site banner
ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38810 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

40
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm flirting with a rather incendiary view.

Over the COVID era and the recent excessive developments in the LGBT movement, I've been looking into radical feminist worldview where my gripes with a lot of society overlaps with some of theirs. At least, a section of theirs. I can't help but think that they are at least partially correct in their analysis of gender dynamics, regardless of the solutions they purport. I also agree with them that men are by default degenerates that need tons of rigorous external tempering to get right. And that access to porn is a bad idea, I've personally seen what crippling porn addiction can do to a man. Now I don't buy into the rest of the grift attempting to promote what they regard as feminine features in men, and indeed such attempts at social engineering can be pretty disastrous. I watched this video last night about what it means to be a man in a sedentary, urbanite lifestyle that doesn't really key into our more primal instincts like before, say, the Second World War. A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis. Combine with this the growing wealth inequality. The consumption of various media that bring to life our escapist fantasies across all genres like high fantasy or superheroes or science fiction or even highly romanticised high school dramas, actually serves to remind them exactly how mundane our life really is. Going forward, I think it'll only get worse as it festers with no easy solutions. Worse still, we're pursuing the wrong solutions by regurgitating the myth that all behaviour is socialised and not evolutionary, that we could get men to "unlearn" masculinity and "learn" femininity. In the end, such attempts will not only push the rejects over the edge, it might also risk creating more rejects. In many ways, I see Tyler Durdan as the "proto-red pill" media in how the persona gives the rejects what they desire and giving them an opportunity to pursue hightened competition in dominating in actual fights. The more woke the culture gets, and the more progressives freak out over the "red pill media" gaining traction and blame it as the source of "male entitlement" rather than a symptom of something a bit more complicated, the more these rejects' perception of society will overlap with the red pill crowd's. I realise the second part of my comment seems completely contradictory to what I'd said in the beginning, but what I'm trying to say is that radfems are correct in their analysis that the "degenerate phase" is the default phase of men and it requires significant external pressures to correct. Part of the problem could be that young boys being coddled might potentially give way to the mentality that life is a template where a series of events fall into place like they're a given like so: school -> girlfriend -> college -> job -> success. But if the habit of actively working towards your every goal isn't imbibed into you since a very young age, once reality confronts you, you become a doomer and just give up like you could do nothing about it. Like you were just born in the wrong household/class/society/whatever. I don't think the mainstream media is ever going to address this head on without being bogged down by what goes within the overton window of the culture war.

I know its a rather chaotic hodge podge stream of thoughts, but I hope I made sense in getting my point across.

I can't help but think that they are at least partially correct in their analysis of gender dynamics, regardless of the solutions they purport.

The radical feminists were quite intelligent in describing the problems that existed at the time, but more or less batshit crazy when discussing solutions.

It's not a secret I have a strong dislike of radical feminism and its theory, to put it mildly. The feminist theory of 'patriarchy' (I know other people like to use patriarchy to mean other things) is wrong, and this includes the idea that men are 'default degenerates'. I guess I also am disagreeing with many other commenters here too, but in a milder form.

Men are not inherently degenerate. Men are inherently risk-takers, driven and ambitious compared to women. Men need a proactive 'purpose' in a way women do not. Part of this is the male social role - masculinity is determined by a man's ability to protect and provide, but of course there is a innate biological element to it. This drive that men have can go in any number of directions, good or bad, productive or degenerate. But given that humans are, on average, pro-social creatures that generally prefer to cooperate, this drive tends towards good and productive. If the natural state of men is degenerate, then how does civilisation exist? Given that men literally built civilisation, at the very least in the literal physical sense.

The problem arises when society fails to provide young men at large with a pro-social way to harness their drive, which has to indicate a systematic failure with society, given that I believe the natural tendency is to be pro-social. If men can't be or aren't allowed to proactive within the society, they will 'degenerate'. Men need a sense of identity, a sense of community, a family, to channel their efforts into something productive. Without those things, they're going to just lash out and/or become 'degenerate'. That energy has to go somewhere. The crisis of masculinity is exactly when society fails to provides those things. There is an oft used proverb of dubious "African" origin which describes men pretty well here - the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. It should really not be surprising that the men who are the most 'degenerate' historically have been men who have existed on the fringes of society.

I think men are violent by only insofar that men are agentic. I don't think it's really possible to separate men's propensity towards violence from their tendency to exert agency in other ways and in other parts of societies. Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women. It is the same drive that causes men to commit violence that also causes them to compete with other man for status, climb the corporate ladder, engage in physical labour. So it is not so much that men are violent per se, but rather that men are and expected to be agentic beings which necessarily includes the domain of violence.

I think men are violent by only insofar that men are agentic. I don't think it's really possible to separate men's propensity towards violence from their tendency to exert agency in other ways and other parts of societies.

Related to this, I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.

Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599

"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."

In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.

"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."

Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full

"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."

I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund

This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=AsgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA210&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=nine%20out%20of%20every%2010&f=false

"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235720134_Who_are_the_Heroes_Characteristics_of_People_Who_Rescue_Others#:%7E:text=It%20was%20found%20that%20males,%2C%20violence%20and%20traffic%20accidents

When it comes to men there's very much a tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.

Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women.

And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.

Tyler Durden was a terrorist, also showcasing how some portion of the ‘incels’ or whatever the term is will turn to violence.

Seriously- mass shootings are pretty much all young males with no male role to fill.

Seriously- mass shootings are pretty much all young males with no male role to fill.

It's almost always narcissism and rage, not lack of a role.

People who don't know what to do just stagnate, they don't lash out and kill random people.

Write it down: %favorite_demographics% Americans kill because of narcissism and rage, not because of poverty or systemic something.

I'm curious why this got downvoted. I think people without direction could easily fall into either the "frozen in time" failure state or take the "nihilistic/solopsistic violence" route.

No idea.

In many case unless we're talking psychotics like e.g. Jared Loughner, perpetrators of mass killings of random people are narcissists who hate society and feel justified to do so.

It's not something any reasonably normal person would do. Absolute majority of aimless young men settle for at worst drugs & petty crime. To murder-suicide complete strangers you need a pathological personality or something driving you crazy. There's a suggestion that some school shootings are related to very rare SSRI side effects.

Tyler Durden was a terrorist, also showcasing how some portion of the ‘incels’ or whatever the term is will turn to violence.

When Brad Pitt is an incel, you know the word has no meaning whatsoever.

This seems like an inability to decouple. The story touched on modern alienation and how young men found some difficult to articulate lacking in modernity. The fighters were described not as incels but as "the middle children of history" with "no purpose or place".

Durden:

We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'll all be millionaires movie, gods and rock stars. But we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very very pissed off.

Incels:

We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'll all be fulfilled, happily married and useful. But we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And We're very very pissed off.

Do you see the parallel now? Of course the original expectations were always an unrealistic lie. Most men historically have not reproduced. But that realization itself is deranging, it is liable to get young men's blood boiling. If all they've been suffering for is a lie then why suffer? Some may even lash out and punish whoever they've convinced themselves are responsible in misplaced but not misfelt rage.

Yes, it's about disenfranchised men. I'm disputing the claim that it's about incels.

I guess I don't think anyone is claiming it was written about incels, it's just addressing the same root thing that incels also feel even though it presents differently.

Be more specific about what you take from the comment you're replying to?

Because if I take your comment literally... "a commenter on TheMotte used the word "incel" in relation to a character played by Brad Pitt [note - not Brad Pitt himself], and from this we see that the word "incel" is meaningless" seems difficult to justify.

Tyler Durden is played by Brad Pitt, an infamously sexually attractive man. He is the alter-ego of another man who, while less overwhelmingly sexy than Brad Pitt, is still a pretty good-looking dude. Both in-universe and out-of-universe, the men involved are not struggling sexually, nor suffering the world's disdain, nor would they even if they hit a rough patch.

