[HN Gopher] Men Without Work (2016)
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Men Without Work (2016)
Author : ianai
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-01-03 14:51 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (time.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (time.com)
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| First world problems.
|
| When they don't exist, you invent them.
|
| EDIT: Young people who can work but don't surely have a reason
| why they don't work.
|
| Some are happy just freeloading and enjoying life on someone
| else's expense (often their parents). Others have a solid income
| on the side, just doing freelance stuff.
|
| There are also those who have saved some money while working
| part-time. Now they just want to live their life before comitting
| to full time work.
| tejohnso wrote:
| > Statistically, the labor force involvement for men twenty and
| older fell from 86% to 68% between 1948 and 2015
|
| So what are they doing instead? How are they surviving?
| Aunche wrote:
| It's not quite as bad as it looks. In addition to having a lot
| more retirees, a lot more adults pursue higher education and
| performing homemaking duties.
| goldenchrome wrote:
| They're NEETs. Likely live with their parents. May sell odd
| things here and there to make a buck. Likely invested in
| cryptos which until recently was enough to get by. Often
| getting some government gibs like unemployment or disability
| benefits.
|
| American society doesn't know how to use low skilled men so we
| keep 'em fed and put them to the side.
| yterdy wrote:
| "Low skill" is often also something of a misnomer. Many are
| highly-skilled, but have difficulties navigating the social
| environment of both employment and self-employment.
| Neurodivergent people often fall into this category.
|
| Others are moderately-skilled, but not to the magnitude of
| their competition (common in art/design); or, they have
| technical skills that are only useful in jobs that also
| require conceptual/design skills (or vice versa); or, they're
| skilled in a niche set of tasks which hiring managers see as
| nice "add-ons" to another prerequisite (if outmoded) set of
| skills. As an anecdote: until the Meta crisis the past fall,
| there were a lot of openings for jobs that amounted to,
| "Builds XR prototypes/vertical slices so that when VR/AR
| goggles take off we have some sort of killer app concept
| ready for production." This requires someone with 3D art and
| software engineering and interactive design chops, for an
| interaction paradigm that's maybe 30% finalized. My vantage
| point was as an intermediate-level amateur 3D artist trying
| to stumble my way around Unity/UE, watching devs stumble
| their way around Blender/C4D/etc., all of us watching UX
| designers used to Figma et al. stumbling their way around
| both. With no room for people to bring what they CAN do to
| the table, and learn the rest as they go, many don't find
| anywhere to land.
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| You say "low skilled" but many of them have university
| education. I do not think that is the problem at all
| [deleted]
| giantg2 wrote:
| Probably a lot of FIRE too, if I remember right.
|
| Edit: Why disagree?
| TylerLives wrote:
| >American society doesn't know how to use low skilled men
|
| What's the solution though? I can think of 3:
|
| 1) Bullshit jobs (i.e. fake jobs or real jobs that exist only
| to support fake jobs. This is the current answer)
|
| 2) Universal Basic Income - Doesn't solve the problem of
| giving people meaningful work, but gives them some freedom to
| discover/create their own solutions
|
| 3) Artificially making life more difficult - For example,
| banning furniture companies that are too good at their job.
| Want new furniture? Here are some tools, go and make it.
| Maybe find some friends to help you with it too. This
| solution would solve the problem, but it would be extremely
| unpopular and would likely need to be enforced globally, or
| people would just go to a place where they can buy furniture
| cheaply.
|
| First solution will likely continue to be the most popular
| one. I hope the second solution continues to gain popularity,
| maybe not directly as UBI, but something similar. Third
| solution is extremely unlikely, it's more of a thought
| experiment to realize how solving real problems gives us
| meaning and creates bonds among people. Kaczynski writes
| about this when he writes about three groups of human drives.
| 9530jh9054ven wrote:
| Cynically speaking, supported and freely provided voluntary
| euthanasia is also an option as well... with all the good
| and ill that option brings. I'd certainty take that option
| if I couldn't ends meet.
| notwokeno wrote:
| There used to be places for them but they were replaced
| with immigrants, women, automation and outsourcing.
| unholythree wrote:
| Women have meaningfully been part of the workforce since
| at least the 70's. Both of my silent generation
| grandmothers worked outside of the home most of their
| lives.
|
| Immigration has increased since the mid century: https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
| but I don't think many low skill jobs would exclude a
| native born applicant
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Blue collar opportunities abound in the trades, where
| skills can be acquired on the job. Welding, wiring,
| plumbing, and construction.
|
| However, these jobs are viewed as harder and less
| attractive than white collar work and some people balk at
| them.
| vikingerik wrote:
| If that number is just for age 20+ with no upper bound, then
| the missing ones are the retirees, there are a lot more
| survivors past age 65+ now than in 1948.
| watwut wrote:
| Waaay more people go to college and way more people are
| retired.
|
| Also, 1948 was fairly close after war. There was general
| systematic effort to get men returning from war into work. That
| includes goverment policies seeking that and employers firing
| women just to get men to work. Also economy was doing very
| well. Also, not insifignicant amount of men died in war.
|
| Incarceration rates went up, America locks more people then
| most world countries. Majority of people going to prison are
| men. Being in prison or jail means being unable to work and
| having very hard time to find work after.
|
| The world was different in a lot of ways.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > So what are they doing instead? How are they surviving?
|
| Government handouts, but especially undocumented "gig" work and
| all kinds of crime, or relying on income women (or other family
| members) make from cleaning or whatever other shit paying jobs.
| Or they join the Army and serve as cannon fodder, which
| technically removes them from employment counts.
|
| The problem is that there are _a lot_ of "left behind" areas,
| not just in the rural USA aka "flyover states" but everywhere
| across Western societies, and governments haven't really
| figured out solutions for large, structural changes (industries
| closing down, less manual work needed in farming) other than
| handouts and leaving people to their own fate. The reality is
| that a lot of these areas simply are far too far gone to be
| saved, but it's political suicide to even admit that, much less
| _do_ something about it - something like paying to re-settle
| people somewhere else, or to inject absurd amounts of money
| into these areas to make them livable again, e.g. incentivizing
| large employers _for the long term_ (instead of the current
| "trend" to stay just barely long enough until tax credits
| expire and then re-locate to somewhere with fresh tax credits),
| subsidizing critical infrastructure like public transport,
| basic grocery and other stores, doctors, schools and basic
| entertainment.
|
| Political incentives simply aren't lined up with what needs to
| be done, and to make it worse there are entire political
| parties who have made their entire policy just to be
| obstructionist to any common sense - first and foremost the GQP
| in the US, but also in Europe parties like the German AfD,
| UKIP/Brexit Party in the UK, FN in France or whatever
| Berlusconis and Salvinis parties in Italy are called.
| Additionally, eroded tax bases (thanks to decades of
| neoliberal, trickle-down bullshit) everywhere make the large-
| scale investments required outright impossible, and the rich
| elites have bought off enough politicians to make sure that
| meaningful change on that front won't ever come around.
| tonmoy wrote:
| As I can't find the book or the data it references, can someone
| more knowledgeable comment on the validity (and interpretation)
| of the data?
| password4321 wrote:
| I think this discussion from 3 weeks ago is somewhat relevant,
| when people are satisfied with success in virtual worlds:
|
| _Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet
| addiction?_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34019486
| wpietri wrote:
| Since the Wikipedia article is so bare, I'm concerned that this
| discussion will mainly be a vibes-based shouting match based on
| the title. In hopes of averting that, some meatier content:
|
| A piece from the book's author:
|
| https://time.com/4504004/men-without-work/
|
| Some reviews and discussions:
|
| https://www.nybooks.com/online/2016/09/15/americas-lost-work...
|
| https://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/11/13176948/labor-forc...
|
| https://archive.ph/20170311160320/https://www.ft.com/content...
| dang wrote:
| Great, I've changed from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Without_Work_(book) to that
| first article. Thanks!
|
| Wikipedia submissions are good when there _isn 't_ a
| substantive article out there, but not good when they're just a
| generic summary of what can be explored more specifically in
| other places. Past explanations about this:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| slibhb wrote:
| The deal was: men worked, women didn't, monogamy was strictly
| enforced and husbands had dominion over their wives.
|
| That deal is over. Feminism and sexual liberation won. The new
| equilibrium may very well involve a good chunk of men "dropping
| out". The article poses this as a problem, claiming it may cause:
| "lower living standards, greater economic disparities and slower
| economic growth than we might otherwise expect".
|
| Given that these potential problems result from the free choice,
| I find myself somewhat apathetic. I would prefer more economic
| growth and less inequality but, personally, the whole
| "manchildren" phenomenon doesn't stir up a lot of emotion.
| MrMember wrote:
| 60% of college graduates are women and the gap widens every year.
| It's going to get a lot worse before (if) it gets better.
| warinukraine wrote:
| What a coincidence, just yesterday I watched his interview with
| the Hoover Institution. It's on youtube.
| vedran wrote:
| The book "Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing
| Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men" by
| Leonard Sax goes into a lot of detail behind some of the
| underlying problems causing this.
| takoid wrote:
| For anyone else wondering what the five factors are:
|
| > Sax's research found that the following five factors
| attribute to our society of underachieving, disengaged boys:
| (1) changes at school; (2) video games; (3) medications for
| Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); (4) endocrine
| disruptors; and (5) the revenge of the forsaken gods.
|
| From this Amazon review which also goes into further detail:
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2UQS7MYS7I5JI/
| gota wrote:
| Im sorry, but item (5) means less than nothing without
| context. Can someone who read it please add some?
|
| I'll go looking for it & will edit this (if I make it in
| time, before the editing window closes)
| takoid wrote:
| Also from the linked review:
|
| > In Dr. Sax's final factor "the revenge of the forsaken
| gods," he identified in leading to a generation of
| unmotivated, disengaged boys and men. Boys need strong male
| remodels to emulate and look-up to. Dr. Sax stressing that
| gender does matter because "boys and girls differ with
| respect to risk factors for social pathology" (p. 178).
| adolph wrote:
| In the transition to a post-scarcity world it may be that this
| crisis represents a transition in which people's mental wellbeing
| is less moored to earnings and oriented more toward value.
| jnmandal wrote:
| Are you implying we are approaching a post-scarcity world now?
| verdverm wrote:
| we are not getting further away, closer, so this would be
| "approaching"
|
| GP may be more referring to the reduction in need for
| physical labor based jobs as robotics and automation
| increase, more than "post-scarcity," a "post-labor-scarcity"
| should arrive beforehand
|
| But to GP's point, transitions take a long time and we are
| already seeing the early changes. It's not like it has not
| started
| zackmorris wrote:
| Dunno about the parent, but for me, post-scarcity means that
| struggle exists for synthetic reasons that aren't due to
| resource constraints.
|
| For example, billionaires running 3 companies (poorly) is an
| indicator that they could stand to pay higher taxes so the
| rest of us don't have to pay their share. Oil companies with
| a combined worth of trillions of dollars would do just fine
| without their subsidies when we already have cars like Aptera
| and Lightyear 0 getting over 40 miles of range per day on
| solar alone. Factory farming has not prevented us paying $5+
| for a dozen eggs. And so on.
|
| By these kinds of metrics, I would say that we passed into
| post-scarcity sometime between the late 60s and the rise of
| Reaganomics in the early 80s. Certainly by 1990 with the fall
| of the USSR. Everything since, and especially pivotal events
| like the Dot Bomb, 9/11 and the Housing Bubble popping, were
| due to the post-truth reality that filled the void left by
| scarcity. This was all fairly obvious by the time The Matrix
| and Fight Club came out in 1999. Similar movies like In Time
| are practically documentaries now IMHO.
| adolph wrote:
| As the sibling comments' note, post-scarcity is the direction
| of progress even if not yet the position. Scarcity's object
| is a moving target, of course. For example, instead of abject
| starvation, the primary focus becomes food security. This is
| progress to be celebrated.
|
| At the same time as things like basic foodstuffs are becoming
| ubiquitously available, there is also a dematerialization of
| humanity. A prime example are household goods, like phone
| book, encyclopedia, cookbooks, typewriter, checkbook, phone
| and answering machine, etc that are made redundant by
| inexpensive compute and connectivity. In addition to the
| basics being non-scarce the highest intellectual achievements
| of the world are simultaneously delivered in better quality
| for less than ever.
|
| Are we approaching a post-scarcity world now? Yes and, as
| always, the future isn't evenly distributed. A society that
| can afford to hold labor pools un-utilized indicates one that
| is rich in basic needs. For it to be a crisis that their
| labor is not required indicates a society poor in
| imagination.
| asperous wrote:
| I wrote the original wikipedia article for this! I haven't read
| the book just thought it was notable.
|
| It was a little tough getting past the editors (the section
| referencing all those news articles they made me put in to reach
| notability). I also got called a shill for the publisher.
| patorjk wrote:
| I don't understand why some people feel the need to be so
| snarky in their summary messages:
|
| > I'll bet this clown got paid to write this article and they
| did a poor job of it, too.
|
| It's really turned me off from contributing. Years ago I got
| into a spat where someone didn't like something I added to an
| article and said my sources weren't valid since they were blog
| posts. I went and found a mainstream magazine article on the
| topic and they still balked - but eventually relented since
| they really didn't have a leg to stand on. They silently
| removed the addition a few months later. However, at that point
| I was over it and didn't care. The fact eventually made it back
| into the article a few years later when someone else added it
| in.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| In practice Wikipedia is often an effortocracy, not the
| meritocracy it wants to be.
| Clent wrote:
| Brute force is no longer useful to our economy.
|
| We continue to replace male labor with machines.
|
| The last vestige is the trades, mostly in the construction
| industry.
|
| It's only a matter of time until the technology industry gets
| around to disrupting male labor out of the trades.
| lordfrito wrote:
| My 2c.
|
| Society doesn't care about young men. They're pretty much left to
| fend for themselves. Hopefully they have a good family structure,
| and a few good male friends. Without that they're toally adrift.
|
| I learned this lesson when I got a flat tire driving across two
| states when I was 20. No one is willing to help. I guarantee a 20
| yo woman would have no problem flagging down help, heck people
| would stop to help without being asked.
|
| I'm 51 now, and I understand why more and more men are checking
| out. The grind isn't worth it. There's a reward system in play
| here, you grind at life and are rewarded. Grind in school and you
| graduate. Grind more and you get a degree. Grind more and you get
| a family and career and some big toys.
|
| It seems that the amount of grinding men have to do is
| increasing, and the net rewards society bestows seem to be
| decreasing. I won't get into a shouting match on what the
| problems men experience are, you can fill in the blanks with your
| own experiences and biases, but all the men I know seem to agree
| that there seems to be less of an upside to sacrificing for the
| greater good than there used to be. As a middle aged man
| strangers I meet expect the worst from me, why should I try?
|
| As an alternative you can spend your hours grinding away at video
| games and leveling up. And the games are getting better every
| year.
|
| It seems to me that many young men are finding leveling up in
| games is simply more rewarding than leveling up in real life. I
| wish it weren't so, but here we are.
|
| Historically speaking, civilization is built and defended largely
| on the backs of young men. When they check out, it can't be a net
| good for the trajectory of society.
|
| Or maybe this is a win for feminism? Women finally have work
| equality and so men don't have to work as hard anymore.
