Modern life is just bizarre, and especially so for men. We used to perform tasks that were immensely valued by women. Our rewards were directly dependent on our abilities. We worked hard and we achieved goals. Modern life is none of those things for most men. There is very little difference between the pay in many jobs, whether they are typically performed by men or women. These jobs often don't reward you for your abilities but rather reward you for who you know or how good your are at politics. Most jobs are also boring. With the money obtained, whether you are male or female, you can go and buy your meat at the supermarket and pay someone to build your house and so on.
Men seem to have been replaced by a master-slave relationship with masses of people working for a small group of large companies that provide for both men and women. It is like large businesses are the new man. I feel like they are a middle-man that simply should be replaced. I tend to agree with the unabomber in that modern life simply isn't compatible with humans.
Cheer up. Contrary to what many believe, men's chances in life have never been better than now.
Life used to be rough and unfair for most us men. Maybe the oldest son had a chance to inherit the farm or shop of his father so he could provide for a wife and family. Many men, however, had no such luck and went through life without marrying, many without ever dating or being with a woman.
Western women don't need men to provide an income to the same extent as before, and that opens up a lot of other possibilities for us men.
Guys can actually get married although they only earn enough to support half a family or 40% of a family. I even know several guys that makes less than 10% of the family income (and that's through welfare). What chance would a stay home dad have had in 1920? What chance would an unemployed guy have had?
And equally important, we can date women without providing them anything else than a bit of romance. It has still only been a couple of generations in which a majority of us dated for years without having to marry.
Some women still look at earning ability but many women also look at other traits nowadays. Looks, intellect, humour, family skills, interests etc. Work on that and be grateful you weren't born at any point in human history before the 1950s.
While there exist women that don't look at earning ability of men, and there exist men who don't look at the age and appearance of women, both of those seems to be depressingly small minority when ever I see studies on it. I recall a poll from example china where 80% of women answered that they could never date a man who earned less than a set amount (which is above average pay), and a majority who considered that a man should not even be allowed outside if they didn't earn that much. They should be inside studying or working.
Why is post-1950 men better off in this regard than pre-1950?
The context in China is widely different from developed countries like the US or European countries. China is a country that underwent a massive change in their economic system and a massive growth in the past 20 years, that completely changes people's expectation. I mean just when I lived in Shanghai from 2009 to 2013, the cost of a cleaning lady went from 10 RMB/per hour to 25 RMB/hour.
Anecdotally, I've heard quite a few Chinese woman tell me that they wanted to marry someone who was rich only to end up marrying a few years later someone who earned about as much as they did.
I don't have statistics for countries that have been developed for some time like US and Europe but, in my experience, flexie is absolutely correct. It's not that difficult to find women who don't really care about the earning ability of their mate.
Do you want to marry someone who filters based on earning ability? Those are the types I try and avoid!
Post-1950 man has so many more freedoms and opportunities and ways to live life, sure it is probably harder if you want to live your imagined 1950s lifestyle but now you don't have to live that 1950s lifestyle.
I am sure a huge number of men were chain ganged into living that way during the 1950s which made life a lot worse than now.
But I guess with choice and freedom brings anxiety and fear of choosing incorrectly.
I think there's a lot of men who'll do anything to have a regular sex partner and a sense of purpose. Unfortunately, the sense of purpose society prescribes men is that of sole provider for a woman and 2-3 kids. Men are as much a victim of the societal power structures that pressure us all as women in this sense - an assertion that masculinity is intrinsically linked to this rather oppressive structure causes issues for men who don't fit into the structure.
I married a woman who definitely filtered based on earning ability. Not in terms of "must be a millionaire" but in terms of "must have some evidence that he will be able to hold down a steady job." I'm pretty sure that if at some point in our relationship before we got married I had decided to permanently quit working and play video games all day, she would have broken up with me. I think the majority of rational women who are not independently wealthy do this.
In fairness, she also imposed these rules on herself, so that she could take care of herself and any children in the event something happened to me. (She works part-time in a highly paid field. Partly because it interests her to work, and partly as an economic hedge -- we don't really need her income now, but if something happened to me, she could switch to full time and support the family.)
It's economically rational to want a spouse who can earn money. It's not necessarily gold digging.
>Life used to be rough and unfair for most us men. Maybe the oldest son had a chance to inherit the farm or shop of his father so he could provide for a wife and family. Many men, however, had no such luck and went through life without marrying, many without ever dating or being with a woman.
