Oct 22, 2022·edited Oct 22, 2022Liked by Richard V Reeves
As a Biological Psychologist, lifelong teacher, and former stay-at-home dad that raised two boys, I agree with this. And, quite frankly, one of the worst influences on their lives was the teachers that they had in grade school (for all the reasons noted in this essay, and more). I think that virtually everything that's going on in education is not only anti-boy but anti-child and, to a great extent, anti-rationality....
Yes, boys today are told, pretty much from the first time they set foot inside a schoolhouse, that they bear original sin and are the cause of all the world's problems. Men won't go into teaching because one false accusation can ruin your career and your life. Parents of girls freak out if they find out that there's a male teacher. I'm frankly surprised to find out that the percentage of male teachers is as high as 24%; from what I've seen of public schools here, I would have thought it was a lot lower. In many public schools today, the only adult male the children ever see is the janitor.
Wow, that is horrible. I had a male teacher in 4th grade and he was fantastic. I had a mix of male and female after that and I think that is a good balance to have, even for girls.
All of this critical theory is also destroying things by what you call "original sin" and identity politics, which are absolute poison for a school's social environment.
Take this the next logical step. The consistent feedback I get from 20-30-something men and women is the active discrimination against males in the workplace. Upper middle managements that are overwhelmingly female and unapologetically discriminatory in their employment practices. The clear justification being "the history of sexism" and the boogie-man of "the patriarchy". I've heard stories of men "apologizing for being male" on Zoom calls. I met a woman hiking in CO whose son came home from HS and apologized for being a male. (He was encouraged by his <female> teacher). Kendi-ism is now. "The solution for past discrimination is current discrimination.". It's also a recipe for strife and breeding misogynists......The Rule of Law was designed to undercut generational grievance-holding. Hatfields and McCoys and all that. Schools now teach it.....
I disagree. Most teachers I know care deeply about their students. But teachers are no longer the schoolmarms of the Old West, hired to sacrifice their own lives in favor of the children. Modern teachers are adult professionals. They join unions to negotiate pay, benefits, and working conditions with their employers, and they rely on those unions to protect themselves from the excesses of their employers.
Teachers unions protect teachers, not children, parents, or school management. They are labor organizations, not "make everybody happy" nonprofits. Unions are legally bound to serve one master: their members.
Students have parents, school administrators, and government on their side. Teachers have only their unions. If students needs more protection and resources, it's time for parents, taxpayers, government, and school administrators to do their job better.
Teachers' unions are doing their job just fine. The others aren't. Step it up, school systems. You signed the labor agreement with your employees, live up to it. If your clients--the children--have unfulfilled needs, then fill them. You do that, you will not have a problem with your teachers or their unions.
What a crock. Adult professionals? Teachers' Unions are the 800-pound gorilla in state and national politics. What does pushing, demanding CRT, sexual mutilation, anti-religious secularism, diminishing anti Western Civilization history, censoring scientific Covid research so teachers could stay home, and going to Ukraine (Weingarten) for God knows what; have to do with "protecting their members from the excesses of their employers?"
Why do you think public student enrollment is cratering? Public schools are a mess.
It's easy to blame unions for everything you hate. But the "mess" you complain about is within the power of state government, voters, and school boards to change. That they refuse to do so leaves the unions open to fill the void.
If you want to restore the balance between school systems and employee unions, tell government and school boards to get off their lazy asses and do so.
Wrong again. The state government and school boards are in cahoots with the teachers unions. They too are the problem. Balance, or the end of public education as we know it, has and will occur as nasty school board members are replaced by parents who want schools to teach their kids not indoctrinate or groom them. It will take time. But don't sit there thinking the system works just fine.
Agreed. In our school district, the school board is elected in large part due to the financial support and organizational assistance provided by the teacher's union's PAC.
I didn't say "the system works fine." It does not. I said teachers unions are successful at getting good pay and working conditions for their members, and defending members from stupid management decisions. That's the job of unions, and they're good at it.
They are not the reason schools suck. Neither unions nor teachers control school funding, budgets, staffing, recruitment, educational priorities, hiring and firing, or anything else you guys complain so bitterly about. School boards, administrators, and politicians control all that, and ultimately, voters control everything.
If you want balance back in the schools, you need to insist that school districts, taxpayers, and voters do their job as well as the unions do.
1. Dissolve school boards. They're non-essential. At the very least let's rename them Clown Boards.
2. My wife is a 26 year veteran of the NYC school system...run by - you guessed it - Democrat politics colluding with the UFT, producing a MESS while they self-congradulate.
3. NYS screws up most of what it touches.
4. So where does that leave our kids in general if the state and school boards are useless? As of now, with very few options other than charter schools.
I agree completely! Many of today's teachers flunked working in the private sector so they decided to go for the free Master's but took that word a bit too literally. They are not the "Masters" of children; children have at least one parent who has dibbs on what their kids learn and self-loathing 101 should not be on any curriculum.
Practically all of the teachers I had and currently know chose it as a profession from the outset. Teaching as a last resort for those who have issues holding down a job in the private sector (which runs the gamut in terms of the types of jobs available within practically every field imaginable) makes little sense given the competing demands and relatively low pay that come along with it.
Shane, I have to take exception to the idea that government and school administrators are on the “side” of the students. Here in Illinois, school administrators and government are owned by teachers unions. Amendment 1 will be the final installment of that ownership deal.
Hey, jude! I'm talking ideally, of course. Government and school administrators are supposed to support the needs of their clients, which are students, parents, and taxpayers. Unions are supposed to support theirs, which are teachers.
The imbalance we see right now--unions reigning supreme--is not because unions are all-powerful, but because government and school managements are so weak and ineffectual.
That imbalance needs to be righted. Ultimately, government has final say over all of it, but that requires vision, courage, and just plain guts. These days, that doesn't describe politics.
I lived in Illinois for my first 66 years, and just moved to Arizona. I agree with your assessment that teachers unions "own" Illinois education, but that's only because the unions are smarter and better at their job than schools and government are at theirs.
I think teachers' unions s/b banned. Not just for financial reasons but for the future of the country. Until there was an NEA etc, local control meant local values. The teachers unions have nationalized education. And implemented uniform ideological indoctrination. (I live 4 mos each ILL, FL, and CO) We're seeing it now. Nearly all kids at least understand the Woke worldview, even if they don't buy in. They are radicalizing a significant percentage of vulnerable kids. Not all. Not even most. But enough......
And now you have the CDC getting involved with the institution of the COVID vax in the regular immunization cycle. There's zero evidence. Everyone is working against the kids. Everyone.
Not sure unions are better at their job, unless their job is to manipulate government for their own benefit, at the expense of students and taxpayers. That’s what they have been good at.
I liked Illinois a lot. I did not like the increasingly confiscatory taxes, though, and so when the opportunity to move showed itself, I got the moving truck in gear.
Unions are very good at their jobs, which includes negotiating better contracts with their members' employers. If that's at the expense of students and taxpayers, then parents and voters need to elect politicians with more guts and knowledge to level the playing field.
It's easy to blame unions for the schools' ills. But unions do not run schools, the state and administrators do. The latter don't like the former, they have the power to change it.
Shane/Jude, The unions run IL for several reasons. Money. Organization. Media. Excellent propaganda. But mostly because the consumer doesn't foot the bill. The parents of kids in school are motivated. Beyond motivated. Every possible edge or assistance that someone can dream up for their kids they rabidly pursue, with the unions cooing support. At least here in the suburbs. And there are acctg games played. Capital budgets get funneled to Operating budgets, so maintenance is deferred until there's no choice but to pass a bond issue. Forty years ago I had the idea that school spending s/b frozen. And every new dollar would be 50cts taxpayer and 50cts parents of students. Put a price on all these "must haves.". As it is, parents buy it and put it on someone else's credit card. And that's just the financial side. More.....
I paid my local taxes (in IL) for years and years and years and sent both of our children through parochial school for 13 years. If it wasn't for the parochial schools, the public schools would be even more overwhelmed. I'm glad we did what we did but I agree, more financial responsibility should be on parents.
It sickens me to think of the seniors still paying taxes for failing schools/systems.
The idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for other people's kids education (among other things) is exactly the kind of thinking that needs to stop if we are to heal our culture and improve our society. Having children is an essential role in any society, and all of us have an interest in it whether we are parents or not. You want parents to pay more for children's education when they already have enough extra expenses as it is?
In a healthy populace, the proper raising and educating of children should be priority #1. We cannot afford to treat it as simply another private transaction in a free society. In fact, a reasonable argument could be made that people who don't have kids should pay more in taxes in order to do their part in supporting the next generation. The fact that this idea would fly like a lead balloon in American politics is a perfect example of what ails our national psyche, and why so many of us are lamenting the sad state of our national identity - because we have a weak to non-existent concept of civic duty and what it means to be an American citizen.
The limits of writing vs talking. That's not what I trying to say. My point, is there is no restraint on the spending; and indeed a powerful incentive the other way. If I'm paying 3cts on every new $1 spent on my child then I'm got little incentive to question new spending. If I'm convinced my child "needs" XYZ or they'll fail, I'll fight like hell to get it for them; esp if I'm paying nothing for it. I raised three children. K-8 in parochial schools. 9-12 at New Trier HS. Foot in both worlds. The parochial school was good; and, it had constraints on spending, because parents paid. At NTHS, the only constraint was what could be jammed into the RE tax. Current parents vote en masse. There are enough former parents who share your POV (as do I in the main) that they vote for increases. It adds up over the years, as no programs are EVER sunsetted.
So, that's really my point. If current parents had to pay, say half, of any increased spending since Year XXXX, then they'd be more prudent in new spending, and more likely to look at past spending to see what isn't really needed. And parent-less households would still support.
When I first moved to Glencoe in 1988 I deliberately chose a home in the rare mixed-race area. A couple years later I was getting signatures on a petition to sensitize the Village Board on some issues the black community had. An elderly black woman neighbor said, "I'll sign your petition. But, can you also address school spending. I get it that people paid for my children to go to school. So, now I have to pay for others. But......does it have to be so much??". Opened my eyes, since I had kids 4, 3, and 2 at the time. We need to reform how we do this.
"mostly because the consumer doesn't foot the bill."
Of course we do. Most school funding in Illinois comes from local property taxes. We pay through the nose for local schools--when I lived in Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, $6,000 of my annual $7,000 tax bill went to the school system. Every parent of every child in the Naper school system paid those property taxes.
My wife and I didn't have kids, so we paid to educate everyone else's. That was fine, because democracy demands an educated society. But man, we paid a lot of dough over the years.
Up until Janus, teachers joined union because they had to. My experience with unions, both labor and professional, are that they are much more adept at catering to THEIR interests. To wit, a union VP was recently hired by my Cities HR department. Those employees jump ship so often that they aren't doing anything that puts them personally (in a career aspect) at risk.
I agree: Janus ended the closed union shop that made employees join unions whether they wanted to or not. My beef with Janus is it didn't end the "free rider" part: employees that refused to join the union or pay union dues got the same pay and benefits the union negotiated for their members. That made the Janusites moochers. Free riders should remain at the mercy of the employer for pay, benefits, discipline, and all the other things unions provide their members. Instead, they get the protection and benefit of workplace unions without paying a dime for the privilege.
When you say that unions cater to their own interests, do you mean they cater to their members' interest as opposed to those of employers; or that union leaders cater to their personal interests at the expense of members?
Meh. You might've heard the old saw about the new mayor walking into the City building and asking "how many people work here" and the answer being "about 50%". My experience is the opposite....too many union freeloaders who know they can't get laid off earn the same amount as the productive employees.
And yes, my comment was that union leaders cater to their personal interests at the expense of members. Many years ago, I worked for a state agency in the metropolitan area of the biggest City in the state. My group of employees wanted a raise (similar to the feds GS locality), but that particular union would not support that; they said an engineer doing an engineers job in the metro area was the same as an engineer doing that job in a rural area so they'd only advocate for a statewide raise.
Here is an example of catering to union not teacher interests. The Unions can lobby for more education money from state and federal coffers. That does not mean a significant raise for teachers. It more commonly means the district goes on a spending spree and hires more non-essential staff like counselors, librarians, nurses etc. Also massive wage disparites go to special ed - an ever burgeoning grift/loophole. All the students failing are an excuse to hire more special ed teachers.. To no avail. Unions grow more powerful, average teacher salaries do not increase.
Your response is the reason we desperately need school choice. The teacher's union is run by thugs. The leadership has absolute contempt for the students and parents. Much of their COVID response was cultish criminal behavior driven by the unions. It is true that school boards matter but they almost always capitulate to the demands of the Unions or align with their ideological insanity. Parents must have a choice and I hope that AZ experiment is successful.
The only bright side of the plandemic was that I found a private on-line school for my daughter. They've been doing internet schooling right, NOT having a teacher film their standard lesson or do the same thing by Zoom. They've actually made interactive lessons that use the power of all the tools the internet has available. With this now being possible, remind me again why we need thousands of tenth grade geometry teachers?
Well yes and no. I agree that many teachers are trying, but in the public system, parents don't matter and administrators kowtow to unionist interests. The only ones whose needs aren't being acknowledged are the kids. If the unions and teachers were working just fine, we wouldn't have parents pulling their kids from the system and looking for alternatives. And government is rightly acknowledging that parents are unhappy and providing more public school choice, something that is desperately needed here in Canada.
Unions are not the problem. School management and governments are the problem. Unions serve their members' needs, period. They are not responsible for service the needs of the school system or parents. Unions are labor organizations whose job is to take care of their members.
The imbalance comes because school boards, administrators, and politicians are not taking care of children, parents, and teachers. If they were, unions would not exist. I used to be a union president in the newspaper industry, and often told my counterparts in management: If you guys did the right thing most of the time, the need for me wouldn't exist. The labor director agreed.
Well if that was true we wouldn't have Unions dictating working conditions such as class size and composition...at the price tag of $3m/year in our province which has pushed other programs such as French Immersion out the window...because it serves union interests over children. The province did fight that all the way to Supreme Court and they lost, so I don't see that as the fault of the schoolboards, or the parents, or the school administrators. And we also have unions capturing schoolboards as well with their constant lobbying for teacher trustees to be in Office and overriding school's authority over what resources to use in the classroom. My kids also went through 4 school strikes over their 13 years, with teachers pulling their crap by refusing to send home report cards and cancel grad activities along with ALL sport/art programs when they walked. Unions have also championed themselves in charge of co-authoring our latest and weakest curriculum, and telling parents that they're racist because they don't align with their ideological principles. Unions have more money than any other organization to continuously show up in Court for every single indiscretion and bully others who do not agree with them. It's tiresome. So you'll have to excuse me if I don't buy your argument. I'm too far gone in knowing way too much about their antics to suggest they're not the problem. Let's you and I just agree to disagree and also acknowledge that if unions weren't the problem, we wouldn't have so many parents turn their backs on the system and demand public choice in your country.
Teacher Unions oppose school choice. They haven't raised teacher salaries instead they have massibley expanded specialized employee pay for Special ed, counselors, librarians and other staff, not to mention bureaurocrats. All of those new payroll employees effectively detract from teacher salaries. What you write about the other stuff is valid as well. Both can be true.
I typically think of my son as woke because he has a trans friend, and he gets mad at me when I say that I have no problem calling him by his chosen name, but in my head I’ll never actually believe that he’s not a girl.
However, this last week, he came home complaining that they spent all of English class watching a movie about nonbinary Hawaiians. He said it was straight indoctrination, and had nothing at all to do with English.
I was proud and relieved that he is thinking for himself, and even though he has trans friends and classmates and respects them, he recognized this English period for what it was. But I was also worried. Who know what else they’ve been telling kids, and how much of it goes unquestioned.
Funny, my daughter has a friend (female) who went from lesbian in 5th grade to non-binary by 8th grade and then “male” (call her James please) by 10th grade. Yet “James” took a male date to the homecoming dance. In the beginning my daughter would get upset when I continued to call this girl by her given name and use she/her. It didn’t take long before my daughter was like whatever. It’s all crazy.
And that is why we can not call them adult professionals. If parents had to pay for this (like my husband and I did for our children's education) they would be blowing up the phones and emails of the teacher and administration. Why are they allowed to get away with this absolute bullshit?
Good for your son.... the truth is that showing a movie about Hawaiians is far easier than teaching English... and it's nutty in my field, biology, too:
You are quite literally a biologist! You could testify before Congress.
I wonder if there is a concerted or loose effort to break down all barriers of medical or scientific ethics. Because then the human body is completely reductionist and anything is permissible.
The Justice did know perfectly well. She intelligently to get caught up in that political trap. The senator did not ask the question for knowledge, but to generate a political sound bite. It was a bullshit question and she was smart to bat it away.
Bat it away? Oh hell no. She literally said because she wasn't qualified to answer the question, she wouldn't answer it. That was after hesitating for a period of time. We are ALL qualified to answer that question. She could and should have said, "I am going to refrain from answering that should a question in the LGBTwhatever whatever lane comes up while serving on the Supreme Court." At least that would have been honest!
If I were the person asking the question and got a BS answer like she gave, I would have asked a follow up question. Did you flunk sex ed in high school?
If you did flunk it, a double X chromosome define what a woman is?
She was playing the leftist game of deliberate obfuscation and I eschew obfuscation.
Her answer was awkward and ill-conceived. Me, I would have looked down my dress and then chirped brightly, "Well, I'm one of them, senator. How much of an anatomy lesson did you need, exactly?" But that's me.
I still don't blame her for not answering the question, because the question was political gotcha at its worst. If she played the "leftist game," the senator played the rightist.
You win the thread for "eschew obfuscation," though.
School has no business indoctrinating students to the teacher's or the school's admin political or social ideology. They should be teaching the 3Rs, not sexual orientation, CRT, and nutty hard left ideals. There should be sex ed in high school but it should be straight biology and that's it.
It is up to the parents to discuss sexual orientation and political views not the school.
Someone posted today that parents have no business interfering in school policies supporting goofy ideas. What hog wash!
I am so sorry to have read this comment. If CommonSense degenerates into this kind of vile talk I will sadly leave it. Please dont respond to this sort of thing.
Your reply indicates why males avoid the field of education. There is the idea that any man who enjoys teaching school children is flawed in the worst way. Children, especially those in a household with an absent father, need good men in their life and through them the example of caring, encouraging, and defining what a man is.
Celia, do you think rt and comprof are one in the same? They both give they same stupid answers, never on point, just insults. Maybe the belong to the same club, "the I'm a loony left lemming club".
I don't think they're the same person. But I find it interesting that com's activity went up just as JustMe and MattMullen made themselves scarce.
The fact that people like this--who clearly *despise* Bari--are paying her for the chance to troll here suggests to me that they are either a) being paid to do so by some Leftist organization or b) are psychologically sick enough to pay money to do the kind of trolling they could do for free elsewhere.
Despite all the disadvantages and drawbacks of displaying manly virtues in today’s society, men need to be manly and women need to recognize those virtues.
I’ve noticed that women who say that all men are trash tend to have remarkably poor taste in men.
In my book, manly virtues are courage, honor, truth-telling even when the truth is unpleasant or hard, staying loyal to your personal values, supporting and helping your tribe however you define it--family, friends, coworkers--applauding your culture when it does well but leading the charge to fix it when needed, listening when people talk, acting decisively once facts are in, changing course when facts change, apologizing for mistakes, refusing to apologize when mistakes are not made, helping the weak, punching bullies whether physical, political, or social, read widely and incessantly, and learn as many things as possibly so you're passable in them, even if not perfect: cooking, chopping wood, hunting, gathering, wiring a room, fixing a sink, changing a diaper, shooting a gun, sharpening a knife, winning a fistfight, avoiding a fistfight, loving your family without preconditions, writing a poem, telling dirty jokes, building a cabin, not taking yourself too seriously, being active in local politics, living in freedom and allowing others that same right, and telling memorable stories.
Which are, come to think of it, are womanly virtues as well as manly.
The concept of virtue is traditionally associated with masculinity. “Vir” is Latin for “man”, and hence where we get the word.
That’s not to say that women cannot be virtuous, but they manifest their positive qualities in a different way, i.e., a feminine way as compared to a masculine way.
100% yes: “ Given the rate boys are diagnosed with various behavioral disorders, it’s fair to wonder if it’s the educational institutions, rather than the boys, that are not functioning properly.”
The decline of recess in elementary schools has been particularly puzzling to me. When I was in school we'd get 30-50 minutes of recess a day. We used every second of it in raucous games of football, basketball, etc. It was my favorite part of school and a great opportunity to expend energy and develop socially.
By the time my boys got to school, recess was down to 15 minutes. Not sure what midwit came up with that idea, but it's definitely harmful to the social and educational development of boys.
You can bet that nitwit had a Ph. D, or more likely an Ed. D like Dr. Jill, and wrote a grammatically obtuse and incoherent word salad to justify cutting the recess time to almost nothing. To be replaced by what? Sensitivity training? Imagine as Americans get fatter and less fit, that gym and recess are cut. Lunacy. The only way to get boys to focus is to wear them out. I think I know of what I speak, having raised two and coached middle school boys for years.
Boys need that outlet. As has been said, boys (as a rule) don't do well sitting and listening. Girls (as a rule) do.
I learned during the pandemic, when I started working from home (which I do to this day), that I am infinity more productive when I can be walking outside while in a meeting, or taking a break to walk my dogs in between focused mental processing.
Even though I achieved some pretty lofty career positions, I hated being force into meetings, or being expected to spend hours in an office, when my attention span was better suited for a different environment.
I look back at my education and wonder how I ever made it through. I managed to finish very well academically, and got a couple degrees from well respected Universities, but I spent a lot of time NOT learning and daydreaming. The whole concept of one size fits all for both genders, and learning capacities seems hopelessly outdated. Montessori took a shot at this but never seemed to be embraced as much as it should of (because unions opposed it?), but maybe the movement towards home schooling and charters will. Hey teachers unions, do you still think it was a good idea to take that one-two year break during the pandemic? You got exposed.
