour (fighting, being rough etc.) is not tolerated and dealt with in rather feminin ways (not so rightly). Schools lacking male teachers does not help either. This trend is visible all over society as well. Where I grew up with semi regular bar fights, today every physical alteration involves the police. Not saying "the old days where better" at all. Just that society has changed to honour the feminine treats much more then the male treats, so I too worry more about the success of my son then about the success of my three daughters (who are in effect, socially & financially significantly better off, although slightly younger).

dlp211 6y ago
What does physical violence have to do with the success of your son?
- watwut 6y ago
  This will sound tongue in cheek, but presumably, if a boy is allowed to beat other boys, then he feels better about school. I had the "opportunity" to watch how fighting and being rough played out in class where my daughter was. There were like two boys who attacked other boys, verbally or physically. Majority of boys were unhappy about the situation, did not liked being insulted or pushed or being attacked. Their parents complained about issue, because their boys stopped liking going to school for that reason. I really don't think the solution should be "boys are boys and therefore more aggressive one should be allowed to attack other boys". That literally harms boys that done nothing wrong. The thing about "boys fighting among themselves" is that pretty often, it is not consensual, it is one boy attacking another.
  - xd 6y ago
    Sounds like they were bullying the other kids. I've never been a fan of violence but as a kid I loved playing rough, especially wrestling and these days enjoy a bit of a judo; but have zero desire to get into a pub brawl. When it comes to kids I think people confuse unwanted and mutual roughhousing.

0xy 6y ago

More females go to the university these days, and according to OECD reports girls received higher marks than boys for identical work (the deck is stacked against boys from the outset). [1] Then they're more likely to go to jail and more likely to get a higher sentence for an identical crime. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672 https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672

nxc18 6y ago
If you read the article the suggestion is that grading for classes includes things like not misbehaving, following the rules, and paying attention to the parameters of the rules. This all sounds like a cultural issue of how we socialize boys. Why is it just expected that boys can’t pay attention or not break out into fist fights constantly? Reading that article it sounds like boys are graded fairly when you consider that it’s not just doing the work that counts, but doing the right work, the right way, at the right time, while not being an asshole. I don’t know why society bakes in the idea that boys should be jerks by default, but that’s probably a separate conversation. Ability to get along with a team is crucial in modern workplaces just as it is in the classroom.
- damnencryption 6y ago
  I have observed the same but I don't get why we treat kids as slave labourers in school where they need permission to drink water, go to washroom or speak up and have mandatory work they can't refuse.
  - watwut 6y ago
    It is fascinating, because I remember conservative objections to feminization of schools being that women are too soft and wont be able to demand enough discipline. Which turned into women are too strict in demanding discipline. I am inclined to agree with proposals to give kids more space for running around and generally using their energy. But then again, the test obseesed system which sees free time for kids as "wasting time" and "being just childcare" is enforced by politicians rather then something that school teachers themselves wanted.

globular-toast 6y ago

Well they should be worried about their daughters too. Being a "successful" single woman is not a fulfilling path for the vast majority of women [1]. Most of them will want children and a physical human male [0] to care for them, not the government. Feminism is equal opportunity. It's bad for everyone. [0] I initially wrote a trigger word here, "real man". [1] Here's a top HN article from a "successful woman" showing how unhappy it makes them: https://tracy.posthaven.com/reflections-on-being-a-female-founder https://tracy.posthaven.com/reflections-on-being-a-female-fo...

rimliu 6y ago
I have never seen the definition of the "real man", let alone an explanation what makes him "real" and the other men not real.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Real as in not the government. A real person who can hug you and stroke your hair.
ithkuil 6y ago
What about all those men who cannot reach your ideal of what a "real man" should be? Should we worry about them or dismiss them as unadapted to the society norm du jour? There will always be people who don't fit. Nerdy types were losers a few years ago; now macho types are. The word "progress" is quite insidius. It seems to imply there is a direction where "better" is located and we're heading towards it. Instead we're relentlessly and half-blindly exploring the vast multidimensional space of possibility of the human condition. And this walk happens at different time-scales which are hard to fit in our everyday experience.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Please read my edit. I do not mean Real Man(TM) in that sense. I never use those two words as a fixed term, they just accidentally ended up together in my comment.

