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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

#571

Post by clutchdude »

barry-cotter wrote: post #476
clutchdude wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Total hours worked in the US has DOUBLED since then. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B4701C0A222NBEA And more work is done part-time(usually by those are unable to work full time jobs) https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=B4701C0A222NBEA&ut...

Total hours worked by people who are being paid. If you’re working on a farm but you’re a farmer’s wife you’re not being paid. Female liberation resulted in a very large increase in the labor force, a much less drastic rise in hours worked than in paid labor hours.

Sadly, I don't have any data to refute that:

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/july/nonfarm-payr....

That said, I doubt it's enough to offset the growth in population among workers.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S

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

#572

Post by joshuamorton »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #419

> we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic I know "toxic masculinity" is a dumb academic term that never should have become a slogan, but Andrew, Mr. Yang, that's not what it means. It's like "async functions". Not all functions are async. It's okay if a function is sync. Adjectives modify nouns to make them refer to a specific subset. It's fine to be masculine. I don't know what it means to be masculin…

Not to give too much credit to Yang, but I think he's hitting on a point that is more subtle than you're making, perhaps by accident.

I agree with you, masculinity is good, fantastic, worth cherishing. I'm a man, I enjoy my masculinity (whatever that is, yeah), and I enjoy expressing it in mostly positive ways. This sometimes means doing stereotypically feminine things, or acting in "softer" ways, which is fine. Emotional maturity is masculine.

This leads to me sometimes being referred to as a man who is "written by a woman" or an "egg" (a trans person who isn't yet out/hasn't realized it yet). These are obviously jokes, but they're still harmful jokes, because they perpetuate the idea that my good attribute can't be masculine. This shifts from toxic masculinity being a bad subset of masculinity, to masculinity being toxic by exclusion (as nontoxic traits are inherently non-masculine).

That's a really harmful pattern, and one that people shouldn't perpetuate.

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

#573

Post by nautilius »

Gwarzo wrote: post #554
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And pointing to the decline of religion isn't very helpful for us atheists. I can't really buy into a religion I don't believe in for the sake of making society better. I'd rather try to make society better directly, I don't want to do a "noble lie". I'll gesture vaguely at "the suburbs". Low trust and alienation describes my childhood in a place where you needed a car to do anything and even when my parents let me w…

"And pointing to the decline of religion isn't very helpful for us atheists" Pointing to something that is true doesn't need to be helpful. Making the statement it's not helpful to you, is helpful to noone.

Surely, there are more atheists than ReactiveJelly. No need to be so restrictively negative.

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

#574

Post by sokoloff »

dlsa wrote: post #346
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…

If most women are optimising unemployed men out of dating / marriage then men being unemployed has far more significant consequences for men than women. Women are all about equality for access to employment but then complain that there aren't enough suitable men with jobs. The more a woman earns the smaller her dating pool becomes. Perhaps she could be more flexible in partner selection? There are outliers but the da…

> Perhaps she could be more flexible in partner selection?

My experience suggests that people are rarely more flexible than they need to be to meet their goals. And: why should they be?

This results in some amount of assortive mating (of the social, rather than genetic, variety), but I don’t see a likely path out of this. It’s the human version of “birds of a feather”.

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

#575

Post by guskel »

luckydata wrote: post #311
thrway99 wrote: post #61

My observation is that we are going to have a radical rebalancing of who reproduces and who doesn’t. Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen just…won’t pass on genetics. Children are a lot of work and energy. I’m highly introverted and high earning. My wife was the aggressor in my case. She pretty much made it all happen. I think…

This is such a weird take. You really don't need to be all that special or beautiful to find a partner, I've always been a stocky guy all my life and I never had a real issue finding sexual partners and now I'm happily married with kids. Get yourself a personality, don't be weird, dress decently and talk to people. That's really all you need, no matter what you look like there's someone out there that's into it. Don'…

The thing about these kinds of comments is that it's impossible to know why it worked for you, why you're specific situations worked out different.

So many men try all your advice and still struggle greatly.

