Men Inequality: are men falling behind in society?

[mintoots]

Not too long ago, I sat next to a woman on the bus who discussed male inequality with me, rather briefly. It was possibly the first I've heard of it from a technical point of view. It seemed she was an academic from the social sciences. Coming across this video now has me considering the depths behind this idea of men "falling behind" and its implications on society. I hope we could start a conversation on it. I wonder if it's valid. What do you think?

 

[mintoots]

Here is another interesting article to consider in relation to this topic:

10 Boys VS 10 Girls Were Left Unsupervised In A House For 5 Days & The Results Were Wildly Different

TLDR: 10 boys wrecked chaos in their homes, while the girls set up order.

Boys:

Girls:

 

[Wyote]

TLDR: 10 boys wrecked chaos in their homes, while the girls set up order.

Looks like somebody didn't get the "there are no genders" memo

~Chaos Coyote

 

[mintoots]

Looks like somebody didn't get the "there are no genders" memo

~Chaos Coyote

Ehhhh I kinda knew I was going to get that query at some point. The LGBTQ aspect also adds to this discussion, because what then, do these researches make of genders in the minority population? The world is broken!!!!!!!!

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

It's at least a bit amusing that he claims there are no consequential differences in adult brains and then gets bewildered at the gender gap in STEM and HEAL. Men are more interested in things, and women are more interested in people. In the gender-equality paradox, the disparity between personal choices actually grows in more egalitarian societies.

One thing I agree with is that fatherlessness is a core problem in this, but I don't see how getting more men into education is going to fix that. We need to get rid of the obsession with equality because nobody even knows what it means or why it should be our redeeming principle. First, he acknowledges that the upshot of feminism was shifting of the scales rather than some universal improvement, but then he goes on to play the same stupid numbers game. Seriously, what kind of magic is going to happen when more teachers are men? What matters is what we teach, not who teaches it.

Maybe the idea is that boys are more receptive to male role models. But even then, public education is a failure. On the one hand, both parents are now expected to work, which cuts the time they spend on actually raising their child. On the other hand, public school teachers are so overloaded that they have to be apathetic to the needs of individual children in favor of the curriculum. In the end, no child is given proper guidance and gets raised on a nihilistic social media dross.

What is emblematic of the whole confusion is the appeal to reinvent what it means to be a father. We can't reinvent that because we haven't invented that in the first place. There are some temporal conditions to the traditional idea of fatherhood, but for the most part, we have settled on male roles in the family because we have discovered them to be meaningful. It doesn't matter if there are new issues; the patterns of our behavior are still the same. We are not dealing with new, unknown technology but something very old and human, so maybe instead of constantly trying to come up with innovative piecemeal solutions, let's look at what has worked in the past. What fathers need now is the same thing they needed 1000 years ago.

Of course, it doesn't surprise me in the least that there is no mention of how significant is the abandonment of God in all this. We need and want to serve a higher purpose, but when this is all rooted in self-determined values that can change as quickly as our feelings about them, it's only natural that eventually we see through the vanity. What we really want is unlimited love, beauty, truth, and good; but these are discovered values. Liberation is not the removal of all constraints, only the removal of malevolent constraints. When God calls out to Moses in Exodus to deliver a message, he says to set the people free so they can serve Him in the desert, not to set them free so they can do whatever. Remove the service, and you're left with the desert and no obvious way out.

It's completely understandable when "worthless" is the last thing a man thinks of before suicide. Like anything else, our value is ultimately determined by external sources, as value is meaningless outside of social context. If nobody is willing to pay you for labor and nobody loves you, then you are actually worthless. But if those same men understood that this was changed forever in the historic moment when the death of Christ breathed inseparable sovereignty and value into each individual, they could still find grace in service to Him.

 

[mintoots]

It's at least a bit amusing that he claims there are no consequential differences in adult brains and then gets bewildered at the gender gap in STEM and HEAL. Men are more interested in things, and women are more interested in people. In the gender-equality paradox, the disparity between personal choices actually grows in more egalitarian societies.

One thing I agree with is that fatherlessness is a core problem in this, but I don't see how getting more men into education is going to fix that. We need to get rid of the obsession with equality because nobody even knows what it means or why it should be our redeeming principle. First, he acknowledges that the upshot of feminism was shifting of the scales rather than some universal improvement, but then he goes on to play the same stupid numbers game. Seriously, what kind of magic is going to happen when more teachers are men? What matters is what we teach, not who teaches it.