A lot of urban schools no longer have any playgrounds. I remember seeing one elementary school in Los Angeles that consisted entirely of classroom and officer trailers, installed on a big asphalt parking lot. No play area, not a single square inch of grass or dirt anywhere. And the whole thing was surrounded by a 10-foot fence topped with razor wire. It looked like a prison.
It's worse than that. Recesses are now regulated and aggressive play is prohibited. PE is being downgraded. Participation prizes dominate sports. Read "Coddling of American Mind" or "War against boys".
So agree with this. Went to tiny rural school and we had recess every morning for 15 minutes before school even started. It was good for everyone. Dodgeball, tetherball, Four Square, swings and jump rope. Now even if they have recess, kids don't know how to play. They look at phones or expect teacher to moderate the activity. It is really concerning.
i'd advise ignoring "Comport", She's obviously a troll looking for reaction. I know it is hard not to take the bait, but fish get hooked on bait and the fisherman (or woman in her case) keep fishing even when a fish gets away.
If you had any goddamn sense, that would have been obvious. But just like the rest of this "Trump echo chamber" masquerading as "insightful free thinkers" and "anti-cancel culture" warriors - you simply clap like a mentally disabled seal at whatever claptrap stimuli comes your way.
Sorry, Celia...my points/arguments cannot be refuted and I am owning many on this board. They are drawn to my siren song....each trying to challenge me....and each one failing and winding up at the bottom of the hill, broken and bloody.
You seem to want an "echo chamber" of Trump supporters - where you can rant and rave about the "closed-minded, hateful leftists"....when, in reality, you are NO different.
Well, the indoctrination that you practice masquerading under the rubric of "education," no. But the classical liberal arts education that educated legions of our best leaders and thinkers, and which you abjure, has been abandoned at our peril.
Don't practice indoctrination, Bruce. Teach subject matter - undergraduate and graduate. What exactly do you "imagine" faculty do on a daily basis, Bruce? Rant anti-Trump stuff all day? Spend lectures telling white people they're evil?
Funny....everything that the "classical liberal arts education" encompasses is actually completely antithetical to your worldview, Bruce. So, you either have no idea what that means, or you think your attempts at censorship are fulfilling that.
However, it does explain the hatred of higher education in general and the demonization of high school/middle school teachers as "pedophile groomers" by Trump supporters, such as yourself.
Reeves did not mention all-boy schools in his podcast discussion or his post. I wonder if single-sex schools would be work better than our current mess.
I think it should be given a shot. When I taught 8th grade summer school we separated the boys and girls for that six weeks period. I did the exact same lessons and books. Oh man! Barely any classroom disruptions in either class and got though more learning material.
We should at least try it for middle schools grades when hormones are insane.
The boys don't stand a chance. And some boys get bullied by both sexes.
Then they get to High School and, unbeknownst to them, are one-two years less mature and easily manipulated by the more mature females all around them.
Of course, it goes both ways, but as a rule, testosterone is an Achilles heal when up against feminine charm and maturity.
I went to a high school that had predominantly single sex classes. All the religious ones and the majority of the secular ones. Only lunch and study hall were intentionally coed. Single sex classes were great! Way fewer distractions when trying to learn, though I'm glad the whole school was coed.
I thought about this too. They don’t even have to be “single-sex” so much as tailored to specific educational traits that appeal to the masses. Seems we’re viewing education very narrowly these days. Our public education is a female-dominated arena. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems to be becoming extreme and impacting the course of the educational process for many. In my current town, my kids won’t even have the chance for a male teacher until high school, meaning they may never have a male instructor. I’m not complaining, it’s a great school system, but it makes me wonder where we’re heading.
Thank you for your honesty. You just confirmed every thought we’ve had about teachers and their agendas. Actually you made clear it is even worse than we thought.
By the way, who do you think pays your salary and cushy pension?
Plus fully paid health care, life insurance, and you’ve got Medicare. Plus all that money you made during your 3 month summer break is invested and paying an income stream. Plus your 403 account. You’re not hurting, missy.
That’s funny, after 20 years in public education I came to the exact opposite conclusion. I wanted to see parents more. And now that I’m a parent myself, I want school choice now more than ever.
And there was a running joke in the teachers lounge about the union and collective bargaining: Oh no! Union, please done give me a raise because then all my other fees go up (like healthcare) and I end up with less in my pocket! We can’t afford the Unions “base pay increases!” LOL
"The solution…kick parents out of the classroom and back to where they belong, running the machines, doing the paperwork, or running a household. Leave teaching to those who have invested years of education and know what they are doing."
Pretty goddamn arrogant of you, considering who pays your salary and benefits and sweet, sweet pension. Yes, teachers should be left alone to teach, within reason, treated with respect, and given the resources to succeed. But if you want that respect from us, you damn well better give it in return. We can turn off the money spigot whenever we want.
Almost forgot- we can clearly see what those years of education got. Falling student test scores and graduating students who are functionally illiterate.
Go ahead, whine that it’s the parents’ fault. That’s the standard excuse for your failure.
In NYC the schools were run by the unions. Schools couldn't fire incompetent teachers. In fact they had "rubber rooms" where incompetent teachers and even teachers who sexually molested students were kept during school hours. These teachers would go to these rooms and watch TV, read books, knit or anything they wanted to do and were paid for doing nothing because they couldn't be fired.
Teachers were promoted not on merit but on seniority. The teachers unions are huge and have undue influence on how schools are run and what they can teach.
Part of the decline in male achievement can be traced back to concerted efforts by feminists to eradicate all boys schools/events/spaces/sports. Documented in "War against boys" by Sommers.
Single sex classrooms within co-ed schools is a great situation. I'd love to see that in all charter schools, especially where parents can take their federal ed dollars to the school of their liking.
I'm all for single sex schools. My husband went to one back in the day. Now that school, which is where our children attended has long been co-ed. The challenge with single sex schools has been maintaining enrollment.
Thanks for the info. Do you recall why he is against it?
Listening to him, I think he is doing a great service in pointing out the issue, but I also think he still holds many things as higher priority than actually fixing the problem.
Red shirting, for instance, may be a practical option for a fair number of boys, but this also extends their childhood taking from those young men a year of adulthood. Single-sex education might be able to achieve the same results without that cost.
Good question; it’s been weeks since I finished the book. As I recall it was something to do with sex segregation being regressive. Basically, he knows his audience and that they’d never go for that, so he was careful about what he said on every score to try to avoid losing people. He will lose people in any event of course, but he did a sizable amount of throat-clearing and tailored his proposals to the audience he is trying to reach. In a way I get it, the left is daft about this issue and perhaps if he can plant a seed then some change can be made. I’m just so many years ahead of this sort of milquetoast critique that I’m in no way the intended audience.
I wonder how many men who aren’t working now were “diagnosed” with ADHD growing up. It’s no wonder that since women are the majority in psychology, education and healthcare “normal behavior” is defined as a person who sits quietly and pays attention. Having a son who went through this as a child, I can say that the process is a total scam and had I bought into it, my son would probably have become one of the men who decided to check out of life. Thankfully he is not but the scars of being categorized as “bad” linger to this day.
I told the teacher who wanted me to have him evaluated for ADHD to fuck off. And enrolled him in tai kwon do classes to help him burn off some of that physical exuberance and in chess classes to help him learn to concentrate. He went on to graduate from Stanford and is a successful professional today, so I think I handled that teacher's recommendation in absolutely the right way. 😀
I suspect ADHD does exist but there's wayyyyyyy less of it than is diagnosed.
Many other boys are not so lucky. Their parents, trying to "do the right thing" buy into the false nostrums of the pharma-educational complex. Which has wreaked havoc on our civilization.
Honestly I was going down the “do the right thing path” but my husband (thank God for him, boys need fathers) was vehemently against putting our son on medication. He gave me pause to question the process. It was a very frustrating situation. Our son was fine at home. He was (and still is) very enthusiastic and passionate and displayed his enthusiasm in school. He did well in school academically with a lot of hard work and went on to college and became an all American football player. Had he been medicated, I don’t think that would have happened. And I feel so bad for all the boys who’s parents believed they were doing the right thing for their sons and didn’t push back.
The schools can be very manipulative and bullying. You were fortunate to have a supportive husband to be a sounding board. Can only imagine a single parent being "bulldozed" because that reality check is missing. I faced a not dissimilar situation when my younger daughter was in first grade and the school wanted to hold her back and subject her to all sorts of testing and "evaluations." I pointed out to them that she was the youngest child in her class and, at that age, the differences are stark. Fast forward, she's just finished her masters degree at the top of her class and is an exceptional mother with an exciting and rewarding job. So much for their "expertise.
You must be enormously and justifiably proud of your son.
You must be so proud as well! :) Thank God your daughter had parents that pushed back also! I think we can all agree on the problems, but the solutions are the hard part. I’m glad there are discussions just not sure the solutions will come soon enough to help the children who are stuck in a failing system with people who do not have the wherewithal to advocate for them.
Was right there with you. Thankfully I was an educator myself, so I knew what to ask, what to push and want to allow to happen for him. Our complication was that our son had a stroke at birth, so we were always on the lookout for whatever might come.
He's thriving in college and I say humbly that a big part of that was retiring and staying home with my children to provide a routine after school, volunteer at school and engage whenever and wherever I could.
Funny, I was thinking about this listening to the recent podcast. I know it’s a horribly sexist thing to say, but is there an argument for having more schools that cater to the strengths more common of boys? I’ve heard this about Montessori schools, but I’m thinking more broadly.
I think both boys and girls could benefit if there were schools that supported children that don’t conform to the “sit quietly and pay attention” mold. They instead try to medicate them into compliance.
For a bit more credibility it would have been better if a woman had written this, a topic that is long overdue for serious attention. We fail at everyone’s peril when we neglect our male citizens, to demonize their behaviors at every age - from boys being “on the spectrum” at an early age, to toxicity to patriarchy, to blaming every ill suffered by women on “white men”. Women are now less able to find suitable life partners equally or better educated than themselves, not a problem decades ago. Men, on the other hand, are walking away from these newly empowered gender warriors, uninterested in competing with them in a game not of their own choosing, or fending off the barrage of gender-based insults hurled their way from every direction - by society as well as individuals. The battle is won for women. Now we need to win the war so that society and all of its members benefit from all this progress.
A woman did write about this a few years ago. Read Christina Hoff Summers's book, "The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men". Despite the somewhat provocative title, the book is well researched, referenced, and written.
Left wing feminism have been assailing men for the last 50 and the Democrat Party has embraced this attack. There were feminists that claimed that all consensual heterosexual sex was rape and many of the morons on the left accepted this with open arms. The left wing feminists glorified single motherhood ignoring 50,000 years of evolution where a strong male presence was in the tribe and families.
I'm not stupid. I realize that most single mothers are forced to raise a family by themselves and most do the best job that they can. I despise men who walk away from their families, many not paying child support. Not all men are irresponsible assholes. They do try and take an active role in raising their children.
I have always pushed for equal opportunity in education and in the work place. However, demonizing men by the left has more than helped to cause the problem the author in the article just described.
Over and over I have seen women walk away from their families. It would be interesting to see statistics on that trend. I am always shocked for I cannot understand a mother abandoning her children.
You would also be surprised how many incidents of domestic violence (I was on the board of a nationally known DV center for a while) are perpetrated by women. A staggering amount goes unreported as it's even more humiliating for men to admit it than women.
My father-in-law was subjected to domestic violence by his second wife (now ex, thank God!). He didn't expect that, after 40+ years of marriage to my deceased mother-in-law. And I watched in shock as a steady and stable man (whom I had always respected) was transformed into a stereotypical DV victim. Scary stuff!
Patricia, the young woman across the street from one day after work she never came home. She just walked away.
What made it harder for me is as an adult I knew her since she was in diapers. I was a long time friend of her family and I knew her husband since he was a teenager. I used to baby sit their kids.
Seeing those children everyday was one of the saddest things to ever happen to me and my wife.
To this day I still thing about them.
We were a small close knit community. It hurt all of us. To this day we don't know why she left.
On Megyn Kelly's podcast interview with Tucker Carlson, he talked about his mother abandoning his family. She up and moved to France. It's a large part of who he is today.
Unnecessarily nasty response to what seems like an earnest question. And, while I certainly agree that not everyone is parent material, I wonder why on earth you would equate being a mother with being a doormat. Strange perspective.
Folk leave relationships for many, many reasons. Abuse and being treated as a doormat are common reasons for abandoning your family. Your not being able to understand something does not mean that something cannot be understood.
To add to what you say: Our legal system has never been able to adequately address the needs of children for a father. Toxic relationships between divorced parents lead to all kinds of abuse, especially when the custodial parent is free to denigrate the other parent at will, at length and for all time. Usually it's the dad who is put down by the mom. The conflicted child eventually capitulates and the dad is lost. And that is when the dad is present and trying to be part of the child's life.
Agree. The only point you made that I would dispute is that this article would be more credible if a woman wrote it.
Truth is truth, no matter who says it. If I were to write/talk about problems in the black community, would it be less credible because I’m white? Or just not taken as seriously because of the emphasis placed on superficial features?
I too am opposed to the idea that no one is capable of understanding the concerns of others who don't look like them. But notice what has happened here: the social assumption here is that only a woman has the credibility to write about men's issues. Further, if you read some other things about men's issues, you'll notice that most of them are written from the perspective of "here's how it harms women". I get it -- you have to sell it to the intended audience. Still, it's sad that men's issues can only be debated in terms of men's utility to women, rather than men as humans in and of themselves.
"For a bit more credibility it would have been better if a woman had written this, a topic that is long overdue for serious attention."
This is a tired trope that needs to die. The idea that only specific groups of people can lend weighty arguments on specific topics is the most illiberal concept taught by the modern left. Ideas either have merit or they don’t.
Personally, I find lots of what the author (and you) to have merit.
Sorry, that comment was a bit of sarcasm, because the perception of listeners, while important to conveying meaning, still the belief system of those who judge the speaker is of little moment in the scheme of truth. You are correct that sometimes that reality of perception causes bad shit to happen -- think college campuses, safe spaces, and Title IX kangaroo court prosecutions.
The fact that women are unable to find male partners of equal or higher education/SES/etc., is a problem only because women are unwilling to consider partners of lower status. Male doctors have been marrying female nurses since those professions existed. Either women have to learn to do the equivalent, or there won't be gender parity. And while it may be that there is some inborn component of these preferences, it is remarkable to me how little is expected of women in this regard.
The unwillingness of women to date (or frankly, consider as human) a man on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum is not a good thing, and should be treated like the bigoted, narcissistic point of view that it is.
In 1969 at the age of 31, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I married a Harvard grad - a medical school grad - and although I was a college grad and actually had a lot more of life experience than did he -he was, after all, in school for years, he was a "catch".
Move ahead 9 years when I discovered he had no interest in fatherhood - in fact verbally abused our adopted Vietnamese daughter -left the family when our son was 5 and daughter 6 and managed to call on Sunday evening. That was the extent of his fatherhood.
Both of my children grew up without any male influence since all there was in my family was a mother and sister - both of whom loved the children but neither could show a boy how to build a doghouse or could share his love of football.
If I had known what I know now, I would happily have marrried someone on the "lower end of the "socioeconomic spectrum" . I have lived long enough to know what is important in the terms of a husband and father and it is not a Harvard degree.
I think women are in a very strange place with regards to the age curve. In 2020, one can expect to live into her 80’s, but the reproductive part of life is ideally done in the 20’s, maybe 30’s. Women in that age bracket don’t make the best decisions, but it’s hard to blame them. I don’t know why the post-menopausal crowd doesn’t do a better job imparting wisdom on the younger women, because (and I’m in my 30’s) my age peer women seem genuinely not to understand how their own bodies work, and what the downstream consequences are.
Unfortunately, wisdom is rarely imparted from older to younger. One reason being, that the old and young are now segregated with retirement communiies housing the former with little , if any interchange with the latter. . We, with all the unasked for wisdom at our beck and call, now spend our days making pots or playing pickleball with other wise women. Sadly, most of us really do have to learn through our mistakes.
I express the fact (learned from personal experience) that motherhood is far easier in your 20s than in your 30s. Don't know that anyone listens. But I do say it.
Me too....to my daughter....who I had a 40 1/2. I mean I was much wiser and more "established" but let's face it.....it's harder physically. Right now, both my husband and I should be retired and enjoying grandchildren (God willing). However, my college roommate is in more difficult straights with 22, 18 (still in HS) and 16. Having children (hers are adopted) in your mid 40s is really challenging. Just the generation gap with how we grew up and how they are growing up is difficult. Every time I talk to her, she's says, we're so done! (It doesn't help that all three have issues that are not easily or quickly remedied.)
I have been shocked hearing the nurses speak about their partners who make less then they do. There is pure contempt, and I would be vilified if I spoke in the same manner
Conversely, consider how willing men are to consider as partners women who are unemployed, or who do "prestige jobs" with little compensation, or who have a history of working in lower skilled industries. There are many very well-off professional men who consider someone whose only employment as a waitress to be attractive.
And then consider the opprobrium heaped on men when instantiations of this broader preference set cause problems.
In my case, my father did most of it because of their differing job schedules (and because my mother was not great at cooking). But I’m not saying that the food-sex connection can’t be real.
For biological reasons women are attracted to men that can provide and protect them during pregnancy and for the 1st 4 years of child rearing. You can't demand this basic human nature be nullified. They assess capacity to earn out of necessity not bigotry.
At any rate there is more going on. Women now spend much more time in school and work than ever before. By the time they graduate or decide full time work is not so fulfilling the pool of available males that even approaches their health status, nevermind work or income, is extremely small. Most males in their prime marry younger women.
To the extent that this is true (which my original comment explicitly allows for), that doesn’t mean it should be accepted as normative. In 2022, women don’t need a male breadwinner. They may have instincts to find one, but those instincts are not intractable.
For comparison, men have had to learn to be attracted to older and older women, and have been berated to do so. In the early days of America, it was totally normal for middle-aged men to have teenaged wives. Thankfully, this is no longer the case. Male sexuality has made an adjustment...to a point. Why is it that men are the only ones who are asked to change?
Females might not need a male capable of being a breadwinner when they are not pregant. Most women stop working full time when pregnant. That nesting time is when men usually become breadwinners. Also it is worth noting that men go into a state of over work when married and husbanding. Brad Wilcox discussed this. Most males don't anticipate marriage is the key to making MORE money so there is a disconnect about how behavior works from their end when becoming pessimistic about marriage/mating.
At any rate it isn't easy to alter primate evolution to change what traits females are attracted to. If you study evolution the percentage of males that reproduce is vastly less, in almost every mammalian species, than the % of females. Same holds true for humans. Hypergamy is the larger field of study you can investigate it sociologically or from evolutionary books. We may deviate from that some in human history but it tends to come back over and over. It can be mitigated by cultural forces such as "culturally enforced monogamy" aka marriage. When monogamy abates females compete for a smaller pool of extremely successful males. That is what colleges tend to be right now. Women are not happy with the scene. They too are asking for change.
Um....women don’t “date down” for the exact same reasons men do or have done - we are programmed this way by our evolutionary history. It’s going to take longer than 60 years to undo thousands of years of evolutionary programming. Calling women bigoted for preferring to date someone of equal intelligence and decent earning potential may not be terribly helpful.
Intelligence and earning potential are very different things. There are lots of men without college degrees who are intelligent.
But even with regards to that, it is not uncommon for a man to marry a woman of lower intelligence if she possesses some other desirable qualities. And there is not any hard-coded reason that the reverse cannot be true. Did Einstein demean himself by getting married? I don’t think so, and I doubt there was a wife available who had any sort of comparable intelligence.
And it also bears keeping in mind that men’s totally normal sexuality, having evolved over the same period in the same fashion, is routinely demonized. If you listen to the podcast, there’s a whole ridiculous anecdote about high school boys being disciplined for keeping a rating scale of the girls, which is totally normal and reasonable and would receive no criticism if the genders were reversed (and rightfully so). I think a little more shame directed at women’s sexual choices and a little less shame directed at men’s would, again, go a long way towards true gender equality.
For most of human history earning potential meant physical strength not IQ. There will never be what you call gender equality because males and females are wired completely differently. Sexual dimorphism is actually over 300 million years old. Your approach will not work. A better approach is to critique the system that demanded women prioritize college and work over marriage. Marriage is the cultural force that mitigates against hypergamy and huge swaths of drifting single males that cause mayhem in any society.
Agreed that America’s workaholic culture is a problem, and one which differentially affects women due to the limits of their reproductive physiology.
But I think there are many ways we can transcend our origins. It may be that true gender equality is not achievable, but I think the push in that direction is desirable. I also think that the point of this article is that while social engineering is happening, it is not pushing in the pro-egalitarian direction, and I would prefer that it did.
You cannot transcend biology. The belief you can is driving radical trans activism. All that equity, equality, egalitarian stuff is blank slate marxism but you are adding your own MRA slant to the same ideology now that males are losing. We can have equal rights under the law. That is it. You will never have anything approaching an equal outcome, even between congenital twins raised in the same family. If education was based in free market a gendered model, same sex schools and classrooms for ages 10-18 would prove superior because males and females have completely different physiologies, developmental psychologies and life objectives. Feminists and no one else will make sure no all male schools dominate as they once did. Forcing all education and work to be co-ed completely skews the outcome to favor compliance because most schools/teachers grade on BEHAVIOR not simply test taking/ capacity. The author barely touches on this, he attributes better grades to "homework". Only in so far as homework is following rules it helps females more But the bigger gap is test taking vs behavior.
it is not work-aholism. It is working less for more cheap goods/ more advanced technology. That tech supplicates human behavior and ambition. Men and women are working less and spending more time online doing random useless bullshit like arguing with strangers.
Additionally, I think that there should be more judgment of the sexual choices of both sexes. Anything goes libertinism is not doing anyone any favors in the long run, and detrimentally impacts many in the short term. What you were referencing is mate preferences, not sexual choices, and thus does not fall into the same category. So I’m not sure whether you meant to defend men having unrealistic physical appearance standards in potential partners, or something else.
I wouldn’t defend men having unrealistic expectations. However, by default I think men’s programming, by virtue of casting a wider net, is much more realistic than women’s.
