This is a comment by wellokaythen on the post “The Single Biggest Obstacle Facing Boys and Men Today“.
“I think in this article, and the related articles mentioned, men are getting very mixed messages about what the problems are and what they’re supposed to do. I don’t think the advice is totally consistent.
“For example, the Demise of Guys book focuses a lot on the idea that young men today are not finishing school, not trying very hard to get a job, not being as successful as their fathers’ generation. They just don’t have the spark of ambition any more. They aren’t going out there and taking the world by storm. So, they’ve rejected all that hard work ethic and ambition that earlier generations of men had. They’ve LOST traditional masculine values.
“On the other hand, I read here that young men are TOO much conditioned with traditional masculine values. They are too competitive, too focused on traditional masculine models of success. They are too focused on making money, getting all the trappings of worldly success, working up the hierarchy, etc.
“So, now I’m confused. Men are too much bound up in competitive male ambition and not enough male ambition. What’s wrong with men is that we are status-seeking workaholics and passive couch potatoes. (One wonders where men today find the time to be overwork AND spend all day watching porn.)
“I get the sense that for many young men today, rejecting the corporate and educational rat-race is a kind of rejection of traditional male gender limits. Or at least it feels that way to them.
“In addition, we have agency over our lives, but if you buy into current gender values that control disappears. So, we can break out of our gender straightjacket, but we can’t break out of our gender straightjacket.
“I think men face enormous challenges today, as men as well as human beings in general. Perhaps what most of these advice books are losing sight of is the historical fact that just about every generation for the past few centuries, if not longer, has wondered why men of that era are just not as good as previous generations. There is a quite profitable publishing industry out there telling everyone why they’re so bad and what they need to do to fix their lives.
“Imagine if we all looked around today and discovered that men are not doing so badly at all. (I don’t think that would be an accurate interpretation, but let’s say hypothetically that’s true.) Think of all the authors, life coaches, talk show hosts, and journalists who would be forced to look for gainful employment elsewhere. If I wrote a book with the thesis that things are actually going pretty well for many men right now, sales of the book would be pretty low, even if I could find a publisher. Telling older people that their children will be alright in the world is just not as interesting as telling them their children are in deep trouble.”
Photo credit: Flickr / Banjo Brown
I think it is man’s nature to invest to one thing at the time to get to the top. For some it’s chess, for other’s is work. And there is the game called life. To be successfull in life, you have to be active competitor in job and mating market. If you do quite well in those departments, men will invest more and more. You are are active player in the important fields of life and you become more and more motivated. On the other hand, if a man is not active competitor in life’s important fileds, he often quits… Read more »
This was one of the best comments I’ve read on GMP. Men and boys can’t win for losing. Whatever the question, whatever the issue, if you’re a male, somehow you’re going to be wrong no matter what you do. My stance is to ignore the gender warriors, ignore the politically correct warriors, and do what I know to be right.
I like this piece, and this question, a lot. Leaving aside the deeply contentious and antagonizing overuse of the term “male privilege,” when young women are bombarded with this much negativity about who they are, there is an outcry. And yet the fact that young men are feeling the runoff from this particular line of discourse about how much men are failing to do….whatever… today goes largely derided. Great dialogue.