ralusek 6y ago

It's interesting that left leaning people are worried less about boys in general, but when it comes to their own sons, are more worried about boys. I suspect that this has something to do with gender politics, which most prominently falls within the sphere of the left wing, predominantly focusing on issues affecting women. It makes sense that if you're tuned into spheres primarily amplifying issues impacting women, and not men, that you would assume that your own son's issues aren't necessarily representative of the population at large. Over 60% of college graduates are women, and up until the age that many women choose to have a family (early 30s), women actually out-earn men. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but certain models in our collective understanding of society need to be more cognizant of these facts, among others. People that speak about the problems with the way we conceptualize gender issues, people like Warren Farrell, Karen Straughan, Janice Fiamengo, and Christina Hoff-Sommers, actually face an embarrassing amount of vitriol from institutions, when invited to speak on these topics.

jimmygrapes 6y ago
I listen to NPR a lot while driving. For several years now, I have been keeping a sort of mental rally of the topics discussed, after noticing a trend. At least 9 out of 10 segments (other than news or programs like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me) are about women, black, or homosexual success/suffering. For a straight white male there is only education of others; there is no real sense of sympathy, only empathy. I wonder what effects this may have in the long term.
- distant_hat 6y ago
  The audience of NPR is fairly small, there's a lot of other channels that cater to white males.
  - ikt 6y ago
    The same is for the ABC in Australia and BBC in the UK. His comment resonated strongly with me.

berryworm 6y ago

It's not difficult to "succeed" as a woman. Sure if you want a fancy career and so on, it is difficult. But you can always fall back to simply having children and letting somebody else take care of you. Even if you flunk all your exams and job interviews, you can still find somebody to get you pregnant. Men, on the other hand, have to succeed. Nobody else will take care of them if they fail, and they won't have the option for children or a family as easily (some chaos monkeys exist, but still). Even if they succeed at having a career or family, both can be taken away from them at a whim, no matter what they do. That's mostly a result of biology (and feminist laws), to the point that daughters are more likely to be born in times of crisis (nature playing it safe). I'm surprised the article even speculates about complicated reasons for why people might worry more about their sons than their daughters.

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JacobSuperslav 6y ago

i was just about to have another kid recently. to be honest, my thoughts were: please let it be a girl. like some other people mentioned - i also grew up around bar fights, drugs, football fans, etc. as a parent, i can only influence the kid to a certain degree. i believe most of the work is done by the environment, school, society. i just feel there's a higher chance for a boy to become an aggressive/pathological individual and hurt other people, because girls are not exposed to as much bullshit and toxicity.

mrweasel 6y ago
>because girls are not exposed to as much bullshit and toxicity Based on most people I know with girls, teenagers or pre-teens, as men we are no where near ready for the absolute onslaught of female bullshit and psychological terror girls will inflict on each other (and other women in general, including their mothers). Boys apparently are less bad, sure many of them will get into trouble, but it's manageable. Most just turns goofy for 10 years.
- damnencryption 6y ago
  I think boys in general are just too unaware of subtle differences in status, face, clothes, words, etc. That makes huge difference in how you converse and behave with each other. Generic bad word insult is probably not going to affect me even if targeted. I am not going to remember it but I have noticed women do and for a long time even if minor or as a joke. My female cousin had a journal where she entered things about people and scored them.
- JacobSuperslav 6y ago
  I'd say that you're right, but in the end the outcome is there's a high chance of a girl becoming a person that gets hurt but is more or less empathetic to others, and boys becoming aggressive and hurting others. Just my subjective opinion that I came to after looking at kids growing up where I live(Spain). I'm sure it varies a lot based on where you are too. We still have a lot of thus "machismo" thing going on here.
milchek 6y ago

zapdrive 6y ago

Rightfully so. The gynocentric society that we live in provides much more opportunities and privileges to young girls as compared to young boys. Eg: - There is a wage gap in favor of women for people younger than 30, that absolutely no one talks about. - Young men are more likely to be victims of false accusations, because women are never reprimanded for falsely accusing anyone. - Men get longer sentences for similar crimes as compared to women. - Young men who want to start families are in tough luck because more and more women do not want to bear children until early to late thirties.

ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 6y ago
Men are more likely to be victims of sexual abuse by women that goes politically unacknowledged as well. The numbers [1] are actually quite astonishing if you look at them: [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-victimization-by-women-is-more-common-than-previously-known/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-victimizat...
claudiawerner 6y ago
>- Young men are more likely to be victims of false accusations, because women are never reprimanded for falsely accusing anyone. If we were to compare this statistic honestly with what women experience, we'd find that women experience sexual assault at a much higher rate than men are falsely accused of it. It's hard for me to see this as a 'privilege' we afford "young women". >because more and more women do not want to bear children until early to late thirties. Why is "tough luck" always a bad thing? Why did you list this as a 'privilege' that women have when it's just a case of exercising reproductive agency? I'm sure we can name a myriad of things women also look for in relationships but don't get.
- michaelscott 6y ago
  > If we were to compare this statistic honestly with what women experience, we'd find that women experience sexual assault at a much higher rate than men are falsely accused of it. It's hard for me to see this as a 'privilege' we afford "young women". This is a related, but separate problem. I'm not personally a fan of Injustice Olympics so I'm not going to compare the two and see which is worse; they're both terrible and they both need to be solved (as much as any such societal problems can be "solved"), but OP was specifically referring to false accusations against men which, granted, are asymmetrically punished. Consider the punishment a man receives when he is found to have sexually harassed a woman (both societally and legally) vs. the punishment a woman receives when she is discovered to have falsely accused someone (again, both societally and legally).

getlawgdon 6y ago

Come on. From Brookings, a think tank known weill for its conservative ideology. This concept ("fear for boys) is also framed as fear for white boys" by other conservatives, and both are exponents of a core radical conservative bogeyman: "the growing extinction of the white man."

ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 6y ago
I'm not going to stop caring about issues faced by boys just because unsavory people try to exploit them. Bonus: Conservatives would have a harder time exploiting those issues if we fixed the issues to start with.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> From Brookings, a think tank known weill for its conservative ideology. Not really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Institution
dragonwriter 6y ago
> From Brookings, a think tank known weill for its conservative ideology. Brookings is a center-right neoliberal think tank, aligned with the currently-dominant faction of the Democratic Party. It is economically conservative, but usually not known for being socially conservative. Indeed, the direct conclusion presented by the piece is more in line with liberal (even progressive) than conservative social thought, invoking intersectionality fairly explicitly.
rbecker 6y ago
It must be very convenient to be able to dismiss research done by anyone that might be remotely interested in publishing findings you dislike. When a left-leaning institution publishes findings that broadly align with the left, do you also dismiss them?

damnencryption 6y ago

Here's a theory to explain this. Older couples birth more daughters so as a result of their maturity and life experiences, they are less worried. For couples with both daughters and sons, it might be due to biological differences in progress in maturity and resilience in kids. Girls are more mature at age 10-11 than boys and the trends remain the same till early adulthood.

adaml_623 6y ago

I worry about any survey that excludes results: "We do not show results for respondents who describe themselves as “moderate” or “not sure.” Is there any chance that this brookings institute has an agenda to push the idea of the liberal vs conservative totally polarised society?

jokethrowaway 6y ago
I don't know this institute but I don't see why this would be the case as the result points as both liberals and conservatives being more worried about their sons than their daughters.

fit2rule 6y ago

Ctrl-F: "War" Well, this is a useless article, then. America is a war-fighting nation. Any discussion of the 'fate of our children' which doesn't account for America's extravagant war industry, is incomplete. Men are being sent off to fight wars. That percolates through all strata.

pubby 6y ago

My observation is that in the adult business world, masculine traits can be advantageous. But before that, in schooling and such, masculine traits have few benefits outside of sports, and are frequently discouraged and suppressed. This causes dissonance, where men are being raised to be gentle, only to reach adulthood and realize that male privilege as advertised does not benefit them. Women, especially attractive women, seem to receive more support, attention, and sympathy than men. In general, they have less pressure to succeed, and more options to fall back on. I suspect this leads to an easier transition from teenager to adult, though this advantage fades as they age, and they deal with unfair disadvantages otherwise. As an aside, I'll mention that in recent years the internet has greatly magnified the amount of attention young women receive. Few talk about it, but they should, for it's the biggest change to gender differences in years.

