"What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to white people?"
"White people live longer than black people. They do better in this economy. More of ’em graduate from college. They go into space and do everything black people do, and sometimes they do it a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way—these white people are going to leave us black people in the dust."
"Researchers have suggested any number of solutions. A movement is growing for more all-black schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of black people. Some people think that black people should be able to walk around in class, or take more time on tests, or have tests and books that cater to their interests."
Well, try replacing "women" with "black people" and "men" with "white people" and they would most certainly publish it. In fact, any time the slightest improvement in the fortune of any allegedly-mistreated group occurs (women, blacks, whatever) it is trumpeted and paraded endlessly.
Anyway, the article didn't point out two salient facts:
1. Women still lag in almost everything that matters (engineering, entrepreneurship, science, math) and
2. Parents prefer girls over boys for the same reason they used to do the opposite: Because that is the gender more likely to take care of them in their old age. No one wants girls because of "empowerment" or whatever PC bullshit journalists happen to be obsessed with.
I'm not sure to what extent people think that far ahead. If there's an expressed preference for girls over boys it's because:
a) Girls are often easier to deal with as parents than boys are (I'm thinking in the 7-10 age range and then again in the 14-17...)
b) Mothers prefer daughters while fathers prefer sons, but fathers tend to keep their mouths shut about it.
The assumption that engineering, entrepreneurship, science, math are everything that matters, is seriously problematic, and is likely at the core of the genuine gender inequality that gets the feminists upset.
"The only problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
I would love to see how the sex is distributed over fields where you are likely to earn at least 50% more than those who don't have a similar degree.
I don't really count a degree in communication or womens studies as a college degree at the same level as math, biology or medicine.
"Their [research] also suggests that the disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren’t primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents — and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. [...] Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on?"
(If you read the whole article, they are using poor to mean low-income minority, i.e. black.)
Perhaps I miss your point. Do you mind making it explicitly?
What if modern, postindustrial society is simply hostile to males in return for all the past hostility to females?
edit: apparently axle replied while I had my lament on the state of scholarships. Summarized: out of literally thousands available after pre-filtered (however poorly), I had to toss out all but a dozen or two because I'm white and male.
A woman (and a black guy) have institutions against them. They go somewhere, and they are instantly assumed to be less competent. That's why these things are given to them - to help out the weak, not to push YOU down. Those things are legs-up to equalise the playing field - you, as a WASP already are at the starting line, asking to get those things is to get another 10 yards.
And no, it's not a socio-economic program. If you took a white bum and a black bum, and you cleaned them up and dressed them nice and sent them to interview, the white will likely get more jobs than the black guy. There is an inherent issue that non-WASPs have to deal with.
A poor black kid from a farm and a poor white kid from a farm don't have the same chances of succeeding in life. The white kid is neutral (everything is always open to him), but the black kid has things working against him right from the start.
It's going to be difficult for you to understand because you have never BEEN a woman in a managerial position. You have never BEEN a black guy applying for jobs.
Let's do this test: Imagine I say you'll get ALL the perks that black people get from the government, do you think you will have a better life being black?
So, why are "they" the majority of the workforce, a clear majority of college graduates, and trending up in both cases?
At some point it's time to stop arguing about theory and look about you. It's over. The male-WASP free ride is over. Maybe we've hit balance, maybe we haven't, but if we don't want to shoot right past the balance we better start looking around a bit before blindly spouting arguments from the 1960s. At some point you get to active discrimination against male-WASPs. Note how I carefully failed to phrase that as a question. And if it's not time to at least discuss the matter in light of the facts of my first paragraph, when will it be? Give me a concrete criterion for when we know we're finished.
Had I asked that question 20 years ago, one imagines the answer would be "When parity is reached", but since we've shot past that and it's still not enough, apparently that's not the real criterion.
This is a broad problem with politics right now; nobody knows when to say enough! Enough money has been spent on education, enough pension benefits have been given, enough has been spent on the military, enough affirmative action has been done. There has to be enough sometime.
def enough_done_for(policy, effort):
return False
Allowing this for the sake of argument, at what point do you stop "giving" things to disadvantaged groups? If a group makes up 60% of the population of college graduates, is it time to start punishing them as well?
That's a correct assumption for many groups (e.g., college students) due to the effects of affirmative action.
By lowering the standards/imposing quotas for group X, that group will probably not meet the higher standards of everyone else. Thus, everyone will have to assume that members of X are less competent.
Oh, to answer your question: if I could become black, I would.
If you're a male-WASP, you don't need X because you are clearly capable of getting it via another method. So pick someone you can (supposedly) help more: the people with "institutions against them".