Maybe the idea is that boys are more receptive to male role models. But even then, public education is a failure. On the one hand, both parents are now expected to work, which cuts the time they spend on actually raising their child. On the other hand, public school teachers are so overloaded that they have to be apathetic to the needs of individual children in favor of the curriculum. In the end, no child is given proper guidance and gets raised on a nihilistic social media dross.

What is emblematic of the whole confusion is the appeal to reinvent what it means to be a father. We can't reinvent that because we haven't invented that in the first place. There are some temporal conditions to the traditional idea of fatherhood, but for the most part, we have settled on male roles in the family because we have discovered them to be meaningful. It doesn't matter if there are new issues; the patterns of our behavior are still the same. We are not dealing with new, unknown technology but something very old and human, so maybe instead of constantly trying to come up with innovative piecemeal solutions, let's look at what has worked in the past. What fathers need now is the same thing they needed 1000 years ago.

Of course, it doesn't surprise me in the least that there is no mention of how significant is the abandonment of God in all this. We need and want to serve a higher purpose, but when this is all rooted in self-determined values that can change as quickly as our feelings about them, it's only natural that eventually we see through the vanity. What we really want is unlimited love, beauty, truth, and good; but these are discovered values. Liberation is not the removal of all constraints, only the removal of malevolent constraints. When God calls out to Moses in Exodus to deliver a message, he says to set the people free so they can serve Him in the desert, not to set them free so they can do whatever. Remove the service, and you're left with the desert and no obvious way out.

It's completely understandable when "worthless" is the last thing a man thinks of before suicide. Like anything else, our value is ultimately determined by external sources, as value is meaningless outside of social context. If nobody is willing to pay you for labor and nobody loves you, then you are actually worthless. But if those same men understood that this was changed forever in the historic moment when the death of Christ breathed inseparable sovereignty and value into each individual, they could still find grace in service to Him.

Good points, although interestingly, we have rather contrasting reactions. While you point out the essence of structure and purpose in view of a direction aligned with God, I am actually wondering about dismantling societal structures completely as in screw all stereotypes. There could be a need for a fresh kind of order, which cannot be achieved without first breaking down the norms. Perhaps the attention to gender equity is the swing needed, but perhaps we also shouldn't let it oscillate too far. This is what I seem to take from this. Exclusion is the problem, but, it's like everyone is just claiming that they are being excluded, but are they really? Institutions are still paternally structured in certain leadership roles. I think the "huh" bits of his views are that he's advocating for stereotypes, nonetheless. It's almost like playing a victim card in some aspects and while it may be valid there, it doesn't necessarily apply like a cookie cutter solution would. I do agree that there needs to be a revisiting of what societal roles to be, and I have a sense it must not be anchored on gender.

 

[aeon]

Sons from wealthy families are more likely than daughters to get secondary education. Daughters from poor families are more likely than sons to get secondary education.

Parental background and daughters’ and sons’ educational outcomes – application of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis

Cheers,
Ian

 

[aeon]

It's at least a bit amusing that he claims there are no consequential differences in adult brains and then gets bewildered at the gender gap in STEM and HEAL. Men are more interested in things, and women are more interested in people.

Are you making a claim of biological basis absent consideration of intersectionality, e.g., normative gender roles, post-1971 workforce and wage stagnation, patriarchal wage depression, financial capital versus human capital, medicine as a profit center, cultural technocracy, misogyny as a tactic for gatekeeping in STEM, the gendered socialization of children, the early emotional castration of boys, competition and selection in mating, strategies in mate attraction and selection, sexual response predicated on mate adherence to normative gender roles, university funding, patent applications, and so on?

I ask because you used men and women in your assertion, which are gendered cultural constructs, and do not address or reflect an actual biological basis in sex, especially as it concerns hormonally-mediated neuronal development, interconnect, and expression.

Cheers,
Ian

 

[Roses In The Vineyard]

To put it short as reasonably possible the issue of gender equality wasn't fixed at all but rather flipped and made worse than just about anyone could have imagined never mind broken the social contracts that helped bring stability to society in this area. Just more on the wall for all to see that our modern society really hasn't progressed and has become a mouse utopia.

