If we are missing a story, it is only because we haven't learned to write it ourselves.
I think you push an idea that each oppressed group has a story that ties our struggle for something larger but that's not what it feels like when you're chased out of a town by a racist in a old red toyota truck. It doesn't feel like there is some larger struggle that I participate in that allows me to be hopeful or be fulfilled in the way that you think white men should be.
That sounds like minimizing/glorifying the hate that oppressed people receive. "the hate oppressed people feel gives them fulfillment" is just so terribly minimizing.
The script that I get as being a mexican man wasn't that I'm fighting white supremacists. It's my dad telling me how to interact with cops. And here's no nobility for being targeted for hate.
The story that I have, is one that I made. I am a caring father and spouse. I am a progressive man. I'm mexican. I'm the world ok'est dungeon master. And all of those things, I love about me. None of those things I received for being hated. And if was so easy for men to build fulfillment in themselves for oppressive systems placed upon them, not a damn self-victimizing right wing man today would be angry.
You're right that something is missing and I think you're right that it's a story. But I think you're wrong that these stories come from oppression. These stories we write ourselves.
I think most white men still have family that grew up playing out the nuclear family script that elevated men above his family. That was a successful script for a lot of white men during that period. But that's no longer a script that is successful. And most white men are having to do what women, people of color, LGBTQ+ have had to do for quite a while, write our own stories. Otherwise we'll have this same feeling a generation later where the new generation of white men can no longer follow the script of 2024.
We have to teach our sons and our brothers to be able to build a self-worth outside a narrow traditional cultural script. That the script we had, did not work for so many people and going back to it isn't likely to help all the terrible things in our life.
And fuck this view in particular. “A young man who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth."
That's just the glorification of white male rage. You repeat a fucked up script and agree with it. That right-wing men should be angry and you understand the motive for violence.
You ever apply to other groups? I doubt any person who says that would agree the same applies to young women. The people who use this phrase also often advocate for killing BLM rioters.
That phrase isn't about anger at being rejected, it's about our cultural acceptance of the men who form violent white hate groups. Because when these kinds of men burn things down, it isn't the system. It isn't capitalism. It isn't burning the tenets of feminism through rigorous debate. It's people. It's black churches. It's women. It's immigrants who are here to seek a better life. And it's countless other people that these right-wing folks blame. So fuck that.
Focusing on the last part of your comment: if I got it right what you’re saying, one thing is to understand where one is coming from, another is justifying it.
Just because one understands that the extremist, conservative rise comes from being kicked out of the village, it doesn’t mean glorifying it. Maybe you are trying to say that when one feels left out from a community, they shouldn’t “burn down the village” to use the same metaphor. But when one does feel left out… us humans do really feel the need for a community around us, and when one is (or feels) ostracised from it, they’ll always feel broken apart, there’s not much to do about it.
I’m thinking of this beautiful documentary-insight into a couple of rioters who stormed the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. in Jan. 6 2021; what these two people have in common is that they’re tremendously lonely.
Ok, this is just a small illustrative example, but academics as Robert Putnam (notoriously in Bowling Alone) have indeed pointed at the fact that having lost traditional forms of community, democracy falters, as people will be lonelier, trust others less, feel threatened, and radicalise. Others (reading from the wiki of the book) have pointed at how the pro-Trump sentiment was born out of a yearning for these past days of community now lost.
This is all to say, of course these people shouldn’t have stormed the Capitol, nor voted an arrogant 78-year-old child named Donald. But one can understand where they’re coming from. And I too would feel threatened and lonely if I felt ostracised from my community.
I think the greater problem isn’t that one burns the village because they’ve been kicked out: I think they were never kicked out in the first place, these people have been radicalised by the media into thinking that they’re under attack, with great success because they probably felt vulnerable due to a lack of community.
All of this if I read your comment correctly. I’m not the best at getting exactly what people say.
I appreciate your words, you're right that loneliness can really put dark thoughts into the leftover bits in our brains.