That either one of them would be representative of "incel" culture, even in its early days, is ridiculous. Incel has become a catch-all term for "distressed and male", and that's really not a useful description. The concerns of the narrator are not the concerns of incels, as /u/FiveHourMarathon attempts to suggest. The narrator is influential, has status, has sexual success, and relative economic comfort. He's unhappy, but "incel" is not the same thing at all -- at least, it didn't used to be.

At this point, "incel" has become a new, fairly general insult. A socially acceptable replacement of calling someone "gay" in the old times. The literal meaning is different of course, but the underlying sting of the insult has a very similar source, namely that the person cannot fulfill the masculine role of seducing women and "obtaining" sex from them. When calling others "gay" (in the schoolyard sense) was not as taboo as today, it also referred to this: being passive, non-agentic, not being a go-getter.

Lame, loser etc. It doesn't mean "literally lives a zero-sex life involuntarily".

It's just part of the standard woke narrative. "Society's problems are caused by a group of men, and it just happens to be a group we despise."

Brad Pitt was the mental image projected by the schizophrenic narrator of what he would be like if only he could bring himself to actually just fuck Marla the way he wanted to all along. Brad Pitt, within the universe of the film, doesn't exist, he's an idealization of the chaotic masculinity the narrator wants to access. (I'm using the actor rather than the character name "Tyler Durden" because whether Tyler exists is kind of complicated, the narrator is also Tyler)

Which taking the visual symbolism of the film seriously, presents us with two explanations.

Either the incel imagines that he must transform himself into Brad Pitt at his absolute hottest in order to have sex with a woman. Or the incel thinks that if only he could have sex with a woman, the act of doing so would transform him into Brad Pitt at his absolute hottest.

I think it's one of the best commentaries on male sexuality in film. Probably alongside Eyes Wide Shut.

I prefer my third explanation: the movie is not about an incel.

Incel is kind of a loaded term, but the precipitating event of the narrator's split personality is presented pretty clearly as his meeting Marla, and being unable to fuck her as himself, needing to become free to have sex. So incel maybe not, but I don't think the work can carry a reading that isn't centered on sexual repression.

Repressed sexuality is absolutely one of the themes, as an expression of the broader repression of masculinity and purpose; the narrator is not an incel, he's a very traditional manosphere conception of a beta male. He has a comfortable job, and a comfortable life, but has no vitality or ambition or ways to really actualize and express himself as a man.

He's castrated by society and his own fear of rocking the boat. Tyler's an escape not simply because he has sex (the narrator isn't a sexual tyrannosaurus but there's also no indications I remember of him being an eternally blueballed virginal wreck), but because he's free in all ways -- he's free to fuck, he's free to fight, he's free to rebel and claw personal meaning out of a peaceful and atomized suppression of the self.

I definitely agree Fight Club's message puts it firmly in the manosphere wing of gender politics, but I reject wholeheartedly the idea it's about incels. Ennui with modern society firmly predates them. Uncle Ted's crazy, but he's not incel crazy.

Brad Pitt wasn't the incel; Edward Norton was. Which is still pretty unlikely, though that kind of thing is par for the course for Hollywood.

I think the term "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" is particularly salient here.

Whether it's shooting up a shopping mall out of anger at [women/jews/whatever] or attacking an actively oppressive tyrannical government, it's young males who are generally willing to throw their life away in an act of supreme violence for a cause they believe in or at least against an enemy they hate.

So this factor of males turning to violence has both positive and negative valences depending on circumstance.

But yes, Tyler Durden is a terrorist.

I feel comfortable saying that lone wolves turning to killing is negative in most every circumstance.

Even if we impartial observers agree with the cause, labeling it freedom-fighting, the adage still holds. “Be nice until you can coordinate meanness.” Throwing one’s life away to hurt the “enemy” is rarely efficient. This is one of the big reasons why democracy, as a tool for suborning violence into coordination, is so useful.

Pulling on the Fight Club thread, I can speak directly to how men seem to need structure, challenge, and, yes, some form of 'violence' or otherwise direct physical risk to reach full self-actualization.

I'm a martial arts/combat system instructor at a local gym. Krav Maga.

I fully attribute most of my confidence and positive affect in life on my participation in this hobby. I'm really good. It makes me happy.

And I have now, across dozens of examples, observed exactly how getting to engage in a healthy outlet for aggression can turn a man's whole perspective on life around.

Guys of all ages come in having never thrown a goddamn punch in their life, they awkwardly cast Fist towards a thick, cushioned pad, they feel the impact and maybe their knuckles start bleeding, they tire out within a minute... and a wide grin starts to spread across their face. Not all of them stick with it, mind. But in that moment, it is like they've finally gotten to connect with their primal purpose and let deep instincts loose, and not only are they not chastised for it, they're encouraged!

Those who show up repeatedly and advance through the levels usually get really into it. Their confidence increases, they start training cardio harder, their discipline goes through the roof. We introduce them to sparring and they get hit in the face the first time and it shakes them up, but they redouble their efforts because being able to shake off a smack to the face is actually an important life skill. And this is where the Fight Club parallels really come to a head, when they're showing off bruises they received and talking up how excited they are to go another round. They'd honestly rather be in the gym getting smacked around than spending time at work. I have, personally, given a guy a black eye (accidentally!) and he comes in the next day sporting that thing like he received an award, ready to learn more.

All in all, what I see is guys 'discovering' and embracing masculinity beyond just the superficial brand that Redpill/manosphere types tend to shill. Its not just an image they're projecting, it is a complete renovation of the self. And all it took was learning to deliver an efficient and effective beatdown.

And one of the 'strangest' trends I've noted? The types of guys who take these classes tend not to be the jocks, meatheads, or 'bros'. My most consistent students are the fucking nerdiest, most introverted and awkward types you can imagine who are still able to maintain basic hygiene practices. Dudes getting masters degrees in hard sciences, who hold down tech or tech-adjacent jobs (One guy, about to get his black belt, is the owner of a company that does does computer repair and home networking!). They're not jacked, they're not looking to become jacked to attract women (some are already married!), there's really no superficial motivation other than self-fulfillment and the acquisition of a potentially useful skill.

Its like they've realized that there's some aspect of themselves that they have been deprived of since birth, and perhaps told that they shouldn't express, and yet having found a place where they can express it, they are driven to devote their lives and time to it to the same degree you'd expect a nerd to devote to any borderline-obsession hobby. And they're better for it.

Anyhow, I strongly feel that martials arts might be the sole remaining bastion of pure, healthy masculinity left in Western Society, and it is almost certainly the only one that hasn't come under direct attack from the Cathedral, like team sports, military service, and fatherhood have.

Which is why I also feel like the recent trend of Influencer Boxing, despite being silly on the surface, is actually going to be an extremely positive development if it gets young males to develop their martial side in something other than Call of Duty.

EDIT: I want to emphasize my point about it being nerds who are the surprisingly most devoted students:

Check out Mark 'the Zucc' Zuckerberg, training MMA:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bu3_EW0muC0

I'd enjoy hearing how the sight of that guy throwing hands like a semi-pro has updated your priors.

The post that made me (eventually) create an account.

