The Gender Wars
They're apparently ongoing. Who knew?
Yesterday, I flagged Derek Thompson‘s Atlantic essay “What Is America’s Gender War Actually About?” but didn’t get around to reading it. This morning, I see that WSJ’s Aaron Zitner and Andrew Restuccia published a report overnight declaring “America’s New Political War Pits Young Men Against Young Women.” I study war for a living and yet somehow missed one going on right here at home.
The WSJ essay is chock-full of anecdotes, including an opener pitting a male farmer against a female engineer which I found decidedly unhelpful. But the data in the report are useful:
The forces of American culture and politics are pushing men and women under age 30 into opposing camps, creating a new fault line in the electorate and adding an unexpected wild card into the 2024 presidential election.
Voters under 30 have been a pillar of the Democratic coalition since Ronald Reagan left office in 1989. That pillar is showing cracks, with young men defecting from the party.
Young men now favor Republican control of Congress and Trump for president after backing Biden and Democratic lawmakers in 2020.
Women under 30 remain strongly behind Democrats for Congress and the White House. They are also far more likely to call themselves liberal than two decades ago.
Before President Biden ended his candidacy this month, Trump was winning support from a majority of men under age 30, according to a merger of Wall Street Journal polls in February and July. If that holds until Election Day, Republicans would win young men for the first time in more than two decades, voter exit polls show.
Young men backed Trump over Biden by 14 points in the merged Journal polls this year, a substantial swing from 2020. In that election, they supported Biden by 15 points, according to AP VoteCast, a voter survey. Young women in the Journal surveys backed Biden by 30 points and Democratic control of Congress by 34 points, essentially unchanged from 2020.
The gender gap extends to opposing views of abortion, student-loan forgiveness and other issues affecting the lives of young adults.
The question now is whether Harris, the expected Democratic nominee, will recapture the support of young men or push more of them away. Harris’s candidacy removes Biden’s age, 81, as a voter concern and instead spotlights social, economic and policy issues driving young men and women apart.
This is followed by more anecdote but also noting that Trump and the GOP writ large are successfully pushing a “tough guy” image, one that was bolstered by Trump’s defiance in the face of an assassin’s bullet and played up at the Republican National Convention.
The testosterone-fueled lineup, coming on the heels of Trump’s fist-pumping response to bullets flying past him, “positions Trump as an anti-hero that millions of young men—specifically, young, first-time voters—connect with and even aspire to,’’ said John Della Volpe, director of the Harvard Youth Poll. “It’s something they see everywhere they consume information, whether it’s in the gamer community, TikTok, Instagram.’’
The replacement of Joe Biden, a feeble octogenarian, with Harris, a woman 20 years Trump’s junior, changes the dynamics of the race in ways that are not yet clear.
Harris, the expected Democratic nominee, is pressing her party’s argument that the wave of new state abortion restrictions strips fundamental rights from women. The protection of reproductive rights is a far more salient issue for women than for men, Journal polls found.
The gender divisions reflect the increasingly different experiences of American women and men in their 20s, as well as the influence of campaign messages from candidates and parties.
Women now make up a record 60% of college students and carry 66% of all student-loan debt, research shows. They support the Biden administration’s push to forgive student loans more than young men do, Journal polling finds.
We used to call this a “gender gap” rather than a “war.” But it does seem more pronounced now.
Polling last week by the Journal found Harris leading Trump among young voters by about 10 percentage points, less support than Biden drew from the group in 2020. The sample size was too small to measure how voter preferences differ by gender among those under 30.
Some men say they have lost economic, cultural and political influence to women amid the focus on equity and diversity. Others expressed resentment over feminist and progressive attitudes on college campuses, in the entertainment industry and at many workplaces.
In certain U.S. cities, young women are outpacing young men in median annual income and are more likely than young men to live apart from their parents. A larger share of women under 30 are reaching financial independence compared with young women in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center, while fewer young men are reaching that milestone compared with four decades ago.
The Democratic push for diversity is making them more likely to vote for Republicans, some men said. An April survey by the Pew Research Center found that 23% of men—and 33% of men who backed Trump—believed the advancement of women has come at their expense.
Many young men feel abandoned by Democrats, saying Republican politicians are the ones making direct appeals to them, according to interviews with dozens of men under 30.
The Biden administration has focused on political appeals to women, people of color and other Democratic constituencies. Harris called for affordable child care and paid parental leave in her first campaign speeches, policies less likely to appeal to single young men.
Biden successfully pressed for trillions of dollars in federal spending on infrastructure construction, semiconductor manufacturing and other sectors that traditionally employ men. Yet young men maintain an overwhelmingly negative view of him, Journal surveys found.
[…]
The shift toward Trump includes Black and Latino men. Young Black men had backed Biden over Trump by about 70 percentage points in 2020, and Latino men backed Biden by more than 40 points, according to AP VoteCast.
Journal polls found support for Biden shrank this year before the president withdrew from the race, leaving him with a narrow lead, as small as in the single digits, among nonwhite men.
Young white men have leaned Republican in the past and showed signs of shifting in greater numbers to the GOP this year.
Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men.
Other men say they are drawn to the so-called manosphere, a loose collection of male influencers who espouse macho, “anti-woke” views. The hyper-masculinity of the right, many of them said, is at the core of its appeal, not policies or party politics.
This is a phenomenon we’ve discussed many times over the years. The shifting social and economic landscape has removed men from a dominant position in society and the household to one where they are, at best, equals and, quite often, at a distinct disadvantage. Physical strength has been devalued while patience and interpersonal skills are at a premium. Boys do less well in school, which demands sitting for long periods and being quiet, than girls and, for decades now, this has translated to more young women than young men going on to college and graduate or professional school. And, since successful women almost never have interest in pairing with men who are less successful, this leads to rejection, resentment, and rage.
Thompson adds additional insights. He begins similarly to the WSJ duo:
The United States is politically polarized along several lines, including race, geography, and education. Heading into a general election that will once again offer voters a choice between a Democratic woman and a Republican man, gender may seem like the clearest split of all. But surveys, polls, and political scientists are torn on how dramatically men and women are divided, or what their division actually means for American politics. The gender war is much weirder than it initially appears.
By several measures, men and women in America are indeed drifting apart. For most of the past 50 years, they held surprisingly similar views on abortion, for example. Then, in the past decade, the pro-choice position surged among women. In 1995, women were just 1 percentage point more likely to say they were pro-choice than men. Today women are 14 points more likely to say they’re pro-choice—the highest margin on record.
In 1999, women ages 18 to 29 were five percentage points more likely than men to say they were “very liberal.” In 2023, the gap expanded to 15 percentage points. While young women are clearly moving left, some evidence suggests that young men are drifting right. From 2017 to 2024, the share of men under 30 who said the U.S. has gone “too far” promoting gender equality more than doubled, according to data shared by Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. Gallup data show that young men are now leaning toward the Republican Party more than at any other point this century.