|
| I don't have answers. But the trend has been clear for a long
| while.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| > Or maybe this is a win for feminism?
|
| I understand this is a passing remark, but I want to answer the
| question anyway.
|
| Feminism is not about making men's lives more difficult or
| about cheering when men struggle. Most feminists believe that
| gender equality can benefit everyone, including men, by
| creating a more just society. It is not about oppression or
| mistreatment of any group, not of even men.
|
| Men supporting and helping other men benefits feminism and
| women by challenging traditional gender roles and expectations.
| In a lot of countries, the cultural norm is for men to be
| strong, independent and self-sufficient and not to seek help or
| support from others, especially other men. This creates a
| culture of toxic masculinity (not all masculinity is toxic,
| only the toxic kind is problematic). In such a culture men are
| expected to repress their feelings, hide their vulnerability,
| and not seek support when they need it, etc. Often, women are
| expected to fit under the exact opposite (not being allowed to
| stand alone, expected to be vulnerable and emotional, etc.) as
| if we were sharing a limited pie and not the potentialy
| unlimited social world we live in. This is harmful to people of
| all gender.
|
| Breaking down traditional gender roles and expectations and
| supporting and helping each other is good for everyone. This
| can also help reduce the stigma and shame that may be
| associated with men seeking help or support and encourage more
| men to seek the help and support they need. This in turn can
| help create a more equitable and just society for all, which is
| one of the main goals of feminism. I wish the men in my live
| all had the same kind of emotionally vulnerable relationships I
| have with the women in my life. I can't begin to imagine how
| hard and lonely it can be to live in a world that prevent you
| from connecting freely with others.
|
| In my book, anything that makes life harder for men is a loss
| for feminism.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > Feminism is not about making men's lives more difficult or
| about cheering when men struggle. Most feminists believe that
| gender equality can benefit everyone, including men, by
| creating a more just society. It is not about oppression or
| mistreatment of any group, not of even men.
|
| The problem here is, that in many places, we've gone past
| equality to clear privilige for women (and other groups, that
| mostly are not young men). In my coutry women can get a grant
| every year for 3-5k eur to start a private company. Up until
| recently they had to work less years until (government)
| retirement, got higher pensions for the same amount of money
| paid in (still true), and since they live longer, they get to
| receive the money for a longer time in average. For same
| crimes, they get lower punishments, they get priority due to
| hiring quotas (especially in tech), and in recent times even
| existential threats are better for women than men (eg. being
| able to leave a war-torn country or just not get drafted to
| war). On the other hand, there are many support systems from
| women, from women-only workshops, places, scolarships,
| sponsorships, to shelters, support groups and treating mental
| healt issues way differently than with men. Add to this a lot
| of media (both social and mainstream) propaganda how (white)
| men are the problem of the world, how women are better in
| everything,...
|
| How should a young, not very-pretty and not rich men feel in
| such a society? They're basically worthless if they don't
| provide for others while being treated as shit by everyone
| while playing at an uneven playing field. I totally
| understand that more and more of those men will just say
| "f*ck everything" and remove themselves from society that
| doesn't value them.
| lordfrito wrote:
| Ultimately feminism or not isn't the point to me. You can't
| get two people in a room agreeing what feminism is and isn't
| anymore. No true scotsman etc. So I've given up arguing isms.
|
| Whatever it is, we can all agree that society is in flux. Old
| rules are being thrown away, new and unproven rules are being
| written. There will victories, losses, and speed bumps along
| the way.
|
| I'm not qualified to judge the goodness or badness of what's
| happening overall. I have my doubts, but they're mainly just
| for me as they reflect my personal experience and biases.
| Society will go on without me (and my generation) regardless
| of my views. In the end this is civilizations burden, not
| mine.
|
| Still it's good to see stuff like this at least discussed.
| There was a time you got shot down for merely mentioning that
| many men have it hard as well.
| epups wrote:
| I'm sorry, but I think your narrative is misguided. When you
| were 20,which was 30 years ago, it might have been less likely
| that you would get a stranger to change your tire. But it was
| much more likely you, rather than a woman, would find
| employment and especially reach a position of power. Which one
| do you think is more important for a satisfying life?
|
| The fact that we are working towards a more equal society is
| not only a win for feminism, it is a win for humanity.
| Civilization has historically been built by men, as you say,
| because we used to believe that women were incapable of
| contributing equally. A big mistake, and a huge waste of
| potential talent.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| The problem is with basic male-female relationship dynamics
| within the concept of marriage/family. Women are attracted to
| wealth and status, men are attracted to appearances. Now that
| women can build a career equal to men, not only do they find
| those men unattractive...they really have no need for a man,
| aside from procreation. With how expensive everything is
| getting, and requiring both couples to work full time careers
| just to be able afford a home, its just not manageable to
| bring children into the picture for most people. Forget about
| day care which costs $1500 a month.
|
| What we're seeing and will see more of is demographic changes
| similar to china where there are more elderly people and not
| enough young people to take over and care for the elderly.
|
| Beyond demographic changes, there is something behind men
| needing a family to take care of that makes him have worth
| and gives him something to keep working for. Being a career
| slave for nothing is probably a big part of the suicide rate
| among men
| lordfrito wrote:
| Yeah listen I wasn't blaming feminism, it was more of an open
| question or alternate perspective on the matter. There is a
| difference between causation and correlation. Just sharing
| one man's perspective, which is all I have really. Which I
| thought I made clear, but this is online discourse so I guess
| I need to clarify.
|
| I could list 100 things I've experienced as a young man that
| led me to my conclusions, but I'm not here to win an
| argument. I don't have the answers. It's the questions that
| matter.
| mint2 wrote:
| This comment leaves out a major important point.
|
| In the original comment, calling out the troubles of men as a
| win for feminism is a totally wrong premise. It was also an
| offhand remark at the end and really took away from the
| commment. feminism is unrelated to creating those cited
| difficulties and actually try to solve some of them.
|
| The troubles described sounded more like the product of
| rising inequality, reduced union sway, and growing power of
| the corporate machine. Some also sounded like products of
| unhealthy machoism in society where "real men" are expected
| to be 100% self reliant and always do things like change
| their own tires
| ithkuil wrote:
| I agree that shouldn't be a zero sum game.
|
| Yet, there are undoubtedly forces at play it that cause a
| significant fraction of men to feel disfranchised. We can
| blame that to reactionary forces, to the last blows of
| patriarchy, but ultimately it's a real issue and unless we
| find a way to communicate across the ever deeper chasm the
| situation can only get more serious.
| joeman1000 wrote:
| I'm really feeling this. I'm 26 and have noticed that I'm
| chopped liver in terms of hiring/recruiting. Also same for life
| in general. I feel a bit 'fucked over'
| vagrantJin wrote:
| I think most societies throughout history have had the same
| intuition about young men.
|
| Quite recently the Ukraine was drafting young men. If they
| decided to check out en-masse, there would be no country called
| Ukraine anymore. Society is a fragile thing.
| lazide wrote:
| Looking at the rawest biological elements - a society without
| women of child bearing age having kids, won't be a society
| very long (a few decades, usually).
|
| A society without someone fighting and dying to defend it,
| can go until someone tries to conquer it - then it can be
| dead almost instantly without enough people willing to fight,
| kill, and die defending it.
|
| Both of those are real problems.
|
| Fighting doesn't have to be 100% men. But if you draw out a
| population distribution of various useful attributes (mental,
| physical, etc.), most men are built for it, and will do it
| naturally and unprompted, and most women are not.
|
| And when you look at what even modern fighting looks like,
| 99% of the women (and most of the men) are going to be trying
| to run the other direction.
|
| And like in Ukraine, without folks standing, fighting, and
| dying, not only would Ukraine no longer exist, but the cancer
| of conquest that would eat anything and everything it can,
| would just get stronger. And eventually devour everything if
| left unchecked.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I also noticed this in university and I was curious enough
| about it to read some history books. I believe that society
| never cared about young men. They were always left to fend for
| themselves.
|
| In my opinion, the part that's new in modern times is the
| transparency caused by the internet. Rags to riches, washing
| dishes to becoming a billionaire, ... these stories have always
| been extremely unlikely to happen in practice. But without a
| way to check the statistics, people still kind of believed in
| them. With the access to information that we have now, that is
| changing and so people are checking out when they notice that
| the structure of society is stacked against them. I mean it
| always has been, but without the internet people didn't notice
| it so clearly.
|
| And yes, I also believe that feminism might play a role, but
| more on the demand side: Nowadays, it is not mandatory anymore
| for the man to have a good enough job to feed the family,
| because double-income-households have become the norm. Back in
| the days where typically only the man would be the breadwinner,
| there was probably a stronger psychological pressure for men to
| deliver. I'm not sure if the absence of that nagging is good or
| bad, but it sure changed in the past 50 years.
| lazide wrote:
| What about 2 income household means the man doesn't also need
| to contribute enough?
|
| In my experience, the man losing the job almost always ends
| in divorce and a bitter woman too (and mandatory child
| support payments on the man).
|
| It's a really common pattern.
| lordfrito wrote:
| Yup. We can pat ourselves on the back about changing gender
| roles, but when a man loses his job his chance of divorce
| goes way up. [1]
|
| Personally I think trying to reprogram humans to fight
| biology is a lost cause. But people keep trying.
|
| [1] https://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men-
| women/
| lazide wrote:
| To address a different point here - up until the 70's, the US
| had and regularly used the draft.
|
| Most countries have mandatory military service for all males
| that starts anywhere from 16-18yrs old.
|
| Pretty much everywhere except some specific parts of the US
| (and still even then, though it's not stated out loud), it's
| expected for a man to get and hold a decent job, or women
| will ignore him and everyone will look down on him. Does it
| always, 100% apply? No. It's definitely the majority case
| though.
|
| Does that mean men were abandoned? I don't think so.
|
| Honestly, it seems more like men were a resource. Just like
| everyone else.
| Balgair wrote:
| Aside: Since there is a lot of commentary about 'being a real
| man' here, I thought I'd drop two links that really helped out
| those close to me 'snip the apron strings'.
|
| https://www.artofmanliness.com/
|
| https://www.scouting.org/
| blahblah1234567 wrote:
| I think "Men Without Work" is a euphemism.
|
| The problem is:
|
| - Men without Skills in-demand-- skills which are at least
| somewhat fulfilling & interesting to those men.
|
| Solution: Research labor data for careers in high demand, then
| cross reference those careers with skills a person is interested
| in. Then identify resources & a roadmap for learning those
| skills. And sit down, and put the time in to learn & apply those
| skills at a novice to intermediate level.
|
| - Men who refuse to work. Part of why they refuse to work is that
| they might not recognize the solution above: to build skills
| relevant to a career they consider meaningful. This may also be
| due to a lack of monetary resources to live somewhat comfortably
| while building those skills (That said, I lived in a tent for
| months while teaching myself web development). Or they are
| overburdened by obligations and decided to give up and check out
| of society (i.e. turn towards homelessness and/or drugs)
|
| Caveat: I know some folks who call themselves "poor folks". The
| reality is that their problem isn't that they're poor. Their
| problem is that they refuse to put together a well formatted
| resume, apply to jobs, and accept that they may have to start at
| the bottom of the career ladder. (And/or build new skills)
|
| The concept of "Work" is but one link on a dependency chain:
|
| Study -> Skills -> Productivity -> Work -> Career -> Build
| resources
| notwokeno wrote:
| /g/ is full of intelligent people who could easily do what I do
| every day at work and are still unemployed.
|
| It's not a lack of skills. Getting a job (especially your
| first) is a _lot_ of work. In some ways IMO it 's more work
| than what you would be payed to do. Once you get payed what do
| you do with the money? You spend it to participate in society.
|
| Except most of our social institutions are gone anyway.
| Marriage (the larger motivator) is practically symbolic at this
| point. All that's left are the hard economic ideas, so they can
| spend it to live in their own place and not deal with their
| mom. Even those aren't doing so well, look at home ownership or
| even renting. Is it worth it? Some say yes and get jobs, plenty
| say no.
|
| We've restructured society so there's no place for these men
| even if they did find jobs, then on top of that we've brought
| in millions more men to ensure if that any niche that developed
| would be immediately filled. This is what people really mean
| when they complain about low wages or high inflation and it's
| not something that can be fixed by fiddling with the money
| supply.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| There seems to be a duality among people where some people find
| satisfaction working with their minds, others with their hands.
|
| I know it's a controversial view but I truly believe it: some
| people just want to see something physically accomplished at
| the end of a day's work. A roof shingled, a road graded, a
| cabinet hung....
|
| When society pivots and those manual jobs go overseas, just
| telling everyone they're better off going into tech anyway is
| not going to fly.
|
| Perhaps those career assessment test or whatever I took in high
| school had some validity after all. For better or worse, I
| understand shop classes are gone now from high school. I took a
| wood shop class (and still make things from wood to this day).
| Metal shop class was offered (stick welding was sort of the
| pinnacle of that class), shop class (where you worked on cars
| that the teachers brought in -- always likely a sort of side
| business the teacher had going.)
|
| My daughter went to Norway as an exchange student and it sounds
| as though Scandinavian schools still have some idea of a
| vocational track in public school education. While we may have
| sent most of the factory jobs overseas we still construct,
| wire, and plumb houses here, still build roads and bridges.
| blahblah1234567 wrote:
| I agree. People have differences in satisfaction based on the
| type of work they're attracted to.
|
| Personally, I love working with my hands. But I want a job
| that pays very well and offers location flexibility. (Plus I
| love learning an entire system of skills which builds upon
| itself) So, I chose IT.
|
| But I still plan to do construction projects-- a Maker Space
| near me offers evening courses in welding, electrician
| skills, and carpentry.
|
| I think the unfortunately reality is also that:
|
| - There are differences in effort
|
| - There are differences in intelligence
|
| - There are differences in industriousness (how proactive a
| person is)
|
| Which leads to some people being more suited towards
| intellectually challenging work. Others are more suited or
| interested in less mind-oriented work. Which is totally ok--
| there is a huge demand for both.
|
| So, I Agree-- Not everyone is better off in Tech.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'm entirely like that. If it wouldn't wreck my body and it
| paid the same--or even close--I'd carry boxes from one side
| of a room to another all day, over programming or most other
| office work. Or basically any trade work except electrical.
| Trying to maneuver those tiny little wires in tiny little
| spaces makes me irrationally angry.
| giantg2 wrote:
| There's also a third, or subset under your refuse to work
| category. Some people who check out do so because the system is
| stacked against them. These could be people with criminal
| records, health issues, etc. Good luck getting a good job if
| you have any sort of record, mental illness, etc. Even stuff
| like delinquent child support can prevent your hiring. How
| about that - can't pay your support because you don't have a
| job, can't get a job because you're behind on your support...
| blahblah1234567 wrote:
| Great point. I didn't think of that, but it's so true.
|
| Felony records, Health problems, etc. prevebting people from
| working.
| kranke155 wrote:
| The amount of meaningful, well-paid work in our society is also
| shrinking at a rapid rate.
|
| Expecting everyone to just become baristas and waiters (which
| is what's happening in the UK at least) is just pushing people
| towards a giant mental health crisis.