Back in the 90’s, there were phenomena of “playboy bunnies” and “heroin chic”, which I think were toxic and unhelpful. I think it is unfair to tar “men” with creating these norms, as Hugh Hefner is not the average man, nor are the people in charge of New York runways. But to the extent that unhealthy, unrealistic norms were propagated by a small minority, I think that was bad, and I’m glad it’s (mostly) gone.
As far as I can tell, modern beauty standards are much more “girl next door”, which I think is a good thing.
I would push back quite strongly against the idea that the rating scale anecdote is typical of male sexuality in a vacuum. That incident and others like it are very much culture bound (while I believe in biology and biological differences, culture is also important). And it was unacceptable. The student(s) involved needed to be made aware that making such a list and allowing it to be disseminated such that the girls on it were hurt by it is not appropriate behavior at any age. It is neither normal nor reasonable.
One of the earliest participatory online social media experiences was something called “hotornot.com” a predecessor to Twitter/FB/etc. that simply ran and endless series of pictures of people and asked the online conoisseur to simply state yes or no as to whether the picture was “hot”. If anything, this is more simplistic than a rating scale. Are you saying that the founders of this company should be subject to some sort of discipline? And if so, for what?
The specific 1-10 format is a cultural artifice, sure, but the idea that the default human perceptual experience involves scanning the visual field for viable sexual targets and assessing their desirability does not strike me as being a controversial claim, nor a problematic one.
I also don’t get what harm you’re referring to. If a girl is harmed by not being at the top of the list, or feels “objectified” by having been reduced to a number, this is not the sort of harm that constitutes harassment. People get rejected sexually all the time. People get judged in all sorts of ways. Of course it hurts a little when the judgement is not positive; humans are social animals. There is nothing wrong or pathological about rendering these judgements.
At most, I would say making a list is a little crass. I wouldn’t do it, but I saw such lists being made by other guys and I certainly didn’t seek to stop them.
To look at it from another angle, I see nothing in this list remotely as problematic as the “shitty media men” list which circulated negative claims which were unverifiable, often false, often harmful, and perhaps occasionally a legitimate form of whistle-blowing. It was a grotesque episode, but the makers of that list suffered no consequences (to my knowledge), and I would support their free speech rights all the way up to the point of legal defamation.
I don’t remember how the incident was handled by the school because it’s been probably a month since I finished the book and I stopped listening to the podcast at this point. I would probably say they needed to have the message conveyed that this was inappropriate and maybe be asked to write an essay about why or some such. Not suspension or anything like that. If they had been able to keep it off campus and keep their yaps shut about it then it obviously wouldn’t have been an issue. I’m surprised that you can’t see the harm of reducing fellow students to a number. It’s disgusting. Yes people did slam books and whatever back in the day and I think that should have been strongly discouraged too. Fwiw, I also objected to the media men list to which you refer. A chat over coffee or gossip at a dinner party is one thing, but allowing it to be disseminated has real consequences and I don’t support people being fired because of unsubstantiated allegations.
As for hot or not, yes, I recall encountering that site and being horrified by it. This holds regardless of the sex of the person being rated. I have never engaged in such a thing and find it morally reprehensible. I hold no position on the legality of such enterprises- I leave that for others to figure out. My critique is purely a moral one.
Given that there are meaningful differences between 2022 America and hunter-gatherer culture, I think we can transcend some aspects of our biology. You’re right that the trans ideology is fantastical pseudoscience.
I’m also not arguing that outcomes should be equal. In fact, I’m not even arguing, as you suggest that “men are losing”. If anything, the ideology you’re talking about seems to have affected women worse. The higher death rates, lower economic numbers among men I attribute to other causes.
What I am arguing is that even where gender egalitarian laws and policies exist, we will not get equal outcomes, but that egalitarian approach to policy is still, in most cases, the right foundation. To the extent that cultural norms purported to be about “equity” or “fairness” but they aren’t, I think the hypocrisy should be ended.
I’m agnostic on same-sex education. Intuitively, I don’t like segregation. Perhaps it has merits. Virtually anything would be better than the status quo.
John, let me rephrase your statement using different language. Many women will not consider men of lower status, especially wealth. The reasons that drive this might include significant greed and pride. These, of course, are sins.
But as other commenters have noted, there is an evolutionary advantage to women who are biased towards wealthier, higher status men. Mothers are in a vulnerable state during pregnancy and while their children are dependent. Higher status and wealthier men CAN help protect the moms and kids. It doesn't always work out, but it probably works out more often than not.
This mate-selection occurs across cultures and has been true for a long time. I think it is hard-wired. Jordan Peterson, for one, has discussed this at some depth many times.
However, don't think that sins are limited to greedy and conceited women. I have it on good authority that all have sinned.
Consider also the reverse criteria of how men select women. Men look for traits that add up to the ability to conceive healthy children. These traits include youth, physical fitness, evidence of healthy hormonal influence when the woman was growing up (hips wider than waist, reasonably large breasts, big eyes, clear complexions, etc.) This is also true of men across cultures and has been true for a long time. There is a pretty obvious evolutionary advantage in these mate-selection criteria too.
While it may sound fine to say that men are virtuous for being attracted to lower-status women, that has to be coupled with men's rejection of women that are not physically attractive enough. I would say that excesses of lust and pride are active in men. Rough guess: the amount of greed and pride exhibited by some women is more or less balanced by the amount of lust and pride exhibited by some men.
We are all flawed and make flawed choices. I hope that we can work out ways to reduce the incentives to make really bad choices and maybe mitigate some of the fallout from those choices too. Clearer understanding of each other and ourselves might help.
The other point I wanted to get at was that I think some of the takes on this subject are overly ingenuous with regards to the sort of rational factors you’re talking about. I don’t doubt that there is a drive by women to find men who are useful to them, but I also think there is a tremendous level of entitlement in young women (as I’ve talked about elsewhere, who genuinely don’t seem to understand the privilege they have, or what the rest of life looks like). A lot of this is class-based bigotry. I also think there’s a substantial amount of actual racism embedded in these preferences. And then there’s a lot of shallow materialism.
The average-looking (or worse) young woman who demands a six-foot Wolf of Wall Street and nothing less is an entitled brat. This is not said nearly often enough. And as with all such people, part of the problem is that they’ve never heard this criticism and thus are under no pressure to do better.
I think the alleged sense of entitlement among women for 6-6-6 men is tremendously overblown. Women who are less than perfect looking goddamn well know it because they can’t possibly not know it and feel bad about it in such a visually obsessed culture. Most women, in my experience, have a pretty fragile sense of self-worth. Granted I’m a dinosaur so I don’t talk in person to a huge number of younger women, but I suspect what a lot of men interpret as entitlement is just so much bravado. A bravado that, I should add, is occasioned by a pervasive sense that people, generally, and men, specifically, cannot be trusted, which may have started as mostly a stereotype but has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's hard to impute motivations to others (entitlement vs bravado), but a lot of the data from dating apps seems to support that unrealistic and arbitrary preferences are quite extreme among young women. And to be clear, I think the apps themselves are not the main cause and that they just tend to reveal some unpleasant truths.
Dating apps don't reveal much of anything except that reducing the dating process to a shopping experience is bad for everyone involved. Attraction is contextual for women. Take men out of context and there isn't enough there to form a judgment. I say this as someone who met their partner on an app. I almost didn't message him because his pictures obscured what he looked like (sunglasses, hiking pictures taken from far away). I am extremely physically fit and he's not. I have a graduate degree and he doesn't. But he has other strengths not visible on a dating app that I don't have. Maybe I'm an outlier (certainly true on a lot of metrics) but I did not go into dating feeling entitled - far from it. I'm fortunate that he is an outlier too.
Dating apps don't reveal true preferences or for that matter truth of any kind, is what I'm saying. They reveal preferences that emerge only in the context of extremely limited information. Meeting someone in real life and developing an attraction to them in an organic way is what is true.
Within your framework, the point I was making is that young men have been subject to strong social pressures, for at least as long as I’ve been alive, to resist certain aspects of our sex drive. We are told that we shouldn’t be attracted to women who are conventionally attractive in the way you describe, that all women are beautiful and any statement to the contrary is hateful. We are told that any perception of older women as being less attractive is a form of discrimination. We are told that any means of expressing our sexuality is harmful and that we should live in silence, waiting to be selected by a woman. And to some extent, all of these messages have taken hold. Not completely. As you say, the biological drives are still there, but significant top-down changes have been imposed on male sexual behavior, with some effect.
What I am saying is that this is not intrinsically bad, and I would like to see a similar critical approach taken to female sexuality.
I would also say that all of our evolved preferences run the risk of being maladaptive in a world that is different than the one in which they evolved. It might have made sense for women to make the choices they do in another era in ways that don’t make sense now.
John, I agree that these preferences can become maladaptive. One of these is the preference for the "bad boy." This has led to disastrous situations for many a young woman and her children. Now it has worked out for many too as the man might be independent and not ready to put up with BS. Or he has no respect for her either and becomes abusive.
In the culture I grew up in the initiative belonged to the man. He asks her out for a date. He asks her to marry. Now he might get rejected. God knows I was rejected plenty of times when I was a scrawny teenager with acne and no car. I was also rejected for date requests (less frequently) in my 20's when the acne was cleared, I had a good job, a degree, etc. The initiative was mine as was the rejection and the restaurant tabs. Not complaining. It worked out for me in the end.
As to the things we are told, well, I wish we could influence the cultural influencers. Some things being pushed are BS and becoming worse BS. My hope is that as prevailing narratives move ever further from plain truth we will collectively say enough.
As far as cultural influence, the good ideas will beat the bad ones in open competition, pretty much by definition. I don’t think that a trans activist has ever won a debate. Nor any of the other prermutations of nonsense I suspect you’re referring to.
There was a debate on campus sexual assault among two feminists, one who would now be called “woke” and the other an independent, liberal-minded person, that I think was a bit of a canary in the coal mine on this (http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?item.6648.1). I suspect that the people running the culture have adopted anticompetitive strategies to avoid being caught in precisely this situation.
I like to think, as you suggest, that eventually ground-level objective truths will become impossible to ignore.
I'm constantly amazed at how many white women I meet who immediately want to start talking about race and the terrible white men with me. Yes, I'm a white man. They expect me to agree and are shocked when I don't.
These poor women are so aggressively indoctrinated through their media sources and they can't see it.
It’s very sad, because I think there’s a difference between the small group of people promulgating this stuff who are grifters or worse, but don’t actually believe it, versus the much larger group of younger people, many of whom genuinely don’t seem to know any better.
If you are interested in female authors discussing this, well here are two. Jennifer Roback Morse's book THE SEXUAL STATE is a tour de force. It traces the roots of the sexual revolution and how it causes the issues that Reeves discusses. Louse Perry's book THE CASE AGAINST THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION just came out and I have yet to read it. However, I have heard her on a couple of podcasts and she is somewhere between Reeves and Morse on her thoughts. I intend to read her book soon.
But fellow commenter Ben Septer is correct. Truth is truth. However, that said, I find Morse's and Perry's takes preferable to Reeves. His prescriptions are a bit timed when you consider facts such as the relative rates of suicide - over 3:1 male.
Evaluating an argument based on the identity of the writer instead of the merits of the argument is everything that’s wrong with public discourse these days. Let’s stay focused on ideas, not identity.
This woman right here is 100% willing to co-sign this article. I am the mother of a boy who has been the victim of every policy described here and it is both disturbing and heartbreaking to experience.
And has been going on for too long. We have lost a couple of generations of boys to this - all races and all economic backgrounds! The only way past this, in my view, is to put extra parental effort into our boys. Not all parents do that difficult work. It bucks the system and takes a lot of effort. But I believe it is worth it, because a well-educated, well-adjusted man will still rise to the top and still command respect, even when the cancellers relentlessly attack his gender, race, sexual preferences and anything else at their disposal. Masculinity is not toxic - cancel culture is toxic. By the way, as a mom, you have perspective and maturity not enjoyed by feminists intent on making a point for their own recognition at others' expense.
Excellent post, I will leave the battle to the current generation I’m old fashioned. I believe in the Alpha male and have been happily married for 45 years. My husband has protected us and provided for us I wish the same on everybody.
What would you have done if your Alpha male had decided to abandon you without any notice? Would you be able to protect and provide for yourself and your children if he did?
You always so negative and angry Shane. My Alpha male wouldn’t have left me or his children. My happy family I think stems from both our solid backgrounds growing up in not such privilege circumstances, and you right I would have been devastated had I landed up like that a single parent, and yes you right I would have struggled so if I appeared smug I apologize. Why I told about my Alpha male is because in our home there are dynamics which as the article says are 12000 years old why would anybody want to rock a winning formula. You can see what happens if you do we have a very unhappy America.
My husband and I had our 51st anniversary this year. I was barely 18 when we married and we were both in college, both graduated, have 4 great kids and 6 wonderful grandkids.
I’ve lived through a lot of these transitions in our society and there are changes for the better and many for the worse. But ‘traditional’ families do exist, they just don’t make as much noise on social media.
We have a townhouse in a rebuilding high density neighborhood in Denver and most of our neighbors are younger adults. They’re friendly and earnest and really not very different than I was at their age.
I think the extreme refiguring of what it means to be men and women and how we should live is an artifice being imposed on society by a militant few whose voices are amplified by social media and who have agendas that are at odds with most people’s values and hopes for their futures.
I admire traditional families. And untraditional families. My view is, Whatever works for you is what you should do, and the rest of us should butt out.
Skinny's Alpha male system works for her, and I am delighted that is does. Someone else's Alpha male walks out on her--or dies of cancer--she will be devastated unless she has kept an open mind about a Plan B. I have no issue with a traditional family system, only in forcing those who want no part of it to do it anyway. If it's genuinely voluntary, go for it.
I think the "refiguring of what it means to be men and women" is largely a media creation to fill air time. A segment of society certainly pushes that, but it's a small minority and the rest of us can ignore it. As you say about your young neighbors, most of us are friendly and earnest and get along, and the rest is hot air on media.
I don't believe I am, but if I appear that way to you, Skinny, I apologize. You didn't appear smug, and I'm not remotely complaining about your family structure---you found what works for you, your Alpha is happy with your family dynamic and so are you. I am delighted you have a long and happy relationship. Everyone should.
Sadly, everyone doesn't, and women need to prepare for that possibility. Women who tie all their hopes and dreams exclusively to an Alpha male without being prepared for the moment that might end--divorce or death--are going to suffer, and I want no one to suffer.
Even if the man-in-charge dynamic is 12,000 years old, that doesn't make it good for everyone. For thousands of years, women had to participate because they had no other options. Some were happy like you. Other led miserable lives because their Alpha was a beast, an abuser, a womanizer, a pedophile, a lazy jerk, or some combination. But they had to stay married no matter how bad it got, and I don't want that to be the case for anyone.
I had a terrific equal partnership with my wife of forty years. Each of us were Alpha at the things were were best at, and Beta in the things the other was best at. it worked just fine. Sadly, she died at age 59 and I live on. The model worked for us, just like your model works for you.
If the Alpha model is voluntary, by all means, go for it! If it's forced, that's bad for both partners and bad for society.
I hope this adds a bit of nuance to what I wrote, and again, apologies if I came off as angry.
If you're talking about me, you assume incorrectly. I had a terrific marriage. It went 40 years and might have gone 40 more except that cancer killed her at age 59.
My point is that with a 50 percent divorce rate in the United States, many women who assumed their Alpha male would protect and provide for them wound up screwed and tattooed with Alpha went hunting younger mates. My advice to women and men who insist their partners will be there no matter what, so they don't have to think about that, might find themselves one day stranded without a life jacket.
I made no premise about either sex. I said 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, I had no idea who initiated them. The rest of my statement stands: both women and men need to have a Plan B in mind in case Plan A does not work out for whatever reason, which includes divorce but also includes death of the spouse.
If it's a complaint about sexism against women or racism against black people, nobody would insist that the author isn't credible because the author is a woman or a black person. To the contrary - it's a male/white author who would be criticized for speaking out of turn! Yet when men are the victims, you ALSO argue that the author shouldn't be male!
Moreover, you frame the problem as a problem for women: "Women suffer from the lack of good men!" Once again, imagine the reaction if sexism against women was described as a problem for men!
No need to imagine anything. Boys have been disadvantaged so that girls could somehow catch up. Well, the girls have passed the boys by, resulting in all kinds of detriment to everyone, not just the boys but the girls as well. I do not criticize the author at all. What I am saying here, apparently in a confusing way, is that the cancellation crowd will discredit his arguments because he is a male making the case that feminism has gone too far. That is on the crowd, not the author, whom I applaud for bringing this issue up and substantiating his position with statistics.
That's true; they will. But a woman writing the same thing will be branded a "gender traitor". The cancel-cultists are basically tribalists. They wouldn't matter if they didn't hold such a hugely out-sized influence over government and media.
Point taken. Nevertheless, this problem about our boys needs focus on the numerous issues we have put on them. First, stop putting so many of them on the spectrum. Second, embrace their unique behaviors and guide them into productive channels - let boys be boys a little more. Third, stop feminizing them, asking them to and even shaming them into adopting behaviors unique to girls. Also, adjust teaching methods to allow them the freedom to productively go off on their own rather than following rote procedure that, frankly, is more suitable to girls but frustrates boys. All of this while expecting more of them, so that they aim higher and reach their potential.
Exactly JDFree white makes should actually stand up now, have another million man March to Biden’s Washington. Mind you not such a good idea can you imagine it would be the “2023 insurrection on the capital by white males” wait until 2024.
To be accurate, it would be 2025 but I get the idea. Democrats always, always, always cast events as evil when they are not part of their narrative or agenda.
More to the point actual liberals and conservatives need to be writing and to be published here. Note the Democratic Partyspeak amidst the faux "reasonableness". This bloke is just another ideological loony.
And the one thing that everyone avoids is that this entire sick charade could be ended in a hot second if men were really the beasts that the extreme feminists portray them to be. Because biology is immutable and men are simply stronger and bigger. Indeed, one need look no further than the Islamic societies that enforce a rigid male dominance. But men in Western societies did not want to see their wives oppressed and their daughters denied opportunities. And, yet, predictably, as is the case with most things that "progressives" touch, sanity has been turned on its head and men have been demonized and marginalized. The facts don't lie and those laid out by Mr. Reeves are but the tip of the iceberg. The radicalization of marginalized men is only just getting started. What do you think will happen when they see boys being turned into girls, boys anesthesized with drugs to make them more malleable, masculinity demonized, and young men denied work opportunities? And all the while, lonely women decry the absence of real men and revile the soy boys who prostrate themselves on the altar of the cult of feminism.
Men need women; women need men. Our chidren need both. Conservatives need liberals and liberals need conservatives; neither need progressive/socialist ideologies that are neither.
I took plenty of women's studies during my psychology degree, spent plenty of time interacting with advocates of the sort you discuss, and it has always been striking to me how completely disconnected from reality their view of men is.
Part of the problem is some branches of modern feminism completely disavow the natural roles and limits of femininity. Instead of being perceived and accepted as perfectly natural limits, and the starting point for defining themselves and their political and social needs, some modern feminists really don't want to be female anymore. They don't want to behave as female, (that's "performing femininity" or "female socialization") be seen or appreciated as female (pandering to the male gaze) or be treated as female (that's condescending chauvinism). They don't want to be ultimately responsible for pregnancy anymore, (which is unrealistic, ahem, for obvious reasons) or have the social or family nurturer roles. Ironically, they're using male behavior and freedoms as a measuring stick against themselves instead of having their own female ones. Consequently, they're more "woman hating" than men in some instances. They're completely oblivious to where that self neutering (or self masculinizing) path has lead and continues to lead. They're oblivious to "toxic femininity" which is really the more pervasive problem than "toxic masculinity" nowadays.
“Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.”
― H.L. Mencken
It’s always been remarkable how much women hate femininity, how much they put each other down, how they reject the sorts of things you’re talking about. To the extent that there is any influence of feminism at all, I think it is much as you describe. A male-dominated society worships women, but a female-dominated society hates them.
Because it does seem like there's something unique here. On some intuitive level, it would make sense if a bunch of white men had structured the societies they built and lead to their benefit. But in reality, it seems like they didn't. If anything, quite the opposite.
There's an Orwell quote on this subject I've never been able to find, but the gist is that you'd never see the dominant group in any other society propagandizing against itself, as is the norm in the Western world.
I agree but Reeves thinks that the marriage toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube, and people of lower socioeconomic status will not return to it as a life script, so fathers need to have equal relationships with their fathers (equal in time to what they have with their mothers) in a world where marriage is uncommon, while the wealthy continue to reap its benefits. It’s so wrongheaded on so many levels I don’t know where to start, but the inevitably high level of conflict between the two estranged parents and its effects on the child is a start.
Much appreciated but was hoping for more engagement.
Maybe over caffeinated when I read the article.
And no intention to insult the many clear thinking and fair minded women who share these boards. Just hoping to ignite some honest discussion on this immense and looming problem.
Give it some time. It’s early still. I love your soy boy, altar of feminism comment. It’s what has brought us they/them and men who wear nail polish. 🙄
You in no way insulted clear thinking women. Many of us are the mothers and grandmothers of boys, and we see clearly what is going on. I worry every day about my grandsons who are just starting out in school.
I think a lot of people are not aware of the problem. All they know is "failure to launch" when the boys reach their 20s, and then they label the boys as slackers.
Mother of three boys, now grown. The public school system was awful for all three of them. The underlying messaging was terrible. In 8th grade, one of my sons was told at the awards ceremony, "You were the best math student, but we gave the outstanding math student award to (a girl), because she was nicer to the other students in class. " I wish I was kidding. In college, all the women in STEM and special interest groups create a Venn diagram where there are no spaces prioritized for men, other than fraternities. The feminists are trying to dismantle those too. Our saving grace was a Jesuit all-boys school, which provided a safe and nurturing learning and social environment. My boys are faring way better than their friends who attended public school. It is time to overhaul our educational system and our thinking about boys.
Although to be fair, a lot of the young men in fraternities are bringing it on themselves. Men may be discriminated against but they’re not all victims.