I've encountered this EXACT behavior in employers and have been skipped over for jobs several times. When I asked if there was a reason they picked someone significantly less qualified (they said I was the best qualified), they stated explicitly that I should be able to get a better job somewhere else, so they picked someone they felt needed the job more, and would be capable enough.
But if that's the case, why in God's name was I applying there in the first place?
I'm with you. Don't let HN's pro-kyriarchy[1] mob mentality get to you. Most of them somehow missed the fact that 1 in 5 women are still raped in college[2]. They also fail to realize that rape is HEAVILY underreported on most college campuses. They don't realize that women (and girls) are often blamed for causing their own rapes, blamed for "participating" in the crimes committed against them[3], or that rape of women is still part of male lore[4][5]. Find me the "balance" in that. Tell me when exactly we've hit it.
They fail to realize that we're not "done" solving the real issue of ingrained prejudices just because women are getting educated and have jobs. They don't realize that self-hating racism and sexism is just as ingrained in the underprivileged minorities. They don't realize it, of course, because white men have never been underprivileged minorities. They don't realize that it's a lifetime struggle not just with a world, to accept you for who you are, but with yourself[6][7].
They don't realize that unrealistic body image expectations are eroding women's sense of self worth[8]. They don't realize how it warps the mind, changes priorities, and restricts what choices women make, despite any actual or supposed abundance of choice. They don't realize that in many dark-skinned nations there is now a separate "white" beauty standard that competes with the beauty standard that makes sense for them, culturally[9][10].
If you think that being liberal and educated absolves you of playing into this kyriarchy, then it's possible that you've never even heard that color blindness theory creates racism[11], and you've probably never heard of anything about any moral credential bias[12]. You've probably also never heard of the myriad ways in which the patriarchy actually hurts men[13].
They fail to realize that for someone else to gain some power, the currently privileged must give up some of that power[14]. They're not whining because "we're missing the balance", they're whining because they're personally losing some privilege. In a fight for equality, that's supposed to happen, but they hate it. They see it, take note, and fight back. They don't realize that other men are already fighting back[15][16][17]. They don't get what they, presonally, did to deserve losing anything.
If you think there's no unjustified racism in Arizona[18], you must be kidding yourself. Or, I guess, you must be a privileged Arizonian. If you think there's no sexism despite your one-claim-trumps-all job statistic, you must be joking. Or, I guess, you must be a white male. The most important privilege that you have is the privilege to ignore your own privilege.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyriarchy
[2] http://www.cpbn.org/program/where-we-live/episode/wwl-sexual...
[3] http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/but-why-shouldnt-sh...
[4] http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-pre...
[5] http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/10/rape-culture-...
[6] http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/08/worst-enemy.h...
[7] http://refusethesilenceblog.com/post/631417596/intern-blogge...
[8] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1247008...
[9] http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/FaceOff/weight-debate-fat/st...
[10] http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/2010/05/expect-black-...
[11] http://news.illinois.edu/news/10/0421online.html
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_credential
[13] http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/06/in-which-anot...
[14] http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-...
[15] http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2007/10/explainer-wha...
[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Collier_Township_shooting
[17] http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/08/14/guest-post-dead-gir...
[18] http://wonkette.com/415809/arizona-school-demands-black-lati...
Oh, and HN? I'm utterly ashamed of you for voting axle down so vehemently. In the future, when you speak from a position of privilege (and I don't just mean white privilege or male privilege, because privilege comes in many shapes), please, please also do your research before spewing knee-jerk nonsense.
All else held equal, that is simply not true in modern America. There are very powerful incentives to hire the equivalently qualified black guy in order to avoid lawsuits.
Anyway, all this affirmative action stuff will have to be dismantled in the next twenty years when whites are a minority. It will simply become impossible for institutions to function if they have to make sure their loans/admissions/hires correspond to the new population profile.
Alternative theory: Society is failing our boys.
One other odd fact: In my neighborhood, this problem really only affects white men. There are quite a few black male medical assistants and nurses and almost no white ones.
/not a value judgment on either statements
> Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else--nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation.
We're living in a country where almost all the projected growth professions produce no capital or exports.
This is really all about a shitty job market, heavy on consumption and health care, not some boys vs girls thread.
But the truth is that too many first generation continue to lament fictional externalities while current immigrants continue to succeed.
I'm quite sure men will do just fine over the coming decades, thank you kindly, Ms. Hanna Rosin, and sorry to disappoint. :)
In the meantime I'll make a note not to do any more reading over at the Atlantic. Sad for me; they were once a great rag.
(edited for tone)
- The Title. "The End of Men". Sensationalistic. Aggressive. Inappropriate. Simply reverse the title: "The End of Women." OR: "The End of Blacks." Or: "The End Of Jews." This is not a worthy title, though I understand it's a catchy one.