Couldn't agree more. A conversation I've had over and over with my close male relatives always starts pretty much the same "The day you really start moving from boyhood to manhood is the day you understand you're going to be judged on your performance forever. There will be people who "love you for you" but you are going to be judged by society (and by those loving people!) based on what you do and can accomplish." A lot of guys sort of zoom forward from there to "get a good career." While that should be a goal, I think it's far more effective to start with something personal that you can commit to daily: physical exercise within a martial context. The results really do permeate every aspect of life; social capability, overall confidence, (controlled) risk taking, career performance. Not to mention basic health and energy levels (side note: the wealthiest guy I ever could call a friend ALWAYs would say "health over wealth. I'd trade it all to have my knees back"). However, I think that this impact is actually seriously under-realized by guys who workout only for cosmetic reasons (obviously) but even those who workout with legitimate fitness goals. In my mind, this is because even if you're trying to PR on your squat, or get your mile time below howevermany minutes, or climb a 5.14 route, you aren't competing with the other members of the species directly. So it all gets blunted. Maybe there's some grey area here if you're doing it in a directly competitive context (an organized footrace, a powerlifting meet) but I still think it's miles away from training with the idea of "I can use this to deliver violence when necessary." As a military-adjacent dude (never served, but did contracting for a long time) I really see this in the actual badasses (combat arms, SoF dudes) who leave the service and still really train hard on guns. It's partially habit and partially them keeping up a readily available social network, but the ones who keep themselves in shape, do a combat sport, and do meaningful range drills really do walk around with that cliche "cool confidence" that's impossible to fake. For folks into Gun YouTube - compare the general attitude of GarandThumb to BrandonHerrera. Ultimately, unless you are career military (and even then) you do have to craft capability beyond Being The Biggest Badass In The Room, and that is important to realize and a big downfall for a lot of the Joe Rogan types who might sort of dabble with BJJ but never develop something else. Even The KingOfTheBros mixed MMA with comedy before he was the biggest podcaster in the metaverse. Still, the highly-personal and immediate satisfaction of daily training within a martial context, to me, needs to underpin life for males without serious medical issues (i'm talking mostly chronic, birth-related things, not mild obesity or asthma).

While that should be a goal, I think it's far more effective to start with something personal that you can commit to daily: physical exercise within a martial context. The results really do permeate every aspect of life; social capability, overall confidence, (controlled) risk taking, career performance. Not to mention basic health and energy levels (side note: the wealthiest guy I ever could call a friend ALWAYs would say "health over wealth. I'd trade it all to have my knees back").

This is effectively a statement of my overall mindset for my daily life.

I work and try to perform well because that's good, but I would never, ever sacrifice my health to keep my job.

As a military-adjacent dude (never served, but did contracting for a long time) I really see this in the actual badasses (combat arms, SoF dudes) who leave the service and still really train hard on guns. It's partially habit and partially them keeping up a readily available social network, but the ones who keep themselves in shape, do a combat sport, and do meaningful range drills really do walk around with that cliche "cool confidence" that's impossible to fake.

Yup, and interestingly I don't think I would ever recommend a guy go the military route solely for the fitness and confidence boost, but one can't deny that it would provide those benefits if you commit to it.

Genuinely, males 'evolved' to have a Männerbund that provides them the structure and an outlet for aggression against an acceptable opponent.

But in a world as comfortable as the one we live in, there's really no room for such an organization outside the military... except in the martial arts context. And even that can lead to an unhealthy place (see Andrew Tate) and yet I think without that we end up with a specimen of male that is of minimal use to anyone, not even himself, and knows this.

I think an interesting approach could be making National Guard membership way easier with different cores of seriousness. You're an aimless 25 year old who smoked weed all through high school and is now semi-employed. Great, you're going to PT a lot and learn basic discipline. You're an IT dude in his 30s who's looking for something like a Mannerbund connection and also want to serve? Awesome, you're now part of a Cyber Protection Team. You're former active duty SF, but your knees are weird from too many jumps and you want to actually see your kids? Permanent Training cadre.

The problems here are that

  1. The Military still makes Reserve/NG just as difficult to join as Active Duty. Endless paperwork, multi-month delays, weird waiver requirements for tattoos etc. Age limits are also weird. If you're 35+, in good shape (to where you can crush the PFT), and have no medical / criminal record it's still bizarrely had to join.

  2. Goldwater-Nichols while overall extremely good for the professional force, did make the place of the Reserve/NG a bit of a head-scratcher. Combine this with that fact that doctrinally, the Army still goes to war with Reserve/NG.

Mostly for the better, imho, the military is now a professional bureaucracy. And the American way of war is a lot more overwhelming logistics and material advantage than "warrior spirit" (expect for tiny elite units). Again, this is a great thing for running a technologically advanced super military that needs to be always ready for nation-state conflict. Culturally, however, that means the military is a lot more distant for men who just want basic feelings of purposeful camaraderie.

I'm pretty sure I read it in another thread on here and I apologize for not citing ... but someone said "Traditional male roles have been torn down over the past 30+ years. Good or bad for society is up for debate, but what isn't is that no replacement have been provided."

You also have the issue that in the modern world, unlike the ancient, war is generally bad even for the victors. Instead of fertile agricultural land and slaves and loot, the winners get the smoking remains of factories and a bunch of bombed out buildings.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/peoples-rights-far-right-extremist-civilian-militia/672493/

Reading this most of the guys involved sound like morons, but damn if the idea doesn't appeal to me. Just to hang out, train, prepare, and go when needed.

But I'd also suggest volunteer fire companies as a more productive equivalent day to day.

Yeah, that sounds pretty nice. Especially in wildfire-heavy areas in the West...it might be possible to do more intensive forest management and controlled fires if we had more personnel.

Won't go into details (nice try, NSA!) but I went to a public citizens militia field day thing once with a buddy.

That shit was Call of Duty: Renaissance Fair. Dudes who had to bring lawn chairs with them to a makeshift range so they wouldn't pass out while reloading mags. Trading weird Confederate memorabilia the way I traded Magic Cards in the 8th grade. Dude's with sub-MOA $5000 ARs who couldn't hit minute-of-basketball.

There have to be enforced standards. Those are hard to rigidly enforce when your membership may also be the way you finance the organization. "Rick weighs 400 lbs!" "Yeah, but his toilet repair company paid for all the ammo and his wife makes great Frito pie!"

This is why my idea (sort of reluctantly) falls back to a Federal org i.e. the National Guard. The other alternative are the for-profit tactical training / security orgs. There are a million of them and, perversely, the ones that are largely bullshit have huge Social Media presence and the actual hitters have zero profile and names that are beyond forgettable. Cue Lil Wayne: "Real Gs move in silence like lasgana." Also, they're for profit and usually at the price points that only State/Federal agencies can afford (or maybe multinational Oil and Gas companies). It's not like me and my buddies can pool together an extra $150k for a weekend of training.

"Traditional male roles have been torn down over the past 30+ years. Good or bad for society is up for debate, but what isn't is that no replacement have been provided."

Strong agree there.

The trend of undermining any and all possible healthy models of masculinity (as fathers, in particular) has been ongoing and while there's a lot of effort spent mocking the unhealthy models that arise, nobody seems particularly interested in converging on a healthy model, particularly one that might be appealing to a younger man.

In particular, there seems to be a glut of young men trying to strike it rich and famous as they (correctly) note that wealth and fame will actually get them positive attention (and girls, and personal freedom, and the ability to acquire neat toys). So they go all-in betting on stocks, or crypto, or some other kinda insane get-rich-quick scheme because hey, the worst that can happen is he goes broke and starts over again.

And your idea is pretty decent, since at a bare minimum it offers a life path with some fulfilling purpose and personal challenge and promise of growth and advancement alongside like-minded comrades.

I'm not a big fan of the 'national service' idea, but a culture that encourages men to develop their martial traits is likely to improve on what we have now. So give men viable paths forward that DON'T involve gambling their lives away hoping to strike it rich.

I only had some karate lessons as a kid. They were kinda fun, but I admit there were times where I'd rather have been at home. Maybe I just wasn't old enough to appreciate it, though I did tolerate P.E. class up until like middle school.

I can only second this. Getting into martial arts was the single best thing I ever did for myself, and dropping out for the time being due to various reasons is probably the single biggest negative factor dragging down my overall wellbeing.

I concur, although I've always enjoyed combative computer games I never knew how much more satisfying boxing was.

Only dipped my toe into it, at the urging of a therapist at an addiction clinic.

Sadly because of a prior injury I had to give it up after cca 10 lessons.

