That's a funny site: Over the last few years, it has become increasingly obvious that American men — particularly those of the post-boomer generations — have f

That's a funny site: Over the last few years, it has become increasingly obvious that American men — particularly those of the post-boomer generations — have fallen into a cultural gap. Our voice is barely a whisper in the traditional media, we are consistently portrayed as worthless buffoons and advertisers ignore us. (Any guess on whether the phallic-symbol logo was a deliberate selection or not?) Can you imagine a masculine man, in any era, actually voicing such a complaint? "Mommy mommy everyone's ignoring me and calling me names! I hate the girly and faggy tv all these women and faggots make but I can't stop watching it!" Usually I associate masculinity with stoicism, quiet resolve, and a brave git-er-done approach; the masculine man would do his thing and not really worry about what the natterers were nattering about. I think the one-sentence rebuttal is "videogames": the male demographic interested in manly tales of derring-do is really interested in obtaining experiences that approximate the male desire to actually go and do-derring; videogames -- being interactive -- are such better approximations to that experience that the demand for lesser such stimuli -- action sci-fi, comic books, etc. -- has substantially diminished. Think of the Hardy Boys: every novel has a mystery that the boys solve along with their dad, usually with some fisticuffs and other feats of masculinity tossed in (breaking stuff; escaping from bandits; etc). Now compare with a videogame (say, Halo): you have a guy put into a difficult military situation and you have to fight your way out; success is not guaranteed, but you are given an obstacles to overcome and the tools to do so. Which is a better simulacrum of adventure? Under what possible circumstances would a young boy trade a bunch of his adventure videogames for a cost-equivalent basket of books? I'm pretty sure videogames have killed off an entire industry of young-male-fantasy; there are still huge nerds who read a lot and buy comic books and so on, but the much broader group of "casual readers" now play games instead of buy comics and so on (who might read a handful of non-assigned books between elementary school and high school graduation; think about the football and basketball teams). For lightweight masculine entertainment sports of all kind fill out the rest of the gap. The remainder has to do with differences in educational attainment and corresponding income differences; women on average have more education than men do on average, which translates into higher incomes (this isn't a claim about salary disparity for doing the same job -- it's that more women are now in higher-paying jobs than men). There's a legitimate issue underneath, there -- it's not like men are (or ought to be) guaranteed by birthright forms of employment that enjoy superior compensation to the work women do, but the fact of the matter is that as present trends continue the "skills" undereducated males possess don't have lots of market value. Not being as well-positioned (vis-a-vis les femmes) as providers means the balance of power shifts, which no one likes when it goes against their favor. I think the educational system could be improved in ways that'd stop wasting as much educational potential on the part of males, but that's neither here nor there. A final curiousity here is that the author's sense of historical norms (in terms of media targeting) is pretty far off the historical fact, but it's not like an accurate knowledge of the publishing market in the early 20th century is commonly possessed; it might've behooved the author to do some research but this is an amateur publication on the internet trolling for readership, not a serious attempt at peeling back the veil to get a good look at truth. EG: in earlier eras a common complaint amongst the middle-class on upwards was that the stay-at-home wives would sit around filling their heads with garbage ideas from too many novels. Men, being busy with work and other responsibilities, had far less free time to dedicate to reading fiction for entertainment. There were reams and reams and reams of crap fiction cranked out aimed at stay-at-home wives to pass the time -- and they would have lots of time in that era; most of that fiction was utterly forgettable and is now mostly forgotten, out-of-print and only preserved in a handful of libraries for historians interested in the trash culture of the time. As television became mainstreamed this industry died off a lot (less need for trash entertainment), and it died off further as women entered the workforce (less time spent at home). The perceived more-masculine nature of historical media is thus a compounding of two bias-inducing dynamics: - the rise of tv and women in the workforce mean that the recent-history media landscape was quite different from its early situation (it's fair to go way back, since he's bringing in Jules Verne) - the fact that most trash culture isn't worth anyone's time to preserve leaves it mostly forgotten; a consequence of this is a historical filter that throws out most of what got made, leaving behind a biased sampling (eg: the average intellectual can maybe name <40 books from before 1800, most of which are classics; it's eminently not the case that all books published before 1800 were classics) The most obvious change in mass-media content over the last 20 years has been moving away from explicit violence in tv and film (except in horror, which is actually a female-majority product these days, go figure!). If you watch an 80s era Arnold flick you'll see a lot more blood and dismemberment than is the norm today. I see this as a shift in cultural mores and another case of videogames stealing the demand: cultural norms against explicit violence are if anything a positive development; once the tide has turned there's not much point putting it back in -- people will skip a movie if it's too violent but not that many people will skip a film b/c it lacks gore -- and for those who enjoy that kind of thing videos from Mortal Kombat onwards have catered to it. If you want intelligent commentary on media and gender Camille Paglia should be your first stop; she's also a markedly better writer than whiskey, who writes as his nom de plume suggests he might.