|
| Without manufacturing there is no middle-class, and the West
| has abdicated its manufacturing. That's led to the bifurcation
| of our society in two halves - the well-to-do service workers
| who have accumulated valuable knowledge, and the people serving
| them. I don't think it's a healthy outcome.
| fundad wrote:
| Service work can be elevated to a living wage career since we
| depend on it and there is so much capital tied up in
| restaurants and retail.
|
| Of course people will say they don't want to pay more but
| we're already paying enough to support higher wages.
|
| Factory owners didn't want to pay much either so we don't
| have good-paying factory work. VCs and CEOs don't want to pay
| much for programmers either and we see where they're taking
| the industry for the next generation.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > Their problem is that they refuse to put together a well
| formatted resume, apply to jobs, and accept that they may have
| to start at the bottom of the career ladder.
|
| I see this a lot. Younger people who have been led to believe
| by incendiary reddit and twitter rants that everyone lived like
| some Leave it to Beaver sitcom in the near past and they should
| be able to own a house and support a family at 19 on a
| McDonald's salary, and anything short of that there's no point
| participating because it's not fair. There are a lot of
| legitimate grievances in there regarding stagnating real wages
| and student debt etc. but for many it's just an excuse.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| My high-school-diploma, _literally_ raised in a barn,
| divorced-with-child-support-plus-another-kid-out-of-wedlock
| dad, who piddled around at odd jobs making almost nothing in
| his 20s before finally getting job at the railroad and
| working up to middle management, retired early as a
| millionaire, having paid my way through college (a cheap one,
| but still). My mom had a junior college degree and only
| worked like 6 years, before they got married, so they were
| single-income, too. We went on a nice couple-weeks-long road
| trip every year and traveled to see family around holidays.
| They could afford to drop a stupid amount of money on a Tandy
| for me when I was really young, in case the whole computer
| thing took off. We did great.
|
| It really, _really_ was different for the boomers. And union-
| won retirement benefits were _so_ good back then. Plus that
| money was tied up in the retirement scheme, so you couldn 't
| "defect" and spend it to compete for housing (driving up
| prices) rather than putting it in your 401k.
| fundad wrote:
| In Beaver's time, the best paying jobs were not available to
| the global majority.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| True, and even among white suburban middle-class people the
| depiction was often unrealistic.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| I can not for the life of me get a "bottom of the career
| ladder" SDR/BDR position...
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Except that there really was a time when a person was able to
| graduate high school, go down to the local factory, and get a
| job that would buy a house and support a family with nothing
| other than a firm handshake. They didn't do it on a McDonalds
| salary, but that's because this all happened before McDonalds
| were around, and the cafes and restaurants that McD's later
| replaced all paid living wages.
| chasd00 wrote:
| many many people simply won't work if they don't have to. If
| they're able to live off parents or significant others and can
| get enough entertainment/stimulation online to keep them
| satisfied then that's all they're going to do.
| blahblah1234567 wrote:
| Indeed. I know a couple folks in that situation
|
| - A 30 year old guy who lives at his mothers house. He's a
| part time videographer. For the last 5 years, hasn't
| proactively built any other skillset. Currently he says he'll
| work on getting into the construction industry. The irony is
| that he studied through calculus recently at a community
| college, but isn't enthused by the non-social work of a IT
| professional. Like other gig workers I know, he's only
| recently wised up to the fact that maybe he can't support
| himself on gig work, and that lacking business
| skills/knowledge he's unlikely to be a entrepreneur. Reality
| is beginning to dawn on him: he's getting older, and women
| will be less and less likely to see him as an adequate
| provider.
|
| - a 32 year old guy who has a family trust he lives off of.
| Dropped out of college around age 19 or 20 to spend the next
| decade smoking marijuana and playing video games nearly as
| though it's a full time job. Fortunately he recently returned
| to finish college and will soon have a science degree. He'll
| be about 33-34 and start working at a career level of a
| typical 22-23 year old. The difference though is that he
| lacks common sense developed by resource scarcity & the
| existential need to become a professional. So, at 33, he'll
| be a less mature version of a 23 year old. It's sad to see.
| (I firmly believe young adults shouldn't be given free
| money-- they'll end up without a proper incentive structure.
| It's a bit like getting cheat codes to a game: there's no
| longer a reason to work at it.)
| [deleted]
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Unspecified in all of this is: Society at large needs less
| labor to function.
|
| What happens when all of the production is automated to the
| point we don't NEED 'Men to work'?
|
| What do we do with them? What mischief do they get into when
| they have idle hands?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Even if something like food service at McDonald's is
| automated, it's tough to argue that we should be getting
| humans to work on things that can be automated.
|
| Imagine working 40 hours a week then seeing that the machine
| both prepared more product and made fewer mistakes than you,
| or feeling like you're doing work just because someone (the
| government) pities you enough to force some jobs to remain
| non-automated.
|
| Working with more complex, higher-skilled work that makes you
| feel like you're improving the lives of others is what our
| brains crave, not repeating menial tasks over and over again.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| > Imagine working 40 hours a week then seeing that the
| machine both prepared more product and made fewer mistakes
| than you
|
| The Ballad of John Henry is Civil War era, but even he was
| a century or two after the Luddites started wrecking
| automated weaving machines. It's actually been a feature of
| the Industrial Revolution for awhile, but I think the
| effects are more pronounced now than ever.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| The problem with that is that there are people that are
| more or less intelligent and more or less motivated.
|
| There's NOTHING wrong with the occasional menial task, and
| there's nothing wrong with being unmotivated, so long as
| it's not a net negative drain on society.
|
| Once everything is automated away, I suspect it won't be
| the Star Trekian Utopia we'd like.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Once everything is automated away, I suspect it won 't
| be the Star Trekian Utopia we'd like._
|
| The Star Trekian utopia grew out of a 21st century
| devastated by a world war that saw a third of the Earth's
| population wiped out so... -\\_(tsu)_/-
| fundad wrote:
| Order-taking is miles apart from the actual prep, cooking
| and serving. Imagine owning AND MAINTAINING a machine that
| can do all of that with less combined labor and expense.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I mostly agree.
|
| I feel like some people will gravitate back towards self
| sufficient activities. There are a lot of people on this site
| doing stuff like building their own furniture, gardening,
| etc. Of course I do think there will be a subset that use
| their time for more destructive things, as happens even now.
| ponow wrote:
| You'd think so, but an array of regulations makes that
| increasingly difficult. Fixing your own house or car can
| put you in legal hot water.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Try doing that in a studio apartment
| giantg2 wrote:
| There are productive hobbies that can be preformed in a
| studio apartment, even if those options are more limited.
| honkycat wrote:
| there is a huge opportunity for environmental conservation
| and clean-up, and care-giving for the sick / elderly /
| mentally ill.
|
| unfortunately there isn't a profit motive for those things,
| so the work in those industries tends to be low paying and
| requiring a high level of education.
|
| there is definitely still a ton of work to do in the world,
| we just don't have anyone willing to pay for it.
| robotburrito wrote:
| The question that must be asked is instead, "What will they
| do with us?"
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > What will they do with us
|
| Or to us.
| ponow wrote:
| It's one thing to say that about very young men, and quite
| another who followed society's and especially goverment's
| pushing and funding of higher and higher education. Only later
| do they find out that their crazy study hours were largely
| wasted, and they'd have done much better in a trade. They were
| led astray.
|
| It would be better for people to be integrated into the
| workforce _during_ their education, to ensure that it stays
| relevant and to keep the movtivation. This idea of education as
| a kind of social enlightenment is an elite luxury, and makes
| people more miserable and regretful and unemployable.
| fundad wrote:
| Do you really feel your hours of study were wasted?
| 65 wrote:
| Goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29633355-men-
| without-wor...
| ianai wrote:
| In lieu of any particular review I'm submitting the Wikipedia
| page.
|
| I was unemployed for most of the Great Recession and can
| empathize with much of this book. I also just remember the
| "tragedy of my twenties" realizing society had basically no
| interest in me. Despite a math degree and IT/programming
| experience. Then the myriad people I've interacted with in the
| last decade plus who are in this situation.
|
| Luckily I now have good paying career. But I fear a society that
| leaves so many cold.
| fullshark wrote:
| Society (meaning gov't programs) doesn't care about you beyond
| your economic output. We offshored countless unskilled labor
| jobs that men would traditionally take in America and told them
| they needed to take out crippling loans in order to get
| knowledge worker skills that our industry is working overtime
| to make obsolete within 5-10 years anyway.
|
| Many just are giving up, they don't see an opportunity here,
| they just are going to play video games, take drugs, and
| accomplish nothing with their lives.
| ianai wrote:
| Actually, society varies. But social contract theory does
| point out that the contract goes both ways. And that society
| works, in the interest of self sustenance, by making the
| individual lives better than they would be outside of
| society. Otherwise a society won't last long or diminish with
| time.
|
| Progress could be as simple as introducing or better funding
| employment programs. It'd clearly really help if there was
| some clearinghouse type organization informing people about
| labor market opportunities based on the individual
| characteristics. The clearinghouse could seek information
| directly from employers as to preferences/priorities/etc.
|
| But also some people just cannot function in society without
| some kind of back support. It can't be a social optimization
| to leave such people to homelessness.
| lazide wrote:
| I'm not sure what your point is here. You seem to be saying
| 'society will eventually collapse unless x happens', but
| the parent was saying 'x doesn't seem to be happening in my
| experience'?
| adversaryIdiot wrote:
| man I am so happy i heard someone else say it too. I seriously
| felt like "society had no interest in me". Not being able to
| find a job and getting no matches on things like tinder left me
| devastated. I am on anti depressants and fear that time to this
| day.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Not being able to find a job and getting no matches on
| things like tinder
|
| I never personally experienced this (I've always been
| employed since graduation and I got married before there was
| tinder), but it still always feels like a gut punch to read
| that other people experienced it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > I seriously felt like "society had no interest in me".
|
| I'm pretty sure society is not obligated to _have_ an
| interest in you (I 'm not trying to put words in your mouth
| however).
|
| I think you become truly actualized only when you decide what
| it is _you_ want, what you imagine for yourself. If what you
| want is in conflict with what society wants of you, you have
| to decide then whether it is important enough to you to take
| the road less travelled.
|
| Watching biographies of various artistic people ("The Art
| Life" about David Lynch comes to mind, also "Crumb") it's
| clear that some people are just "a certain way" and will
| choose to live that way - society be damned. (Of course, that
| there are documentaries about these luminaries tells you that
| a few at least have found societal acceptance after all.)
| whatshisface wrote:
| There's a basic human need to be valued by others and to be
| part of a community, and the system we have now grades
| people according to traits that are mainly genetic and
| casts them aside if they aren't seen as desirable enough.
| As for what the cut is, well, it's many-faceted, but the
| waterline is rising and as you age all of your desirable
| traits are fading. If you have real personal relationships
| (either career or friendship-related) you've escaped it for
| now, but if anything ever happens to reset your network and
| cast you back into the default pot, you might get a chance
| to experience it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I agree, but there are communities within the larger
| community. If you're into D&D you can fit comfortably
| within a like-community of RPGamers.
|
| And I can't help but think back to the punks, or goths or
| any of the other disenfranchised youth cultures that
| appeared to revel even in the rejection from broader
| society.
|
| "The children they despise us, the difference is now we
| want to be hated."
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's funny to think of a future where the rising
| difficulty of surviving in mainstream culture for anyone
| who's not a movie star eventually results in a society
| evenly split between punks and goths, but something tells
| me that's not a real solution. :-)
| [deleted]
| lazide wrote:
| When has that ever NOT been the case?
| whatshisface wrote:
| The idea that there's a certain line below which some
| mentally disabled or physically deformed people would go
| from being normal members to society to objects of
| charity has always been there, and it has always been a
| problem, but what's new is the extension of that category
| minus the charity to perfectly healthy 50 year old guys
| who basically have nothing wrong with them.
| [deleted]
| luckylion wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure society is not obligated to have an
| interest in you
|
| It somewhat stops being a society if it says to some
| members "whether you live or die is irrelevant to me, I
| will not care either way". That's what some people
| experience at least some of the time.
|
| There's a social contract. Is it still binding you if
| society doesn't hold up its end?
| lazide wrote:
| If society feels like it wants it to, it's hard to evade
| the various means of enforcement society has created and
| funded for the purpose.
| luckylion wrote:
| That's true, and I don't think society will say "we've
| let you down but in return you don't owe taxes". I meant
| to ask more about the ethics. Should you feel obligated
| to uphold your end if the other side does not?
| lazide wrote:
| Practically, does it matter if the other side has guns
| and doesn't care what the person thinks?
|
| (Ethically, of course, spherical cows and all, there are
| many ways to discuss it - but why?)
| luckylion wrote:
| Society doesn't function because of law enforcement (and
| the threat of violence by the state), it functions
| because the super majority doesn't break the laws. If the
| social contract breaks away, you can have an army but you
| can't run a modern society on threats, or you'll exhaust
| the resources by government watchmen, and you'll end up
| with 10% in society being productive and the rest
| watching them and each other.
| lazide wrote:
| I think you misunderstand my point.
|
| Good fences make good neighbors.
|
| Enforcement is the fence.
|
| Functional societies have reasonable fences, and rarely
| need to test them in the majority case, because they're
| functional. There is no point in thinking about testing
| something you know works.
|
| When someone starts wandering off, or a problem case is
| there, it also deals with them in a way that doesn't
| undermine everything else. It keeps problems at bay.
|
| Without that fence, or when the fence starts being moved
| so it's NOT in the right place, problems cascade and
| grow, society starts fighting itself and others as trust
| is lost in institutions and other people, and eventually,
| either vigilantism, civil war or mass corruption is the
| result. Like you're discussing.
|
| It's a constant, ongoing process.
|
| This also makes it pretty rough being an edge case, which
| is the context of the thread we're in.
|
| A society beyond a certain, relatively small size without
| law enforcement (or similar boundary setting and
| enforcement) will, no matter how amazing, fall apart as
| the natural forces of corruption and selfishness tear at
| it unchecked. It doesn't have to be a professional corps
| of folks, but it has to be a working mechanism though.
| Even small groups have this. Usually in the form of a
| chief, village head, etc.
|
| Larger groups of course need something more formalized
| eventually, just due to scale.
|
| Regardless, not towing the line is going to get you
| stomped on, _unless_ you're able to get under the radar,
| or are part of a large enough group that you can force
| the apparatus to leave you alone. Though that definitely
| contributes to the whole 'mass corruption' problem.
| [deleted]
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure society is not obligated to have an
| interest in you
|
| I have grown to believe over time that this is true, and
| that most people are willing to throw away unsuccessful or
| unlucky others using this reasoning. It's depressing, but
| also frees you from feeling any particular obligation to
| society. If society doesn't either provide you with what
| you need or a means to achieve it, I recommend that you
| cheat, steal, tax-evade, and law-break as much as is
| personally beneficial.
| lazide wrote:
| Be aware, that then opens you up to being directly
| attacked by, and not just ignored, by society.
|
| And society has lots of fangs, in that sense.
