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The data are clear: The boys are not all right

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#241

Post by uoaei »

marcellus23 wrote: post #225
kevinob11 wrote: post #82

I'm a white straight male, grew up middle class near Seattle. I'm now in my mid-30s and have 3 kids. Semi-recently I had an (maybe my first?) experience where I wasn't the favored party in a situation. My kids have made focus more difficult, and I work in an industry (tech consulting) where focus is a big deal, and the idea that I'm not the perfect person for the job was a foreign feeling. I no longer felt "I was mad…

> Semi-recently I had an (maybe my first?) experience where I wasn't the favored party in a situation You're mid-30s and you might have just experienced your first thing like that? Man or woman, that's hard to believe. And more importantly, I'm not sure your experience can be generalized to all men. As someone who has experienced situations like that frequently, and knows other men who have, it's a bit frustrating to…

Yours is an argument of kind in reply to an argument of degree.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#242

Post by 0xy »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #112
lph wrote: post #46

Andrew Yang makes some good points in this piece, particularly about positive masculinity and role models. Whether fair or not, the perception that the left is hostile to men has driven recruitment for the far right, and that merits some reflection. But he's also really facile about underlying economic causes. It's easy to blame problems on "our culture has been broken by the wokes!", but many of the problems of youn…

I've coached high school sports teams, both boys and girls, for the last two decades. I've seen some of these trends unfold over the years with my student athletes. My observation is girls are just more motivated than boys, even for something fun like sports practices and workouts, girls in general will show up more consistently than boys. The teachers I've spoken to at the school where I coach have confirmed the sam…

Schools are structured to benefit girls, and the deck is absolutely stacked against boys. The vast majority of teachers are female, and they mark boys worse for equivalent work. [1] Boys generally require more physical activity than girls, yet the majority of school is "sit down and stare at this whiteboard".

Of course they're less motivated, it's quite literally a rigged game.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#243

Post by [deleted] »

rhino369 wrote: post #59
bmj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the father of 18 year old who is not going to college and instead working as a carpenter, I don't think lumping 18 year olds with 25+ year olds makes much sense. Perhaps I have an antiquated view of family, but I don't feel his "independence" has everything to do with where he lives. I'm more than happy to have him around the house if it allows him to save money and live a better life at, say, 21.

It absolutely makes sense. The idea that an 18 year old would start their own household is an artifact from a small period in our history when 18 year olds could easily get an unskilled job that would afford a decent modest lifestyle. But that only really started in the late 40's and was over by the 70's.

[deleted]

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#244

Post by uoaei »

ytwombly wrote: post #150

US-based cis-hetero white man here. The data reinforce the impression you get glancing at the headlines or spending a day out anywhere in America observing other men. Dare I say it even reinforces what I know from painful firsthand experience as a man, at the lowest points in my life. I was lucky though, with a supportive family who helped me through the confusing years of early adulthood. You can point to the declin…

> what explains the relative stability in post-Christian Europe?

Politics is the new religion insofar as it develops moral frameworks and makes people abide by them while convincing them they are making the "rational" choice. This is informed substantially by Enlightenment-era philosophies and is the major component in modern consent manufacturing.

"Rational" in scare quotes because good luck converting questions of morality into questions of rationality.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#245

Post by jimbokun »

lph wrote: post #215
jimbokun wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So were those teams trying to exclude women? Or just no (or few) women that wanted to be part of those teams? Right now, tech companies are desperate to hire anyone qualified. Are you saying they are deliberately excluding women from consideration? From what I've seen, all the tech employers are desperate to hire and promote women, and there are just very few women interested.

No, the teams weren't trying to exclude women. Not at all. They were representative of the company and the entire industry. There are very few women in tech. So then the question is why are very few women in tech? If you really dive into this, it's a chicken-and-egg problem: The fact that so few women are in tech makes the whole scene into sort of a frat house, which is often not a welcoming or kind environment to wo…

> The fact that so few women are in tech makes the whole scene into sort of a frat house, which is often not a welcoming or kind environment to women

I have had several jobs in tech. None of those work environments resembled a frat house.

Maybe a few startups resemble a frat house, but is it really indicative of the industry as a whole?

