And it's genuinely infuriating with people saying that men are voting for Trump because of misogyny and they all want to rape woman. Like just no, that's not why men are voting for Trump. Trump makes them feel heard and voices their general grievances at society.
I won't ever consider feeling bad for voting red until the Dems decide to run real primaries, and those cannot include "superdelegates." Dems elites: Trust your people!
Parties are private entities. I think it's reasonable for them to privilege their elites. If anything, Republicans should try doing the same. That's how you end up Youngkins rather than Kari Lakes
It’s certainly reason able for those in power to privilege themselves—that what elites always and everywhere try to do. My question is whether that’s a winning strategy when those who are not elite tire of it and a populist alternative presents itself.
And Democratic primary voters are very concerned with electability. A true primary process would have helped. It would have helped the party what everyone was truly concerned about and which message and person resonated with voters. Biden should have stepped down after the midterms, so that a proper primary could be arranged.
something that has proven very damaging to our boys and their development is their reliance on video games for entertainment. It supersedes everything else valuable in their lives! It contributes to numerous physical, mental and social health issues. It will not end well for them.....
To add to that, Ellie, video games used to have more offline/social multiplayer elements. You take your controller over to your friend's house and play with them. Now, online focus means you are talking to strangers you never meet in person.
I kinda feel like this comment highlights some of what men *dont like* about the conversation.
It’s a conversation about us but not by us or for us. It’s the pathologizing and problematizing of things that aren’t actually bad.
Video games. They can obviously be addicting. But do they cause problems? Or is withdrawal into video games in some sense a result of an alienating world with few opportunities for fulfillment? It’s probably a mixture of both but it’s presented as “lazy men addicted to video games”.
Not to mention games are, for most men, fun and part of socializing even today.
So when I talk about boys and video games I mean like ages 6-18. I had 3 of them so I feel fairly qualified to comment on what I saw in my own home! It is a sedentary activity that allows a child to sit for hours releasing loads and loads of dopamine into their system, all while sitting on the sofa, and the games never end! It becomes all consuming, taking the place of real life friendships, sports, homework, clubs, hobbies, dinner time, etc… Parents, just beware. And the new internet based games expose your kids to all kinds of strangers (predators?) and sexual content. It ended up causing so much strife and stress in my home I got rid of it all. Best decision I ever made for my boys. 😃
I mean, I played games growing up. It was a big part of bonding with other kids my age (Minecraft!, I still play with my best friend after 15 years) and I wouldn’t want to miss out on that. Idk it’s possible there are predators out there but one nice thing about games is it’s mostly anonymous with no requirement to be on mic. I feel like competitive online gaming is mostly not a huge danger to age appropriate kids (probably teens). Younger kids could probably go on a Minecraft server or something with friends if you knew who was on there.
It just seems like everything within balance. You have these teen girls getting mental health issues from TikTok — seems like in a lot of ways social media is more prone to predatory behavior and addiction. People are sharing images of themselves and stuff. Games can be a hyper stimulus but are less toxic in this regard. I also think that other commenter is right, I grew up in a street car suburb where playing outside was still something we did, and for most of my childhood I was sharing the computer / Wii with the rest of my family and my mom would kick me off.
I grew up at the dawn of youth social media and would rate that as waaaaaaaay waaaaaaaay way more harmful to my generation than video games. My relationship to video games is mostly positive. But I’ve never been too addicted to them.
Cool. Yes sharing one desktop computer was “better” I guess. Now everyone in the family has screens and retreat to their rooms and isolate themselves from others. The online games are an easy place for predators to hang out, and even Minecraft has Sexual content. Just ask the kids, they know! My point is that too much gaming is not healthy for young brains, too much time spent in front of a screens means our kids are missing out on other more valuable developmental activities and socialization. Just my opinion!
This is true, but boring, safety obsessed suburban living and a lack of definable male spaces heavily drive this, too. Every male space has been defined as “needing more women” until it’s not a male space anymore and caters to women’s needs. Subcultures are also more female driven than ever via e-girls and social media.
I swear whenever people bring up men’s issues there is always someone like you that blames it all on video games. They are not the main reason we are failing. The fact you blame it also shows you don’t know the average guy.
There is porn on Minecraft! Why would I make that up? The boys talk about it at the lunch table in the cafeteria. Look up Minecraft sex mods. All the little boys do.