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| That's merely a practical consideration. Besides, the
| difference between "ignored" and "directly attacked by"
| is mostly rhetorical when your psychological or
| physiological needs are unmet.
| lazide wrote:
| Hah, 'merely practical' is high praise for a concern IMO?
|
| It does matter. Plenty of subcultures have done stuff
| that is technically illegal, or at least could be
| prosecuted/or would be made illegal if noticed, but was
| quite beneficial to them in their own view, by not
| getting enough attention to be worth directly attacking!
| Or having folks be distracted enough elsewhere to not go
| after them.
|
| I'm guessing most in the LGBTQ space can pretty clearly
| identify the difference between the two, for instance.
| Being accepted being even nicer than both, of course.
| Catered to almost unheard of!
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| > I also just remember the "tragedy of my twenties" realizing
| society had basically no interest in me.
|
| For me it was wallowing in grad school for five years after
| graduating college in 2007 and not being able to find any entry
| level positions with a math degree due to the housing crisis,
| and the relative uselessness of an undergrad math degree,
| without useful experience in anything else. I remember the
| constant manic hum of "when am I going to start making real
| money, instead of pulling out more loans each year?".
|
| Fortunately, I learned to program during that time and
| eventually got my first job writing Python for a small civil
| engineering start-up.
| Mezzie wrote:
| > I also just remember the "tragedy of my twenties" realizing
| society had basically no interest in me.
|
| Female, but same hat and I empathize. In my case, I'm a lesbian
| who ended up with MS, so like with your average straight guy,
| my worth in society is pretty much based on my work
| life/career. I also share the jealousy a lot of straight men
| have for straight/bi women being more able to 'opt out'. It's
| not a rational feeling, but it's there.
|
| > But I fear a society that leaves so many cold.
|
| Me too. We can only expect people to beat themselves up for so
| long before some of that rage and despair is turned outward,
| contributing to the destabilization of society.
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| What is MS? Masters degree? Microsoft?
| Mezzie wrote:
| Yeah, Multiple Sclerosis. Though I do have a master's
| degree, but it's _not_ an MS funnily enough.
|
| It matters because if we're talking biology, there aren't
| many people who are like 'yeah, I'm going to have the
| cripple carry my child!' and dating as a female with a
| progressive disease is not great. So from a social
| standpoint, I am also an 'extra' 'useless' body, like how
| these men tend to feel.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Multiple Sclerosis, I think
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| Definitely don't look to the mental health system for help.
| It's designed from the ground up to use people like
| resources, mine them for all their value, and discard them
| (after some insults).
|
| I really feel for people with mental health issues and no
| insurance. I have insurance, but have somehow still payed
| thousands of dollars out of pocket, and in far worse shape.
|
| It's like they're TRYING to get people with ADHD to kill
| themselves. You can find countless accounts of people
| traumatized by this system, but they don't want to change a
| thing... they seem to think it's our problem just for
| existing. I was told to just give up on my career...
| nevermind that it will never matter, and the next job will
| just fuck me up.
|
| I can't really put into words the rage I feel against Doctors
| and Psychs... this is who they expect us to go to for help.
| scottLobster wrote:
| Yeah it seems like there used to be a cultural value of putting
| people to work. Generally speaking you had to be a real fuck-up
| to not get a job. Maybe the jobs available weren't the best,
| but you could get something to pay for basic food/housing with
| little effort or credentialing. The attitude was, if you were a
| decent person and willing to work, "come by and we'll find
| something for you to do".
|
| Now the zeitgeist in the job market seems to be "Why should we
| give you the gift of this job? Speak quickly and well, lest we
| cast you back into the void! You are a piece of shit until
| proven otherwise!"
|
| Granted some of that was always around for more competitive
| jobs, and some fields like engineering seem relatively exempt
| (outside of FAANG-style interviews) due to demand, but given
| what I was taught to expect growing up by schools/parents vs
| what reality turned out to be, there's definitely been a shift.
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| That's the case for the standard jobs that people with a
| business/english/history degree compete for. There's so much
| supply of college grads.
|
| But, if you look at trade jobs (plumber, electrician, etc.)
| then there's still tons of demand and they pay well.
|
| But no one wants to do that.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| This almost certainly varies with the specific labor
| market, but what I've heard anecdotally is that there's
| tons of demand for _experienced_ tradespeople, but the
| prospects being fresh out of school aren 't great unless
| you have connections.
| yterdy wrote:
| From my perspective, trades are effectively gatekept
| (somewhat purposefully but also as a function of the
| business). It's a damned-if-you-do/don't situation with
| licensing headaches on one side, and the prevailing
| reliance on networks for finding both jobs and work on the
| other; the former a way to rein in the volatility of
| "vendor" availabilty and work quality caused by the latter,
| but with the side effect of raising the barrier to entry
| (and the cost of training for already wary bosses). "Trust"
| concerns on an encounter-to-encounter basis are too
| important for the robust market you would like. I've talked
| to two people who were looking for construction workers:
| one was a family friend who knows me well and was somewhat
| cool on me applying, especially after finding out the
| physical difficulties I'd had at a retail job that had
| turned out to be more demanding than I'd anticipated. The
| other was a stranger who freely gave out his number, but
| who implied that there'd likely be a soft hazing period to
| determine if I, unlike many other past applicants, "really
| wanted to work." $20/hr sounds great, but how much of that
| is going to future physical therapy? (I never texted back.)
|
| Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, jobless, with an art degree (a
| few credits short of a sculpture minor), watching
| woodworking Youtube videos in my garage-less Millennial
| apartment. I tend to think enthusiasm is not really the
| issue.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Do you think this is a social change or a change in the
| reality of workers leverage? You seem to be implying that
| corporations used to give people jobs because it was the
| right thing to do, but now they are more selfish. I think
| laborers just don't have much leverage anymore.
|
| Domestic workers losing leverage isn't a huge surprise given
| that the last 30 years have been about globalization.
| ianai wrote:
| Globalization is only part of it. Lots of things beyond
| globalization have titled power away from labor. Look at
| the locomotive labor unions being blocked from striking by
| the president and congress last month for a recent,
| egregious example.
|
| The courts, too, largely moved towards corporation rights
| over workers rights/needs.
|
| Probably too minimum wages are below the market clearing
| levels in most places. This evidenced by places seeing an
| increase in the number of employed when minimum wage
| increased.
| [deleted]
| spacemadness wrote:
| Well, there is the other side of some engineering,
| particularly with software, which is ageism. So those on the
| "wrong" side of the hump get laid off and can't find work.
| Now it's because they didn't manage their career well enough,
| etc. etc. which translates to "you are a failure." So what
| seems exempt is only exempt at the beginning of your career.
| cs702 wrote:
| Many men who would have done well as labor or middle management
| in, say, 20th century factories, now find themselves the victims
| of a rapidly changing, ever-more-concentrated, ever-more-
| automated global capitalist economy that has less and less need
| for them. And to them it _feels_ as if no one cares about them.
|
| To riff on Churchill[a]: Capitalism is the worst economic system
| ever invented... except for all others that have been tried from
| time to time. It's _ruthless_.
|
| There may be a better system... but it hasn't been invented yet.
| For now, we must figure out how to make this horrible system --
| capitalism -- be less horrible, including for all those men who
| now find themselves marginalized by it. If we blindly let AI-
| powered software "eat the world" unfettered, without humane
| constraints, we'd only see greater concentration of economic and
| political power going forward, which would likely end up in some
| kind of really ugly societal breakdown.
|
| --
|
| [a] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-
| form...
|
| EDITS: Many, necessary for more accurately articulating my
| thoughts.
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| "deaths because of communism are entirely because of communism,
| but deaths because of capitalism are because you didn't pull
| your bootstraps hard enough"
| cs702 wrote:
| Yes, capitalism on its own, without any kind of social and
| individual-rights safety net, is ruthlessly cruel. "The
| worst."
| 13of40 wrote:
| I'm struggling to interpret this. On the one hand it could be
| saying that from the perspective of a capitalist, we unfairly
| decline to assign the capitalist system blame when someone
| falls through the cracks. But the fundamental difference
| between the two systems is that the latter trades some amount
| of a person's autonomy for a better collective "deal". In
| other words, a communist society takes responsibility for the
| well-being of its citizens, so it also bears the
| responsibility when things go south and someone dies before
| their time. (Whether the system values that life to the same
| degree as the person and their family is a different
| question.)
| sschueller wrote:
| Capitalism wants you to think it's your fault but when you
| get sick from poisoned food and water but it's entirely the
| fault of the greedy capitalist that put profits over all.
| Sure that in true capitalism the bad actors go out of
| business but how many die before that happens?
|
| What do I care if people die because my actions today in 100
| years, I won't be around to have to face the consequences...
| /s
| andsoitis wrote:
| That's why you still need a system (government) that
| regulates the rules within which we play.
| friedman23 wrote:
| How is capitalism the issue here? Under what system can people
| without ability to contribute magically gain the ability to
| contribute?
|
| Capitalism means literally everything to everyone, it's absurd
| at this point.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| When the whole world is run by capital, your contributions
| are only measured by how they help capital. There are ways to
| contribute to society that don't pay the bills.
|
| And in any case, socialist countries don't outsource labor.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think "riff off Churchill" or "borrow from" would be helpful
| instead of "paraphrase," since the quote was originally about
| democracy, not capitalism (mostly wanted to note this because a
| couple people seem to have taken as a direct quote more or
| less).
| cs702 wrote:
| Good point. I edited my comment. Thank you!
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| That's a pretty useless quote. It entirely ignores the fact the
| economic systems all exist on a spectrum from extreme
| libertarianism to complete state ownership. The question has
| never been capitalism versus socialism, it's always been "how
| much regulation do we want as a society in exchange for a
| higher floor in our quality of life?" (and its follow up, did
| that regulation actually achieve its goals?)
| oneoff786 wrote:
| That framing seems poorly equipped to handle things like
| feudalism.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| Hm. I've always thought of feudalism as a form of state
| ownership wrt to property/means of production, though there
| are definitely additional considerations re: other rights;
| the state in that case being the feudal estate.
| tolciho wrote:
| Charles Boix in "Political Order and Inequality" posits
| that feudalism is a particular form of "the looters are
| in charge, because they can be" as contrasted with the
| more rare republic where there is more equality among the
| power-sharing producers. Republics can involve various
| shades of "republic at home, looters abroad" e.g. the
| Athens of Perilces. Republics are not very common nor
| large nor long-lived, at least up until the 18th century
| or so. Military technology and who can afford it is a big
| factor.
|
| More to the original topic, republics per Boix must
| prevent looting from the producers; this includes both
| external agents--"special military operations",
| barbarians on the frontier, foreign commercial agents who
| banana your republic, etc--and internal agents, who could
| be those welfare queens, men out of a job and certainly
| not looking (I mean why would you??), or plutocrats
| making out like bandits.
| dbingham wrote:
| It's not just a spectrum from Libertarian Free Market to
| State Socialism. There are many other forms of economic
| system.
|
| Capitalism isn't even synonymous with free markets.
| Capitalism just speaks to who gets to own the businesses
| (those with the capital). There are alternatives other than
| "the state". Worker cooperatives exist and are perfectly
| functional and successful. Which means one economic system
| that isn't often spoken about might be described as "Free
| Market Socialism", in which businesses are governed
| democratically by their workers in a free market. That system
| doesn't really fit on the above referenced spectrum.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I agree with everything you're saying. My reference to free
| market -> state socialism as a spectrum I think is still
| valid, but is only one axis upon which an economic system
| can be evaluated. Syndicalism, worker coops of course exist
| and are distinct from each other, but those both still
| exist on a spectrum from a free for all to state ownership.
| Admittedly I did conflate things a bit with my point about
| raising the floor on quality of life though.
| dbingham wrote:
| Sure, you could have a Free Market Socialist economy in
| which there are sectors of the economy managed by the
| state. And that there's a lot to tease out in terms of
| what level of the state is doing the management
| (municipal utilities vs a national health care system,
| for instance). This is also true of Capitalism.
|
| But it's not like Free Market Socialism sits in the
| middle of the spectrum from Capitalist Free Market to
| State Socialism. If anything it exists on a separate
| spectrum entirely where you're taken the variable
| "ownership of business" and flipped it to "workers". And
| then there's a different variable that forms the axis
| "how much of the economy is state managed".
|
| But even the question of "how much" is the wrong one
| here. A much more valuable question is "which sectors"
| are state managed and why. And, as referenced above, at
| what level of the state.
|
| And then there's the question of what kind of state we're
| dealing with (democratic or authoritarian) and how it's
| organized.
|
| I think these sorts of things are why I don't generally
| find spectrums helpful when it comes to economics,
| politics, and policy. Then tend to boil down complex
| systems to single features of those systems. But the
| impact of those features depends heavily on the other
| pieces in the system. It's a feature of complex systems
| that tweaking a single variable can have unexpected
| consequences because it's heavily impacted by the state
| of the other variables in the system.
|
| I think, in general, it's more useful to describe the
| systems as coherent objects with certain sets of
| features. Even trying a multi-dimensional map gets tricky
| fast.
| friedman23 wrote:
| > Worker cooperatives exist and are perfectly functional
| and successful
|
| Ha sure. Ok, which brand of socialism do you support and
| why? Socialism is a sad joke, socialists group under a
| banner that does not even exist in reality.
|
| Socialism: social control of the means of production
|
| What does that even mean in practice? Nobody knows. This is
| why socialists and communists always end up killing each
| other.
|
| //
|
| //
|
| //
|
| edit: because I'm getting rate limited because socialists
| like to flag posts they disagree with, my response to the
| post below:
|
| > Yes, worker cooperatives exist and are successful.
| Mondragon[1] is probably the biggest and most well known
|
| Small private corporations that are worker run under
| capitalism is a very unique definition of socialism.
| Socialism under the silly wikipedia definition you provided
| mandates social ownership of the means of production. For
| something to be considered socialist, property rights need
| to be abolished and "control" needs to be redistributed in
| some manner. Of course "control" is in quotes because under
| socialism nobody owns anything, "society" owns it. Workers
| don't really have control either because they can't choose
| to sell their control, that would obviously just be
| capitalism with extra steps.
|
| Nobody ever actually explains the details of any of this.
| The communist manifesto gets close because Marx clearly
| understood that to steal from people you need to kill them
| but he never actually prescribes the details of running the
| damn thing after killing all the property owners.
|
| > In other words, there are any number of ways social
| control can be constructed, and has been constructed. Some
| more successful than others
|
| In other words you did not contradict anything I said.
|
| > Social control through the state of large segments of the
| economy has been perfectly successful both in the US and in
| Europe.
|
| Perfectly successful under what definition? Neither the US
| or Europe have complete social control of the means of
| production and the little control they do exert is widely
| known to be extremely wasteful and inefficient.
|
| > Driven on a road? Congrats, you've benefited from social
| control of infrastructure
|
| The roads are terrible and filled with pot holes in San
| Francisco. The sidewalks are covered in shit. The storm
| drains did not function when a small storm passed the city.
| Please don't tell me they need more money to fix those
| problems.
| dbingham wrote:
| Ignorance and self satisfaction, always a great
| combination those. I debated whether to even respond, but
| decided I would for those reading along.
|
| > Ha sure.
|
| Yes, worker cooperatives exist and are successful.
| Mondragon[1] is probably the biggest and most well known.