But then shifts to this:
Arguably, men and women aren’t rapidly diverging in their politics at all, as my colleague Rose Horowitch reported. At the ballot box, the gender gap is about the same as it’s long been. Men have for decades preferred Republican candidates, while women have for decades leaned Democratic. In a 2024 analysis of voter data, Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results, “found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections,” Horowitch wrote.
One suggested explanation for these apparent contradictions is that the most alarming surveys are showing us the future, and this November will establish a new high-water mark in gender polarization, with women breaking hard for Kamala Harris and men voting overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Another possibility is that these surveys are a little misleading, and gender polarization has already peaked, in which case this is much ado about nothing.
A third possibility interests me the most. John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, says the gender gap is real; it’s just not what many people think it is. “The parties are more polarized by gender attitudes than by gender itself,” he told me.
As alluded to above, this is my take as well.
If that sounds a bit academic, try a thought experiment to make it more concrete. Imagine that you are standing on the opposite side of a wall from 100 American voters you cannot see. Your job is to accurately guess how many of the folks on the other side of the wall are Republicans. You can only ask one of the following two questions: “Are you a man?” or “Do you think that men face meaningful discrimination in America today?” The first question is about gender. The second question is about gender attitudes, or how society treats men and women. According to Sides, the second question will lead to a much more accurate estimate of party affiliation than the first. That’s because the parties aren’t remotely united by gender, Sides says. After all, millions of women will vote for Trump this year. But the parties are sharply divided by their cultural attitudes toward gender roles and the experience of being a man or woman in America.
The fable above plays out in survey data, too. In the March 2024 Views of the Electorate Research (VOTER) Survey, 39 percent of men identified as Republican versus 33 percent of women. That’s a six-point gap. But when the VOTER Survey asked participants how society treats, or ought to treat, men and women, the gender gap exploded. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said women face “a lot” or “a great deal” of discrimination while only 19 percent of Republicans said so. In this case, the gender-attitude gap was more than six times larger than the more commonly discussed gender gap.
To Sides, the conclusion is obvious: The political parties are more divided by their views on gender than they are divided by gender itself. It’s not “men are from Mars, and women are from Venus.” It’s “Republican men and women are from Mars, and Democratic men and women are from Venus.”
Which seems obvious once stated. While the “war” metaphor remains overwrought, we don’t have a “gender war” in the sense of a struggle between men and women we have one in the sense of a fight over gender.
Political language today is so coded by gender that it’s easy to identify blind quotes by party. If you hear a politician complain that the opposing party is dominated “by a bunch of childless cat ladies,” well, it’s obviously a Republican speaking. (That would be J. D. Vance in an interview a few years ago with Tucker Carlson.) If you hear a politician accuse the opposing party of becoming a “He-Man woman-hater’s club,” well, it’s obviously a Democrat talking. (In this case, the Democrat is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz describing the GOP presidential ticket and this month’s Republican National Convention.)
But there’s a difference between distinct gender rhetoric and a coherent vision of womanliness or manliness. For its part, the GOP plays host to several visions of masculinity, awkwardly mushed together. Trump is a thrice-married Lothario who combines the showmanship of a pro-wrestling heel with the wounded rage of a country-club rejectee. The result is a potent mix of cosmetic macho bluster and marrow-deep elite resentment. For the purpose of containing this multitude in a phrase, let’s call it “alpha-victim masculinity.”
As Thompson’s colleague Tom Nichols observes in his recent essay “The Great Manliness Flip-Flop,” this is cosplay masculinity.
America after World War II celebrated traditional masculinity. It venerated images of the strong, silent types in popular culture, characters who exuded confidence without being braggarts and who sent the message that being an honorable man meant doing your job, being good to your family, and keeping your feelings to yourself. Heroes in that postwar culture were cowboys, soldiers, cops, and other tough guys.
Republicans, in particular, admired the actors who played these role models, including Clint Eastwood, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, and, of course, Ronald Reagan, who turned art into reality after he was shot: He apologized to his wife for forgetting to duck and kidded with his surgeons about whether they were all Republicans before they dug a bullet out of him.
After the 1960s, the GOP defined itself as a guardian of this stoic manliness in opposition to the putative femininity of Democratic men. (Remember, by this point, Democrats such as Reagan had already defected to the Republicans.) Democrats were guys who, in Republican eyes, looked like John Lennon, with ponytails and glasses and wrinkled linen shirts. To them, Democratic men weren’t men; they were boys who tore up their draft cards and cried and shouted and marched and shared their inner feelings—all of that icky stuff that real men don’t do.
These liberal men were ostensibly letting down their family and their country. This prospect was especially shameful during the Cold War against the Soviets, who were known to be virile, 10-foot-tall giants. (The Commies were so tough that they drank liquid nitrogen and smoked cigarettes made from plutonium.)
Most of this was pure hooey, of course. Anyone who grew up around the working class knew plenty of tough Democratic men; likewise, plenty of country-club Republicans never lifted anything heavier than a martini glass weighted down with cocktail onions. But when the educational divide between the right and the left grew larger, Republican men adhered even more strongly to old cultural stereotypes while Democratic men, more urbanized and educated, identified less and less with images of their fathers and grandfathers in the fields and factories.
In the age of Donald Trump, however, Republicans have become much of what they once claimed to see in Democrats. The reality is that elected Democratic leaders are now (to borrow from the title of a classic John Wayne movie) the quiet men, and Republicans have become full-on hysterics, screaming about voting machines and Hunter Biden and drag queens while trying to impeach Kamala Harris for … being female while on duty, or something.
[…]
As I have written, Trump is hands down America’s unmanliest president, despite the weird pseudo-macho culture that his fans have created around him—and despite his moment of defiance after a bullet grazed his ear. I give him all the credit in the world for those few minutes; I have no idea if I’d have that much presence of mind with a few gallons of adrenaline barreling through my veins. But true to form, he then wallowed in the assassination attempt like the narcissist he is, regaling the faithful at the Republican National Convention about how much human ears can bleed. As it turns out, one moment of brave fist-pumping could not overcome a lifetime of unmanly behavior.
[…]
I also know this: The real men are not the ones who have to keep crowing about manliness and putting down women. Real men serve their nation, their community, and their family, and unlike Trump and his elected Republican coterie, they do it without whining or demanding credit.
Regardless, Thompson continues,
If the GOP’s gender politics are fragmented by decorum and divorce, the glue tying the party together may be a nostalgia for social-dominance hierarchies and opposition to the cosmopolitan mores of the left. As the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle has written, the progressive movement originating with the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s has embraced a cultural politics that is “free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles” and that “rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated.” The watchword of progressive gender politics is not tradition but liberation, a full break from the pull of history. Tradition, which conservatives see as a guardrail, progressives see as a straitjacket.
