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The End of Men

theatlantic.com

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Re: The End of Men

#71

Post by alxp »

rubashov wrote: post #32
axle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is really that you likely have not been anything else apart from a male WASP. See, there is no institution working against you. These things you are complaining about not getting are not the main product, they are shortcuts. A scholarship is not the normal way of studying, it's a shortcut way, for people who have something working against them. A woman (and a black guy) have institutions against them. The…

> the white will likely get more jobs than the black guy. All else held equal, that is simply not true in modern America. There are very powerful incentives to hire the equivalently qualified black guy in order to avoid lawsuits. Anyway, all this affirmative action stuff will have to be dismantled in the next twenty years when whites are a minority. It will simply become impossible for institutions to function if the…

All else is most definitely not equal, but you know this.

Re: The End of Men

#72

Post by rubashov »

cia_plant wrote: post #60
rubashov wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about genes and "verbal ability" studies. But the cold hard fact is that IQ is highly genetically heritable and is very strongly correlated to schooling and professional outcomes. Look, we can strip babies away from their parents en masse and force them into "optimal upbringing" experiments, as perhaps you are suggesting. Or, we can celebrate diversity and acknowledge that different groups of pe…

"heritable" does not mean "determined by genetics" FYI.

Wording revised. Identical twin studies show it is determined by genetics.

Re: The End of Men

#73

Post by Qz »

erlanger wrote: post #29
sbt wrote: post #13

being a white male sometimes feels like the entire fucking universe is suffering from some sort of inferiority complex.

It's also excellent. I regret that our privilege necessarily implies disadvantage for everyone else, but we have it far easier than most. It seems that no amount of anti-discriminatory measures can erase this admittedly positive prejudice.

I'm not sure that 'having it far easier than most' somehow equates to 'excellent' for anyone other than Bill and Ted.

Re: The End of Men

#74

Post by paylesworth »

rada wrote: post #57
codingthewheel wrote: post #25

This article is okay, somewhat sexist. I'm surprised it passed the first round of editorial review. Imagine the uproar if a man published an article flirting with "the end of women" in a major publication. This is a feminist claptrap with a lot of anger behind it, and intended to push buttons. It amounts to "girls are better than boys HAHA!" I'm quite sure men will do just fine over the coming decades, thank you kind…

I am surprised you saw the article as angry. I've read it as being very sympathetic towards boys and men. I thought it factually presented the decline of male participation in college and at work as well as in family life and sounded an alarm at what's happening. All the anecdotes were along the lines of, what do we do to involve men more?

For example, try reading it with a woman's voice trying to encourage her dog. "Awww, look at the poor little puppy, errr man."

Re: The End of Men

#75

Post by jerf »

axle wrote: post #46
jerf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you planning on even engaging with my point? I'm not sure why I should try to engage with yours if you're not going to engage with mine and instead fire back trite gotchas. Apparently as a black woman I'm more likely to get a degree and more likely to get a job, so what was your question again? Deprogram yourself and look around you . You're running old code. If there is still vast reservoirs of systematic racis…

That's basically the problem - you don't understand. You don't understand that black men can't just go into the clubs that white people can, you don't understand that when white people meet black people, their faces are slightly less relaxed. Take a trip as a white guy to Asia or Africa or somewhere. You are the pinnacle of society. And we're not even talking Barack Obama mixed race, try being a real black person for…

Ah, moving goalposts. Now affirmative action is not done when it fixes the US, it's only done when it fixes the world.

May I humbly suggest that screwing around with hiring policies or college acceptance policies in the US is extremely unlikely to have this effect? If the US refused to employ anyone but black women in any position, anywhere, I do not see how that will solve your problem with the world.

You're still not engaging with my point, either. When is it enough? Give me a criterion for when I know we're done. And since we're not talking about "the world" but the US, when are we done in the US? Now you want 50/50 parity in politics, specifically, to add to all the places where "they" are ahead and still gaining? Can we finally stop if we actually get there, can we finally stop if male-WASPs are underrepresented in all parts of the job market and in all degrees, or will that not be enough either?

I really hate to say this, but this is the sort of argumentation we get on this topic. You refuse to engage with your opponents because you're used to just winning. Wave the flag of racial discrimination and watch the opposition just melt away. You don't have to engage. When discrimination in the US was rampant and it showed in the job market and college degrees, that was probably reasonable. But if you want to explain why we need these policies when we've exceeded proportional representation and are still trending away from proportional representation, you're going to have to actually engage. Why aren't we done here?

(And I don't care about fixing the world for the purposes of this argument. I'm pretty sure that being an American and believing that I must solve the world's racism with my policies is not generally acceptable, rightly so. Now we shouldn't dismantle affirmative action policies because that wouldn't be sufficiently culturally imperialist?)

