From "What’s the Matter with Men?
They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex" by Idrees Kahloon (The New Yorker).
"The aim is to compensate for their slower rates of adolescent brain development, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making. Reeves, who places great stock in this biological difference, also places great stock in his proposed remedy: 'A raft of studies of redshirted boys have shown dramatic reductions in hyperactivity and inattention through the elementary school years, higher levels of life satisfaction, lower chances of being held back a grade later, and higher test scores.'"
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110 comments:
Girls like to work with people, boys like to work with things. How about making things in America instead of China? And perhaps we are working too much with people. What good is that doing?
What a load of garbage.
Every job that makes the world actually work (construction, sewer, electric, rail, shipping, drilling, mining, etc.) are done almost exclusively by men.
These are 'must have' jobs, not 'like to have' jobs like gender inequity writers.
The left needs to be destroyed root and branch. They are communists bent on the destruction of Western society.
men are to blame for everything.
Except the wonderful amazing caring Biden family and FBI crooks. Those dudes are worth media worhsipfulness!
The redshirt proposal follows longstanding move to redshirt boys for sports reasons. Which as nothing to do with sex differences, just physical development. Bigger boys have competitive advantage. Growing up in England, male school sports strictly age, not grade based until 16.
If an extra year of kindygarten were a proper response then how did boys manage without it decades ago? Every suggestion in this excerpt is a dog's breakfast.
I think holding boys back a year is actually a good idea. Girls really do oupace boys in elementary school and junior high. You see it sports too, where 14 or 15 year old girls can win Tennis tournaments or gold medals.
My son-in-law, with no college, is making big bucks as an electrician. All his friends are tradesmen, and they’re all raking in the dough, buying multiple vehicles and rental units, and they didn’t go to college either. If you think brawn doesn’t matter any more, try to find a tradesman to do a small repair on your property.
Screw the colleges. They are a hostile environment for men, and a pig environment for women.
If you want men in the colleges, shut down the women’s studies departments. Feminism is an apostate religion. Indoctrination in it must be driven out of the schools. If you can’t indoctrinate students in Christianity or Judaism in state schools, why can you indoctrinate them in Althouse’s evil feminist religion?
Why are the state colleges forcing indoctrination in Althouse’s religion on students?
Our son must be the exception.
He did a year of pre-school that the Elementary Principle sat on the board and advised on curriculum.
As a Flag Day Birth, the kindergarten teacher recommended he wait a year for kindergarten. This was after passing all the kindergarten tests, and interviews. As he was well spoken, they decided to start with the 5th grade vocabulary list and go down until he started to get words he understood. He understood all the 5th grade words.
We told the school we understood there concern about the XY problem, and calendar issue. We asked if any girls were being admitted that scored lower on the entrance criteria, They admitted yes many girls were behind our son intellectually and socially.
Even the Superintendent asked to speak to us. We again listened and declined to take their advice. The Principle was 3 hours short of a Phd in early childhood education, and the Superintendent had his Phd. They both guaranteed us, at some point our son would fail spectacularly and must likely never recover.
Graduated in the top 5 in his Engineering Class (not 5%), Offered post grad scholorship, turned it down, and has been getting regular promotions at work since graduating.
I understand the Bell Curve. But the super educated have no understanding of the concept.
@Joe Smith
Exactly. You might as well channel Camille Paglia, she's says pretty much the same thing.
There is no masculinity crisis, other than that our hyper-feminized society is working overtime to keep boys from being boys and doing boy things.
The reason for this is the same reason for the Salem Witch Trials, ftm transgenders, or when girls fainted for Elvis; girls do whatever other girls do, and they like whatever other girls like. Women and girls, by biological definition, must be social to survive, if they're to have any chance at all. They're programmed to be hyper social, so they're easily influenced by others and will do whatever is needed to fit in. It's also why they're the main target of political propaganda and campaigns. It is one of the many reasons society as a whole is being pushed to become more feminine; the disagreeable masculine influence must replaced by the agreeable feminine in order to be controlled. Boys are hard to control. When the top influencers push an idea, it is uniformly run up the flagpole with women first, because women are the most likely to uniformly go along with it.
Why is the "problem" of boys in kindergarten not a failure of the teachers, predominantly women? (I started kindergarten at age 4!)
"... shift toward brains away from brawn...."
Yes, and in light of the extensive scientific, engineering and mechanical breakthroughs by women one can certainly see the justification for this statement. /S
We have also seen extraordinary breakthroughs in other areas infested by women. Think of the even-handed application of Title IX we have seen by female HR officers on college campuses. And don't forget the advances in university curriculums like Womens Studies, CRT, Black Queer Studies and the woke like. /S
The predominance of women "teaching" our kids couldn't possibly have anything to do with boys falling behind, because teachers have no responsibility to prevent that. /S
We've discussed this numerous times on your site. Good to see The New Yorker diving in. It certainly goes against the ever-present narrative of women this, and girls that which is constantly drummed into everyone's head: on TV, movies, news, etc. Women are graduating and progressing, while boys and men are left behind, drugged, and later projected as morons.
Then to top it off, you're told you're toxic when just being yourself, doing what your DNA programmed you to do before you came out of the chute and said, "Hey Babe".
The idea of holding boys back 'officially' is more or less a cover for what they've been doing for about 25 years unofficially. I was skipped grades when I was young, not held back. It's not the boys, it's the schools and our society which allowed off the rails fenimism to create their own blend of toxicity and spread it around to push down the boys and men.
I say, let things run their course. When the country has had enough of extreme and bizarre women/men running things, they'll start longing for men to be men and women to be women and allow the natural order of things to go on. And before you get all in a huff, by 'natural order of things' I mean, like allowing for boys shifting in their seats at school because the classes are too boring, changing the curricula with boys in mind as well as girls, allowing for the nature of boys with the answer to raise their hands aggressively and having the teacher actually call on them, instead of ignoring them, thereby letting them take part in the class and keep them interested.
