Men and Women
Our Brave New World, and Its Discontents
This article, “What’s the Matter with Men” caught my attention recently. The author, Idrees Kahloon, takes an interesting gamble. He goes out of his way to show his progressive bona fides to his The New Yorker audience, that he shares many of their basic precepts like “Women had to endure centuries of subjugation and discrimination,” as just one example. He even mentions “social conditioning (which helps explain the gender skew of certain occupations),” to put his audience at ease. But to what purpose?
The problem as Kahloon states it is that
In academic performance, boys are well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where the sex ratio is approaching two female undergraduates for every one male. (It was an even split at the start of the nineteen-eighties.) Rage among self-designated “incels” and other elements of the online “manosphere” appears to be steering some impressionable teens toward misogyny. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, and generally dying earlier, including by suicide.
There’s no doubt about it, there’s definitely a problem with boys. In passing, the author mentions the plight of boys in single parent families, but does not dwell long enough to investigate, though he mentions that all the single parents are mothers. The boy problem is largely the absence of men problem. Why would boys do worse than girls in single parent families? Kahloon seems to have no idea, none, though he himself was once a boy. Or you might think that Kahloon drops a lot of hints and clues as you read the article, while still trying to bring his audience along as a unthreatening fellow traveler?
Apart from academic performance, there’s also the work, or lack of work, performance that interests Kahloon:
It would help if we had a firm grasp on why men are withdrawing from work. Many economists have theories. Eberstadt believes that “something like infantilization besets some un-working men.” He notes the availability of disability-insurance programs (roughly a third of nonworking men reported some kind of disability in 2016) and the over-all expansion of the social safety net after the nineteen-sixties. In 2017, the late Alan Krueger, who chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, calculated that nearly half of all nonworking men were taking pain medication on a daily basis, and argued that the increased prescribing of opioids could explain a lot of the decline in the male labor force.
To be fair to the writer, Kahloon has an applied mathematics degree and full time employment at The Economist, so he tends to look at issues from a top down economic view. At times this works well. Yes, there has been a loss of manufacturing jobs which were largely done by men, and there has been a deflation in blue collar wages in recent years. Kahloon searches everywhere for answers - “infantilization,” “drug use,” disability insurance, “racism,” “incarceration,” and the “expansion of the social safety net” - but never finds a satisfying answer.
This is why modern economics often leaves people puzzled and unmoved. There are some economist who first try to understand the human being and the incentives that motivate them. Then there are others who look at the outcomes and try to work backwards to find what happened. The bulk of the literature on popular economics and sociology, including all the books the author mentions here, take the latter approach, of course. If you want to sell a book of 400 to 600 pages it’s imperative that you look at life’s problem from the top down as this provides the most complex view and therefore the most labyrinthine solutions. Nobody but a fool wants to read a 10 page pamphlet on what constitutes the human being and the motivations that lead them through life. Our idiot forebears wrote that nonsense over and over again for thousands of years and look what it’s got us!
This explains why Kahloon and his ilk do not talk about human nature and how it impacts human lives; they are now knee deep in a great effort to completely change the world. To admit that there is an unchanging constant in the world, like human nature, is to give up the great mission of world wide change. The author mentions “social conditioning” and “masculinity is… malleable,” as facts but never gives human nature a mention. It’s interesting that those who refuse to believe in human nature spend an inordinate amount of time, effort and cash trying to change it.
The other odd notion that pervades the article is that while men and boys have problems, women and girls are marching forward to a great new world! How do we know this? Well there’s lots of empirical evidence in test results, number of female CEO’s, number of female STEM graduates. That suffices, right? You would think, according to economists, that a good corporate job would be enough to satisfy any woman. Yet, strangely women continue to seek relationships with men. To what purpose they do this no one in Kahloon’s orbit can answer, but it does create problems. When you have, as the author mentions, two female graduates for every one male graduate, dating life becomes problematic.