| It's effectively the GE of worker cooperatives. It's
| based in Spain, functions across numerous verticals and
| has 80,000 worker owners and total annual revenue around
| 12 billion euros.
|
| One you might be more familiar with is Equal Exchange[2]
| - yes, the tea, coffee, and chocolate company. They have
| 126 employees, annual revenue of around $70 million, and
| national distribution.
|
| Those are just two examples, there are hundreds more. You
| can scoff all you want, but these companies exist and are
| successful. They show that companies owned and governed
| by their employees can operate perfectly efficiently and
| compete in the marketplace.
|
| > Ok, which brand of socialism do you support and why?
|
| It's interesting to note that nowhere in my comment did I
| imply support for socialism. I merely mentioned its
| existence as a system, in the context of a conversation
| about boiling down the world of economic systems to a
| spectrum. Interesting that the parent commenter found
| mere mention of its existence triggering.
|
| > Socialism: social control of the means of production >
| What does that even mean in practice? Nobody knows. This
| is why socialists and communists always end up killing
| each other.
|
| From wikipedia[3]:
|
| > Socialism is a left-wing[1] economic philosophy and
| movement encompassing a range of economic systems
| characterized by the dominance of social ownership[2] of
| the means of production[3][4] as opposed to private
| ownership.[5][6][4] As a term, it describes the economic,
| political and social theories and movements associated
| with the implementation of such systems.[7] Social
| ownership can be state/public, community, collective,
| cooperative, or employee.[8][9] While no single
| definition encapsulates the many types of socialism,[10]
| social ownership is the one common element.
|
| In other words, there are any number of ways social
| control can be constructed, and has been constructed.
| Some more successful than others.
|
| And no, socialists don't always end up killing each
| other. Social control through the state of large segments
| of the economy has been perfectly successful both in the
| US and in Europe.
|
| Driven on a road? Congrats, you've benefited from social
| control of infrastructure. Drunk water from your tap? If
| you're in the US, the water you drink from your tap and
| the sewer that carries away your waste is almost
| certainly owned by a municipal utility - again social
| control. In most of Europe, entire health care systems
| are run by the state through social control.
|
| In other words, state socialism - both municipal and
| national - has been shown to be perfectly successful when
| used in the sectors of the economy it's best fit for and
| on the scale most fitting.
|
| As I pointed out above, social control of individual
| enterprises (worker cooperatives) has also been shown to
| be perfectly effective.
|
| By all means, engage in the debate about what economic
| systems are the most effective and the least harmful. But
| if you're going to do it, do your homework first and
| leave the self satisfaction behind.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Exchange [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
| yucky wrote:
| > Worker cooperatives exist and are perfectly functional
| and successful. Which means one economic system that isn't
| often spoken about might be described as "Free Market
| Socialism", in which businesses are governed democratically
| by their workers in a free market.
|
| Yes, in capitalism. We have worker coops, there is
| absolutely nothing in capitalism that prevents or restricts
| them.
| dbingham wrote:
| Right, the fact that they are successful in Capitalism
| presents the possibility of building the entire economy
| around them. It would be a free market of independent
| businesses, but those businesses would be governed by the
| workers involved in them. Financing would happen through
| loans and crowdfunding, rather than equity. This economic
| system wouldn't be Capitalism, but it would be a Free
| Market. It would involve "social control of the means or
| production", in this case through the workers, so you
| could call it "Free Market Socialism", and it doesn't fit
| on the typical spectrum people imagine that goes from
| Free Market Capitalism to State Socialism.
| yucky wrote:
| What would be the advantage of removing sole
| proprietorships, partnerships etc though? If worker coops
| are already one existing type of business in a capitalist
| system, why would we limit ourselves to just that type
| and remove others?
| [deleted]
| cs702 wrote:
| I find it useful. My take from it is that capitalism
| _requires patches_ to work, because otherwise it becomes too
| horrible for too many: "The worst."
| afavour wrote:
| I'm very far from a red-pilled anti-feminist but I do think this
| is a hugely overlooked problem.
|
| Perhaps too much of an aside but I was lucky enough to be able to
| take an extended parental leave when my child was born, being a
| "stay at home dad" for the best part of a year. It was incredibly
| hard work, incredibly rewarding but also a real eye opener at how
| society still doesn't know what to do with a full-time parent
| that isn't a woman. Meetups are still called "New Mums Groups",
| you get shifty looks at playgrounds, playspaces etc., endless
| questions about _what it is that you do_. Even the people trying
| to be positive end up being somewhat patronising ( "oh are you
| babysitting today!").
|
| Anyway, point is, true equality would mean that it's absolutely
| fine for a man to stay at home and raise a family while the woman
| is the breadwinner. We're not there and that hurts both men and
| women.
| dbingham wrote:
| Yeah, this is real. Men still tend to get erased from the
| parental equation to a large degree. And this doesn't just
| affect stay at home dads. Much of the dialog around pregnancy
| loss and childloss seems to forget that there's often a father
| involved as well, and that the loss impacts both parents. When
| we lost our first child to a still birth, people would often
| focus entirely on my wife when offering sympathy and comfort.
| The assumption was often that I was supporting her through the
| loss, not that I was also someone experiencing the loss who
| needed support. This is problematic on multiple levels, but on
| a very basic level it just made it that much harder for me to
| grieve the loss and made me feel erased.
|
| That said, I don't think it makes sense to connect the issues
| surrounding the ways in which men and women are still gendered
| in society, our resulting assumptions, and the harm they do
| with this particular problem. Because I think this particular
| problem affects both men and women, though with perhaps some
| differences in affect that are worth calling out because of the
| aforementioned gender roles and assumptions.
|
| I haven't read the referenced book, but I would separate this
| problem from the one described in the book. I think we're
| reinforcing those stereotypes when we frame the general problem
| of "people not having work" as being specific to men.
|
| Even beyond that, I would challenge the whole notion that
| people need to be included in the workforce. I think we're
| framing the problem wrong when we look at it that way. People
| need to be economically secure, they need to have deep
| connection to communities, and they need to have something
| meaningful to do with their time. Right now, many people only
| get those things from work. This is true of both men and women,
| plenty of women talk about loss of identity and struggle
| finding community when they become stay at home parents.
|
| So I would argue that the book is taking the wrong framing -
| both in focusing on men and in taking the wrong assumptions, or
| perhaps, the wrong ordering.
| garettmd wrote:
| I remember during most interactions with healthcare providers
| during my wife and I's pregnancies, hardly anyone ever talked
| to me, sometimes never even looking at me. I get it, I'm not
| the one carrying a baby to term, but I would have thought the
| fact that I was showing up to all these appointments, staying
| by my wife's side, taking part in decisions, and supporting
| her and the baby through the whole thing would have granted
| me a bit of acknowledgement of my role and investment in the
| whole process. But many times people acted like I wasn't even
| there.
|
| I can't imagine having to deal with that dynamic with what
| you went through, and am so sorry for your loss.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i know exactly what you mean. I remember an early doc
| appointment with my wife she was pregnant with our first
| child, the doctor was going over things with my wife like
| what she should be doing and what she should not be doing
| etc. I asked the doctor what i should be doing and what i
| should look out for, she just glared at me and said "you've
| done enough." implying i was only there to get my wife
| pregnant. That was 13 years ago but i still remember it
| vividly.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Medically speaking, what did you expect a pregnancy
| doctor to tell someone who wasn't pregnant?
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Presumably they know what things that the patient would
| benefit from external help with. That kind of advice is
| pretty standard in the medical world.
| watwut wrote:
| I mean, what you think doctor should tell you about what
| you should be doing while wife is pregnant? If the wife
| wants your support, I would expect the wife to tell you
| what kind of support she needs. She does not need doctor
| to be her speaker, presumably. And doctor giving you
| instructions on what she should be doing in pregnancy
| would be patronizing toward wife.
| zdragnar wrote:
| For a first pregnancy, the doctor shouldn't make any
| assumptions about what the couple knows and doesn't know.
|
| Even if the advice was "Let her listen to her body, she
| will know when she needs help and support" would go a
| long way- both in assuaging the father's concern, and in
| reinforcing that it is both acceptable and encouraged to
| ask for help as the mother's body changes.
| unholythree wrote:
| If we take the poster with good faith we can assume he
| genuinely thought the doctor might know some useful ways
| he could be of help that neither he nor his wife knew.
| Even if there wasn't (which seems unlikely to me) I feel
| like good bedside manner should extend to a patient's
| loved ones when possible. Simply addressing him politely
| to say "Just be available and help as you can." would
| have be a far kinder way to blow off an anxious person.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I cannot relate to yours or garettmd's experience, on
| both east or west coast of USA. There was lots of
| information for me (the dad) by the OB, and during the
| class about birthing we took for our first. This was in
| last 5 years.
| williamdclt wrote:
| For the record, I agree with you and your argument is aligned
| with everybody I know who consider themselves feminists. It's
| part of what's meant by the now-memesque "patriarchy hurts
| everyone".
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I had this exact experience as well. Returning to my career was
| strange. People were half glad to hear that I prioritized my
| family, and half disconcerted that I'd set my career aside. Our
| culture wants men to be extremely productive and committed to
| wealth generation.
|
| Women are increasingly treated this way too though. Women were
| shunned for choosing their career. Now if they choose family,
| their career still suffers. How can they win? At least men have
| a clear expectation from society. In many parts of North
| America, it's increasingly true that women don't have the
| freedom not to work.
|
| We have a serious problem here. It doesn't strike me as a
| problem of gender roles so much as cultural priorities (perhaps
| at the core of this is the pursuit of wealth and growth over
| focusing on family). I was as capable as my wife in caring for
| our son so that wasn't a problem. The problem was that anyone
| ever saw something wrong with that picture, I suppose.
|
| We also took an enormous financial hit in order for her to
| continue working, because there was a very real concern than
| her career would suffer beyond repair if she took off, but I'd
| presumably be able to return fairly easily with my decade or so
| of software development experience. This happily turned out to
| be true. But still, what a strange situation to have to
| navigate.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > People were half glad to hear that I prioritized my family,
| and half disconcerted that I'd set my career aside.
|
| People don't really know what to do when you demonstrate you
| don't have total devotion to an organization. Even if it's
| for a "higher calling," in the case of care, it still feels
| like they see it as not fully devoted. There's also this
| weird undercurrent that your career must be the focal point
| at all times in your life and that you must be constantly
| growing and fulfilled in it.
|
| > In many parts of North America, it's increasingly true that
| women don't have the freedom not to work.
|
| Yeah, this is really gross. And the norms are pushed by those
| who made the choice to not have a family, or to
| outsource/ignore theirs. In effect, it becomes a game of,
| "who can sacrifice the most to capitalism?" And games like
| that favor those who are broken/not smart enough to throw
| more of their lives away.
|
| > Our culture wants men to be extremely productive and
| committed to wealth generation.
|
| This drive objectifies men, and men are smart enough to
| realize they can't fight it, so they instead try to channel
| it. But it's not at all the same as an intrinsic motivation,
| it's an extrinsic threat of sorts. It dehumanizes men to see
| themselves primarily as providers rather than people. This
| makes it easier to prioritize their career at the expense of
| other things.
| beyond_based wrote:
| [flagged]
| freshpots wrote:
| Is this a serious reply? Do you believe what you said here?
| beyond_based wrote:
| Entirely serious. It's short to keep it to a point and so
| some nuance is missing, but there you have it.
|
| I don't mind the flagging - I don't expect anything more
| from people unwilling to take a look at things
| objectively.
| freshpots wrote:
| I didn't flag it, but I am not even remotely surprised
| that it was.
|
| You have an incredibly toxic, misogynistic, and incel-
| based worldview that is very unhealthy. Virtually every
| ill you stated was the fault of women, even consumerism
| and violence. How many women were mass shooters again?
| Started wars?
|
| It is frightening that you really think that way, and I
| worry for those in your orbit after hearing that you are
| entirely serious.
| beyond_based wrote:
| You have to look at it from a certain perspective. It's
| not just misogynist. It's also misandrist. I don't just
| blame women, I blame the men for failing to uphold
| society to a higher moral standard and letting petty
| things like envy, greed, and selfishness take over them,
| at which point a woman can easily further manipulate them
| to do their bidding. Our increasingly decadent society
| wouldn't be so if men realized they hold the keys to
| building and maintaining prosperous societies, and can
| refuse the corrupt inclinations of women hellbent on
| ruining it all for materialistic, personal gain. And that
| of other men who desire power and money and materialistic
| things for the sad approval of women.
|
| The reason why I don't mind the flagging and the
| downvotes is because I don't expect a single individual
| on HN to publicly agree with me. Anecdotally and
| privately, women and men have both echoed these things to
| me in a slightly more nuanced, forgiving tone. My take is
| more brazen, and unpalatable for this site and many
| others.
|
| Personally, I don't subscribe to the manosphere, MRAs,
| MGTOWs, the Andrew Tates or anyone inbetween. These are
| all symptoms of a societal illness.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Women were shunned for choosing their career
|
| in my experience raising two kids women are much more looked
| down on for choosing family over career. My wife wanted to be
| a stay-at-home mom but many of her friends, and especially
| online, thought she was "too good for that" with some even
| being hostile to the very concept. If a woman has an
| established career and then chooses to be a stay-at-home mom
| she's likely to pay a heavy price socially.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| > women are much more looked down on for choosing family
| over career
|
| I don't doubt this at all, at least in certain circles. I
| suspect it's not limited to small circles, either. My
| wife's office culture is somewhat accepting of women
| leaving to raise families, but many of the women in
| management have totally forgone that option or have/had
| their kids in daycare very, very early on. I'm certainly
| not judging as I have no idea why, or what would
| necessitate that, or if it's necessarily good or bad. It's
| too complicated to judge in any meaningful way.
|
| It certainly generates expectations and pressures though,
| and they're very harmful to people like my wife. Many of
| the women my wife has talked to feel distinctly anxious
| about managing their family life with women like that in
| charge. Further, many of the men in management are quite
| old and tend to think of leaving to raise a family as a
| distinct lack of commitment to the work - something which
| gets you excluded from "serious" work like field
| deployments where high reliability and commitment is
| considered crucial to the role.
|
| Many women are already excluded from much of field work
| because some older dudes think women aren't strong enough
| to make the work safe. For example, under-water
| installations of equipment are almost exclusively performed
| by men because the men running the deployments believe a
| woman would be incapable of supporting a man if his safety
| was compromised. As such, the women on the team who want to
| progress need to fully commit in all other possible ways in
| order to appear viable. Leaving to have kids is essentially
| 3 strikes at once against your reputation in field work.
|
| It's tough to watch.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| It's literally insane that people would consider working at
| a company to be more important than someone raising their
| own children instead of paying someone else to raise them
| for most of the day. I'm thankful the mother of my children
| could stay at home with them while I worked.
| [deleted]
| Ancalagon wrote:
| In the US I think, for me personally, its less about the
| work/career itself being more important than raising the
| kids (because it's definitely not, don't get me wrong).
| Moreso is the issue of financial opportunity and
| stability. Much of society and decent living standards
| today _demands_ dual income households. Permantently
| risking half of that dual income is terrifying.
