The male inequality problem is getting worse(bigthinkmedia.substack.com) |
The male inequality problem is getting worse(bigthinkmedia.substack.com) |
I'm not sure why this is, but I expect it's because women and girls are now being given equality of opportunity to a greater extent than ever before, and it turns out they're just better at most things in our modern society.
So I'm not convinced that "male inequality" is the best term to describe this state of affairs. When women having more equal opportunities leads to worse outcomes for some men, is that really inequality for the men? Or are we just seeing natural differences play out.
Maybe the future for most men is work where brute force and strength is required, as that's the only edge they really have on women, comparing group to group.
I've worked in academia, mostly the humanities, since the 1980s, and have observed a clear difference in how much effort women put into social networking and how this affects career progress. On the negative side, this can lead to cliquishness. I even once had a gay colleague who complained bitterly that his sub-field was dominated by lesbians who resisted male inclusion.
It seems to be a frequent observation, such that it may now be uncontroversial, that women generally approach things with a broader contextual awareness while men are in general more narrowly task-oriented. The implication is that we should expect women to generally lead in social advancement while men will tend to have a lead in technical prowess.
An illustration that has given me much cause for introspection, as a teacher and researcher, is my working library. I have about 200 books on a shelf near my desk, that I thought were of such quality that I wanted my own copy always at hand. On that shelf, there is just one book by a woman. I have often considered how it could be that there are so many women in my working life but so few on my shelf.
To be a better person I have always had to be surrounded by better people. When those people have been women, my opportunities for improvement are much broader and more comprehensive.
To say that women have made me better is insufficient. I'd offer that women have been critical to making me a more worthwhile human being.
I think "male immaturity" is more apt.
We humans have a tendency to view pendulum swings with a skewed perspective, one that overblows the near and recent while obscuring and distorting the more distant. What we don't see, we may fill in with what we imagine or we may just fail to consider it. We also tend to forget what pendulums can do, given some time, patience and a bit good faith nudging that honors the original intent.
I was my wife's caregiver for a quarter century, primarily for mental health issues. During some periods of vulnerability she would disappear and odds were high she'd be in risky environments.
Getting cooperation with police (in whatever area I suspected she'd gotten to) during these periods was often difficult. The reason is that men that invented or leveraged mental health issues as a means to gaslight their wives/SO.
This was a thing that police ran into with some regularity. Conversely, men who had been a longterm and experienced caregiver to a spouse with mental health challenges was so rare, I might be their only example.
Me and these manipulative men present pretty much the same way - and police had necessarily been trained on the latter. There hadn't been enough of me to put me on the radar (and still aren't, afaict.)
The result is that police were generally unwilling to work with me and she stayed vulnerable a lot longer than she would have otherwise. The pendulum had swung to a place that made one woman less safe than it once would have.
The solution here isn't forcing the pendulum back to a place where police could be manipulated into helping men gaslight the women in their lives. The natural pendulum swing would be one where there's be a process where I could present myself to police as an authentic and trustworthy caregiver.
But that isn't a just-do-it-and-be-done solution. The reality that necessitated that police learn how to recognize and handle gaslighting men introduced a layer of complexity. Recognizing and working with me would be yet another layer of complexity - an even more complex one by nature of where it landed (atop what gaslighters created).
What actually (if indirectly) left my wife more vulnerable here wasn't police who failed to assess me. It was a culture where men learned how to gaslight their wives and could operate that way with some success.
The most useful and lasting solution should be one that addresses the creation men who harmfully manipulate others in gainful way.
I think the term “toxic masculinity” sort if has three different connotations, for some it’s a weapon to attack people with, for some it’s a weapon to be attacked by (both of these things are bad)
But for a lot of people (myself included) it’s an “obviously” useful/enpowering framework for understanding why society rejects certain kinds of men, and why certain societal pressure in men feels harmful to men. The term toxic masculinity isn’t supposed to just describe the behavior on others, it’s supposed to describe the way it is toxic to men themselves!
I do think it’s somewhat time to evolve past the feminism of the past. As someone who read a decent amount of it, I could argue until I’m blue in the face about how it is meant to be inclusive of all people, but sometimes I think a unfortunate truth about society is the cover matters more than the book. Or if you are going to use feminism as the framework, then you have to have people representing all sides of it, and not sort of imbalanced towards just one wave/interpretation/side. And I think that’s hard to do because of the incentives.
Many qualities are not ruined by universal adoption. Kindness, consideration, empathy, patience and understanding built on the above are some.
> I think the term “toxic masculinity” sort if has three different connotations, for some it’s a weapon ... I do think it’s somewhat time to evolve past the feminism of the past.
The notion that men be better has always been a good one. The core of our toxicity is a failure to understand others in a useful, productive and beneficial way. We men are not very far down the road of understanding others. We have not reached some kind of end that would merit turning back.
The origin of calls to turn back reliably come from the small group that is petulant about making meaningful changes. To transition from a small to a loud group, they are compulsively seeding their discontent wherever they can. We can spot where they've found fertile ground by listening for their echos.
But back to us. There absolutely is room for improvement and the way to get there is by adopting kindness, consideration, empathy, etc. For us men, our ability to achieve these things is tied to our willingness to clean up our own house. We are better men when we have ambition that stretches past our base desires and includes what women decide they want for themselves.