But the issue I have is the way Jeremy uses the phrase, “A young man who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth."
When Jeremy cited the rightwing manosphere as the source of this quote, he's specifically calling to the context in which the rightwing manosphere uses that term. Which is to excuse rightwing violence/terrorism against people. Not gov't, not economic issues, they attack people. Most commonly people of color, women and LGBTQ+ folks.
This quote isn't about loneliness or rejection, it's about the violence that will happen when those men aren't embraced in the way they feel they should be. It's an acknowledgement that they expect violence from this group and it's acceptable.
"I hate to say it, but I agree" is what Jeremy wrote after citing this phrase used in rightwing social media.
Again, Jeremy cites rightwing social media in that paragraph. He's pointing to the context in how he is using that phrase. Jeremy says he understands why rightwing nutjobs feel like they need to murder innocent victims for the systemic issues in their life. And that's fucked, right?
Isn't the main reason why the 1950s was so good for American men (at least if they were white) that World War II had reduced the rest of the world's industries to ruins, leaving America with almost no foreign competition?
Offshoring accelerated dramatically at that point of course, due to both China's entry into the WTO and the use of the internet to manage globe-spanning supply chains.
Something men could embrace that might be helpful is the idea of solidarity. It's very meaningful to me right now, since there are so many forces that aren't serving anyone or the world itself, and there's a dire need for us to turn things around.
Many men are already part of the solution: the truth tellers who risk so much, the organizers who help people stand up to corporations together, the men who are valiantly protecting the environment.
I have a brother whose health is not good right now, and I'm giving him a lot of emotional support. This song came to me one morning, and feels very meaningful. I've always loved it, but wished it included sisters too. But in my mind, it includes everyone, although right now I'm literally giving my actual brother a lot of support. How do we reclaim this wonderful attitude? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUWZqbumaZo&list=RDeUWZqbumaZo&start_radio=1
Internet porno really undermines what is good about male sexuality. And twists it. Its especially hurtful to simple and vulnerable men and teens. It kills the good in men. It’s normalizing is such a slap in the face to straight men, who aren’t nihilists. It’s such an insult. Teaching kids the language they use. Gaslighting them about how they feel about it. Emotionally traumatizing and messing up teen boys for 20 years. Why no mention of this?
Great post. I’ve had many of the same thoughts and you’ve articulated them very effectively.
I’ll add another element that encourages men (especially cis/hetero/white men) to dislike all the groups of people you’ve mentioned.
It’s a social psychology principle called reciprocity of liking. In a nutshell, we like people who like us.
In our current culture of grievance, members of oppressed and marginalized groups regularly express anger toward groups they perceive as the offenders: women against men, non-whites against whites, trans folks against cis folks, etc.
The problem is while these grievances are valid, it can feel to those men without any claim to diversity that everyone is against them, is angry with them, doesn’t like them.
And it’s hard to like people who don’t like us. So they want to burn it down.
You know what we need men to do? Raise kids. Clean the house. Wash the dishes. Make a meal and have it on the table for when your wife, who makes more money than you, comes home. Organize community events to help maintain social cohesion. Volunteer at a charity to help the homeless. Work in early education for very little money. Take pride in your spouses achievements and be supportive. Learn how to go down on women.
When you do this, you will feel acknowledged and accepted. You will have a place in the village.
A young man who will burn down a village that rejected him to feel its warmth is a monster. You are justifying annihilation for selfish gratification.
Women have been asking men to more for a long time. We have a place for men: beside women. How can this be any clearer?
Or, maybe, when men say there's no place for them, they really just want gender segregation.
Do monks have a crisis of meaning or purpose? All male social organizations devoted to some kind of higher purpose (and to supporting their members in their pursuit of that higher purpose) seem like they could solve most the problems that the author is talking about.
I'm struggling with this one. You're coming from a good place but I can't get past what I see as "coddling" to these angry, young men.