The aerobic training was punishing but I didn't mind it that much.

Sparring was fun, except against women*.

Still, those half a dozen sparring sessions against 6' to 6'5" teenage guys were.. quite something. One of those things you don't know you have missed your entire life or something like that.

*at times the class of 10-12 young men had 1-2 women in it, and it was always awkward as fuck. Neither of them was either big or aggressive enough to make a credible sparring partner, and it was just .. awkward, I imagine for all concerned.

Thanks for your reply, I've saved it for future reference!

This part especially hits true:

All in all, what I see is guys 'discovering' and embracing masculinity beyond just the superficial brand that Redpill/manosphere types tend to shill. Its not just an image they're projecting, it is a complete renovation of the self. And all it took was learning to deliver an efficient and effective beatdown.

Which underscores the biggest problem with the redpill grift, its not so much about offering its followers a solution to their problems as it is about making them feel good about having them.

Yeah, whatever nuggets of truth, wisdom, and useful guidance are tucked in there, as with almost everything these days, it has become coated in a slimy crust of scammy con jobs by people claiming to have some special insight into said truth and wisdom... for a price.

Since desperate and lonely males are pretty damned vulnerable to manipulation, they're a ripe target for people looking to extract their money under the guise, maybe even honestly believed, of offering them enrichment and meaningful growth.

I mean, I get paid for teaching, so I also make money in this way, but I don't earn more per student that signs up nor do I offer special 'premium' packages or host fancy conventions for additional fees.

The consumption of various media that bring to life our escapist fantasies across all genres like high fantasy or superheroes or science fiction or even highly romanticised high school dramas, actually serves to remind them exactly how mundane our life really is.

Well, that seems like a matter of imagination more than anything else. So long as we're not living right up against the limits of what we can possibly imagine, there will always be some idea in comparison to which life will feel mundane.

And if that's a problem that one wants to solve, it is much, much more easily solved by stunting imagination than by making life more awesome. Just slam down hard on any dreamer; let everyone know that not being content in their place leads only to ruin (https://youtube.com/watch?v=dRXzkdNy-8Q), and perhaps you can suppress discontent no matter what people's circumstances are.

I suspect most people won't want to take such a deal, though.

I also agree with them that men are by default degenerates that need tons of rigorous external tempering to get right.

No, only the right incentives. The trouble is that these incentives mostly come from and in the form of women, who resent this role. So now we have a massive problem.

Like, yes, if you want to control men en masse by force and without using women and the access to them as incentive, you're going to need a lot of external pressure, and what even so, what you create won't really be a man, per se, but a stunted bonsai man robbed of most of his potential and drive who most women won't be attracted to and who therefore will never reproduce.

And that access to porn is a bad idea, I've personally seen what crippling porn addiction can do to a man.

You realise that this kind of porn addiction, as well as simping and other parasocial relationships with women, real or fictional, is just a bad solution to a different problem, right? Basically all of this comes circling around to women as gatekeepers of sex demanding unrealistic things, contradictory things, or outright lying about their preferences in a mate for social points.

Contra to the feminists, I think it's female entitlement we need to be looking at. "Ramona Flowers ruined a whole generation of women." Plus princess mentality, etc.

A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis.

They were talking about a male crisis in the 1800s. Masculinity's always under threat

There are two conclusions which can be drawn.

Either the defense was successful or the perception was wrong.

third option: masculinity has been being shaved down from its original form for thousands of years.

In the 1800s men were legally able to tell their wives to stfu and get in the kitchen, or bend over, or whatever. In the 800s some cultures probably let you stone a woman to death for being a slut or something. Go far enough back and being a man is literally just grabbing a rock and smashing the skull of everyone who you dont want to fuck.

Go far enough back and being a man is literally just grabbing a rock and smashing the skull of everyone who you dont want to fuck.

There is no evidence I'm aware of to support this statement. The past being a different country, people make up fictitious stories about it freely, when in fact all the evidence I can see supports the idea that men and women have always found a reasonable peace between them.

I don't think they were wrong, but I believe they would be surprised by the depths to which we have sunk.

IIRC Francis Drake complained of the "effeminate age" he inhabited, and also IIRC there are similar complaints from Roman authors.

Everyone's effeminate compared with a globe crossing pirate who beat the spanish armada with 34 warships.

That doesn't mean they weren't right though.

Scott had a Tumblr post recently making a similar point (https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/690907658183720960/re-1-please-see-the-sentence-in-parentheses-i ):

I will never understand the human urge to leap from “lots of people have thought this was true over a long period” to “and therefore it must be false”.

What I see is that, if lots of people have thought something was true over a long period, and there doesn't seem to have been any particular evidence that it actually was true in much of that time, then clearly there's a desire to believe that it's true that ought to be taken into account.

Or, at least, that they had correctly identified a problem but were wrong about the degree.

And since social conditions are different in different locations about the globe at different time periods, it could indeed be possible for there to be an ongoing 'masculinity crisis' insofar as one country or the other ends up weakening and falling from power whilst another ascends.

I'm not able to take this thesis very far, though.

My read is a pretty simple one:

Young men are a dangerous and often degenerate demographic and they really have only two motivations: Sex and violence. Sex is what they want and violence is what they can do. One of the prime problems of society is how to get young men into adult society without doing anything too damaging. In the past, this was accomplished with marriage. Boys got married young, and the combination of sexual access, family responsibility and parental attachment was generally a strong enough combo to blunt the worst impulses.

That system is gone now, for most of the developed world.

The intersection with feminism is one of several reasons for this. Feminism wants equality with men, but specifically in the male dominated spaces, not the female spaces they had already dominated for millennia. The problem is that while all people are status-seeking, women are mate-status-seeking. Men don't much care, so long as a woman is attractive and pleasant. Achievement is sexy on a man, it's completely orthogonal for a woman. By gaining status in formerly male fields, women reduced the number of mates they are willing to consider substantially. The success of women in academics and the workplace creates a large and growing sector of the male population competing over a small and shrinking number of women who are poorer and lower status than they are. It also creates the phenomenon of wildly successful women complaining bitterly there are no decent (i.e. higher status/richer) men anymore. And there aren't, because the ladies succeeded in pricing themselves right out of a mate. Men can and will date down the heirarchy. Women (as a generality, exceptions, NAW, all that) don't.

This state of society is unstable in the long run. Young men who are not brought into society will eventually turn on society. And once they turn, it's only a matter of time before they organize, find a cause and start using the only power they really have: a violent death wish. I believe we already see the first stage of this with school shooters, ISIS recruits, etc.

The question is which way women want to go? They can keep the money and status, but they'd have to fight their own psychology and mate down. Or they can give up the money and status and have more mate options that coincide with their preferences. Or they can rely on repression to keep the men in line, but that requires men to do it, the women will still be alone, and people who are willing, even eager to die are really hard to stop.

Ten percent of 350 mil is thirty five million dudes. The whole US military, National Guard and all police put together are about two million. Plus, they're staffed by who again? Oh yeah, young men. Right now the radicalization rate is tiny, but if even a tenth of one percent of that ten percent get as radicalized as school shooters, that's almost twice the size of the Marines. Probably not enough to stage a full-on revolution, but plenty enough to seriously degrade society. Three percent of them radicalized would most likely bring down the government.

Assuming they're organized and aiming in the same direction. We already have a quite violent, quite sizeable criminal fraction, who aren't anywhere close to bringing down the government.

No and yes.

No, I don't think they need to be particularly organized.

Yes, they need to be significantly more radicalized than street criminals.

FWIW, I don't think this is a likely scenario, I'm merely pointing out that you don't need all that high a percentage of the population to be suicidally homicidal to make a big difference.

Status is such a nebulous thing that I worry about this a lot less than you.