It’s mostly men who are lower in economic strata that bear the brunt of the anti-male societal reset.
Unless of course they trans themselves - then they go ‘straight’ to the top of the privilege pyramid
The author makes an important point. We cannot stop considering the needs of 50 per cent of the population without realizing unintended consequences.
I was at a meeting one evening this week when a volunteer, a brown man, explained to the group that men, and white men in particular, take up too much space in the world. He claimed if you encountered a white man in the grocery store, he would not yield to provide social distance. It was a grossly unjust generalization. Because of the current Zeitgeist and the nature of the organization I work for, the other four participants in the meeting -- two white women and two white men -- listened to this tirade without comment. But we spoke about the comments amongst ourselves after the fact. We have created a culture where it is acceptable to express to sexist, racist commentary as long as it is directed to white men. It is wrong.
What do you think happens when people are faced with lies that society screeches must not be questioned? Sooner or later the society implodes, just as the old Soviet Union imploded. Free speech means being able to call out those lies -honestly and without fear of reprisal. The Democrat Party - and its diminutive Beria, Merrick Garland, - stand for the enforcement of lies.
Goddess of Wisdom and War. With great wisdom, we won’t have wars. When all else fails, I’ll be ready. Other girls were told they were princesses. I was told that I was a goddess. This has served me well.
Ah… but when you are retired, you can simply say “I don’t agree with you on that” no matter what the Zeitgeist. I think it was Dr. King who said “in those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” We don’t need to be church to be thermostat, we can kindly and gently state where we disagree.
Good point. For the record I do disagree in meetings when with other members of the leadership team when we are discussing plans and policies. I am always out-voted but I think it is my responsibility to offer alternative perspectives or considerations. On occasion I have been able to moderate plans. I refuse to put my pronouns and land acknowledgements on my email tag. I resist where I can.
This committee meeting that included volunteers is a bit more sensitive to handle, especially given some very fresh manufactured "race" issues with my workplace. It is baffling to me that someone could feel like those comment, which are at best biased and worst racist and sexist, are acceptable in a public form. Worse, I believe he thought he was educating the other members of the committee. This is not the way to win hearts and minds.
I don’t think it’s about winning hearts and minds; or people would listen as much as they talk. IIn the presence of True Believers Who Have to Diss Someone I sometimes say “I don’t feel comfortable with that stereotype of (white people, Republicans, Democrats) not to get into a discussion about whether the True Belief is wrong but to be able to leave the room and not be exposed to what feels like..hate. No one deserves that and no workplace should allow it. IMHO.
Not to be *that* person but the Bible has quite a bit to say on the topic of men, how they should behave and how men and women should act towards each other. I just can’t help but think so many of today’s issues all trace their roots back to the rise of secularism. 🤷🏻♀️
I agree, but I couldn't come up with a way to say that. And of course, you will get the people who rant about women being subservient. If they actually studied the Bible, they would read many stories about strong women leaders and learn that God instructs men to honor and respect women (and women to honor and respect men).
After all, it was Jesus who invited the approach of women, for example, the woman who touched his garment to be healed from a lifetime of bleeding. Jesus showed over and over the significance of women in turning the old ideas/customs/ways into new cultural norms.
Short answer: Get God back in the schools. There’s lots of holes in Darwin. We need to, at a minimum, present both. We open Congress with a prayer. Why can’t we have some God in the schools?
The Catholic Church has been correctly aligned with all the tenets of Evolution for decades now. If you think Catholic and Baptist schools don't teach evolution and big bang you need to bone up on the stats. The students from parochial schools vastly outperform public school students on all issues related to STEM inclusing evolutionary biology. Darwin was wrong about many things and any modern biologist worth his salt will admit as much. The foundations of natural selection and evolution remain sound however.
It seems the passage of time is a pendulum on which civilizations slowly change as the pendulum moves. I think there will always be religious groups. People want to believe in something bigger than themselves. Some of us chose to believe in God, others choose secular things or ideas. I think civilization will eventually swing to more belief in God and “conservative” or traditional lifestyles. Maybe not in my lifetime, but maybe in future generations. Who knows? We move in one direction and when it becomes too extreme or intolerable, we will move in the opposite direction.
It isn't just religiosity it is largely women in industrialized countries choosing other things over family/reproduction. See the work of Hans Rosling.
There is the problem: men ( or women for that matter) need to be seen as something more than a "cultural side effect". It's a very good essay and I totally agree with it, but it seems that we are not only disrupting 12,000 years of cultural heritage, but hundreds of thousands years of evolution as well. Note to young leftists, you cannot wish things like biological imperatives or previous events away. Just saying.
Well one great point made is the elimination of education for skilled trades. With manufacturing moved overseas and schools wanting to eliminate auto and wood / metal shops and replace with gender studies, it stands to reason that the goal is gender neutral. Look at the leaders of women groups, do they look like they care about boys or men? Hell they have to sneak up on a water fountain.
Long said our priorities are all wrong. The US has a serious shortage of skilled workers. I know people with companies that can not find people willing to work and learn. They can make six figures a year but the work is sometimes long and odd hours. We sold a couple of generations the you must have a degree bullshit and eliminated manufacturing.
Now we have micro aggression and are you a boy or girl and you are now six and should know. My hope is parents getting re-engaged with schools will help. Yet, until our incompetent government pulls it's head out of their ass, and helps get manufacturing and trade schools stood up, not much will change. They piss money away on gender studies but can't subsidize any manufacturing near a city for jobs in the hope of providing opportunities to lower income folks.
Keep telling young men to stop being mean and you will get the Biden administration. Men need to be women or just not have a pair. Plus, being honest, not sure that's what women want in their man. Think they would prefer a guy who believes in protecting his family and working hard to support. It doesn't have to be what you do for a living but more that you act like a man and not a gender afraid person.But have women been sold the you don't need a man story for so long?
My generation, GenX, is the first to “benefit” from the “you don’t need a man” narrative. It’s awful what these ideas have done to men. Ask any man, regardless of age, about online dating today and you’ll see the results.
Women too. I’m GenX and me and my women friends talk about the falsehoods of what we were told. Like career, career, career….only to struggle to build the family environment later in our 30s.
Agree. Didn’t have my daughter until I was 34 and almost didn’t have her at all because I didn’t *want* children. She is the best decision I’ve ever made and way more important and satisfying than any job or career.
I understand that. I had my son when I was 36 because my career came first. I loved my career, but I love my son and my family so much more. It is a more complete satisfaction and joy. The traditional, nuclear family is denounced in our society, but it is a model that has worked for centuries. When civilizations have steered away from the model, they have eventually failed. Children need a stable, nurturing home environment to flourish. They need positive male and female role models to learn respect and confidence.
Yes! I grew up with a fiercely feminist family, and assumed I’d most likely just have a kid on my own when it was time. As a kid I had been given a giant pin that had prominently displayed in my bedroom that read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” I somehow married a man whose family completely missed the feminist movement (in the sense of traditional roles). I discovered shortly after my first baby that I desperately didn’t want to leave her in someone else’s care, and he completely supported that. I wanted to be there to raise my babies, and to take care of my family. They are currently teenagers, and my only regret is that I felt so much daily shame and guilt about taking such an “unfeminist” path while they were growing up. I don’t know how I had the guts to do it, except that it was such a deep, primal drive for me. I am so deeply grateful for that choice and for the family I have because of it. That might not be a pull for every woman, but for me, feminism didn’t say I could be anything. Feminism told me who I should be and what I should want. That was exactly what we were trying to break free from.
I have also been unraveling the mind fuck that is “man-hating” while being married to a man and raising a boy. I read all the books that explained the raw, biological differences between human males and females (thank god) before my son was born, but there was still the deeply conditioned contempt that I’ve had to grow out of. The benefit of the woke movement is that it has gone so extreme that it’s knocked the scales from my eyes.
As a woman, I’m deeply grateful that I stand on the shoulders of all who have gone before me, both men and women. These people suffered and fought for changes that desperately needed to be made. But that pendulum has swung dreadfully far in the opposite direction, and wrought much suffering there, as well. Babies have been thrown out with the bath water. It brings me much hope to read the comments section (on all these articles) that so much reason, critical thinking, and compassion exist in our society. I pray that this is the silent majority that ends up steering our collective ship.
Had a similar experience… I was one of the “smart kids” growing up in NY and was taught it would be a waste of my life if I *didnt* go into a high power career…so I did all of it, only to discover that raising a family is more important to me. But the feeling of being “worthless” or that I’m “making the wrong choices” or “giving up once in a lifetime opportunities” when forgoing career advancements has been really tough to shake, even when I know that I am happier putting that energy toward my kids. Luckily, I was able to ignore that feeling as I had my 4 kids during medical residency and fellowship. And now that I have the chance, I hope to impart the idea on my daughters that they have more options than I did. Wish I had known that being a stay at home mom in a traditional marriage was right for me and wouldn’t have meant I was a failure, especially before expending all the time/costs of medical training.
Me too. But I had a come to Jesus moment - at the end of my days which would I regret more not being a good mother not being a great lawyer? It was a no-brainer. I never looked back and quit practicing law until my youngest left home.
I think one of the worst things that feminism did to women was the promise that they could "have it all": the glamorous, high-flying career *and* the Leonardo DiCaprio spouse *and* the two beautiful and perfectly behaved children. Nobody, man or woman, can ever have all that.
A close family member, who's a graduate of a prestigious university and has a solid high-paying career and a ton of outside interests, is an outcast in the dating community as a male who's only 5'6" tall.
The eradication of tracking and vocational schools in the US was part of progressive "anti-racist" measures coming from Harvard and infiltrating DOE. They claimed tracking would prevent/discourage blacks and hispanics from becoming Astrophysicists/attending college.
I have yet to see any programs from progressives that has made anything better. My thought is that progressives having never done or accomplished anything just keep thinking the next idea will work.
The truth is that as true socialists they just know so much. But unfortunately it's all wrong. They will never be happy until they can lock up those they disagree with. All of their anti racist policies have only made life worse for minorities. But since they really deep down don't like minorities or the poor, they just don't care.
I think they care about minorities but they are too high on their own supply to assess their own policies critically. There are ways of blaming any bad outcomes on "not enough" progressive policies. Thomas Sowell pointed this out some 40 years ago. They will say not enough welfare. Give money to both parents even if both are in the home and not working. . Not enough anti-racism to stop water contamination in Louisiana. Not enough policies to prevent power outages in CA.
Blaming stubborn anti-vaxxers for covid deaths, and doubling down on the need to go after their jobs to break the resistance.
There are still not enough incentives for a critical mass to question their own logic. After this election you will start to see cracks in the fronts. You will see more educators questioning teacher unions. You will see more politicians questioning state funded trans clinics. A critical mass of the poor need to just leave the Democratic party before the Dems wake up.
"But like all revolutions, it has generated real challenges, too. You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects."
Social engineering continues to evade the engineers; we don't really understand ourselves or the roots of the human condition very well and yet changes are made, and experiments conducted without any forethought about the outcomes. Dr. Jordan Peterson is quoted as saying something to the effect of "Oh you don't like the institution of marriage? Before you throw it out, rethink what you are replacing it with". It is clear to many that the alternatives, regardless of the purported advantages to monogamy, are yet to be vetted by history or outcomes as successful.
A side comment: As an actual engineer (software and electrical), I can't tell you how much the phrase "social engineering" pisses me off, because there is nothing about it that resembles actual engineering. But I understand why people use that analogy.
I wonder if it just where we are at in this particular cycle, like in a historical context. I think there can and is going to be a movement that gives men more economic power in society. I say this from a practical standpoint.
I am a single-mother with an advanced degree and make a decent living. I thank the opportunities given to me from the women who fought hard before me. And yet, when my plumbing went out and I had water flooding my house, the fact is I paid way more to the man who came to fix it in a half hour than I make in two days!
I pointed this out to both my kids-a son and a daughter. We will see if they take notice.
I hope to instill different thinking in my kids. I came from a working class background…went on to college but really missed so many aspects of how I was raised.
It’s sad that for too many degrees= status and prestige
You nailed it Madjack. I equally despise the members of the technocratic class who look down on trades people or physical laborers. (In the Hamptons, the swells disparage the traffic from contractors as "the trade parade.") As if they could actually do anything but talk or manipulate money. Would they ever walk a mile in their shoes. Imagine looking down on an electrician who can diagnose and repair a faulty circuit when you believe electricity comes from a socket and wail when the power goes out. Or an auto mechanic who discovers that you gassed your car forever without even once checking the oil level? Their towering self-regard is infuriating. And despicable.
Take away the ‘financialization of everything’ and what skills do the money manipulators actually have? They’re dependent on the government/banking cartel and of little competence in the real world of things.
A plumber charges based on cost and benefit. I would have to assume that the cost of you going to work is the price of transportation (if you don’t work remotely). A plumber needs to drive to multiple locations a day, in a vehicle equipped with tools and materials necessary to fix a multitude of problems along with carrying a multitude of insurances for his business, health and overhead, etc., follow licensing regulations that are additional costs. Not to mention the cost of employees who support the business. So what he charged you is not actually the amount of money he makes per hour, so it’s not a true comparison.
This article makes many good and valid points, right up until the disparaging remarks of the “populist right”. I voted for Donald Trump twice. I voted for him the first time b/c I was voting against Hillary Clinton. I voted for him the second time b/c his policies, both foreign and domestic, were rooted in reality as opposed to ideology. Democratic ideas might sound good to some, but the policies accomplish NOTHING. The disaster of the Joe Biden administration has these failing democratic policies on full display.
Most of CS commentators who write the articles suffer from TDS. I voted twice as well for President Trump and if he is on the ticket for 2024 will be voting a 3rd time fir him!
I too mostly voted against the vile Hillary and will vote for anyone who runs as the Republican in 2024, even if it’s a head of lettuce. It would still have more brain matter than Biden.
Glad Mr. Reeves is taking on this subject, but a couple of points I disagree on:
One, we should be very skeptical of the idea that feminism, or any ideology or social movement, has any significant causative effects on social changes. There are plenty of material explanations for these changes rooted in the technological developments of the Industrial Age and subsequent Information Age. Pre-Industrial gender roles were not arbitrary, and they did not disappear because someone discovered they were "sexist" and complained about it. The gendered division of labor simply became obsolete. I think you could argue for some causative effects of feminism downstream of the big picture changes, most of them negative, but let's give credit where it's due. Mass transit, the assembly line, the pill, etc. etc. are way more important than anyone carrying a snarky sign through the streets.
The idea of women being less dependent on men than in prior ages is not correct. Women are more dependent on men than they were in the Stone Age, just not on specific, identifiable men that they know. Technology has made many forms of male labor obsolete, but it has done the same for traditional female forms of labor. Women in the colonial U.S. spend a lot of time cooking, sewing, cleaning, and doing physical labor that produced useful results. Women of the modern laptop class, or more generally as part of the service economy, generally do not do essential work (particularly given the failed state of teaching and the social sciences). A single woman in 2020's America lives in a house built by men, drives a car built by men on roads built by men, uses devices designed by men built with rare minerals mined by men powered by coal and gas mined by men, and is protected by a mostly male police force and military. So does a single man, incidentally. Many of these men will be nonwhite, non-American, of low SES, living in remote areas, not part of this woman's social world. The fact that this woman likely never meets most of these men might lead her to be less aware of her dependence, and she might not have the same gratitude towards them that she would if she lived on an 1800's homestead with one man. But women need to hear the words of our former president: "You didn't build that".
I'm also not as bullish on "HEAL" professions. While I agree that more male teachers and psychologists would be a good thing, I don't want to valorize those professions, and many of them may eventually become as obsolete as the old blue-collar jobs. What is education as a profession when all the information in the world is available on a phone and the teaching professions are dominated by insane ideologues and corrupt unions? I would rather see more women in mining, coding, and garbage removal than see more men working in nursing homes, fine arts, and house cleaning, though all of these are in the direction of gender parity.
Otherwise, agree with some of the big points on the labor force and education, and agree that there just isn't a clear set of social norms and rules around masculinity and a lot of bad and confusing messaging that seems to make it tough for us.
I wonder what the effect is on the 70+% of black boys who grow up without a same sex role model? All households have seen an increase in single parent families, but how do we ever close the gaps in graduation rates, and reduce the crime rates in urban environments when these boys often learn more on the streets than at home?
I'm curious, but is anyone aware of all male academies, taught largely my male teachers (I suppose there may not be enough males teachers) established in urban environments? I appreciate that funding would be a problem, but I'd rather see the tech robber barons spend their money there than on some of their current causes like changing elections, donating to their dysfunctional alma mater, or to causes based on dubious science.
Thomas Sowell and Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about many of the all male Charter Schools. They were successful until feminists demanded they be co-ed. Any successful school that has a preponderance of male grads will be systemically attacked by feminists. They tend to be STEM and hands on. Check out "Wilderness Academies" - basically survivalist camps.
There were two public all male colleges in the US - The Citadel and VMI. But that wasn’t fair and now they’ve got women and the cadets are “cadating” each other with all the drama and distractions that entails. Many students benefit from single gender education. Options are few. Hampden Sydney is now I believe the only all male non-theological college in the USA. It’s a very expensive private school.
As a Biological Psychologist, lifelong teacher, and former stay-at-home dad that raised two boys, I agree with this. And, quite frankly, one of the worst influences on their lives was the teachers that they had in grade school (for all the reasons noted in this essay, and more). I think that virtually everything that's going on in education is not only anti-boy but anti-child and, to a great extent, anti-rationality....
The latter is hurting both boys and girls.
Yes, boys today are told, pretty much from the first time they set foot inside a schoolhouse, that they bear original sin and are the cause of all the world's problems. Men won't go into teaching because one false accusation can ruin your career and your life. Parents of girls freak out if they find out that there's a male teacher. I'm frankly surprised to find out that the percentage of male teachers is as high as 24%; from what I've seen of public schools here, I would have thought it was a lot lower. In many public schools today, the only adult male the children ever see is the janitor.
Wow, that is horrible. I had a male teacher in 4th grade and he was fantastic. I had a mix of male and female after that and I think that is a good balance to have, even for girls.
All of this critical theory is also destroying things by what you call "original sin" and identity politics, which are absolute poison for a school's social environment.
Take this the next logical step. The consistent feedback I get from 20-30-something men and women is the active discrimination against males in the workplace. Upper middle managements that are overwhelmingly female and unapologetically discriminatory in their employment practices. The clear justification being "the history of sexism" and the boogie-man of "the patriarchy". I've heard stories of men "apologizing for being male" on Zoom calls. I met a woman hiking in CO whose son came home from HS and apologized for being a male. (He was encouraged by his <female> teacher). Kendi-ism is now. "The solution for past discrimination is current discrimination.". It's also a recipe for strife and breeding misogynists......The Rule of Law was designed to undercut generational grievance-holding. Hatfields and McCoys and all that. Schools now teach it.....
Sad and disturbing.
As the past years have shown teachers are for teachers and care little for their children. Especially the teachers unions.
I disagree. Most teachers I know care deeply about their students. But teachers are no longer the schoolmarms of the Old West, hired to sacrifice their own lives in favor of the children. Modern teachers are adult professionals. They join unions to negotiate pay, benefits, and working conditions with their employers, and they rely on those unions to protect themselves from the excesses of their employers.
Teachers unions protect teachers, not children, parents, or school management. They are labor organizations, not "make everybody happy" nonprofits. Unions are legally bound to serve one master: their members.
Students have parents, school administrators, and government on their side. Teachers have only their unions. If students needs more protection and resources, it's time for parents, taxpayers, government, and school administrators to do their job better.
Teachers' unions are doing their job just fine. The others aren't. Step it up, school systems. You signed the labor agreement with your employees, live up to it. If your clients--the children--have unfulfilled needs, then fill them. You do that, you will not have a problem with your teachers or their unions.
What a crock. Adult professionals? Teachers' Unions are the 800-pound gorilla in state and national politics. What does pushing, demanding CRT, sexual mutilation, anti-religious secularism, diminishing anti Western Civilization history, censoring scientific Covid research so teachers could stay home, and going to Ukraine (Weingarten) for God knows what; have to do with "protecting their members from the excesses of their employers?"
Why do you think public student enrollment is cratering? Public schools are a mess.
Nice try.
It's easy to blame unions for everything you hate. But the "mess" you complain about is within the power of state government, voters, and school boards to change. That they refuse to do so leaves the unions open to fill the void.
If you want to restore the balance between school systems and employee unions, tell government and school boards to get off their lazy asses and do so.
Wrong again. The state government and school boards are in cahoots with the teachers unions. They too are the problem. Balance, or the end of public education as we know it, has and will occur as nasty school board members are replaced by parents who want schools to teach their kids not indoctrinate or groom them. It will take time. But don't sit there thinking the system works just fine.
Agreed. In our school district, the school board is elected in large part due to the financial support and organizational assistance provided by the teacher's union's PAC.
I didn't say "the system works fine." It does not. I said teachers unions are successful at getting good pay and working conditions for their members, and defending members from stupid management decisions. That's the job of unions, and they're good at it.
They are not the reason schools suck. Neither unions nor teachers control school funding, budgets, staffing, recruitment, educational priorities, hiring and firing, or anything else you guys complain so bitterly about. School boards, administrators, and politicians control all that, and ultimately, voters control everything.
If you want balance back in the schools, you need to insist that school districts, taxpayers, and voters do their job as well as the unions do.
100%
Points for "in cahoots," which is a terrific old-timey phrase.
1. Dissolve school boards. They're non-essential. At the very least let's rename them Clown Boards.
2. My wife is a 26 year veteran of the NYC school system...run by - you guessed it - Democrat politics colluding with the UFT, producing a MESS while they self-congradulate.
3. NYS screws up most of what it touches.
4. So where does that leave our kids in general if the state and school boards are useless? As of now, with very few options other than charter schools.
I agree completely! Many of today's teachers flunked working in the private sector so they decided to go for the free Master's but took that word a bit too literally. They are not the "Masters" of children; children have at least one parent who has dibbs on what their kids learn and self-loathing 101 should not be on any curriculum.
