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Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

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641–650 of 1001 posts

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#641

This sounds like they're not really taking into account boys needs, with the idea that we shouldn't be "gendered" when relating to them. This made me think of Andrew Tate, who is a douchebag, but has a huge following with young men, apparently because he has found a way to appeal to them emotionally. Anyone who is looking at how to push boys in the right direction should look at what appeals to them and meet them whe…

There's a segment who function with the idea that the emotional needs of boys, teen guys, and men can go unmet and that they will just somehow crumble and be okay with it. This is not true. People with unmet needs will seek to meet those needs; if something healthy is not provided, it ought to be no surprise when unhealthy means are found as a substitute. Instead, boys are discriminated against academically, emotiona…

>If someone asked me an obscure sin, something that went unrecognized but was none the less heinous, I would say that attempting to inculcate the innocent with self-loathing, to saddle them with Original Sin, and to more or less attempt to have that hatred internalized, that would be a mortal sin, if for no other reason than there's simply a finite capacity you can find in humanity for that self-abnegation and past that point, one or more will snap, will turn on you, and it will always be in a way you most dread.

As someone raised in a hardline Calvinist worldview I couldn't agree with this more, claiming someone is fundamentally disgusting and contaminated on a basic level simply for existing can do awful things to them whether the beliefs stick or not.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#642
post #578

It's not just a health crisis it's also a insurgency recruitment pool. Anyway history has a way to do away with dysfunctional cultures.

No, it doesn't. History, just like nature, is almost completely random and "unfair".

Nature is absolutely not "almost completely random", it follows the path of least resistance in any and all things.

Thus making it "Fair" if we had all the variables

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#643
post #11

> New research shows that when fathers are present and emotionally invested in children’s lives, they are more likely to develop a stronger sense of self-worth and excel in everything from school to relationships. Regardless of the debate on how tough (or not) love should be, the absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful that we should be trying to address.

Without evidence, I'll suggest that this is an oversimplification. In a model where boys require masculine modeling from older, adult figures, "absent fathers" are most an issue when a boy's regularly-accessible social unit has been whittled down to the nuclear family. That seems to be a crisis in-and-of-itself. When I look at socially-successful men, they often have had multiple older men in their lives to model the…

Teachers, mentors and friends are of course very important, but I would believe this not to be the case.

There is no society or commune to take care of the immediate needs. There can be large families that offer a very good and secure support network and there are families that form clans. In that it seems to be a very neutral influence.

> I admit that there's likely some who won't like hearing this

You have to advertise this larger community unit a bit because I don't really see it aside from the latter example. The time of the utopia commune parenting with the weird third party uncle was never very popular and most importantly, not very successful.

Father that take pride in parenting will get much better results and to say that is egotism seems like a very sad and reduced perspective.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That was tried, in various forms already. Now I let you guess by whom. Honestly, people in Germany are freaking out because the AfD won the county equivalent of a mayors election for the first time. In Germany's second smallest county (it is a Landkries, a county is as close a thing as possible). What bothers me much, much more is to see all this Nazi-eugenics derived ideas slowly but surely finding their way again i…

TIL this sort of derailing of a conversation is called 'concern trolling':

Concern trolling is a manipulative tactic where an individual pretends to be genuinely concerned about a particular issue or cause, but their real intention is to derail the conversation and discredit the opposing viewpoint. In the example you provided, person B is attempting to associate the contentious idea with Nazi thought in order to make anyone who opposes or questions the idea appear sympathetic to Nazis.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#645

My impression is, men are stuck in a world where they are told not to be men. Toxic masculinity is perhaps a thing, but boys are told endlessly how they shouldn't behave and how their nature is flawed. Girls on the other hand, all is well.

Isn’t the paragon of masculinity in American culture all about “improvise, adapt, overcome”? The idea that men have a fixed nature and can’t thrive outside a particular environment is… not very masculine. Something I think people miss sometimes is that there’s a big market for messages loudly affirming girls’ identities and choices because things are not, in fact, going that well.

Good point, we (men) might be oblivious to the fact that pressure has ramped up for women too, they now need to be a woman AND a man to get prestige.

It's been an ongoing adventure with my partner, she works very hard for a good salary while I'm the successless indie game dev. We talk a lot about it and our feelings about it, and I realize how privileged/lucky I am to have found her and that she accepts me.