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

Good points, although interestingly, we have rather contrasting reactions. While you point out the essence of structure and purpose in view of a direction aligned with God, I am actually wondering about dismantling societal structures completely as in screw all stereotypes. There could be a need for a fresh kind of order, which cannot be achieved without first breaking down the norms. Perhaps the attention to gender equity is the swing needed, but perhaps we also shouldn't let it oscillate too far. This is what I seem to take from this. Exclusion is the problem, but, it's like everyone is just claiming that they are being excluded, but are they really? Institutions are still paternally structured in certain leadership roles. I think the "huh" bits of his views are that he's advocating for stereotypes, nonetheless. It's almost like playing a victim card in some aspects and while it may be valid there, it doesn't necessarily apply like a cookie cutter solution would. I do agree that there needs to be a revisiting of what societal roles to be, and I have a sense it must not be anchored on gender.

The thing is, stereotypes are based in reality. It is only recently that the word started being used in a way that basically synonymous with "wrong." We used to say that the exception proves the rule; now it seems that the exception proves that there can be no rules.

Like every other revolutionary idea, the complete restructuring of society hinges on the expectation that somewhere along the way, we will create a new type of human being. We think that the farther ahead in time we live, the more morally mature we are. It's just not going to happen. Marxist utopia promised well-being for all, and the millions of dead bodies were not enough to synthesize this new essence. Nietzsche's Ubermensch is nowhere to be seen. Interpersonal causality is still what it was at the dawn of cultures. It's the pinnacle of arrogance to think that in our trivial lifetimes where we couldn't possibly accumulate enough wisdom, we can just make a fundamentally different universally applicable system of values out of whole cloth.

This is at the core of most grandiose progressive ideas: pride and the desire for complete autonomy over our fate. These are the sins that created all sins. We are not masters in our own house.

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

Are you making a claim of biological basis absent consideration of intersectionality, e.g., normative gender roles, post-1971 workforce and wage stagnation, patriarchal wage depression, financial capital versus human capital, medicine as a profit center, cultural technocracy, misogyny as a tactic for gatekeeping in STEM, the gendered socialization of children, the early emotional castration of boys, competition and selection in mating, strategies in mate attraction and selection, sexual response predicated on mate adherence to normative gender roles, university funding, patent applications, and so on?

I ask because you used men and women in your assertion, which are gendered cultural constructs, and do not address or reflect an actual biological basis in sex, especially as it concerns hormonally-mediated neuronal development, interconnect, and expression.

Cheers,
Ian

I'm making a claim based on the data from the gender-equality paradox and the independent cross-cultural appearance of the same endogenous interests that were present way before half of your suggested explanations were even relevant. Are there any long-term studies that would verify that these factors are at the core of gendered development?

Even chimpanzee infants mimic the same patterns in play. The females are much more likely to adopt rudimentary "dolls" as their primary object of interest.
https://www.science.org/content/article/do-chimps-play-dolls

 

[mintoots]

To put it short as reasonably possible the issue of gender equality wasn't fixed at all but rather flipped and made worse than just about anyone could have imagined never mind broken the social contracts that helped bring stability to society in this area. Just more on the wall for all to see that our modern society really hasn't progressed and has become a mouse utopia.

It probably isn't as simple as a direct flipping which why I feel Reeves' analysis is falling short. What I see instead is there is a widening class gap across the US and that exclusions based on gender are subsumed within that. The bigger drivers of a widening class gap is the societal structure itself. It's the institutional structure that needs to be revisited altogether.

 

[mintoots]

We are not masters in our own house.

Hmm. I have other thoughts on this, albeit departed from this subject altogether. If anything, I am of the opinion that the very humanity of religion makes it a volatile cloth to structure society upon. I am more inclined to understanding and forwarding the laws of nature in determining a societal structure that is good for life in general, and not just humans.

The human specie has exhibited wild circumvention of the laws of nature while disregarding the bigger picture because it simply couldn't grasp it. The resulting effect is chaos. I see this to be a result of an immature exercise of willpower. I daresay that maturity in its exercise can be more closely achieved today with reality modeling tech improving. We're getting closer to modelling minds and cities. Our predictive technology is improving which is promising. We could also, of course, just use our conscientious intuition.