Re: The End of Men

#76

Post by lukev »

Qz wrote: post #69
lukev wrote: post #34

Who gives a crap? Even if there are measurable statistical differences in competence at various activities between the sexes (which is far from proven), the average variation between two individuals is far, far more than the average variation between the sexes at large. In other words, treat people like the individuals and stop ANY form of discrimination based on irrelevant categories, sex-based or otherwise. Also, t…

> Even if there are measurable statistical differences in competence at various activities between the sexes (which is far from proven), the average variation between two individuals is far, far more than the average variation between the sexes at large. This is has no bearing on the issue. Yes, two individuals are probably measurably more different than the average woman vs the average man, but the qualities of the…

> This is has no bearing on the issue. Yes, two individuals are probably measurably more different than the average woman vs the average man, but the qualities of the individual tend to balance out to a middle point in the larger picture.

If the average difference between all men and all women on Skill X is 3%, and the average difference between any two given individuals is 30%, then even though there are two distinct loci, gender is still an extremely weak indicator. Sure, it shows up on statistical charts, but for that to be a meaningful "larger picture" means it should be able to inform our actions as a society. But the huge intra-group variation means that any action we do take based on this data is necessarily unfair to a large number of individuals.

> (p.s. the data says you're wrong.)

Please, I love to see it. I would have researched it myself except didn't have time to dig around right now and a quick Google search turns up nothing on the subject.

Re: The End of Men

#77

Post by rada »

crystalis wrote: post #47
rada wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making cents on a dollar, whether from non-whiteness or non-maleness, is hardly an inferiority complex. But hey - don't just take my word for it, see for yourself. Go to a McDonalds and request an item from their 99c menu. When they ring it up, say you only have 3 quarters. When they stare at you, tell them they just need to get over it... and please, don't forget to let us know how it worked out.

Thanks for trotting out a heartwrenching example to go with your incorrect statement. See http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/03/08/department-of-labor-... , notably "The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."

I am well aware of the various ways to look at statistics. Average vs median wages, equal pay vs comparable pay, etc. However, before you get angry, please consider that the argument works the other way too. For example, the statistic that advertises that about half the managerial jobs are taken by women is heavily skewed by jobs that are managerial only in the sense that there is a managerial title such as a shift manager at McDonalds, loan officer, etc, whereas if we take executive positions the number is well below 20%. There are many ways you can manipulate the numbers to support both sides of the argument, but whichever way you spin it, can we agree on something we all know - that white guys make more than women or non-whites overall? In other words, if you don't like that I used 3 quarters in my example, would it really be much different if you had 9 dimes, or would you still be laughed out of the aforementioned McDonalds?

Of course my point was not the 75 cents to a dollar ratio. My point was, the original poster implied that they (women|brown people|whatever) rally against us (white males) because they are a bunch of whiny jealous sissies. So, as one of them, I'd simply like to state that we are not against you (in fact we like you very much!) and we are well adjusted, thank you very much. You can use belittling words such as "heartwrenching" or "inferiority complex" all you want but it doesn't make any difference. A dollar is a dollar, and a bunch of change is a bunch of change.

P.S. Not surprisingly, to support your argument, you linked to a guy who is so gender-angry that he maintains a blog whose sole topic of discussion is how men are short-changed by the modern society. Just look at his table of content: "American Women Resorting to Desperate Measures", "A Life System Support For A Penis". I mean, the guys blames women's lib for teens having oral sex for chrissakes:

http://www.the-spearhead.com/2010/06/08/the-result-of-womens...

Re: The End of Men

#78

Post by acid_bath »

lukev wrote: post #34

Who gives a crap? Even if there are measurable statistical differences in competence at various activities between the sexes (which is far from proven), the average variation between two individuals is far, far more than the average variation between the sexes at large. In other words, treat people like the individuals and stop ANY form of discrimination based on irrelevant categories, sex-based or otherwise. Also, t…

> I have no hard data to back this up, but I strongly suspect that your average woman in her 20s is FAR more likely to be at least partially dependent on a husband or parents than a man of the same age.

Careful with your selection bias, though.

My experience mirrors yours (all my male friends are completely independent, many female friends are dependent on boyfriend or parents), but almost all my male peers are software developers, engineers, some PhDs, etc. My female peers, on the other hand, are from a more diverse pool of people.

Re: The End of Men

#79

Post by chipsy »

rubashov wrote: post #41
acangiano wrote: post #6

> What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? Alternative theory: Society is failing our boys.

Alternative theory: "modern, postindustrial society" means dysfunctional economy. > Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else--nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation. We're living in a country where almost all the projected growth professions produce no capital or exports. This is rea…

See also: everyone who's written about how continued GDP growth in industrial countries is both pointless in terms of improving quality of life, and a bad idea environmentally. For example, commercialized child care and food service are a huge distortion of traditional household duties.
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