- cross-posted to:
- feminism@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- feminism@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/19420914
Trying to understand why I had these opinions, I recalled how much different being a man felt at 18 versus 28. I had no money which I presumed meant I had no value to the opposite sex. I wanted the company of women and girls, but I also resented them because I lacked experience in dating and my few experiences were rocky. A lot of magazines and headlines focused on the shortcomings of men and boys in the early 2010s, and it was easy for me to get negatively polarized into thinking it was a personal attack. Academic feminism did and does a much better job explaining patriarchy better than blogs and news sites which boiled down systems of sexism to individual behaviors.
My experience as a resentful teen boy wasn’t unique. It’s the same experience that millions of boys are going through, which they’d ordinarily grow out of by the time they hit their twenties. In my case, it was happening during a period of social revolution on gender and during an evolution in mass communications. Many of these early communities on Atheism, which captured me for their sensibility and anti-orthodoxy, evolved into anti-progressivism and eventually evolved into the Redpill and Manosphere which is how millions of young boys today engage with their gender. At least my period in this mindset was short lived: about two years. By the time 2016 rolled around, I had clearly lost interest in online gender wars as tyranny seemed a greater threat. I was now 24 and actively attending college; I had plenty of friendships and dating experiences with women, and that teenage resentment was forgotten.
The big crisis we’re dealing with today is that the resentment is not only not expiring when men get into their twenties, but it’s being weaponized globally by parties against men’s material interests. What young boys like me didn’t realize when we were being lectured about patriarchy and the problems of men, is that being a man is an extremely privileged position over women, we’re just not old enough to benefit from it yet. This presents a problem on how we teach oppression and discrimination to young people who have little autonomy of their own and feel bad when you imply your immutable characteristics harm people you seek validation from.
I’m honestly wondering if this post isn’t just missing the forest for the trees. Like, what if it really is all about just guys not getting laid?
Like, OOP goes to college, spends time with lots of women, goes to parties, and sleeps with some of them. His view is now that society is reasonably just, since he now has a reasonable expectation that he will be able to have sex.
I mean, we can think about the various manosphere spaces: the red pill - treat women badly to get sex; mgtow - give up on relationships with women and just do your own thing; incels - just give up, you were doomed to l be a virgin from the start; “male loneliness epidemic”, aka, I can’t get a girlfriend. And then we have Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson giving these men advice, which if you remove the toxicity, boils down to: stop caring about what women think of you, take care of yourself, work out, get hobbies, spend time with friends, do well in your career. Which is pretty good advice to follow if you are a man, looking for women!
And it’s not like sex is some trivial thing, either. From an evolutionary point of view, if you can’t have sex and have no expectation of being able to get it in the future, that’s a death worse than death. It is the end of your genes, which are programmed to want to continue existing even more than any individual is.
So if you’re looking to deradicalize young men, it’s possible that the solution is to just give them a straightforward path to getting some pussy.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Or, at least, you’ve touched on something that is often overlooked and underemphasized, despite being a (if not the) root cause of this stuff. I think it’s hard for people to understand if they were not young men once, and it’s easy to forget as you age, even if you were.
sex, or a relationship, house, and stable income?
I feel like being able to live for longer than a month if you get sick and can’t work is a WAY larger deal for mental health than if you can have sex once in a while.
You’re fitting the problem to the things you want it to address. As someone who was formerly a young man, I can tell you that I didn’t care about owning a house, healthcare was an ephemeral thing I didn’t think about, and making fast food wages was good enough for me. But I did care a lot about the fact that I wasn’t getting laid.
I mean, so are you. That’s what the whole conversation is about, adding our own views to get a better idea of the topic from all sides. You brought the topic of sex, I brought the idea of a stable life. It’s not a bad thing to bring in a different opinion.
As someone making fast food wages right now and is literally a young man right now a stable future is the #1 topic for me. Housing is so expensive I don’t know if I’d be able to live in the future without my parents. Wages are absolutely horrible and jobs aren’t hiring.
for context, in currently in highschool and when I get out in a month I’m concerned if scholarships fall out bc defunding education I won’t be able to go to college and my parents are also coming on rough times (personal) I’m concerned that they wouldn’t be able to support me either.
I’m actually curious and trying to learn here, how was that your main concern? Like I genuinely don’t understand how that was the biggest deal in your life at that point.
I’ve learned that i’m a LOT less sexual than a lot of my peers so I just don’t get it.
but also, completely ignoring how bad everything is, the ONLY factor that would lead me to voting for the right leaning party is probably peer pressure as I live in a conservative area and saying you vote left is kinda seen as odd.
And I really do want to have a conversation here and learn. Sorry if my earlier message came off as rude, I was kinda in a bad mood when I wrote it 😓