Women make up a majority of the electorate, outvoting men by millions of ballots each election. So it might be strategic for Democrats to adopt a political language and policy platform that appeals disproportionately to female voters. The problem, as Richard Reeves, the author of the book Of Boys and Men, has told me, is that men vote, too. The left has become more adept at shaming toxic masculinity than at showcasing a positive masculinity that is distinct from femininity. Progressive readers of the previous sentence might roll their eyes at the notion that it is the job of any left-wing political movement to coddle men’s feelings. But if a large shift rightward among young male voters helps Trump eke out a victory in November, Democrats will have little choice but to think up a new message to stop the young-male exodus.
“The Democratic Party appears to have made a conscious choice not to make young men a political priority,” Cox told me, just as “the GOP under Trump seems unconcerned about the ways it may be alienating young women.” If American politics in 2024 is a gender war, it is not yet a conflict between the genders. Let’s hope it never gets to that. But it is a conflict between the parties over the role of gender, the meaning of gender, the definition of gender. And that, frankly, is strange enough.
In a more rational world, of course, such questions would be absurd. We shouldn’t have gender-based expectations and the very concepts of masculinity and feminity wouldn’t exist. We do not, however, live in anything remotely like that world.
We have fostered a large cohort of young males—I hesitate to call them men—who are failing at life and somehow blame women for it. This is likely not a problem with a political solution. And, certainly, if there is one, it sure as hell isn’t Donald Trump.
Republicans are just weird, sad, lonely, online people who really have no idea how they sound to people who aren’t already them.
WaPo and “media” do the bothsides thing because…. their owners who are wholly conservative men want to elevate their fellow conservative losers to unearned equality with liberals. You know, affirmative action. And the other thing that should be entirely clear from this thread.. the media is 100% CONSERVATIVE, not liberal.
[The ongoing attempt to call media “liberal” is a backdoor propaganda attempt to shoehorn conservative goals into liberal thought.]
Never forget that conservative men thought American Psycho set to phonk would be a good idea for a DeSantis political ad. People who aren’t incels watch that and think.. “what the familyblog is wrong with you?”
Let’s be the flip for real… it’s not “we” who have fostered a cohort of males who fail at life. It’s conservative Republicans who do that, full stop.
Agree with the assessment that there’s nothing really changed here.
This is all so exhausting. If these men–the ones who feel as though:
–understood what it’s like to have to work twice as hard to get half as far, maybe they’d stop this whining.
I’m in my mid-50s, and off the top of my head have at least a half-dozen stories from my own work experience of times when men got a break or grace not extended to women. Add to that the broader cultural aspects–the fact that women have only been able to get a loan or a credit card without a male co-signer since what, the 1980s, just as an example–the fact that women still have to over-prepare and over-explain because we cannot miss anything without being critiqued–it’s just so maddening that this is some how portrayed as such massive strides that “men feel left behind.”
@Jen:
This reminds me of a dept. chair I had at Harvard who claimed he had to pay the men more than the women or else the men would “feel bad.”
When exactly did we become cry-baby nation? Men of all ages have to adjust to a world where other people have views that matter too? Waah!!! No fair!
It’s not a war, it’s just immaturity.
Signed, Father of two grown-up sons
Racism and misogyny are both variations of the “aristocracy of the mediocre”.
People who want to sit atop the social hierarchy, but want it handed to them like a participation trophy.
The whiny cries of entitlement are just embarrassing. Don’t understand how men believe that makes them attractive to women. Work harder guys.
The “tough guy” image re Trump almost made me spit my coffee. Later in the piece it was mentioned that Trump was one of, it not THE, most unmanly presidents. It wasn’t that long ago that Trump’s platinum blond comb-over (not to mention the half pound of makeup) caused polite people in his presence to suppress the urge to laugh out loud. Now, as is the case with his daily incoherence, his appearance is dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” To think that young males look at him as a macho man role model is absurd – no matter how many times he pumps his fist before the docs use a styptic pencil to stop his ear bleed.
There was some discussion yesterday about attacking GOPs as “weird”. There was a question of whether it would work and how it could be applied to Trump. A lot of why “weird” can work revolves around this manliness stuff.
First, Trump is an obese old man (full disclosure – six weeks younger than me) who wears makeup and an extreme combover and makes himself out as a tough guy. That’s weird. Second, when we attack Trump on democracy, what a lot of MAGA see is the libs are afraid of Trump, he’s strong. And yes we are afraid of Trump. If a 6′-4″ burglar threatened me with a gun, I’d be afraid. I’d also be afraid if a ten year old child started playing with a loaded AR-15. In one case I’m afraid of a strong enemy who wants to hurt me. In the other I’m afraid of a child who doesn’t know what it’s doing. It doesn’t make the child macho. “Weird” makes the distinction.
And it has the advantage of being hard to flip. If we say they’re fascists, they say no you’re the fascists. They’re gonna come back with Harris wears makeup?
I noted above that I’m old. I was a dating male when Roe was decided. We thought it was wonderful.
@Jen:
This is true, but it’s not how people work. Most people regardless of race, gender, religion or anything else, respond at a hyper-personal level. Telling men they have it easier than women, while true in general, gets an automatic negative reaction because most people find their lives hard and their choices difficult. When a young white male gets turned down for a job responding with (effectively) “you must have really been a loser to not get that because everything is usually just handed to white men on a silver platter” just makes an enemy out of the person.
@Chip Daniels: I was going to link those two as well (linking the racial and gender contrasts are, and how whites and males are frustrated that they dont have quite as much power as they used to).
A Harvard study came out the other day showing expected salaries for middle-class 27-year-olds now compared to a couple decades ago, iirc. In general, blacks have made ground and whites have lost ground (in inflation-adjusted dollars). This provides some evidence as to why the white working class is unhappy about this and turning to Trump. Two things about this study:
1) Whites still made like $10k more than blacks, which was something like 30% more. So there’s no reason for them to be crying about it.
2) it wasn’t a zero sum game at all. The parts of the country where the blacks made up the most ground was where the whites lost the least ground (or in some cases gained themselves).
I originally was reading this in the NYT Morning Briefing email, but here’s an article talking the same study. Apologies if my brief summary is less than perfect. nyt link
Thompson has a podcast on The Ringer. I have only listened to an episode or two. I have more frequently heard him when he is a guest on the Bill Simmons Podcast. He was on last week, and briefly previewed this piece.
He referenced Roland Inglehart’s thesis of postmaterialism–summarized as, once material security is no loner a concern, the only thing left is culture war.
I do not know enough about Inglehart’s idea to assess whether Thompson is describing it accurately or if he is, whether he is applying it appropriately. But it seems to me that much of what we categorize as ‘culture war’ has material concerns underlying them.
Moreover, with all due respect to Inglehart and Thompson, this strikes me as similar to something I heard Sam Harris say, “we are probably where we need to be nutrition-wise.” Neither claim stands up to scrutiny unless one restricts analysis to the mean and median.