Status doesn't have to be moneymaking, or having the best jobs. In fact, these are poor stand ins for the real status maker: what other people think of you. Being a well respected person among a group of well respected people is status, and you don't need a specific job or achievement to do that. Men can achieve status and reputation through social skills, sports achievements, comedy, etc.

Men can achieve status and reputation through social skills, sports achievements, comedy, etc.

Absolutely, but crucially, these are low percentage options. They are handsomely rewarded at the highest levels, but for every pro athlete, actor or comedian there are thousands who didn't make it. Simply put, these sorts of jobs cannot be the solution to a population-level problem. There just aren't enough of them.

A more realistic method is crime, and this is the prime driver of violence cycles in dysfunctional communities. The gangs provide a hierarchy to rise within, there's danger and money and drugs. And because of all that, there's sexual access as well. My pet theory is that this explains the crime level in our more dangerous areas. When it becomes the easiest way to gain protection, brotherhood, status and pussy, what red-blooded teenager wouldn't join a gang? I did. I just had the caution and foresight to make sure it was the toughest gang in the world.

We all know it’s going to the last of those three options

Technology ushered in a utopia of unlimited wealth for everyone for one of the basic desires of humanity. Men are just humans with above average sexual desires, only degenerate as far as women are frigid. Those desires are now sated. I for one am grateful , but perhaps when other dogs caught the car, they found out they never really wanted this, they want to keep running. By banning it, they hope to recapture the energy and pain from this unfulfilled desire to produce more stuff, kids and gdp. Or perhaps they think people should be in pain, not get what they want, and pray with thorns in their underwear.

I can feel the emotional appeal of this kind of "men in trouble" narrative, but I don't think it matches empirical reality all that well. Consider one of Fight Club's most famous quotes:

We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Sounds like a real crisis of masculinity. But where's the data? Male suicides per capita have been largely static or declining in almost all Western countries including the US. Reported mental health issues have increased, but this increase is driven more or less exclusively by worsening mental health in women; male mental health as measured by referrals has been relatively stable over the last twenty years - link to some UK data here.

I feel like this pattern is borne out among my friends and acquaintances too. I'm in my 30s, and I know quite a few women who have had serious mental health crises (usually associated with high stress jobs, especially in combination with parenting), whereas my male friends have mostly thrived, and now are happily ensconced in their careers and having kids. Quite a few of them had rocky spells in their 20s, but that's a normal part of growing up, especially for men where risk-taking is more common.

I don't know why so many right-wing Zoomers are obsessed with the evils of porn. I don't think porn is necessarily a great thing, in the same way that watching loads of TV isn't ideal for you, but I've yet to see anyone blow up their life with (legal) porn, whereas I've known people blow up their lives with alcohol, opiates, cocaine, gambling, and reckless driving, none of which are exactly new (though the opiates are getting worse). And when I look at subreddits like /r/loveafterporn, I'm much more inclined to see the person with the mental illness as being the controlling/BPD or psychodrama-seeking wife who is treating her husband's porn use as an existential threat to the relationship, rather than the poor guy who's jacking off to legal teens behind his wife's back.

More broadly, I think some of the male Zoomer doomerism (Zoomerism?) is just a matter of people looking for a romantic narrative around their gender generation. Which is fine, Palahniuk was doing it for GenX in Fight Club. But absent supporting data, I'm inclined to view it as a narrative rather than fact.

I feel like this pattern is borne out among my friends and acquaintances too. I'm in my 30s, and I know quite a few women who have had serious mental health crises (usually associated with high stress jobs, especially in combination with parenting), whereas my male friends have mostly thrived, and now are happily ensconced in their careers and having kids. Quite a few of them had rocky spells in their 20s, but that's a normal part of growing up, especially for men where risk-taking is more common.

I don't understand why people use this sort of heuristic when talking about something like this. By definition, one's friends and acquaintances are the types of people who have friends and acquaintances. The men with porn addictions so severe they "blow up their lives" are ones who have very few to none of those things. Given that, the odds are very good that your perception of the prevalence of such people based on your observation of friends and acquaintances is lower than the true prevalence.

Your other points about lack of evidence has some value, but this one about your own experience with your friends and acquaintances doesn't, and the fact that you seem to be informing your view based in part on this is troublesome.

Male suicides per capita have been largely static or declining in almost all Western countries including the US.

OBJECTION! Break it down by age group:

https://sprc.org/scope/age

Suicide among the ages of 15-34 demographic has increased, if there's an overall decrease it is because rates among 50+ demos (i.e. boomers) is decreasing.

But young people killing themselves is, ceteris paribus, MUCH more concerning than older people offing themselves. It should be extremely alarming if there is any significant increase in suicide rates among teens and young adults. And there is. This cannot be shrugged off.

The CDC confirms that the AGE ADJUSTED suicide rate has increased in the past 20 years!

For 2000–2016, the age-adjusted suicide rate increased 30%, from 10.4 to 13.5 per 100,000 population, increasing on average by about 1% per year from 2000 through 2006 and by 2% per year from 2006 through 2016.

For females aged 10–74, suicide rates in 2016 were higher than in 2000.

For males aged 15–74, suicide rates in 2016 were higher than in 2000.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db309.htm

INCREASED 30 fucking percent.

THERE'S the data.

/images/16632506901989577.webp

Eyeballing it, it looks like it went from 14/100k to 18/100k. 30%, yes, but doesn't seem that big overall.

Note that those are per-year, not per-lifetime risk of suicide. The 2016 numbers per-lifetime sum to something like 1%.

Add the slow-acting methods (excessive drugs/alcohol) and 'accidentally on purpose' ODs and it's getting pretty big.

Shit dude i didn't know i committed suicide back in my 20s. Also why don't we include people who dont wear seatbelts as suicides, and anyone who goes into a high risk job.

"Excessive" is of course somewhat open to interpretation -- I'm talking about the levels which will very likely kill you by fifty if you don't cut it out. I'm guessing you didn't OD in your 20s, and also that you don't have much experience with people who did. If you had, you'd know that it's very rarely quite an accident. (Less rare these days because there really is a non-negligible chance of getting a hot shot with more fentanyl in than you'd like, but still pretty unusual)

Don't mistake me for one of the reddit no-fun millenials -- I did tonnes of drugs in my 20s and beyond too; enough to know that it's all fun & games up to a certain point. More people than ever are crossing this line nowadays.

This but unironically. I've theorized that suicide as a specific act is less important to consider than a spectrum of self-preservation----self-destruction. There are a lot of guys today who kill themselves by gun or OD who in my dad's generation drove dangerous cars and motorcycles too fast too often until a crash got them, who in my grandad's generation joined the Marines and didn't duck fast enough, who in my great-great-great-grandad's generation joined a merchant ship crew and went off to tropical parts unknown and were never heard from again. It's just that today, you have to really try to get yourself killed, where in the past you could do fairly normal things (drive cars, join the merchant marine or the Marines) and probably get yourself killed if you didn't try to keep yourself alive hard enough. Young men deciding they have nothing to live for is a universal phenomenon, how it is expressed is different.

I get what you are saying, that risk taking behavior is common in young men and the risks available these days might have less reward associated, but its still unreasonable to compare a risky yet possibly rewarding strategy (striking out on your own to make a new life out on the frontier) to literally just killing yourself. Likewise, some people use drugs to escape their reality, this is not the same as permanently giving up on reality by ending your interactions with it.

Young men deciding they have nothing to live for is a universal phenomenon, how it is expressed is different

I think theres a few different "nothing"s being bundled here, the threshold for "i have nothing going for me in this town, i'm out of here even if it means joining the circuis" is pretty far away from "i have nothing to gain in this world that i can possibly reach and i would rather die than make any further attempt"

The two attitudes look identical from the outside if the way you deal with them is the same. "I'm going to join the Navy to get out of this nowhere town and see the world" and "I'm going to join the Navy and hopefully I'll die and end this stupid life" both look like "He joined the Navy and died in a storm or a fever somewhere East of Suez" to everyone but the man himself.