Citation needed. This has absolutely not been the case in most of recorded history and in most of the known world.
When it come to vague recollections, source is not that easy to bring. I don't write down what I see, so sometimes you got to take it for what it is.
Through after some searching, I did find today what I looked at several years ago and they seems very similar to what I recalled. "The survey shows that about 80% of the single women interviewed think that it's reasonable for men to only consider a relationship if they receive a monthly income of above 4,000 yuan (US$635)", which was above the average income in 2011 when the study was done. - (http://www.womenofchina.cn/html/womenofchina/report/136873-1...)
For the even more depressing parts, okcupid blog from 2009 shared some data. For how men view of women: (https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...). To quote: "This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s."
This is based on dating websites where people need to make a quick decision based on a relatively limited set of information. I don't know how much this skews the data but it wouldn't surprise me that on a dating website, people make more decisions based on superficial data (earnings, look) than in real life.
That said, in real life, there's not necessarily a lot of social mixity so people will tend to meet people who earn about the same as they do.
Slightly out of topic, funnily enough when I used such a website, I lowballed my earnings because I didn't want to meet women for whom that was an important factor.
Yes, also for men without college degrees. Even most welfare clients are better off than an average man in 1776, 1861, 1914, 1940 etc. and they in turn had way better lives than men in the stone, bronze, or iron ages and men in the Medieval period.
I wouldn't even want to change for a successful young, white American male in the 1960s or whenever America was at its industrial peak.
Look, we are so lucky at this point in time in the Western world. Far from everything is great, but we live long lives in comfort, mostly painless, mostly without death or disease or hunger, mostly without war, we date around for fun during a decade or two, travel as we like, wherever we like, get entertainment on demand, chose our own profession, before we marry out of love when we are in our 30s or even 40s. Kings would envy our comfortable lives and I bet even Cary Grant would envy the dating life of a regular young man armed with Tinder.
I disagree. My wife's grandfather, who I'd consider typical, bought a house and provided for a family of four in Palo Alto while working at a local Safeway. A job that required no college degree but only the willingness to show up and take some pride in his work. It was a modest yet peaceful and satisfying existence.
As far as comfort, I'd don't accept the premise our lives are more comfortable now than in 1955. My guess is most young men would gladly trade the latest dating app and the interwebs for the conditions of the typical 1955 US male.
>As far as comfort, I'd don't accept the premise our lives are more comfortable now than in 1955. My guess is most young men would gladly trade the latest dating app and the interwebs for the conditions of the typical 1955 US male.
Does that include being drafted into the Korean War? The Vietnam War? The Suez Canal Crisis?
The issues under discussion are as challenging for black men as they are for men of other races. Possibly more so, since they have to deal with all the racist bullshit in addition.
I wouldn't have thought gay men were under consideration here, since we're talking about marriage to women.
I was talking about the issue of the rose-colored view of America in the middle of the twentieth century. My point was that even if America in 1960 really was better than America in 2017 for uneducated white working-class men, that's a pretty small segment of the American population. Our country, while from from perfect, is significantly less racist, sexist, and homophobic than it was then.
Eric Zemmour, a French political writer and polemist (he has controversial views on immigration and such, but is right on other topics), speaks about this in great detail in his book "The First Sex" (a reference to Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex") He explains how capitalism has taken the "useful idiots" of feminism and used them to first turn women into workers (hence doubling the amount of consumers as it created a population with a newfound salary) and then feminised men to turn them into passive materialists. Men are no longer the authority, they are less and less the breadwinner, they are encouraged to be more feminine, to be more passive than aggressive, to be sensitive and open with their feelings, all emasculating them even further. Then he cites studies of the sharp rise of men who have trouble getting an erection, of the sharp rise in divorces and people no longer wanting to have a family of their own. He connects, in a somewhat Marxian manner (without the communist solution that Marx proposes) that unbridled capitalism destroys the nuclear family under the false kings of individualism and liberty. If you're interested in this stuff, Freud also talks about this: he claims Civilisation should channel men's aggressive tendencies, not suppress them (as we are doing now). The result in doing the latter will mean men will find other ways to rebel, and it will be against civilization instead of being used to enhance it.