| gedy wrote:
| Having been through this, I think some of it is a little
| jealousy/sour grapes from the 2 income couples who _have_
| to work to pay for all their stuff.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| And if she had picked career, she would also have payed
| that price.
|
| Men only pay it when choosing stay-at-home dads.
| rapind wrote:
| Similar experience for us. Wife was basically surrounded by
| nannies and there wasn't a ton of community support, at
| least not nearly as much as there used to be for my mother.
| I assume this varies based on location (not all communities
| can afford nannies).
|
| It's just economics IMO. It's mostly double income now.
| nineplay wrote:
| It's a real problem that goes further than feminism. There are
| large numbers of men and women who truly believe that childcare
| is more naturally a woman's domain and see men getting involved
| as a kind of 'woke-ism' - men aren't raising children because
| they want to, they are raising children because they think it
| gives them leftist brownie points.
|
| I've seen this attitude on HN. I think a lot of posters like to
| see themselves in a man-of-the-house role and wouldn't want to
| give up their position as breadwinners.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I get the "are you babysitting today" whenever I take the kids
| to the grocery store, but only from women. If men say anything,
| it's usually a joke about a vasectomy. I find both off-putting,
| but the "babysitting" thing really is odd. It's Saturday! We're
| buying groceries!
| chasd00 wrote:
| yeah i get the "babysitting?" thing a lot which is awkward. I
| never really know how to respond, like "no, just doing
| regular stuff as usual.."
|
| I know this thread is about a different topic but i went to a
| dad's lunch at my oldest's middle school. The school put on
| this presentation about how to be a good dad, it was very
| humiliating. Like it wasn't even about being a good parent it
| was just about how not to be a terrible parent, interviews
| where the guy says things like "i'm a good dad because i'm
| sitting at the table when my kid is eating dinner" or "i'm a
| good dad because i don't make jokes about my daughter's
| weight" etc. I was embarrassed to be sitting there and just
| turned around and talked, and had lunch, with my son which
| was why i was there to begin with.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Being out with three young children, as a man, is the only time
| in my life I've had people go as far out of their way to hold a
| door for me as men commonly do for women (with or without
| kids). That was interesting. First time I was like "wtf is
| happening?" before it dawned on me. That only lasted a year or
| two, a window in which I had enough in the right age range to
| trigger that behavior, I guess. Wasn't because I had a
| stroller, since I usually didn't, and wasn't because my hands
| were literally full, since I usually had at least one free.
| Like, nobody goes _that_ far out of their way if I 'm just
| carrying a couple drinks or something. It was truly exactly how
| we (guys) behave when holding the door for women. Neat
| experience to see the other side of that, I guess.
|
| I got a lot more comments about it than my wife did. I'd get
| several of the "wow, you must be busy!" sorts of remarks every
| time I was out. She'd get the occasional one, but nothing like
| me. Different expectations, I guess.
|
| Never felt shunned or treated with suspicion at parks. Worried
| I might, but it was never an issue. I tend to dress pretty
| well, though, by the standards of my area, which probably
| helps.
| rapind wrote:
| > society still doesn't know what to do with a full-time parent
| that isn't a woman
|
| True, but I think there's an issue with expectations. Biases
| don't change overnight. It sucks, but everyone could use a
| little pragmatism IMO.
|
| TBH I'm not sure this bias will change very much anyways, as I
| don't think the math supports it. If anything we've moved to
| double income, not to a role reversal.
| licebmi__at__ wrote:
| I'm still surprised that people are aware of the drawbacks that
| a patriarcal society with strong gender division where those
| who don't conform are usually punished, and somehow identify
| with "redpilled antifeminists" who want a traditional society
| and attack the group which historically has been criticizing
| and questioning gendered roles.
| javajosh wrote:
| The fact that you need to apologize and explain why you care
| about issues that might affect men is telling in and of itself.
|
| The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to
| dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize
| this fact. I'm a pretty hardcore liberal and I I'm totally
| astonished on a daily basis at the hate in vitriol directed at
| men that go without comment, let alone castigation that it
| deserves.
|
| As for the rest of your post, absolutely. I love being a dad
| and it's a shame that our society doesn't seem to care much
| about father's apart from being a provider of money. Every man
| should be aware that if things go south and their marriage that
| their children could be taken away from them and they will be
| vilified if they try to get them back. You will not get
| sympathy from your friends or family or from the public at
| large. He will be fighting the tide.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| I had the same reaction to his first sentence. Why do you
| need to say that?
| afavour wrote:
| > The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to
| dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to
| recognize this fact.
|
| I'm conflicted about that. Not denying that what you've said
| is true but I specifically chose the term "red pilled"
| because there are huge toxic (predominantly online)
| communities that are openly misogynistic. e.g. in theory I'd
| like and participate in the "men's rights" subreddit, in
| reality it's a pit of toxicity. Some of the frustration there
| is justified (family law definitely seems biased against
| fathers) but the result is not positive.
|
| I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men
| being accepted as stay at home parents comes _from men_.
| Swizec wrote:
| > I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men
| being accepted as stay at home parents comes _from men_.
|
| Funnily there's also research showing that a lot of gender
| discrimination towards women comes _from women_.
|
| Perhaps as a social species we all try to keep _our_ group
| from straying too far from core values.
| LightHugger wrote:
| Just like how a lot of the societal pressure causing womens
| issues comes from women. There's no difference between
| genders in this aspect. Though for some reason, i see some
| feminists trying to blame men exclusively for men's
| problems. I have never seen a man blaming women for all
| women's issues the same way.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| [flagged]
| ponow wrote:
| Bull.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Do you have factual information backing your statement? I
| have, to take the two dominant Christian fundamentalist
| interpretations:
|
| - for Mormonism: "Numerous Prophets have instructed that
| a Mormon woman's place is in the home. Only Federal anti-
| discrimination laws, which the Church vigorously opposed,
| and the threat of Federal prosecution, forced the Church
| in 1970s to stop terminating female employment upon the
| birth of her first child. While no longer as clearly
| directed from the pulpit, a women's place in Mormonism
| remains very different than that of a man. Even into the
| 1980s, President Kimball reiterated that "...a mother's
| place is in the home!" The idea of complementary spheres
| for men and women rules Mormon doctrine and is the answer
| to almost every question about the lack of power for
| women in the church." [1]
|
| - for the Southern Baptists: "A wife is to submit herself
| graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even
| as the church willingly submits to the headship of
| Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband
| and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility
| to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in
| managing the household and nurturing the next
| generation." [2]
|
| This is what these religions teach about women, there is
| no denying or whitewashing that.
|
| [1] https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-
| culture/wo...
|
| [2] https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/report-of-the-baptist-
| faith-and-...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| There's a lot of religious things written down that many
| people don't really follow in practice. Are there various
| religious views that don't view women as I would like to?
| Sure. But it's quite a leap to "literally brainwashed
| from birth that women's purpose is to be docile
| broodmares".
|
| And quite a few religious women _want_ to be house-
| makers. Do I personally think that 's a rather outdated
| view of what it means to be a woman? Sure. But it's not
| my life to live and the women's choice. Let's assign some
| agency to these women and allow them to live their lives
| as _they_ see fit before claiming they 're "brainwashed".
| "Being able to make my own choices just like men" is kind
| of the point of feminism, no?
| eropple wrote:
| [flagged]
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| In my experience, what you're saying is complete
| nonsense. Feminists spend much more time lying about
| men's issues than they do attempting to meaningfully
| rectify them.
|
| Even a simple statement like "boys are falling behind in
| education" can get you implicated as a misogynist. Here's
| a lovely pull-quote from a recent report, The State of UK
| Boys:
|
| > There's often an underlying assumption that boys should
| be attaining higher than girls, and if girls attain
| higher, then that's a problem. - Louise Archer
|
| I could give examples on a range of issues: from suicide,
| discrimination in the court system, domestic
| violence/sexual assault. There's a set of knee-jerk
| responses (e.g. men only commit suicide more due to
| firearms/violence) that simply aren't true (men also die
| more from intentional overdoses). For each and every
| thing MRAs complain about, there's a knee-jerk, half-
| baked, feminist reaction.
| afavour wrote:
| > Feminists spend much more time lying about men's issues
|
| Not sure if there's a name for this fallacy but you see
| it all the time: attributing the opinions/actions of an
| extreme minority to a whole group. No denying there are
| some feminists about there spending all their time lying
| about men's issues but feminists as a whole don't.
|
| Same applies almost every time someone says "leftists",
| "the right wing" etc etc etc
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| To be clear, you believe the Global Boyhood Initiative,
| who published that report, are an extreme minority, and
| are accusing me of a fallacy because of that?
|
| Fascinating. This is exactly the sort of half-baked lie I
| was talking about.
|
| Edit: At some point, rubber has to meet road. Either you
| accept that boys falling behind in education is an issue,
| or you don't. If you don't accept it as an issue, then
| you cannot simultaneously claim to be the ones solving
| it.
|
| Some of those solutions are not easy. It's been known for
| decades that boys get lower grades in school, and not
| always for the quality of their work. In the UK we saw
| girls suddenly shoot past boys in maths results when
| exams were cancelled for COVID and teacher-assessed
| grades were given instead. What's the feminist solution
| for that?
| afavour wrote:
| You added that after I replied.
|
| To be honest your entire tone here is an example of
| really unproductive online conversation, I don't have any
| interest in participating in it (this whole thread is
| dead because the "purple haired feminist" parent comment
| was flagged anyway)
| broken_mind wrote:
| Of course you don't.
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| [flagged]
| woodruffw wrote:
| It's not appropriate or kind to expect people to read
| your mind on an online forum.
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| I didn't. I gave a concrete example of the phenomenon I
| was already talking about. If he wants to give concrete
| examples of what he's talking about, he's more than
| welcome to do the same, but he can't, because it's a lie.
|
| The conversation would have ended up the same way had I
| seen his reply before editing the example in - I'd just
| have given it afterwards, and he'd still have no answer.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| What do you call the fallacy, which I have seen
| increasingly online, where someone defines something as
| being an "extreme minority" when it actually isn't, and
| then claims the other person committed a fallacy because
| of that?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| OP appears to be committing the "motte and bailey"
| (fallacy?) himself.
| subradios wrote:
| This is true and false, the "blue haired feminist" crowd
| tends to have the most sympathy on this topic, but has
| solutions or ideas that treat men as broken women - which
| is a major problem that most men deal with all the time.
|
| Even in the schoolyard in a progressive area in the 90s,
| most teachers and social workers were women and literally
| didn't get it.
|
| It's like, the exact definition of what I would call
| "implicit bias".
| thrownawaydad wrote:
| "but the result [of men's rights subreddits/etc] is not
| positive"
|
| For me, it was positive. When you're going through personal
| hell, there's a lot to be said for having others in the
| situation to commiserate with. Do many of the guys there
| sound like jerks? Sure. Maybe they even are--or maybe
| they're just blowing off steam in the face of a horrible
| situation. I think it's often the latter.
|
| One side effect of carefully banning forums that (truly)
| support men is that we're left with an environment where
| most places that might seem to be "help" are actually
| dedicated to gas-lighting and castigating men in this
| situation. This has created a vacuum where some rather
| dubious looking options are actually the best available.
|
| May the gods bless my MRAs and the guys at my local dive
| bar. Without them, I wouldn't have made it.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> in theory I'd like and participate in the "men's rights"
| subreddit, in reality it's a pit of toxicity._
|
| Indeed, but so is the equivalent feminism subreddit (try
| "r/askafeminist" for example). And yet "women's rights"
| don't have the same stigma as "men's rights". What explains
| this asymmetry? Why is it some movements get defined by
| their extremists, and others don't?
|
| _> : a lot of this societal pressure against men being
| accepted as stay at home parents comes from men._
|
| Really? Maybe its the company I keep, but I've never felt
| judged by other men when I share I love caring for my kids.
| If anything, I get a lot of smiles and nods irl and
| supportive comments online. If someone like Andrew Tate
| gave me shade about it, I'd take it as a reason to pity
| him. It takes a special kind of asshole to throw shade on a
| father who loves his kids, and who's kids love him.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| afavour wrote:
| I'd argue that women's rights, from Suffragettes on, has
| a widely documented history of... reasonableness, for
| want of a better term. Men's Rights doesn't yet. It's a
| much newer movement, things may change. But right now I'm
| struggling to think of the sane, sensible organisations
| out there promoting men's rights.
|
| I'd also question whether /r/askfeminists is "the
| equivalent". It has 100k followers, /r/twoxchromosomes
| has 13 million followers and from a brief read through
| doesn't feel like a particularly toxic place, despite
| discussing feminism/women's issues. Maybe the key here is
| that women's issues are mainlined into general
| conversation while men's issues are sidelined to their
| own area where toxicity breeds.
| sonjat wrote:
| As a woman who finally gave up on twoxchromosomes because
| I felt is was a bit too toxic I somewhat disagree on it
| not being toxic. It seemed determined to paint women as
| perpetual victims of toxic men. Ironically it also seemed
| determined to paint men as bad if they didn't protect
| women (yes, this is an exaggeration. No, not all and
| perhaps not even most posts/comments were this way. It
| just happened enough and it made me angry enough that I
| decided avoiding that subreddit was best for my mental
| health)
| wpietri wrote:
| Exactly. I think there's a pretty simple answer to this
| question:
|
| > What explains this asymmetry?
|
| What explains it is an asymmetrical history: millennia of
| oppression of women, often violently enforced. E.g., if
| you read the Iliad, it's basically a who-stole-my-woman
| story inside a who-stole-my-woman story; at the time,
| women were pretty close to property with opinions. An
| easy way to see the through-line to today is the history
| of "marital rape", where society did not see married
| women as being able to choose whether or not to have sex
| with their husbands. That was always the case under
| English common law, and was not fully outlawed in the US
| until 1992:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect
|
| We may have removed most of the gross legal
| infrastructure of patriarchy, but the cultural aspects
| are still only slowly dissolving. We have generations
| more work to do there. The reasonableness you mention is
| exactly what amazes me. Think of all the men who haven't
| been murdered as the slept.
|
| And I think this history also explains why the Men's
| Rights movement is so bonkers. A shift toward fairness is
| a loss for the people who used to benefit from the
| unfairness. This has left a lot of men upset that they
| aren't getting what they feel they are due. Some handle
| that well, but the ones who don't are going to fight to
| turn the clock back. And as Corey Robin points, out,
| reactionaries like that often cloak their efforts in the
| progressive language of the day. So we end up with "men's
| rights" as a bizzaro-world mirror of women's rights. And
| one of their heroes, one with 4 million Twitter
| followers, getting arrested as an abusive sex trafficker
| and international pimp.
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| Kindly visit the Men's Rights Movement wiki page:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement
|
| Go through the issues in the second section and tell me
| what Andrew Tate's position was on any of them.
|
| Spoiler alert: you can't. Tate was not an MRA, he was a
| pickup artist.
|
| Male feminists also tend to find themselves in trouble,
| by the way. Michael Kimmel used to play the same game of
| lumping legitimate issues (suicide/education/family
| courts) in with incels upset they can't get laid. He had
| to retire after getting #MeToo'd, heh. Tiresome and
| predictable. Perhaps I should add a Google Alert for your
| name ;)
| wpietri wrote:
| Is this just a nitpick on Tate in particular? That was a
| side note, and one I don't think you quite got, as I
| didn't say he was an MRA, just popular among the same
| sort of people. Which I think you'd have a hard time
| denying.
|
| And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't
| have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms
| men. They do! My point is that for an awful lot of
| people, those points are a cloak for a deeply emotional
| backlash against feminism. So I'm less interested in what
| they claim motivates them than what we can learn from
| what they actually spend their time and attention on.
