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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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The "masculinity crisis" is probably down mostly to the traditional foundations of masculine identity, what distinguished it fundamentally from femininity going back several thousand years at least, e.g being physically powerful and being good at killing people/animals are less and less relevant than ever in industrial and post-industrial society and are only going to become more so.

Except

  1. It isn't. There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male. The trades are male. Some physical jobs that aren't as obviously about strength, like drivers, are also very gendered male.

  2. There's differences that show up in the modern age too. Engineering is predominantly male (though not as male as the trades), despite vast effort made to change that. But do men get credit for this? No, we get rhetorically beat up for it.

It's not men who need fixing. It's the people who insist on refusing to acknowledge anything positive about masculinity.

There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male.

There are a lot less than there used to be and will probably be even less going forward.

There's differences that show up in the modern age too. Engineering is predominantly male (though not as male as the trades), despite vast effort made to change that. But do men get credit for this? No, we get rhetorically beat up for it.

Yes, there are other sex differences. But upper body strength, and what flows from it like fighting, killing, other feats of physical strength was for a long time the single most important sex difference. It absolutely dwarfs most others, even if you assume all other sex difference are 100% innate. Its shrinkage as a relevant factor in modern society is hugely impactful and probably couldn't be otherwise.

A huge portion of the seething over women having "fake email jobs" and what have you probably comes down to the fact that a huge portion of men also have "fake email jobs" nowadays. You can say "well the majority of cutting edge research in XYZ field is still done by men" or whatever, but that's a tiny proportion of all men so it doesn't really matter for the average person. It used to be the case that a miner or a steelworker or farm laborer could tell himself he was doing a job only a man could do and that was a source of pride and identity for him, though even by the 19th and early 20th century the anxiety about the softening of manhood was already well-advanced, evidenced by all of those intellectuals who argued that regular warfare was necessary to maintain racial/national virility. But nowadays a guy who works as a cashier at wal mart or does some rote office job understands full-well that a woman could do his job just as easily and it probably grates psychologically.

This reminds of the study (don't have the link, sorry, it's quite some time ago) that claimed to show that men resent and feel threatened by female success, and that this is a large part of successful womens' struggle with dating, based on the fact that men are much less attracted to successful women.

The numbers? Seeing a highly prestigious/high earning job such as CEO increases a woman's chance to consider dating that person by something like 50%, whereas men give only a 10% premium. On the other hand, seeing someone with a less prestigious/lower earning job than them reduced the chance to consider dating that person for the majority of women to near zero irrespective of other qualities, while men only gave a 20% penalty or so.

In other words, men just don't consider women's jobs as super-important either way. Only a minority of men resent that "a woman could do this". It's women who look down on male cashiers so much that they'd never consider dating one.

But as usual, everyone tries to find a way to blame men.

Whether women wanna date men who make less money than them is a totally different question from whether the disappearance of traditionally masculine jobs from the economy contributes to a crisis of masculine identity.

  • -10

If your post was entirely about how men just really like building, fighting, hunting, etc. and that modern jobs simply fail to fulfill some primal male urges I'd completely agree! Though I'd add that modern jobs struggle to sufficiently fulfill many primal female urges as well.

But a large chunk of your post was about how men resent certain female jobs and in particular resent doing jobs if - and because - a women can do them. This is a fairly common claim I hear, and it's in my view an inversion of reality ; It's primarily women who resent men doing a job they can do themselves, similar to how the average man does not resent successful women, but successful women resent the average man.

Though I'd add that modern jobs struggle to sufficiently fulfill many primal female urges as well.

I'm not sure this is accurate. Many female jobs: Nursing, Teaching, HR, etc. seem to scratch feminine itches and are either high status or have significant social support for arguing they should be high status.

In contrast the male jobs are very much low status, and status is an important part of scratching the male itch.

I don't think it is, mostly because one of the main reasons why there exists a crisis of masculine identity is because without provider-type jobs, women won't mate with men. It's less about miners and steelworkers vs fake email jobs, and more about provisions and providers vs children and child-rearing. Women have been moving away from producing children and spending time rearing them, and instead have been joining men in producing provisions (money) and spending time acquiring them (jobs). Men cannot and will never be able to make new children. They can raise them, but they are not suited for it, certainly not for the first year, likely more like two or three.

The elephant's tail is completely different from the elephant's nail, so I will grant you that the two questions are, in fact, different. That doesn't address either issue, and deliberately ignores the ways in which they are connected.

There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male.

But these jobs are proportionally much more scarce than 50 or 100 years ago.

There's quite a few "stereotypically masculine, requires physical strength" jobs that having hiring shortages right now. Construction labor, Garbagemen, police beat cop in cities, and Army grunt (not West Point officer) to name a few. This suggests that it's not like those jobs have completely disappeared leaving manly-men with nothing to do, it's that those jobs are now so low status that no one wants them.

"Everyone knows" that the way you make good money now is to study STEM or business and get a while-collar job, even if what you really want to do is use your muscles in the real world.

I can't help but notice that three of the four jobs you listed are public sector jobs, which may have something to do with them being low status.

"Everyone knows" that the way you make good money now is to study STEM or business and get a while-collar job, even if what you really want to do is use your muscles in the real world.

They're not wrong. If you can do the work you can make a lot more money in computer programming or finance easier than you can in the trades. It's not impossible to make big money in the trades, but sometimes it requires connections (they don't hand out those $400k/year backup crane operator jobs to just anyone), and when it doesn't it still requires business skills as well -- you have to run your own operation and have employees.

The stereotypically masculine jobs with hiring shortages now tend to either have cyclical employment (like construction) or be shit for other reasons (including being very low status and/or low pay, or all the baggage of the military)