And...allowing men to be men. And don't give me that men just do bad things. We also built this world. Wanna keep going? You're going to need a few of us around.
The 'shift' is not just from brawn to brains, but to certain kinds of brains - service oriented brains. This to me explains the large influx of women into the workplace - the percentage of jobs which take social skill has exploded, while many of the jobs focused primarily on technical skills have been offshored.
This is backed-up in my mind anecdotally in my prior work where I was in design engineering in a very technical business. It wasn't that there weren't any women engineers, but the vast majority of women engineers that were hired only remained in their positions for a few short years before moving on to roles in, for example, Quality Control, management of production teams, etc. These were more people-interactive roles than design engineering. Very few stayed on as design engineers acquiring depth in their technical area... essentially all the technical 'experts' with depth in their fields were the 'old men'.
Retail Lawyer,
We still make things in the US. Lots and lots of things. Probably more things than ever.
We do it with a lot fewer people though which is why, even though mfg output is up, mfg employment has not kept pace.
One of the reasons we do it with fewer people is because manufacturers can't find people. This is nothing new.
I've been in thousands of manufacturing plants over the past 30-40 years. Especially in the past 15-20 years I doubt that I have been in any that are fully staffed. Pretty much all are struggling to find people to work for $15-20/hr.
A friend of mine builds manufacturing machinery. He will hire anyone who can tell a hammer from a screwdriver and is interested in machiney for $40m/yr plus benefits. He's had a "now hiring" sign in front of his plant for the 20 years I've known him.
People would rather work in McDonalds or Starbucks and "Fight for $15" while making $10/hr than work in manufacturing.
And that is a huge problem for America.
(Though very profitable for me, since I work a lot with automation)
John Henry
I haven't seen a surge of successful women into STEM, rather the opposite. I certainly knew some back in the day, two have been elected fellows of the AAAS and deserve it, but the last ten years have been a drought. What a disappointment.
Wait, I thought girls were exactly the same as boys. Now they find out they are not?
readering, My grandson plays club volleyball (2022 national AAU champions!) and that is strictly by age group.
OT I was signing up for a VA online account this morning (I LOVE my VA medical care.) and instead of asking my gender or sex, it asked for my "sex at birth" Only 2 options.
John Henry
Having trashed the old dispensations, these Most Caring and Wise Folk now need to patch the mess they've made. You can be sure of three things:
(1) They will never be finished; this is a business and it needs to continue and grow
(2) It has a high and rising social and economic and cultural cost, which all of us will be forced to pay
(3) They will never apologize or even acknowledge their culpability
If there is a male > female imbalance in careers, income or honors, it is due to patriarchy, misogyny, and systemic sexism. Hence, it is the fault of men.
If there is a female > male imbalance, it is because men (even as boys) are weak, stupid or just generally suck. Hence it is the fault of men.
I see a pattern.
"nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly"
And nobody predicted that, while doing it, they would keep complaining about the patriarchy and glass ceilings with perfectly straight faces.
"He would encourage more men to become nurses and teachers"
IOW, keep devaluing what men do and make them submit to feminine values. (Not dismissing the rec, though. Men should expand their horizons, and learn.)
"How about making things in America instead of China?"
The incredibly rich corporations do not want to have to pay adequate living wages (and provide other standard employment benefits) to Americans when they can provide subsistence wages and no benefits to the Chinese, so that won't happen.
Of course, we could just stop breaking kids, not just boys, to the classroom and continue the learning by doing that is how humans actually learn. But if there is to be a "redshirt" period, better it be at 12 yrs old instead of 5. The boys could just have a year learning how to use basic tools and do useful things which is where their true nature.
Mind and hand, but schools have rushed back to be academic and "educators" denigrate the ability to do something objectively useful.
"Man must seek his chief instruction in his chief work, and not allow the empty teaching of the head to precede the labor of the hand. * * * We have to thank the nonsense with which our children's early years are diverted from labor and directed toward books, for a world full of blockheads."
--Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, (1746-1827), "Learning by head, hand and heart".
We redshirted one of our boys. We saw the benefit when my older son missed the cutoff by a few days. So we automatically did it with our other boy, who was a summer birthday. That son is a bit squirrelly. If we'd put him in a year earlier, I'm sure we'd be pressured to get him medicated.
It's much more common in the South than other places we've lived.
According to the St. Louis Fed, women are forced to go to college because men take all the lucrative non-college jobs, such as the trades. So should we really be trying to harm women by getting more men in college?
"College entry—whether it is to get an AS or a BS—helps women gain access to careers where they have a comparative advantage (e.g., office work). Men on the other hand have better access to lucrative careers that don’t require a college degree (e.g., construction work). This appears to be the most reasonable explanation for why women outnumber men in college."
--Why Do Women Outnumber Men in College Enrollment?
March 15, 2022
By Oksana Leukhina , Amy Smaldone
Get ready to expand the sex offender lists when 18 and 19 year old boys are dating their under 18 classmates. Seems like a setup for statutory rape cases.
Based on my experience, about half the boys currently 'redshirted' absolutely hate the building and attendance rules required in school and end up with more disciplinary issues.
Most 17/18 year olds are desperate to get out of the confines of high school. Are kids one year older going to focus and work more in HS?
Might be good in elementary school, but not so much on the other end.
rcocean said...
I think holding boys back a year is actually a good idea.
Or we could do something crazy, abandon the factory model of education, treat kids as individuals rather than feedstock. Take an artisan approach and determine how to shape each piece. After all, the modern American education system was arranged in the wake of WWI to ensure obedient, physically fit boys for the trenches, or other battlefields. Girls just tagged along. And the phalanx was diverted into the factories after WWII. But the need for a mass of men to feed the cannons declined in the '70s, but the school system was organized to profit from mass production even if the output quality declined precipitously.
