Stats for nerds
0recommend
6mentions
6people
2022–2025years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I haven't read that book, but I might now. It's refreshing to see such a realistic assessment of the problems. IMO, the most important line from that page:
>The problems of boys and men are structural in nature, rather than individual; but are rarely treated as such.
This is why shame does nothing productive, whether it's shaming boys for displaying "masculine" traits or displaying "feminine" traits. We can't address a social problem by asking every individual to change. That's just not feasible, even if there weren't a "man-o-sphere" and "radical feminism movement" working against it. Heck, even if the root problem was a personal one that each man could solve for himself, our options would still be a society-wide solution or tossing our hands up in resignation and hoping for the best.
- Something to note, most testing seems to show women/men are about average in intelligence but there is slight variability between the two. So thinking one gender is smarter doesn't bear out.
I've read excerpts "Of Boys and Men" that indicate academic changes to assist girls may have harmed boys.
For example, in schooling, it was shown that girls do better on homework while boys would do better on testing. So, teachers realizing this, would increase the homework mix into final grade which helps girls but harmed boys.
Getting rid of recess or PE earlier may have had an impact as well.
Something to note, these changes were not made deliberately to hurt men, it's just accidental on part of educators trying to fix what was clearly a flaw system.
> Most boys didn’t start digging in and grinding like the girls did until maybe junior year of college.
Sure, that's 20-21 when some of hormones are wearing off. ;)
- From the article:
>>>> struggling to put away their laptops when asked
"One of my principles generally is look at what rich people are doing and see whether or not they know what they're doing and that could be more broadly learned. And, you do see this sport red shirt, "academic" red shirting. So, it's for academic reasons, not athletic reasons, but this is relatively common in upper middle class circles. (parents will have their kids restart the grade, voluntarily). And, indeed some private schools do it almost by default. They have a second year of pre-K [pre-Kindergarten]. And that second year of pre-K skews very male".[1]
Rich men like Bill Gates and famously severely restricted access to computers to their kids [2]. Members of the "All In" podcast, including FB exec Palihapitiya do not allow any screen time [3]
COVID turbocharged negative trends, but maybe our leaders could look at what people with resources are doing, then help our kids with simple solutions: Start by taking computers back, away from 6-8 year olds.
[1] Richard Reeves: Author "of Boys and Men" (how boys are completely falling behind)
[2] https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/why-steve-jobs-bill-gat...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-capital-ceo-chamath-pali...
- concern for the plight of boys and men is more fashionable than you might think in progressive spaces, especially in the past few years.
for example, Barack Obama's summer reading list just came out. I think being on this list indicates being fashionable among progressive elites.
https://x.com/BarackObama/status/1823082706462253510
one of the books he lists this year is "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About it" by Richard Reeves. It's about exactly what you say.
- > Most amazing of all is how, according to the article, there's nothing even driving young men into the arms of the manosphere. No underlying problems, no systemic issues, no societal attitudes. It's happening for no reason at all, based on nothing but made-up talking points.
Let's try reading the article....this should help
> It’s tempting to use the cyclical nature of the male crisis (and the cynical version of its modern variant) as a reason to reject worry about men. But there are plenty of reasons to be concerned. In his new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, And What to Do About It, Richard V. Reeves, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and founder of the new American Institute for Boys and Men, argues that unlike the late 19th century, or 1958, today’s men actually have fallen significantly behind women on a number of sociological metrics.
> In every school district in the United States, girls do better than boys in English and Language Arts. In Chicago, the gap between girls and boys getting high grades is identical to the gap in social class. Programs designed specifically to boost educational achievement for underprivileged kids like the Kalamazoo Promise are effective for girls but barely move the needle for boys. Almost a full quarter of boys are diagnosed with a developmental disability—twice as many as girls. One third of men with a high school diploma are out of the labor force. In 2014, one third of adult men lived with their parents. “The success of the women’s movement has not caused the precariousness of male social identity,” writes Reeves, “but it has exposed it.”
> Boys are not finding a way to live that feels rewarding. According to a 2017 Pew study, men find less meaning in their lives, from fewer sources, than women. Research by the Survey Center on American Life published in 2021 shows that men are increasingly lonely. One in five single American men report that they do not have one person in their lives they consider a close friend. The words that suicidal men are most likely to use to describe how they feel is “useless” and “worthless.”
This article is not denying the existence of problems. It is highlighting that online misogynists selling supplements and courses are making it worse, while they profit off of this misery popularizing empty, reactionary agendas that hurt everyone.
- > "The men’s rights stuff is toxic because it’s about conflict. It’s about pushing back against feminism, which is essentially fighting against equity. With that said, I see nothing wrong with fighting for the interests of boys and men. I, too, want to see boys succeed (I have a son!) But it’s not about his rights. It’s about his opportunities and the support and so on, that he gets."
See the thing about this is even if you genuinely try to not make it about conflict in my experience people project conflict on to you. I once wrote an article about men being disadvantaged when it came to access to resources when escaping domestic violence, despite making up a significant proportion of victims according to data gathered by the Australian bureau of statistics (I'm Australian and was writing about the situation here).
A lot of government sources also presented domestic violence data in a way that was straight up misleading i.e. "31% of women experiencing assault experienced it from a partner vs 4.4% of men", totally ignoring that men were vastly more likely to be assaulted by strangers and a better comparison is the total number of men and women (73,800 women vs 21,200). Which works out to a little over than 1in 5 people surveyed who were assaulted by a partner being men, which despite still being significantly less certainly doesn't seem as minimal as the numbers when presented as a proportion of total assaults suffered. (note this happened nearly 10 years ago so these numbers are from a survey done in 2006).
My article discussed this kind of presentation and how it made male victims of DV more invisible than they should be, and how services for them weren't present (including some government services having "for men" pages which only had advice for how abusers can stop being abusive).
I legitimately had editors at places argue with me and suggest I was ignoring facts to have an anti woman agenda by quoting some of the numbers I was criticising in my article. That's how pervasive some of this stuff is. That you can say "hey look, this place is using very selective language when when framing the data, look if even using their own sources you can see how this creates an unfair comparison to minimise male victims" and then have someone use the exact numbers being discussed to tell you that you are being anti woman.
This is a sore spot for me because as a child I suffered domestic abuse, and I find the idea that there wouldn't have been resources for me if I had suffered it as an adult scary.
And I especially object to the idea that men's rights stuff is inherently about conflict. It certainly is for some people, but I made a genuinely constructive attempt to discuss a problem that in no way blamed women (my sister suffered the same abuse I did, I certainly wouldn't want her to not have resources!) and I had multiple people accuse me of being sexist.
