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My kids are both girls. If I had boys I'd be really concerned about the lack of positive role models. You have... what exactly? Andrew Tate? Elon Musk? I'd take

• Apocryphon 2y ago
  Shouldn’t a parent be a role model of their own
  • api 2y ago
    Oh yeah, you are, but I'm talking about outside in the culture. This becomes very important in the teens.
    • antisthenes 2y ago
      > This becomes very important in the teens. It's the parent's job to make sure it doesn't. Glorifying hyper-successful figures isn't healthy without understanding how they came to be hyper-successful (99% cases it's inheritance/nepotism/luck).
  • watwut 2y ago
    For a teenager that is not locked and isolated?
• peterlk 2y ago
  I have no kids, but perhaps positive role models can be found in more specific categories like music. For example, I think Jacob Collier sets a great example. And I think my parents had similar concerns. I was raised on gangster rap and Eminem, and my parents were very concerned about that. But overall, I think I turned out alright. My feeling is that it’s much more important to have role models closer to home. The light that Elon Musk and Andrew Tate are cast in can be greatly influenced by the people around your kids if not directly by parents
• rhapsodic 2y ago
  [dead]
• trillic 2y ago
  LeBron James, Michael Phelps, Richard Feynman, Keanu Reeves, Fred Rogers, Desmond Tutu, Linus Torvalds, Elie Wiesel.
  • hkt 2y ago
    Media centrality somewhat matters
  • Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Make a large enough list of men, I’ll find the example of why any of these folks are terrible role models. Linus Torvalds famously loves to verbally abuse others working with him, just for one small example…
    • moi2388 2y ago
      So? Doesn’t mean he can’t be a role model. Just don’t emulate all behaviour exactly from any person. People have flaws. Every single one of them.
      • Der_Einzige 2y ago
        The issue is that one has no control over what gets modeled by those looking at "role models". Many of the best role models are the kind of folks who large systems or structures refuse to teach about en mass because these role models are uniquely subversive. Malcolm X vs Martin Luther King Jr being the classic example of this.
  • BJones12 2y ago
    I know that list was off the top of your head, but if a quickly-assembled list of male role models includes guys who died almost 40 years ago that probably indicates that there aren't enough of them.
  • juniperus 2y ago
    This is the most boomer comment I’ve ever read. On what planet are these any child’s role model? Elie Wiesel? Desmond Tutu? Those are like NPR lifetime achievement award winners, they have no social capital among any generic guy under 18. 0
• ForTheKidz 2y ago
  I think this is the wrong framing. You should not be expecting to find role models on the internet to begin with. This is not an environment designed to produce examples of healthy human life. (This was also generally true of TV, btw, excluding PBS.) I do have many people, including some men, on the internet I respect and try to model my own behavior on. None of them are trying to rake up views on YouTube, twitch, or any social media platform. hasanabi is the closest this gets and he's clearly trying to cater to teenage boys/young men and is irrelevant to my life, although I do admire his commitment to being a bulwark against reactionary takes. Secondly, we need to be teaching emotional identification, regulation, and how to make yourself happy without comparing yourself to others. How to be a valuable member of a community. None of this is specific to men, of course, but the masculinity of that will reveal itself in how people choose to present themselves—nobody is saying men shouldn't try to provide for the people around them or shouldn't protect them or shouldn't be a basis of emotional stability. Notably, it's also masculine (to others) to abandon your family and community. Two very different conceptions that are equally real in our society. If you start from the assumption of some platonic ideal of "masculinity" you'll end up very confused. If you can figure out how to sell this to a bunch of teenage boys you can conquer the world. Personally, I think men are gonna need to feel a generation of pain or two before the obvious incentives are going to align with boys learning to take care of themselves. All of my role models as a child were fictional characters, only about half of them were men, and little of their attraction had to do with helping me feel secure in my masculinity. So perhaps I'm just missing the point entirely.
• hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
  When I think about it, it makes sense. By the way, could you share some female role models who appeal to girls? What I noticed is that some people look good when viewed at a distance. But it sometimes happens that when you look closer, or time passes, the people who seemed very positive (Bill Cosby and many others) show some other aspects.
  • watwut 2y ago
    Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo. Hell, even AOC or Kamala Harriss altrought not cool, they are not openly toxic. There is no female equivalent of Trump o, you have to be a man to consistently fail upwards and be enabled that consistently.
• dghlsakjg 2y ago
  Role models don’t have to be para social relationships with attention economy celebrities. Look within your own community, those are the people that can have a bigger more direct effect anyway. Camp counselors, teachers, neighbors, creatives, local government officials, coaches, etc. there are all sorts of people who don’t suck who are doing great things right near you, right now, who not only have time to mentor kids, but actually want to.