But no worries, the fear now is that there won't be men doing the necessary jobs, cheaply and this is just a first salvo in the move to shape men into cheap labor just as they fixed wages and required work when demanded in the wake of the Black Death.
The article in The New Yorker recognizes that boys and girls are different and that boys are in trouble. That is enough to recommend the article, even though the solution isn't likely to help.
What is to be done with children who decide they are misgendered?
Adding a year of kindergarten or starting boys a year later is just giving them more of the same, without addressing the problems with the education system and society.
Our education system is all caring and sharing, and boys don't understand it. Restorative discipline does make sense to boys. Bringing back the occasional swat on the ass would help. Also, boys need heroes, adventure stories and rough play. We used to know that.
Also, boys need fathers and fathers need jobs that pay well for hard work.
What would the British (or The New Yorker for that matter) know anything about real men any more?
How about designing school to a masculine model with shorter periods of sitting and listening/reading and more recess with sports etc. when I was in elementary school the teacher let us go to recess when we had finished in-class work like arithmetic, quizzes, etc. Slowness in us boys was gone when incentives were put in place.
I recall I was in the bottom of 3 class tracks in 1st and 2nd grade, middle in third grade, top in 4th grade, and tied for top student with a girl in 6th grade. The slow start didn’t hurt me. When we played co-ed kickball, there was a rule against a Buddy and me being on the same teams. That rule came from the girls who didn’t want their feelings hurt by losing too badly.
Boys and men always have to make it with brains and brawn. Now, women have created a generation and a half of boys/men who can't.
Women want a year paid leave, desk jobs, work from home, free healthcare, free daycare and any other unsustainable benefit you can imagine all in the name of "work-life balance". Oh and they want to be able to abort any baby at any time. It's amazing somebody is still willing to fuck these people and knock them up.
You know who makes your life balanced sweetheart??? The ditchdiggers!!! Without them you'd starve and freeze to death.
There is no shift away from "brains". There was just a shift toward estrogen dominated brains to make things "equal". And we all know estrogen dominated brains know more about what they don't want, than what they do want. And by taking over education in America, they infected young boys and young men with the same thought patterns.
Look at all the kick ass things we got out the education establishment since women completely took over. The US public education system is the biggest coven on the planet. Let's not forget about the downward trend of falling test scores and output. Oh...wait...that's not their fault, that one belongs to the mom and dad.
But don't forget to protect and fund my pension dammit!!!!
Put the boy on Ritalin, rather than run him around the block. Tell him his dad and grandfather are evil white supremacists and misogynists. Put books in the library on how to blow other boys. Tell them it's ok to tuck your penis between your legs and sit on your balls.
Turns out women in the name of "equality" are as evil as men. Look at fucking New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern. How about Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton? These witches want to control your life, bomb you, and hunt you down to inject mRNA into your ass and your kids ass. And they are willing to do it without telling you.
In 2023, when it comes to the female dominated education establishment, we're not talking about Marry Poppins or Maria Von Trapp taking care of the kiddies.
When the left has been grooming a generation of Pajama Boyz, it’s no wonder they’ve had some success. And now comes the Great Bemoaning.
C'mon now, I've seen a lot of pictures of women Ironworkers walking the girders back in the 20's.
"haven't seen a surge of successful women into STEM, rather the opposite"
Hypothesis: the more open to talents and choice the system, the more the participants will get sorted according to preference and differential advantage. Hence, liberated women who are free to choose will be more likely to choose things they like and are (relatively) good at. As some European research (Sweden, Poland) seems to support.
Imagine you’re some blue-collar, 29 year old dad in Peoria, IL or West Allis, WI. You show up to meet your son’s kindergarten teacher and it’s some tik-tok, potbellied, green haired, nose ring wearing millennial feminist with transgender and pride flags decorating the room.
And you don’t have the money to pull the kid out of there and send them to a private school like the liberal Ivory Tower rich do. In the second grade your son is already running against the wind.
They only way to break this is to let local and state education dollars follow the student, not the system. Alternatives and competition to the public schools has to be created. It’s started, but more states need to follow.
Cook - Not entirely true.
Yes - the Tim Cooks and and the Nike of the world - use cheap labor the line their pockets.
But - there are plenty of small and mid-sized American corporations who manage well - until they are crushed by democrat pushed union mobs (see small coffee shops in Oregon that all closed due to union mob take--over) or the large Tim Cook /Heinz corps who gobble up the formerly privately owned companies and take all the labor to China and elsewhere.
serious question
considering All this.. WHAT is with all the 11 year old girls, that want to be boys?
Maybe, rather than cashing the insurance checks and writing prescriptions..
They should be sitting these girls down, and saying to them: Let me tell how it is, being a boy.
Super Seriously,
instead of being a geeky gawky bad looking girl.. You want to be a geeky gawky bad looking Boy?
what the?
A proposal: The STEM Gender Equity Act: Until such time that the percentage of women employed full-time in STEM careers (see attached list) reaches fifty percent of the work force, ten percent of all women applying for college curricula devoted to liberal arts or social science or gender/race equity tracks (see attached list) shall be statutorily diverted into STEM curricula (i.e., engineering, 'hard' sciences, mathematics, etc. -- see attached list). See also: STEM Labor Draft Act.
I hadn't noticed any shift to brains.
A woman showed up one summer as a garbage man on Monday though and I never saw her again. She may have gone into human resources.
I was raised by baby boomer strong Irish women. Their parents died young so they were on their own. My mother and her three sisters. And they expected me, my brothers, and my cousins to grow up and be men. They’d smack you in the ass if you deserved it…and they let you have fun when it was time. And they would swear up a storm when you mess up the house they just cleaned. You sat at the table and at the dinner that was made. And you finished it not to let it go to waste.
