This last week, two articles came to my attention that made me think of how we’re treating males in our society.
One of the articles, and I can’t link it, because it was read to me, is so wrong it’s not even wrong. It would need to come several paces closer to reality to be MERELY wrong. My husband read it to me — he doesn’t have any care for my blood pressure, really — early morning a couple of days ago, and I never asked for the link.
Apparently there is some woman who is known as The Oracle of Wall Street. I protest her name should more properly be The Pythonese of Wall Street. She obviously is inhaling some kind of fumes, and throwing everything she can against the wall, in the hopes it will stick and she’ll be considered wise.
Her latest eructation, apparently, blames men for the lack of marriages, and the lack of marriages for the real estate slump.
Men, you see, are willfully not getting married because they’re in their parents’ basements playing computer games. This pythonese is such an amazing oracle that before this she said they weren’t getting married because they were obsessed with sports betting.
Now, there are a million reasons marriages aren’t happening to the extent they aren’t happening. Actually from where I stand, they are happening but just late, and often too late for children, or the young people never have the minimum security necessary to buy a house and have kids.
And that’s because real estate is not exactly in a slump. It is, if anything, ridiculously overvalued. Not because of any great pressure of population, but because, as in China, real estate is becoming the only SAFE vehicle of investment. This way lie ghost cities, falling apart as they are built, and existing only as notional value.
But there’s more to it, including the fact that we expect both men and women to work their tails off and go into debt to get fairly useless college degrees. And before you guys start the usual right-wing chest beating about doctorates in puppetry and “studies” — and yes, those exist, but that’s not the point of this — and how those degrees are useless… they’re all useless. More or less deliberately rendered so.
There are still good STEM degrees being offered, I hear. But this is like I hear about there still being good public schools, but almost every successful student out of any of our educational establishments practically had to beat the school into giving him/her an education and not just a diploma. And after obtaining the diploma (as well as managing, somehow, an education while getting the diploma) they also had to have a lot of luck, and an amazing amount of persistence to get jobs.
Because jobs, even ones you don’t expect, are mostly being given to people being brought over on work visas, because they can be paid less and also abused like rented mules. Which in turn means anyone who gets hired for a lot of high-requirements job can now be paid low and abused like a rented mule, because the competition can be. Which in turn–
Guys, my generation worked hard. Really hard. Until our forties, Dan sometimes worked 80 hour weeks, and had maybe half a day a week off. Which meant I was trying to break into writing while also coping with two small children, with no backup. Sometimes the whole thing felt like a high-wire act. The two years I had a corporate job in translation were fortunately before the kids, because they expected the same number of hours from me. In fact, part of the reason to leave that job was because we wanted to have children. Also because we were quite literally spending my salary on take out and new clothes — we didn’t have time to wash our clothes.
But the young people today manage to have more invidious work conditions, because on top of that kind of crazy schedule, they’re often contractors with no job security and/or they know they’re stuck at a “low/entry” level, and there is no pathway to advance at all. They see no future. And what they’re being paid, partly because of the over-valuation of real estate, partly because of regulations that make real-estate price insane, is not nearly enough to afford a house.
In fact, rents are crazy enough — partly because of the covidiocy and deferred maintenance — that the young people I know who are lucky enough to have what passes for good jobs in their fields (raging successes, in fact) are most of the time sharing a house with three or four people. Married couples will double up on a two bedroom house smaller than our starter home. Or they’ll share with two singles, one of whom will be sleeping in the living room.
And that’s the people who get married and have jobs, which are by and large already wildly successful and lucky.
I’ve talked about this in this space before, but our friends are much the same type of people we are. They’re strivers, who work very hard. And with a few exceptions (there’s always a permissive parent!) their children are the same type of people. And most of them — even if the boys started having difficulties in middle school. All of them, pretty much — finished college. Sometimes multiple degrees.
But I don’t know a single family who has managed to “launch” all their children. I particularly don’t know any family who has managed to “launch” both boys. (Well, us, I suppose, wobbles and all, but that makes us amazingly lucky, and incredibly grateful.) And keep in mind a lot of these “kids” are now in their forties.
