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Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

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Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#171
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overwhelming way the left talks about it is in terms of "toxic" masculinity or through the perspective of feminism. The latter is a valid perspective, but dominates the discourse which is hardly a balanced approach.

Is not toxic masculinity. Is toxic humanity.

People use masculinity and femininity as excuses to be toxic. Neither masculinity nor femininity is toxic; the adjective serves a purpose. "Don't do ____, it makes you less of a [gender]" is toxic. "It's okay that you hurt somebody by ____, it's in your nature as a [gender]" is toxic.

Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#172

Anyone who isn't a religious fundamentalist needs to find a non-combative way to talk about it that doesn't make it into a zero-sum game between boys and girls because the far-right evangelicals approach this as a means to an end: "here's this thing that will be easy to point at as a justification for the reversion to traditional gender roles that we already wanted." So anyone who wants to advance the experience of p…

> far-right evangelicals approach this as a means to an end:

Stopping referring to traditional gender roles as a far-right evangelical viewpoint is a good start.

Do you have a better way to phrase that, based on your own suggestion?

Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Girls mature faster, and learn differently. Frankly, a lot of boys simply cannot sit still in a classroom and listen to a boring lecture. They're going to be inattentive and they're going to have more behavioral issues. The solution is more hands on learning, and more physical activity. Gym class isn't even available to many kids anymore. Pretty much everyone should be getting an hour of physical activity a day and y…

> Girls mature faster They act more mature because they're pressured to by society. I won't bombard you with articles but I urge you to look into the causes behind that saying.

[deleted]

Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article you are commenting on? He mentions that schools don't service men very well and that most dropouts are men

> But overall, young men hit the labor market or college or whatever less well-prepared as a result of the education system. No facts about it, just some random assertion. Schools aren't going to change the way males relate to playing games, sports, and farting around in general compared with actually studying. What other part of the article did I miss? Oh, this: > the education system isn’t doing very well by lots o…

[flagged]

Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#175
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically all of the liberal publications treat it as a major topic every so often. A hugely shared article from 2 months ago in WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine... Also in the Atlantic last year: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/21-r... This is just off the top of my head, but it's easy to do a Google search.

Opinion pieces are cool, but have you seen any politicians in positions of power advance debate? What’s the Biden administration’s agenda for men?

You might want to read the first WaPo piece I linked.

It's precisely about how while liberals are recognizing the negative effects of the crisis of masculinity, they haven't been able to converge on solutions. And how that's a problem.

Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#176

“Only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally” ~ Chris Rock Lots of yakking it up about how sad men are but it's all so disingenuous. My experience leads to me to believe that the moment a man asks for help is the moment he has lost the respect of his peers and, should he be so lucky, his female partner. Evolutionarily, men are disposable, and the workplaces and dating arenas we must inhabit reinforce it…

How can we forget this classic:

"Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat." - Hillary Clinton

Men: not even the primary victims of their own gruesome battlefield deaths.

Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#177
post #11

The left talks about this all of the time, as do the middle and right. Pretending otherwise makes me question whether the author is actually trying to help or simply sell his book.

The litmus test is whether the issues are being treated like an (apocryphal?) Medieval witch test, where you are a witch regardless of the outcome.

For example, the fact that males disproportionately commit suicide is blamed on toxic masculinity - lack of vulnerability, cultural self esteem issues or whatever. Ok, fair enough; now the counterfactual is, what if females disproportionately committed suicide? It's pretty clear that it would be diagnosed on the left as related to toxic masculinity too (like e.g. women being less assertive asking for raises is).

The left talks about these issues like that, all the time, indeed - that makes it easier to dismiss the issues or to blame them on the "victim". It appears that the author thinks some other approach is needed.

Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as someone who has largely progressive values, I hesitate to call myself liberal anymore because of a lot of the downright embarrasing shit comming from the left these days. > The left talks about this all of the time, every time I've seen leftists talk about this. its always in the form of gaslighting men into blaming themselves for their failures. as if the k-12 educational system isn't currently stacked against th…

It's why I am hard right now. I'm tired of being gaslighted and demonized. I grew up in Europe and was ultra liberal most of my youth.

The hard right comes with a bunch of nonsense like racism and generally serving the elite though which is a bad idea.

Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#179
post #11

The left talks about this all of the time, as do the middle and right. Pretending otherwise makes me question whether the author is actually trying to help or simply sell his book.

The overwhelming way the left talks about it is in terms of "toxic" masculinity or through the perspective of feminism. The latter is a valid perspective, but dominates the discourse which is hardly a balanced approach.

"Toxic masculinity" was a perfectly reasonable concept when it was originally defined as a kind of social norm. If we interpret "masculinity" as "behavior socially expected from men", then this trivially extends to "toxic masculinity" as "toxic behavior socially expected from men". For sociologists in the early 2010s, this was a great idea and collected a lot of harmful social expectations under a convenient label.

The problem is that a lot of people, many of them journalists and "influencers" writing for a lay audience, decided they could just cross out the "socially expected" part, which results in a completely different concept that puts the onus for the behavior entirely on the individual — hardly a socially enlightened perspective — and that amounts to the appropriation of academic jargon for the speaker's use as a rhetorical bludgeon. And sure, a lot of these writers were left-leaning self-described feminists who may have assumed they could do no wrong. And yes, many of these term-abusers would go on to propagate real toxic masculinity while decrying the failures of the target of the week from their position of presumed revolutionary thought.

But don't blame the sociologists. They used a reasonable term to describe a real problem. And now they've had to go pick a new term — I think it's something like "male role behavior syndrome" but I don't remember exactly.

Re: Boys and Men in the United States Are Struggling. The Left Should Talk About It

#180
post #177
post #11

The left talks about this all of the time, as do the middle and right. Pretending otherwise makes me question whether the author is actually trying to help or simply sell his book.

The litmus test is whether the issues are being treated like an (apocryphal?) Medieval witch test, where you are a witch regardless of the outcome. For example, the fact that males disproportionately commit suicide is blamed on toxic masculinity - lack of vulnerability, cultural self esteem issues or whatever. Ok, fair enough; now the counterfactual is, what if females disproportionately committed suicide? It's prett…

Do you have any real examples? As written, it sounds like you’re criticizing non-specific hypothetical leftists for doing something hypocritical which doesn’t seem likely to lead anywhere productive without identifying who you’re talking about or providing examples of real things they said.
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