When you got older, you showed up at every family birthday party and holiday or you got your balls busted. You could get drunk at the birthday party, but dammit…you showed up out of respect and support for others who love you and count on you.
But they let us be boys. Boys that needed to be disciplined when we didn’t sit still in church. Boys that were allowed to run around outside until the streetlights came on. Boys that were allowed to fail, because the great athletes just got lucky in the genetic pool and you just have to learn to deal with that.
But they were also protective like a mama bear. My mother is now 76. Retired RN. She is appalled by what is going on at the public schools and universities. The politics… the transgender push and confusion… but most of all the cruelty of the lock-downs, masks, and mRNA shots.
And when I was a kid, if some Master Degreed administrator told my mama bear that I had to get some experimental drug shot up my ass… it wouldn’t have happened. Guaranteed.
The better question is, "What's the matter with schools?" but that's not allowed.
Oh, this is nonsense. There's two causes.
1. Some men, out of pride, won't do jobs that they think are beneath them. They believe having no job is better than a low-status one. Get over it. A long-haul trucker makes more than the person who wrote this piece. The focus on verbal ability and college education in our pop culture and media conceal the reality of how this country actually works.
2. A lot of jobs are incompatible with drug addiction, which I believe is the other half of the problem. Drugs are an enormous drag on the economy, besides destroying millions of lives. Drugs are poverty, poverty is drugs. Crime is drugs, drugs are crime. Can't pass a drug test, or can't pass the background. Stay away from drugs.
I've never had a job that required a college degree, and I ain't poor. My coworkers very often are.
Women are not the problem. Men's choices are the problem. Get a job, stop doing drugs. That's all you, guys.
What's the Matter With Men?
I can't wear shorts in my job interviews.
"nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world"
Nobody predicted that the sisters of the connected would prove also to be connected? Here's a secret - the sisters were always connected, too.
also my taxes are too high
and women suck at handjobs, they always have, compared to the master, I'm not even giving them handjob opportunities anymore.
is this a bitch session?
I can come up with a list
Our son was born in September, so we had the option of starting him in kindergarten either when he was 4-turning-5 or 5-turning-6. Holding him back was an easy choice. He wasn't socially ready, and he's more confident being one of the oldest in his class every year, rather than one of the youngest. I'm told that that status will especially pay off in middle school, when everybody's starting to change.
Lower the drinking age to 18.
Quit redshirting childhood.
I'm a longtime NYer subscriber, but its grasp of 'America' was perfectly visualized by Saul Steinberg's 1976 cover: "View of the World from 9th Avenue".
The real question is do feminists even care boys are in trouble, or are they celebrating that fact?
Conservative as in "pro-Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness"?
Conservative as in "the People" and "our Posterity" and a republican form of government with restricted authority under The Constitution?
Or is it DIE?
Or is it war of the worlds?
Or is it keep women affordable, available, and taxable, and the "burden" of evidence aborted, cannibalized, sequestered in darkness?
I very much doubt ANY man questioned his own metaphysical state of being just because some chicks joined the work force. Not even when they began to dominate many fields. Not even when higher ed became over 60% female and completely oriented to the female minority student experience. We didn't question our existence, much as feminists of a certain type wish we would do, we questioned why institutions we built and supported became distinctly unwelcoming to us. That those same institutions have devolved into shells of their former purpose is not coincidental.
All this time making fun of Ayn Rand readers and the Left was busy using Atlas Shrugged as a how-to in order to bring about Cloward-Piven. Oops, I mean the new name: The Great Reset.
[catastrophic] [anthropogenic] immigration reform
labor and environmental arbitrage
Levine is like Mengele seeking personal affirmation through medical, surgical, and/or psychiatric corruption in politically congruent ("=") constructs.
That said, free the Uighurs. Stop the spread of the Green blight in blue and green environments. Stand up for the virginal footprint, first breath, first heartbeat, first nervous system impulse. First, they came for the Jews... babies... fetal-babies. Close the abortion clinics.
It's not so much that jobs now require more brains, that would be to the advantage of boys, but that jobs today require compliant trainability, with the thinking done for you. Fewer and fewer people are doing the actual thinking, and they are creating tools for the rest. "Here is a tool to ban right wingers on Twitter, you just click here..." That's not a "brains required" type of job.
Joe Biden was way ahead of the curve when he flunked third grade.
"The incredibly rich corporations do not want to have to pay adequate living wages"
Why do all of these "incredibly rich corporations" support Democrats so heavily? Untrammeled immigration and a free hand with H1-B visas surpasses wages, that's why.
Well, there it is. The dumbest thing I've read all day. And it's only 1:30.
Boys need to be boys but modern education is all about getting boys to act like girls. How about more hands-on classes, exploratory free time, and outdoor activities?
"How about making things in America instead of China?"
The incredibly rich corporations do not want to have to pay adequate living wages (and provide other standard employment benefits) to Americans when they can provide subsistence wages and no benefits to the Chinese, so that won't happen.
Exactly what many conservatives have been saying for years while liberals running the banks and investment houses and government shipped more jobs to their buddy China. Now that is closing off as an option for many reasons but foremost the crazy Chinese Virus that through even worse mismanagement than Biden's has slowed China's economy to a near standstill. Their economy is about to have a huge hit and they will make it up by raising prices to their customers. They haven't been the "cheap efficient" option for years, but supply chains are time-consuming to build or replace and industries are just starting to move things back here, or to friendlier manufacturing hubs like Viet Nam and India.
Like Cook, I'm in favor of moving as much of that back here. I believe in self-sufficiency as much as we can muster it, and buddy we are much better positioned than most countries who rely on international trade for their very survival. We can whether a low-trading period much easier than countries without our agricultural and manufacturing advantages. John Henry ain't the only one around here riding the make it in America boom. Even automation employs some people and scaling it up will employ even more.
