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Have Men Become Culturally Redundant?
- onion2k 3y ago“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” ― Franklin Leonard
- blarg1 3y agoI find it ironic when people say that, the quote could easily be used in the opposite direction.
- tourist2d 3y agoArticle mentioning suicide is the leading cause of deaths in young men in the opening paragraph. You: probably due to their past privilege
- onion2k 3y agoSuicide is the leading cause of death among young men because a combination of medical science and safety regulations have made all the other causes incredibly unlikely.
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoWhy is it not the leading cause of death for young women then?
- onion2k 3y agoBecause something else kills more of them.
- cassianoleal 3y agoI don't see how this kind of truism helps the discussion.
- sdflhasjd 3y agoHonestly, looking at the ONS data I grabbed, it's not even a truism. Male suicide is the top (non-accidental, which isn't mentioned in the article) cause of death among all people aged 15-45 in England and Wales. Boys and Men in that age category just do twice as much dying overall, and the only significant categories (of my arbitrary cutoff) that women are doing worse in is cancer and childbirth.
- cassianoleal 3y agoOh I was specifically talking about onion2k's statement that essentially boiled down to "X is not the leading cause of death for young women because something else is", which is a truism and not useful in any way. The interesting information here would be why it is for one cohort but not the other.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rgoulter 3y agoOne thing I've noticed about this line is it gets used from all sorts of groups feel like they are the ones which were oppressed / the other group is the oppressor.
- onion2k 3y agoI don't think it's a particularly useful thing to say about yourself because, as you say, lots of people use it to try to claim they're being oppressed when really they're just losing their privilege. It's very accurate when you're looking from the outside inwards though, such as this case where someone is claiming men are becoming irrelevant when obviously it's just that others are being seen more equally.
- rgoulter 3y ago> lots of people use it to try to claim they're being oppressed when really they're just losing their privilege. FWIW, "those people are oppressors, and are now being treated equally" is just as emotionally charged. I generally think it's not a particularly useful thing for anyone to say.
- ex_nihil 3y agoThis quote only works for those who experienced both sides of the change. And the problems brought up in the article is mostly about the younger generations.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoHas culture become culturally redundant?
- jb1991 3y ago> Suicide is now the number one cause of death among British men under forty-five. Wow.
- goodcanadian 3y agoWhat else do you expect them to die of? This statistic on its own says very little. It could mean that suicide is rampant, or it could mean that we live in an incredibly safe society with very good health care.
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoThe statistic on its own says very little, but it says a lot when you compare it to the same statistic for young women.
- defrost 3y agoConsistently for almost a century (world war stats altered things) young male suicides rates have been approx 4x that of young women (IIRC). That itself is of note and worth discussion, but in the context of "this is happening here and now!!" it's not anything new, sudden or different.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoDrug overdose, alcoholism, or car crashes
- jb1991 3y agoWell, for example, the leading cause of death of children in the United States is guns. That is certainly not something I would’ve expected, but it’s true. So I guess in this case, it was equally surprising. There are a lot of things that can cause people to die, so it just seemed like an odd one to be at the top.
- pm90 3y ago> As a result, many men are struggling to fulfill their own outmoded expectations of what a man should be. “The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it has ‘gone too far,’” Reeves writes. “It is that it has not gone far enough”—that is, it has not succeeded in replacing traditional models of masculinity with something more adequate to our current circumstances. The Western male is stuck in a culture of masculinity that is now desperately mismatched with his material reality. “Women’s lives have been recast,” Reeves writes. “Men’s lives have not.” Men have been consigned to “cultural redundancy.” It’s pretty simple. Adapt or perish. Big generational change is not uncommon.
- HL33tibCe7 3y agoBig generational change is uncommon. And on this scale it is completely unprecedented
- mantas 3y agoAdapt or perish or (re)shape the world. Current state where saying „kill all men“ does not raise eyebrows is a pretty sad state. Too many pseudo-feminist lunatics are tolerated.
- polotics 3y agoI never saw that sentence anywhere, and seeing you quote it definitely raises my eyebrow. Are you aware that not everyone posting on the web is who they say they represent? The quotes looks more like inflammatory tactics than anything a feminist would write.
- mantas 3y agoIt is inflammatory tactics. But it's interesting how such posts on social media wouldn't get auto-ban. Is feminists inflammatory tactics fine? Especially when people get in trouble for what could be swept under the rug as „inflammatory tactics“ in the opposite directions? While at the same time very tame things get accounts suspended. Personally I got a ban on Facebook for calling Russians „Muscovites“ in my native tongue. Which is not even a derogatory term (we have different words for that). Yet „kill all men“ posts on Twitter or FB stay up.
