I think men of my generation and older got hit with the kind of distorting media forces women have been dealing with for a long time and it broke many of our brains.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
Male flight
"In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was at 50%.
By 2009, male enrollment plummeted to 22.4%.....research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling... is the number of women in the classroom." https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college
The only reason imo to read John Williams' Stoner is to see into the mind of a mediocre white man who was losing it over the social progress of women and non-white people in the 1960s, particularly in academia which for men like Williams was suppose to be white men's hallowed refuge
Dismissive, contemptuous attitudes about education were common among the boys I grew up with in the wealthy Detroit suburb I lived in when I was a teenager in the 1960s.
American popular culture has sneered at educators and education since Washington Irving’s depiction of Ichabod Crane in 1820.
Sure! Are you by any chance a member of the NCHC? They’re a good place to start because they’ve got a lot of the demographics info spanning the years. One of the challenges is that without active, overt recruiting of men, programs tend to 65% or higher women.
Fond memories of trying to make sure we paid our dues before budgets got swept at the end of the year. 😂
They’re really good at making papers, reports, and even some books accessible online via your institution login. I’ll check my folders and see if I can send you a starter list…
Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and all the propaganda outlets that followed have fed those dads decades of permission to be their worst selves.
In the 90s one thing people debated was whether a republican was a true believer or just selfish. I think we have to move beyond that, they really do believe all this stuff. There is a vast ecosystem feeding them this bs and the average person is completely unaware that it exists.
Had this conversation with my wife this weekend. In our media beautiful women were typically trophies awarded to men being stoic Badasses who ignored all rules of a corrupt system in favor of results.
Notable exceptions exist (Aliens), but Stallone was a star, not Micheal Biehn.
Definitely. I’ve noticed a lot of content in “manosphere” spaces that seems to encourage a type of orthorexia and body dysmorphia revolving around bodybuilding. It reminded me a lot of the pro-anorexia content that got pushed on teenaged girls during the 1990s-2000s.
The aesthetic this subculture pushes towards is more the fascist ideal of the “male body” as muscular and perfectly sculpted without a drop of fat on it, yet somehow stronger than a strength trainer’s despite that type of body not actually being what you’d see on a pro strength trainer…
…but the neurotic tone around restricting/controlling one’s diet and the shaming of men who don’t have a dehydrated shrink-wrapped six pack reminds me a lot of the diet industrial complex that pushed women to be impossibly skinny, the belief that no one will ever love you if you fall short, etc.
The relentless shaming of fat people (or anyone who’s interpreted as “fat” through this perfectionistic, distorted funhouse mirror lens) feels very much the same, too
I mean I get it, it ABSOLUTELY must suck to be universally told from 0-17 that you and your demographic cohort are the princes of the universe who’ll get everything handed to them and then have basically 18-now be one long “LOL SUCKERS” but also they’re making their reaction everyone’s problem
What seems to really scare these people is the possibility of having to deal with uncertainty rather than 'knowing' that everything will be OK as long as they make the right choices and Work Hard.
And most marginalised people can't afford to ignore that.
Rush Limbaugh was literally brainwashing.
he set up his program to be repetitive for a reason.
It took my dad 1 month of listening to him in the background to completely change personality in the 1990s.
Yes I've seen some clips of him and Beck. They throw that "I'm the only one you can trust" verbiage around to keep people hooked on the brand but it ends up really screwing with people's heads.
The whole extreme conservative thing is really a cult at this point.
Ours is a culture of instant gratification. We don't put much value on knowledge and wisdom which take time and effort to acquire. When stress arrives, for many, there is little to fall back on except what we absorbed from our parents as children.
Explain? thank you for empathizing with women. it’s the biggest unspoken, unaddressed issue in the world today….the problem with men. Not all men…but men. we talk around the edges of misogyny and how the young men today are lost but men have literally taken us to edge of extinction
I saw it coming up in the late 80s/early 90s. The economy wasn't really ready for us in our 20s, because it was still trying to take in the whole Baby Boom, so we muddled along until about 30 and then started to do better.
Women could cope because we expected a struggle. A lot of men were ruined.
I think a number of the men from my generation (x) behaved exactly like Trump, Kavanaugh, etc did and they became very defensive and very angry when they learned that women in particular never thought their sexual harassment and assault was “just a joke,” funny, cool or ok.