If the bottom 1% of men who just can't fit into normal life (and today become your school shooters, drug addicts, incels etc) existed before the 20th centure, their existence would have been hidden by just dying in ways that were written off as a normal cost of doing business back then. This article claims that during certain periods a fifth of British soldiers stationed to Jamaica died every year, while a third stationed in West Africa kicked the bucket. Merchant numbers weren't a whole lot better.

More comments

This is a stat that should not be increasing in a healthy nation.

4 extra lives per 100k, just gone. With all the various second-order effects, especially on friends and family, that must imply.

And consider that this stat is just successful suicide attempts, so doesn't capture all the people who might be contemplating or having made unsuccessful attempts.

I defy anyone to explain this as a positive or neutral indicator.

I defy anyone to explain this as a positive or neutral indicator.

While the loss of life is tragic, in the long term we're optimizing for mental resilience.

Interesting point if only because it brings us into a debate over whether it requires greater mental fortitude to actually commit a suicide or to continue living with whatever pain lead to the ideation in the first place. Is suicide, in most cases, actually a case of mental 'weakness?'

Pointing out, perhaps, that women have higher rates of (many) mental illnesses and yet a lower suicide rate than men, which is usually ascribed to men choosing much more effective means of killing themselves and, likewise, actually doing it with full intent of succeeding.

While an interesting debate, I'm instead going to rephrase:

While the loss of life is tragic, in the long term we're optimizing for not being stressed to the point of suicide by the demands of modern society. Whether that's through us becoming stronger or us becoming weaker is, I think, immaterial to the widely-agreed on fact that it's better if your population isn't suiciding in droves.

Ah! That is an excellent clarification.

I can agree that the goal here should be to examine exactly what about our prosperous modern economy is still so intolerable or otherwise lacking that we have people choosing to end it.

No. We're not selecting for that. Because modern society is changing too fast for selection pressures to react.

I defy anyone to explain this as a positive or neutral indicator.

Don't tempt the devil.

Given the preponderance of Utilitarians, Aeithiests, and Accelerationists on theMotte there is a very real possibility that someone will take you up on that.

Would love to hear it, and would listen in good faith.

Gonna rip any logic gaps apart though.

And if their argument is good then it would presumably be their position that we should increase the suicide rate, so interested to see if they bite that bullet or try to dodge.

Sure, let me try.

Assumption A: A life can be so bad as to be of negative value to the person themselves.

Assumption B: Because of self-preservation artifacts, not all whose lives are negative in value are determined to end them.

Assumption C: Your desire to kill yourself generally increases as your life value drops further into the negatives.

Conclusion: More suicides means more people were pushed from the margins of worse-than-worthless lives into making a correct decision. Of course it would be better if they were raised from those margins, but apparently we can't all have nice things.

Of course it would be better if they were raised from those margins, but apparently we can't all have nice things.

This would be a stronger conclusion if we actually examined the problem to figure out what was pushing them into the decision. I don't think the majority of suicides are people who are actually suffering from material deprivation. The problem is fundamentally an emotional/mental one where people feel that life is not worth living. And in theory helping people find reasons to live and instilling purpose should be doable!

Suicide rate doesn't seem to correlate with GDP-per-capita, just ask Japan and South Korea.

Thanks for going through the data, I thought something smelled fishy about doglatines post.

Boomers and gen x males suicide rates are dropping and that’s also interesting. I guess when your economic status has never been higher, and you’re thriving and flush with cash looking forward to retirement, life feels pretty good, even if you left society a burning wreck for the youngins

Man, I'm resisting the urge to spew data all over the place in response to that comment because in my research I've concluded that the masculinity crisis, focusing on young men, is WAY WORSE than you'd think if not paying close attention.

I'm giving Doglatine benefit of the doubt that he's arguing in good faith, he probably is!

But, I mean, look at this:

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/

The economic outcomes of prime-working-age men differ substantially by partnership status. In 2019, 73% of men without a partner were employed, compared with 91% of partnered men. The gap in employment among women, which is more modest, goes in the opposite direction: 77% of single women held a job in 2019, compared with 74% of women with a partner.

and

In 2019, the median earnings of men without a partner were $35,600, lagging far behind those of partnered men ($57,000).

I have EXTREME concerns about what happens to a nation when the young male population isn't able to 'buy in' to the long-term success of the population, because said nation gives them nothing to live for and doesn't reward their efforts towards improvement. Why should such a man continue to participate and play 'by the rules' and produce wealth and value?

Suicide is just one indicator of this. There are others.

Another likely signal is the popularity of cryptocurrency speculation and reddit's /r/wallstreetbets which is largely dominated by young men literally gambling their life's savings trying to vault out of their shitty current standard of living.

Well, TIL. This is both startling and rather depressing, as 1) I'm somewhat certain that this is the first I've heard of this, and 2) I'm definately in the unpartnered category with little chance of that changing any time soon.

Atleast they try and give a reason as to why this all may be later in the article;

Researchers have considered why this relationship between partnership status and economic outcomes exists, particularly for men. Is it driven by the fact that men with higher levels of education, higher wages and better prospects for the future are more desirable potential spouses? Or is there something about marriage or partnership that gives a boost to a man’s economic outcomes? The research suggests that both factors are at play. Married men earn more because high earners are more likely to marry in the first place. Cohabiting men also receive a wage premium. In addition, marriage or partnership may make men more productive at work, thus adding to the wage premium that already exists.

None of which speak well of possible solutions, though. Christ.

It is still possible to find success on the individual level, the stats shouldn't hamper you from putting efforts into improving your own life!

But its clear that there's something failing in the current system that is showing a strain in the young male population, and I don't like where this is going to take us.

You could also look at the labour participation rate for young men, which is dropping at historically unprecedented rates.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/beyond-bls/mens-declining-labor-force-participation.htm

During the 1996–2016 period, the nonparticipation rate increased the most for younger men of prime working age, those age 25 to 34. In terms of education, the largest increase in nonparticipation was seen among men with the middle levels of educational attainment—those with either (1) a high school diploma but no college, (2) some college, or (3) an associate’s degree.

This links data was from before the pandemic, which likely worsened things even further.

Ooh, how about college enrollment and completion?

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/10/08/the-male-college-crisis-is-not-just-in-enrollment-but-completion/

Although this might not be all that negative, on net.

I don't know why so many right-wing Zoomers are obsessed with the evils of porn. I don't think porn is necessarily a great thing, in the same way that watching loads of TV isn't ideal for you, but I've yet to see anyone blow up their life with (legal) porn,

Because people 'blowing up their life with porn' doesn't look like what you think it looks like.

It's not telegenic, interesting, doesn't get into the crime blotter, it's just sad and boring. Quite often they don't have a life to blow up in the first place. You think you have any reason to know or be friends with guys who apart from work spend 2-3 hours daily on porn? You think you can tell which guy at work has little drive because his reward system is completely screwed from superstimuli ?

For some unclear reason, serious porn use makes men even less sociable than can be ascribed to their solitary 'hobby'.

Have you counted the amount of men you encounter who fit that pattern, and compared it to how it was before mass internet ?

You do know people are more solitary and friendless today than ever before, right ?

I feel like this pattern is borne out among my friends and acquaintances too. I'm in my 30s, and I know quite a few women who have had serious mental health crises (usually associated with high stress jobs, especially in combination with parenting), whereas my male friends have mostly thrived, and now are happily ensconced in their careers and having kids.

You are aware of 'survivorship bias' right ?

psychodrama-seeking wife who is treating her husband's porn use as an existential threat to the relationship

Are we really supposed to think you'd be perfectly okay with your wife neglecting ..everything else and locking herself away for 60-90 minutes daily to masturbate over things that you are scared to contemplate as 'no biggie', right ?

60-90 minutes!? That's a crazy amount of time just to rub one out.