 

[John K]

Not too long ago, I sat next to a woman on the bus who discussed male inequality with me, rather briefly. It was possibly the first I've heard of it from a technical point of view. It seemed she was an academic from the social sciences. Coming across this video now has me considering the depths behind this idea of men "falling behind" and its implications on society. I hope we could start a conversation on it. I wonder if it's valid. What do you think?

I think that this isn't as simple a problem as it's manifestation might imply. The Jungian model of the psyche applies to the collective as well as to individuals and there is no doubt that man and woman as symbols reach deep into our collective unconscious - as well as being concepts that we use consciously as though they are ones we can define however we want to suit our purposes. In an individual, if your ego believes it is all of the psyche and acts autocratically this will create unconscious compensating effects if the acts run counter to the depths of your being and these will be unexpected, disruptive and will defeat your purposes.

So with society as a whole. We cannot change customary gender roles and the balance between them through conscious fiat (eg through politics) without strong unconscious reactions at the level of a society as a whole - this is just another example of the law of unexpected consequences. There should be no surprise in this because it happens at a macro level in other fields as well - in economics for example, when what seems to be an obvious policy results in the opposite to the intended effect, or to a chaotic effect.

This is saying nothing about the ethics of the situation: inequality between men and women (as traditionally the terms were understood) was an injustice crying out to be eliminated, and the same is true of many other aspects of gender status within society. But when such changes are put into effect, there are all kinds of unintended and unexpected consequences that will be destabilising forces within our society, and large percentages of the population will feel they are living in a continuous psychological and linguistic earthquake. They won't be aware of it in such terms, but that's what is happening in my view. Is it a price worth paying? Who knows - these things typically take 3 or 4 generations to play out until society reaches a new psychological platform, where once again peoples' roles are more stable, clearly defined and understood. Justice says that it's necessary to try, though, but there will be a lot of pain in the meantime, because many people are not able to live comfortably in the transition, and only a few are able to educate their children emotionally to live within that future. It's a big experiment on our next 2 or 3 generations, and I hope it doesn't lead to tragedy.

Just one other thought. The USA is obviously a major society, but the world is much bigger than that. I don't get the impression that these issues that are affecting the Western culture are the same in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It would be interesting to see what a comparative study of men's roles would look like across the world.

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

I am of the opinion that the very humanity of religion makes it a volatile cloth to structure society upon. I am more inclined to understanding and forwarding the laws of nature in determining a societal structure that is good for life in general, and not just humans.

Good for life by what standard? We can't use technology to bypass humanity. If anything, it makes it more dangerous because it allows us to ignore it, while every choice we make remains embedded in our condition. You have to see that the very language you use here illustrates that. Once you start talking about good, you set a cornerstone for a religion. Then, you can either appeal to an external standard or assume the role of moral arbiter yourself. But if there exist any laws of morality that you want to rediscover with technology, they obviously haven't been written by us any more than the laws of physics. We have been uncovering the hypothetical optimal pattern of human habituation for thousands of years, and every time we ended up in religion.

 

[John K]

Good for life by what standard? We can't use technology to bypass humanity. If anything, it makes it more dangerous because it allows us to ignore it, while every choice we make remains embedded in our condition. You have to see that the very language you use here illustrates that. Once you start talking about good, you set a cornerstone for a religion. Then, you can either appeal to an external standard or assume the role of moral arbiter yourself. But if there exist any laws of morality that you want to rediscover with technology, they obviously haven't been written by us any more than the laws of physics. We have been uncovering the hypothetical optimal pattern of human habituation for thousands of years, and every time we ended up in religion.

A bit of an aside - though it is tangentially relevant to the main theme of the thread.

I'm very much with you on the notion that an ethical system without an external reference point - by which I mean one that is sourced outside humanity - is arbitrary and open to whatever you choose. I like C.S. Lewis's appeal to the Natural Law in his lecture series Mere Christianity as evidence that there is moral intelligence embedded in the fabric of our world. The Natural Law, or whatever we want to call it, is present in some form in almost all human societies since time immemorial, but it carries a lot more force when it is seen to originate outside the invention of people.