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| > just popular among the same sort of people. Which I
| think you'd have a hard time denying.
|
| I'd have a hard time denying it because I have no idea
| what that "sort of person" is even supposed to be. Is it
| just people you don't like?
|
| I went down the Men's Rights rabbithole because I got
| sexually assaulted by a woman as a teenager and didn't
| know how to deal with it. They were the only ones talking
| about it, and I assure you nobody involved had any
| interest in relegalizing marital rape.
|
| Rather, that seems to be a bit of DARVO given that
| feminist thinkers like Mary Koss would see happened to me
| reduced to "unwanted contact".
|
| > And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't
| have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms
| men.
|
| "Patriarchy hurts men too" is empty handwaving, not a
| substitute for genuine solutions.
|
| Given your little quip - "think of all the men who
| haven't been murdered as they slept" - I doubt you'll be
| interested in providing help for men (or boys, as it was)
| like myself. If that's the feminist line, then it is
| clear that feminism, to put it mildly, isn't for me.
| wpietri wrote:
| > that "sort of person"
|
| I have a hard time believing you can't figure this out on
| your own, but briefly, the manosphere.
|
| As to the rest, I am truly sorry to hear about your
| sexual assault. But I'm also sorry that you, like so many
| of the "sort of person" I'm talking about, have turned a
| bad experience into a reason to bash feminism rather than
| a reason to fight things like rape culture. If even with
| your experience can't figure out why serial rape victims
| might murder their attackers and why somebody might be
| surprised that doesn't happen more, then I'm not sure how
| I can clear up my point for you.
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| > the manosphere
|
| You're talking in circles here - you brought up what
| "sort of person" is in the manosphere, and your answer is
| people in the manosphere. Not exactly insightful.
|
| The so-called manosphere is a wildly diverse grouping
| with different experiences, complaints, and conclusions.
| Lumping in Andrew Tate with Men's Rights is just
| nonsensical.
|
| > bash feminism rather than a reason to fight things like
| rape culture
|
| I can do both and it's served me very well. When
| feminists like Koss et al. downplay female abuse of boys,
| that _is_ rape culture and I 'll fight them all day long.
|
| > If even with your experience can't figure out why
| serial rape victims might murder their attackers
|
| This is a schizophrenic strawman. I understand that
| _perfectly_ and I 've said nothing that could lead
| someone of sound mind to think otherwise.
|
| I've been called a feminist in real life (much to my
| annoyance) in arguments about abortion, or about
| behaviour online or at work. There's nothing about Men's
| Rights that requires taking legitimate rights away from
| women. I can be a good person without identifying as my
| own enemy.
|
| If you were actually sorry about my experience, you might
| like to prove it by not making up lies, cut from whole
| cloth, about me and men like me, in what looks like a
| desperate attempt to paint yourself as One of the Good
| Ones.
| wpietri wrote:
| I obviously disagree in almost every particular here, but
| we seem to be mainly talking past one another, so I'm
| tapping out here. I am truly sorry about your experience
| though, just as I am for everyone who has been sexually
| assaulted.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I will disagree with the "reasonableness" with the
| Suffragettes. They weren't perfect. Two instances seemed
| unreasonable. First, the bombings. If you don't know
| about the bombings associated with the Suffragettes well
| ...
|
| The second being the involvement with that White Feather
| movement. As much as people say "You don't have to put
| men down to elevate women," that was a prime case of it.
|
| And after that we've still got the "boys are stupid,
| throw rocks at them" T-shirts, the "male tears" cups, the
| "#killallmen" hashtag, and so on.
|
| Maybe all of this just escaped you, I dunno, but now that
| you have it in front of you, please don't ignore it.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| There have been plenty of nutjob feminists out there;
| "feminism" is very broad and there is a wide range of
| variety in viewpoints. Many of these viewpoints are
| reasonable. Others ... not so much.
|
| A few years ago I tried to bring up this issue in the
| comments section of a paywalled (and fairly small)
| magazine where I voiced the view that we should move a
| little bit "beyond feminism" and look more towards gender
| relations and have a more "holistic" view on things,
| rather than look only from a female perspective. Not that
| there's anything wrong with feminism, but you know, it's
| just one side.
|
| In the next article my comment was cited to "demonstrate"
| that men still had a lot to learn with some disparaging
| and condescending text.
|
| Not the first nor last time I've seen something similar
| happen. Yes, you can have the occasional constructive
| discourse on a small scale (such as HN), but bringing the
| topic to the forefront in the mainstream is difficult,
| especially as a man. When you do succeed it captures
| attention for 5 minutes and then we move on and nothing
| really happens.
|
| So ... I gave up. I don't really talk about it much. Why
| bother? It's like screaming in a void.
|
| So what are we left with then if many of the reasonable
| people have given up? The nutjobs. And now it's _even
| harder_ to bring these issues up.
| kneebonian wrote:
| part of the problem with '/r/twoxchromosomes' is that no
| moderator of the sub actually has two x chromosomes,
| which introduces a new and separate dynamic.
| friedman23 wrote:
| I never knew that, absolutely hilarious. I find that
| internet forums are just terrible all around. Moderating
| is an extremely important but thankless and unpaid job.
| So (with rare exception) the only people that do it are
| completely irrational and inept power hungry people with
| too much time on their hands. In the case of HN the
| reason moderation is so good is because Dang is actually
| paid from what I understand. But even on HN the mouth
| breathers learn the ins and outs of the system and know
| how to abuse flagging among other things.
| monksy wrote:
| > /r/twoxchromosomes
|
| That is a sub in which nearly every post that rises to
| this a "my partner/male-acquaintence did x I'm shocked"
| and it's nothing but a pile on about how "bad men are".
| Even if not every post is male critical a lot of the
| positives seem to be shaping on behavior. It hasn't
| always been radicalized like that, nor has it been
| focused on that type of content.
| TylerE wrote:
| Is it really that hard to understand the difference
| between a historically oppressed minority and the
| minority that historically was doing the oppressing?
| tonightstoast wrote:
| > the minority that historically was doing the
| oppressing?
|
| Is it so difficult to realize those oppressors are dead
| and these men weren't alive in 1920?
| TylerE wrote:
| If only they were. Or did you forget males taking away
| female rights just last year?
| ZGDUwpqEWpUZ wrote:
| https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-
| gap-p...
| tonightstoast wrote:
| Please check out the Vox article linked by the other
| poster. I want to preface with saying I'm pro choice. But
| are you really going to argue the 5 men and 1 woman that
| vote to affirm Dobbs is representative of the nation?
| People (including me) have been complaining about how the
| court hasn't had a majority blue nomination since the 50s
| even though the political pendulum has swung multiple
| times since then. And grouping every male into the ruling
| .01% is not a good faith argument.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Who killed all the gamergaters?
| Beltalowda wrote:
| These are like a few thousands people, maybe in the tens
| of thousands _at the most_. There are about 1 billion men
| on the internet, give or take.
|
| The internet is very good at amplifying a bunch of very
| motivated nutjobs. I can, if I wanted to, send death
| threats and all sorts of horrible things to hundreds of
| people before breakfast. And tomorrow again. And the day
| after that. And I'm just one guy with a crummy laptop.
|
| Go out on the street and I'll bet you that most men
| haven't even heard of gamergate, or have only vaguely
| heard of it and don't really know much details. And those
| that do at least roughly know what it was all about will
| think they're a bunch of idiots.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The point is: men with this grievance are doing it to
| themselves. If you think Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate
| are going to break you out of "the matrix" and restore
| the proper roles of men, that's only going to make you
| hideous to normal people, especially women, even if you
| 'roided up and got a Joe Rogan neck size. There is no
| shortage of these men that filled the ranks of
| gamergaters, the various "patriot" brownshirt gangs, etc.
| They are very much among us and they are horrible
| misogynists. Pretending they died off three generations
| ago is unproductive and nutty.
|
| It's not being amplified without effect, recruitment, and
| numbers. Jordan Peterson would not be a podcast star
| without a large population of followers. Those followers
| are being misled into misogyny and related "red pill"
| ideologies.
| friedman23 wrote:
| Ok, so when do historical victims stop being victims and
| stop being treated like victims?
| Mezzie wrote:
| This is a fascinating question because we're in a
| transitionary period.
|
| Like my mother, who is very much alive and still working,
| was 100% a victim of sexism: She was alive in and grew up
| in times where she couldn't have a credit card or
| mortgage, when jobs were sex-segregated, and wasn't
| allowed to go to college to be an engineer like her
| brother because she was raised to stay at home and pop
| out babies. (She bailed at 15 instead of conforming.)
|
| On the other hand, that's very different from the
| experience of a woman born in 2003. They're both adult
| parts of society.
|
| And that's without getting into the experiences of women
| in their 30s and 40s which, depending on where they grew
| up, could go either way.
| luckylion wrote:
| What makes that super weird for me is the inheritance by
| gender.
|
| I get reparations, e.g. for enslaving people. In its
| simplest form, you break it down to "should have been
| paid instead" and make that a claim that can be
| inherited. There are arguments about collective guilt and
| claims against collectives etc, but that's a second step.
|
| But women aren't an ethnic group. Children are pretty
| much a 50/50 split between male and female. Those claims
| (for reparations, and extra privileges because other
| women elsewhere in a different century were
| disadvantaged) are very different, and make no sense to
| me, at all.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I agree that reparations make no sense for sex based
| oppression historically. The only/main type of
| reparations I might agree with is something like extra
| social security for women of an age where they were
| legally prevented from earning more. (You can't turn
| around and tell a 65+ year old woman she should have
| chosen a higher earning career if you didn't let her). Or
| providing state support to child brides (I'd also support
| this for minor males married to of age females).
|
| Then again, I think reparations in general are a
| _terrible_ idea.
|
| It's just interesting because our society is moving so
| quickly that you have some people alive who genuinely
| were personally oppressed and some in the same group who
| weren't.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That is a really interesting perspective.
|
| Even if you buy into intergenerational guilt and benefit
| for groups, each new generation (without exception) must
| come from both groups.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| This is a classic problem of binary thinking, identity
| politics, and crab bucket mentality.
|
| Any progress and help will always be met with resistance
| if you lump huge swaths of the population together and
| view it as a competition.
| xg15 wrote:
| Depends what the goals of the movements are. Most
| feminist discussions I've seen acknowledge that "the
| partriarchy hurts men as well". So highlighting issues
| like being discriminated as a male single parent or stay-
| at-home dad would probably find support in feminist
| spaces: Dealing with them shares the same vision as
| feminism does, just from the perspective of men instead
| of women.
|
| In contrast, many spaces that are branded as "men's
| rights" today seem to go for an entire different vision
| of society, which often looks like a cartoon version of
| the 50s (if consistent at all). If lots of men find
| themselves lonely, unfulfilled and unable to find a
| girlfriend, I think that _is_ a serious issue, but the
| solution of the "men's rights" groups - that it's the
| women who have cut back their own goals and ambitions,
| just so some men they don't even know have a chance to
| have sex - seems pretty insane to me.
|
| Also note, not all women are feminists either. There are
| plenty of women who have issues with men taking on
| traditionally feminine roles because they it violates
| their own _conservative_ worldview. I believe that 's
| where the "Karen" slur originated from.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> , many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today
| seem..._
|
| That's the thing, that's the _branding_. The left (with
| Tucker Carlson 's help) managed to get everyone to think
| of a man tanning his balls with any mention of men's
| rights. This is a major coup for leftist feminists, and a
| major loss for human rights.
|
| Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights.
| They are worker rights. It means equal protection under
| the law, protection from rape and violence, protection
| from discrimination and threats. These are basic human
| rights that should be afforded to everyone. This should
| not be a zero-sum game: to give one group rights you
| should not take them away from another group! There are
| plenty of rights to go around and they won't run out.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Men 's rights are human rights. They are father's
| rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protection
| under the law, protection from rape and violence,
| protection from discrimination and threats. These are
| basic human rights that should be afforded to everyone.
| This should not be a zero-sum game: to give one group
| rights you should not take them away from another group!
| There are plenty of rights to go around and they won't
| run out._
|
| Fully agreed here, I'm just doubting that the resistance
| against that really comes from the left - my impression
| is that it more comes from the right (or maybe press
| outlets who have rebranded to look "woke" on the surface
| but still promote mostly traditional views).
|
| E.g., I haven't yet seen a feminist sub on reddit excuse
| a female rapist or deny that a male rape victim is a
| victim. Though I have read articles that have done
| exactly that.
|
| Some examples of feminist discussion of men's issues from
| Reddit:
|
| - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/z083j5/t
| he_gu... While the OP is dismissive, the discussion
| itself is far more nuanced.
|
| - https://www.reddit.com/r/WitchesVsPatriarchy/comments/z
| z535i...
|
| - https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/z7rsv1/
| mens_...
|
| Also, I like subreddits like r/menslib which try to
| provide "non-tate/peterson" communities for men's issues
| - often arguing exactly like you did.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > E.g., I haven't yet seen a feminist sub on reddit
| excuse a female rapist
|
| They don't have to, society already does this for them
| all the time.
|
| Pay attention to how media frames the crime when a female
| teacher sleeps with an underage male student versus when
| a male teacher rapes an underaged female student.
|
| My word choices are deliberate here. In a vast majority
| of headlines and articles I've seen, if the perpetrator
| of a sexual crime is female, the language is much softer
| about the action.
|
| And courts tend to be much softer on them as well than on
| the men doing the same crime.
| xg15 wrote:
| Yep, I've seen this as well. What I've haven't seen is
| actual feminists endorsing those articles.
|
| This makes me think this kind of narrative stems more
| from "woke captialist" media or from people pushing the
| "men are always happy about sexual attention" narrative.
| That narrative is considered part of "toxic maskulinity"
| - exactly the mindset that feminists want to get rid of.
|
| Also note that (in the US) the legal definition of rape
| was changed to include men _no earlier than 2012_ [1]
| (i.e. under Obama). Under the previous definition, it was
| fundamentally impossible to consider a man a rape victim.
| That previous definition was from 1927.
|
| So the assumption that only women could be raped was the
| older one. The modern progressive movement was who got
| men _included_ in that definition.
|
| [1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-
| definition...
| danaris wrote:
| I'm not familiar with r/askafeminist (or any other part
| of Reddit, really), but from what I've seen, the mirror
| "equivalent" to MRAs more generally is radical feminism,
| or radfems.
|
| For those who are unfamiliar, the basic tenet of radical
| feminism is that the source of women's oppression is the
| patriarchy (OK so far, if reductionist), which is run by
| and for men (broadly true), and thus men are all
| inherently bad (whoops that's where they lose me).
|
| In many cases, it's an ideology that ends up repeating
| many of the aspects of Christian fundamentalist
| patriarchy, just from a different angle: men and women
| are fundamentally different; biology dictates your role
| in society; etc.
| watwut wrote:
| Radfems I have seen were significantly less hateful then
| what I found on Redpill or MRA subs. It is not that some
| of them were not hateful or mocking men, but the levels
| and amount of it were much different.
| spacemadness wrote:
| Yes, just as anti-feminist/pro-patriarchy behaviors can
| easily come from women. It's part of our cultural
| programming and its very hard for people to sidestep that
| without a lot of self analysis.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men
| being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.
|
| Maybe men are just more vocal about their opinions
| regarding stay-at-home dads? Women may not exert "societal
| pressure" against stay-at-home men, but they're ~30% more
| likely to divorce them than working men (a 3.3% chance of
| divorce in a given year vs. 2.5%)[0].
|
| > For marriages formed after 1975, husbands' lack of full-
| time employment is associated with higher risk of divorce,
| but neither wives' full-time employment nor wives' share of
| household labor is associated with divorce risk.
| Expectations of wives' homemaking may have eroded, but the
| husband breadwinner norm persists.
|
| [0]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122416655340
| triceratops wrote:
| An unemployed (not by choice), frustrated guy can't be
| fun to be married to. I could see it causing problems in
| the relationship.
|
| Lo and behold, in the paper they say this too:
|
| "It is possible that husbands' less than full-time
| employment is associated with marital disruption more
| strongly than wives', not because of gendered
| interpretations of lack of full-time employment, but
| because husbands' part-time employment or nonemployment
| is more likely to be involuntary. Involuntary
| nonemployment may negatively affect marriages more
| strongly than voluntary nonemployment, by affecting
| outcomes like partners' mental health. It is not possible
| to evaluate this perspective with the current data,
| because voluntary specialization by men in unpaid labor
| is rare: in 2012, only about one-fifth of stay-at-home
| fathers were home primarily to care for the family
| (Livingston 2014). Future research is needed to explore
| the experiences of deliberately nontraditional
| households, although their rarity illustrates the
| consistency of the male-breadwinner norm."
