It's Time to Take on the Male Malaise

>What we’re learning is that when we don't think about boys and just assume they’re going to be OK because they’ve been running the world and they’ve got all the advantages relative to the girls—and all of which has historically been true in all kinds of ways. But precisely because of that, if you’re not thinking about what’s happening to boys and how they are being raised, then that can actually hurt women. … And I will say, as “progressives,” Democrats, progressive parents, enlightened ones, we’ve made that mistake sometimes in terms of our rhetoric. Where it’s like we're constantly talking about what's wrong with the boys, instead of what’s right with them.

I remember a speech by Obama that occurred around the time my wife was sent to a class (she's a teacher) where they separated everyone in the room by race and she felt spent the class finger wagging at her group ... over the course of the entire class. As you might expect they told her about all the advantages her group has had if only because of what little they knew of her.

I don't remember Obama's speech very well but the part that stuck out to me was he described how when talking to people you will find that they don't feel like anything was just given to them, and how that's a bad approach regardless if you think they had advantages or not. He also seemed to hint that maybe regardless of their background, maybe they weren't just given anything.

I think we can recognize differences, but also when speaking to people recognize they as an individual are far more than those differences or generalizations.

I think academic information / study about general patterns are good when in the right context, but they're of no use when talking to people, often counterproductive, and often wrong.

Take a group of people. Divide them into two groups. Tell half of them they are victims of injustice and the other half that they are privileged and owe the other half something.

When has this ever produced anything positive? For either side?

We do this from preschool on up, and it has only made everything worse. Bring back the "melting pot" concept, please. Underline our similarities and shared goals. Both political parties are weakening our unity as much as they can.

American politics is weird and basically a list of grievances. Female/feminist politics make sense because they are addressed to a more powerful group (men) which yields. Men don't have anyone to petition to, so it won't happen.

> and all of which has historically been true in all kinds of ways. But precisely because of that, if you’re not thinking about what’s happening to boys and how they are being raised, then that can actually hurt women. … And I will say, as “progressives,” Democrats, progressive parents, enlightened ones, we’ve made that mistake sometimes in terms of our rhetoric.

And this is partially why young men have turned to toxic influences like Trump and Tate. They've been told they're "privileged" or somehow responsible and for acts commited by other men. Of course they will look in the other direction at the group of people saying the opposite.

This why Kamala lost the support of a lot of young men and by the time she tried to recoup it was far too late.

The issue is the framing: "men have privilege".

The problem is the vast majority of men have very, very little privilege. Most of them are oppressed by the men who do have privilege just like everybody else. Telling the vast majority of men who do not have privilege that they have to "sacrifice" to fix the situation is just going to make them angry.

Being a man sucks, too. We know this from women go into blue collar jobs, somehow manage to overcome the sexism only to discover on the other side that nobody gives two shits about them, how they're feeling, whether they're hurt, etc. We know this from female to male transitioners who suddenly encounter the fact that they are now suddenly invisible to general society. The studies go on and on.

We are in this thing together, and we need to help each other out.

This isn’t the position most people want to hear but:

You can’t have mutual trust and equivalence between any two affinity groups at a large enough scale over the longest period, because there are biological costs to existence and reproduction that cannot be overcome.

> The idea that being pro-male means being anti-female is a hard one to overcome. I get it; but also, people have to get over it.

This is not a tenable position.

Men by physical nature are the only possible group that can create safety for women and children against other men from other social groups. Why? because in order to reproduce, women must be in a extremely physically vulnerable position for 9-18 months during gestation and nursing. There are cultural ways to offset this, and sure you can replace “men” for “structural security “ if you like but the numbers would look at those as the same (future mechanical sentries notwithstanding)

People forget they are literal animals and that it actually has an impact on reality.

The majority of human culture was created to “protect” women by limiting their risk to violence from an outside group. Internal violence aka marital rape, that was “productive” was largely ignored because individual independence was a lower cultural value than group cohesion through reproduction.

Since the enlightenment however, that math has been inverted and now the individual person, not the tribe, family or state is the primary and basic unit of measurement for “flourishing.” Most people would look at that as an unvarnished success for womens liberation and rightfully so.

It makes sense theoretically that humans are past the point of sex differences being the primary difference in power allocation - however that’s not what’s happening.

What’s happening is that people are looking in the past and saying “we dont need men anymore please just go away” but not changing the culture to create a space for these now relatively useless men. You land eventually at the Dworkin position: “men are no longer needed because ridding them from the population would increase peace since we can now reproduce safely without them.”

The problem is that the culture humans built over the last 80,000 years was built around genetic survival in a complex environment of chineral organizations which flip flop between mutual-cooperation or competition depending on the resources available and alignment between group members.

This cannot be solved through cultural changes because the roots are biological.

You need either biological changes, which eliminate the risk: access to abortion, contraception, eliminating aggression in XY persons etc…are effective and reduce the population effectively also.

However you now have a new problem, or solution, depending on your position of what the goal of humanity is, which is: how many people of what kind should exist.

Again, there’s no possible solution here because there’s an intractable existential conflict between the biological realities of humanity and the idea of individual freedom to act unencumbered.

You can’t have both individual liberty and unless everyone internally agrees with everyone else on how they should live and act. Not only is that not possible, humans reject the idea of a singular goal for humanity which eliminates the concept ofof population wide alignment.

So long as that is true then groups of people will “defect” in Nash equilibrium terms, “break” all the enlightenment rules and then breed their way to domination.

If you want any proof of this look at the relative population growth rates of Korea, Japan and Afghanistan.

Only one of those countries will have a massive population in 100 years and they aren’t very friendly to the idea of individual freedoms.