What’s the Matter with Men?

They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex.

SOME SNIPPETS:

Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. 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.

Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar argues that the rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of what the sociologist David Morgan calls “ontological security.” They now confront the prospect of “cultural redundancy,” Reeves writes. He sees telltale signs in the way that boys are floundering at school and men are leaving work and failing to perform their paternal obligations.

Boys, meanwhile, are at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and twice as likely to be suspended; their dropout rates, too, are considerably higher than those of their female counterparts. Young men are also four times as likely to die from suicide.

The political right has eagerly filled the void. At the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, the Republican senator Josh Hawley gave a keynote speech on the crisis of masculinity, in which he blamed “an effort the left has been at for years now,” guided by the premise that “the deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men.” Hawley, who is planning to expound upon his thoughts in a forthcoming book titled “Manhood,” argued that the solution must begin with “repudiating the lie that America is systemically oppressive and men are systematically responsible,” and with rebuilding “those manufacturing and production sectors that so much of the chattering class has written off as relics of the past.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/30/whats-the-matter-with-men?utm_source=NYR_REG_GATE

There is much more within the above article, but you get the general gist: Men aren't coping and Republicans are eager to turn men back into men again. 

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