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| > Women may not exert "societal pressure" against stay-
| at-home men
|
| I'm not sure that the study supports this. I think that
| the terms "stay at home dad" and "stay at home man"
| implies a male spouse who stays at home to do unpaid
| housework or child rearing instead of working a full time
| job.
|
| The study seems to say that, for men, being unemployed is
| positively correlated with divorce risk, but that doing a
| larger share of household labor is not.
|
| Not all unemployed men are "stay at home" men.
| vhcr wrote:
| Check out /r/MensLib/
| Clent wrote:
| There are some men's right subreddits that do not have
| allow the self-pity but they do not make it to the front
| page. I will not share specific subreddits for the sanity
| of the moderators but they are out there that focus on
| men's mental health specifically.
|
| Toxic Masculinity is men on men hate.
| chowells wrote:
| "Toxic Masculinity" is an idea created by men's groups
| [1] to describe the stresses on them that make them
| unhealthy and come from some cultural ideal of manhood.
| It was literally created by men as language to separate
| discussion the good parts of societal expectations from
| the damaging parts. A large number of people (that is,
| everyone who wants to talk about it sincerely) still use
| precisely that meaning. It's only those people who look
| for every reason to get upset who willfully misinterpret
| it as an insult on the concept of masculinity.
|
| "Toxic masculinity" is men examining themselves and
| seeking to reject the parts they don't like. There's no
| hate involved at all. The whole thing is an exercise in
| self-expression and self-determination.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_mov
| ement
| Eumenes wrote:
| I don't know a single man that uses or embraces that
| term. It seems to be used exclusively by arm chair
| psychiatrists or terminally online twitter people.
| afavour wrote:
| I use it. HTH.
| broken_mind wrote:
| It's irrelevant how the term was born. It's relevant how
| it ia used now: and it's never used in good faith. Can
| you tell me part of masculinity that are not toxic, based
| on modern feminist thought?
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Sharing my thoughts, a recent idiom I ran across that I
| increasingly find useful in situations like this is "two
| things can be true at once."
|
| There can be people who are extremely misogynistic - but they
| can also have completely valid concerns and grievances that
| make them feel that way. "They might be idiots at best, but
| they might have decent reasons why they got there." Just ask
| any dad who has lost his children, wife, and property to an
| actually-false claim of domestic abuse. Ignoring those
| grievances, under the hope of trying to avoid giving them any
| respect, I believe risks actually increasing the number of
| misogynists because it doesn't address the underlying hurt
| that many of them may be experiencing, or the cause that will
| keep repeating itself.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| A similar thought I find helpful to internalize is that
| "hurt people hurt other people". That is to say, many
| victims are themselves assholes and abusive.
|
| It is important to remember that fair justice should be
| extended to all people, independence of their individual
| moral or sympathetic valence.
|
| It cuts both ways. Despicable people deserve a fair
| treatment, and victims themselves must be held accountable
| for their actions.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to
| dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to
| recognize this fact.
|
| I must be living under a rock then -- this Zeitgeist you talk
| of is alien to me. I am a male who does not feel in any way
| dehumanized, nor have any of my male friends expressed as
| much.
| broken_mind wrote:
| Good for you! I've never noticed this thing so it doesn't
| exist. Pure and simple internalized misandry.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Doesn't exist.
|
| Zeitgeist.
|
| There's a pretty broad strata between those two.
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fullshark wrote:
| I think this book is probably more about men who aren't working
| and are instead doing nothing productive. Raising children
| wouldn't count.
| ponow wrote:
| It does if you got a serious education that goes woefully
| underutilized.
| fullshark wrote:
| I don't know, I have a "serious" education and using it to
| help a corporation make a little bit more money doesn't
| really seem that much more valuable than raising my kid.
| The opportunity cost for many with serious educations is
| maybe not that high.
| afavour wrote:
| Yeah I was kind of "yes, and"-ing the book topic. Women being
| out of work isn't seen as such a crisis because so many are
| actually "working raising families. My point is that the same
| opportunity ought to be available to men, too.
| willcipriano wrote:
| We didn't let Jordan Petersons (not that he is some sort of
| ideal) brand of masculinity out and now we are stuck with the
| Andrew Tate style. Masculinity is something that needs to be
| cultivated, trying to stamp it out just results in weeds.
| ianai wrote:
| One (not the best) way to judge a world view or policy is to
| simply empower it and let it play itself out. Then
| investigate the value add to society and itself over time.
| Both of your examples wound up being problematic in the
| fullness of time.
|
| I definitely think there's a place in the human world for the
| masculine and feminine and etc. But actual bullying, which I
| think relates to much toxic masculinity, rightfully should be
| countered. It doesn't help that much toxic masculinity, to
| me, seems based in fundamental weakness or fear. (So address
| the underlying source of fear as a psychological phenomenon.)
| nimbius wrote:
| a lot of this, at least in the united states, is due to a deep-
| seated dichotomy of heteronormative gender roles in suburban
| life. new mums groups have learned to be welcoming, but not
| inclusive to newcomers and that may largely be due to
| puritanical influences present in a lot of the cultures that
| oversee these groups. one could go so far as to say such
| patronisation and strict gender conformity serve to ostracize
| and secure the old-guard from ever encroaching threat of
| feminism or change.
|
| As a diesel mechanic in the midwest, I can say the decline in
| men that have work could be a couple of factors. First, we
| decided 30 years ago everyone had to go to college, and in
| doing so found most degrees hardly worth the paper they were
| printed on while landed gentry reaped the windfall of college
| loan income. conversely tradecraft like welding, carpentry,
| HVAC, engine repair, and plumbing fell by the wayside with many
| of these crafts given a scarlet letter and left to beg and
| plead for any help whatsoever. there is still plenty of work,
| its just been made obscure and wicked by a hand that cant reap
| any lending profit from it.
|
| second, militant drug testing and background checks have
| created an artificial scarcity. Do i need a sober person to run
| a drill press? certainly, but if that person spent a little
| time in jail for cannabis possession i dont care. Viewing
| potential employees as potential liabilities has in turn
| created a culture of calvinist jackboots that only hire the
| most visibly noble --if not technically bereft-- to fill their
| ranks.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| I used to tell kids to go to college, and was unhappy if they
| did not go. Now I tell them they need a career. You need a
| skill people will pay for, or your life will suck. I'm in IT
| and most of skills come from a 2 year local degree, so it's
| college, but. It was very skills based. It was a career. Tell
| kids to get a career.
| microtherion wrote:
| I believe (and that's hardly an original observation) that
| some of the problems in the US trades based professions stem
| from their lack of non-academic credentials systems.
|
| In e.g. Germany or Switzerland, your pot smoking drill press
| operator could point to a four year apprenticeship, and
| possibly even advanced specializations beyond that, with
| hundreds of recognized professional tracks. In the US,
| professional skills seem to be acquired somewhat more
| randomly, and consequently, are less portable.
| unholythree wrote:
| That's less true in union work or licensed trades; but of
| course lots of trades are only licensed in specific
| localities or the licensing is loosely enforced.
|
| There definitely is a emphasis in the U.S. on college being
| the "correct" path though. I recently saw a public charter
| school in my city advertise their entire graduating class
| was accepted into colleges. Clearly this was the best
| metric of success to them.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > First, we decided 30 years ago everyone had to go to
| college, and in doing so found most degrees hardly worth the
| paper they were printed on while landed gentry reaped the
| windfall of college loan income. conversely tradecraft like
| welding, carpentry, HVAC, engine repair, and plumbing fell by
| the wayside with many of these crafts given a scarlet letter
| and left to beg and plead for any help whatsoever. there is
| still plenty of work, its just been made obscure and wicked
| by a hand that cant reap any lending profit from it.
|
| If welding, carpentry, HVAC and so on were clearly strong
| career paths, people would have figured this out and ignored
| the college advice. Skilled trades have the potential to be
| great careers, but fall short. 1. They just don't pay enough.
| You can go to college and learn computer science and at 22
| years old have a shot at making $100K+ or even more in
| expensive COL areas. In the trades, you have lots of
| training, apprenticeships, seniority... how many years does
| it take to get to $100K as a welder? 2. The work is tough on
| your body, which has a shelf life. As opposed to an office
| worker who can sit in his office chair, collecting a salary,
| until he dies of old age. I supposed these two points can be
| mitigated by learning the business and eventually running
| your own contracting company, where you siphon your profits
| and employ younger bodies. But not everyone can/will go down
| that path.
|
| I agree with you about the drug and background checks. I'm
| sure they don't help either.
| subradios wrote:
| I think comparing the trades to the hottest intellectual
| profession on the planet with extremely heavy competition
| is extremely misguided.
|
| The whiteboard torture test exists because there are tens
| of thousands of candidates and only hundreds of those
| actually have a pulse when it comes to developing software.
|
| I'm not talking about implementing Kadane's or Dijkstra's,
| I'm talking about fizzbuzz, basic control structures, etc.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| If welding paid, I'd be doing that rather than sitting at my
| computer dealing with corporate bullshit. I didn't get a
| degree but I'm still sitting here coding and not welding. I'm
| just saying I think there's more to the issue than that we
| sent people to college. The trades just don't pay well
| enough.
| hollywood_court wrote:
| Being a stay at home parent is certainly a lot of work. I did
| it for a while until my son started pre-k. However his school
| follows the schedule of the local university so it's just been
| he and I for the past 3 weeks during the holidays and for 2
| weeks recently before that during Thanksgiving break.
|
| We quickly fell back into our same routine of taking walks and
| working on his reading and writing.
|
| But I am definitely familiar with the questions from the
| mothers at the playground or the fitness class he attends.
|
| I just tell them that I was fortunate enough to retire at 40
| and I'm presently trying to reinvent myself as a web developer.
| ponow wrote:
| I barely talked to any of them after some of these exchanges.
| I refuse to explain myself.
| SnoJohn wrote:
| I recently learned about the concept of the "Lead Dad" which is
| when the father is the chief caregiver. There are a handful of
| groups that try to connect these fathers (1).
|
| A big part of their emerging agenda is to get corporations and
| schools to recognize that the father is actually the point of
| contact and to destigmatize the dad who pauses or leaves his
| career to raise the kids.
|
| 1. https://thecompanyofdads.com
| mfer wrote:
| Two big things stick out in all of this to me...
|
| 1) There's the idea that one parent does not work for a
| company.
|
| This is hard for a lot of men and women to handle. A lot is put
| into the idea that adults need to be part of the economic
| productivity cycle or you're failing. Stay at home dad's are
| looked down on by others a lot due to this. It happens to many
| stay at home mom's, too.
|
| Think about it. If both parents work they make more so they can
| consume more. That means more money for share holders and
| companies.
|
| > what it is that you do
|
| This assumes that the important thing to do is something
| related to companies and the economy. It's unsaid but assumed
| without most realizing it.
|
| 2) We have an idea that women can do anything men can. That
| women can step into traditional mens spaces. But, the opposite
| isn't true. That men can step into traditional womens spaces.
| It's a double standard. It's not said but it's thought. Even
| when people don't realize it.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << A lot is put into the idea that adults need to be part of
| the economic productivity cycle or you're failing.
|
| Yes and no, I think. I agree in abstract, because I am sure
| it is a factor, but I will give my personal anecdata. Covid
| was a stroke of good luck for me, because I effectively was
| able to be a father and work from home at the same time ( 1st
| year kid - and she slept on a tight schedule ). And I will
| admit it was incredibly fulfilling ( albeit tiring ).
|
| We are a dual income household and above average in terms of
| income for our state and I honestly do not feel comfortable
| enough to let her stay home full time ( which is part of the
| reason for my goals for 2023 are more aggressive in terms of
| learning and moving my skill set to the next level ). Even by
| myself, we are above average and I still think it is not
| enough to keep the current level of comforts ( and I have no
| idea how other people manage ).
|
| << 2) We have an idea that women can do anything men can.
| That women can step into traditional mens spaces. But, the
| opposite isn't true. That men can step into traditional
| womens spaces. It's a double standard. It's not said but it's
| thought. Even when people don't realize it.
|
| Again, I think yes and no. Are there MMA fighters? Yeah, and
| some good ones too, but as my cousin recently said: "Do I
| want my daughter to be a plumber? No."
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Why doesn't your cousin want their daughter to be a
| plumber?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It was not explicitly stated. The unspoken reason was
| "She should get a degree and have a BS job in an office."
| It is possible I am just projecting my own prejudice
| here.
| mfer wrote:
| > "Do I want my daughter to be a plumber? No."
|
| How many people want their son to be a plumber? Likely not
| many of the people on HN.
|
| Does a lot of this view have to do with what people think
| of jobs like plumbers?
| dgfitz wrote:
| Plumbers, at least on the East Coast, make good money. If
| one of my kids became a plumber I would have no problem
| with it. Do I WANT them to become a plumber? Not really.
| If school is just not interesting to them and they like
| working with their hands a trade isn't a bad way to go.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| They make decent money here too. I genuinely want my kid
| to do what they feel they want to do ( or have a strong
| predisposition for ). That is obviously not apparent now,
| but I absolutely agree that trade is not a bad idea from
| my perspective. I have an indoor job with no heavy
| lifting, but.. eh, there are days I wish I asked my dad
| to teach me about currents and cars.
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