Practically all of the teachers I had and currently know chose it as a profession from the outset. Teaching as a last resort for those who have issues holding down a job in the private sector (which runs the gamut in terms of the types of jobs available within practically every field imaginable) makes little sense given the competing demands and relatively low pay that come along with it.
Totally agree!
Shane, I have to take exception to the idea that government and school administrators are on the “side” of the students. Here in Illinois, school administrators and government are owned by teachers unions. Amendment 1 will be the final installment of that ownership deal.
Hey, jude! I'm talking ideally, of course. Government and school administrators are supposed to support the needs of their clients, which are students, parents, and taxpayers. Unions are supposed to support theirs, which are teachers.
The imbalance we see right now--unions reigning supreme--is not because unions are all-powerful, but because government and school managements are so weak and ineffectual.
That imbalance needs to be righted. Ultimately, government has final say over all of it, but that requires vision, courage, and just plain guts. These days, that doesn't describe politics.
I lived in Illinois for my first 66 years, and just moved to Arizona. I agree with your assessment that teachers unions "own" Illinois education, but that's only because the unions are smarter and better at their job than schools and government are at theirs.
I think teachers' unions s/b banned. Not just for financial reasons but for the future of the country. Until there was an NEA etc, local control meant local values. The teachers unions have nationalized education. And implemented uniform ideological indoctrination. (I live 4 mos each ILL, FL, and CO) We're seeing it now. Nearly all kids at least understand the Woke worldview, even if they don't buy in. They are radicalizing a significant percentage of vulnerable kids. Not all. Not even most. But enough......
This is absolutely 100% correct.
And now you have the CDC getting involved with the institution of the COVID vax in the regular immunization cycle. There's zero evidence. Everyone is working against the kids. Everyone.
Congratulations on getting out of Illinois!
Not sure unions are better at their job, unless their job is to manipulate government for their own benefit, at the expense of students and taxpayers. That’s what they have been good at.
I liked Illinois a lot. I did not like the increasingly confiscatory taxes, though, and so when the opportunity to move showed itself, I got the moving truck in gear.
Unions are very good at their jobs, which includes negotiating better contracts with their members' employers. If that's at the expense of students and taxpayers, then parents and voters need to elect politicians with more guts and knowledge to level the playing field.
It's easy to blame unions for the schools' ills. But unions do not run schools, the state and administrators do. The latter don't like the former, they have the power to change it.
Shane/Jude, The unions run IL for several reasons. Money. Organization. Media. Excellent propaganda. But mostly because the consumer doesn't foot the bill. The parents of kids in school are motivated. Beyond motivated. Every possible edge or assistance that someone can dream up for their kids they rabidly pursue, with the unions cooing support. At least here in the suburbs. And there are acctg games played. Capital budgets get funneled to Operating budgets, so maintenance is deferred until there's no choice but to pass a bond issue. Forty years ago I had the idea that school spending s/b frozen. And every new dollar would be 50cts taxpayer and 50cts parents of students. Put a price on all these "must haves.". As it is, parents buy it and put it on someone else's credit card. And that's just the financial side. More.....
I paid my local taxes (in IL) for years and years and years and sent both of our children through parochial school for 13 years. If it wasn't for the parochial schools, the public schools would be even more overwhelmed. I'm glad we did what we did but I agree, more financial responsibility should be on parents.
It sickens me to think of the seniors still paying taxes for failing schools/systems.
Catholic schools cast less to run and have a much higher graduation rate and students moving on to higher education than public schools.
The idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for other people's kids education (among other things) is exactly the kind of thinking that needs to stop if we are to heal our culture and improve our society. Having children is an essential role in any society, and all of us have an interest in it whether we are parents or not. You want parents to pay more for children's education when they already have enough extra expenses as it is?
In a healthy populace, the proper raising and educating of children should be priority #1. We cannot afford to treat it as simply another private transaction in a free society. In fact, a reasonable argument could be made that people who don't have kids should pay more in taxes in order to do their part in supporting the next generation. The fact that this idea would fly like a lead balloon in American politics is a perfect example of what ails our national psyche, and why so many of us are lamenting the sad state of our national identity - because we have a weak to non-existent concept of civic duty and what it means to be an American citizen.
Eric
The limits of writing vs talking. That's not what I trying to say. My point, is there is no restraint on the spending; and indeed a powerful incentive the other way. If I'm paying 3cts on every new $1 spent on my child then I'm got little incentive to question new spending. If I'm convinced my child "needs" XYZ or they'll fail, I'll fight like hell to get it for them; esp if I'm paying nothing for it. I raised three children. K-8 in parochial schools. 9-12 at New Trier HS. Foot in both worlds. The parochial school was good; and, it had constraints on spending, because parents paid. At NTHS, the only constraint was what could be jammed into the RE tax. Current parents vote en masse. There are enough former parents who share your POV (as do I in the main) that they vote for increases. It adds up over the years, as no programs are EVER sunsetted.
So, that's really my point. If current parents had to pay, say half, of any increased spending since Year XXXX, then they'd be more prudent in new spending, and more likely to look at past spending to see what isn't really needed. And parent-less households would still support.
When I first moved to Glencoe in 1988 I deliberately chose a home in the rare mixed-race area. A couple years later I was getting signatures on a petition to sensitize the Village Board on some issues the black community had. An elderly black woman neighbor said, "I'll sign your petition. But, can you also address school spending. I get it that people paid for my children to go to school. So, now I have to pay for others. But......does it have to be so much??". Opened my eyes, since I had kids 4, 3, and 2 at the time. We need to reform how we do this.
"mostly because the consumer doesn't foot the bill."
Of course we do. Most school funding in Illinois comes from local property taxes. We pay through the nose for local schools--when I lived in Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, $6,000 of my annual $7,000 tax bill went to the school system. Every parent of every child in the Naper school system paid those property taxes.
My wife and I didn't have kids, so we paid to educate everyone else's. That was fine, because democracy demands an educated society. But man, we paid a lot of dough over the years.
Up until Janus, teachers joined union because they had to. My experience with unions, both labor and professional, are that they are much more adept at catering to THEIR interests. To wit, a union VP was recently hired by my Cities HR department. Those employees jump ship so often that they aren't doing anything that puts them personally (in a career aspect) at risk.
I agree: Janus ended the closed union shop that made employees join unions whether they wanted to or not. My beef with Janus is it didn't end the "free rider" part: employees that refused to join the union or pay union dues got the same pay and benefits the union negotiated for their members. That made the Janusites moochers. Free riders should remain at the mercy of the employer for pay, benefits, discipline, and all the other things unions provide their members. Instead, they get the protection and benefit of workplace unions without paying a dime for the privilege.
When you say that unions cater to their own interests, do you mean they cater to their members' interest as opposed to those of employers; or that union leaders cater to their personal interests at the expense of members?
Meh. You might've heard the old saw about the new mayor walking into the City building and asking "how many people work here" and the answer being "about 50%". My experience is the opposite....too many union freeloaders who know they can't get laid off earn the same amount as the productive employees.
And yes, my comment was that union leaders cater to their personal interests at the expense of members. Many years ago, I worked for a state agency in the metropolitan area of the biggest City in the state. My group of employees wanted a raise (similar to the feds GS locality), but that particular union would not support that; they said an engineer doing an engineers job in the metro area was the same as an engineer doing that job in a rural area so they'd only advocate for a statewide raise.
Here is an example of catering to union not teacher interests. The Unions can lobby for more education money from state and federal coffers. That does not mean a significant raise for teachers. It more commonly means the district goes on a spending spree and hires more non-essential staff like counselors, librarians, nurses etc. Also massive wage disparites go to special ed - an ever burgeoning grift/loophole. All the students failing are an excuse to hire more special ed teachers.. To no avail. Unions grow more powerful, average teacher salaries do not increase.
Your response is the reason we desperately need school choice. The teacher's union is run by thugs. The leadership has absolute contempt for the students and parents. Much of their COVID response was cultish criminal behavior driven by the unions. It is true that school boards matter but they almost always capitulate to the demands of the Unions or align with their ideological insanity. Parents must have a choice and I hope that AZ experiment is successful.
The only bright side of the plandemic was that I found a private on-line school for my daughter. They've been doing internet schooling right, NOT having a teacher film their standard lesson or do the same thing by Zoom. They've actually made interactive lessons that use the power of all the tools the internet has available. With this now being possible, remind me again why we need thousands of tenth grade geometry teachers?
Well yes and no. I agree that many teachers are trying, but in the public system, parents don't matter and administrators kowtow to unionist interests. The only ones whose needs aren't being acknowledged are the kids. If the unions and teachers were working just fine, we wouldn't have parents pulling their kids from the system and looking for alternatives. And government is rightly acknowledging that parents are unhappy and providing more public school choice, something that is desperately needed here in Canada.
Unions are not the problem. School management and governments are the problem. Unions serve their members' needs, period. They are not responsible for service the needs of the school system or parents. Unions are labor organizations whose job is to take care of their members.
The imbalance comes because school boards, administrators, and politicians are not taking care of children, parents, and teachers. If they were, unions would not exist. I used to be a union president in the newspaper industry, and often told my counterparts in management: If you guys did the right thing most of the time, the need for me wouldn't exist. The labor director agreed.
Well if that was true we wouldn't have Unions dictating working conditions such as class size and composition...at the price tag of $3m/year in our province which has pushed other programs such as French Immersion out the window...because it serves union interests over children. The province did fight that all the way to Supreme Court and they lost, so I don't see that as the fault of the schoolboards, or the parents, or the school administrators. And we also have unions capturing schoolboards as well with their constant lobbying for teacher trustees to be in Office and overriding school's authority over what resources to use in the classroom. My kids also went through 4 school strikes over their 13 years, with teachers pulling their crap by refusing to send home report cards and cancel grad activities along with ALL sport/art programs when they walked. Unions have also championed themselves in charge of co-authoring our latest and weakest curriculum, and telling parents that they're racist because they don't align with their ideological principles. Unions have more money than any other organization to continuously show up in Court for every single indiscretion and bully others who do not agree with them. It's tiresome. So you'll have to excuse me if I don't buy your argument. I'm too far gone in knowing way too much about their antics to suggest they're not the problem. Let's you and I just agree to disagree and also acknowledge that if unions weren't the problem, we wouldn't have so many parents turn their backs on the system and demand public choice in your country.
Teacher Unions oppose school choice. They haven't raised teacher salaries instead they have massibley expanded specialized employee pay for Special ed, counselors, librarians and other staff, not to mention bureaurocrats. All of those new payroll employees effectively detract from teacher salaries. What you write about the other stuff is valid as well. Both can be true.
Bingo.
I typically think of my son as woke because he has a trans friend, and he gets mad at me when I say that I have no problem calling him by his chosen name, but in my head I’ll never actually believe that he’s not a girl.
However, this last week, he came home complaining that they spent all of English class watching a movie about nonbinary Hawaiians. He said it was straight indoctrination, and had nothing at all to do with English.
I was proud and relieved that he is thinking for himself, and even though he has trans friends and classmates and respects them, he recognized this English period for what it was. But I was also worried. Who know what else they’ve been telling kids, and how much of it goes unquestioned.
Rich, developing an internal BS detector is perhaps the most important thing anyone can learn.
Funny, my daughter has a friend (female) who went from lesbian in 5th grade to non-binary by 8th grade and then “male” (call her James please) by 10th grade. Yet “James” took a male date to the homecoming dance. In the beginning my daughter would get upset when I continued to call this girl by her given name and use she/her. It didn’t take long before my daughter was like whatever. It’s all crazy.
I love that watching a movie passes for education now.
And that is why we can not call them adult professionals. If parents had to pay for this (like my husband and I did for our children's education) they would be blowing up the phones and emails of the teacher and administration. Why are they allowed to get away with this absolute bullshit?
We watched 'Old Yeller' in school.
Good for your son.... the truth is that showing a movie about Hawaiians is far easier than teaching English... and it's nutty in my field, biology, too:
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/women-dont-produce-eggs
You are quite literally a biologist! You could testify before Congress.
I wonder if there is a concerted or loose effort to break down all barriers of medical or scientific ethics. Because then the human body is completely reductionist and anything is permissible.
I think that you are correct.
The Justice did know perfectly well. She intelligently to get caught up in that political trap. The senator did not ask the question for knowledge, but to generate a political sound bite. It was a bullshit question and she was smart to bat it away.
Bat it away? Oh hell no. She literally said because she wasn't qualified to answer the question, she wouldn't answer it. That was after hesitating for a period of time. We are ALL qualified to answer that question. She could and should have said, "I am going to refrain from answering that should a question in the LGBTwhatever whatever lane comes up while serving on the Supreme Court." At least that would have been honest!
If I were the person asking the question and got a BS answer like she gave, I would have asked a follow up question. Did you flunk sex ed in high school?
If you did flunk it, a double X chromosome define what a woman is?
She was playing the leftist game of deliberate obfuscation and I eschew obfuscation.
Her answer was awkward and ill-conceived. Me, I would have looked down my dress and then chirped brightly, "Well, I'm one of them, senator. How much of an anatomy lesson did you need, exactly?" But that's me.
I still don't blame her for not answering the question, because the question was political gotcha at its worst. If she played the "leftist game," the senator played the rightist.
You win the thread for "eschew obfuscation," though.
Neither side has a monopoly on deliberate obfuscation. That's a political thing and has nothing to do with a specific ideology.
School has no business indoctrinating students to the teacher's or the school's admin political or social ideology. They should be teaching the 3Rs, not sexual orientation, CRT, and nutty hard left ideals. There should be sex ed in high school but it should be straight biology and that's it.
It is up to the parents to discuss sexual orientation and political views not the school.
Someone posted today that parents have no business interfering in school policies supporting goofy ideas. What hog wash!
I have teenage kids and hope they think for themselves too. Here’s a sad statement on education https://www.city-journal.org/yes-critical-race-theory-is-being-taught-in-schools#.Y1SAfbdQF-M.link
School of education needs to be torn down
I am so sorry to have read this comment. If CommonSense degenerates into this kind of vile talk I will sadly leave it. Please dont respond to this sort of thing.
Agree!
Shame on you! You actually sound just like Trump!
Common Sense is a place where ppl can come together to learn more about each other AND agree to disagree RESPECTFULlY without name calling & insults!
Please don't feed the troll!
Your reply indicates why males avoid the field of education. There is the idea that any man who enjoys teaching school children is flawed in the worst way. Children, especially those in a household with an absent father, need good men in their life and through them the example of caring, encouraging, and defining what a man is.
Don't bother. RT's a malignant narcissist. Changing the subject and ad hominem attacks are all he's got.
Please don't feed the troll!
“ Now, how does a dose of stupid feel?”
You should know, tell us.
Well, I'll never answer your posts again.
Did that seem significantly less dickish in your head before you typed it?
Please don't feed the troll!
Every village needs an idiot. I feel duty bound to ensure his health & welfare.
Please don't feed the troll!
Celia, do you think rt and comprof are one in the same? They both give they same stupid answers, never on point, just insults. Maybe the belong to the same club, "the I'm a loony left lemming club".
I don't think they're the same person. But I find it interesting that com's activity went up just as JustMe and MattMullen made themselves scarce.
The fact that people like this--who clearly *despise* Bari--are paying her for the chance to troll here suggests to me that they are either a) being paid to do so by some Leftist organization or b) are psychologically sick enough to pay money to do the kind of trolling they could do for free elsewhere.
Girls are doing just fine. And that's a good thing. Boys have been demoralized and constantly humiliated.
Amen
Spot on.
Despite all the disadvantages and drawbacks of displaying manly virtues in today’s society, men need to be manly and women need to recognize those virtues.
I’ve noticed that women who say that all men are trash tend to have remarkably poor taste in men.
Agreed. To be fair, most men that say most women are trash also have poor taste in women.
Can you be specific as to what manly virtues are?
In my book, manly virtues are courage, honor, truth-telling even when the truth is unpleasant or hard, staying loyal to your personal values, supporting and helping your tribe however you define it--family, friends, coworkers--applauding your culture when it does well but leading the charge to fix it when needed, listening when people talk, acting decisively once facts are in, changing course when facts change, apologizing for mistakes, refusing to apologize when mistakes are not made, helping the weak, punching bullies whether physical, political, or social, read widely and incessantly, and learn as many things as possibly so you're passable in them, even if not perfect: cooking, chopping wood, hunting, gathering, wiring a room, fixing a sink, changing a diaper, shooting a gun, sharpening a knife, winning a fistfight, avoiding a fistfight, loving your family without preconditions, writing a poem, telling dirty jokes, building a cabin, not taking yourself too seriously, being active in local politics, living in freedom and allowing others that same right, and telling memorable stories.
Which are, come to think of it, are womanly virtues as well as manly.
The concept of virtue is traditionally associated with masculinity. “Vir” is Latin for “man”, and hence where we get the word.
That’s not to say that women cannot be virtuous, but they manifest their positive qualities in a different way, i.e., a feminine way as compared to a masculine way.
Milquetoast not “milk toast. Apologies for the pedantry.
Milk toast is tastier and that is not pedantic.
🤔
Do you mean willing to accept danger if it will solve a problem?
Please don't feed the troll!
Seriously, please elaborate
No, just thinking danger is more fun
Carlos Danger
100% yes: “ Given the rate boys are diagnosed with various behavioral disorders, it’s fair to wonder if it’s the educational institutions, rather than the boys, that are not functioning properly.”
The decline of recess in elementary schools has been particularly puzzling to me. When I was in school we'd get 30-50 minutes of recess a day. We used every second of it in raucous games of football, basketball, etc. It was my favorite part of school and a great opportunity to expend energy and develop socially.
By the time my boys got to school, recess was down to 15 minutes. Not sure what midwit came up with that idea, but it's definitely harmful to the social and educational development of boys.
You can bet that nitwit had a Ph. D, or more likely an Ed. D like Dr. Jill, and wrote a grammatically obtuse and incoherent word salad to justify cutting the recess time to almost nothing. To be replaced by what? Sensitivity training? Imagine as Americans get fatter and less fit, that gym and recess are cut. Lunacy. The only way to get boys to focus is to wear them out. I think I know of what I speak, having raised two and coached middle school boys for years.
Schools needed to increase their “instructional minutes” for federal funds. Yes, teaching is measured in minutes.
"...teaching is measured in minutes"
Though obviously not in outcomes.
Boys need that outlet. As has been said, boys (as a rule) don't do well sitting and listening. Girls (as a rule) do.
I learned during the pandemic, when I started working from home (which I do to this day), that I am infinity more productive when I can be walking outside while in a meeting, or taking a break to walk my dogs in between focused mental processing.
Even though I achieved some pretty lofty career positions, I hated being force into meetings, or being expected to spend hours in an office, when my attention span was better suited for a different environment.
I look back at my education and wonder how I ever made it through. I managed to finish very well academically, and got a couple degrees from well respected Universities, but I spent a lot of time NOT learning and daydreaming. The whole concept of one size fits all for both genders, and learning capacities seems hopelessly outdated. Montessori took a shot at this but never seemed to be embraced as much as it should of (because unions opposed it?), but maybe the movement towards home schooling and charters will. Hey teachers unions, do you still think it was a good idea to take that one-two year break during the pandemic? You got exposed.
A lot of urban schools no longer have any playgrounds. I remember seeing one elementary school in Los Angeles that consisted entirely of classroom and officer trailers, installed on a big asphalt parking lot. No play area, not a single square inch of grass or dirt anywhere. And the whole thing was surrounded by a 10-foot fence topped with razor wire. It looked like a prison.
Prison of the mind and soul.
It's worse than that. Recesses are now regulated and aggressive play is prohibited. PE is being downgraded. Participation prizes dominate sports. Read "Coddling of American Mind" or "War against boys".
So agree with this. Went to tiny rural school and we had recess every morning for 15 minutes before school even started. It was good for everyone. Dodgeball, tetherball, Four Square, swings and jump rope. Now even if they have recess, kids don't know how to play. They look at phones or expect teacher to moderate the activity. It is really concerning.
I didn't know that. That's absolutely tragic.
Wonder?
That's not even debatable. The educational institutions are the source of the madness.
Lol. Dude....you like REALLY hate "book learnin'"
Based on how many years I spent doing it, one would find that hard to believe. But, yep. Much wisdom in Tom Sawyer.
i'd advise ignoring "Comport", She's obviously a troll looking for reaction. I know it is hard not to take the bait, but fish get hooked on bait and the fisherman (or woman in her case) keep fishing even when a fish gets away.
Thought Comprof was a male always comments on his white wife. Obviously I should have realized it/he/she could be anything even a troll/bot.
Or even - perish the thought - a commie professor?
Yep. Am male. Have to comment on my white wife often....because everyone keeps calling me racist.
Have a white wife. Can't be racist. Have used no racial slurs. Can't be racist.
Thems the Bari Weiss message boars rules!
Thanks RBM. I know you're right but I just keep hoping that sanity and logic will eventually win out.
Don’t hold your breath!
Uh....I'm not a woman, dummy.
If you had any goddamn sense, that would have been obvious. But just like the rest of this "Trump echo chamber" masquerading as "insightful free thinkers" and "anti-cancel culture" warriors - you simply clap like a mentally disabled seal at whatever claptrap stimuli comes your way.
"Uh...I'm not a woman, dummy."
So tempting. But no......I must resist.
Please don't feed the troll! Resist! Fortitude!
Sorry, Celia...my points/arguments cannot be refuted and I am owning many on this board. They are drawn to my siren song....each trying to challenge me....and each one failing and winding up at the bottom of the hill, broken and bloody.
You seem to want an "echo chamber" of Trump supporters - where you can rant and rave about the "closed-minded, hateful leftists"....when, in reality, you are NO different.
Oh, trust me. I have no doubt you don't find much value in education. Your general takes make that abundantly clear.
But that does explain why so many "forgotten" people are being left behind in this knowledge worker/information-industrial economy.
Well, the indoctrination that you practice masquerading under the rubric of "education," no. But the classical liberal arts education that educated legions of our best leaders and thinkers, and which you abjure, has been abandoned at our peril.
Don't practice indoctrination, Bruce. Teach subject matter - undergraduate and graduate. What exactly do you "imagine" faculty do on a daily basis, Bruce? Rant anti-Trump stuff all day? Spend lectures telling white people they're evil?
