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

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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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.

Sure, but the onus isn't on me to prove that they didn't want to commit suicide, whoever wants to add those numbers to the suicide stat needs to prove they belong there, which i am skeptical of.

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.

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