Stiffed
"In Stiffed, Susan Faludi turns her powers of reporting and analysis to the problems of men and comes up with a revolutionary diagnosis. Men's problems aren't the product of biology, or of such trumped-up enemies as feminism and affirmative action, but of a modern social tragedy. By listening to men's stories in their own voices, by taking them on their own terms, Faludi uncovers a buried history - the untold story of how America made a glittering set of promises to the men of the baby-boom generation...and proceeded to break every one of them."--BOOK JACKET. "What keeps men from revolting against their circumstances? Faludi's explanation for that mystery opens up the possibility that men's coming rebellion could emancipate both sexes from their true and mutual enemy, a cultural force that constrains us all. Stiffed is a major reassessment of what it is to be a man in modern America."--BOOK JACKET.
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- Another good resource for this would be Stiffed by Susan Faludi ( https://susanfaludi.com/stiffed.html ) . Similarly, she started off saying "why are guys resisting the women's movement?" and that lead her to some great insights about the situation of men. I think she has some fantastic insights into why it is hard for progress to be made here. (her observation about the "masculine" approach taken by civil rights and women's rights and being a process that can't be taken to 100% completion has sat with me for years). highly recommended as another thoughtful reflection on the situation.
- This question reminds me of the excellent book STIFFED: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi. It's about work, what it is to be a man, how these things are changing and have changed, say in the 2nd half of 20th C. One of the most enlightening books I've read.
e.g. How many men in middle management (since 1960s or so, I guess) don't know what they are doing themselves, let alone can explain it to their kids. Boys not having a male role model, if they have no idea what their father does. etc
- Voltaire's Bastards by JR Saul is about all those things and many more. Absolutely amazing book, as are most of his others. Kind of a history of rationality since the 18th C, and how it went so wrong. Also a lot about technocrats, politics, etc etc. (About time I read it again!)
Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics blew my mind. (He sees almost all modern political parties as dominated by this rationalism.) I was embarrassed how much I learnt from this long essay. Even a lot about piano teaching. Worth it for the ancient Chinese anecdote in the footnotes alone.
Richard Sennett The Fall of Public Man is a history of public spaces, living in cities, public politics, political charisma etc, since Paris in the 19th C.
Erving Goffman Presentation of Self in Everyday Life looks at (All these books are very hard to summarise!!) the stages, backstages, performances of life, actual stages, shops, hotels, ranks in organisations, these little worlds with rules and customs, how the rules are subverted, created, evolve.. full of fascinating stories.
EF Schumacher Small is Beautiful - definitely about government, money, society. Economics as if people mattered. When I first read this, I thought the survival of the planet depended on people reading it.
I found Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (1729) extremely funny and just as true. How everything depends on the sins of humanity. If we were all virtuous, economies would fall apart etc. Goes in detail into this argument and he's hard to argue with.
Susan Faludi's STIFFED. I learnt so much about modern work, life, society, and being a man from this. A must read.
p.s. and everything by JK Galbraith and C Wright Mills. Good luck!
- >much better off than any of my family before me
How so? I doubt it. That sounds like a terrible life, with no enjoyment in it of any kind. A life worth living doesn't build itself! Really sounds like you are torturing yourself. Being very mean to yourself. It's easy to do - we aren't taught that you are someone in your life you have to be kind to, the most important person in fact, as it's virtually impossible to love others while being so mean to yourself. I had to learn about loving myself. Treat yourself like you would treat someone you really love.
Imagine someone you really really love, then you forcing them to live how you are living. Doing a job they hate, no friends or family visits, not involved in anything, no joy or pleasure in life.. It would be obvious that it's a very cruel way to treat someone, amounting to torture. People don't enjoy those things, or being deprived of so many things. What things do people enjoy? Imagine a rich, fulfilling life, and work on giving that to the person you love - yourself.
Self-help books helped me a lot with this stuff. They're the main thing that helped, I guess, apart from being directly inspired by other people and inspiring books. Everyone has their own favourites, but some that helped me - SARK's first half-dozen books, Paul Kurtz Exuberance, Carol Lloyd Creating a Life Worth Living, Joanna Field/Marion Milner's books starting with A Life of One's Own, Richard Bach books, Austin Kleon books, Zen and the Art of Making a Living, Tristine Rainer The New Diary, Ben Zander The Art of Possibility, Gracian's The Art of Wordly Wisdom. Montaigne. Plutarch. Emerson. Susan Faludi's Stiffed may help you understand yourself, your world, your work, your life better than any of these. Good luck!
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. – Oscar Wilde
- All these had a huge impact on me. The descriptions are inadequate, I've just tried to mention the subject matter.
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand - how males and females talk different languages.
Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By - how our language and thoughts are built from a fabric of conceptual metaphors. Philosophy In The Flesh is about the conceptual metaphors that philosophy is built from.
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century - WWI, WWII and other wars, nazism, communism etc
Plutarch's Lives - biographies and stories from famous ancient Greeks and Romans. Amazing how little's changed.
