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Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this was considered in the film (I haven't seen it), but the difference between how men's and women's issues are treated is quite obvious to me. It's due to an imbalance in the care matrix. If we think broadly about who cares about whom, it goes like this: * Men care about women because they want to mate with them, * Women care about women because it's in their own best interest to look after each oth…

It appears you and me came to the same conclusion. The only solution I see to this problem is bringing down the value of reproduction through technology. Think artificial wombs. That should hopefully lessen the social pressure of men to compete.

Men don't really compete due to a conscious desire to reproduce, though. It simply pleases men to have more power and more access to more women. The only reason is because they are descended from men who had power and access to women.

This seems to be a common misunderstanding of how natural selection works. Giraffes don't select other giraffes consciously because of their ability to reach higher leaves. They select them unconsciously simply because they are attracted to giraffes with longer necks. And they are attracted to giraffes with longer necks because they are descended from giraffes who were attracted to giraffes with longer necks and those giraffes were able to reach higher leaves and could slightly out-compete the other giraffes.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#802
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. When my kid was young and I was out with him the other parents (invariably women) treated me as an oddity and assumed I would be incompetent. Yet, many don't like the fact they're saddled with the majority of childrearing. Dating is much the same: the majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity. This gets better as one gets older,…

> majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity This is so insane. Anyone who's been enough a player of the dating game and treed to optimise your strategy known you will end up becoming or (in my case) pretending to be "toxic masculinity" because it work so much more on girls.

Not really. I've found the opposite: last time I was single I spent a year dating professors, PhD students, professionals of various kinds, scientists etc. It was off the back of a profile that was specifically designed to highlight my mind and interests. I got very few hits from Instagram obsessives and had a truly wild time.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why there is a dichotomy presented in relationships like that - sure, 10 years into your marriage you might not be going at it like rabbits as you were in the first year, but there isn't any reason why parents can't provide stable environments for children _and_ have strong romantic relationships still. It takes very little to carve off some time for one another, and that continued investment in…

> It takes very little to carve off some time for one another, and that continued investment in bonding with another in and of itself long term provides the stability children need. Why is romanticism the only way to "invest in bonding"? There seems to be a large subset (maybe very large?) of the population where the only way to bond on some level is sex.

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By failing to maintain the population. The richer people get, the fewer children they have. This is the same in countries all over the world. Your intuition is wrong on this one.

And why should we maintain the population ? Have we reached the perfect amount of people on earth ? We could be a lot less humans on earth, it would be amazing for the environment, and I think we'd be as happy. The only downside I see is economic (in the sense that everything is built with the expectation of growth). But it is to me an economic problem, and not a reproduction problem.

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#805
post #598
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, as a culture, we should emphasize MORE the health of the family, of the duty and honor it brings to raise kids and less on the "perfect" romantic relationships of the parents? Shouldn't we promote a less Hollywood-like picture of long lasting relationships? I have the feeling that we are trained too much to think that our "romance" and sex life should last forever. When - in reality - a good relationship trans…

It can be healthy for a family not to be together. Fetishizing stability and the nuclear family over happiness of the people in that family isn't necessarily a good solution to anything much. Sure, a good relationship might not resemble the hollywood ideal very much, but "duty to the family" leads to misery for a lot of people, and kids don't grow up happy and well adjusted when mom and dad are very unhappy with thei…

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#806

This comment will probably be lost but hey maybe someone will read it: We inherited a world where for many generations, men were hostile to women. It was unfair and needed rectifying. But increasingly, we fixed it by normalizing hostility to men. Overemphasis on "toxic masculinity", hyper focus on promoting outcomes for girls while doing nothing of the sort for boys. Plenty of various "Women in X" supporting each oth…

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Historically, women have been barred from pursuing education, from voting, from making their own medical decisions, from holding political/academic/religious/scientific positions of power, from controlling their own finances, and from participating in the majority of careers, among many many other examples. Lack of access to these things necessarily constrains one’s autonomy. And some of these restrictions persist even today, to varying degrees in different parts of the world.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From things like "my son left his math book in school, can someone send a picture of page 23 so we can prepare for the test" to "my daughter didn't write down the homework assignments; can someone send them" to organizing the class outing, discussing general issues with teachers or the schools organization.

Doesn't this just delay learning about responsibility and consequences until later, when the consequences might actually be real? Parents getting this involved in the children's learning seems really, really weird to me.

We are talking primary school, when kids don't have their own phone/computer and it is unrelated to taking responsibility and consequences. If my daughter ask me to relay a question/message because she didn't wrote well / forgot a detail, she is actually taking responsibility for it.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#808

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…

The issue is that in US driving license is trivial to get and it shows on the roads ( queue explanations that it is just the function of car being a necessity -- true, but irrelevant too the point ). Even if instituted, I don't think people would accept that kind of infringement though I admit this is probably one place, where we should be able to self-regulate ( we clearly can't though and some systems are built for ever increasing population, which is a separate force that would prevent that kind of change ).

In short, I agree. I don't think we are doing it well now.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#809
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…

I feel the same about "The Red Pill" movie and couldn't see how the criticism aligned with the reality. What I do see often is that entrenched actors and groups will attack, with specially reserved ardor, any artist or production taking a position of understanding and shared interest between groups or actors that are meant to be at odds. With this movie, the critics could have said the filmmaker, Alex Lee Moyer, avoi…

> couldn't see how the criticism aligned with the reality.

I think it’s the same phenomenon of people skipping the article and going straight to the comments where they make statements based on the headline and their own existing contexts.

By the time they learn the content, if they ever do, they dig in and try to defend their positions.

I think this is caused by the incentive is for karma/whuffie/whatever rather than actual knowledge and benefit to fellow man. So macro is that the first to comment gets the most points. And everything else is downstream results.

So people assume the doc is about bad people doing bad things and talk like that. It doesn’t help that it also falls into the complex zone of “Hitler loved dogs” where people who truly are jerks also are into redpill stuff, but likely a very small percent of the total number. So it’s easy to make reductive comments of “this jerk is into redpill let’s talk about him and get more clicks and ignore the thousands of men blowing their brains out [0]”

[0] about 80% of US suicides in the 2021 were men, https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/suicide-rate-by-ge... The rate different isn’t as stark globally but still much higher for men than women, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#810
post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I thought for 1 there was actually both : half men are effeminate and the other half basically ultra-masculine gym bros ^^. Eastern Europe looks interesting tho

> basically ultra-masculine gym bros I don't think that's ultra masculine. At least people around me like that are self obsessed, appearance obsessed but ultimately fragile men. I also know because I was probably almost the same. I had a beard and looked like a lumberjack. Was I a real man? Not really. I'm not saying I now know what a man should be, but it definitely isn't an ultra masculine gym bro. It is someone wh…

> someone who can create a stable, responsible, potentially loving environment for a family, someone who can endure a lot of strain and responsibility while still holding it together

How is this different from a woman's role?

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