I agree a big part is definitely unencumbered capitalism. But we've also lost something besides the 1950's dominance, which good riddence. These men aren't expected to get out and take hits. To learn and grow from it. To add to their communities. To be a role model. To just be fucking better.
They say they care about this country but the majority of recruits in the military are people of color. They're like sheep who want to be lied to because they refuse to do their part to build upon the narrative that was handed to them.
To go forth and make this country better for everyone. I have no idea who told them they're owed something because I don't remember it being that way. Maybe it was Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, or Jordan Peterson.
Somehow we need to get back to a manhood that is about becoming a better human being. Hell maybe we never really had it in the first place? If we lost it or never had it then it's time we thrown out the narrative and start fresh.
Hi Jeremy, I appreciate the conversations you're trying to spark with this newsletter. Men absolutely need to be talking with each other about mental health, how we see ourselves in relationship and society etc....
This post was interesting and made me think about my own experience being taught how to be a boy and how my sense of self as a man grew out of those formative experiences. For me so much of the "story" I inherited taught me not to need other people, not to understand my self in relationship with others. When viewed in the context of this story of self imposed isolation that final quote you shared can be inverted to "A young man who rejects the embrace of the village may seek burn it down to feel its warm." This puts a very different spin on what is a troubling and problematic framing of men's rage and violence (as pointed out by an above commenter). The question becomes; how much of men's rage and violence is born of our own rejection of ourselves and of the relationships we could be cultivating? In my experience the answer is a lot of it is. It also and importantly makes male rage men's problem, not the village's.
This doesn't take away from the larger context of capitalism that you rightly use as framing. None of us are born with a story that encourages us to reject relationship, seek isolation and view ourselves as lone players in a world based solely on competition and hierarchy; those stories are taught. What is re-framing does do is refocus the story of men on becoming or rather re-becoming relational beings. Learning to write stories of relationship is something any and all men can do for the benefit not only of themselves but also others in the village.
At the end of the day capitalism has come for white men and they are completely unprepared to navigate it. They believed that capitalism worked for them not that they were the stormtroopers for capitalists until they made themselves redundant.
There is a profound lack of empathy and introspection in white men. This is a result of privilege. Everyone else figures out pretty quick that the mythology doesn't apply to them and has to learn the skill of comparing reality to the mythology. Everyone has their blindspots but having struggled makes it easier to recognize other peoples struggles. More importantly there were other people that had gone before that knew the deal. Generations who could give insight and context. Old white men are as blind or blinder as young white men. Old white men remember when the myth was at least somewhat true.
Regarding the quote “A young man who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth." I think he used a poor word choice when he said "I agree" I read that to mean that it was a true statement not that he felt like it was good or right. I don't think he is accepting the behavior rather that is what we are seeing happen and we have to address it. We are seeing it and you are right it is a messed up narcissistic, nihilistic, unreasonable response but dismissing it as messed up doesn't provide us with a solution.
We can absolutely ask the question "what is wrong with men and boys and how do we fix it?" where the focus isn't about making them feel better but rather how do we protect ourselves and get them to stop hurting people and electing fascists. Making them feel better may be part of that strategy. I honestly don't know how to get through to these people and I don't know what leverage we have.
I think the question then becomes how does one, exactly, organize around class, when it seems we trust others based on self-similarity in readily perceivable traits (color of skin/eyes, speech and mannerisms, etc).
I think the U.S. Civil War, for example, in which a small group of rich white men convinced the vast majority of their fellow white yet poor af “brethren” to fight and die so that black people would remain slave labor — and thus keep down poor white people’s wages — encapsulates this perfectly.
The Fed is the epitome of musty, rusty, crusty, dusty toxic patriarchy & bureaucracy from the old world order. The Fed is the cancer at the heart of late stage capitalism.