Hey Kyle, educate yourself! All the boys know about this. Do you have Google?! Minecraft has a huge mod community that enhances and enriches the game in various ways. That goes for sex mods, too, which are measured in tens of thousands. It wasn’t easy to choose the best ones, but we took our time to do so. Here are the best Minecraft NSFW mods…..
Thanks for writing this. I think the quote from Harris’s father is really important. Men have many issues as you point out. I wrote a book titled “How Democrats Can Win Back Men” on this topic and also have a Substack “Men and the 2024 Election.”
It’s not even that”we have it tough, too.” It’s that men are socialized to understand that in a certain way, that assumes agency in the face of these challenges and unfairnesses. This understanding was accepted and embraced and respected by women in the past (they had to!). I feel there continues to be great value in that cultural product, for both men and women. To hear it dismissed glibly as “toxic masculinity” (especially by privileged and spoiled persons) is insulting to the last degree, because it makes the message clear that men’s striving to measure up and do the right thing is worthless.
Thanks for pointing out what awful role models some of these guys are. I think it's important to voters. For me personally, both Walz and Vance projected positive images of manhood fwiw.
"Doug Emhoff — who has acknowledged cheating on his first wife and impregnating another woman." As I seem to recall, that woman was his child's nanny--even more unsavory in my mind.
Agree with so much of this, but to steel man this, some stats are explained by the fact men are also the perpetrators of crimes with higher ratios of men or women. If you consider that you’re still left with many self evident male-centered hardships. The hardest being the inability to openly discuss or amplify the subject at all.
"Men are 90% of America’s incarcerated population."
One note I have made in the past about the site you get this stat from (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/) is that their page about gender issues is literally called "Women and gender"
The same page where they note that only 10% of prisoners are women focuses the gender disparity on those 10%.
Nice essay Zaid. The current iteration of the Democratic Party is to hold on high, perceived victim classes (race, alphabet folks & women/abortion). Men are not included. From a cultural lens, take a look at Hollywood movies for past 10 years, and especially the last 5 to see it most clearly. Rarely will you see a strong positive male lead anymore. Men of this archetype have been largely erased from the silver screen. The same can be said for legacy TV and streaming movies/shows. What you do see on screens/TV/streaming are strong female leads. And by season 2 I’m never surprised anymore to find these lady protagonists sucking face with another female.
On the contrary, it’s so easy that, once you’ve got the hang of it, you can forget you’re being a man and you’ll still be a man. Not like playing the oboe or speaking Portuguese.
It's not merely men as entities the left demonizes, it is masculinity as a whole they loathe so much, that is because any strong male who is secure in his own shoes, doesn't need others to think for him or to leave in constant panic that something bad will happen and there's nothing he can do to save himself other than give power and freedom away to the party he chooses to vote for and constantly demonizes individual responsibility and free thinking
One more comment. I wrote an entire post that thoroughly rebuts Harris's question whether "... any law that gives the government the power to make a decision about a man’s body": A Letter to Post Gender Columnist Monica Hesse About Her “Kamala Harris’s 19 Words” Article (https://stephenbond.substack.com/p/a-letter-to-post-gender-columnist-f18)
Domestic violence affects one in three male-female relationships. There’s a reason 90 % of prisoners are male. Why are men praised for claiming they are women and competing in women’s sports? Why did men deny women the vote for so long, only granting it in the 20th century? Why are men treating women like slaves in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.? Why is female genital mutilation allowed in Africa? Why is female education forbidden in many countries? Why are female babies left to die in China and India? Why do so many women around the world cook for men and then have to wait till the men finish eating before they can eat the scraps left behind? Why do men commit so many rapes?
What you’re describing is bad behavior by men (you made a few mistakes, there’s only one country where women are forbidden from education not multiple but your main point stands). Nonetheless, what you didn’t acknowledge is hardships faced by men. And that’s the issue.
These are interesting questions with real answers.
Feminism has been an important philosophical movement with deep contributions and has helped flesh out our awareness of the predicament of women.
But embedded in the language of the post is one of the weaker parts of feminism: a kind of implicit belief in a “mysoginistic force” that flows through everything (especially men). In reality, the plight of women was mostly a matter of biology, with the Industrial Revolution enabling women to be freed from the shackles of their reproductive systems. Before modern technology societies were much more constrained by the physical abilities of human beings, and norms tended to evolve around those constraints and the constraints of the environment. Most sexist norms originally existed as sensible (if tragically imperfect) practices in a world without birth control.