Of course, he is not advocating for communism. The big "enemy" he is denouncing is rather _unbridled_ capitalism, and with that, the erasure of borders, the liberal, globalist economy (and political movements that follow), the sovereignty of countries being traded away to transnational entities, etc. As general as I could put it, he exposes feminism for making women the "reserve army" of capitalism against the worker strikes in the 1970s, which resulted in the diminution of salaries and thus prevented families from being able to support themselves on only the man's salary. He highlights that power has been moving from political leaders to business leaders (see: election of Donald Trump) who have been bending countries to their will, forcing those countries to no longer make decisions to best serve their countries but instead to best attract businesses (which bring jobs, development, education, etc etc). He is advocating for a return to the nation state which he believes is being dismantled, conservative and self-sustaining economies within countries with protectionist/nativist regulations. Whilst his solutions can be questioned, his diagnostic is still rather accurate, in my opinion.
That book has a lot of his opinions on the disappearance of the men's virility, but the parts in which he explains the causes and consequences of that are fascinating.
I specifically highlight the fact that I don't think his conclusion is the best one. However, none can deny that there is truth in his diagnostic. To me, he's a guy who writes well and does his research on current phenomenons, hence why he is accurate on what is _currently_ happening. He has little education on economics though, and is just proposing ideas which he has gained through reading nostalgic essays on the glories of the past.
I take exception to the diagnosis! There was never a system of "national" capitalism under which nation-states could make totally independent economic decisions, except during the two world wars. Even in those times, those nation-states made those decisions not for the good of working-class people but for the survival and power of the nation-state itself.
The social-democratic "reasonably golden" age was based upon the Bretton-Woods trade system, under which currencies were pegged to each-other and surpluses were recycled to prevent international debt crises. That was by no means an autarkhic capitalist system; it was internationalist social democracy.
Utopia never existed. Until about 250 years ago, your outcomes depended overwhelmingly on what family you came from, no matter your skills. Children of peasants would become peasants; children of artisans would become artisans; and so on and so forth. Rebelling to that state of thing would likely get you hanged or ostracized.
The industrial revolution and global colonization changed that, injecting opportunities for an ever-growing section of men; and genocidal mass-war eventually did the same for women. This land of mirth and honey where every man has an opportunity to bootstrap himself is a somewhat fantastical invention. Social mobility might have been higher than average in the US between 1850 and 1950, but anywhere else "where you come from" was always the most important factor in anyone's fortunes.
Your blanket statement is bullshit. Maybe you should read a book from the era, men were terrified of the horrors these wars produced. Perhaps they saw a chance to escape their absolute poverty, that doesn't mean they liked what they did.
Yes many men were opposed and many of them even severely punished for that opposition.
The point however still stand - both wars and political parties who brought them in had a lot of support. Not just from women. Those revolutions and wars did not just randomly happened out of nothing. People, not just women, wanted them.
Also, many German veterans from wwi wanted the war, wanted to reverse humiliation they felt after loosing. Some were opposed, but opposition was not universal among them.
It wasn't just escape from powerty, it was something meant to give their lives meaning, building imperium and all that crap.
There was a lot of shaming of men who were not soldiers. One particularly interesting example of it is The White Feather[1] campaign against men in England during WWI. It was orchestrated by women, including prominent feminists no less.
The solution is actually quite simple. Being able to choose your child's sex. If women have happier and easier lives, parents will prefer having daughters which will in turn increase the female population and decrease their value, bringing the value of sexes to an equilibrium.
Wow! I never thought of it that way, but it makes sense. Though if unhappy men are mostly invisible to society, that might lead to parents choosing boys under a wrong impression.
When you say sentences like the last one, you might want to consider getting psychological help. There are all kinds of critics of modern life one could reference that aren't mass murderers.
That's an ad hominem. Just because he is a murderer, it does not invalidate everything that he ever said.
We should do well to recognize criminals as fellow human beings, instead of mindlessly reject everything about them, just so that we can follow the predictable and tiresome ritual of shunning the deviant so we ourselves can be perceived as good.
The only reason anyone knows what he thought is that he murdered people until he forced the media to publish his depraved opinions. He wasn't an original thinker. There are plenty of people who wrote critiques of modern life that didn't have to murder people to get attention for them.
I respect your sentiment, but your comment is bullshit. There are plenty of interesting jobs with different pay that depends on your ability - if anyone, a HN user should be well-aware of that. And while all negative things you mention exist to some extent, they're at their lowest in human history, not the either way around.
I feel that you rely more on interpretations of personal experience instead of objective look at the world.
Men seem to have been replaced by a master-slave relationship with masses of people working for a small group of large companies that provide for both men and women. It is like large businesses are the new man. I feel like they are a middle-man that simply should be replaced. I tend to agree with the unabomber in that modern life simply isn't compatible with humans.