As a middle-aged man who's been studying this stuff for a while, I'd like to throw in my observations. We are in a Masculine Crisis, and both men and women are

As a middle-aged man who's been studying this stuff for a while, I'd like to throw in my observations. We are in a Masculine Crisis, and both men and women are suffering, because gender isn't zero-sum, and a society that damages men is just as harmful to heterosexual women, who struggle to find men. Late-stage capitalism's breakdown of the family (which it molded into a bourgeois form, then let rot) happened in black communities about 40 years before it started to hit rural whites. This makes it hard to sympathize with the so-called "white working class", who clutched their pearls and moralized and showed no sympathy at all when this dysfunction was hitting blacks in Detroit, half a century ago. What is a Masculine Crisis? Well, I think this sentence hits it straight on: Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss. When you tell men that the only way to be masculine is to "provide", and then deprive them of all means to provide except to subject oneself to the whims of a high-status person--a person given that status not on merit but simple random accidents of heredity--you leave them without a decent choice at all. Not playing is no option (a man must "provide") but every play is a losing one (the requisite self-emasculation of subordination). Whether this is a condition of low expectations (society has given up on men) or high ones (as workplace pressures mount, due to the erosion of worker's rights and dignity) is irrelevant; either way, it shuts people down. Of course, the experience is pretty awful for women, too. Work, for 95% of people in this society, is just horrid. No one should have to do stupid shit to survive--I hope we can agree on that. I just don't think this particular social ill is as gutting for women as it is for men. When it comes to the Masculine Crisis, we on the left are really missing the opportunity. Ex falso quodlibet; principle of (possibly literal) explosion. When no options exist for someone, he tends to make one. I'm not an accelerationist of any kind (leftist or rightist) but acceleration is happening. Alas, the left is so deep in the cul-de-sac of gender being entirely socially constructed (which is not true) and therefore meaningless (which it's not) that they can't figure out how to operate in this environment. So, instead, the Masculine Crisis is left to be exploited by the center-right (Jordan Peterson) or worse, the actual fascists. Conditions like this produce war. Why? Because five thousand years of human history have produced exactly one situation in which a man can be subordinate and still accept himself as a man--to pick up a weapon and join an army of some kind. Mind you, I don't want war; I'm staunchly against it except as a last resort. However, conditions like those in the modern workplace (except for those born into hereditary wealth) are at such a level as to throw young men into hopelessness... and they will often do anything for those who promise any kind of hope, no matter false.