The idea that female oppression is arbitrary is self defeating. To believe women existed under arbitrary oppression for millennia simply because of “sexism” is to believe that for much of human history across most cultures women never had the agency to advocate for themselves and advance their interests. Was it millions of years? The more you put this in a scientific or evolutionary context the less sense it makes. We live in the midst of a seismic shift in our species relationship to the world and to ourselves, driven by technology. Our beliefs and attitudes are shaped by our environment and constraints. There is no evil misogynistic force that has been plaguing society for all these years. It’s only ever been the tragedy of the human experience.
I don't know, for all the whining about DEI and affirmative action you folks do, I'm surprised your response to the male achievement gap in education isn't just simply to tell men to study harder. I mean, like literally it's a skill issue?
Boys and girls develop differently and at different rates. Both of our sons struggled and it wasn't for lack of motivation or ability. It might make more sense to segregate the sexes at least until basic development differences are resolved.
how about not forcing elementary school boys to sit still or get hooked on Ritalin while female teachers lecture boys on not being agreeable enough to sit and just regurgitate what the teacher wants back
K-12 system is run by women and it treats boys like they’re defective girls.
Men are also more frequently responsible for shouldering all the costs of their college education while also being expected to not live with their parents or live off their girlfriend or wife while they finish school.
Additionally, a lot of men have discovered that white collar offices are women’s environments and are full of bullshit jobs that provide zero fulfillment to men.
Ex: I work in marketing, and watching my female colleagues get excited about a run of the mill marketing campaign is just weird. It’s a celebration of triviality, but they’re very proud of it.
Perfect, Zaid. Perfect. I've been trying to tell this story myself for years. But ears don't wanna hear.
And it's genuinely infuriating with people saying that men are voting for Trump because of misogyny and they all want to rape woman. Like just no, that's not why men are voting for Trump. Trump makes them feel heard and voices their general grievances at society.
I won't ever consider feeling bad for voting red until the Dems decide to run real primaries, and those cannot include "superdelegates." Dems elites: Trust your people!
Parties are private entities. I think it's reasonable for them to privilege their elites. If anything, Republicans should try doing the same. That's how you end up Youngkins rather than Kari Lakes
It’s certainly reason able for those in power to privilege themselves—that what elites always and everywhere try to do. My question is whether that’s a winning strategy when those who are not elite tire of it and a populist alternative presents itself.
And Democratic primary voters are very concerned with electability. A true primary process would have helped. It would have helped the party what everyone was truly concerned about and which message and person resonated with voters. Biden should have stepped down after the midterms, so that a proper primary could be arranged.
something that has proven very damaging to our boys and their development is their reliance on video games for entertainment. It supersedes everything else valuable in their lives! It contributes to numerous physical, mental and social health issues. It will not end well for them.....
To add to that, Ellie, video games used to have more offline/social multiplayer elements. You take your controller over to your friend's house and play with them. Now, online focus means you are talking to strangers you never meet in person.
I kinda feel like this comment highlights some of what men *dont like* about the conversation.
It’s a conversation about us but not by us or for us. It’s the pathologizing and problematizing of things that aren’t actually bad.
Video games. They can obviously be addicting. But do they cause problems? Or is withdrawal into video games in some sense a result of an alienating world with few opportunities for fulfillment? It’s probably a mixture of both but it’s presented as “lazy men addicted to video games”.
Not to mention games are, for most men, fun and part of socializing even today.
So when I talk about boys and video games I mean like ages 6-18. I had 3 of them so I feel fairly qualified to comment on what I saw in my own home! It is a sedentary activity that allows a child to sit for hours releasing loads and loads of dopamine into their system, all while sitting on the sofa, and the games never end! It becomes all consuming, taking the place of real life friendships, sports, homework, clubs, hobbies, dinner time, etc… Parents, just beware. And the new internet based games expose your kids to all kinds of strangers (predators?) and sexual content. It ended up causing so much strife and stress in my home I got rid of it all. Best decision I ever made for my boys. 😃
I mean, I played games growing up. It was a big part of bonding with other kids my age (Minecraft!, I still play with my best friend after 15 years) and I wouldn’t want to miss out on that. Idk it’s possible there are predators out there but one nice thing about games is it’s mostly anonymous with no requirement to be on mic. I feel like competitive online gaming is mostly not a huge danger to age appropriate kids (probably teens). Younger kids could probably go on a Minecraft server or something with friends if you knew who was on there.