It also suffers from snapshot bias–it favors a frozen moment of time rather than including an analysis of effects from a policy change. Ex: look at economic growth, we can eliminate free and reduced school lunches.
Maybe this is an indication of my bias, but it seems to ignore the apparent goal of culture war claims coming from the right–as a tactic designed to place real economic concerns on the back burner. Or: the goal is to blame an Other for the economic struggles of whites, or men, or white men.
@Jen:
FWIW, I have seen this play out at my university in just the last several weeks.
And, I will note, that most of the administration at said university is male. Overwhelmingly so. There are only two females in positions from dean up. Two. And the BoT has one.
So, denial of the obvious isn’t just a problem with climate change. This phenomenon was utterly predictable. I know, because I’ve been watching it develop for at least 30 years. And people still dismiss it. We are millimeters away from destroying our own democracy in large degree because of male discontent, and still it’s, bwah hah hah, what are men whining about?
Do men still have disproportionate power? Yes. Does that matter in this context? No. What matters is direction and perception. Graph the male power line and it is clearly going down. And men perceive this.
Mary Sues are a Hollywood myth. In the real world men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive and more familiar with weapons. They are also half of all votes. Men don’t just have political power, they have the power of direct, personal violence. There’s a reason we have shelters for battered women and not for battered men.
This is not a subject for ideology. Men are dangerous. Right now, today, not in some distant future, they are dangerous. Dismissing this issue is as stupid as hand-waving away climate change.
@Michael Reynolds: I am not going to deny that there isn’t an issue here, but I think your framing is wrong.
First, if climate change was the right analogy, we would be talking about all men. But we aren’t.
Second, the better analogy is race (and, of course, race is also part of this). Whites had to learn (and many clearly haven’t) that they are not superior to Blacks and cannot use the state to enforce their power positions. Moreover, the only route to justice is some level of relative power loss.
Men are in the same position.
And some men understand this better than others.
The discussion above about gender v. attitudes about gender is on point.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, women decided that they weren’t going to take it any more and took action. Back then, we second-wave feminists recognized that if women changed, men would have to change as well. Men made the choice (aided and abetted too often by women) not to change. So here we are. Time for men to make the leap to the society women are building.
There’s nothing eternal or immovable about gender roles. You can find pretty much any of them across history and the globe. The US has quite a variety today. The men who are dissatisfied are sticking to a single role that is becoming more and more outdated.
Young men are now generally being out-performed by women and instead of competing and working harder, so many are proclaiming themselves to be victims of discrimination, etc.
Well, thishis has been coming for a long time.
Personal anecdotes: A few years ago when my daughters were graduating from high school when it came time to honor students who were high achievers (merit scholars, valedictorians and so forth) over 3/4ths of those acknowledged were young women. I recently attended the graduation of my niece’s daughter – same thing, probably 3/4ths of honorees were female.
The result is that the proportion of college enrollments is now about 60% women, 40% men.
So, what’s our solution? Send in Ben Shapiro, Josh Hawley, and Jordan Peterson (Canadians are always helpful) to advocate for these hapless, helpless victims.
Here we have White Women for Harris being schooled in how to talk about this election. I’m sure the young men will be lining up to be treated the same way
@Cheryl Rofer and @Steven L. Taylor: For sure. And I think that’s more or less happening with men in the professional class. But blue-collar men who are falling behind are angry and see the deck stacked against them.
@al Ameda: Girls are more naturally suited to the strictures of school than boys and there are fewer social pressures against high academic achievement. We see boys who were high performers in elementary school become mediocre in middle and high school both because they’re just generally antsier and have a harder time sitting there being quiet for hours on end and because doing well in school is considered “girly,” especially among the working class.
@JKB: So far, 60,000 or more White Dudes for Kamala have signed up for a Zoom call tonight. Speakers include
DOT Secretary Pete Buttigeig
NC Governor Roy Cooper
Congressman Adam Schiff
Actor Misha Collins
Actor/Singer Josh Groban
Author Scott Galloway
Actor Josh Gad
Here’s a link to sign up!
@Steven L. Taylor:
Minor point: even in climate change there will be winners, not every country loses. Russia looks to do quite well from a warmer climate – they have a whole lot of arctic beach-front property.
I’ve admitted before that I don’t have a solution to propose. The issue is exacerbated by people freaking out over AI, and a side order of transgenderism. Big societal changes can often engender (heh) strong reactions. Sometimes dangerous reactions. History is not encouraging. After WW2, women who had come into the work force out of national necessity, were pushed back into the kitchen quite easily.
You say it’s not all men, which is true. It’s also not all women. If it were all women I’d worry a lot less, but there’s a strong quisling segment of females. Let’s remember that White women voted for Trump.
Harris is holding a White Dudes for Harris phone meeting tonight. Was supposed to be 20,000 guys. Is now at 60,000. (And one – I just signed up.) This is a smart move. I’m impressed. Obviously we can’t and shouldn’t roll back women’s progress to reassure insecure men, but we should at least acknowledge that there is a genuine issue here.
@Cheryl Rofer:
In full transparency, I’m attending that call (and I have donated to the campaign already).
The uncomfortable reaction to these affinity group calls on social media has been depressingly predictable. It’s a great reminder of how much education and outreach is still necessary on topics around race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of identity.
Definitely, some of the resistance is willful ignorance or a desire to cling to color/gender/sexuality-blind notions of how society should work. The challenge is that those discussions must take time (often in spaces everyone feels safe in) because there is so much to unpack (and, in many cases, unlearn). Unfortunately, people often try to rush the conversation, and that typically only leads to people’s existing views becoming more and more entrenched.
@CSK: This is literally something that happened to me–I turned down a job offer because the salary was too low (and they wouldn’t budge on it), particularly considering the fact that I had direct experience doing the work. They ended up hiring a man, who’d moved from out of state (so no direct work experience). Surprise, surprise, they found more money to offer him, saying “well, he has kids to support.”
I agree with the last sentence. I’m not sure what to make of the middle one. Men and women are different; in a rational world, that would be understood, accounted for, and accepted. However, if anything, the world we live in favors men over women in a great many ways, and I’d argue serves neither well.
It’s possible that’s a very class-based assessment, though; while it’s possible I’ve lost things to women/minorities (although I’d say it’s not that I’ve lost, but they’ve gotten something they richly deserved as well, and at a certain level, everyone is very capable, and promotions are something of a crap shoot), I can’t say I’m really worse off in any way that really matters.
At work, and I work in a very male dominated industry, I see women mostly going down (guided down, I don’t know) a program management track, because it’s seen as more flexible, while men “stay technical.” And there’s an expectation at the upper echelons that promotions reward the technical people, even though a good PM is invaluable, and there are far fewer of them then there are of us. Whenever I’m working with any woman in a senior position, I know they’ll be incredible, technically. They also usually have soft skills that dwarf mine.