known 6y ago

"You don't have to be famous; You just have to make your parents proud of you" --Meryl Streep

taylodl 6y ago

I have two daughters and a son aged 18-24. My son is 24 and is working on his Ph.D. in computer science, so he's doing alright. But my wife and I worried about him the most while he was growing up. For starters, an alarmingly high number of his friends and classmates were diagnosed with ADHD and so were drugged. Boys need more physical engagement - especially when they're younger. Yet schools are reducing time for recess. I taught my kids to take care of their own business and not tattle so long as: nobody was seriously hurt (no blood), no one was in immediate danger, and property wasn't being destroyed. Those aren't the rules they use at school. Kids continually tell on one another to try to get each other in trouble. Boys tend to be more "ornery" and so tend to get in trouble a lot. This creates an atmosphere where boys are viewed as being "just bad." Sadly, boys learn that girls are "sneaky." That has its own issues but that's for another post. Bullies are another matter. I was raised to not start fights but finish them. I raised my son the same way. That's not AT ALL how schools work. They do nothing about bullies. Their "no tolerance" policies for bullies are laughable because they don't do anything about bullies. Teachers have told me their hands are tied. They know who the bullies are, but now there's such a stigma with being branded a "bully" the administrators won't let them do anything about it. Eventually the bully will get their just reward and their parents will raise holy hell with the school and the tables get reversed: the bully is the victim. It's disgusting. I've seen that happen time and time and time again. I did see a teacher once stand up to the bully's parents and the school administrators and inform them the bully was, in fact, a bully and learned an important lesson in life. Thank goodness she had a paper trail tracking parents' complaints and had the backing of all the other parents. As part of all this is parents today won't accept that their children aren't perfect little angels. I knew my kids weren't perfect - they're kids. Their teachers appreciated that they could work with my wife and I if they were having issues. They lamented that so many parents simply wouldn't accept that their children weren't perfect and refused to work with teachers to rectify a situation. Finally, when my son went to college he had to contend with all the so-called Social Justice Warriors blaming all men, especially white men, for all the world's ills. Never mind that my son and his friends had nothing to do with making the world what it is - just like the SJWs. The sad irony is in their eagerness to blame these young men for all the world's problems they were undermining what I was teaching him about how we came to be in the mess we're in and what steps we can take to get out. I was trying to raise my son to be a good man and the SJWs were making it clear that their world view didn't include the concept of a "good man."I could go on and on and on regarding this issue, but that would be for another post. My daughters? They never had any of these problems. None. Obviously things turned out okay and grad school has been completely different for my son than undergraduate school but - the whole point is my wife and I worried about him a lot more than we ever worried about our daughters. The good news? Yes, you're going to worry more about your sons. That's just a fact of the times in which we're living. Raising kids has never been easy and raising sons has become harder. My advice is to persevere and raise them to be a good man: a man who respects all people regardless of sex, race, religion, or sexual orientation; a man who knows it takes many different perspectives to solve today's problems. It's not easy and it never has been - but the rewards are worth it!

LatteLazy 6y ago

Go look at outcomes and you can see why.

notJim 6y ago

What's striking in this thread is the equation of masculine toughness with unhealthy things like getting in bar fights and doing drugs. Reading the report, men think their sons are less tough than their daughters. Putting these two together suggests that the way we define toughness for men in anti-social ways may be the problem. Perhaps we need to differentiate between healthy and unhealthy ways of building toughness, and seek healthy ways for men/boys to build toughness. As one example, I (a man) have never been in a fight, but I have found that challenging myself physically, and going camping have built toughness for me. Neither of those things required me to hurt myself or other people. There is something deeply toxic to me about a definition of toughness that requires men to hurt others, or to hurt themselves.

milchek 6y ago

Not an American, but I do agree and am seeing a perhaps a 'knee jerk' reaction in society where we've neglected girls for so long that now the pendulum has swung the other way very quickly. Think of all the initiatives to get girls into STEM, to give them positive role models, to enrich their lives, to give them more heros and icons in media (consider every hero in recent CGI and cartoon films). We, humans, do this a lot. We see something wrong, and we overcorrect. So, what happens then is that boys start to get left behind again. I think we're going to need to correct the correction in some way down the road to ensure we really have balance and equality. I have a daughter and son, I'd love for them to grow up in a world where they have equal opportunity to live lives that are meaningful to them.

octokatt 6y ago

I forgot how much I hate the comments section of any mention of gender on Hacker News.

notaspecialist 6y ago

26 pages of comments and all of you don't get it. You don't get the point of it now, the why and only two of you actually see a part of the coming storm.