Funny....everything that the "classical liberal arts education" encompasses is actually completely antithetical to your worldview, Bruce. So, you either have no idea what that means, or you think your attempts at censorship are fulfilling that.
However, it does explain the hatred of higher education in general and the demonization of high school/middle school teachers as "pedophile groomers" by Trump supporters, such as yourself.
Oh please. Just stop.
No. Why would I allow people to post ignorant buffonery unopposed?
If you have a cogent response, please share - but it seems you have none.
Are you trying to "cancel" me?
Do you consider this a 'cogent' reply as you requested? Really now? "Dude"?
No. Your reply was stupid and pointless.
The only thing left to say is 'bless your little heart'. Done here.
Of course you're done. Go back to the sidelines and leave the debate to your intellectual betters.
You are really enamored with “LOL”. That seems to be your intro for every comment.
Please don't feed the troll!
Celia, I know you are right but sometimes it’s just too tempting…
Too tempting to do what? Get owned regularly?
Yep. Because 99% of the comments from people on here are laughable.
Reeves did not mention all-boy schools in his podcast discussion or his post. I wonder if single-sex schools would be work better than our current mess.
I think it should be given a shot. When I taught 8th grade summer school we separated the boys and girls for that six weeks period. I did the exact same lessons and books. Oh man! Barely any classroom disruptions in either class and got though more learning material.
We should at least try it for middle schools grades when hormones are insane.
Studies show that girls perform better in single sex classes. How about coeducational schools but single sex classes?
We have a coed public middle school that has single gender schools within it. It is a successful magnet program that is highly sought by parents.
Plus mean girls reign supreme in junior high.
The boys don't stand a chance. And some boys get bullied by both sexes.
Then they get to High School and, unbeknownst to them, are one-two years less mature and easily manipulated by the more mature females all around them.
Of course, it goes both ways, but as a rule, testosterone is an Achilles heal when up against feminine charm and maturity.
Which is why I laugh every time I hear talk of weaker sex and submissiveness.
I went to a high school that had predominantly single sex classes. All the religious ones and the majority of the secular ones. Only lunch and study hall were intentionally coed. Single sex classes were great! Way fewer distractions when trying to learn, though I'm glad the whole school was coed.
I thought about this too. They don’t even have to be “single-sex” so much as tailored to specific educational traits that appeal to the masses. Seems we’re viewing education very narrowly these days. Our public education is a female-dominated arena. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems to be becoming extreme and impacting the course of the educational process for many. In my current town, my kids won’t even have the chance for a male teacher until high school, meaning they may never have a male instructor. I’m not complaining, it’s a great school system, but it makes me wonder where we’re heading.
Thank you for your honesty. You just confirmed every thought we’ve had about teachers and their agendas. Actually you made clear it is even worse than we thought.
By the way, who do you think pays your salary and cushy pension?
Very well.put.
$18,000 a year after 22 years of full-time teaching? I don't buy that for a minute.
Plus fully paid health care, life insurance, and you’ve got Medicare. Plus all that money you made during your 3 month summer break is invested and paying an income stream. Plus your 403 account. You’re not hurting, missy.
Obviously one did.
We’d all love to have paid jobs with zero accountability. Unfortunately that’s not how the world works.
You are a very odd individual
That’s funny, after 20 years in public education I came to the exact opposite conclusion. I wanted to see parents more. And now that I’m a parent myself, I want school choice now more than ever.
And there was a running joke in the teachers lounge about the union and collective bargaining: Oh no! Union, please done give me a raise because then all my other fees go up (like healthcare) and I end up with less in my pocket! We can’t afford the Unions “base pay increases!” LOL
R T
I don’t know what you were paid, but it seems to me it was too much.
"The solution…kick parents out of the classroom and back to where they belong, running the machines, doing the paperwork, or running a household. Leave teaching to those who have invested years of education and know what they are doing."
Pretty goddamn arrogant of you, considering who pays your salary and benefits and sweet, sweet pension. Yes, teachers should be left alone to teach, within reason, treated with respect, and given the resources to succeed. But if you want that respect from us, you damn well better give it in return. We can turn off the money spigot whenever we want.
Almost forgot- we can clearly see what those years of education got. Falling student test scores and graduating students who are functionally illiterate.
Go ahead, whine that it’s the parents’ fault. That’s the standard excuse for your failure.
In NYC the schools were run by the unions. Schools couldn't fire incompetent teachers. In fact they had "rubber rooms" where incompetent teachers and even teachers who sexually molested students were kept during school hours. These teachers would go to these rooms and watch TV, read books, knit or anything they wanted to do and were paid for doing nothing because they couldn't be fired.
Teachers were promoted not on merit but on seniority. The teachers unions are huge and have undue influence on how schools are run and what they can teach.
Unions are big business and are toxic.
no like Catholic K-12 school
My 3 boys went to an all-boys high school and thrived in it.
Part of the decline in male achievement can be traced back to concerted efforts by feminists to eradicate all boys schools/events/spaces/sports. Documented in "War against boys" by Sommers.
Great point! I was scratching my head thinking about that as well - at least in the K-8 grades.
Single sex classrooms within co-ed schools is a great situation. I'd love to see that in all charter schools, especially where parents can take their federal ed dollars to the school of their liking.
I'm all for single sex schools. My husband went to one back in the day. Now that school, which is where our children attended has long been co-ed. The challenge with single sex schools has been maintaining enrollment.
God help you.
In the book he explicitly states that he is against any form of single-sex education.
Hi Nicole,
Thanks for the info. Do you recall why he is against it?
Listening to him, I think he is doing a great service in pointing out the issue, but I also think he still holds many things as higher priority than actually fixing the problem.
Red shirting, for instance, may be a practical option for a fair number of boys, but this also extends their childhood taking from those young men a year of adulthood. Single-sex education might be able to achieve the same results without that cost.
Good question; it’s been weeks since I finished the book. As I recall it was something to do with sex segregation being regressive. Basically, he knows his audience and that they’d never go for that, so he was careful about what he said on every score to try to avoid losing people. He will lose people in any event of course, but he did a sizable amount of throat-clearing and tailored his proposals to the audience he is trying to reach. In a way I get it, the left is daft about this issue and perhaps if he can plant a seed then some change can be made. I’m just so many years ahead of this sort of milquetoast critique that I’m in no way the intended audience.
Thanks. And please try to use "milquetoast" in at least every other post. Great word!
I wonder how many men who aren’t working now were “diagnosed” with ADHD growing up. It’s no wonder that since women are the majority in psychology, education and healthcare “normal behavior” is defined as a person who sits quietly and pays attention. Having a son who went through this as a child, I can say that the process is a total scam and had I bought into it, my son would probably have become one of the men who decided to check out of life. Thankfully he is not but the scars of being categorized as “bad” linger to this day.
One of my sons was like that, too.
I told the teacher who wanted me to have him evaluated for ADHD to fuck off. And enrolled him in tai kwon do classes to help him burn off some of that physical exuberance and in chess classes to help him learn to concentrate. He went on to graduate from Stanford and is a successful professional today, so I think I handled that teacher's recommendation in absolutely the right way. 😀
I suspect ADHD does exist but there's wayyyyyyy less of it than is diagnosed.
Your son is lucky he had you as a champion.
Many other boys are not so lucky. Their parents, trying to "do the right thing" buy into the false nostrums of the pharma-educational complex. Which has wreaked havoc on our civilization.
Honestly I was going down the “do the right thing path” but my husband (thank God for him, boys need fathers) was vehemently against putting our son on medication. He gave me pause to question the process. It was a very frustrating situation. Our son was fine at home. He was (and still is) very enthusiastic and passionate and displayed his enthusiasm in school. He did well in school academically with a lot of hard work and went on to college and became an all American football player. Had he been medicated, I don’t think that would have happened. And I feel so bad for all the boys who’s parents believed they were doing the right thing for their sons and didn’t push back.
The schools can be very manipulative and bullying. You were fortunate to have a supportive husband to be a sounding board. Can only imagine a single parent being "bulldozed" because that reality check is missing. I faced a not dissimilar situation when my younger daughter was in first grade and the school wanted to hold her back and subject her to all sorts of testing and "evaluations." I pointed out to them that she was the youngest child in her class and, at that age, the differences are stark. Fast forward, she's just finished her masters degree at the top of her class and is an exceptional mother with an exciting and rewarding job. So much for their "expertise.
You must be enormously and justifiably proud of your son.
You must be so proud as well! :) Thank God your daughter had parents that pushed back also! I think we can all agree on the problems, but the solutions are the hard part. I’m glad there are discussions just not sure the solutions will come soon enough to help the children who are stuck in a failing system with people who do not have the wherewithal to advocate for them.
Was right there with you. Thankfully I was an educator myself, so I knew what to ask, what to push and want to allow to happen for him. Our complication was that our son had a stroke at birth, so we were always on the lookout for whatever might come.
He's thriving in college and I say humbly that a big part of that was retiring and staying home with my children to provide a routine after school, volunteer at school and engage whenever and wherever I could.
Funny, I was thinking about this listening to the recent podcast. I know it’s a horribly sexist thing to say, but is there an argument for having more schools that cater to the strengths more common of boys? I’ve heard this about Montessori schools, but I’m thinking more broadly.
I think both boys and girls could benefit if there were schools that supported children that don’t conform to the “sit quietly and pay attention” mold. They instead try to medicate them into compliance.
For a bit more credibility it would have been better if a woman had written this, a topic that is long overdue for serious attention. We fail at everyone’s peril when we neglect our male citizens, to demonize their behaviors at every age - from boys being “on the spectrum” at an early age, to toxicity to patriarchy, to blaming every ill suffered by women on “white men”. Women are now less able to find suitable life partners equally or better educated than themselves, not a problem decades ago. Men, on the other hand, are walking away from these newly empowered gender warriors, uninterested in competing with them in a game not of their own choosing, or fending off the barrage of gender-based insults hurled their way from every direction - by society as well as individuals. The battle is won for women. Now we need to win the war so that society and all of its members benefit from all this progress.
A woman did write about this a few years ago. Read Christina Hoff Summers's book, "The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men". Despite the somewhat provocative title, the book is well researched, referenced, and written.
Left wing feminism have been assailing men for the last 50 and the Democrat Party has embraced this attack. There were feminists that claimed that all consensual heterosexual sex was rape and many of the morons on the left accepted this with open arms. The left wing feminists glorified single motherhood ignoring 50,000 years of evolution where a strong male presence was in the tribe and families.
I'm not stupid. I realize that most single mothers are forced to raise a family by themselves and most do the best job that they can. I despise men who walk away from their families, many not paying child support. Not all men are irresponsible assholes. They do try and take an active role in raising their children.
I have always pushed for equal opportunity in education and in the work place. However, demonizing men by the left has more than helped to cause the problem the author in the article just described.
Over and over I have seen women walk away from their families. It would be interesting to see statistics on that trend. I am always shocked for I cannot understand a mother abandoning her children.
You would also be surprised how many incidents of domestic violence (I was on the board of a nationally known DV center for a while) are perpetrated by women. A staggering amount goes unreported as it's even more humiliating for men to admit it than women.
My father-in-law was subjected to domestic violence by his second wife (now ex, thank God!). He didn't expect that, after 40+ years of marriage to my deceased mother-in-law. And I watched in shock as a steady and stable man (whom I had always respected) was transformed into a stereotypical DV victim. Scary stuff!
I can’t understand any parent abandoning his children.
Patricia, the young woman across the street from one day after work she never came home. She just walked away.
What made it harder for me is as an adult I knew her since she was in diapers. I was a long time friend of her family and I knew her husband since he was a teenager. I used to baby sit their kids.
Seeing those children everyday was one of the saddest things to ever happen to me and my wife.
To this day I still thing about them.
We were a small close knit community. It hurt all of us. To this day we don't know why she left.
On Megyn Kelly's podcast interview with Tucker Carlson, he talked about his mother abandoning his family. She up and moved to France. It's a large part of who he is today.
Not everyone is parent material. Not everyone wants to be a doormat. Etc. Most importantly: not everyone is you.
Unnecessarily nasty response to what seems like an earnest question. And, while I certainly agree that not everyone is parent material, I wonder why on earth you would equate being a mother with being a doormat. Strange perspective.
Folk leave relationships for many, many reasons. Abuse and being treated as a doormat are common reasons for abandoning your family. Your not being able to understand something does not mean that something cannot be understood.
To add to what you say: Our legal system has never been able to adequately address the needs of children for a father. Toxic relationships between divorced parents lead to all kinds of abuse, especially when the custodial parent is free to denigrate the other parent at will, at length and for all time. Usually it's the dad who is put down by the mom. The conflicted child eventually capitulates and the dad is lost. And that is when the dad is present and trying to be part of the child's life.
Gotta love Summers.
Agree. The only point you made that I would dispute is that this article would be more credible if a woman wrote it.
Truth is truth, no matter who says it. If I were to write/talk about problems in the black community, would it be less credible because I’m white? Or just not taken as seriously because of the emphasis placed on superficial features?
I agree. We constantly put the brakes on ideas when we question the validity and rights of the persons expressing them.
I too am opposed to the idea that no one is capable of understanding the concerns of others who don't look like them. But notice what has happened here: the social assumption here is that only a woman has the credibility to write about men's issues. Further, if you read some other things about men's issues, you'll notice that most of them are written from the perspective of "here's how it harms women". I get it -- you have to sell it to the intended audience. Still, it's sad that men's issues can only be debated in terms of men's utility to women, rather than men as humans in and of themselves.
"For a bit more credibility it would have been better if a woman had written this, a topic that is long overdue for serious attention."
This is a tired trope that needs to die. The idea that only specific groups of people can lend weighty arguments on specific topics is the most illiberal concept taught by the modern left. Ideas either have merit or they don’t.
Personally, I find lots of what the author (and you) to have merit.
You and I agree. It’s just that so many consider the source first, looking to discredit their arguments based on superficially.
Ah, forgive Mr. Giunta, he seems to be a product of trendy identity politics.
[edited to corect Auto misspelling]
You misread me. I abhor identity politics. I simple make the point to highlight how others look to discredit an argument based on superficial things.
Sorry, that comment was a bit of sarcasm, because the perception of listeners, while important to conveying meaning, still the belief system of those who judge the speaker is of little moment in the scheme of truth. You are correct that sometimes that reality of perception causes bad shit to happen -- think college campuses, safe spaces, and Title IX kangaroo court prosecutions.
I agree we have gotten to a trend where people are starting to accept the idea <group a> is the only group that can have a view on <issue a>.
We get out of by giving any credence to that idea.
The fact that women are unable to find male partners of equal or higher education/SES/etc., is a problem only because women are unwilling to consider partners of lower status. Male doctors have been marrying female nurses since those professions existed. Either women have to learn to do the equivalent, or there won't be gender parity. And while it may be that there is some inborn component of these preferences, it is remarkable to me how little is expected of women in this regard.
The unwillingness of women to date (or frankly, consider as human) a man on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum is not a good thing, and should be treated like the bigoted, narcissistic point of view that it is.
In 1969 at the age of 31, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I married a Harvard grad - a medical school grad - and although I was a college grad and actually had a lot more of life experience than did he -he was, after all, in school for years, he was a "catch".
Move ahead 9 years when I discovered he had no interest in fatherhood - in fact verbally abused our adopted Vietnamese daughter -left the family when our son was 5 and daughter 6 and managed to call on Sunday evening. That was the extent of his fatherhood.
Both of my children grew up without any male influence since all there was in my family was a mother and sister - both of whom loved the children but neither could show a boy how to build a doghouse or could share his love of football.
If I had known what I know now, I would happily have marrried someone on the "lower end of the "socioeconomic spectrum" . I have lived long enough to know what is important in the terms of a husband and father and it is not a Harvard degree.
I think women are in a very strange place with regards to the age curve. In 2020, one can expect to live into her 80’s, but the reproductive part of life is ideally done in the 20’s, maybe 30’s. Women in that age bracket don’t make the best decisions, but it’s hard to blame them. I don’t know why the post-menopausal crowd doesn’t do a better job imparting wisdom on the younger women, because (and I’m in my 30’s) my age peer women seem genuinely not to understand how their own bodies work, and what the downstream consequences are.
Younger women think they know more than older women because they're ‘modern’ and older women don’t understand how ‘things are now.’
If you tell them anything from your past experience they just smile indulgently.
My mom used to say ‘too soon old and too late smart.’ I thought at the time that she was talking about herself. 😆
Unfortunately, wisdom is rarely imparted from older to younger. One reason being, that the old and young are now segregated with retirement communiies housing the former with little , if any interchange with the latter. . We, with all the unasked for wisdom at our beck and call, now spend our days making pots or playing pickleball with other wise women. Sadly, most of us really do have to learn through our mistakes.
I express the fact (learned from personal experience) that motherhood is far easier in your 20s than in your 30s. Don't know that anyone listens. But I do say it.
Me too....to my daughter....who I had a 40 1/2. I mean I was much wiser and more "established" but let's face it.....it's harder physically. Right now, both my husband and I should be retired and enjoying grandchildren (God willing). However, my college roommate is in more difficult straights with 22, 18 (still in HS) and 16. Having children (hers are adopted) in your mid 40s is really challenging. Just the generation gap with how we grew up and how they are growing up is difficult. Every time I talk to her, she's says, we're so done! (It doesn't help that all three have issues that are not easily or quickly remedied.)
I have been shocked hearing the nurses speak about their partners who make less then they do. There is pure contempt, and I would be vilified if I spoke in the same manner
Conversely, consider how willing men are to consider as partners women who are unemployed, or who do "prestige jobs" with little compensation, or who have a history of working in lower skilled industries. There are many very well-off professional men who consider someone whose only employment as a waitress to be attractive.
And then consider the opprobrium heaped on men when instantiations of this broader preference set cause problems.
Men have always fallen for waitresses. I think it’s something about a woman bringing them food. Reminds them of mom 😂
In my case, my father did most of it because of their differing job schedules (and because my mother was not great at cooking). But I’m not saying that the food-sex connection can’t be real.
For biological reasons women are attracted to men that can provide and protect them during pregnancy and for the 1st 4 years of child rearing. You can't demand this basic human nature be nullified. They assess capacity to earn out of necessity not bigotry.
At any rate there is more going on. Women now spend much more time in school and work than ever before. By the time they graduate or decide full time work is not so fulfilling the pool of available males that even approaches their health status, nevermind work or income, is extremely small. Most males in their prime marry younger women.
To the extent that this is true (which my original comment explicitly allows for), that doesn’t mean it should be accepted as normative. In 2022, women don’t need a male breadwinner. They may have instincts to find one, but those instincts are not intractable.
For comparison, men have had to learn to be attracted to older and older women, and have been berated to do so. In the early days of America, it was totally normal for middle-aged men to have teenaged wives. Thankfully, this is no longer the case. Male sexuality has made an adjustment...to a point. Why is it that men are the only ones who are asked to change?
Females might not need a male capable of being a breadwinner when they are not pregant. Most women stop working full time when pregnant. That nesting time is when men usually become breadwinners. Also it is worth noting that men go into a state of over work when married and husbanding. Brad Wilcox discussed this. Most males don't anticipate marriage is the key to making MORE money so there is a disconnect about how behavior works from their end when becoming pessimistic about marriage/mating.
At any rate it isn't easy to alter primate evolution to change what traits females are attracted to. If you study evolution the percentage of males that reproduce is vastly less, in almost every mammalian species, than the % of females. Same holds true for humans. Hypergamy is the larger field of study you can investigate it sociologically or from evolutionary books. We may deviate from that some in human history but it tends to come back over and over. It can be mitigated by cultural forces such as "culturally enforced monogamy" aka marriage. When monogamy abates females compete for a smaller pool of extremely successful males. That is what colleges tend to be right now. Women are not happy with the scene. They too are asking for change.
It should be normative. Norms that are inconsistent with human nature are ipso facto worthless.
The idea of changing human nature is the modern one, starting with Marx and the new socialist man (although precursors may be found in Nietzsche).
Um....women don’t “date down” for the exact same reasons men do or have done - we are programmed this way by our evolutionary history. It’s going to take longer than 60 years to undo thousands of years of evolutionary programming. Calling women bigoted for preferring to date someone of equal intelligence and decent earning potential may not be terribly helpful.
Intelligence and earning potential are very different things. There are lots of men without college degrees who are intelligent.
But even with regards to that, it is not uncommon for a man to marry a woman of lower intelligence if she possesses some other desirable qualities. And there is not any hard-coded reason that the reverse cannot be true. Did Einstein demean himself by getting married? I don’t think so, and I doubt there was a wife available who had any sort of comparable intelligence.
And it also bears keeping in mind that men’s totally normal sexuality, having evolved over the same period in the same fashion, is routinely demonized. If you listen to the podcast, there’s a whole ridiculous anecdote about high school boys being disciplined for keeping a rating scale of the girls, which is totally normal and reasonable and would receive no criticism if the genders were reversed (and rightfully so). I think a little more shame directed at women’s sexual choices and a little less shame directed at men’s would, again, go a long way towards true gender equality.
For most of human history earning potential meant physical strength not IQ. There will never be what you call gender equality because males and females are wired completely differently. Sexual dimorphism is actually over 300 million years old. Your approach will not work. A better approach is to critique the system that demanded women prioritize college and work over marriage. Marriage is the cultural force that mitigates against hypergamy and huge swaths of drifting single males that cause mayhem in any society.
Agreed that America’s workaholic culture is a problem, and one which differentially affects women due to the limits of their reproductive physiology.
But I think there are many ways we can transcend our origins. It may be that true gender equality is not achievable, but I think the push in that direction is desirable. I also think that the point of this article is that while social engineering is happening, it is not pushing in the pro-egalitarian direction, and I would prefer that it did.
