A Tale of Two Cites

A Tale of Two Cites
Left-wing feminist protest in Spain

My first citation is to a Wall Street Journal article about the increasing aimlessness, lack of motivation and sense of self-worth among young men.  The second, from the excellent Janice Fiamengo, explains those phenomena as WSJ writer, Rachel Wolfe, would never dream of doing.  (In fact, I attempted to post a link to Fiamengo’s piece as a comment to Wolfe’s article; the WSJ rejected it.)

Wolfe says that the “trajectories” of young men and young women are “diverging” and mentions facts like declining workforce participation rates for men versus increasing ones for women, the greater number of young men than women living with their parents, the decline in manufacturing jobs, etc. to support her.

And she suggests a cause.

You see, there’s now a “more equal playing field” for the sexes that allows women to “seize opportunities” resulting in men “floundering.”  Ah, that must be it.  Women would always have outperformed men if they’d only had the chance; now that they do, they rule.  Of course they do.

Needless to say, she cites an “expert” to back her up.

Until the past decade or so, “there was an assumption that men just needed to show up for their life and they’ll get a job and have a family and be provided for, because they’re men,” says University of Maryland masculinity researcher Kevin M. Roy.

Huh?  I’ve been around since the 1950s and that “assumption” – that we men just need to, I suppose, exist and, somehow, a well-paying job and a wife and kids will materialize – comes as complete news to me.  More absurd is Roy’s claim that men have always (until 10 or so years ago!) assumed they’d “be provided for.”  Uh, no.  Quite the opposite.  What we assumed – correctly – was that we’d be the ones doing the providing.  This guy’s a “masculinity researcher?”  Yikes.

Wolfe does finally get around to quoting some of those aimless men.

One said, “I just felt so lost.”  Another described himself “like an outsider looking at his own life.”  One study found that 2/3s of young men say that no one knows them well, while other data show a whopping 30% increase in suicides among 25-34-year-old men from 2010 – 2023.  Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, says,

The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society.

Given all that, some writers in Wolfe’s place would re-evaluate the claim that men’s problems are all about the demise of male privilege or the inherent superiority of women.  Not Wolfe.  She imagines no possibilities outside those prescribed by feminist talking points.

By contrast, Fiamengo sees clearly.

For years, feminists in the English-speaking school systems have done everything they can to psychologically destroy a generation of boys, calling their masculinity “problematic,” “hegemonic” and “toxic.”

If boys and young men find themselves at sea, could it possibly be that 50 years of negative messages play some role?  We now have more than two generations of boys who’ve spent their school years marinated in disdain, because they’re males.  They hear it in classrooms, on television, in books, newspapers and magazines, in the movies, etc.  Why are we surprised when they learn the lesson they’ve been relentlessly taught – that their very existence is toxic to others, that their every achievement is just an unearned gift of “the patriarchy?”

Fiamengo cites a litany of horrors perpetrated by school systems against boys, men and the very concept of masculinity.  So, in the U.K., out of about 97 schools studied,

62 schools confirmed that they were teaching about toxic masculinity. 10 schools even admitted to teaching that “men and boys possess traits that are inherently toxic and negative for society.”

And of course everything even arguably “male” is connected to “rape culture.”  If you’re a guy and you’re the sole provider for your family, you might think you’re a responsible adult.  Nope, you’re just a rapist in waiting.

Fiamengo accurately concludes,

If one wanted to create resentment and a strong sense of unfair treatment, such teaching materials are precisely how it would be done.

Exactly.  I only add that, if one wanted to create a generation of young men who feel “lost,” unknown, unwanted, unimportant and inclined to suicide, that’s how you’d do it.  I know this because it’s how it’s been done.

That’s no accident.  Even after half a century of tearing down men in hopes that this will somehow help women, men still outnumber women in politics, math, technology, and the military. The hard-line feminist goal, as demonstrated by Fiamengo, seems to be the further destruction of men’s sense of self-worth.  How else to explain the apparent obsession with male influencer Andrew Tate on the part of many of the teachers Fiamengo quotes?

Now, I have no brief for Andrew Tate.  I find many of his claims absurd.  But what he definitely stands for and what I suspect makes him a bête noire of feminism is that he consistently calls on men to be responsible for themselves, to make good choices and learn from mistakes.  To Tate, you are not a victim and, outside of extreme circumstances, no one but you can make you one.  Look clearly at your own behavior, how it contributes to your unhappiness and make necessary change.  Don’t set goals you can’t or won’t realize.  That sort of thing.

It’s a message directed precisely at the type of young man Wolfe quotes, the lost ones, the ones who live with their parents.  Unsurprisingly, many of them consider it a lifesaver.

So naturally the feminists in Fiamengo’s piece find it repugnant.  They’re appalled that adolescent boys might think for themselves and draw conclusions at odds with feminist orthodoxy.

Fiamengo gets it right.  Wolfe is lost in a wilderness of feminist talking points.  That the former blogs on Substack while the latter is read by millions of WSJ subscribers says a lot about contemporary discourse on the sexes.

This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.

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