- "A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way and its vast cultural consequences." Vast is a weasel word. Used here, an attempt (in the "hook" paragraph, and just above the fold) to dramatize what's to follow, which is well-written but (let's face it) mostly devoid of hyperlinks or factual supporting evidence. Opinion piece stuff at best.
- "Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing, and with shocking speed." There have been and are many matriarchal cultures around the world, many of them predating and enveloping the dominant male patriarchy she refers to. But what I object to here is the use of the word shocking.
- "As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest." Bad rhetoric. Sophistry. You can't argue that men have forced women into a subservient role of child-rearing-and-raising while at the same time arguing that we as a society haven't leveraged the "talents" of the female half of the population. Bullshit. Back when it was tooth and nail, men fought and hunted, women gathered and took care of the kids. As our powers to control the world around us improved, so too improved the plight of women (and of men). Universally. Across the board. In a process that is still continuing to this day.
- "With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success." Correlation does not imply causation, and it especially doesn't imply reverse-causation. This should simply read: "With few exceptions, the greater the country's economic success, the greater the power of women. And men. And children." I can take any two correlated statistics and assign bidirectional causation to them too, if I want. A and B are correlated? Well obviously B caused A. Or A caused B. Depending on whatever makes my article sound better.
- "As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye." According to what official source? Stereotypes like this need to be backed up with hard numbers, and from better organizations than the OECD.
- "Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination." A tired old chestnut. Most companies today are deathly afraid of being perceived as discriminatory. There may be an "old boys club" around the upper echelons of the corporate power structure, but it's not just women who are excluded. I'm excluded. And you're excluded. Far more important is the fact that women don't seem to be interested in certain occupations or positions at all. Take computer programming as one example.
Well, whatever. I didn't intend to write a book on it. She came across (to me) as self-satisfied, smug, and sure, very "sympathetic" towards us broken and outdated Men 1.0 models. I read this type of material in the 60s, and in the 70s, and in the 80s, and in the 90s, and the "shocking" effects that are prognosticated never actually happen. So what's the point of this article? To take a recent employment statistic and weave it into a sermon of the marginalization of men. I found it tiresome, and there are feminists out there who actually have original thoughts (take Camille Paglia as an example).
In other words, treat people like the individuals and stop ANY form of discrimination based on irrelevant categories, sex-based or otherwise.
Also, the article makes much of the fact that women are getting more education. But this is probably because it is both harder and less necessary for them to jump into the workforce straight out of high school, not because they're any better or more prone to academia. I have no hard data to back this up, but I strongly suspect that your average woman in her 20s is FAR more likely to be at least partially dependent on a husband or parents than a man of the same age.
You might want to stop and think about how the world would have to look for the above statement not to be true. I don't think it's as strong as you think it is.
But you'd never know it from reading the subject article, so I felt it needed to be restated.
Careful with your selection bias, though.
My experience mirrors yours (all my male friends are completely independent, many female friends are dependent on boyfriend or parents), but almost all my male peers are software developers, engineers, some PhDs, etc. My female peers, on the other hand, are from a more diverse pool of people.
I would agree if 'male' and 'female' were arbitrary labels. But they're not. Gender is far less arbitrary than, say, race. It is reasonable to suppose that even a small shift in power between the sexes might affect how they interact, and by extension, society (and not necessarily for the worse, of course). In other HN articles it has been claimed that big changes happen when the sex ratio is put out of balance by even small amounts.
> In other words, treat people like the individuals and stop ANY form of discrimination based on irrelevant categories, sex-based or otherwise.
This is beside the point. As a demographic, men are becoming less privileged without there being overt discrimination against them. This is newsworthy.
This is has no bearing on the issue. Yes, two individuals are probably measurably more different than the average woman vs the average man, but the qualities of the individual tend to balance out to a middle point in the larger picture. While variation is high, there is a single locus.
With gender, the average woman compared to the average men may be less different than any two random individuals, but there are nonetheless two loci for gender.
> But this is probably because it is both harder and less necessary for them to jump into the workforce straight out of high school, not because they're any better or more prone to academia. I have no hard data to back this up, but I strongly suspect that your average woman in her 20s is FAR more likely to be at least partially dependent on a husband or parents than a man of the same age.
And maybe Unicorns are making all the girls smarter, and flying spaghetti monsters are distracting all the men from studying and doing homework. I have no hard data to back that up. I'm just saying.
Seriously though, if you don't have at least some kind of evidence to back up what you're saying, you're better off just not saying it.
(p.s. the data says you're wrong.)