Thank you for these thoughts and explanations. As a women who experienced the 3rd wave of feminism in the late 1970s/80s in Berlin, I never believed that 'feminism' was against men, and I vehemently argued against that division. At the time (or a little later), I also remember a 'men's movement' in certain circles... which seems to have fizzled out and never had much impact.
The waves of feminism did give women some sort of 'new identity', temporarily, with a certain amount of solidarity and inner strength (although the promised 'equality' never really happened). And the 'trans' and 'gender-identity' movement, trying to abolish the concept of 'woman' altogether, didn't help either.
The 'us against them' narrative didn't work back then for women, and it doesn't work now for men. It is a distraction from the real distribution of power (the 'c' word)...
What we're both saying is that this whole blaming an apparently 'other' group of fellow humans for our own experience of struggle with life is not getting to the root causes.
Young men are not disaffected because ‘capital’ robbed them of their deeply cherished dreams of cosplaying Ned Flanders in a Xeroxed suburb. This is bad analysis.
Lmfao, my thoughts exactly. This entire post contains so many faulty assumptions that are a result of cookie cutter academic sociology/feminist narratives, which as the commenters have proven, are not up for debate at all within said institutions. Mens collective response to this has been to build entirely new informal institutions revolving around male/masculine podcasting, YouTubing and other social media influence. Ultimately, big tech efforts to censor such efforts backfired and fueled the “us vs them” narrative, and for the moment they seem to be trying to embrace this rather than continue to censor it. I have no idea how sustainable or lasting this male “movement” will be, especially since its nativism flies in the face of capitalist interest (see the H1B outrage against Elon).
If we are missing a story, it is only because we haven't learned to write it ourselves.
I think you push an idea that each oppressed group has a story that ties our struggle for something larger but that's not what it feels like when you're chased out of a town by a racist in a old red toyota truck. It doesn't feel like there is some larger struggle that I participate in that allows me to be hopeful or be fulfilled in the way that you think white men should be.
That sounds like minimizing/glorifying the hate that oppressed people receive. "the hate oppressed people feel gives them fulfillment" is just so terribly minimizing.
The script that I get as being a mexican man wasn't that I'm fighting white supremacists. It's my dad telling me how to interact with cops. And here's no nobility for being targeted for hate.
The story that I have, is one that I made. I am a caring father and spouse. I am a progressive man. I'm mexican. I'm the world ok'est dungeon master. And all of those things, I love about me. None of those things I received for being hated. And if was so easy for men to build fulfillment in themselves for oppressive systems placed upon them, not a damn self-victimizing right wing man today would be angry.
You're right that something is missing and I think you're right that it's a story. But I think you're wrong that these stories come from oppression. These stories we write ourselves.
I think most white men still have family that grew up playing out the nuclear family script that elevated men above his family. That was a successful script for a lot of white men during that period. But that's no longer a script that is successful. And most white men are having to do what women, people of color, LGBTQ+ have had to do for quite a while, write our own stories. Otherwise we'll have this same feeling a generation later where the new generation of white men can no longer follow the script of 2024.
We have to teach our sons and our brothers to be able to build a self-worth outside a narrow traditional cultural script. That the script we had, did not work for so many people and going back to it isn't likely to help all the terrible things in our life.
And fuck this view in particular. “A young man who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth."
That's just the glorification of white male rage. You repeat a fucked up script and agree with it. That right-wing men should be angry and you understand the motive for violence.
You ever apply to other groups? I doubt any person who says that would agree the same applies to young women. The people who use this phrase also often advocate for killing BLM rioters.
That phrase isn't about anger at being rejected, it's about our cultural acceptance of the men who form violent white hate groups. Because when these kinds of men burn things down, it isn't the system. It isn't capitalism. It isn't burning the tenets of feminism through rigorous debate. It's people. It's black churches. It's women. It's immigrants who are here to seek a better life. And it's countless other people that these right-wing folks blame. So fuck that.
Spot on. Love this. Especially the part about being an Ok DM. That is a tough role my guy.