My daughter (7) said she wants to be a doctor, like mommy, which I’m sort of in favor of, but I’ve also seen how the US medical training program was built for married men, who can spend their 20s and 30s in school, and still have a family and life afterwards, and I was there when my wife was having fertility issues because she’d needed to delay children until after she’d finished residency. But I don’t know how to have that discussion with my daughter now. And I hope I don’t need to; maybe we’ll have fixed things by the time she gets to college. They’re less bad than they used to be.
It would be far better to focus on making things better for everyone; there are so many things we make into zero-sum when there’s really plenty to go around, but some people are unwilling to share. Were I not doing well financially, I might be really angry at women/minorities; I’d hope not, but I don’t know. But the way to deal with this isn’t to take things away from women/minorities, it’s to make it so that life isn’t so precarious for those who have less. Medical school sucks for everyone; making it less horrible would be positive for all involved. Women might see more benefit, but that’s because it’s far worse for them than men right now.
@Matt Bernius: You and I often agree on things. I’m going to disagree slightly on a few things in this response.
The uncomfortable reaction above is to something on X. I’ve called it Twitter, but it is now fully Elon Musk’s creature with all the ugliness that implies. So it’s X. On Bluesky, we’re dancing and celebrating.
Someone who knows more about organizing than I do commented that these affinity groups are Organizing 101. The people who sign up now will be those who support Harris and who are comfortable in their identities. They will be encouraged and strengthened by the group to reach out to others in that group. And we should recognize that Trump and his weird friends are using identity: that of unhappy white men. Let’s get the happy white men out there for Harris!
Yes, I’ve been told that since the 1960s. The time is now, always has been.
“ We used to call this a “gender gap” rather than a “war.” But it does seem more pronounced now.”
Twas a mere gap when women were “the victim.” But now that men are so unfairly and aggressively targeted, it’s a true war!
@Scott: Dan Savage has spoken often about the clueless complaints of conservative men whining that liberal women won’t date them… how unfair and persecuted they are that the people they’re targeting for oppression won’t screw them.
@Cheryl Rofer:
Fair, I really need to spend more time on Bluesky.
110%. I’ve gotten a crash course in organizing over the last few years, which is very much the case. Additionally, it’s worth noting that the majority of Americans lead pretty segregated lives. Which makes it so important to help people build the confidence and practice talking to others within their (intentionally constructed or not) social circles.
Competely agree. I didn’t intend to suggest that we should put off those conversations. I think we need to lean into them. I also firmly believe that certain attempts to have them in compressed and one-off formats–like corporate DEI training–end up doing more harm than good. Especially when they make the mistake of dropping people into really complex topics (i.e. “White Supremacy Culture” markers) without doing the necessary groundwork to have those discussions.
That said, I also recognize my positionality in this discussion and can imagine how it might come across (and, to your point, echo comments made by straight cis-gendered white guys for generations).
@Kazzy:
“Twas a mere gap when women were “the victim.” But now that men are so unfairly and aggressively targeted, it’s a true war!”
Similar to the old saw that class warfare only occurs when the lower classes fight back.
@Matt Bernius: Ah, emojis don’t register here. I offered a thumbs up.
@Cheryl Rofer:
Yes, it’s fully Xlon’s creature now. That’s why we call it Xitter.
@Jen:
I’ve heard the exact same line about the wife and kids to support, too.
It used to largely be true that if you were a white male you had a guaranteed decent job for life. You didnt have to compete with minorities or with women. Of course some of that was due to the effects of unions and the lack of extreme income inequality so laws and policy weren’t written primarily for the benefit of the donor class.
All of that has changed. The rise in influence of the wealthy has largely been enabled/encouraged by the GOP. Job security and jobs went away. A lot fo the jobs oriented towards males moved away. The newer jobs replacing them have largely been ones that women can compete for on equal terms and minorities are now allowed to compete. In this scenario a large number of white males, especially those with below average abilities and work ethic, were bound to lose out. This was a natural constituency waiting to be exploited.
I think the Dems made it easier to lose this group by going weak on unit support since they also wanted access to donor class money. They also emphasized things like health care and child care for the ones who have lost out in our changed economy. They underestimated the importance of the dignity of actually having a job. Last of all, they have sucked on messaging. The GOP, Trump in particular is lying to these people when they say they are going to fix things for them. The Dems have largely ignored them or at worst have declared them not worth having them on their team.
Steve
@Kazzy:
… for certain values of “screw”.
@Kathy:
I also appreciate the fun this creates if you choose to pronounce the “X” with the “Sh-” sound that it can be associated with.
@Kevin:
Differences in sex pretty much have to be accounted for to achieve any sort of equity. But masculinity/femininity and male/female are distinct concepts; the former are social constructs and the latter are biological facts–although even there we’ve conflated the two in recent years.
Actually, the resentment and rage is on the successful women side. They look up as 30 looms and “can’t find a man” who meets their standards. And there is a clock on it now.
In 2022, 25% of those how turned 40 (born 1982) that year were never-married. This has been on the rise since it hit a nadir in 1980 (born 1940) at 6%. And it doesn’t look to decline. They didn’t break it down by those who had children out of wedlock. On the other hand, if you have a child after age 40, you are looking at being real close to retirement by the time they are legal adults.
But yes there is some stoking traditionalism. To listen to some, usually married conservatives, you get the sense that Jerry Falwell would send a message from the grave telling them to “calm down”. But such gets clicks.
More worrying, even to those in the Pentagon, are young men who are “going their own way”, meaning eschewing the traditional marry, have kids, work yourself to death trying to keep them up role. You know, the way that provides the taxes used elsewhere. Instead they work less, live simpler single. And they aren’t signing up to be under the orders of the Woke officer corps.
On the upside, “low-achieving in high school” boys don’t let that stop them from learning useful things in college
And now it is much easier to get started in the Trades, but that doesn’t help those more successful women who couldn’t bear to lower themselves to a man who works with his hands and makes good money doing it.
I really, really wish Harris (and Democrats in general) would sometimes very pointedly point out why men should be concerned. “And young men, most of you like women, right?, they’re coming for contraception next and how do you think that’s going to affect your relationships? And older men, when do you want your daughters to start families? Once they get married, right? I know, you don’t want to think about them having sex, but they’re gonna…”
Men are stupid. They don’t understand things unless you walk them through it, very slowly. They’re also vain and shallow and really like it when someone acknowledges their presence.
@Cheryl Rofer:
Here’s a link to sign up!
As a White Guy, I thank you for this information.
@steve:
No offense Steve, but this is part of the problem of getting past the argument stage on this. No, it was not largely true that white males had a guaranteed decent job for life. Never was, except for some small subset. Not taking time to understand the lived reality of individuals is wrong and, much more importantly, it gets in the way of making progress, and it is just as unproductive when doing it to white males as it is to any other group.
