Thursday, March 04, 2010
Afternoon discussion topic: The man problem
Employment for adult males in the United States is at record lows. It will be interesting to see whether that fact influences the "gender gap" in November's election.
Possibly related item here.
Flip off the safeties and fire at will.
CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.
17 Comments:
By 
Cassandra, at
Thu Mar 04, 05:25:00 PM:
OK, I'll bite :p
As I recall, when feminists made the (ill advised, IMO) case that sexism, male centric culture and so-called "hostile climates" made it impossible for women to succeed in a man's world, the argument was ridiculed to scorn by men who urged these women to "suck it up and compete like men do".
OK. Got it. I didn't buy that argument either.
Now many men (conservative men, and conservative bloggers of both sexes) are excusing these wonderful New Age Men Living in Their Parents' Basements by...
[wait for it]
... going on and on about how misandry, a female centric culture, and a perceived "hostile climate" have so discouraged young men that they've stopped trying and have retreated to the safety of their parents' basements.
So I guess my question is: whatever happened to all this talk about sucking it up and competing like a man?
So much for principles. The world gets more surreal every day.
By TigerHawk, at
Thu Mar 04, 05:28:00 PM:
Nice judo! And I agree with you, actually.
By Bomber Girl, at
Thu Mar 04, 06:35:00 PM:
I'd say something but then the women would be dominating the conversation....just like the jobs.
By 
, at
Thu Mar 04, 07:23:00 PM:
It's a function of some industries getting hit hard that have more men eg construction. There are more women in teaching, healthcare and government.
Feminism only comes into play through politics. Nancy Pelosi didn't want Stimulus money goring to burly men jobs.
By Unknown, at
Thu Mar 04, 07:33:00 PM:
Dirty little secret. Female graduates of medical school (now over half) have shorter careers and work fewer hours while they work. This will only continue to exacerbate shortages of providers as Obama and the Democrats gut the reimbursements to medical providers. Have fun waiting in lines folks. It is OK because you will all be "covered" though.
By , at
Thu Mar 04, 07:50:00 PM:
Hey, you guys are lousy shots, thank goodness
By Purple Avenger, at
Thu Mar 04, 08:10:00 PM:
While men lost most of the jobs (80M/20F), the non-stimulus was rigged to disproportionately (in terms of job losses) bias spending towards traditionally female occupations (60M/40F).
NOW executives publicly bragged about how they managed to pull off this rigging of the stimulus allocations with their lobbying.
The NOW statements about rigging the stimulus predictably got virtually no coverage in the general media and even now a year later, few people are aware of how effectively NOW lobbying screwed over the male population
By Sarah Palin's Uterus, at
Thu Mar 04, 08:51:00 PM:
I'd say something but then the women would be dominating the conversation....just like the jobs.
Ooooh girlfriend. We are like that, you know :p
Seriously, does anyone take NOW seriously these days?
And does anyone really believe the stimulus had much effect on private sector unemployment?
Sorry, but as tempting as blaming the Feminazis may be, I think male unemployment is structural. Men are less likely to work in low skilled, low paid service sector jobs.
And men do a far better job of bargaining for salary and benefits. Good on them, I say. But when circumstances change, so does the value proposition. To a cash strapped employer, the stellar employee who commands an impressive salary may suddenly seem less attractive than a better than average (or even average) employee who is paid far less.
By Escort81, at
Thu Mar 04, 10:44:00 PM:
Bomber Girl drops another payload right on target. And Cass is right the concept of sucking it up and dealing.
To TigerHawk's point regarding a gender gap in November, I would think it will be hard to make a good statistical inference about causality, if only because there are so many confounding factors. However, it will be interesting to look at certain counties where male unemployment has increased faster than female unemployment and compare the "gender gap" to the same county in 2008, and then do a similar anaysis for counties that have held steady in terms of employment.
The central question or speculation is, if a man voted for Senator Obama in 2008, and lost his job in 2009 or the first part of 2010, would that cause him to not vote for a Democratic legislative (or local or state executive) candidate in 2010?