• david-gpu 2y ago
  Even if we accept the premise, which I do not, I still do not understand why a role model would have to be of the same gender as the child. Can't a boy look up to the character and actions of a woman, and vice versa? Do they also need to have other matching traits, like skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation? I have so called mixed-race children and it would be silly to limit them to aspire to be like historical figures that look like them, because I can't even think of one example.
  • ForTheKidz 2y ago
    I also grappled with this issue until I lived in a community that was highly, highly gendered. Children naturally try to mimic the social behaviors around them. If these social behaviors are gendered, they will attempt to gender themselves and view these behaviors through the lens of social expectations of gender. Especially if they are proactively gendered by the adults in their community (i.e. socialized as male or female with explicit expectations), as most communities do. I don't really have any beef with gender roles, but sometimes the roles communicate simply antisocial behavior. One very easy example of this is the high rate of deadbeat dads in comparison to rates of single dads. And yea, maybe some people just shouldn't be around children, but once you observe how this passes down generations with your own eyes it's very difficult to un-see. In these situations simply having a healthy adult that does align with gender expectations on some level, but not another level, that's an alternative can equip children to make decisions about their own life and how they want gender to figure into their own self-image and relationship to the community. What I don't get is that Andrew Tate and Elon Musk are also, erm, not very masculine by the standards of many if not most communities here in america except in the sense of "thinking being an asshole is funny". Neither is Trump, for that matter. Something tells me that there are other factors at play here than just "masculine role models".
    • david-gpu 2y ago
      But the root of that problem is indoctrinating children that they are expected to follow certain paths because of their gender or skin color. Not the absence of role models that match those traits. My sister and I were educated in a gender-agnostic fashion and neither of us fell into the trap of thinking that we must do this or that because of our gender. As a result, we each carved our own different path. I don't see why my children will be any different, unless their own peers indoctrinate them with arbitrary gender roles.
• maplant 2y ago
  How can you say that no positive male role models exist when the most positive male role model Northernlion streams Monday through Friday from 12-5pm
  • Hikikomori 2y ago
    Any non bold role models?
    • maplant 2y ago
      No
• anonym29 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • api 2y ago
    I don't 100% disagree with this, but I think it's being way exaggerated. There has definitely been an overcorrected counter-reaction in popular culture since the 1970s and 1980s where you all the sudden see lots of sitcoms and films depicting men as incompetent, weak, etc. and the women as more competent and well adjusted. The Simpsons comes to mind as a classic example. This is a reaction against the fact that up until the 1970s virtually all women in popular culture were depicted as borderline children, with rare exceptions. Still: I can with no difficulty list many strong male leads in media from this era onward. They're not hard to find. My wife and I just got done binging The Expanse, which had many including the main character (as well as many strong female characters). Action and comic book films are loaded with down-right ridiculously over-powered male leads. Are modern HR departments too strait-laced? Yeah, they probably are, and this too is probably an over-correction. It's a reaction to the days when sexual harassment of women in the workplace was just standard expected behavior, and in many cases a woman was expected to "put out" for her superiors to rise in certain professions. It probably is possible for HR to chill out a little without us going back there. Is there a need for more positive depictions of men in popular culture and better male role models? Why yes, that's what I'm arguing. I don't think there are enough, and I think the "manosphere" mostly pushes misogynistic trash and a desperate caricature of masculinity that comes of -- to me at least -- as weak and pathetic. It comes off that way to most women too. A guy saying he's an "alpha male" is identifying himself as fragile and emotionally stunted. > This even extends to what essentially amounts to pharmacological abuse of boys - when 8 year old boys full of energy can't sit still and pay attention to a boring middle-aged women dispassionately lecturing about boring grammar, the boy is ruled cognitively defective (ADHD) and prescribed powerful amphetamines, nearly as a default course of action! This is a hill I will die on, because I've seen it first hand: ADD/ADHD is absolutely 100% real. Is it sometimes mis-diagnosed or over-diagnosed? Sure. But I have seen -- in my immediate friend and family circles -- many cases of people of all ages for whom ADD treatment was absolutely transformative. Like going from "possibly developmentally disabled, unable to learn to read" to straight A student. I've seen some adult examples too. It's like this: about 60% of the population wear or could benefit from glasses, contacts, or some other kind of vision correction. That's more than half. Why? Because if it doesn't stop you from reproducing, it stays in the gene pool. Having perfect vision was not a requirement for survival, so evolution did not hyper-optimize for it. Why wouldn't the same thing be true for things like the brain and central nervous system? It would be surprising if half the population weren't walking around with brains that, if mildly tweaked, could function much better. Do eyeglasses emasculate men? Is it more masculine to be unable to read small text, or unable to make things out from a distance? BTW -- plenty of girls have ADD/ADHD. It is not gender-specific. I would be willing to believe that it might be over-diagnosed in men, but it's probably under-diagnosed in women. A woman who can't focus and is either a manic-pixie-dream-girl or too passive carries less of a social stigma than these things do for a man.
• deleted 2y ago
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