In my lifetime we have seen entire industries die off or get packed up and moved to Mexico or China. The tens of millions of jobs associated with them evaporated, often overnight. Lecturing those white men who lost those jobs and are terrified about losing their homes or paying medical bills, about how, on average, “white men” are doing better than some other group and so they should shut up about their problems, is going to set them against the speaker.
MarkedMan- I grew up in small towns and rural areas of the Midwest. I think I could have worded what I said better. People still worked hard 60-70 years ago. You could lose your job if you sucked at it and sometimes companies would fail or move. But on the whole you could go to work at a pretty secure job. Unions made sure you got a decent salary. Companies weren’t moving to China yet. Plus, your competition was really limited. The black guy who could do the job just as well as you did couldn’t get hired. If you had an office job that a woman could equally well fill, you were shielded from competition with women. So better phrased you weren’t guaranteed a job but you were guaranteed shilling from competition except from other white men. You had a union to back you up.
I also think that your point is well taken that no one will want to hear this. The underachieving white male doesnt want to hear about winners and losers or competition, they just want the good jobs that their grandparents had.
Steve
@Matt Bernius:
I honestly did not know there was any other possible pronunciation.
@James Joyner:
When talk turns to the differences between men and women, I’m tempted to cite the Bart Simpson Relevance Principle: The little, stupid differences are nothing next to the big, stupid similarities.
@steve: I installed a system in an Indiana GE Refrigerator plant a couple of decades ago. Employed thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, for 50 years. Many of the men (and women) who worked there have only had that one job, and many are 40-70 years old. One day the company decided to move the whole operation to Mexico. Boom, all those people lose their job and the best they can get is lectures about how they “should have learned to code” or be one of the 100 people applying for a job as a Walmart greeter.
Trump is telling people like that, all of them and including the men, they got screwed and he’s gonna fight for them. Democratic leadership doesn’t even notice them, instead completely focusing on how women and minorities are going to finally get their chance. So the women and minorities that work there might feel like the Dem message is as appealing as the Trump one, but how do you think the white men will react? And we can argue whether they should react that way until we are blue in the face, but that ain’t gonna change hard coded human nature.
Do you know what happened 53 years ago, 1971? The rapid growth of wages for the bottom 90% of earner after 1950 ground to a halt. It’s been fluctuating ever since with a slight decline. The wages of the top 10% of earners was flat before starting to shoot up around 1985.
You know what else happened around 1971? A college degree being a guarantee to a good job started declining, rapidly. Still helped for a long time, but was no longer a guarantee.
What was likely a big impact? The development of the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) which massively reduced the downtime reworking assembly lines. This aided in moving US manufacturing to lower wage countries to get them to side with the US over the USSR. Raised many overseas out of poverty off the backs of the US non-college population. On the upside that did create a large population of volunteers for the post-Draft expeditionary US military.
@steve: The week after Trump won I remember watching an analysis with a panel that included Thomas Friedman. One point he made was that if you were a white male in the 1950’s in a state like Minnesota you almost had to try to fail. The entire system was gamed to help you succeed. Credit for white males was easier to obtain, you didn’t have the institutional racism and sexism that people of color and women faced. Even the GI Bill for WW2 vets, which ostensibly helped all vets, was racist because of state and local discrimination. Not all white males succeeded, but it was one hell of a lot easier for them than any of the other groups.
I wonder what blue-collar men are planning to do if Elon Musk actually does get his Optimus robots off the ground and all the manufacturing jobs go away. Still blame women?
Historically, what we’re seeing is the logical result of the Industrial Revolution. More and more technology taking over more and more physical labor jobs. Now we’re starting to see AI take out the “other” jobs that we used to think could only be done by humans.
Nobody wants to look at the final result: how are you going to run an economy when all the decent paying jobs have been squeezed out of the human labor force and transferred out to robots? If the average human can’t find a decent job, he/she won’t have money to purchase any of those nifty products now being manufactured by robots. The obvious way around this is to implement a UBI, but then where does the funding come from?
@MarkedMan:
I think this is both commonly accepted as a truism, while also being an unfair characterization. Democrats, and Biden in particular, have done quite a lot in recent years to both increase manufacturing overall and slow the pace of exporting these jobs overseas. But, since it’s not a Community A affected by closure–>Community A receiving the new jobs, it’s not as noticed.
Median job tenure has dropped over time, and I think sometimes that gets conflated with the “jobs for life” argument. My father, for example, worked for the government for ~30 years. The longest I’ve worked for a single employer is rather different–I’ve been self-employed for over a decade, which is my longest tenure with the same employer.
@JKB:
Do you see how sentences like these blame women for these problems (without much evidence, I might add)? It also continues a pretty obvious pattern victim-based framing (i.e. that men are not at fault here and women shouldn’t be complaining about a situation they created). There’s also an implied “successful women are shallow” aspect of that second comment.
I get that, assuming you are writing in good faith, this is what you believe. However, I hope you can see why many of us reading this do not take this all-or-nothing perspective seriously?
FWIW, from what I have seen from women across the political spectrum about dating, they definitely don’t get all (or even much of the) blame for any challenges with coupling. Granted it’s an anecdotal sampling, but there are many similarities in the patterns.
[Edit: I have reframed my first paragraph to remove the initial snark. I am honestly curious if this pattern of behavior is something you have ever considered.)
I mean, hey, where do we women even get the idea that sexist sh!t happens all the time?
@MarkedMan: Anyone in the situation you described (me in 1986 when the company was sold, for example) that believes that Republicans are EVAH gonna give a rat’s ass about working class people losing their jobs deserves whatever happens. And I was a working class conservative and Republican until I stopped voting altogether.
@Matt Bernius:
I’m not blaming women. But it seems stupid to blame men for not killing themselves to “do better” to meet the higher than “the woman is” standards many women maintains. If a woman wants to marry a man who has equal or higher educational credentials and makes more money than the woman, then the higher her educational attainment and more money she makes, the fewer men who will meet her criteria. Those fewer men have their pick of the “successful” women as well as the lesser successful women. The beloved ‘Pretty Woman’ was the story of a vastly successful man picking a non-college graduate, just scraping by woman. That means a “successful” woman who wants to marry has a big problem to overcome.
And no, the men don’t need to “do better”. They need to decide what life they want and then pick a partner who accepts that life. Or don’t pick a partner. Men used to marry to fit in at church or climb the corporate ladder, both of which are of lesser importance to men these days.
@gVOR10: I don’t understand why more young men don’t think this way. I’m certain that most of them want to have sex. Do they also want unplanned pregnancies? Or do they just intend to abandon any women they impregnate and children they father?