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

#576

Post by BLKNSLVR »

awaythrow483 wrote: post #359
paulpauper wrote: post #111

The crisis, if there is one, is that society has less use for males who have IQs between 90-105 or so, who cannot cut it in STEM, and who are finding it hard to cope with increasingly competitive economic conditions and higher overall costs like rent, and is why many men are delaying family formation or moving back with parents (but also due to careerism for women). Men are just dropping out rather than doing low-pai…

I'm 33, Ive got a fairly high IQ, make $340k in a STEM field and enough to retire tomorrow, I'm not unattractive, and put a huge amount of effort over many years into online dating. I've pretty much given up on dating. I have a total inability to find anyone I'm interested in that is interested in me. When I was younger and I wanted to go to bars and get drunk and be an idiot I had plenty of attractive sexual partner…

> tell Women painfully stupid stuff they want to hear about their quantum vibrations matching and other new age nonsense.

These sound like the kind of partners you're trying to avoid anyway. Although I may be projecting.

Also, are you wanting an easy time dating, or are you wanting a long-term relationship with kids on the horizon? They're two wildly different desires.

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

#577

Post by pnutjam »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #462
_bkr9 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A note on fitness. Any pressure I've had to lose weight or whatnot has come from me . All female partners have said that they don't care about my weight, and some actually like some belly to rest on. That said, they have commented favourably on other physical features, and I'm not particularly overweight. I say all this just to try and fight the idea that crops up that if you're male and don't fit some jacked or "Cha…

Forget the incel subculture, media - traditional, social, or otherwise has been feeding us that for decades as well. If you're not thin and "beautiful", your romantic prospects are zero so why even try. Admittedly, it's also partially one's own fault for buying into it, but being fed a continual stream of the best looking people from a young age seriously alters one's perspective. I spent my entire teenage and young…

Don't be ashamed to go to a gym or take a fitness class. It's a great way to meet people.

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

#578

Post by 11101010001100 »

awaythrow483 wrote: post #359
paulpauper wrote: post #111

The crisis, if there is one, is that society has less use for males who have IQs between 90-105 or so, who cannot cut it in STEM, and who are finding it hard to cope with increasingly competitive economic conditions and higher overall costs like rent, and is why many men are delaying family formation or moving back with parents (but also due to careerism for women). Men are just dropping out rather than doing low-pai…

I'm 33, Ive got a fairly high IQ, make $340k in a STEM field and enough to retire tomorrow, I'm not unattractive, and put a huge amount of effort over many years into online dating. I've pretty much given up on dating. I have a total inability to find anyone I'm interested in that is interested in me. When I was younger and I wanted to go to bars and get drunk and be an idiot I had plenty of attractive sexual partner…

You are, to a very high probability, less interesting than you think you are. Same applies to everyone else.

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

#579

Post by pcmoney »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #239
thrway99 wrote: post #61

My observation is that we are going to have a radical rebalancing of who reproduces and who doesn’t. Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen just…won’t pass on genetics. Children are a lot of work and energy. I’m highly introverted and high earning. My wife was the aggressor in my case. She pretty much made it all happen. I think…

I think the obesity problem is linked to the fact that many people have to work 60 hours a week to survive and don't have the time/energy to get in shape. Capitalism has taken a large swath of people out of the dating game just due to working to survive.

Capitalism has taken more people out of poverty than anything else on planet earth and produced incredible abundance and flourishing in the past 200 years. Socialism has failed every time it has been tried. (Also stop describing everything you don’t like as “Capitalism”, it is intellectually lazy, instead describe what aspect of Capitalism caused the thing you don’t like directly and provably and with a clear alternative that wouldn’t have had worse downsides)

Good critiques of Capitalism are important to help it continue to evolve, compete, and win in a competitive marketplace of ideas.

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

#580

Post by nautilius »

rayiner wrote: post #269
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…

> You can point to the decline of organized religion and with it traditional gender roles, but then what explains the relative stability in post-Christian Europe? As far as I can tell, Europe isn’t all that post-Christian. Even countries that have low levels of people actively practicing religion still carry a strong cultural legacy from Christianity: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes... Co…

Note that 'cultural legacy' is completely different from 'organized religion'. Celebrating 'Christmas' as a family get-together is completely different from celebrating the arrival of the messiah and deriving your complete moral compass from that.
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