And NONE of this has shit to do with fucking feminist concerns about masculinity. I've always thought feminists needed to spend more time thinking about femininity anyway.
Isn't it funny how beneficial it is to divide boys and girls in earlier education? Hey, Marlo Thomas: Billy doesn't want a doll after all.
I played hooky from kindergarten. After one day, I decided I didn't like it. Some friends of my father owned a florist shop and nursery next door to the school. I went to the nursery and helped the old man working there until I heard the noon school bell. I went home and the next day returned to the nursery. This continued until November when my father bought a house and we moved. This was Chicago and I was lucky to escape the winter. First grade, a year later, was a shock but not a problem once I learned the rules. That, of course, was 1945 and the world was still sane.
My high school girlfriend got a BS in Chemical Engineering in 1960 so the "Patriarchy" did not slow her down.
Re : Joe Smith @ 9:56am
Next time you drive by a construction site of any type, note the gender of the workers. Other than possibly the flagman (flagperson?), you will be hard-pressed to spot a biological female. Yeah, they can do kitchen layouts on TV shows, but you'll never see a woman sheathing a roof on a 3-storey residence in 20 deg weather.
Redshirting or advancing a child is down to the parent, not the society. And while our workforce has changed, I would argue that popular culture's perception of the workforce has changed much more - and this perception is the thing that is communicated without cease.
Feminism has not changed all of society for the better. While female participation has made great and constructive gains, at the same time we have moved from a society and economy that builds and creates and rewards individual expression, to one that serves and strives for inclusivity and rewards compliance. Those are feminine-tending traits, like it or not, hardwired biologically. And they are not helping our society grow, rather they have come to dominate a trend towards lowest-common-denominator mediocrity. There is a place for mediocrity, certainly - but not as the forefront of culture. There is little inspiration there.
Wait...is someone saying that boys and girls are different from each other and develop differently?
Burn them!
Women lag behind men at [X]: "Gross, misogyinistc sexism, nothing else!"
Men lag behind women at [Y]: "It's very complicated*. . . ."
(* "But it's still men's fault")
Does the article mention single parent homes with the father absent?
How about offering single-sex magnet public schools in larger systems, if they can figure out what a single sex is?
My parents put my brother & me in private kindergartens and primary schools so our November birthdays wouldn't hold us back (a bad thing in those days). My older sister could already read when she entered public first grade so they bumped her to second. Her January birthday meant she was always the youngest. Fortunately, she was 5'10" by age 13, so it didn't hurt her too much in HS.
My parents both went off to college at 16 because NC only required 11 grades to graduate until WWII ended. People matured emotionally earlier then, despite later puberty, a lot less sexual activity, and no porn.
Might not be a bad idea.
Joe Biden redshirted in the third grade and he's President now.
The redshirt notion might be workable. I was a year younger than my classmates, and was at a social and athletic disadvantage.
Of course, the forbidden solution is single sex education.
I seem to recall that males still have higher average SAT scores, while females have higher grades in high school. That, of course, is attributable to the fact that the SAT discriminates against females.
"What would the British (or The New Yorker for that matter) know anything about real men any more?"
What, in your opinion, is a "real man," (other than that he was born with his penis and didn't acquire it later)? What traits do they possess such that the British (or New Yorker writers) would know nothing about them? What traits do they not display? What is the template or ur man of this real man?
Addendum vis-a-vis female influenceability/susceptibility/anthropological origins of social pressure:
People who can't defend themselves physically (mostly women, weak/effiminate men, children, etc.) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. They literally do not ask "is this true", they ask "will others be OK with me thinking this is true."
People like this are very malleable and susceptible to manufactured consensus. If every screen they look at or every word they hear or every directive they're told, they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as 'everyone in the tribe believes the same thing'.
People like this cannot exist without the tribe. It is a death sentence. The only people who can buck this phenomenon - then as now - are alpha types (physical dominance), neurotypical people (autism, schizophrenia, 'free brains unencumbered by accepted ways of social behavior or thinking', etc.), and certain personality types (INTJs, ENTJs) that are free to parse new information with an objective "is this true?" filter. More importantly, they are in a position to risk ostracization because they can make it alone or without others with some discomfort maybe, but they'll be overall fine.
Consensus-based personality types regard such independence and such independent people as being extremely anti-social. Uh yeah...no shit sherlock, it's also why they build rockets and avoid going over a cliff with the rest of the buffalo when it matters most. Consensus types - almost all women - confuse not needing constant social reinforcement for their belief system as anti-social behavior. A much larger percentage of men do not need this reinforcement and are willing to 'go it alone' if they must...
...women label this toxic masculinity.
I see a pattern.
Heads, you're wrong. Tails, you're not right. Trans, you're leverage.
"Redshirting" must mean something different in Britain than it does here in the United Federation of Planets.
But if Head Start actually helped disadvantaged minorities, maybe it should be applied to boys as well. But that won't work. Apart from the complaints from the feminist lobby, the privileged already give their children a head start, so they come out ahead anyway.
It was brilliant (and ultimately disastrous) that feminists came up with "Take Your Daughter To Work Day" and nobody bothered about the boys. An equal opportunity "Take Your Child To Work Day" never became a thing.
One problem is that, on average, women are worth less, on average, as employees. Facetiously, they would rather sit around and gossip, than make their employer more profitable. Just not as goal driven. I found the two juxtaposed pictures from Twitter’s lay-off interesting. The one picture, of the Chicago office, almost entirely of women, who had jobs in censorship, and the like. They were all laid off. The other picture, that included Musk, of programmers, was almost entirely male. They were celebrated, and kept on. The women in the Chicago were just there to give them jobs, while the programmers were there to make the company profitable.