It’s easy to blame the kids and to shake our fists about “kids these days” but it ignores the snarled mess of things that the left (mostly the left, though country club republicans and their addiction to cheap foreign labor don’t help) has made of the labor market and education and which have created REAL “systemic” obstacles to success for people under the age of 45. Those that are succeeding are either incredibly well connected or doing so DESPITE all opposition.
And then there’s the mess the left (and this is ALL the left) has created between men and women. And the weaponizing of society against men. And by men we mean anyone male in this case, starting at about age two or before.
You see, the people attracted to Marxist ideology are of a certain type. And the type is people who like “systems” and simple explanations. And Marxism is as simple as it comes. It posits a dualism to everything. There are good guys and bad guys, there are victims and oppressors. And the way to make the victims rise is to stomp on the oppressors.
The fact that this doesn’t work doesn’t mean it’s not beautifully simple and appeals to a mind that likes simple explanations and dualism.
So, you have… rich people and poor people, and they think — because wealth is a finite thing, that can’t be created, see? — if they take from the rich and give to the poor there is no more oppression and everyone will have “enough”. This delusion gave us 100 million dead, and mass starvation, and the craziness of communism in the 20th century. But for the left that didn’t disprove it. It just meant that they hadn’t got all the oppression out of society, and needed to stomp on more people.
So they identified people who, in their heads, did better, and without looking at any other factors, applied their dualism. We know what they’ve done to races, let alone to political oppression.
But probably their most deranged obsession has been with sex. You see, females had a different type of job (in general. Ignoring the outlier females who always had male jobs, in every era, is one of their bizarre oversights) from males. And in the leftist’s heads, less “glamorous” or “powerful” jobs.
This is also because they’re a bit strange, and don’t — at all — understand soft power. So they saw most rulers/battle leaders/politicians/financiers throughout history were male, and assumed this meant females were powerless. Thereby ignoring the women who raised, supported and often worked in very close association with these men. Except when they claimed some scientist was only successful because of his wife, for …. reasons. But never mind that. They’re nothing if not inconsistent.
Because they ignored soft power — and matriarchs often, in the shadows, controlling an entire clan of successful men (THE single most important thing for a man’s success are the women in his life) or that men and women are different, or that throughout most of history women spent most of their lives pregnant, and therefore for various reasons unable to hold high-stress jobs, or the fact that women in general prefer indoor, people oriented, “safe” jobs, probably due to evolutionary pressures, to be honest, or a million other factors — they decided because men had the more visible, public, and often physically difficult roles, women were being oppressed.
And because women were being oppressed, men must be stomped on so women could rise.
We are now in the third generation of women being berated and browbeaten into not even admitting they want to get married and have children. In my day, already, you were considered stupid for wanting that. Instead they’re told they should want to do STEM work that takes very long and difficult training, and doesn’t leave room for marriage and children. That’s bad enough. And the horrible trauma inflicted on women — my generation already went through this, and some of the generation before — often means they’re very unhappy and resent every male.
But it wasn’t working. In my generation, most of us got married and had children. So, since it wasn’t working, men must — OBVIOUSLY — be stomped on harder, because the only way to rise is to stomp on the “oppressor” don’t you see?
My friend Tom Knighton — a brilliant columnist who deserves much wider dispersal than he’s got so far — wrote a post about this, and the only thing I can say is that he doesn’t go nearly far enough, and he’s a little naively trusting about the whole thing.
He seems to think it’s a matter of girls just naturally being more inclined to academia, but oh, dear Lord, NO.
The entire school system from pre-school on, but more emphatically from middle-school on is designed to favor female achievement and to deter male achievement. It starts with no recess because you know, recess isn’t safe. And with the curtailing of most physical exercise. This hurts males more than females, because more males need to do physical stuff to be able to concentrate and sit still. Call it hypeactive, but it seems to be “just boy.” Now this of course exists on a spectrum, and younger son had much more trouble with this than older son. But even older son benefited from kindergarten teacher who was mother-of-boys and who told him to run around the classroom three times, when he was having trouble concentrating and staying on task.
But it doesn’t end there, oh, no. Already in my day they were pushing group work. Because most girls work better in a group. (I hated it, but I ain’t normal.) And there were a lot of points given for “presentation” again a female strength.
