this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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I'd say the game was definitely rigged from the start, but perhaps not just in the way men are raised and socialised.
If you make a joke about the inadequacy of men, you're a bold and insightful person. If you make a joke about the inadequacy of women, you're a misogynistic pig.
Also, remember gents, you should be ok with automatically being considered a threat, because everyone knows men only think about one thing (this is technically true, normally it's "how the feck do I pay my rent this month, I just spent all my money on ").
I'd agree that men are definitely not raised and socialised for that kind of system, but then again who wants to be?
nobody wants to be here here, we were all born without the input of our own opinion. You can either do something to change society to improve it for the better generally, or you can sit there and go "well idk guys society is hard to do"
we quite literally just have to build a society that builds men up throughout their lives, we need to give them something to care about socially. Currently, they have nothing.
You're definitely right that society needs to do a better job with this. Calling men toxic and joking about their inadequacy might make the person speaking feel better about themselves but it's not going to help society at all because that kind of talk is what pushes more and more boys into the arms of the Tate's of the world.
i think even this line of discussion is partially reductive on a fundamental level. It's an important one to have so i don't want to discount it here, but i think it's probably more important that we focus on the issue specifically rather than how what we're currently doing is bad and how it could possibly be negatively influential. Is pretty redundant when we all know that it's just not going to do what we need it to be doing.
Granted some people won't know that, and that's why we're talking about it now, but i feel like it's just such an easy conversation to have comparatively to this one. I'm surprised that this isn't a more regular topic of discussion, though i guess people probably dont think very hard about it.
Hrm, I'm not sure there. I'd say it's closer to just not knocking them down so often. Most of the time, men and women can build themselves up.
A lot of the issues we currently have are based on women being taught to knock men down, and men being taught to knock women down. Oddly enough, which side has it worse depends on where you're from, but the motivation for it is always the same - power and the maintenance of.
when they have a proper conceptualization and understanding of the world, absolutely, the problem is that we don't exactly raise them with one. This is the reason the manosphere is so prominent.
The problem is not individuals being assholes and raping people for no reason, the problem is a lack of instilling a good social culture in boys as they grow leading them to be primed to be a good person in society. Like i said currently we just kinda shit them out of hs and into college or not, and that's literally it. There's nothing to be interested in or excited about. If you're a woman growing up in modern society there's a lot to be interested in, college enrollments are up, more women are getting educated, more women are going into large businesses and managerial rolls, there's a lot of perceived social progress there.
the problem is men don't really have anything of the sort to care about. Everything they previously had to care about was removed and reinstated with something counter intuitive to what it proposed. We haven't replaced what no longer exists, there is just a void here, and it's no surprise that men enroll in college less, pursue higher education less, and are generally worse off in life (higher rates of suicide etc)
I think you've touched on the problem at hand here, i think the part you don't quite realize is that this is a secondary knock on effect of the prior (what i just mentioned) this is all to be expected as a result from something of this caliber.
i think right now one of the best strategies that we have is to build up the capability of being a good role model, and in general being a good person in boys/young men, it's a little bit reminiscent of previous norms, but we don't really have many options here. One thing that is bound to be pretty effective here is utilizing them to be a social group leader of their domain (mostly other men)
You raise some excellent points here, however I'm not entirely swayed.
Your point about raising men with a good social culture is a good one, however it has its roots in the fallacy which really lies at the heart of the matter - that only men need fixing.
As a man, I've sat through a work conversation where a group of women (including my direct senior) have openly denigrated men in humour (I found it edgily funny). If it had been the other way around, the men involved would be talking to HR the next day, no laughs involved. The standards to which both parties are held need to be the same, though what those standards are is anybody's guess.
Equality, equity, justice: that lovely ladder graphic. If you give students extra resources, their outcomes are better. "Women in stem", "women's networking day", all aimed in one place at one group. In our drive to redress imbalance against women, we have created one against men. It isn't the fact that young men feel isolated and need socialising that's stopping them, it's the fact that the deck is rigged against them and we celebrate that rigging.
What you see with the "manosphere" (never heard it called that before, I like the name), is the froth and bubbles. The boys who are angry, but who can't do anything about it, are the ones who tumble in there and become monsters instead.