If the average difference between all men and all women on Skill X is 3%, and the average difference between any two given individuals is 30%, then even though there are two distinct loci, gender is still an extremely weak indicator. Sure, it shows up on statistical charts, but for that to be a meaningful "larger picture" means it should be able to inform our actions as a society. But the huge intra-group variation means that any action we do take based on this data is necessarily unfair to a large number of individuals.
> (p.s. the data says you're wrong.)
Please, I love to see it. I would have researched it myself except didn't have time to dig around right now and a quick Google search turns up nothing on the subject.
Heck, even spatial abilities are so last-century, now that everyone has a GPS.
So then you get things like men's constantly decreasing fertility, for decades now. Decreasing testosterone levels, again trending downwards for many years now.
I'm not saying this is either good or bad, I'm just saying this is an environment which creates different evolutionary pressures, and our species is responding to it.
I'm not sure I can imagine the destination, though.
Instead, I'd suggest you look at the various changing environmental factors for an explanation of these phenomena: BPA in plastics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A), the growing use of soy in human diets (with its attendant phyto-estrogens), and the growing quantities of synthetic human estrogen in the environment (already known to have effects on fish, see for instance http://www.seattlepi.com/local/124939_estrogen04.html).
Measure the testosterone level in your bloodstream.
Then for a few weeks start doing heavy squats (weight lifting) every other day, go car racing, skydiving, etc.
Now measure T again. See the difference?
There are all sorts of things like that. The bottom line is, the more secure the environment, the less the need for men to be "men".
Also, I was not implying that the new evolutionary pressures have already made changes, I was just saying the changes are being made now - but how long before they will become visible, I have no idea. Probably not tomorrow.
I did work construction when I was younger, and I must say, I enjoyed it immensely. I always love to help out someone build a shed or throw up some drywall.
It's just plain fun to build things with your hands, even if you're mainly doing the work with your finger-tips these days.
If I want to create with my hands the fight for free time becomes imperative. I've been working to find a sustainable lifestyle that has room for a little extra time off for years. Free time has the single biggest effect on quality of life in my opinion. Having time for physical work is great, but the beauty is free time can be used for anything.
It will also be interesting to see if history bears out the current theories that men skew to the extremes. In 20 years women may make up the majority of the white-collar workforce, but will they also dominate at the executive level?
Wikipedia goes even further than my hedged and uninformed "very few" statement and says:
There are no known societies that are unambiguously matriarchal,[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] although there are a number of attested matrilinear, matrilocal and avunculocal societies, especially among indigenous peoples of Asia and Africa,[9] such as those of the Basques, Minangkabau, Mosuo, Berbers or Tuareg. Strongly matrilocal societies sometimes are referred to as matrifocal, and there is some debate concerning the terminological delineation between matrifocality and matriarchy.
which is no doubt enough to keep anyone occupied for hours, but anyway, I see no evidence that early societies were matriarchal.
*Of the 25% that is "science", the bulk of it isn't really, it's just memorizing definitions. I remember in my 9th grade physics class we had to memorize that the definition of a "virtual image" was an image that appeared behind a mirror. They never went into any detail about the physics of lenses, they just found a science term and made everybody memorize it.
Look at any movie, telefilm, sit-com ecc where the main character is a youg boy. He's always a good-looking,athletic, funny,street-smart guy. And at school sucks.
The smart guys are always nerds, losers.
The girls are always pretty, shy, serious and very good at school.
I think that for a school boy there is a lot of social pressure to be good in sports, get many girls and be the leader of your class. They can't afford to lose time studying.
For the "good" girls there is social pressure to be more serious and academically good.
"The problem with "The End of Men" is that it isn't an isolated problem, putting males today and males tomorrow out of jobs. Instead, it's part of a larger pattern. That pattern is the replacement of human labor with automation."
Check out the whole thing here: http://www.intellectualpornography.com/2010/06/one-oclock-da...
The entire premise of this article is pretty weak, which isn't surprising for The Atlantic. While more women may be employed than men, the jobs they have are associated more with support than with production. As long as our economy doesn't become based on social work and child care, men don't have too much to worry about.
In fact, it seems to hide the real problem of getting more women involved in math and science. Technical skills will be even more important 20 years from now, and women are sorely underrepresented in those fields. I think the society that has the most women involved in tech will be big winner in the long term.
I know a few recent nursing school graduates, they tell me the running joke in the medical profession is that all the successful women are merely hunting for a successful mate(with a doctor being the brass ring).
Career as means to long term relationship might seem misogynistic, but there's also the common male stereotype of men chasing money primarily to attract women.
I'm not presenting real evidence here, maybe a survey of professional women and their relationship goals would be enlightening.
GTG girls, Big Sis is on the screen, and it's time for the two-minute bitch.