This has been ramped up to insane degrees. Being dutiful and counting buttons prettily now count for a lot more than actually knowing the material. I had a kid about to fail a class because he consistently forgot to turn in homework (He did it, just forgot to turn it in) even while he had straight As in every test. This is ridiculous and not in any sense sane. If you can do the work in a time, watched test, why should you be failed? Yes, sure, learning to complete boring tasks (and most homework is incredibly boring and counterproductive) is needed in the workplace, but so much of it? (Kids routinely had three hours of button counting and coloring the squares different colors, or equally stupid make-work after school.) And should it count for 80% of the grade? Why? Is your goal to teach material and skills, or to create mindless drones?
The point being that I personally knew girls in my boys’ classes, who couldn’t reason, couldn’t cypher, couldn’t write a sentence — anyone remember when my blog was “invaded” by son’s middle school classmates — but who had straight As in everything. I guess they did their homework dutifully, and colored those squares PRETTY colors.
These same girls four years later, and in the same state of smug mental disuse had scholarships for ivy leagues, and stellar resumes. And I’m sure they graduated, and found jobs where they mostly spend their time karening and screaming “discrimination” while someone else does their job.
This is not about my kids. They did well enough by learning outside the school, and by not giving up, and keeping up the striving. BUT others… well.
If you are always wrong, by motive of having a penis, if every history lesson is about how you are an oppressor for reason of having a penis, if anything you do at school will be misjudged and attacked, because you have a penis, if the very structure of the school is designed to make you appear stupid and fail, because you are a perfectly normal male, and if further, even when you succeed you’ll not being given credit or incentives, because the girls must be uplifted (and their mothers will scream bloody murder if they’re not given the lady’s A)… well, you’re going to give up.
I want to emphasize this is bad for the girls/women too. It’s horrible. They will enter STEM degrees with no idea of how ill prepared they are. And then often they won’t be failed, because the college is afraid of failing them. Most are still smart enough to run screaming into social sciences (all those “studies” degrees you love to rail about) but note that they do it convinced they were pushed out of STEM by “prejudice” and “discrimination” instead of being ill-prepared due to discrimination IN THEIR FAVOR. Those who go all the way to the end are often convinced they are discriminated against in their jobs, when they are often run up the ladder to a place they can do no damage. I’m convinced this is 90% of the glass ceiling, the other 10% being that even the competent women do suffer from discrimination, because everyone believes they are like the over-promoted ninnies.
But the boys and men. Oh, the boys and men. Our society is very hard on males. It always was.
The males are expected to succeed DESPITE ALL OBSTACLES. They’re not supposed to suffer from depression and despair. They’re not supposed to show weakness. And they are told from their youngest age that they are privileged, and society is designed for them to succeed.
So when the weight of factors — educational, social, physical — arrayed against them makes them fall, and they can’t get up, they know they, personally, must be defective.
And even the people who are supposed to be on the right, and understand that society has been broken by the leftists, will rage at boys and call them lazy, and say they play too many video games, and look what a disgrace they are. Why, when you were their age, you walked ten miles in snow, both ways, even in summer, thumping your chest all the way, and you had girls falling on your from above begging you to take them to your cave! If only these slackers applied themselves! If they had a little more gumption!
Stop kicking the boys and men. Stop piling on them. The left does it enough.
Walk a mile in their cement shoes.
The miracle is not that a good portion — probably 40%– of young men have given up, and are staying hidden and playing escapist games. The miracle is that more of them haven’t taken weapons and started making people pay. And for that we should be grateful.
Now we can’t fix the system itself. The system is a mess. But the system is made of individuals, and you are an individual.
Even if you don’t have kids, you probably know boys or young men. Figure out how to reach them. Most of all, enter into their interests. Make sure they know it’s not their fault. it’s the fault of crazy bureaucrats and theorists.
Women aren’t failing because of them, and the world is not designed to favor men. On the contrary. Everyone is failing, because the institutions are insane.
It’s not their fault. They’ve done nothing wrong. Telling them so, will be novel enough, in most cases, to capture their attention, to be fair.
And then figure out how to help. Teach, mentor, come up with some opportunity you can offer. Not handouts, but hands up.
Give boys and men a chance. A lot of them will fail. But if one in ten succeed, we’ll have managed something. We might have managed to salvage enough of the mess.
Don’t rail against the future. Go and build it.
You might only do a little, but you are not alone.
Be not afraid. Go work.