I have one nephew who I’d say is definitely struggling and at least one other who is teetering on the edge of whether to classify him as struggling. I have other male family members who are not yet into the high school/18-35 bracket, but this phenomenon is definitely on my radar and any steps/suggestions that can be taken to try and avoid this happening are certainly things that I’m interested in.
But, even if our immediate family members are not struggling, I think that John Donne’s poem “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is an apt reminder that no human is an island, and that the struggle or diminishment of others also impacts us.
Males make up roughly half our population. If only 20% of males 18-35 are struggling, that’s still 10% of the 18-35 humans. And if issues there are causing problems for individuals in that age range, who is to say that the age range won’t become 18-45, 18-55, etc, as it may not just be an issue during a particular phase in life, but something that might be affecting all generations from a certain point on?
Additionally, when we talk about wanting CC to be a welcoming community, we don’t just want the students who are excelling and targeting colleges with sub-10% admit rates. We want all to feel welcome here, and disregarding a topic because it may not be impacting the current posters’ lives as directly may impede people who are lurking from wanting to join and contribute their voices and perspectives to this (and other) topics, particularly if they have more firsthand experience.
The point was the hero mentality requires an object to be saved. Yes it could be a man, a woman, a child or even an animal. But oftentimes it manifests in the “damsel in distress” scenario. Awareness so we don’t fall into that kind of trope is all I was trying to do.
I think this is wonderful! I highlighted “responsibility of women” because as we discuss different ideas of what can be done to help these struggling men, the responsibility should be a shared one. As women needed male allies to achieve more autonomy, so will men rely on female assistance.
So am I.
Agree. I wish we lauded the helpers among us. As Mr. Rogers was quoted, “look for the helpers”.
Maybe I’m wrong, but listening to some of the male voices higher upthread (including the author of the linked article) I anticipate some resistance to the idea that helping should be equated with heroism. That drawing such an equivalency would fall into the category of people who want men to behave like women. That men genetically need the type of heroism where the hero trades their physical suffering for communal praise and status. Or perhaps I am misunderstanding the opinions of those higher upthread.
ETA: unless those standing up for the bullied peer do so by fighting the bully or threatening to do so etc.
Has anyone ever seen a man flying by himself with multiple small children? Frankly, I can only remember one because the flight attendants and some other passengers treated him like he deserved canonization (or at least a knighthood). Meanwhile, when I had to fly internationally with a 3 and 4 year old, I got nothing but a hard time when my 3 year old son needed to go to the restroom and I wasn’t permitted to take him to the first class restroom while the beverage cart was blocking access to all the coach options.
I was told “he’d just have to wait”until they moved past the coach restroom. Right. Because recently potty trained children can just “hold it” for 10-15 minutes
Please tell me that a father in the same situation wouldn’t have been treated any better.
I agree that the “damsel in distress” trope is to be avoided.
My takeaway from the “hero” story was the reward was from a feeling of accomplishment, however trivial it might seem to us. The fact that it was a woman making the request was in my mind irrelevant, and also irrelevant that the person “saved” was actually a man. It could have been any combination, and I suspect that the dopamine high for the “savior” would have been the same.
As an attempt to increase the common understanding on this thread, here’s a video that might be useful. It was about a woman who passed off as a man in the 2000s to learn about men, and did so for 18 months. She found that the experience was not at all what she expected, and “being a male” came with a pretty significant set of disadvantages.
Your post made me remember that I also have a male 18-35 family member who is struggling. It’s not that I forget him, it’s that he is struggling for one of the reasons that has been common throughout history, rather than anything new about our current society, so his situation didn’t come to mind. His parents have alcoholism and also domestic abuse. Growing up, the kids had to call the cops more than once. He’s gone no contact with his parents now for his own sanity. (He catches some flak for having done so, people think it’s part of some TikTok trend, but I support him in this.)
In the olden days, boys were supposedly taught to run towards danger to help people. Nowadays, people of either gender are generally more reluctant to intervene in a dangerous situation, let alone run towards danger. Those that do, like your son, are certainly heroes in my book. But in many cases society sends mixed messages about whether we want to encourage or discourage intervention (viz the Daniel Petty controversy).