It just seems like everything within balance. You have these teen girls getting mental health issues from TikTok — seems like in a lot of ways social media is more prone to predatory behavior and addiction. People are sharing images of themselves and stuff. Games can be a hyper stimulus but are less toxic in this regard. I also think that other commenter is right, I grew up in a street car suburb where playing outside was still something we did, and for most of my childhood I was sharing the computer / Wii with the rest of my family and my mom would kick me off.
I grew up at the dawn of youth social media and would rate that as waaaaaaaay waaaaaaaay way more harmful to my generation than video games. My relationship to video games is mostly positive. But I’ve never been too addicted to them.
Cool. Yes sharing one desktop computer was “better” I guess. Now everyone in the family has screens and retreat to their rooms and isolate themselves from others. The online games are an easy place for predators to hang out, and even Minecraft has Sexual content. Just ask the kids, they know! My point is that too much gaming is not healthy for young brains, too much time spent in front of a screens means our kids are missing out on other more valuable developmental activities and socialization. Just my opinion!
Minecraft does no have sexual content lmao
Yes it does. Strange you don’t know about Minecraft Sex mods. All the kids know about it.
This is true, but boring, safety obsessed suburban living and a lack of definable male spaces heavily drive this, too. Every male space has been defined as “needing more women” until it’s not a male space anymore and caters to women’s needs. Subcultures are also more female driven than ever via e-girls and social media.
I swear whenever people bring up men’s issues there is always someone like you that blames it all on video games. They are not the main reason we are failing. The fact you blame it also shows you don’t know the average guy.
Btw I know the average guy, I’m surrounded by them! 😉
Kyle, video games are absolutely shaping our very young males, as is porn. That’s a known fact. What do you think it is?
You clearly don’t anything about men or video games for that matter considering you’re out here in the comments claiming there is porn in Minecraft 💀💀
There is porn on Minecraft! Why would I make that up? The boys talk about it at the lunch table in the cafeteria. Look up Minecraft sex mods. All the little boys do.
My little brother plays it there is no porn on it whatsoever. Really don’t why you are making things up that are crust blatantly false.
Hey Kyle, educate yourself! All the boys know about this. Do you have Google?! Minecraft has a huge mod community that enhances and enriches the game in various ways. That goes for sex mods, too, which are measured in tens of thousands. It wasn’t easy to choose the best ones, but we took our time to do so. Here are the best Minecraft NSFW mods…..
Haha! Sure thing Chuck! There have only been several books written about this very thing by Experts and physicians in the field.
Thanks for writing this. I think the quote from Harris’s father is really important. Men have many issues as you point out. I wrote a book titled “How Democrats Can Win Back Men” on this topic and also have a Substack “Men and the 2024 Election.”
It’s not even that”we have it tough, too.” It’s that men are socialized to understand that in a certain way, that assumes agency in the face of these challenges and unfairnesses. This understanding was accepted and embraced and respected by women in the past (they had to!). I feel there continues to be great value in that cultural product, for both men and women. To hear it dismissed glibly as “toxic masculinity” (especially by privileged and spoiled persons) is insulting to the last degree, because it makes the message clear that men’s striving to measure up and do the right thing is worthless.
Thanks for pointing out what awful role models some of these guys are. I think it's important to voters. For me personally, both Walz and Vance projected positive images of manhood fwiw.
"Doug Emhoff — who has acknowledged cheating on his first wife and impregnating another woman." As I seem to recall, that woman was his child's nanny--even more unsavory in my mind.
Agree with so much of this, but to steel man this, some stats are explained by the fact men are also the perpetrators of crimes with higher ratios of men or women. If you consider that you’re still left with many self evident male-centered hardships. The hardest being the inability to openly discuss or amplify the subject at all.
"Men are 90% of America’s incarcerated population."
One note I have made in the past about the site you get this stat from (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/) is that their page about gender issues is literally called "Women and gender"
The same page where they note that only 10% of prisoners are women focuses the gender disparity on those 10%.
Nice essay Zaid. The current iteration of the Democratic Party is to hold on high, perceived victim classes (race, alphabet folks & women/abortion). Men are not included. From a cultural lens, take a look at Hollywood movies for past 10 years, and especially the last 5 to see it most clearly. Rarely will you see a strong positive male lead anymore. Men of this archetype have been largely erased from the silver screen. The same can be said for legacy TV and streaming movies/shows. What you do see on screens/TV/streaming are strong female leads. And by season 2 I’m never surprised anymore to find these lady protagonists sucking face with another female.