Right? I understand the impulse to focus on other aspects, but job qualifications for the manosphere and Trump administration manifestly include sexual harassment/assault. These guys are reacting to pushback from women by saying men should assert “dominance” and control over women as an identity.
I would love to hear more about this because I genuinely don't understand. But I suspect I'm confused like a fish that doesn't recognize water, rather than we have a difference in opinion.
You know how women are not allowed to get older and this fuels entire industries? It’s like that, except men are unused to those pressures and responding poorly to them
millennial girls/teens/young women were processing the media circus around britney spears (for example) a lot different than millennial guys. it was laid out very clearly what’s expected of us
Oh! I see. As an educator I see a similar mechanism with young men asked to read works (fiction or not) from the perspective of people with different genders. Girls have done it from the time they started reading, so they're used to it while (some) boys get angry that they are expected to do so.
The body image part is significant for sure. But I think the MMA revolution is really at the core. "Bloodsport," the Gracies, the ideal of becoming "the baddest motherfucker on the planet" with a forehead tattoo that reads "POOR IMPULSE CONTROL."
I think the growth of MMA after the Gracies is more of an issue. Once it stopped being a competition between different arts (and different sized competitors), and just became boxing and sweaty dick punching, the dumb bastards who misinterpreted Fight Club were doomed
Spent the 1990s doing martial arts about 6 hours per week, plus running, triathlons, etc. No regrets in regard to the health benefit but keeping the practice in perspective was hard, as was finding myself in crowded bars arranged around fight rings, hearing the PA call for volunteers at ~145 lbs.
"There can be no doubt that our Nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination. Traditionally, such discrimination was rationalized by an attitude of "romantic paternalism" which, in practical effect, put women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage." ~ William J. Brennan
Whole lotta middle aged white guys with educations still identify as an R from the 80s and can't bring themselves to admit what the current GOP is. So they have to watch Fox and keep allegiance because the entire non-GOP nation is clearly "radical leftist"
I took a women’s studies class in the 90s where The Beauty Myth was assigned. I remember writing about how I was concerned eventually that profit engine would be turned against men. I just didn’t predict that when it did, it would not just make them loathe their own bodies, but women too.
The dark side of feminist criticism about how the culture and especially advertising feeds women destructive ideas about womanhood is that a lot of people saw the market opportunity in selling men destructive ideas about manhood.
Yeah. The beauty/diet-industrial complex cornered the market on making teen girls and women so neurotically insecure that they’d buy any product or fad diet to “fix” themselves, so they started looking into instilling similar insecurities into teenaged boys.
I don't think it's a coincidence that all at the same time we're dealing with young men unsure of what being a man means, middle aged men doing anything to seem younger, and old men refusing to retire.
Comments
"In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was at 50%.
By 2009, male enrollment plummeted to 22.4%.....research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling... is the number of women in the classroom."
https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college
American popular culture has sneered at educators and education since Washington Irving’s depiction of Ichabod Crane in 1820.
They’re really good at making papers, reports, and even some books accessible online via your institution login. I’ll check my folders and see if I can send you a starter list…
Yes that's correct.
But you've got the reason wrong.
It's the characteristics of white supremacy and the patriarchy.
We white people adhere to them and don't even know it.
https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html
Notable exceptions exist (Aliens), but Stallone was a star, not Micheal Biehn.
https://bsky.app/profile/sigreign.bsky.social/post/3lobgba77tc2h
And most marginalised people can't afford to ignore that.
he set up his program to be repetitive for a reason.
It took my dad 1 month of listening to him in the background to completely change personality in the 1990s.
The whole extreme conservative thing is really a cult at this point.
Enough
Look at the geography of the elected Republican cult. It’s primarily the confederacy and confederate adjacent states.
The election of a black president and the open racism of Dear Leader have…
Sure, Republican propaganda has done its share of harm but these current Republicans are generationally predisposed to being like this.
It’s not that something has happened to these young men.
Women could cope because we expected a struggle. A lot of men were ruined.
The anger they felt when she stood up was memorable and always stuck with me.
terrified their pasts would come out
https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a20862383/men-get-fat-shamed-too/
That advertising still exists you know, but women have been going to therapy and learning and growing.
Why don't men expect that out of themselves and each other???
Trying to get them to even SEE their own inherent racism is a goddamn gauntlet in its own right.
She talks about it here and it's well worth the watch imo.
https://youtu.be/d9-0cxfmPHs?si=FAWqO319R9tuC7SR