I don't suppose you've heard of "edging"?

Yes, and 'gooning' as well, but it still seems like a lot of time.

"I take a shower and open up at least 30 tabs of Overwatch SFM porn and edge for at least 2 hours until I feel better." This example comes from a woman, too, though whether you think it actually happen(s/ed) is up to debate.

My impression was that women generally do longer sessions less frequently and men do short sessions more frequently. But of course this isn't a subject I discuss with many people so my sample size is admittedly very small.

Really? 90 minutes would be a disappointingly short session for me. Mine are closer to 7-11 hours but only every other week. But I don't feel like my life is particularly 'blown up'. Surely, it's not that big of a time commitment compared to a relationship? I still have time for university, parties, and other hobbies. I do, however, regret that the dopamine frenzy could have been used for more productive ends, like a programming project.

I think the point is that someone who is truly addicted to porn isn't just rubbing one out. They are compulsively watching porn, not just having a quick orgasm and moving on with life.

If you're on SSRIs it's not unusual.

Then logically it follows that "just rubbing one out" isn't what they're doing.

I've yet to see anyone blow up their life with (legal) porn,

What kind of observation would qualify, to you? Does blowing your life savings on OnlyFans count? Missing a national exam because you fell asleep after a jack at dawn? Ending up arrested for molestation because you thought it'd be as easy?

I don't even care about any of these, because they're edge cases. But when people are willing to condemn all kinds of behaviours except masturbation, I just don't get it.

Sounds like a real crisis of masculinity. But where's the data? Male suicides per capita have been largely static or declining in almost all Western countries including the US.

So I opened the URL. "Almost all Western countries including the US" does not equal the entire world.

Between 2000-2018, suicide mortality rates rose by 35 percent in the United States.

https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/us-suicides-are-stagnant-or-on-the-rise-among-many-groups/

More data is available here:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7108a7.htm

Supposedly there was a slight drop in the rate in 2019, but I'm sure that the worsening continued since 2020.

We also need to keep other things in mind. A high percent of drug overdoses, car accidents, disappearances are probably suicides. (It's also true that murders are sometimes faked as suicides, but whatever.)

I don't know why so many right-wing Zoomers are obsessed with the evils of porn. I don't think porn is necessarily a great thing, in the same way that watching loads of TV isn't ideal for you, but I've yet to see anyone blow up their life with (legal) porn, whereas I've known people blow up their lives with alcohol, opiates, cocaine, gambling, and reckless driving, none of which are exactly new (though the opiates are getting worse).

The effects of these are difficult to hide from your social circle. In the end, you probably go broke, get into an accident, and either die, or need to get treatment. The people around you will know and see, and you won't be able to hide the symptoms anyway. But the effects of porn addiction are more likely to remain hidden. The only other person who is likely affected is the spouse. Of course you don't see it happening. You'll hear about a divorce, but chances are that nobody will tell you the real reason it happened.

But the more important factor is this: mainstream society has found a way to give license to your contempt of porn. I'm sure most posters here are familiar with anti-porn arguments from the past. There was the one about porn being immoral, and it being degrading to women. These narratives were pretty much thrown into the memory hole (there's no point in discussing the reasons here). Then there was the one about porn causing erectile dysfunction, which seems to be rather popular among homely women but, as far as I know, the scientific proof is sketchy.

The current, and most effective, one is that "porn distorts young men's expectations of sex" (this basically means the women you see in porn vids are unrealistically hot compared to average women of the same age, due to the obesity epidemic, and pretend to enjoy getting jackhammered and giving head, and actually seem to know how to give head) and "watching porn screws up men's brain chemistry". These are popular theories because they fit into the general narrative that "unfortunately we haven't yet arrived to our utopia, because weak men are sabotaging feminism", "toxic men cannot adapt to the modern world" and "if anything bad happens to a woman, it's men's fault". Zoomers, whether right-wing or not, would never propagate such sentiments if they didn't get mainstream encouragement.

In the US, the white male suicide rate has increased, as has the addiction rate. Certain populations have lower suicide rates and usually these populations hold to older conceptions of masculinity, for instance Black American males have lower suicide rate and significantly higher rates of esteem (as well as narcissism). The male suicide rate in a place like Germany is complicated by Turkish and other Muslim groups having a lower suicide rate. Turks and migrants in Germany have a significantly lower participation in the economy, migrants especially but even Turks who have been in Germany for decades have a 3x higher unemployment rate. The complaint i hear is "why do the migrant men hang out on the street instead of working". Men are also less likely to talk about mental health, and therapy is female-coded so I don't think we can just look at UK referrals (it's essentially how many women talk to each other outside therapy).

Of course, in a world with increasingly easy distractions, I don't think suicide is even a good method for looking at whether "masculinity is in crisis". Many more of the hikkomori in Japan would have committed suicide 20 or 30 years ago. The rise in JBP and the ideas often talked about by Joe Rogan show widespread agreement among a large sample size that there are problems re: masculinity

The suicide rate was lower in the nineties than in the 50s-70s, so I am skeptical that issues around masculinity are likely to be causal.

Is this one of those things where people point to artifacts of advances in medicine, in order to argue that social issues improved?

If you are saying that, in order to determine the effect of norms of masculinity on suicide rates, all potential independent variables must be considered, that is my entire point. But, you seem to be implying that the reduction in suicide in the 90s was the result of advances in medicine, yet the linked chart shows no reduction in suicide rates from 1944 to 1986. Were there no improvements in medicine in that time period? That seems unlikely. It is certainly possible that advances in medicine explain all or most of the decline, but in order to demonstrate that, you need to bring evidence, rather than just making the assertion.

I don't think this is an incendiary view, in fact it is a very conservative one. There are many researches for instance regarding polygamous vs monogamous societies and across various outcomes monogamous societies come ahead: crime rates, warmongering and so forth. Monogamous societies were in fact minority of civilizations and they to large extent limited male (and female) aggression and impulses by culture and religion. Men who have wife and children have more stake in the society and thus are less likely to cause trouble.

The problem with feminism is that they have it exactly backwards: instead of noticing how society tamed men, they see it all as some historic conflict between toxic men and oppressed women as a class. The solution was not to feminize men, it was to masculinize women as it is now ubiquitous with the new mean girlboss archetype. But I would not throw the blame on feminism, in fact it only falsely reinforces the idea of revolutionary social change by activists and movements. I think the larger part of "blame" lies at the feet of technology. The obvious one being the pill, which gave women possibility to replicate male sexual behavior without risk. But I think the more significant is servitization of economy, which gave women ability to compete with men on the same grounds.

The current calling out of toxic masculinity by feminists reminds me of current meetoo rape allegation trends. Sex positive feminists clamored for sexual liberation of women, they no longer have to be at home watched by their relatives. Break the shackles of bigoted religious sexual stigmas, go out and have sex any time with anybody you wish. Prostitutes are suddenly sex workers, porn is at leas normal acting if not outright art and so forth. However when suddenly sex became cheap and without any stigma some people - mostly men - "take advantage" of it. Now we need to somehow bring the clock back and create some elaborate system of consent and new sexual mores and culture to protect women from predators. If only there was something like that before, right?

Your post made sense to me, but I think that's a result of me agreeing with 90% of it. It might help if you broke up your stream of consciousness into proper paragraphs and subpoints.

A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis. Combine with this the growing wealth inequality.

Hasn't it always been this way. Taxi Driver is already almost 45 years old. It's not so much indicative of a male crisis but that socially maladjusted protagonists make for a more interesting story/plot. As for the rest, this sort of male fatalism gets tiring. Life does not have to suck or be directionless . Even in spite of biology, humans are still endowed with some capacity for reason and decision making abilities.