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Understanding - introduced me to ancient Chinese philosophers. The Importance of Living - introduced me to ancient Chinese writers, poets and the Chinese way of life.
Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach - read it when I was 14, and I was into music, art and programming, so it blew my mind.
Susan Faludi, STIFFED - men, work, jobs, masculinity, 20th C
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion - media, war, propaganda, democracy
Noam Chomsky's political books
E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful - the world, development, government, planning, organization, humanity, sustainability
J.R. Saul, Voltaire's Bastards - power, history, democracy, technocracy, reason, rationality, history from late 18th C until today.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 - the anti-industrialist tradition, politics, culture, society and the new language describing these things
Clifford Pickover, Computers, Patterns, Chaos, and Beauty - programming, mathematics, art, fractals, dynamical systems etc
Ben Zander, The Art of Possibility - hard to explain, kind of advanced self-help, the magic of changing attitudes, expectations, habits.
My favourite non-fiction books of all time, though, are the essays of Emerson, Hazlitt, RL Stevenson, GK Chesterton, Santayana, Bertrand Russell. And the books of Nietzsche, SARK and Robert Fulghum.
- > If your house is on fire you don't stop to mow the lawn. You put the fire off.
It's a nice analogy. Please identify the fire, and tell me how to put it out. Your criticism is that I am behaving suboptimally if my goal is to fix discrimination, and the clearest way to demonstrate this is to explain how I can behave more optimally.
> The problem with low-hanging fruit is that they give you a false sense of accomplishment. In optimising code, the easy 1% fix doesn't mean anything if there is a slow function taking 60% of the call times.
Please, figure out a way to identify the 60% function here, and identify how to solve it. If such an optimization exists, I'll go for it. Explain in further detail (1) what it is that we should fix and (2) how we should fix it. Otherwise, the low hanging fruit is what I'll go for because (1) we know it's a problem and (2) we know how to improve it.
> Very plausible? That is as far fetched idea as any I've ever heard. At the very least, citation needed.
There was a recent discussion about how much evidence you need in order to convince people that sexism is a real problem that we need to solve. But "citation needed" in this case very easily turns into "citation provided", if you would bother to go to Wikipedia or Google rather than dismiss claims offhand.
1. "exposure to seemingly innocuous sexually suggestive ads can lead to disturbing antifemale sentiments" http://www.psu.edu/dept/medialab/researchpage/newabstracts/o...
2. "women whose male partners objectified them scored lower than those whose partners didn't gaze at their bodies" http://www.livescience.com/11649-ogling-men-subtracts-women-...
If you'd like to read the studies and point out flaws in methodology, or provide studies that refute these claims, feel free to do so. I hope you consider these studies sufficiently relevant for the discussion, I don't want to have to track down the study which most closely replicates the conditions described in the article.
> If I showed a picture of Simon Peyton Jones would that equally imply "programmers in the audience have to be as smart as him else you are losers"? If I show Marc Zuckenberg or some other successful enterpreneur does that mean "Less than 1 billion net worth is for suckers"? Would anyone even think of it that way?
I think men have an enormous problem when they internalize the comparison of themselves against more successful men portrayed in media, and this can definitely have harmful consequences. There are plenty of stories about men who become unemployed during an economic downturn but don't tell the family. Every day the men would drive out to a parking lot, wait for ten hours, and return home, living off savings. They thought that the prospect of being unemployed was emasculating. They felt that being laid off is a personal failure — even in a recession, even if the company is going bankrupt for reasons beyond their control.
I think this would happen less if we reassured men that they do not become worthless creatures just because they are temporarily unemployed, that they have value as a human being beyond their careers. I think there aren't nearly enough men in media (movies, advertising, etc.) portrayed as valuable members of society through avenues other than what the traditional measures of success dictate.
For further reading, I recommend "Stiffed" by Faludi and "The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" by hooks. I've been looking for a good book about men written by men, but I have not yet found one that incorporates the most basic lessons learned by the feminist movement. It's like the difference between Kant and Aristotle: Aristotle was a genius but his work is mostly irrelevant today, of course he wasn't well-read by modern standards since hardly anything had been written yet. Most men writing about male sexual politics haven't read enough from the past dozen or so decades of female sexual politics, and it shows in their sophomoric arguments.
> >Sexism is not a simple problem and you do not help anything by imagining what it would by like if a woman put sexy pictures of a man on a powerpoint slide. Fact is, men are not generally worried about getting raped.
> Where's the equality then? Or is having different arbitrary demands for each gender acceptable?
If I were really after just "equality", and I were a dictator, I could just order my secret police to rape men until the numbers match up for the two genders. I'd not like to get into a deeper discussion about "equality" but suffice it to say our resources are (as you stated) limited, and the problems for men and women are different, so we have no business e.g. allocating the same level of funding to men-only DV shelters because they are simply not needed as much. Also suffice it to say I think objectifying men is wrong too; but it is not as much of a problem (based on empirical evidence that suggests that it is not as much of a problem).