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#246

Post by tharne »

bmj wrote: post #35
johncessna wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners. and > Research shows that one significant factor women look for in a partner is a steady job. As men’s unemployment rises, their romantic prospects decline. Unsurprisingly, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from 1960 to 2010, the proportion of adults without a college degree who marry plummeted from just ove…

As the father of 18 year old who is not going to college and instead working as a carpenter, I don't think lumping 18 year olds with 25+ year olds makes much sense. Perhaps I have an antiquated view of family, but I don't feel his "independence" has everything to do with where he lives. I'm more than happy to have him around the house if it allows him to save money and live a better life at, say, 21.

This is spot on. Multigenerational housing used to be the norm, not a symbol of failure.

Why we all think it's a great idea to leave our families at 18 and pay high rents so that we can live with strangers we found on the internet is beyond me.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#247

Post by uoaei »

frankbreetz wrote: post #5

>>Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own free will because their wife is working and they are staying home with the kids, both of these facts could be true, but seems like a win in both gender equality ter…

> I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own free will because their wife is working and they are staying home with the kids, both of these facts could be true, but seems like a win in both gender equality terms and allowing men to have the life they want. This seems better then having two working parents.

You sound like you didn't look at or have any sense of the statistics around two- vs one-income, single-family households before you posted this comment.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#248

Post by tharne »

rhino369 wrote: post #59
bmj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the father of 18 year old who is not going to college and instead working as a carpenter, I don't think lumping 18 year olds with 25+ year olds makes much sense. Perhaps I have an antiquated view of family, but I don't feel his "independence" has everything to do with where he lives. I'm more than happy to have him around the house if it allows him to save money and live a better life at, say, 21.

It absolutely makes sense. The idea that an 18 year old would start their own household is an artifact from a small period in our history when 18 year olds could easily get an unskilled job that would afford a decent modest lifestyle. But that only really started in the late 40's and was over by the 70's.

> The idea that an 18 year old would start their own household is an artifact from a small period in our history when 18 year olds could easily get an unskilled job that would afford a decent modest lifestyle.

I think this is the root of a lot of people's frustrations around housing, and adulthood. For most our history it was expected that you would have multiple generations sharing a household. The idea that you move out of your family's house the second you turn 18 or finish college is a relatively new idea. As parent commenter points out, this was really only the norm for two generations, suggesting that that, and not our current situation, is the historical outlier.

Living with your family for a while allows you to save money and help your parents out after they spent the better part of two decades raising you.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#249

Post by marcellus23 »

uoaei wrote: post #241
marcellus23 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Semi-recently I had an (maybe my first?) experience where I wasn't the favored party in a situation You're mid-30s and you might have just experienced your first thing like that? Man or woman, that's hard to believe. And more importantly, I'm not sure your experience can be generalized to all men. As someone who has experienced situations like that frequently, and knows other men who have, it's a bit frustrating to…

Yours is an argument of kind in reply to an argument of degree.

The degree is irrelevant. I don't doubt that men have privilege — but the "but women have it worse!" comment often shows up on articles like these, and since it's just whataboutism, it feels like it's suggesting that we shouldn't care about these issues.

Shouldn't we care about how society is treating people, no matter who they are, instead of getting into a pissing contest about who society is _really_ screwing over the most?

Not to mention, frankly, it's ridiculous to imply that a 35-year old male software engineer's experience is at all representative of that of the average male (who is far, far worse off).

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#250

Post by api »

mandmandam wrote: post #91
frankbreetz wrote: post #5

>>Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own free will because their wife is working and they are staying home with the kids, both of these facts could be true, but seems like a win in both gender equality ter…

This isn't mysterious. The people sucking money out of the wage pool are the 1% class, not women. 20 trillion in debt for illegal and stupid wars probably didn't help either, though it does tie in once again with the 1% class.

> 20 trillion in debt for illegal and stupid wars

That's really the elephant in the living room. Perhaps as a society we are poorer because we set fire to trillions in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the HN crowd here's a metric: the average seed round is like $2M these days, so Iraq at roughly $3 trillion would be enough to fund 1.5 million startup companies.

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