@JKB:
Framing the problem with the idea that women have a “do better” standard that men cannot meet is inherently blaming women. I get that you believe this. And I suspect you can share stories (perhaps even personal experiences) where this happened. And I don’t question that this happens in some cases. But I would be really careful at extending this to “all women” which you just doubled down on.
Doubly so because you provide no actual evidence to back up your assertion… beyond… Pretty Woman… a film from 1990. BTW, there are a lot of romantic comedy’s that reverse that scenario. See, for example, most Hallmark movies that feature successful women giving up her future for a blue-collar man.
My issue with your post is that you never seem to be able to extend the empathy you appear to have for a group you identify (in this case, men) to groups you are not a part of (in this case, women).
This gets back to the broader point I and Kurtz, among others have pointed out about your “reasoning.” It really seems you start with a belief (i.e. that women are to blame for wanting too much out of men) and then gravitate to evidence that supports that viewpoint and ignore the wealth of counter evidence.
If you have actual evidence to back up your assumption (beyond anecdotes) then please share. Otherwise, you are just bringing one set of anecdotes and then pretending that they somehow outweigh the anecdotes that others of us bring.
Again, you seem to want to have things both ways.
Asides:
BTW, anecdotally speaking, I know a number of “successful” women who are in relationships with “laborers.”
You also don’t address how men (and in particular incels… if you have had the misfortune of diving into that community) can also have unrealistic expectations about women. The entire “Tradwife” genre is basically porn for that fantasy.
Beyond all that, I’m going to work to respond with less snark–It may take me some time.
Sharing my data set of 1, even liberal young man and women may differ on priorities. My daughter is dating a young man who had no plans to vote before Harris was the nominee, and now only plans to vote if he hears Harris express support for Palestine and against the war in Gaza. My daughter agrees with him about Palestine, yet she was going to vote for Biden before and now Harris regardless, because she feels like her rights as a young woman are on the line.
@Matt Bernius:
THIS.
Anecdotes are not data, but oof, some of the breakups I’ve seen…several sets of high-achieving couples have followed this pattern: both with graduate degrees, both fairly high-earning, the men out-earning the women. Men lose their high-paying jobs and “hold out” for jobs with similar or higher salaries, can’t find anything, start feeling “less than” and then have affairs. Or, they both make similar salaries, but when they want to have kids–which had been discussed, right down to who would be taking a step back from the high-powered career–all of a sudden, the guy feels “too much pressure” because yep, now the bulk of the earning is on him. He starts to complain that he’s pulling most of the weight, gets unhappy, and either quits (!) his job or…has an affair.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and all that, I suppose.
I think we’d be happier as a society if we managed to not define ourselves through our work, for one. But also, better money management skills, and the ability to talk to our partners about financial expectations.
Anecdotally, what I’ve found in dating the past few years (after the demise of a 20-year marriage) is that women are generally looking for some confidence and purpose in men’s lives. I’ve met some quite successful people and I haven’t heard any hints about rejecting less accomplished men. To many, being able to work with your hands is a positive, and I don’t even mean that as an innuendo. If you can fix stuff around the house, bonus points for sure.
Of course the women around here greatly value compassion and thoughtfulness. Hence many dating profiles categorically reject Trump voters. It’s not a rejection of blue-collar, although there may be significant overlap, it’s a rejection of low emotional intelligence.
@Jen:
Actually same-sex couples have the same issue about raising children and who will put their career on hiatus to care for the children. Work is an essential part of a person’s identity, in my view.
@Matt Bernius:
College credentialed woman are more likely vote Democrat/Harris. The more credentials, the higher the likelihood. I’m simply pointing out that most of those women maintain the ancestral desire to marry up, they have a limited pool of partners. A woman who looks for the person instead of the prestige, will do better. It is always possible.
Let us look at one of the earliest mentions of “dating” in a middleclass publication, The Ladies Home Journal, 1914
As we can see, even more than a century ago, a college sorority girl swimming in the pool of college boys, looked to date up.
It isn’t blaming women, it is observing. Men are choosing not to get college credentials which they must accept removes them from the dating pool of a woman looking to date someone with college credentials.
You have no idea of the freedom you gain when you separate your identity from your work.
@Skookum: RE: same sex couples–Oh, gosh yes–and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. However, as I noted, my post was informed by anecdotes and I have not personally observed a breakup of a same-sex couple with children. The ones I know remain happily married.
Regarding defining oneself through work–I’ve seen too many people sink into significant depressions after layoffs that were well beyond their control. I think striving to find that balance between work being an important part of who we are, without allowing it to define us, is a laudable goal.
@JKB: “Actually, the resentment and rage is on the successful women side. They look up as 30 looms and “can’t find a man” who meets their standards. And there is a clock on it now.”
You keep telling yourself that, JKB! It’s them uppity bitches who are bitter and angry because they can’t land themselves a steaming hunk of man-candy like you.
@JKB:
No doubt. But there are two problems:
1.) what kind of life is possible is severely limited by salary. It is trading one type of freedom for another.
2.) everything, from luxuries to the basic necessities of life, demand x amount of money.
If you accept those two premises, then it leads one to a lot of places that are uncomfortable politically.
For one, it reveals the moderate rallying cry, “socially liberal; fiscally conservative,” to be utter nonsense. Fiscal policy and social policy cannot be neatly separated.
It should call into question the policies of both parties, but in particular, the one that you defend here on a daily basis. Because the GOP and many of its voters love to place the blame of economic inequality at the feet of poor people.
America places a dollar value on every person on the planet, both literally and figuratively.
Based on your other posts here, the quoted post:
is either stunningly dishonest;
or indicates that you haven’t worked through the impact it has on the rest of your political preferences.
I am not saying that if you took the time, you would suddenly agree with me on everything. But it cannot be denied that it is at odds with your preference in political party.
@Matt Bernius: My take is that he’s a DGAF on the question you raise, but he may just be in deep denial (on an Egyptian Holiday 🙂 ).
ETA: Deep denial by a nose.
I started to work outside my family’s farm in 1973. Women were just beginning to appear in male-dominated professions. It could be ugly.
Women who wanted to earn the same wage as men were given jobs that were set-up for failure. A petite woman forced to use a jack hammer all day, etc.
The passive-aggressiveness from both men and women. (The women were stuck on belief that their value was defined by attractiveness to men.) And then, when a woman COULD do a job as well as a man, the some men’s egos were threatened. (The men were stuck on the belief that they could certain jobs better than women simply…well..because they had gonads.)
Gradually, women understood their self-worth to be more than simply a reflection of a man’s admiration. Physical performance standards were developed to be non-gender based. Title IX flipped young women’s focus from being a cheerleader to being an athelete (to get scholarships). By the time I left the system development workforce, younger women had NO idea that they were less capable than men.
Upon reflection, my deepest regrets about the work life I experienced is that my income and pension reflect that I was paid less for the same work as men, faced extreme stress at times at I changed my internal self-identity to be comfortable in my own skin, married late in life, and have no children. But all in all, I’m in awe of the improvement of women’s role in society. Or at least until Dodd.