- ETH_start 3y ago"We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher collective bargaining laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: in the first 10 years after passage of a duty-to-bargain law, male earnings decline by $2,134 (or 3.93%) per year and hours worked decrease by 0.42 hours per week. The earnings estimates for men indicate that teacher collective bargaining reduces earnings by $213.8 billion in the US annually. We also find evidence of lower male employment rates, which is driven by lower labor force participation. Exposure to collective bargaining laws leads to reductions in the skill levels of the occupations into which male workers sort as well. Effects are largest among black and Hispanic men." https://www.nber.org/papers/w24782 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24782
- LaurensBER 3y agoThis article quotes a bunch of statistics and then jumps to conclusions without analyzing why (some) men do worse than (most) women. Given that most men still outearn most women and that more women attempt to commit suicide and the ongoing (predominantly female) teenage mental health crisis this whole article reads like a case study of how to lie with statistics and jump to (bad) conclusions. Men have problems, women have problems and instead of framing it as a gender issue and arguing that either men or women have to change I think it would be more productive to zoom in and analyse why less men graduate from college or why (young) women have seen such a rapid decline in wellbeing in the past ten years.
- ashwagary 3y ago>more women attempt to commit suicide My understanding is women attempt suicide but more men succeed at it.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoin the US. because guns.
- luckylion 3y agoIt's the same in Germany. Without guns. Men commit suicide approximately 3 times as often as women with the exception of children under the age of 15, where there's slightly more girls than boys. [1] At the same time, women more frequently "try". The common explanation is that most of those aren't serious tries but rather cries for help and attention, while men will try to commit suicide when they positively want to die. Before you protest, here's an article describing multiple studies suggesting such (in German), which adds that male suicide is a sign of toxic masculinity, so it should be above suspicion of being misogynistic. [2] [1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Gesundheit/Todesursachen/Tabellen/suizide.html https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Gesund... [2] https://www.spektrum.de/news/suizid-paradox-toedliche-geschlechterrolle/1620966 https://www.spektrum.de/news/suizid-paradox-toedliche-geschl...
- yawpitch 3y agoClickbait headline used to advertise book that refutes clickbait headline. Next sports.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoIf you are male: Learn to adequately feed yourself. Don't make that the responsibility of some woman. There are many more things that need to happen to address these issues, but that's a place to start and it will make a difference in your life in an immediate and material fashion. (Crickets chirp -- very loudly)
- luckylion 3y ago"Suicide is now the number one cause of death among British men under forty-five" - "Hey, it would really help if you learnt to cook sophisticated meals" I'm not sure that's the answer.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI said nothing about cooking, much less sophisticated meals.
- luckylion 3y agoDid you think men are starving because they don't know how to eat, or that they only ever eat Ramen noodles? I can assure you: they don't, and self-starvation is very rare form of suicide. I'm sorry, maybe there's some context I'm missing or you're quoting from some book or something else, but it sounds like telling someone who's legs were amputated that they should get a new haircut because that will immediately change their life.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI know quite a lot about being suicidal. Taking care of yourself is the best antidote there is.
- somedude895 3y agoThen what are you saying? That men shouldn't rely on a woman to be the main provider? That men should inform themselves on nutrition? I genuinely don't understand what you're trying to say.
- HL33tibCe7 3y ago> “The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it has ‘gone too far,’” Reeves writes. “It is that it has not gone far enough”—that is, it has not succeeded in replacing traditional models of masculinity with something more adequate to our current circumstances What if the problem we’re facing is that men actually need traditional models of masculinity?
- bell-cot 3y agoLooking at the bit you quote, I'd say the problem is much bigger and worse than that. Have you seen any sign that the modern feminism movement either cares about such things, or is "mentally coherent" enough to devise workable models? (Vs. performative ideological and rah-rah exercises.)
- jfengel 3y ago"Traditional models of masculinity" have been different traditions in different times and different places. Men cannot possibly "need" the "traditional models" of twentieth century America. The twenty-first century is unprecedented, and everybody (men and women) will adapt to it. The individuals will adapt, and new traditions will arise based on them. They should be inspired by what we know of the past, but claims that "it was better the way things were" fails to acknowledge that things were really, really bad for women (among many others) for a very long time. They demanded change because they hated it.