Women can contribute and excel in the sciences. Interestingly, we had two recent female Presidential science advisers from my alma mater, one two years ahead of me, the other two years behind. Both with hard science PhDs. Kinda knew both a little back then. At my daughter’s wedding a year ago, her entire bridal party had STEM related doctorate degrees (DDS, PharmD, and 3, like her, with engineering PhDs). Interestingly, over half the entering class in the PhD program in her department, the year she started, were women. She assured me that was an anomaly. The thing though about a STEM doctorate is that you (still) have to produce results, and not just talk, talk, talk. We had prepared her to survive in a male dominated workplace, and we all are glad we did. I sent her a mug for Christmas that had “Miss”, crossed off, “Ms”, crossed off, “Mrs” crossed off, and “Dr”, at the bottom, not crossed off. She loved it, and immediately took it to work, where her nickname with all the guys is “The Doctor” - initially to distinguish her from another woman there with a similar sounding name.
Of course we pushed her, esp in mathematics (4th generation with a math centric degree). Taught her Algebra in lower school, and derivatives in 6th-7th grade. Top of her class from about 4th grade on (the guy ahead of her before that had a photographic memory, and was the fastest when memorizing tables for simple arithmetic, but quickly faded after that). Now she routinely does math at work, that I would struggle with if I had her job, despite a math degree.
When I was in college getting an engineering degree I remember wishing there were more women in my technical college. There was only a handful and they were widely popular regardless if they were good-looking or not. It was the biggest dry spell of my life!
45 years later doing engineering work and the needle has barely moved.
The only essential thing that women produce is babies.
The only essential thing that men produce is everything else.
I didn't become a decent student until I got to college; by grad school time, I was really good.
My youngest brother (who was but 3 when our father died) was held back in two grades. He graduated from a white-flight private high school that was full of drugs; so were the buses and schools he was avoiding, but at least he wasn't in a minority, and clear across town.
"Boys need fathers." Easier said than arranged.
So the idea is to treat males as even more inferior.
It's very common for me to see men (white guys) here is Georgia accompanied by Latinas.
Couldn't this be a made-up problem?
The gender delta: a tale of vaginas and breasts, of penises and chests.
"Rapid liberation of women." Followed by the even quicker obliteration of women.
“What’s the Matter with Men? They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. …”
Is that true? Are men floundering in the workplace? Where is the evidence for that?
The whole issue is invented bullshit.
First, boys do better on average than girls in tests. But Reeves says that's irrelevant, because grades are now more important. Well, the solution is to stop making grades, which are entirely subjective, more important NOT pretend that boys are doing poorly.
Same with law review. Men do better than women on the LSAT and make more money as lawyers, so who the hell cares if some grade grubbrs make law review?
Men make more money than women, so who the hell cares if they don't go to college? Girls get a useless business degree or an AA in cosmetology, boys go to the army and make staff sergeant.
But here's the real facer:
Is he saying that black girls are doing better than white boys?
Why, no. No, they aren't. Nor are Hispanic girls doing better than white boys. Whites do about the same as Asians on the tests that matter (grad school).
His whole argument disintegrates when controlled for race.
The man's a liar and a huckster, the people who fall for his swill are dupes and dopes, and this is a non-issue that will never go beyond his goal, which was to get a book deal and get on some podcasts.
I have been teaching school on and off for 50 years, Grades 2 through 12, mostly middle through high school, and I have seen the problem develop (and worsen markèdly) through the decades. There are tangential issues, but the overwhelming problem is clear -- there are FAR too many women in both teaching AND administration, and the results are nothing short of disastrous.
Reading assignments are almost universally emotion-focused "girlie" pablum, and boring as hell for most boys. Heck, my daughter, currently in Grade 6, finds most of them quite boring, and at home reads historical biographies like McCullogh's 'John Adams', descriptions of how trans-Pacific flights are managed, penguin biology, and so on. She's still very much a girl, and happy about that.
Writing is even worse, with mandatory "journalling" about feelings, including things which happen at home. My daughter "journalled" about how angry she was that she could not write about how dolphins are trained and compare it to horses and dogs. In upper grades, students are not uncommonly asked to record their *feelings* about historical events, rather than produce a coherent contextual analysis thereof.
And on, and on, and on. Kids, especially boys, are being intellectually pussy-whipped into becoming infantilized, emotion-driven, non-rational intellectual pansies. Because that's what most of their teachers are.
"First, boys do better on average than girls in tests. But Reeves says that's irrelevant, because grades are now more important."
Grades measure compliance and indoctrination.
The incredibly rich corporations do not want to have to pay adequate living wages…
Incredibly, I worked for 50 years for incredibly rich corporations that paid me very well. Nobody “wants” to pay anybody, nor should they. The employer/employee relationship is adversarial. You get what you’re worth and what you can successfully bargain for.
Maybe the problem is your attitude of entitlement, Robert. You aren’t entitled to a good wage and benefits. Get rid of this foolish notion.
"The real question is do feminists even care boys are in trouble, or are they celebrating that fact?"
Both, and both for selfish reasons. On the one hand boys being in trouble is compounding the beyond-fucked-up-holy-shit-this-is-so-bad dating market these 30ish bimbos are experiencing. On the other hand, feminine chortling-while-nefariously-rubbing-hands-together is absolutely nothing new. It goes back to at least Fulvia in the early empire, and you can just ask any man whose been divorced in the last 50 years.
tim in vermont said...
"It's not so much that jobs now require more brains, that would be to the advantage of boys, but that jobs today require compliant trainability, with the thinking done for you. Fewer and fewer people are doing the actual thinking, and they are creating tools for the rest. "Here is a tool to ban right wingers on Twitter, you just click here..." That's not a "brains required" type of job."