You cannot transcend biology. The belief you can is driving radical trans activism. All that equity, equality, egalitarian stuff is blank slate marxism but you are adding your own MRA slant to the same ideology now that males are losing. We can have equal rights under the law. That is it. You will never have anything approaching an equal outcome, even between congenital twins raised in the same family. If education was based in free market a gendered model, same sex schools and classrooms for ages 10-18 would prove superior because males and females have completely different physiologies, developmental psychologies and life objectives. Feminists and no one else will make sure no all male schools dominate as they once did. Forcing all education and work to be co-ed completely skews the outcome to favor compliance because most schools/teachers grade on BEHAVIOR not simply test taking/ capacity. The author barely touches on this, he attributes better grades to "homework". Only in so far as homework is following rules it helps females more But the bigger gap is test taking vs behavior.
we work less now than we ever did btw. https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
it is not work-aholism. It is working less for more cheap goods/ more advanced technology. That tech supplicates human behavior and ambition. Men and women are working less and spending more time online doing random useless bullshit like arguing with strangers.
Additionally, I think that there should be more judgment of the sexual choices of both sexes. Anything goes libertinism is not doing anyone any favors in the long run, and detrimentally impacts many in the short term. What you were referencing is mate preferences, not sexual choices, and thus does not fall into the same category. So I’m not sure whether you meant to defend men having unrealistic physical appearance standards in potential partners, or something else.
I wouldn’t defend men having unrealistic expectations. However, by default I think men’s programming, by virtue of casting a wider net, is much more realistic than women’s.
Back in the 90’s, there were phenomena of “playboy bunnies” and “heroin chic”, which I think were toxic and unhelpful. I think it is unfair to tar “men” with creating these norms, as Hugh Hefner is not the average man, nor are the people in charge of New York runways. But to the extent that unhealthy, unrealistic norms were propagated by a small minority, I think that was bad, and I’m glad it’s (mostly) gone.
As far as I can tell, modern beauty standards are much more “girl next door”, which I think is a good thing.
I would push back quite strongly against the idea that the rating scale anecdote is typical of male sexuality in a vacuum. That incident and others like it are very much culture bound (while I believe in biology and biological differences, culture is also important). And it was unacceptable. The student(s) involved needed to be made aware that making such a list and allowing it to be disseminated such that the girls on it were hurt by it is not appropriate behavior at any age. It is neither normal nor reasonable.
One of the earliest participatory online social media experiences was something called “hotornot.com” a predecessor to Twitter/FB/etc. that simply ran and endless series of pictures of people and asked the online conoisseur to simply state yes or no as to whether the picture was “hot”. If anything, this is more simplistic than a rating scale. Are you saying that the founders of this company should be subject to some sort of discipline? And if so, for what?
The specific 1-10 format is a cultural artifice, sure, but the idea that the default human perceptual experience involves scanning the visual field for viable sexual targets and assessing their desirability does not strike me as being a controversial claim, nor a problematic one.
I also don’t get what harm you’re referring to. If a girl is harmed by not being at the top of the list, or feels “objectified” by having been reduced to a number, this is not the sort of harm that constitutes harassment. People get rejected sexually all the time. People get judged in all sorts of ways. Of course it hurts a little when the judgement is not positive; humans are social animals. There is nothing wrong or pathological about rendering these judgements.
At most, I would say making a list is a little crass. I wouldn’t do it, but I saw such lists being made by other guys and I certainly didn’t seek to stop them.
To look at it from another angle, I see nothing in this list remotely as problematic as the “shitty media men” list which circulated negative claims which were unverifiable, often false, often harmful, and perhaps occasionally a legitimate form of whistle-blowing. It was a grotesque episode, but the makers of that list suffered no consequences (to my knowledge), and I would support their free speech rights all the way up to the point of legal defamation.
I don’t remember how the incident was handled by the school because it’s been probably a month since I finished the book and I stopped listening to the podcast at this point. I would probably say they needed to have the message conveyed that this was inappropriate and maybe be asked to write an essay about why or some such. Not suspension or anything like that. If they had been able to keep it off campus and keep their yaps shut about it then it obviously wouldn’t have been an issue. I’m surprised that you can’t see the harm of reducing fellow students to a number. It’s disgusting. Yes people did slam books and whatever back in the day and I think that should have been strongly discouraged too. Fwiw, I also objected to the media men list to which you refer. A chat over coffee or gossip at a dinner party is one thing, but allowing it to be disseminated has real consequences and I don’t support people being fired because of unsubstantiated allegations.
As for hot or not, yes, I recall encountering that site and being horrified by it. This holds regardless of the sex of the person being rated. I have never engaged in such a thing and find it morally reprehensible. I hold no position on the legality of such enterprises- I leave that for others to figure out. My critique is purely a moral one.
I’m guessing that like most other married couples, Einstein’s wife was always right. 🙃
Spot on. Humans flourish when they act in accordance with their natures.
Given that there are meaningful differences between 2022 America and hunter-gatherer culture, I think we can transcend some aspects of our biology. You’re right that the trans ideology is fantastical pseudoscience.
I’m also not arguing that outcomes should be equal. In fact, I’m not even arguing, as you suggest that “men are losing”. If anything, the ideology you’re talking about seems to have affected women worse. The higher death rates, lower economic numbers among men I attribute to other causes.
What I am arguing is that even where gender egalitarian laws and policies exist, we will not get equal outcomes, but that egalitarian approach to policy is still, in most cases, the right foundation. To the extent that cultural norms purported to be about “equity” or “fairness” but they aren’t, I think the hypocrisy should be ended.
I’m agnostic on same-sex education. Intuitively, I don’t like segregation. Perhaps it has merits. Virtually anything would be better than the status quo.
John, let me rephrase your statement using different language. Many women will not consider men of lower status, especially wealth. The reasons that drive this might include significant greed and pride. These, of course, are sins.
But as other commenters have noted, there is an evolutionary advantage to women who are biased towards wealthier, higher status men. Mothers are in a vulnerable state during pregnancy and while their children are dependent. Higher status and wealthier men CAN help protect the moms and kids. It doesn't always work out, but it probably works out more often than not.
This mate-selection occurs across cultures and has been true for a long time. I think it is hard-wired. Jordan Peterson, for one, has discussed this at some depth many times.
However, don't think that sins are limited to greedy and conceited women. I have it on good authority that all have sinned.
Consider also the reverse criteria of how men select women. Men look for traits that add up to the ability to conceive healthy children. These traits include youth, physical fitness, evidence of healthy hormonal influence when the woman was growing up (hips wider than waist, reasonably large breasts, big eyes, clear complexions, etc.) This is also true of men across cultures and has been true for a long time. There is a pretty obvious evolutionary advantage in these mate-selection criteria too.
While it may sound fine to say that men are virtuous for being attracted to lower-status women, that has to be coupled with men's rejection of women that are not physically attractive enough. I would say that excesses of lust and pride are active in men. Rough guess: the amount of greed and pride exhibited by some women is more or less balanced by the amount of lust and pride exhibited by some men.
We are all flawed and make flawed choices. I hope that we can work out ways to reduce the incentives to make really bad choices and maybe mitigate some of the fallout from those choices too. Clearer understanding of each other and ourselves might help.
The other point I wanted to get at was that I think some of the takes on this subject are overly ingenuous with regards to the sort of rational factors you’re talking about. I don’t doubt that there is a drive by women to find men who are useful to them, but I also think there is a tremendous level of entitlement in young women (as I’ve talked about elsewhere, who genuinely don’t seem to understand the privilege they have, or what the rest of life looks like). A lot of this is class-based bigotry. I also think there’s a substantial amount of actual racism embedded in these preferences. And then there’s a lot of shallow materialism.
The average-looking (or worse) young woman who demands a six-foot Wolf of Wall Street and nothing less is an entitled brat. This is not said nearly often enough. And as with all such people, part of the problem is that they’ve never heard this criticism and thus are under no pressure to do better.
I think the alleged sense of entitlement among women for 6-6-6 men is tremendously overblown. Women who are less than perfect looking goddamn well know it because they can’t possibly not know it and feel bad about it in such a visually obsessed culture. Most women, in my experience, have a pretty fragile sense of self-worth. Granted I’m a dinosaur so I don’t talk in person to a huge number of younger women, but I suspect what a lot of men interpret as entitlement is just so much bravado. A bravado that, I should add, is occasioned by a pervasive sense that people, generally, and men, specifically, cannot be trusted, which may have started as mostly a stereotype but has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's hard to impute motivations to others (entitlement vs bravado), but a lot of the data from dating apps seems to support that unrealistic and arbitrary preferences are quite extreme among young women. And to be clear, I think the apps themselves are not the main cause and that they just tend to reveal some unpleasant truths.
Dating apps don't reveal much of anything except that reducing the dating process to a shopping experience is bad for everyone involved. Attraction is contextual for women. Take men out of context and there isn't enough there to form a judgment. I say this as someone who met their partner on an app. I almost didn't message him because his pictures obscured what he looked like (sunglasses, hiking pictures taken from far away). I am extremely physically fit and he's not. I have a graduate degree and he doesn't. But he has other strengths not visible on a dating app that I don't have. Maybe I'm an outlier (certainly true on a lot of metrics) but I did not go into dating feeling entitled - far from it. I'm fortunate that he is an outlier too.
Dating apps don't reveal true preferences or for that matter truth of any kind, is what I'm saying. They reveal preferences that emerge only in the context of extremely limited information. Meeting someone in real life and developing an attraction to them in an organic way is what is true.
Within your framework, the point I was making is that young men have been subject to strong social pressures, for at least as long as I’ve been alive, to resist certain aspects of our sex drive. We are told that we shouldn’t be attracted to women who are conventionally attractive in the way you describe, that all women are beautiful and any statement to the contrary is hateful. We are told that any perception of older women as being less attractive is a form of discrimination. We are told that any means of expressing our sexuality is harmful and that we should live in silence, waiting to be selected by a woman. And to some extent, all of these messages have taken hold. Not completely. As you say, the biological drives are still there, but significant top-down changes have been imposed on male sexual behavior, with some effect.
What I am saying is that this is not intrinsically bad, and I would like to see a similar critical approach taken to female sexuality.
I would also say that all of our evolved preferences run the risk of being maladaptive in a world that is different than the one in which they evolved. It might have made sense for women to make the choices they do in another era in ways that don’t make sense now.
John, I agree that these preferences can become maladaptive. One of these is the preference for the "bad boy." This has led to disastrous situations for many a young woman and her children. Now it has worked out for many too as the man might be independent and not ready to put up with BS. Or he has no respect for her either and becomes abusive.
In the culture I grew up in the initiative belonged to the man. He asks her out for a date. He asks her to marry. Now he might get rejected. God knows I was rejected plenty of times when I was a scrawny teenager with acne and no car. I was also rejected for date requests (less frequently) in my 20's when the acne was cleared, I had a good job, a degree, etc. The initiative was mine as was the rejection and the restaurant tabs. Not complaining. It worked out for me in the end.
As to the things we are told, well, I wish we could influence the cultural influencers. Some things being pushed are BS and becoming worse BS. My hope is that as prevailing narratives move ever further from plain truth we will collectively say enough.
As far as cultural influence, the good ideas will beat the bad ones in open competition, pretty much by definition. I don’t think that a trans activist has ever won a debate. Nor any of the other prermutations of nonsense I suspect you’re referring to.
There was a debate on campus sexual assault among two feminists, one who would now be called “woke” and the other an independent, liberal-minded person, that I think was a bit of a canary in the coal mine on this (http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?item.6648.1). I suspect that the people running the culture have adopted anticompetitive strategies to avoid being caught in precisely this situation.
I like to think, as you suggest, that eventually ground-level objective truths will become impossible to ignore.
I'm constantly amazed at how many white women I meet who immediately want to start talking about race and the terrible white men with me. Yes, I'm a white man. They expect me to agree and are shocked when I don't.
These poor women are so aggressively indoctrinated through their media sources and they can't see it.
Anthony think white males are the lucky ones in your post. Imagine the stress a boyfriend or husband would have in a relationship with these women
Don't need to imagine it, I've seen it.
Great recipe for divorce, which reinforces the underlying issues.
It’s very sad, because I think there’s a difference between the small group of people promulgating this stuff who are grifters or worse, but don’t actually believe it, versus the much larger group of younger people, many of whom genuinely don’t seem to know any better.
Rob,
If you are interested in female authors discussing this, well here are two. Jennifer Roback Morse's book THE SEXUAL STATE is a tour de force. It traces the roots of the sexual revolution and how it causes the issues that Reeves discusses. Louse Perry's book THE CASE AGAINST THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION just came out and I have yet to read it. However, I have heard her on a couple of podcasts and she is somewhere between Reeves and Morse on her thoughts. I intend to read her book soon.
But fellow commenter Ben Septer is correct. Truth is truth. However, that said, I find Morse's and Perry's takes preferable to Reeves. His prescriptions are a bit timed when you consider facts such as the relative rates of suicide - over 3:1 male.
anything by Christina Hoff Sommers.
Also what about Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men
Evaluating an argument based on the identity of the writer instead of the merits of the argument is everything that’s wrong with public discourse these days. Let’s stay focused on ideas, not identity.
This woman right here is 100% willing to co-sign this article. I am the mother of a boy who has been the victim of every policy described here and it is both disturbing and heartbreaking to experience.
And has been going on for too long. We have lost a couple of generations of boys to this - all races and all economic backgrounds! The only way past this, in my view, is to put extra parental effort into our boys. Not all parents do that difficult work. It bucks the system and takes a lot of effort. But I believe it is worth it, because a well-educated, well-adjusted man will still rise to the top and still command respect, even when the cancellers relentlessly attack his gender, race, sexual preferences and anything else at their disposal. Masculinity is not toxic - cancel culture is toxic. By the way, as a mom, you have perspective and maturity not enjoyed by feminists intent on making a point for their own recognition at others' expense.
I will sign with you and I will protest with you. Please tell him not lose faith it’s going to come right!
Excellent post, I will leave the battle to the current generation I’m old fashioned. I believe in the Alpha male and have been happily married for 45 years. My husband has protected us and provided for us I wish the same on everybody.
What would you have done if your Alpha male had decided to abandon you without any notice? Would you be able to protect and provide for yourself and your children if he did?
You always so negative and angry Shane. My Alpha male wouldn’t have left me or his children. My happy family I think stems from both our solid backgrounds growing up in not such privilege circumstances, and you right I would have been devastated had I landed up like that a single parent, and yes you right I would have struggled so if I appeared smug I apologize. Why I told about my Alpha male is because in our home there are dynamics which as the article says are 12000 years old why would anybody want to rock a winning formula. You can see what happens if you do we have a very unhappy America.
My husband and I had our 51st anniversary this year. I was barely 18 when we married and we were both in college, both graduated, have 4 great kids and 6 wonderful grandkids.
I’ve lived through a lot of these transitions in our society and there are changes for the better and many for the worse. But ‘traditional’ families do exist, they just don’t make as much noise on social media.
We have a townhouse in a rebuilding high density neighborhood in Denver and most of our neighbors are younger adults. They’re friendly and earnest and really not very different than I was at their age.
I think the extreme refiguring of what it means to be men and women and how we should live is an artifice being imposed on society by a militant few whose voices are amplified by social media and who have agendas that are at odds with most people’s values and hopes for their futures.
I admire traditional families. And untraditional families. My view is, Whatever works for you is what you should do, and the rest of us should butt out.
Skinny's Alpha male system works for her, and I am delighted that is does. Someone else's Alpha male walks out on her--or dies of cancer--she will be devastated unless she has kept an open mind about a Plan B. I have no issue with a traditional family system, only in forcing those who want no part of it to do it anyway. If it's genuinely voluntary, go for it.
I think the "refiguring of what it means to be men and women" is largely a media creation to fill air time. A segment of society certainly pushes that, but it's a small minority and the rest of us can ignore it. As you say about your young neighbors, most of us are friendly and earnest and get along, and the rest is hot air on media.
I do wonder, in this exchange, if we all have a different understanding of the term ‘alpha’
"You always so negative and angry Shane."
I don't believe I am, but if I appear that way to you, Skinny, I apologize. You didn't appear smug, and I'm not remotely complaining about your family structure---you found what works for you, your Alpha is happy with your family dynamic and so are you. I am delighted you have a long and happy relationship. Everyone should.
Sadly, everyone doesn't, and women need to prepare for that possibility. Women who tie all their hopes and dreams exclusively to an Alpha male without being prepared for the moment that might end--divorce or death--are going to suffer, and I want no one to suffer.
Even if the man-in-charge dynamic is 12,000 years old, that doesn't make it good for everyone. For thousands of years, women had to participate because they had no other options. Some were happy like you. Other led miserable lives because their Alpha was a beast, an abuser, a womanizer, a pedophile, a lazy jerk, or some combination. But they had to stay married no matter how bad it got, and I don't want that to be the case for anyone.
I had a terrific equal partnership with my wife of forty years. Each of us were Alpha at the things were were best at, and Beta in the things the other was best at. it worked just fine. Sadly, she died at age 59 and I live on. The model worked for us, just like your model works for you.
If the Alpha model is voluntary, by all means, go for it! If it's forced, that's bad for both partners and bad for society.
I hope this adds a bit of nuance to what I wrote, and again, apologies if I came off as angry.
Sounds like he didn’t leave, so what’s your point?
Kjmac see my answer to his post. I think perhaps he has had a miserable experience. It can change your thought process if you have had.
If you're talking about me, you assume incorrectly. I had a terrific marriage. It went 40 years and might have gone 40 more except that cancer killed her at age 59.
My point is that with a 50 percent divorce rate in the United States, many women who assumed their Alpha male would protect and provide for them wound up screwed and tattooed with Alpha went hunting younger mates. My advice to women and men who insist their partners will be there no matter what, so they don't have to think about that, might find themselves one day stranded without a life jacket.
Actually, about 70-80% of divorces are initiated by the wife. So your premise that half of all married men are abandoning their families is false.
I made no premise about either sex. I said 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, I had no idea who initiated them. The rest of my statement stands: both women and men need to have a Plan B in mind in case Plan A does not work out for whatever reason, which includes divorce but also includes death of the spouse.
I didn’t see any ‘insisting’ in Skinny’s post - more that she was just relating her experience. But I do see your larger point
Think for a moment about what you just wrote.
If it's a complaint about sexism against women or racism against black people, nobody would insist that the author isn't credible because the author is a woman or a black person. To the contrary - it's a male/white author who would be criticized for speaking out of turn! Yet when men are the victims, you ALSO argue that the author shouldn't be male!
Moreover, you frame the problem as a problem for women: "Women suffer from the lack of good men!" Once again, imagine the reaction if sexism against women was described as a problem for men!
No need to imagine anything. Boys have been disadvantaged so that girls could somehow catch up. Well, the girls have passed the boys by, resulting in all kinds of detriment to everyone, not just the boys but the girls as well. I do not criticize the author at all. What I am saying here, apparently in a confusing way, is that the cancellation crowd will discredit his arguments because he is a male making the case that feminism has gone too far. That is on the crowd, not the author, whom I applaud for bringing this issue up and substantiating his position with statistics.
That's true; they will. But a woman writing the same thing will be branded a "gender traitor". The cancel-cultists are basically tribalists. They wouldn't matter if they didn't hold such a hugely out-sized influence over government and media.
Point taken. Nevertheless, this problem about our boys needs focus on the numerous issues we have put on them. First, stop putting so many of them on the spectrum. Second, embrace their unique behaviors and guide them into productive channels - let boys be boys a little more. Third, stop feminizing them, asking them to and even shaming them into adopting behaviors unique to girls. Also, adjust teaching methods to allow them the freedom to productively go off on their own rather than following rote procedure that, frankly, is more suitable to girls but frustrates boys. All of this while expecting more of them, so that they aim higher and reach their potential.
Exactly JDFree white makes should actually stand up now, have another million man March to Biden’s Washington. Mind you not such a good idea can you imagine it would be the “2023 insurrection on the capital by white males” wait until 2024.
To be accurate, it would be 2025 but I get the idea. Democrats always, always, always cast events as evil when they are not part of their narrative or agenda.
Read "The war against boys" by Christina Sommers. She is by far the leading authority on these matters. AKA "The factual feminist".
More to the point actual liberals and conservatives need to be writing and to be published here. Note the Democratic Partyspeak amidst the faux "reasonableness". This bloke is just another ideological loony.
And the one thing that everyone avoids is that this entire sick charade could be ended in a hot second if men were really the beasts that the extreme feminists portray them to be. Because biology is immutable and men are simply stronger and bigger. Indeed, one need look no further than the Islamic societies that enforce a rigid male dominance. But men in Western societies did not want to see their wives oppressed and their daughters denied opportunities. And, yet, predictably, as is the case with most things that "progressives" touch, sanity has been turned on its head and men have been demonized and marginalized. The facts don't lie and those laid out by Mr. Reeves are but the tip of the iceberg. The radicalization of marginalized men is only just getting started. What do you think will happen when they see boys being turned into girls, boys anesthesized with drugs to make them more malleable, masculinity demonized, and young men denied work opportunities? And all the while, lonely women decry the absence of real men and revile the soy boys who prostrate themselves on the altar of the cult of feminism.
Men need women; women need men. Our chidren need both. Conservatives need liberals and liberals need conservatives; neither need progressive/socialist ideologies that are neither.
I took plenty of women's studies during my psychology degree, spent plenty of time interacting with advocates of the sort you discuss, and it has always been striking to me how completely disconnected from reality their view of men is.
Part of the problem is some branches of modern feminism completely disavow the natural roles and limits of femininity. Instead of being perceived and accepted as perfectly natural limits, and the starting point for defining themselves and their political and social needs, some modern feminists really don't want to be female anymore. They don't want to behave as female, (that's "performing femininity" or "female socialization") be seen or appreciated as female (pandering to the male gaze) or be treated as female (that's condescending chauvinism). They don't want to be ultimately responsible for pregnancy anymore, (which is unrealistic, ahem, for obvious reasons) or have the social or family nurturer roles. Ironically, they're using male behavior and freedoms as a measuring stick against themselves instead of having their own female ones. Consequently, they're more "woman hating" than men in some instances. They're completely oblivious to where that self neutering (or self masculinizing) path has lead and continues to lead. They're oblivious to "toxic femininity" which is really the more pervasive problem than "toxic masculinity" nowadays.
“Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.”