So the mens’ mental health retreat she attended devolved into men talking about the violence they wanted to perpetrate against women and doing things like chopping up logs with axes while pretending it was their wife, and she started to fear for her safety should they find her out. Scary.
She later died by assisted suicide in Switzerland.
In the Not all heroes wear capes thread I try to share some stories that highlight what some might think are unconventional heroes.
Sometimes heroes have a couple capes to choose from.
“Meet Calley Thierfelder. This Connecticut teen spends her time traveling from school to the firehouse, then from the firehouse to the police department.”
Charlie Allsup, whose sister attends the same daycare as Deputy Ignacio “Dan” Diaz’s son, was moved to help give the family one less thing to worry about
She went through something that had a much more profound effect on her than she realized, and as we later learned, couldn’t recover from it. But in the process, she learned some things about men that she shared with the world:
Here’s a recap:
That she decided to join a men’s bowling league, and despite being an awful bowler, she was readily accepted, showing in her words “the generosity of men”, and that “she was the one who was judgmental” about them
As she neared the end of her 18-month experiment, she revealed herself to be a woman to the bowling club, and found she was readily accepted then as well.
She found repeatedly that men have a problem with forming close relationships
Men and women have a very different approach to sex, with for women it being more mental and for men it being more physical
That she finally understood the difficulties that men faced when it came to dating, with women having all the power, and that the dating process was in her words “grueling”, and that most women had no interest in “soft vulnerable man” she was presenting herself as.
She did find that men are treated better in business transactions, such as buying a car
She spent three weeks as a monk trainee, and despite the pious nature, found that those men were lonely as well
She went to a male therapy group, and that’s where she heard about horrible things they said about “chopping up their wives”, but she described it as blowing off steam of things that they would never do. She empathized with the fear and stress the men feel.
At the end of 18 months, at the male therapy retreat, she found herself unraveling in being a man, and asked a guy to “cut her”. He refused.
Her views about men changed forever. As she said “Men are suffering. They have different problems, but they don’t have it better…”
When asked “Do you think women understand what it’s like to be a man”, her answer was "Not at all. No clue.
So the video contained all of that, and you chose to mention just one part of it, giving a distorted impression to those that didn’t see it. Why?
Because it started as a sort of light and funny video about a guys’ bowling league and then morphed into a nightmare of guys talking about physically harming women and chopping up their wives with video shots of axes hitting logs and her saying she feared for her safety?
And if I found out my daughter’s boyfriend was chopping logs with his guy friends talking about killing my daughter I would counsel her to get out now and not dismiss it as blowing off steam nor reassure her he would never do it.
People can watch the video and come to their own conclusions, but to me it was sad and scary and disturbing.
The part describing the men’s violent fantasies toward women starts at 14:30 (with a brief mention/shot before this iirc), and the part where she talks about “I was out in the woods with a bunch of guys who have rage issues about women and I was in drag and I thought oh god what am I doing?” is at about 16:00 for anyone who wants to see and/or avoid the disturbing parts
This behavior was so repugnant, dangerous and frightening that I can’t quite comprehend how anyone would have to ask why this part stood out to you or anyone else. Sure the bowling team was friendly, but that doesn’t offset the normalization/minimization of a man, ax in hand, actively fantasizing about chopping up his wife. It seems an “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” type question.
It was dangerous for her mentally, but that may well have had more to do with her personally, than the nature of her experiment. In other words, I see an interesting anecdotal account with a tragic end. I don’t see any profound universal truths about the supposed “set of disadvantages” that necessarily come with being male. And I certainly don’t see any indication that what was portrayed is a genetic condition, rather than a contextual and societal one.
Honestly, for me it’s about more than taking chances. Even if I could somehow be assured that her boyfriend would never actually harm her, I wouldn’t want my daughter to be partnered with someone whose idea of blowing off steam was to talk about dismembering her.
I was disturbed that even the male psychologist dismissed it. So many people making excuses for these men and their misogyny.
I mean I understand that many believe that men are genetically prone to this sort of aggression due to evolution, but it does make me sympathize with women who have decided to be single rather than sign up for this.
I finished watching the video and then read the posts that followed on this thread. Knowing the video was shared to increase common understanding I watched it to open my mind to what it’s like to live as a man.
Yes, the last retreat with the violent imagery was very disturbing…the rage and imagined violence shocking. But I want to step back for a moment and address some of the things that @hebegebe pointed out in the summary.