- depressedpanda 3y ago> What if the problem we’re facing is that men actually need traditional models of masculinity? I'm not sure what you mean by traditional, but it's painfully obvious to me that boys and young men need positive male role models. Feminism offers no solution to this, and never will, since its focus lies elsewhere. Hence, we must acknowledge that as an ideology its incomplete (at best). You can be masculine without being "toxic". They rarely, if ever, write articles about the positive aspects of masculinity.
- realjhol 3y agoGiven the amount of suffering reported in the article, its very telling how little sympathy the author has for those it reports on. The author champions an ideology that is doing immense harm, but the author never stops to examine their beliefs. Remember that what is bad for men is also bad for women, especially because women are innately hypergamous - wishing to marry across or up status hierarchies. At some point a young woman will want to find a man she can respect to marry. But the penny hasn't dropped with the author. Maybe the great achievements of feminism aren't all they are cracked up to be. How can they be? - when the world they have relentlessly demanded is making both men and women so desperately lonely and unhappy.
- luckylion 3y agoAre women desperately lonely and unhappy? Teenage mental health aside (probably not caused by lack of desirable marriage partners), loneliness and desperation, and the drug abuse and suicide that follows, seem to be primarily male problems. Maybe enough women don't want to get married, or they have another way of dealing with that not happening, but I'm not sure there's a crisis there. Granted, I don't follow surveys closely, but generally if women are affected, it will be a widely known story and the news will pick it up. It's not, so I assume they aren't.
- realjhol 3y agoThe news hacks bear significant responsibility for many of the problems western society currently faces. They're not going to save either men or women. The birth rate has fallen off a cliff. The rate of family formation falls lower and lower. Older millennial women are coming to terms with the reality that they will likely never have children. Gen Z women are still young enough to engage in extreme promiscuity via the dating apps, without yet feeling the consequences. This isn't going to end anywhere good.
- luckylion 3y agoSome women don't want any children, so while birth rate might be a societal problem, it's not one for individual women, I think. For those that do, there are options, even if they don't want to have a partner. There's the exception of those who want biological children but are infertile. I'm sure there's a lot of suffering (evidenced by them being ready to pay quite a lot of money for help), but I don't think it's a social issue. Maybe there will be a huge explosion 10 years from now and it'll be a complete surprise. Today I don't see any signs of it, and I'm pretty confident that the signs would be very hard to overlook because of the focus on women's health, so any expressed unhappiness that goes beyond rare individual cases will be picked up.
- yosito 3y agoYes, old cultural expressions of masculinity have outlived their usefulness and become toxic in modern environments. One example, we no longer need to fight off predators, so what used to be valued as protective bravado now gets expressed as violence and aggression directed toward our frustrations. Yet, mainstream feminism has become so anti-masculinity that it leaves very little room for new, healthy versions of masculinity to develop. Our evolved impulses as men are left with little space for healthy expression. My ideals are very egalitarian, I'd love to see a world in which men and women are equal and living in harmony. At the same time, I don't think a new, positive vision for masculinity can come from feminism. Feminists are telling men to act more female: don't be competitive, get in touch with the softer emotions, cry more, etc. And while there is definitely a place for men to get in touch with their feminine emotions, we are still evolutionarily predisposed to have masculine emotions. How can we express our innate emotions like frustration, anger and aggression and channel them into healthy expressions that fit in modern life? I believe that we can do that. We need men's movements that cultivate positive masculinity. Movements that tell us what to do with our natural impulses to be physically strong and fight against threats with our bodies. Not feminine visions of masculinity, but neither victim-based visions like incels or men's rights activists.
- realjhol 3y ago> My ideals are very egalitarian, I'd love to see a world in which men and women are equal and living in harmony. But we're not equal - by definition. We're diverse and complementary. What is it that drives the ravenous appetite of liberalism to flatten all diversity out of the world into a homogenous mass of goo?
- bjornsing 3y ago> What is it that drives the ravenous appetite of liberalism to flatten all diversity out of the world into a homogenous mass of goo? If it’s (classic) liberalism that does that I’d say it’s probably because that’s what people individually want. But I think it’s in many cases the other way around. For example, gender differences in career choices tend to increase with economic prosperity and liberalism.
