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New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

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Re: New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

#71

Post by incomingpain »

It started with the paradox of women unhappiness. Which wasnt a paradox at all, fully understood. Yet for some reason 1 political side refused to understand. Ideological blindness.

Then a large amount of $, time, and effort was spent on women to solve this problem, but since they refused to understand the cause. It really was just a boost to women. This shifts men behind. Government intentionally caused this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/upshot/boys-falling-behin...

Then men needed a role model. Men would need to work extra hard to just come up to parity. But government didnt like the messaging of those role models, so they censored their speech and deplatformed them.

Creating the gap/shortage in role models; but men moved to beyond their control. This new role model became huge. He'd talk for hours upon hours with anyone who would listen.

The people who wanted to censor/deplatform but couldnt. So they publicly killed him.

Re: New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

#72

Post by GeoAtreides »

yetihehe wrote: post #70
GeoAtreides wrote: post #68

Why is this flagged?! dang, mods, this is getting ridiculous. A couple of people are deciding what the community is discussing. Something needs to change.

Because HN is about technology, and original link is about social issues. Tech-oriented people are famously bad at dealing with social issues.

downvoting is one thing. flagging is another.

the HN community wants to discuss this issue (37 points / 65 comments). One guy (234000 karma) doesn't.

This is not right and it's making HN a worse place.

Re: New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

#73

Post by oulipo2 »

CalRobert wrote: post #66
oulipo2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely untrue. Feminism has NEVER been against men. Only people who half-ass reading about feminism, and rely too much on stupid far-right videos on TikTok believe that

Ummm… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto seems pretty overtly against men. (It’s literally the society for cutting up men)

this is literally a handpicked "misandrist manifesto". This is absolutely not about feminism.

Re: New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

#74

Post by yetihehe »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #72
yetihehe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because HN is about technology, and original link is about social issues. Tech-oriented people are famously bad at dealing with social issues.

downvoting is one thing. flagging is another. the HN community wants to discuss this issue (37 points / 65 comments). One guy (234000 karma) doesn't. This is not right and it's making HN a worse place.

> This is not right and it's making HN a worse place.

I think so too, but It's not a strong opinion from me. Some things are offtopic. The problem is that there are no other good discussion places to discuss this. Maybe it's because such topics attract a lot of people with strong opinions who don't engage in good-faith discussion (I'm not talking about you or that one guy).

> One guy (234000 karma) doesn't.

I think one guy flagging is not enough for article to be [Flagged].

Re: New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

#75

Post by xenospn »

glimshe wrote: post #34
benterix wrote: post #30

I used to work for a short time as an IT teacher. The kids there were wonderful, even the troublemakers weren't that bad. What struck me is that clearly for some of the boys I seemed to be the only male figure they could related to in their lives: direct, available, happy to just be there and listen, sharing a common passion. They would come to me very often to talk about anything, not just computers. The younger one…

"which of course I had to stop". I want to go back to a world where I can be affectionate toward children without an implication of something more sinister.

Most of the world outside of North America is still this way.

Re: New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

#76

Post by Balgair »

yetihehe wrote: post #3
Urahandystar wrote: post #2

One of the saddest things I heard was a young kid say he's never heard the word masculinity unless it was paired with the word toxic before it. With that kind of attitude is this any wonder?

Sites like artofmanliness.com seem to be more and more needed in today's world.

I've been reading Kate and Bret for decades (!) now.

Amazing site and filled with great male content.

But, umm, anyone know of any other good male-centric sites out there?

All I got is Esquire.com, and it's clearly not the same kinda thing.

Re: New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

#77

Post by Karawebnetwork »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #68

Why is this flagged?! dang, mods, this is getting ridiculous. A couple of people are deciding what the community is discussing. Something needs to change.

I don't have an answer to that, I just want to highlight how blurred the line is between what the community tolerates and what it doesn't. There is a thread with a similar discussion, but somehow the one that comes from fiction didn't trigger the same reaction as this article, which deals with science: Arthur Conan Doyle explored men’s mental health through Sherlock Holmes | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46068015

Re: New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

#78

Post by sunrunner »

yetihehe wrote: post #62
sunrunner wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You used probably the weakest reason to discredit the idea of men improving themselves Those examples you posted that actually are good would also seem to me to be universally important for everyone across all genders. '80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money' seems useful for everyone , and while I doubt a lot of people are going to need '9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches' immediately, what makes that specificall…

> Yes, I picked those examples deliberately, but I don't see why any of the qualitatively good ones are 'manly'. What was your goal? What was your argument? I said that we need men to be more manly (strong and able to do things that are historically considered to be done by men) and you said that those can be also done by women? I would consider woman able to change a tire, play cards and start fire without matches t…

> What was your goal?

I think the thread has been a bit derailed in terms of my intention, which was more to point out that I don't feel like the qualities that are mentioned in the original article (mentorship, guidance figures, schoolwork, relationships, future planning) are really represented well by a clickbait website with articles mostly split between 'Top N things you really need to do for X' and things that would be useful to anyone.

I'd even say the 'Get Style', 'Get Strong', 'Get Social' and 'Get Skilled' categories always appear to wander towards (while never approaching) Andrew Tate territory, in terms of their goals.

> Currently the problem is that we indirectly say to men that being strong is for women and not for men. We say to women "be more manly" and to men "be more womanly", which just perpetuates old cliches, but in reverse.

This I agree with, but I don't feel that website is a good example of a role model for the qualities that the original article mentioned were missing.

Re: New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

#80

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

wincy wrote: post #10
Urahandystar wrote: post #2

One of the saddest things I heard was a young kid say he's never heard the word masculinity unless it was paired with the word toxic before it. With that kind of attitude is this any wonder?

My friend’s son was four and had to have it explicitly explained to him that men can be scientists, too! Based on all the books he’d been read and other media, he assumed only women were scientists.

My son wants to be female because every super hero that's interesting to him, it's female (he is 4). We learned to coast with this, but I did complain about the lack of cool male characters for young kids: the female ones seems to be better curated and more abundant
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