MMmmm. Not so much in manufacturing. There is a lot of back and forth input from the shop floor to the office. As I said before. analysis and creativity are vitally important when you make he machinery that makes the things. John Henry can back me up on that.
@Bruce Hayden
"One problem is that, on average, women are worth less, on average, as employees. Facetiously, they would rather sit around and gossip, than make their employer more profitable. Just not as goal driven."
In some cases...not just worth less...worthless. In my entire commissioned career in the army, I never once - ONCE - interacted with a female commissioned/enlisted/NCO that I thought was worth a damn. Am I saying they don't exist? No. Am I saying they make up such a small minority as to be statistically insignificant for the sake of argument? Absolutely.
I could write pages...books...volumes...on the efficiency and productivity drag of most female members of the armed forces. It started out at best as a support center to free up more swinging dicks in the field and has ended up as a fucking welfare program.
I need to stop writing about this now or I'll go on forever. In some roles? WORTHLESS.
When I was in college getting an engineering degree I remember wishing there were more women in my technical college
I went to the other UW.....Washington. They solved the problem by scheduling English classes (mostly young ladies) into classrooms in the Mechanical Engineering Building.
Guys would just line the halls, and watch the girls walk-by. I know, cuz I was one of them.
Am I really the only one who calls bullshit on the "ontological security" phrase in the headline? Really. Well I'm the only one who wrote a published paper* titled Fiction and Feminism: Fighting Ontological Engulfment too. Admitted language nerd.
*It predates the Internet by a couple years and apparently UC Riverside never digitized the old issues of Mosaic. In fact, it appears to have morphed from an undergraduate Journal for scholarly works and fiction to simply fiction open to the public. Maybe I'll try and get published again there, just for fun!
Ended up skipping half a grade in 3rd grade. The problem being almost a year younger than the other kids, made me think I was weak, since almost everyone had a year growth on me. Playing kickball, all the kids came in, knowing I couldn't kick it over their heads, scarred me for life for sports.
Middle school, or Junior High is the danger zone. All 8th graders are evil. They have not learned how to hide it. For a younger nerd kid, it is hell. This was over 50 years ago, so one cannot blame feminits.
So get to work, ladies -- kill the bitches!
Females can change their gender through surgical, medical, and/or psychiatric corruption.
Females can change their sex, assuming they remain viable, through mutagenic, viral-vector treatments.
Females can perform human rites to relieve "burdens" -- kill the bitches -- for social, redistributive, clinical, political, criminal, and fair weather progress. Well, perhaps not females, who are only politically congruent ("=") to the feminist Venutians/masculinist Martians/socially progressive Uranutians.
Oh, and humans are not ruminants, vegans are a first-order forcing of [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling... warming... change.
Abort them. Abort them all under the State's ethical religious sanction... again, and again, and again. Scalp them, flay them, with pride and prejudice, celebrate their deaths. Sequester their carbon to mitigate progressive [climate] change.
Close friend used to be a plant manager at a decent sized factory, he said that one of his big problems was when workers would override the software to "fix" problems by fiddling with the dials on their specific machine, and those changes would propagate through the production process, gumming up the works.
I am sure that there is still room for novel insight on the factory floor, but it's less and less every year.
I pulled my son out of kindergarten, he was a young five when he started. A year later made all the difference in maturity and he did very well as an older kindergartener. No issues with female teachers and he did well throughout elementary school and most of high school. By the time he was a senior though, he had enough of school and dropped out. He didn’t need my permission he was 18. He got his HS diploma at the local community college and went on to get into a Millwright apprenticeship and became a Millwright journeyman, which was a perfect trade for him.
Females can change their gender through surgical, medical, and/or psychiatric corruption.
Females can change their sex, assuming they remain viable, through mutagenic, viral-vector treatments.
Females can perform human rites to relieve "burdens" -- kill the bitches -- for social, redistributive, clinical, political, criminal, and fair weather progress. Well, perhaps not females, who are only politically congruent ("=") to the feminist Venutians/masculinist Martians/socially progressive Uranutians.
Oh, and humans are not ruminants, vegans are a first-order forcing of [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling... warming... change.
Abort them. Abort them all under the State's ethical religious sanction... again, and again, and again. Scalp them, flay them, with pride and prejudice, celebrate their deaths. Sequester their carbon to mitigate progressive [climate] change.
Yeah, that's an excellent point. The left is just as hostile to biological women as they are to biological men. In fact I think the left right now has a lot of hostility to biology in general.
Biology is created by God and they hate his creation.
tim in vermont said...
"First, boys do better on average than girls in tests. But Reeves says that's irrelevant, because grades are now more important."
Grades measure compliance and indoctrination.
*******************
The FUCK they do, especially not in STEM.
The average salary for a automotive mechanic is $24.80 per hour in the United States and $5,712 overtime per year.22.3k salaries reported, updated at January 19, 2023
https://www.indeed.com/career/automotive-mechanic/salaries
So about $56,000/yr. At most you would need about 1 yr of post HS trade school. Or, you could take Vo-Tec classes in HS and go to work right after graduation.
4 years later, your classmates have degrees in fuck-all studies, $50-100m in student loan debt and no experience. Are likely working in Starbucks of some such fighting for 15.
And you living in your own home, riding around in a Corvette like a Biden and living the good life.
So why don't more girls/young women become auto mechanics?
Why don't more men, for that matter?
John Henry
I'm not an engineer but have been working with and managing engineers for more than 50 years. Also father of a chemical engineer and grandfather of a ChemE student.
I hear the argument about women not sticking with engineering. A couple have mentioned it here and I've been seeing it elsewhere for 20-30 years.
It is a general problem with engineering that I've been seeing since the 70s.
Some people really like the engineering. Designing piping systems for example, or chemical processes or bridges etc. I once read about a mechanical engineer at GM who spent 50 years designing door handles and latching mechanisms. Good for them, we need them and we need heir knowledge and skills. It would drive me batty.
But a lot of people get bored with this after a while and want to progress. There is not much they can do if they stay with engineering. They can get better, but they are getting better at doing the same thing over and over. Maybe work on bigger projects, but again, the same thing just bigger. And at some point it gets too big and they wind up as managers, not engineers.
So companies design double career tracks. Some engineers stay all their career in pure engineering. Others move to the management track. Managing engineers then departments and eventually managing manufacturing plants and divisions and entire corporations.
We don't criticize men for not wanting to stay in engineering. We should not criticize women for it either.
Daughter started as a process engineer in a refinery, went to a job in regulatory affairs in a pharma plant, then QA in a medical device plant. Now has responsibility for HR.
Along with every other function in a mfg plant employing 1500 people. Doesn't do a lot of engineering. She has people who do that. She does more important stuff like tell them what to engineer.
She also went to night school for a couple years and got a masters in engineering management.
I like to think I taught her everything I know. But I certainly don't know everything she knows.
John Henry
White males coming out of college are being massively discriminated against in tech, finance, you name it. Granted this is anecdotal, but I know of so many brilliant, accomplished guys in my daughter's cohort who are having trouble getting interviews, much less jobs, while less accomplished and brilliant women are getting snapped up. My wife is in the finance business and involved in hiring, and she has to fight extra hard for any white male, even one who's head and shoulders above the rest. Of course the guys do find jobs, but just knowing the deck is stacked against them has to be demoralizing.
In the future rapists and potential rapists will get shot by women who belong to the NRA.
And the rape numbers will go down, down, down.
And the women in prison numbers will go up, up, up.
Equality!
And The New Yorker will be scratching its head and wondering why men are so sensitive now, and why they're crying in public and getting shot in the bedroom. And they'll run another New Yorker think piece.
What the Matter With Men?
Blogger tim in vermont said...
"fix" problems by fiddling with the dials on their specific machine, and those changes would propagate through the production process, gumming up the works.
A very common and major problem. Tech set machine parameters by eye instead of the setting it is supposed to have.
I've gone so far as to disconnect the control knobs. They are still there on the control panel but the real control knobs are inside the box.
I once had 2 women, both pregnant at the same time, for whom the temperature was always too hot or too cold. Not much we could do because there was one tstat for the whole area.
Their cubicle was in a corner so one weekend we rigged a dummy thermostat with an empty conduit up into the ceiling. On Monday we gave them a key, explained how to set the temperature and swore them to secrecy.
Never had another complaint. Until a few years later I told one of the women. She got really pissed at me.
John Henry
Supposedly women want to work from home, free health care, free time off for childbirth, free day care for the kids; if you throw in free transportation, housing, and food allowance, what women really want is a rich husband.
John Henry, sure. But what I've seen, since 1980, is women who trained in STEM but then abandoned the field upon graduation, or very soon thereafter. ( Hell, I even married one. I keep telling her there's a crying shortage of smart analog EEs but she says it's too late now.) They flooded into product marketing, mostly.
I vividly remember a chat with some 4th year STEM ladies at Berkeley, my peers, all of whom thought my suggestion to join IEEE and ACM was pointless, because they werent going to be engineers. This convo took place right outside the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) office.
Just had a chat the other day with a lady I'd not seen for five years so was catching up about her kids, especially the youngest, who was not doing well at school last I heard. Doing well she said; working in concrete laying job, making money and loving it.
He hated, hated, hated high school and we laughed, having known many such young men like that in our day. It hasn't changed.
Oh, she said the job had also caused him to grow up and become a man after his sullen, moody, "don't want to talk" years, which was as much due to hating school as being a teenager.
Oh, and this is in New Zealand so it's not just a US thing, though the crap young men are going through via school is most definitely a Western thing, thanks to all those theories of education and everything else that diffuse through the ether.
One way to reverse this trend is for civilization to collapse. We’re really only 9 missed meals away from male and female gender roles to revert back to the norms of the last 150,000 years. We’re pretending today that these gender roles can be fluid and fail to see the luxury that’s been created.
"The FUCK they do, especially not in STEM."
So the percentage of people in STEM is so vast as to right the stats for all of the other kinds of majors?
When boys do better it's men's fault--they're holding the girls back by creating institution and systems to stifle girls' advancement.
When boys do worse it's men's fault--they can't keep up with those awesome girls and haven't created adequate systems to account for the inferiority of men.
Isn't it odd we're back to allowing biological differences between people of different sexes explain both behavior and outcomes? Five minutes ago that sort of thinking was forbidden ("how dare you say I'm not a real X when I say I am; how dare you think there are actual differences between men and women!?") but probably that's just my slower-developed male brain expecting consistency when I shouldn't. Biological determinism is always and everywhere wrong unless that's inconvenient.
As Bob Odenkirk as God as played by Robert Evans said (recording the audio version of his autobiography): A rule is a rule is a rule, unless you're a woman.
It's simple. If they act like boys, they are given drugs
Lots of discussion on STEM and gender.
We went with our son to the engineering orientaion day. My quick calculation was 60% female. At graduation, less than 5%
We have two nieces that were both top of their high school class, pushed into STEM majors. Both switched after a year. The deal with engineering, the answer has to be found, not memorized, and there are multiple answers, some 'might' be better than others.
This is not a value judgement just the reality.
Men and women are different. Each have unique and important strengths, to ignore this is wrong
Men as teachers face potential liability for every word they say, in or out of class, to students and, worse, female teachers. Why bother?
This is nothing; wait ten years.
Today, from the time little boys start school, they're informed, so lovingly, that if they feel like they don't always fit in maybe it's because they're the wrong gender.
Helpful, helpful stuff.
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