- chowells 3y agoThat question frames it in reverse. The right question is whether gender should be culturally important. And I can't think of a single reason why it's good for anyone for cultural roles to be predicated on gender. It hurts men just as much to tell them that they're not supposed to be a nurturing full-time parent as it hurts women to tell them they're not supposed to be a breadwinner. Now, you can certainly find a few places where men and women tend to have different biological capabilities due to how the body develops during puberty. Given that both height and strength have significantly non-overlapping distributions between men and women, it's unlikely you'll see a woman in the NBA. But that doesn't need to result in a cultural expectation regarding the acceptable gender of an NBA player. It's perfectly acceptable to say "most are men, but it's cool if a woman makes it" instead of "you can't do that, you're a woman." So as to the question asked in the article? Well, you've got to be a little careful. Men, the individual people to whom the label "man" is applied, are absolutely not culturally redundant. They can participate in culture as much or as little as they desire. But it would be nice if the label "man" stopped carrying unique cultural expectations. Although as Betteridge's law would suggest, that's sure not a description of the present state of the world.
- timellis-smith 3y agoBecause it is important. The more egalitarian countries show more differentiation across career choices than less egalitarian ones. I.e. men show a greater prefence for thing based careers and women show a greater prefence for people based careers. If you've ever watched kids playing you'll realise how self evident it is, from a very early age before kids are remotely aware of cultural norms. This flies in the face of all predictions that roles of sex are purely cultural.
- chowells 3y agoThat's a complete non-sequitor. I said that cultural roles should not be gendered. You responded that people have things they prefer to do. That is 100% orthogonal. People absolutely should be able to follow their preference so long as they take direct responsibility for the results of their actions. And cultural norms shouldn't add expectations for what people do based on their genders. No conflict. These things work together in harmony.
- somedude895 3y ago> As certain structural barriers that used to hinder women have been removed, women have proven their “natural advantage” in several areas, including in our colleges and universities. This is part of the problem. You always hear of things that supposedly women are naturally better at than men, but nobody would dare say that the opposite might be true in some aspects. Also it's completely lacking what those "natural advantages" are are supposed to be. After all, men still make up most of graduates in MINT as opposed to women who mainly graduate in humanities, except for medicine. Looking at it that way you might as well say women are better at obediently reading and learning by heart and men are better at actually thinking and figuring things out. I'm not trying to be inflammatory here, just pointing out how the point the article makes is generally considered acceptable, while framing it differently would be considered sexist. > Reeves presents a cocktail of public policies that include longer and more generous paid leave for new dads, a reformed child-support system that no longer makes excessive demands of mothers, and more father-friendly employment opportunities (working from home, working part-time, or working flexible hours). This would help alleviate the gender-wage gap while also promoting a healthier model of fatherhood. As always, the solution is government-mandated social change. And why, all of a sudden, when presenting solutions, is nature completely disregarded?
- jemmyw 3y ago> many men are struggling to fulfill their own outmoded expectations of what a man should be Why do we men have to be anything? Why does a woman? Can we just be ourselves and not worry about it? I never have. I've never aspired to be a masculine man's man all grr and .. go camping? Not be able to cook? Those are the traits of a couple of guys I know whose wives left them because they were fucking useless as parents and were aggressive about it. I don't feel like any less of a man because I can cook my kids a meal and would rather book a hotel. I think the problem is constant messaging that we should be something or other and that impresses on kids. Then they feel disappointed that's not how things are for them and unmotivated to find their own path.
- the_third_wave 3y ago[flagged]
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoWhole science is culturally redundant. You don't need to know what is an atom to be able to dance around the fire.
- the_third_wave 3y agoFor a somewhat narrow definition of culture, sure. For western culture, not at all since it is partly defined by the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. The scientific method, for good or bad, is part of the western cultural heritage. I think it is mostly for good as long as we re talking about actual science - based on the scientific method - and not The Science™ or one of the many 'critical' offshoots which are mostly intent on deconstruction. In short, science over religion whether that be one of the theistic religions or the "progressive" gnostic ones which are running havoc through academia at this moment. Objective theories over 'critical theories', scientific knowledge over 'other ways of knowing'.
- jb1991 3y agoOccasionally I see articles like this that seem to have decent perspective and conversation, but they get flagged. What would be the reason for that? Is it just a lot of people here hitting the flag button? Is it because the article is not liked?
- seydor 3y agoIt should be clarified in this kind of articles that they are talking about Single men, not married men. And that those articles are a covert attempt to shame men into 'doing more' to catch up with some kind of standard that is even unspecified