By Gary Rosen, at
Fri Mar 05, 01:55:00 AM:
"Flip off the safeties"
Hopefully it is the Democratic congress and then BO who get flipped off in the next two elections.
By , at
Fri Mar 05, 08:19:00 PM:
Good thing you can still vote even if you don't have a job!
Perhaps the unemployed even have greater motivation to vote and certainly more time.
Maybe they will realize that the country is NOT in the best of hands and vote the SOBs out?
By , at
Sat Mar 06, 08:46:00 AM:
"Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them."
By , at
Sat Mar 06, 02:12:00 PM:
America is a Marxist country and so is very Leftist. Leftism is Matriarchical. Both Communism, other forms of socialism, and of course Utilitarianism and Liberalism all push for female equality.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Either one has patriarchy or matriarchy; there is NO middle station. And as Patriarchy, which is fundamentally Western and masculine, is being deconstructed, Matriarchy is rising to the front.
Face it. America will become a Female led nation. Both clergymen and politicians are effeminate. What George Will calls "Basement Boys". Boys are told to stay in perpetual youth. Boys are not to grow up.
The great destructor of this is the idea of "equality". Equality of the sexes promoted by Communism, Marxism, Utilitarianism, Liberalism is destroying patriarchy and Masculinity.
And when Christian churches and so-called "conservatives" (i.e. republicans of all stripes) sit there and defend Equality, and women's right to vote---well, welcome to matriarchy. The West deserves to die.
By , at
Sat Mar 06, 06:35:00 PM:
Retort to many posters above: I suppose it's nice to not have to work, or to do so as a fulfilling option. Not everyone is so lucky.
"bread·win·ner ' Pronunciation: \ˈbred-ˌwi-nər\
a member of a family whose wages supply its livelihood
There are still a lot of "breadwinners" in this country. More of them are men, but there are many single moms supporting families too. Comedian Drew Carey has a favorite practice of giving $100 tips to his breakfast waitresses. As he says, no one needs the money more than someone serving eggs at 7am.
Far too many "breadwinners" are getting fucked over right now. They're not all "boys in the basement." Please bitch slap yourself for your callousness.
Our current government policies favor public sector employees above all, even though half these people could not show up and not be missed. Nancy Pelosi very deliberately skewed Stimulus to "saving" public sector jobs and very consciously away from burly men jobs.
It's a big reason why Stimulus has been such a failure, and why Obama's Great Leap Forward ain't working. Stimulus confirmed to many thoughtful people in the private sector what Obama was really about -- they've been on strike ever since.
Retort to WLindsayWheeler.
Nice psychobabble. Several major democracies have elected women as heads of state. Can you name one Marxist-Communist state ever run by a woman?
I do agree that many of our major institutions don't like boys. It's an issue. "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them." Indeed.
Obama & Co sell the noble idea that "we're all in this together" ... but one year into his regime and it's already clear that we won't all be equal pigs in Obamaland.
We're going to have a big political fight between (1) those who get government checks and (2) those who pay for them. We're on course for (1) to overwhelm (2), but it's unsustainable ... but (2) can survive with a lot less (1). It may take a minor "Back to the Future" revolution, but that's where I think we'll ultimately come out.
By , at
Wed Mar 17, 09:18:00 PM:
American culture and law are currently, actively and extremely male hostile. Watch any TV show. Reverse the genders of the actors and see if it would still be acceptable.
VAWA and sexual harrassment laws make personal and business life even worse for males.
Men's marriage strike is one reaction to this.
There's another, far worse indicator. The suicide rate for boys is 6x that of girls. What's worse is that no one cares.
By , at
Thu Mar 18, 02:58:00 AM:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/02/towson
"We have a culture that diminishes maleness to the maximum extent
possible. I went to college in the mid 80’s. At that point in history it
was more than disturbing what was happening with gender politics on
college campuses. Now that I’m a parent, I can say that this pales in
comparison to the anti-male rhetoric my children have been fed in
primary and secondary school. Combine this with a media that is so
fearful of patriarchy that it can’t present a respectable father or
husband and a news media that doesn’t even see a problem with two women
earning degrees from California’s state schools for every man and you
have a formula for disaster.