On the contrary, it’s so easy that, once you’ve got the hang of it, you can forget you’re being a man and you’ll still be a man. Not like playing the oboe or speaking Portuguese.
It's not merely men as entities the left demonizes, it is masculinity as a whole they loathe so much, that is because any strong male who is secure in his own shoes, doesn't need others to think for him or to leave in constant panic that something bad will happen and there's nothing he can do to save himself other than give power and freedom away to the party he chooses to vote for and constantly demonizes individual responsibility and free thinking
Absolutely unconscionable! The patriarchy harms men too. Thank you for pointing this out💕
One more comment. I wrote an entire post that thoroughly rebuts Harris's question whether "... any law that gives the government the power to make a decision about a man’s body": A Letter to Post Gender Columnist Monica Hesse About Her “Kamala Harris’s 19 Words” Article (https://stephenbond.substack.com/p/a-letter-to-post-gender-columnist-f18)
Domestic violence affects one in three male-female relationships. There’s a reason 90 % of prisoners are male. Why are men praised for claiming they are women and competing in women’s sports? Why did men deny women the vote for so long, only granting it in the 20th century? Why are men treating women like slaves in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.? Why is female genital mutilation allowed in Africa? Why is female education forbidden in many countries? Why are female babies left to die in China and India? Why do so many women around the world cook for men and then have to wait till the men finish eating before they can eat the scraps left behind? Why do men commit so many rapes?
What you’re describing is bad behavior by men (you made a few mistakes, there’s only one country where women are forbidden from education not multiple but your main point stands). Nonetheless, what you didn’t acknowledge is hardships faced by men. And that’s the issue.
These are interesting questions with real answers.
Feminism has been an important philosophical movement with deep contributions and has helped flesh out our awareness of the predicament of women.
But embedded in the language of the post is one of the weaker parts of feminism: a kind of implicit belief in a “mysoginistic force” that flows through everything (especially men). In reality, the plight of women was mostly a matter of biology, with the Industrial Revolution enabling women to be freed from the shackles of their reproductive systems. Before modern technology societies were much more constrained by the physical abilities of human beings, and norms tended to evolve around those constraints and the constraints of the environment. Most sexist norms originally existed as sensible (if tragically imperfect) practices in a world without birth control.
The idea that female oppression is arbitrary is self defeating. To believe women existed under arbitrary oppression for millennia simply because of “sexism” is to believe that for much of human history across most cultures women never had the agency to advocate for themselves and advance their interests. Was it millions of years? The more you put this in a scientific or evolutionary context the less sense it makes. We live in the midst of a seismic shift in our species relationship to the world and to ourselves, driven by technology. Our beliefs and attitudes are shaped by our environment and constraints. There is no evil misogynistic force that has been plaguing society for all these years. It’s only ever been the tragedy of the human experience.
I don't know, for all the whining about DEI and affirmative action you folks do, I'm surprised your response to the male achievement gap in education isn't just simply to tell men to study harder. I mean, like literally it's a skill issue?
Well I mostly don't like DEI because it makes white people more racist. Because I'm not white, I would prefer white people be less racist!
Evidence-based practice is best. See my project at Berkeley about how we resolve differences.
https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/what_we_do/major_initiatives/bridging_differences
There is nothing wrong with helping minorities, provided what you're doing actually helps us.
This is the thing. Good intentions don't always translate into good results.
And no special carve outs. Those turn pathological. Affirmative preparation is fine.
Boys and girls develop differently and at different rates. Both of our sons struggled and it wasn't for lack of motivation or ability. It might make more sense to segregate the sexes at least until basic development differences are resolved.
Women who earn less than men in the work force should just work harder...
how about not forcing elementary school boys to sit still or get hooked on Ritalin while female teachers lecture boys on not being agreeable enough to sit and just regurgitate what the teacher wants back
K-12 system is run by women and it treats boys like they’re defective girls.
Men are also more frequently responsible for shouldering all the costs of their college education while also being expected to not live with their parents or live off their girlfriend or wife while they finish school.
Additionally, a lot of men have discovered that white collar offices are women’s environments and are full of bullshit jobs that provide zero fulfillment to men.
Ex: I work in marketing, and watching my female colleagues get excited about a run of the mill marketing campaign is just weird. It’s a celebration of triviality, but they’re very proud of it.
There is no male achievement gap. Women is STEM is a very small minority. All the rest is b….s. Grades in nothingness are … nothing.