The trouble is that the various religions have their roots in particular cultures and at particular times in history, and alongside their most precious evergreen contents they also carry a lot of the conventions of the societies that gave them birth. In the Judaic religions, God is masculine and almost always referred to as 'he' - and is imaged with the symbols of father, king, etc. These images come with a sense of power and authority but tangle up God's intrinsic power with those of the outmoded concepts of father and king that were rooted in the originating cultures. These days for example, we see an absolute monarch as an evil to be avoided along with all other totalitarian systems of government; the monarchies that are successful today are constitutional and have no real power. So the concept of king is a very negative one to project onto God in our age and carries either morally negative vibes in our society, or ineffectual ones with real power lying elsewhere. The concept of father in this sense, as a symbol of authority within family or state, is also frowned upon these days as well - we look for a partnership role for fathers, not a dominant one couched in gender terms.

The fault line shows up in an obvious way if we call God she rather than he. It's just as correct as he, but it feels discordant - and of course God is genderless and of all genders at the same time. I'm a Catholic myself, and think that the Church has a lot of work to do to deal with this sort of problem. It certainly needs to rethink the role of women for example, and it needs to find some symbols and metaphors to describe the heart of our faith in ways that are relevant to our age - just as the Old Testament Jewish faith and the early Christian church did in their day.

 

[Wyote]

It's obvious humanity is returning to Space for its religion.
A non-binary One born out of Three.
It just makes sense, however you want to contextualize it, justify it, or articulate it.

 

[Wyote]

Anyway, society is falling behind our Technologic-GOAT-God, might as well embrace that one

 

[Sidis Coruscatis]

The fault line shows up in an obvious way if we call God she rather than he. It's just as correct as he, but it feels discordant - and of course God is genderless and of all genders at the same time. I'm a Catholic myself, and think that the Church has a lot of work to do to deal with this sort of problem. It certainly needs to rethink the role of women for example, and it needs to find some symbols and metaphors to describe the heart of our faith in ways that are relevant to our age - just as the Old Testament Jewish faith and the early Christian church did in their day.

You know that there is one obvious thing that throws this line of thought in a tizzy: Jesus was clearly a man and is essentially representative of the Father. You could object that Jesus had to embody something we can understand, and God's gender, if that term even applies, is something beyond our comprehension. But that same objection makes such debate pointless, and we are left with the legacy of Christ as a man. Most importantly, you wouldn't want to question God's preferred pronouns, would you John?

I can see how the presentation of the doctrine would benefit from an update, but there is a very thin line between that and heresy. The more we depart from scriptural exegesis, the higher the risk of bending the knee to cultural whims and idolatry. Let's keep this firmly in mind:

Spoiler

I'd like to see how Orthodox churches wrestle with this, and I've been considering converting to Orthodoxy, but they are rare in central Europe, let alone active ones.

Another obstacle is that back when the Mosaic laws were being overwritten, people still had a good grasp of the symbolic meaning of narratives. We don't have that luxury now. If you tell someone about Jacob's ladder, you're more likely to hear some mocking remark about how stupid it is that you want to climb to outer space. It's difficult to update the symbolism when everyone is inoculated with a purely scientific perspective.

 

[Asa]

I have a great deal of compassion for men, especially men's mental health and the pressure and stress men carry in society. The way our society works hurts men, too. We need a lot of growth, and we need to find a way to stabilize men's identities and worth.

Men have been at the top in society for a very long time, particularly white men, while others have had fewer rights, both legally and in society, fewer advantages, and fewer resources. As society catches up and people (as a whole) become more equal, those at the top with feel the crunch. As the saying goes, "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." This is going to sting more for underprivileged men (for example, poor men) who have never reaped the benefits of the privilege and for people who were told all their lives that they would have certain rewards when they reached each rung on the ladder. (I suggest younger generations who feel this way talk to Gen X about this because we were the first modern generation to do worse than our parents and miss out on the promised rewards.)

This has a lot to do with class, too.

As change occurs, each side pushes hard. Some are extreme, and some overcompensate. This is part of growth. Some liberals are pushing too hard, and some conservatives are pushing too hard. I could dissect and criticize both sides here. The conservative backlash filters into a pipeline of extremely right-wing recruiting, so I'm hesitant to even engage on this topic or give examples of how shaky this period of growth is.

F.D. Signifier often discusses the manosphere and men's issues, so if you're curious check out his YT.