The solution isn't simple, and while socialisation will help a little, there needs to be fundamental changes to the social world before we can move forward. If your argument were to be, say, socialising both men and women to be kinder to one another, I'd be with you.
i think this is a misunderstanding of my point. I'm not saying that men are fucking stupid and retarded, i'm saying that society has let men slip through it's fingers into a pit of despair, with little to help them crawl out of it. Women are socially better equipped to deal with this for various different reasons, and socially they're doing pretty good right now because of their workforce and education push happening right now, which is a good thing, presumably they will have a similar problem in the future, however i don't think it's going to be as significant as they all have really solid support structures, men often have none. Socially it's ok for women to engage in them and to partake in them, socially for men, it's not nearly as acceptable.
As a collective society, fathers, mothers, family relatives, we all need to work and focus on raising better men going forward who can be more functional in society, as well as giving them a clear place to exist, because right now, there isn't really a place for them to exist.
this is definitely a problem, and this is why i'm leaving these comments, people focus too much on this aspect of the issue, rather than the aspect we should be collectively focusing on, including you at the moment.
this is a different story entirely, and im not sure how much of this is a problem, though it's probably not the optimal way of going about it either so.
i think it's more along the lines that men are essentially an english speaker who up and moved to a place with a completely different culture and a completely different language, they just can't really do much in that environment because the expectations they have don't exist in the real world. There's a reason we see male partners break up with females who begin making more than them, theres a reason they have higher suicide rates, there's a reason men are generally less sociable than women. There's a reason behind all of this, and it isn't some failure of the previous social system, it's a failure of the previous system, and the current one. The worst aspects of both systems are rearing the ugly sides of their faces simultaneously right now, and it's compounding somewhat excessively here.
exactly, and the reason why they end up in there, is because it gives them some sense of purpose, and some sort of drive, redefining social norms back to how they were in the 50s makes everything they do more logical in their framework. We need the modern version of this that isn't predicated on women having no rights, and men having literally only the protection of women to deal with. (i didn't come up with the name btw, it's what online peeps refer to it as)
my argument is that we aren't raising them correctly, we're not raising them with the proper expectations or any at all, and this has a clear and defined impact on the life of men going forward, it's not hard to demonstrate it. It's not hard to redefine the role of a person in society, we just need to do it from a young age. The broader philosophical and child rearing debate here is how specifically to do that, but we all have people that we all love for being genuinely good humans, jimmy carter, mr rogers, etc. People like that are of a dying breed i worry. Starting there would at least give us something to work with on the short span of it.
women don't want to view men as threats. yes, this problem cuts both ways. it ultimately still boils down to how men are socialized. what we see from women is just a response to that.
I think it boils down a lot further than just the socialisation of men. It boils down to how people see one another.
At the moment, the idea that men must be "defused" in some way, as if they might just "go off" is repugnantly offensive. It's a line of thought that harks back to racist ideas of "uncultured savages" who could "regress" at any moment.
Similarly, the idea that everything is ok for women even now is bucolicly stupid. This is beyond simple socialisation to solve, and requires a solid bit of activisim.
The really sad thing is we all want the same thing - for people to care about us, and accept who we are. For people not to hurt us, and to feel like we're part of the wider world about us beyond token consumption.
Does it? Does it really?
I mean, yeah, no shit?
Oh, you're right, I forgot about the 100 years of uncultured, savage men being conscripted into slave labor to build rail roads or whatever.
The persecution complex with you people is astounding.
A question for you to meditate on, as my position is quite clear.
It's clear.
Out of curiosity, how did you feel about man vs bear?
An excellent piece of ragebait, it became more than the issue it tried to raise though.
There's definitely a relationship between the marginalization of dark skinned people (men and women) and the view of dark skinned people as more masculine (therefore more dangerous.)
I'm not sure I agree, but I'm also not sure what you're talking about.
Is there a view that dark skinned people are more masculine? I might accept less feminine; such a view would serve the purpose of making the violence against them easier for people to stomach.
I agree to some degree, but there's also the fact that the socialization of men is the more dire problem in our current society by a significant degree.
That's not why women often consider men a threat.
I think this is an agree to disagree point - my view is that the need to socialise men is only half the solution, and that tackling the rampant socially acceptable iniquity would be a more urgent one (as the longer it goes on, the more disruptive the eventual correction).
Maybe we should try both, surely one dies not preclude the other? That way we'll be sure to fix the issue!
But joking about and insulting them isn't going to make anything better, it's going to drive more impressionable young boys towards people like Tate.