She's crazy enough to agree with me on the fact that I might get exponentially more useful in case of a war/disaster, and that I'd make a perfect dad when we get to it :p

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People aren't having enough children. By what metric? Economics? Economics, ironically, is the reason I don't have more kids. My family is doing, what I would consider, "quite well", but we'd still be pretty fucked with one more mouth to feed, the need for a larger car and possibly larger house. I truly don't know how people that aren't that far below us on the resources / income scale have any hope of comfortable…

It's interesting that when people talk about having another child there is almost always the implicit assumption of maintaining at least the same lifestyle. I was quite amused that in your comment you explicitly talk about expanding your lifestyle to have another child: "the need for a larger car and possibly larger house". Poor people have more children than well off people until you hit top >1% incomes. Economics i…

> Economics is not the thing stopping people from having kids, reduction in lifestyle is.

Technically you're somewhat correct, because it sucks to have kids when you know they'll be raised by an economically poorer you.

And as most of the people don't see themselves as economically stable given the socio-economic conditions that have been in place for the last 15-20 years, that means that many people give up having kids because of said economic reasons (so, you're also incorrect, because economics is indeed stopping people from having kids), saying something like this: "I'm already only scrapping by as it is, bringing a kid into the equation will only make things worse for me and my spouse and definitely for the kid".

Not saying that everyone thinks and acts like this, because otherwise no-one would have had children by now, but it's a strong part of the population I would say.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#647
post #528
post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was not my experience. The message was bitterness, and there is a reason their lot is poorly perceived. Try /r/menslib for a healthier discussion that isn’t centred around blaming women for everything.

> that isn’t centred around blaming women for everything. Without clicking the link, I just know it's gonna be the patriarchy/masculinity, right?

It's a honeypot. It prioritizes feminism / viewing issues under the lens of feminism, over solving the issues boys/men have. In bad cases, the advice given is downright self-destructive, as the political/social climate is not there for individual men to act the way that sub would recommend.

So yes, you're correct.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#648
post #470

What's interesting is that I recently watched The Red Pill Documentary. I recall when it was released that the director, Cassie Jaye a self professed feminist was pilloried absolutely everywhere for giving a voice to Mens Rights Activists. The actual documentary is quite milquetoast. What it is, is her engaging with the ideas around how in some ways men are disadvantaged in modern society. It's fascinating to me that…

The director did a good Tedx talk[0] if anyone would like a tl;dr. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WMuzhQXJoY

Just FYI, TEDx is no guarantee at all about the credentials or worthiness of a talk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_(conference)#TEDx

> TEDx are independent events similar to TED in presentation. They can be organized by anyone who obtains a free license from TED, and agrees to follow certain principles. TEDx events are required to be non-profit, but organizers may use an admission fee or commercial sponsorship to cover costs.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#649
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tate has a following because anybody more mild or less delusional will just get shouted down by vocal radicals who have no concept of why lost men gravitate toward people like Tate in the first place. Anybody that exists in the space he does will be called an incel-adjacent far-right radical regardless of how reasonable what they're saying is, and the only winning move there is to just say that detractors are agents…

I think Jordan Peterson is doing a decent job at this though, his stance on helping young men is quite similar to Tate's, albeit less delusional.

> I think Jordan Peterson is doing a decent job at this though

Is he? Nuking a prolific academic career to write terrible self help books, that you yourself ignore and giving yourself brain damage while you endlessly rant on twitter about mostly made up terminally online nonsense seems like the complete opposite of "doing a decent job" to me...

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#650
post #606

Here's a thought and I am writing this as I don my kevlar flame retardant jacket. For most things in life where we could impact the lives of other people materially - driving is a good example - we ensure some minimal amount of training before letting people perform that activity. However with parenting we have nothing and the result it seems is we pay with a ton more resources downstream in the way of therapy, deten…

You don’t learn how to parent, you learn how to live, in a wholehearted way, and you model that for your children. Good parenting is foremost about growing up before your kids do.

This is terrible "magic thinking" advice.

Kids are VERY counterintuitive (mine at least). Our kid has had behavioral problems at school and at home. And it's extremely difficult to understand the root of the issues (it turns out that the pandemic, moving houses, starting school and having a baby brother all at once can be a bit much for a 3 year old).

Literally EVERYONE who is not a professional told us to smack our kid into submission. But by reading stuff and talking to professionals, you learn that some kids do have weird ways of expressing their emotions, and that acknowledging that and supporting them works. You have to completely turn the way you speak to them around. It's really hard to do cause nobody wants to confort a kid who's annoying, but it works.

None of the stuff I do with my kids would have been possible had I not learnt it as an adult. Stop the magic thinking. Read about children, they're weird and wonderfully different.

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