― H.L. Mencken
It’s always been remarkable how much women hate femininity, how much they put each other down, how they reject the sorts of things you’re talking about. To the extent that there is any influence of feminism at all, I think it is much as you describe. A male-dominated society worships women, but a female-dominated society hates them.
I wonder if there's an equivalent to the in-group preference studies done about race (e.g. https://thuletide.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/in-group-preference-aka-racism-by-race-and-political-alignment/).
Because it does seem like there's something unique here. On some intuitive level, it would make sense if a bunch of white men had structured the societies they built and lead to their benefit. But in reality, it seems like they didn't. If anything, quite the opposite.
There's an Orwell quote on this subject I've never been able to find, but the gist is that you'd never see the dominant group in any other society propagandizing against itself, as is the norm in the Western world.
Society needs to value marriage
between a man and a woman to help solve this problem. Period.
I agree but Reeves thinks that the marriage toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube, and people of lower socioeconomic status will not return to it as a life script, so fathers need to have equal relationships with their fathers (equal in time to what they have with their mothers) in a world where marriage is uncommon, while the wealthy continue to reap its benefits. It’s so wrongheaded on so many levels I don’t know where to start, but the inevitably high level of conflict between the two estranged parents and its effects on the child is a start.
Bruce, as always, well said.
Much appreciated but was hoping for more engagement.
Maybe over caffeinated when I read the article.
And no intention to insult the many clear thinking and fair minded women who share these boards. Just hoping to ignite some honest discussion on this immense and looming problem.
Give it some time. It’s early still. I love your soy boy, altar of feminism comment. It’s what has brought us they/them and men who wear nail polish. 🙄
You in no way insulted clear thinking women. Many of us are the mothers and grandmothers of boys, and we see clearly what is going on. I worry every day about my grandsons who are just starting out in school.
I think a lot of people are not aware of the problem. All they know is "failure to launch" when the boys reach their 20s, and then they label the boys as slackers.
They brought this on themselves.
Let the chips fall where they may.
Mother of three boys, now grown. The public school system was awful for all three of them. The underlying messaging was terrible. In 8th grade, one of my sons was told at the awards ceremony, "You were the best math student, but we gave the outstanding math student award to (a girl), because she was nicer to the other students in class. " I wish I was kidding. In college, all the women in STEM and special interest groups create a Venn diagram where there are no spaces prioritized for men, other than fraternities. The feminists are trying to dismantle those too. Our saving grace was a Jesuit all-boys school, which provided a safe and nurturing learning and social environment. My boys are faring way better than their friends who attended public school. It is time to overhaul our educational system and our thinking about boys.
Fraternities are under attack by public colleges & universities.
Although to be fair, a lot of the young men in fraternities are bringing it on themselves. Men may be discriminated against but they’re not all victims.
It’s mostly men who are lower in economic strata that bear the brunt of the anti-male societal reset.
Unless of course they trans themselves - then they go ‘straight’ to the top of the privilege pyramid
Ah yes, that privilege pyramid.
The author makes an important point. We cannot stop considering the needs of 50 per cent of the population without realizing unintended consequences.
I was at a meeting one evening this week when a volunteer, a brown man, explained to the group that men, and white men in particular, take up too much space in the world. He claimed if you encountered a white man in the grocery store, he would not yield to provide social distance. It was a grossly unjust generalization. Because of the current Zeitgeist and the nature of the organization I work for, the other four participants in the meeting -- two white women and two white men -- listened to this tirade without comment. But we spoke about the comments amongst ourselves after the fact. We have created a culture where it is acceptable to express to sexist, racist commentary as long as it is directed to white men. It is wrong.
What do you think happens when people are faced with lies that society screeches must not be questioned? Sooner or later the society implodes, just as the old Soviet Union imploded. Free speech means being able to call out those lies -honestly and without fear of reprisal. The Democrat Party - and its diminutive Beria, Merrick Garland, - stand for the enforcement of lies.
This is the best statement I have heard regarding the war on free speech. We need any army of free speech warriors to fight back.
High praise from the "goddess of wisdom." Thank you.
Goddess of Wisdom and War. With great wisdom, we won’t have wars. When all else fails, I’ll be ready. Other girls were told they were princesses. I was told that I was a goddess. This has served me well.
Ah… but when you are retired, you can simply say “I don’t agree with you on that” no matter what the Zeitgeist. I think it was Dr. King who said “in those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” We don’t need to be church to be thermostat, we can kindly and gently state where we disagree.
Good point. For the record I do disagree in meetings when with other members of the leadership team when we are discussing plans and policies. I am always out-voted but I think it is my responsibility to offer alternative perspectives or considerations. On occasion I have been able to moderate plans. I refuse to put my pronouns and land acknowledgements on my email tag. I resist where I can.
This committee meeting that included volunteers is a bit more sensitive to handle, especially given some very fresh manufactured "race" issues with my workplace. It is baffling to me that someone could feel like those comment, which are at best biased and worst racist and sexist, are acceptable in a public form. Worse, I believe he thought he was educating the other members of the committee. This is not the way to win hearts and minds.
I don’t think it’s about winning hearts and minds; or people would listen as much as they talk. IIn the presence of True Believers Who Have to Diss Someone I sometimes say “I don’t feel comfortable with that stereotype of (white people, Republicans, Democrats) not to get into a discussion about whether the True Belief is wrong but to be able to leave the room and not be exposed to what feels like..hate. No one deserves that and no workplace should allow it. IMHO.
Not to be *that* person but the Bible has quite a bit to say on the topic of men, how they should behave and how men and women should act towards each other. I just can’t help but think so many of today’s issues all trace their roots back to the rise of secularism. 🤷🏻♀️
I agree, but I couldn't come up with a way to say that. And of course, you will get the people who rant about women being subservient. If they actually studied the Bible, they would read many stories about strong women leaders and learn that God instructs men to honor and respect women (and women to honor and respect men).
After all, it was Jesus who invited the approach of women, for example, the woman who touched his garment to be healed from a lifetime of bleeding. Jesus showed over and over the significance of women in turning the old ideas/customs/ways into new cultural norms.
I agree. There is nothing better than religion to keep humans humble and servant.
Setting aside the spiritual aspect it was an agreed upon code to live by. We do not have one now.
I think the elites of the world could actually use more humility… regardless of source.
I agree.
But religion is very good at making someone humble.
And so is hazing.
It is inherent in religion because it means accepting that there is something bigger than you at work.
Exactly.
Indeed, we just need to look to the sin of pride; perhaps the worst sin of all, leading to all other sin.
What do you see as the way forward, when by all indications decreased religiosity is an irreversible global trend?
Short answer: Get God back in the schools. There’s lots of holes in Darwin. We need to, at a minimum, present both. We open Congress with a prayer. Why can’t we have some God in the schools?
The Catholic Church has been correctly aligned with all the tenets of Evolution for decades now. If you think Catholic and Baptist schools don't teach evolution and big bang you need to bone up on the stats. The students from parochial schools vastly outperform public school students on all issues related to STEM inclusing evolutionary biology. Darwin was wrong about many things and any modern biologist worth his salt will admit as much. The foundations of natural selection and evolution remain sound however.
It seems the passage of time is a pendulum on which civilizations slowly change as the pendulum moves. I think there will always be religious groups. People want to believe in something bigger than themselves. Some of us chose to believe in God, others choose secular things or ideas. I think civilization will eventually swing to more belief in God and “conservative” or traditional lifestyles. Maybe not in my lifetime, but maybe in future generations. Who knows? We move in one direction and when it becomes too extreme or intolerable, we will move in the opposite direction.
It isn't just religiosity it is largely women in industrialized countries choosing other things over family/reproduction. See the work of Hans Rosling.
There is the problem: men ( or women for that matter) need to be seen as something more than a "cultural side effect". It's a very good essay and I totally agree with it, but it seems that we are not only disrupting 12,000 years of cultural heritage, but hundreds of thousands years of evolution as well. Note to young leftists, you cannot wish things like biological imperatives or previous events away. Just saying.
Yes, my time frame on this dates back to the early hunter / gather days.
As the mother of 4 young men, I could not agree more with this piece.
Well one great point made is the elimination of education for skilled trades. With manufacturing moved overseas and schools wanting to eliminate auto and wood / metal shops and replace with gender studies, it stands to reason that the goal is gender neutral. Look at the leaders of women groups, do they look like they care about boys or men? Hell they have to sneak up on a water fountain.
Long said our priorities are all wrong. The US has a serious shortage of skilled workers. I know people with companies that can not find people willing to work and learn. They can make six figures a year but the work is sometimes long and odd hours. We sold a couple of generations the you must have a degree bullshit and eliminated manufacturing.
Now we have micro aggression and are you a boy or girl and you are now six and should know. My hope is parents getting re-engaged with schools will help. Yet, until our incompetent government pulls it's head out of their ass, and helps get manufacturing and trade schools stood up, not much will change. They piss money away on gender studies but can't subsidize any manufacturing near a city for jobs in the hope of providing opportunities to lower income folks.
Keep telling young men to stop being mean and you will get the Biden administration. Men need to be women or just not have a pair. Plus, being honest, not sure that's what women want in their man. Think they would prefer a guy who believes in protecting his family and working hard to support. It doesn't have to be what you do for a living but more that you act like a man and not a gender afraid person.But have women been sold the you don't need a man story for so long?
My generation, GenX, is the first to “benefit” from the “you don’t need a man” narrative. It’s awful what these ideas have done to men. Ask any man, regardless of age, about online dating today and you’ll see the results.
Women too. I’m GenX and me and my women friends talk about the falsehoods of what we were told. Like career, career, career….only to struggle to build the family environment later in our 30s.
Agree. Didn’t have my daughter until I was 34 and almost didn’t have her at all because I didn’t *want* children. She is the best decision I’ve ever made and way more important and satisfying than any job or career.
I understand that. I had my son when I was 36 because my career came first. I loved my career, but I love my son and my family so much more. It is a more complete satisfaction and joy. The traditional, nuclear family is denounced in our society, but it is a model that has worked for centuries. When civilizations have steered away from the model, they have eventually failed. Children need a stable, nurturing home environment to flourish. They need positive male and female role models to learn respect and confidence.
I agree. The village cannot replace parents. Now if there are involved parents and an involved village that child is blessed.
There are/were so many villages I wouldn't want helping to raise my children!!!
It is a form.of immortality isn't it
Yes! I grew up with a fiercely feminist family, and assumed I’d most likely just have a kid on my own when it was time. As a kid I had been given a giant pin that had prominently displayed in my bedroom that read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” I somehow married a man whose family completely missed the feminist movement (in the sense of traditional roles). I discovered shortly after my first baby that I desperately didn’t want to leave her in someone else’s care, and he completely supported that. I wanted to be there to raise my babies, and to take care of my family. They are currently teenagers, and my only regret is that I felt so much daily shame and guilt about taking such an “unfeminist” path while they were growing up. I don’t know how I had the guts to do it, except that it was such a deep, primal drive for me. I am so deeply grateful for that choice and for the family I have because of it. That might not be a pull for every woman, but for me, feminism didn’t say I could be anything. Feminism told me who I should be and what I should want. That was exactly what we were trying to break free from.
I have also been unraveling the mind fuck that is “man-hating” while being married to a man and raising a boy. I read all the books that explained the raw, biological differences between human males and females (thank god) before my son was born, but there was still the deeply conditioned contempt that I’ve had to grow out of. The benefit of the woke movement is that it has gone so extreme that it’s knocked the scales from my eyes.
As a woman, I’m deeply grateful that I stand on the shoulders of all who have gone before me, both men and women. These people suffered and fought for changes that desperately needed to be made. But that pendulum has swung dreadfully far in the opposite direction, and wrought much suffering there, as well. Babies have been thrown out with the bath water. It brings me much hope to read the comments section (on all these articles) that so much reason, critical thinking, and compassion exist in our society. I pray that this is the silent majority that ends up steering our collective ship.
Had a similar experience… I was one of the “smart kids” growing up in NY and was taught it would be a waste of my life if I *didnt* go into a high power career…so I did all of it, only to discover that raising a family is more important to me. But the feeling of being “worthless” or that I’m “making the wrong choices” or “giving up once in a lifetime opportunities” when forgoing career advancements has been really tough to shake, even when I know that I am happier putting that energy toward my kids. Luckily, I was able to ignore that feeling as I had my 4 kids during medical residency and fellowship. And now that I have the chance, I hope to impart the idea on my daughters that they have more options than I did. Wish I had known that being a stay at home mom in a traditional marriage was right for me and wouldn’t have meant I was a failure, especially before expending all the time/costs of medical training.
Me too. But I had a come to Jesus moment - at the end of my days which would I regret more not being a good mother not being a great lawyer? It was a no-brainer. I never looked back and quit practicing law until my youngest left home.
I think one of the worst things that feminism did to women was the promise that they could "have it all": the glamorous, high-flying career *and* the Leonardo DiCaprio spouse *and* the two beautiful and perfectly behaved children. Nobody, man or woman, can ever have all that.
And to further puncture that soap bubble, Leo DiCaprio hasn’t been anyone’s spouse! Or father, far as I know 😉
It brings ME so much hope to read your comment.
I consider myself very fortunate to have grown up in a community where motherhood was still valued.
So sad for your experience. So glad you are not accepting the narrative.
Online dating now is atrocious. Atrocious.
I have nieces who are in their 30’s who cannot find suitable men. It’s very sad.
Curious -- is it because they only consider men to be "suitable" if they're over 6' tall? Link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/women-prefer-men-over-6-123300511.html
A close family member, who's a graduate of a prestigious university and has a solid high-paying career and a ton of outside interests, is an outcast in the dating community as a male who's only 5'6" tall.
In this case, I doubt it.
But an interesting article for sure.
Thanks for sharing.
It's the Murphy Brownification of our culture. Our culture - yours and mine, his and hers.
The eradication of tracking and vocational schools in the US was part of progressive "anti-racist" measures coming from Harvard and infiltrating DOE. They claimed tracking would prevent/discourage blacks and hispanics from becoming Astrophysicists/attending college.
I have yet to see any programs from progressives that has made anything better. My thought is that progressives having never done or accomplished anything just keep thinking the next idea will work.
The truth is that as true socialists they just know so much. But unfortunately it's all wrong. They will never be happy until they can lock up those they disagree with. All of their anti racist policies have only made life worse for minorities. But since they really deep down don't like minorities or the poor, they just don't care.
I think they care about minorities but they are too high on their own supply to assess their own policies critically. There are ways of blaming any bad outcomes on "not enough" progressive policies. Thomas Sowell pointed this out some 40 years ago. They will say not enough welfare. Give money to both parents even if both are in the home and not working. . Not enough anti-racism to stop water contamination in Louisiana. Not enough policies to prevent power outages in CA.
Blaming stubborn anti-vaxxers for covid deaths, and doubling down on the need to go after their jobs to break the resistance.
There are still not enough incentives for a critical mass to question their own logic. After this election you will start to see cracks in the fronts. You will see more educators questioning teacher unions. You will see more politicians questioning state funded trans clinics. A critical mass of the poor need to just leave the Democratic party before the Dems wake up.
"But like all revolutions, it has generated real challenges, too. You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects."
Social engineering continues to evade the engineers; we don't really understand ourselves or the roots of the human condition very well and yet changes are made, and experiments conducted without any forethought about the outcomes. Dr. Jordan Peterson is quoted as saying something to the effect of "Oh you don't like the institution of marriage? Before you throw it out, rethink what you are replacing it with". It is clear to many that the alternatives, regardless of the purported advantages to monogamy, are yet to be vetted by history or outcomes as successful.
Marriage and the family are essential to stable society. They have been under concerted attack for decades
A side comment: As an actual engineer (software and electrical), I can't tell you how much the phrase "social engineering" pisses me off, because there is nothing about it that resembles actual engineering. But I understand why people use that analogy.
I wonder if it just where we are at in this particular cycle, like in a historical context. I think there can and is going to be a movement that gives men more economic power in society. I say this from a practical standpoint.
I am a single-mother with an advanced degree and make a decent living. I thank the opportunities given to me from the women who fought hard before me. And yet, when my plumbing went out and I had water flooding my house, the fact is I paid way more to the man who came to fix it in a half hour than I make in two days!
I pointed this out to both my kids-a son and a daughter. We will see if they take notice.
And yet society looks down on the plumber and elevates the PhD who has trouble changing a light bulb or resetting a circuit breaker.
I hope to instill different thinking in my kids. I came from a working class background…went on to college but really missed so many aspects of how I was raised.
It’s sad that for too many degrees= status and prestige
All work is ennobling. I despise the parasites that live off our generous and corrupt welfare system
You nailed it Madjack. I equally despise the members of the technocratic class who look down on trades people or physical laborers. (In the Hamptons, the swells disparage the traffic from contractors as "the trade parade.") As if they could actually do anything but talk or manipulate money. Would they ever walk a mile in their shoes. Imagine looking down on an electrician who can diagnose and repair a faulty circuit when you believe electricity comes from a socket and wail when the power goes out. Or an auto mechanic who discovers that you gassed your car forever without even once checking the oil level? Their towering self-regard is infuriating. And despicable.
Take away the ‘financialization of everything’ and what skills do the money manipulators actually have? They’re dependent on the government/banking cartel and of little competence in the real world of things.
A plumber charges based on cost and benefit. I would have to assume that the cost of you going to work is the price of transportation (if you don’t work remotely). A plumber needs to drive to multiple locations a day, in a vehicle equipped with tools and materials necessary to fix a multitude of problems along with carrying a multitude of insurances for his business, health and overhead, etc., follow licensing regulations that are additional costs. Not to mention the cost of employees who support the business. So what he charged you is not actually the amount of money he makes per hour, so it’s not a true comparison.
Not to mention since they’re self-employed they pay their own health insurance. My plumber friend pays $35k/yr to cover his family.
This article makes many good and valid points, right up until the disparaging remarks of the “populist right”. I voted for Donald Trump twice. I voted for him the first time b/c I was voting against Hillary Clinton. I voted for him the second time b/c his policies, both foreign and domestic, were rooted in reality as opposed to ideology. Democratic ideas might sound good to some, but the policies accomplish NOTHING. The disaster of the Joe Biden administration has these failing democratic policies on full display.
Most of CS commentators who write the articles suffer from TDS. I voted twice as well for President Trump and if he is on the ticket for 2024 will be voting a 3rd time fir him!
I too mostly voted against the vile Hillary and will vote for anyone who runs as the Republican in 2024, even if it’s a head of lettuce. It would still have more brain matter than Biden.
Glad Mr. Reeves is taking on this subject, but a couple of points I disagree on:
One, we should be very skeptical of the idea that feminism, or any ideology or social movement, has any significant causative effects on social changes. There are plenty of material explanations for these changes rooted in the technological developments of the Industrial Age and subsequent Information Age. Pre-Industrial gender roles were not arbitrary, and they did not disappear because someone discovered they were "sexist" and complained about it. The gendered division of labor simply became obsolete. I think you could argue for some causative effects of feminism downstream of the big picture changes, most of them negative, but let's give credit where it's due. Mass transit, the assembly line, the pill, etc. etc. are way more important than anyone carrying a snarky sign through the streets.
The idea of women being less dependent on men than in prior ages is not correct. Women are more dependent on men than they were in the Stone Age, just not on specific, identifiable men that they know. Technology has made many forms of male labor obsolete, but it has done the same for traditional female forms of labor. Women in the colonial U.S. spend a lot of time cooking, sewing, cleaning, and doing physical labor that produced useful results. Women of the modern laptop class, or more generally as part of the service economy, generally do not do essential work (particularly given the failed state of teaching and the social sciences). A single woman in 2020's America lives in a house built by men, drives a car built by men on roads built by men, uses devices designed by men built with rare minerals mined by men powered by coal and gas mined by men, and is protected by a mostly male police force and military. So does a single man, incidentally. Many of these men will be nonwhite, non-American, of low SES, living in remote areas, not part of this woman's social world. The fact that this woman likely never meets most of these men might lead her to be less aware of her dependence, and she might not have the same gratitude towards them that she would if she lived on an 1800's homestead with one man. But women need to hear the words of our former president: "You didn't build that".
I'm also not as bullish on "HEAL" professions. While I agree that more male teachers and psychologists would be a good thing, I don't want to valorize those professions, and many of them may eventually become as obsolete as the old blue-collar jobs. What is education as a profession when all the information in the world is available on a phone and the teaching professions are dominated by insane ideologues and corrupt unions? I would rather see more women in mining, coding, and garbage removal than see more men working in nursing homes, fine arts, and house cleaning, though all of these are in the direction of gender parity.
Otherwise, agree with some of the big points on the labor force and education, and agree that there just isn't a clear set of social norms and rules around masculinity and a lot of bad and confusing messaging that seems to make it tough for us.
Good points. A boatload of bs 'just so' storytelling is sailing by unexamined.
I wonder what the effect is on the 70+% of black boys who grow up without a same sex role model? All households have seen an increase in single parent families, but how do we ever close the gaps in graduation rates, and reduce the crime rates in urban environments when these boys often learn more on the streets than at home?
I'm curious, but is anyone aware of all male academies, taught largely my male teachers (I suppose there may not be enough males teachers) established in urban environments? I appreciate that funding would be a problem, but I'd rather see the tech robber barons spend their money there than on some of their current causes like changing elections, donating to their dysfunctional alma mater, or to causes based on dubious science.
Thomas Sowell and Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about many of the all male Charter Schools. They were successful until feminists demanded they be co-ed. Any successful school that has a preponderance of male grads will be systemically attacked by feminists. They tend to be STEM and hands on. Check out "Wilderness Academies" - basically survivalist camps.
There is at least one all male school in Detroit serving boys from low-income households.
saw one, but it was 9-12. By then, imho, it's too late. But better than nothing.
Yes. Jesuit schools are what come to mind, but I’m sure there are more.
There were two public all male colleges in the US - The Citadel and VMI. But that wasn’t fair and now they’ve got women and the cadets are “cadating” each other with all the drama and distractions that entails. Many students benefit from single gender education. Options are few. Hampden Sydney is now I believe the only all male non-theological college in the USA. It’s a very expensive private school.