A princess who falls for the stable boy is by definition fantasy. The princess always wants a prince. College educated women will not date much less marry a man without a degree (unless he’s very rich of course), so college women turn to sites like Tinder, a dating app. But the men they seek are in short supply, there being two women for every man, so the men play them: The women settle for hook-ups with opportunistic ‘guys’. I have not heard that women are thrilled about this but perhaps the author knows something I don’t? The desirable college men use women until their 30 or so and then they find a young woman to marry. For some reason women are predisposed to men who have established salaries and are a little older. Meanwhile the used and forgotten women become corporate middle managers. A few even climb to CEO!
(I’ve met CEO’s and CFO’s and CMO’s and all the C’s and never envied one of them. They arrive at 7:00 AM and leave work at 10:00 PM. Their lives are circumscribed to the minute, and thankfully so, since men like this need something to do constantly to prevent them from making everyone else miserable. How the C-Level became the pinnacle of human society is one of the tragedies of American life.)
The coin flips when we look at men and women without college degrees. Since births are 50/50 female and male, here the women are in short supply, there’s only one of them to every two males, so they can afford to be very choosy, and they are. They are going to go with working class men who have quality jobs with good pay and benefits. But if their first choice of mate doesn’t work out as they expect, a tumultuous economy leads to job loss for example, they will move on quickly and seek a better mate. I’ve consulted at businesses that employed working class men, each one divorced with multiple child support orders on their payroll. They end up living in basements because they can’t afford alimony, child support and a life of their own. Younger working class men see this and, like the idiots they are, so no thank you.
Women, following their nature, seek men with the resources to support them and children, but this leaves us with a lot of working class men with no prospects for a date, a female relationship or marriage. If you manage a low price restaurant for example, your chances as a man of finding a female mate approach zero. The author can’t for the life of him understand why working class men aren’t working, because it has never occurred to him that men only do the arduous, back breaking working class work in order to win over a female and a family.
It’s one thing to be unmarried and an accountant. I used to know a guy like this who was a huge train enthusiast. He traveled for 6 weeks a year on trains. But you tell a man that he’s got no chance at a women but he can work 12 hours a day on his back, covered with grease and torn knuckles repairing trains and he’s going to tell you to get off at some point. That job’s not worth it, because the one payoff he must have by virtue of every evolved molecule of his being is the opportunity for a loving relationship and children. When it becomes apparent to him that no opportunity to realize his deepest desires is on the horizon he’ll drop out.
If you’ve noticed that American infrastructure is crumbling, you’ve noticed this exact problem whether you knew it or not. That’s the one job that no woman wants. Repairing things, maintaining things is a male occupation only. Strangely this is never mentioned when discussions of parity arise. We talk about the number of females in high end professions endlessly, but we await a single erudite commentary on the lack of females to repair the trucks that deliver your groceries to the supermarket. Don’t hold your breath.
The purpose of the article finally surfaces near the end where Kahloon writes: “How men are faring in school and at work may not arouse everyone’s concern, but how men choose to pursue politics inevitably affects us all.”
Kahloon, as mentioned above, takes a gamble. Perhaps he can bring the readers of The New Yorker along to understand that the plight of boys and men is important because it affects ‘politics’! Does he succeed? He finally offers no solutions; rather, his effort is just a plea to us to be concerned about a whole host of problems that somehow affect only half the population.
It was not long ago that the elites of our society engaged in an effort to understand human nature, human civilization, human history and pass on to the next generation their findings. Coming out of the 1980’s we turned to a new goal, to remake human life. As we do, we continue to run into great, unmovable obstacles; and after forty years of this unrelenting effort we have forgotten human nature, human civilization and human history, all of which we now denigrate as old fashioned, unnecessary veins of human discovery. We now have “gender theorists” with new ideas, that even Kahloon finds suspect. How this all ends I am too old to ever find out, but one suspects that what took millions of years to evolve and thousands of years to build does not happen by coincidence.
Amen. Well said. I used to weep for the America that will be no more, but now I just look abroad for greener pastures.