From my observation men who treat women badly have low self-worth or some other psychological issue.
Those men (and women) who blame the government for all of their challenges in life were unwilling to relocate for better jobs and started families before they were able to afford them–or even had a clue as what they wanted in life. Many buy toys (e. g., cars) that they can’t afford. Life is financially hard. And yes, they do often bolt the family.
The re-emergence of religion as a way to keep women in their place is concerning.
So, once again, if I were to summarize the “gender war” it’s people seeking to make sense of a world in which they are not successful (unless they are a politician who uses the issue as a campaign wedge issue). Many grew up with the post-WWII standard of living, which has slowly ebbed away, especially when jobs were off-shored.
Whatever the solution, I believe it will focus on work being an essential and meaningful part of one’s life, not a burden.
@JKB: And your evidence is Schopenhauer and LHJ from 1914??? WTF???? Do you have ANY contemporary sources that agree with you? Larry Elder? Sowells? Musk? Anyone?
Bueler… Bueler…
@JKB:
I think it is probably more of an effect of tax policy changes to both personal income tax and corporate income tax, which started in the early 1960s and took a while to change behavior.
Computers had some impact, but they were really expensive then, and most jobs have always been with smaller companies.
Women entering the workforce in larger numbers is also a factor, if you want to blame women. 😉
“Tis the fault of the feminine persuasion”, Mises, Ludwig von, Harradans, Harpies and Trollops: The Three Kinds of Women (1921)
@JKB:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is also true of men as well. So I’m not sure your point here–other than potentially you need to marry someone of the same political persuasion.
My issue is that you jump from something that is measurable to a notion of cultural (or “ancestral”) desire without any actual evidence to support that claim. Basically you are asserting, unless I’m wrong, “that all women want to marry up.” That’s an essentialist claim and needs some evidence to back it up.
When we get to the evidence, as far as I can tell, you have (1) a movie from 1990, (2) a German Philosopher who died in 1860 (honestly, I would have gone with Kissinger’s formulation, which more or less said the same thing), and an article from 1914.
Again, if you believe in essentialism, I guess this is enough. However, for folks who believe in the possibility that cultural perspectives change (and I would humbly argue that there is a LOT more evidence for that than essentialism), that’s really not very convincing.
I also am genuinely curious about your perspectives on men’s expectations about women and how those might have shifted or made dating difficult for women (including conservative ones) who are not interested in being “tradwives.” Or just the tradwife movement in general. If you’re not familiar, you can find details about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradwife
It seems like there’s a heavy tie to that and the concept of “MAGA.”
Can you seriously walk me through the idea that this is not blaming women for the fact that men who choose trades can’t find partners? Or even support the idea that choosing a trade leads to lower dating and marriage prospects? I’ve been doing some light googling and cannot find any data to back up this hypothesis.
And again, it really seems to me like this is a one-sided analysis (i.e. Women do this…). If that doesn’t make sense, let me know.
@Gustopher:
I’d also put the decreased enrollment in unions into that discussion.
That said, any of those arguments is correlation and not causation. I don’t think anyone would argue that there is a single factor that has lead to the phenomena that JKB has called out. Which is also why it’s so hard to “fix.”
@just nutha:
To be fair, the cultural essentialism argument he (?) seems to be making feels heavy influenced by Sowell. Daniel Pinker could also be in there (though I don’t think I’ve ever seen JKB cite him). Sowell is the one that suggests that many (perhaps all) of the issues with Black Culture can be traced back to Southern “honor” culture that came from Welsh, Highland Scots, Ulster Scots, and border English or “North Britons,” who emigrated from the more lawless border regions of Britain in the eighteenth century.
Speaking as a cultural anthropologist (and on behalf of sociologists) that cultural essentialism theory (which relies upon the idea that culture is somehow immutable despite all evidence to the contrary… not to mention that Black Americans, and in particular Slaves, had the same access to that culture as free White folks) doesn’t hold a lot of water.
Men are less likely than women to get a college diploma. Here’s an anecdote. My daughter spent 5 years and $75,000 to become a special ed teacher. Her salary is $48,000. My friend’s son spent 18 months and $7,000 to become an electrician. Current salary is $60,000. Don’t feel bad about my daughter; she has a rich daddy who is getting on in years. Don’t congratulate the young electrician too much; he bought a $80,000 pickup. Her student loans are less than his car loan.
@Jen: Since I have no kids the one constant experience I’ve had across all my jobs is that I am expected to cover for those that have kids. Holidays? PFFT I have no kids so I’m the one that has to work..
Really getting tired of basically getting shit on because I know how to use contraceptives. I know I’d be a shit parent so I’ve avoided the responsibility.
@Matt: That was definitely an issue at points during my career as well. The assumption that the childless are there to pick up slack during holidays/school vacations/whenever got under my skin, big time.
@Matt Bernius: I used to listen to Sowell when he would sub in for Rush Limbaugh back in the day and have read a few opinion pieces by him. I’ll just leave it at I wasn’t impressed; even so, the fact that there are contemporary sources that he could use leaves me to believe that he may well be another troll of the type I referred to a few days back as a classic “DARPA era/type” troll who posts preposterous sh!t just to get people to reply for his own amusement. This, for my scale upstream would put him back in the DGAF camp. Either way, his nonsense is pretty delusional and getting worse. As always, YMMV.
And while I will still agree that this comment area is light years ahead of most, the number of people I simply skip over after identifying their rant for the day is growing. Whether that represents a shift in the aggregate intelligence of the cohort or just that I’m becoming picky about what I read I will leave for greater minds to decide–provided they even care (and lack of concern may well be the better valor choice here).
@Jen:
For what is worth, it me. Not the affair part, but the “lost high paying jobs” (or at least the immediate pathway to them) part.
Thankfully we worked through it and things got much better for me. That said my wife out earned me for almost a decade (some of which I wasn’t even working).
That definitely put pressure on is, but we thankfully made it through.
@mattbernius: First, glad you made it through! Second, I wasn’t suggesting it was a rule, or even the norm…just what I’d observed from a very small subset. That I saw it happen multiple times (and, interestingly, within a fairly short time period) definitely made an impression on me.
Two words: Mark Kelly.
@JKB: You seem super salty about this idea of women wanting to “marry up”.
This has not been my observation at all. I see women (well, quality women) simply wanting a quality man who will be supportive and kind and hard-working, and who isn’t afraid to wash some dishes or take primary duty changing diapers on his own kids.
If a straight, single man isn’t attracting a quality woman, however, I can certainly understand why it’s so compelling to blame outside forces.
@Jen:
I didn’t think you were suggesting this was a rule. And I also think it’s a definite pattern I have encountered in the past, both in my immediate lived experience, and in others as well.