As I watched that part of the video I thought to myself that it was strange that Nora was surprised by their acceptance and “the generosity of men”. Men are people. Yes, she was the judgmental one in this situation! In my mind she probably didn’t have male friends growing up…or perhaps even a brother or engaged father.
The issue I see here is how one defines a close relationship. The bowlers probably feel like they have a close relationship. Norah/Ned seems to think that once she came out as a woman that now the men felt comfortable talking about personal things…like the wife’s cancer.
This was interesting in the light of our “women prefer men who are at least 6ft tall” discussion. I do believe women take a lot more into account when selecting a partner. (See Selena Gomez and Zendaya.) There’s what one finds attractive versus what one wants in the whole picture. But it flows into this next part:
I think this is where we can unpack a lot of the issues with struggling men and it’s related to the power shift toward women. At one time women had to conform to standards (beauty and otherwise) hoping to be picked. Yes it takes courage to walk across the proverbial gym floor to ask a girl to dance, but it’s another thing if you are the girl expected to stand in a line and hope to be picked. There are two sides and neither goes without some discomfort. (Sorry if that analogy seems dated, but I think it illustrates my point.)
Imo the big thing that has changed is that many women have claimed their autonomy. They aren’t as desperate as they once were. I said this in an earlier post but I’ll repeat it: “
I’ve been following along with this thread but not posting. I do think I have something interesting to add now, after the biological/evolutionary differences line of discussion. My husband has had low testosterone for at least/around 15 years. He can’t have it supplemented because he is a cancer survivor. One of the main arguments for those who say men can’t change in certain ways is all that testosterone circulating in their systems. However, when my husband had higher testosterone, he was still the same person (less traditionally “manly” than the men in my family, more interested in negotiation, less interested in protecting me,etc.). Some of these things were great, and some were not easy for me to accept as a feminist, but traditionally-raised woman. I wanted him to want to protect me! But he was raised in a family where the male-female patterns were different. Once his testosterone became lower, he had to accommodate his mood shifts, etc–but he was fundamentally the same person, no more “feminine.” All of his traits were primarily family-produced, not sex-produced. I see a lot of our personality problems and traits in the same way. And in the twentieth-century U.S. and Europe–whatever stereotypes might be thrown around about men and women, whether you had good character or not was theoretically based on the same standards. To me, the problem is that people aren’t being taught about good character and the classical virtues. Heck, even stoicism has something to offer. Women learn self-control through greater disciplining by society, I think–but that doesn’t mean that they have better characters, necessarily. Keep in mind–I’m what most people would think of as a left-liberal (in the U.S.), and I still feel this way.
Thank you for your thoughtful post about the video. Some comments below:
First of all, I think the bowlers have a pretty good relationship as far as men go, and many men do not have this. But I think it’s telling that even though they would likely agree with you they had a close relationship, they were not comfortable enough to discuss things with each other like the wife’s cancer.
I wonder if young men were better off when dating happened in person. It might have been hard for a guy to ask the girl to dance, but she at least got to see him as a person, and accepting a dance is a low-risk chance to meet, talk, and of course dance. Whereas online, younger women are mostly prescreening for men who are taller, fit, usually a few years older and with higher incomes, and so many of the younger men online never get much of a chance.
I am in no way informed about dating apps…I’ve been married over 35 yrs and my kids found their partners through school and work. I do know a couple of people who were successful using a dating app…met their partner and married them. It definitely opens up the pool of candidates. However the podcasts I listened to stated stats that young men have to swipe a crazy number of times to even get a coffee date. (I think it was the original Scott Galloway one.)
I do agree with those podcasters that emphasized the importance of proximity. (But for the record I’m not a fan of the bar scenario I heard Scott Galloway mention.) Unfortunately once people are in proximity the attraction must be there.
I believe it was the DOAC with Paul Brunson that said the reason given the most often for not accepting a second date for women was scent. And it’s funny but good hygiene would definitely be on my list but people rarely mention it. The other two characteristics I saw mentioned that young males can focus on are kindness and fitness. I agree but realize that some men (I wonder what percentage) would feel like (as someone stated above) that’s making men act like women. I think that divergence can be a contributing issue.