There are many places in the world where this hasn’t occurred.
I’m disgusted with America’s system of education.
As a former Harvard faculty member, I saw how little respect there is
for truth, even at the world’s most prestigious academic institution. I
listened to faculty members brag that they’d lie in their research if
they had to. I listened to their death threats when I objected to this.
I saw them take down Larry Summers.
With intellectually corrupt feminist enclaves like Harvard’s Graduate
School of Education driving education policy, it’s no wonder that our
system of primary and secondary education has achieved third world
status... or that it promotes failure for those afflicted with the
disease of maleness."
http://www.illinoisloop.org/gender.html
"As we will explore on this page, boys are doing poorly today, but this wasn't always the case. Therefore, any explanation or attempt at fixing the problem must grapple with the reality that quite evidently something has changed. For that reason, statements like "For boys, it isn't cool to be good at school" fail to explain what is happening -- it may be true, but there's no reason to think it represents a change...."
Read the whole thing.
By , at
Thu Mar 18, 03:04:00 AM:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/22/men
"* My Son Just Said "No".
* Posted by Jay on May 26, 2009 at 12:15pm EDT
*
My son just sat down with his mother and me two weeks ago. He informed us that he won't be going to college in the fall, but instead will be taking both core courses from the local community college and courses leading to internet security certifications from a technical school downtown.
As his mother and I both have graduate degrees (MSEng/MSW), we were both very surprised, as this was not the path we had been building. I'm sure that he found our initial reactions to this new plan to be firmly in the "Less Than Totally Supportive" category.
Both his HS grades and SAT/ACT scores are very solid. He was accepted at four of his top five choices. He seemed very pleased when he made his final decision.
When asked, he replied that the tide turned for him when discussing college life with several of his friends (male, Anglo, hetero, generally $125k-$200k annual family income) who were finishing their freshman years. The feedback was not positive, and to the degree that we asked them over to talk about it with us too.
Four young men came over to our house on a Sunday afternoon. We've known three of them for at least five years, and the fourth since he moved to town in our son's sophomore year. Two graduated from the "Excellent"-rated high school our son attends. Two graduated from a "Recognized"-rated high school in the next town. Three of the four were in the top 10% of their HS classes, and the fourth "around 15%". They attend three separate four-year universities in the midwest (1), the south (2), and the east (1).
Their narrative of their freshman experiences were very similar in many aspects: required sexual assault prevention classes; required gender and racial sensitivity seminars; and long list of support structures available for every group - except them.
One of the four boys recounted his error in truthfully answering a question in a "Campus Safety Issues" seminar. His response that physically defending yourself against violence was proper led to his instant scapegoating by the "seminar leader" as an example of the wrong-thinking that made the campus unsafe for everyone else.
Another of the four made a grave error by raising his hand when his professor in Intro to Sociology asked if there were any Eagle Scouts present. Big mistake. After being regularly harassed and made the butt of "neo-fascist" comments, he ended up dropping the class.
All four of these young men boiled down the issue to the basic premise that the change from an environment in which they were respected and applauded for their individual efforts and achievements into environments in which they were the "Designated Assholes" (their collective term) for everything perceived to be wrong with the campus/country/world was pretty shocking.
As I wrote earlier, I know these young men. They are intelligent, accomplished, and have already demonstrated their leadership abilities in various roles. I have worked with all four of them on public service projects (for which they were not required to volunteer). Two were peer counselors. These are not young men who should fall into anybody's definition of "problem".
I find myself unwilling to force my son into a similar situation, as the university he picked was the private university in the south that two of the four attended.
Maybe he's making a mistake. I don't know.
I do know that blindly branding ANY group of people as the "Designated Assholes" will discourage future people of the same group from wanting to follow in their footsteps."
Read the article and comments.