Tyler Durden is in the archetype of the Redditor (consuming and browsing and collecting, in Tyler's case Ikea magazines, vicarious enjoyment of life mediated through magazines), with a nice loft and stable career, but he felt unfulfilled from this. First he became addicted to the emotional catharses from feminine-coded support groups, which helped but lead to craving more and more. He found greater relief and enjoyment from participating in a risky thrill-seeking masculine community, which was fight club. There's nothing fatalistic about Tyler Durden until toward the middle-end, with villain Tyler Durden going overboard trying to destroy consumer-capitalist society (which I think is a silly plot tie in which isn't really why people are watching the movie or reading the book). Per the author, "bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt. These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be together. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives."

And that access to porn is a bad idea, I've personally seen what crippling porn addiction can do to a man.

What exactly can it do? Make men that don't want to have sex with real women anymore? That doesn't sound like nearly the end of the world, other men will gladly step in to fill the gap. And for those men, does it create severe unhappiness, or just men who don't care to participate in the rat race of trying to get laid. Also, doesn't sound like the end of the world.

Make men that don't want to have sex with real women anymore?

Porn addicts can't have sex with real women. Erectile dysfunction, eventually even the drugs won't work.

And for those men, does it create severe unhappiness,

That's the nice thing about porn, serious use causes emotional blunting - flattens the highs and lows of emotions. Of course, eventually the reality of having one choice only, and that choice is being a perpetually single loser sinks in. I say 'loser' because it's really unlikely for porn addicts to maintain ambitions or a drive to succeed.

It's a dysfunction of the reward system, the entire thing gets out of whack because a basic drive is getting oversatiated.

Porn addicts can't have sex with real women.

Even before any porn addiction develops, regular masturbation to porn will erode one's willingness to even go out and pursue women.

regular masturbation to porn will erode one's willingness to even go out and pursue women.

I think you've got the cart before the horse. The willingness to go out and pursue women is eroded (due to consistent failure) before the regular masturbation to porn.

I don't know about you but in my school we were watching porn before anyone was having sex. I really doubt that men are exhausting other avenues of achieving sexual satisfaction before going to porn. It's another case of the easier if poorer substitute outcompeting the real thing, and the substitute gets quite a head start.

I get it, pursuing women is hard. It is expensive in terms of money and opportunity cost, it opens you up to embarrassment, it requires a lot of self-development if you've got poor social skills, and it's worse these days if you don't have the right look for Tinder, but whenever I start making excuses, or hear someone else doing it, I have to ask 'how did your last 10 attempts go? Oh you didn't even make 10 attempts? Well there you go.'

I won't post a selfie, but I've been likened to both Ricky Hatton and Triple H, and still rarely has it not worked out for me when I've actually been trying.

I've seen a porn addict's partner eventually end up a femcel (not the involuntary sort, the toxic kind), though that relationship wasn't the only wave in her storm. No kids or permanent relationship commitments in this case, luckily.

What I meant is, for the men who do want to participate in the rat race, it creates an unrealistic perception of the experience that can be difficult to decouple from. Combined with concerns over performance anxiety, not a good outcome.

It's not even that. And it's not 'performance anxiety' either! People with performance anxiety get morning wood.

Pornography addicts do not get morning wood despite not having any of the conditions associated with that, such as severe heart disease or diabetes.

Well, the women's equivalent to porn is romantic comedies: we could say that they create an unrealistic perception of what a man should be and do to get a relationship, and then you have tons of "femcels" who just want Mr. Right who must be rich, hot, tall, gentle and a vampire but I do not see the same moral panic about romance novels.

The moral (or rather, social) panic I see isn't about romance novels, but rather about the failure of men as a class to not produce enough of them that meet the expectations of women who want a Mr. Right who's rich, hot, tall, gentle, and a vampire. The analogue for porn would be if there were a moral panic about not enough women being young, attractive, sexually open and skilled nymphoniacs. It's just identifying the societal problem at different parts; for unrealistic expectations set by romance novels, the "panic" is around the failure of men to achieve them, while for unrealistic expectations set by porn, the "panic" is around men consuming and being influenced by them.

a vampire, a pirate, a knight, a doctor etc.

I don't really think romance comedies/novelw or whatever are "women's equivalent to porn" and I find that a curious analogy.

OP's point about porn coming (cough) with a price is, I think, spot on--not to be an old man but porn used to be relatively a challenge to get one's hands on. Now free porn of almost any stripe cam be had for free as easily as literally tapping one's thumb a few times.

I expect any quantitative 'data' on this will not be without a significant amount of noise for myriad reasons, but there are various reasonable assumptions one can make about the socially (and even sexually) debilitating effects of long-term porn 'consumption.'

Romance novels/movies are totally the female equivalent of porn.

The thing to understand is that men and women are attracted to different things. Men are primarily attracted to youth, beauty, and fertility, all of which can be appraised based on appearance[1]. Meanwhile, women are somewhat attracted to physical characteristics, like height and muscles, but what really gets their motor running about a man are his nonphysical attributes; rich, aloof, dominant, confident, dangerous, badass, high status, leader of men, sexually experienced, dark triad traits, etc.

The purpose of porn is to stimulate a man's reproductive instincts. And since men are primarily attracted to visual cues, porn mostly consists of an endless stream of images depicting naked girls who moan a lot. Sometimes there is a plot, but if so it is perfunctory, like the 20 minutes in a horror movie you spend watching random kids act like jerks before the monster shows up and starts fucking them up. Hentai doujinshi has it down to a science; 5-10 pages of setup, followed by 15-30 pages of fucking.

And, likewise, the purpose of romance novels and movies is to stimulate female sexual instincts. But as we stablished, women are attracted to completely different things than men are. So, instead, romance stories depict an endless stream of billionaire athlete demon pirates kings who look great with their shirt off and declare their undying love for the audience surrogate. It is nine hundred pages of the male love interest demonstrating how aloof and alpha he is, a hundred pages where he breaks down, gets weepy, and shows his soft inner core of twu luving betaness, and one page where he tears the lady’s clothes off with his teeth and the couple finally at long last get some action.

Needless to say, both of these can lead to rather... unrealistic expectations.

[1] And secondarily attracted to purity, kindness, fidelity, humility, and obedience, but those are harder to depict in porn. Not that people don't try; the nurse is a popular porn character for a reason, and hentai doujinshi will usually devote what little space is reserved for the plot to making sure you understand that the girl is a virgin.

I appreciate your lengthy response but none of your links convince me of what is I still think is an odd comparison.

You don't have to tell me that women and men's sexuality takes different forms, but I really don't think women masturbate to romance novels or love story films or whatever to even a fraction of a degree that males are spanking it to pornhub (or whatever).

I don't really think romance comedies/novelw or whatever are "women's equivalent to porn" and I find that a curious analogy.

With movies, the argument being made is that women want relationships and men want sex. It's a stereotype, but one with some grounding.

Romance novels... in addition to the above, they're full of actual sex scenes. They are literally erotic material, just in a text rather than video medium.

Too much validation is also a problem. Men and women are probably just too different to have hard analogies.

I don't really think romance comedies/novelw or whatever are "women's equivalent to porn" and I find that a curious analogy.

I'm not surprised. You're a man after all, I assume. To men, stimulation is visual. But romance novels aren't visually stimulating, so they don't count as porn, right? But, in fact, stimulation for women is mental.

OP's point about porn coming (cough) with a price is, I think, spot on--not to be an old man but porn used to be relatively a challenge to get one's hands on. Now free porn of almost any stripe cam be had for free as easily as literally tapping one's thumb a few times.

This remains just as true with romance novels and fanfiction. It also seems to be just as strange (if not stranger) than visual porn. I learned about this the other day and really drove home to me, someone who takes a degree of pride in my knowledge of weird internet cultures, how little I know about the female side of the internet.

I learned about this the other day and really drove home to me, someone who takes a degree of pride in my knowledge of weird internet cultures, how little I know about the female side of the internet.

As a female on the internet, that was new to me, too, so don't feel bad.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats