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The War on Men
You don’t have to be a “revolutionary” presidential candidate to know that there’s something seriously wrong about the way boys are growing into men in this country.
Most of the media is obsessed with fraternities, creepy boys with “affluenza,” and lax bros. Most of that reporting follows a familiar template: bad (white) boys and their victims. It’s a reliably monotonous litany because that frees them from the responsibility of looking at what happens to (mostly non-white) boys who grow up in poor neighborhoods. Short answer: nothing much good. From Citylab:
How adults in the U.S. fare economically depends, to a large extent, on the quality of the neighborhoods they grew up in. But boys and girls who live right down the street from each other don’t always end up, economically speaking, in the same place. And that’s most likely because their childhood environments affect them differently, a new working paper by economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues finds, with boys having an especially tough time.
None of this is surprising. But still:
Differences between men’s and women’s employment rate, income level, and college enrollment at age 30 all varied based on the income and marital status of their parents, but the gender gap in employment varied most starkly. Among those whose parents were in the bottom fifth of income distribution when they were young, the 30-year-old men were less likely to have a job than the women. This was especially true if these boys were raised by a single parent.
The paper — and the post it’s based on — go on to make a lot of lefty-sounding points. The research, however, is pretty clear, though we all might draw different conclusions from it. Yes, the incarceration rates are higher in those neighborhoods. Yes, those neighborhoods are more likely to be, essentially, segregated. But it still gets back to this sentence:
This was especially true if these boys were raised by a single parent.
And what do we see in the culture, in the community, in the halls of left-wing city governments and left-wing federal offices? An obsession with everything but the root problem: families have been torn up by federal and state programs that encourage broken, scattered, fatherless families.
The question is, are those boys in trouble because their fathers are absent or in jail? Or are those men in jail because their fathers were absent?
Either way, one thing we should all agree on: whatever we’re currently doing in under-privileged neighborhoods we should stop doing. Whatever we’re currently focusing our time and energy and resources to we should stop doing.
Published in Culture
Women don’t need to be manipulated; they need to be respected.
Men too.
My theory: Birth control. In the sixties, women thought they wanted to have sex without becoming pregnant. They denied, or failed to recognize, their own intense, unconscious, desire for a child. This was easy to do because they lived in a society that told them they had no such unconscious drive or desire influencing their actions.
So, instead of decreasing out-of-wedlock pregnancy, birth control brought about a change in the norms of sexual behavior that increased the number of out-of -wedlock pregnancies. The original norms were better suited to the real nature of female sexual desire.
S,
I think you are hitting right on it. To go against instinct is insanity and we have hit pure insanity in this society. What is needed is what we all used to take for granted. A society that re-enforces our instincts toward making the best choices. Without such a social order I think we are in moral free-fall.
Regards,
Jim
Who are the feminists y’all are citing? I’m not being snarky—I’m just bewildered. I’m not seeing any names: do you have particular people in mind? Are we still with the Gloria Steinem/Robin Morgan crowd, or are there newbies calling for women in combat?
Re comment # 64
There are women calling for women to have to sign up for selective service. I saw something written by one in The Federalist. The writer is a soldier.