Focusing on the last part of your comment: if I got it right what you’re saying, one thing is to understand where one is coming from, another is justifying it.
Just because one understands that the extremist, conservative rise comes from being kicked out of the village, it doesn’t mean glorifying it. Maybe you are trying to say that when one feels left out from a community, they shouldn’t “burn down the village” to use the same metaphor. But when one does feel left out… us humans do really feel the need for a community around us, and when one is (or feels) ostracised from it, they’ll always feel broken apart, there’s not much to do about it.
I’m thinking of this beautiful documentary-insight into a couple of rioters who stormed the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. in Jan. 6 2021; what these two people have in common is that they’re tremendously lonely.
https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/public-defender
Ok, this is just a small illustrative example, but academics as Robert Putnam (notoriously in Bowling Alone) have indeed pointed at the fact that having lost traditional forms of community, democracy falters, as people will be lonelier, trust others less, feel threatened, and radicalise. Others (reading from the wiki of the book) have pointed at how the pro-Trump sentiment was born out of a yearning for these past days of community now lost.
This is all to say, of course these people shouldn’t have stormed the Capitol, nor voted an arrogant 78-year-old child named Donald. But one can understand where they’re coming from. And I too would feel threatened and lonely if I felt ostracised from my community.
I think the greater problem isn’t that one burns the village because they’ve been kicked out: I think they were never kicked out in the first place, these people have been radicalised by the media into thinking that they’re under attack, with great success because they probably felt vulnerable due to a lack of community.
All of this if I read your comment correctly. I’m not the best at getting exactly what people say.
I appreciate your words, you're right that loneliness can really put dark thoughts into the leftover bits in our brains.
But the issue I have is the way Jeremy uses the phrase, “A young man who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth."
When Jeremy cited the rightwing manosphere as the source of this quote, he's specifically calling to the context in which the rightwing manosphere uses that term. Which is to excuse rightwing violence/terrorism against people. Not gov't, not economic issues, they attack people. Most commonly people of color, women and LGBTQ+ folks.
This quote isn't about loneliness or rejection, it's about the violence that will happen when those men aren't embraced in the way they feel they should be. It's an acknowledgement that they expect violence from this group and it's acceptable.
"I hate to say it, but I agree" is what Jeremy wrote after citing this phrase used in rightwing social media.
Again, Jeremy cites rightwing social media in that paragraph. He's pointing to the context in how he is using that phrase. Jeremy says he understands why rightwing nutjobs feel like they need to murder innocent victims for the systemic issues in their life. And that's fucked, right?
Friendship is the new wealth and community is the new power.
Redistributed by democratic process? Usually inherited? Metered by the power company so you don’t get any for free?
Isn't the main reason why the 1950s was so good for American men (at least if they were white) that World War II had reduced the rest of the world's industries to ruins, leaving America with almost no foreign competition?
That plus all-time high union density, I believe.
A consequence rather an a cause: unions have little defense against an employer offshoring their jobs to a lower-wage country.
Only since the 1990s, right?
Offshoring accelerated dramatically at that point of course, due to both China's entry into the WTO and the use of the internet to manage globe-spanning supply chains.
Yes, this is what I’ve been looking for. Thank you. Yes yes yes.
Great piece Jeremy, I wholeheartedly agree with you. There is indeed a huge need for new stories!
Something men could embrace that might be helpful is the idea of solidarity. It's very meaningful to me right now, since there are so many forces that aren't serving anyone or the world itself, and there's a dire need for us to turn things around.
Many men are already part of the solution: the truth tellers who risk so much, the organizers who help people stand up to corporations together, the men who are valiantly protecting the environment.
I have a brother whose health is not good right now, and I'm giving him a lot of emotional support. This song came to me one morning, and feels very meaningful. I've always loved it, but wished it included sisters too. But in my mind, it includes everyone, although right now I'm literally giving my actual brother a lot of support. How do we reclaim this wonderful attitude? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUWZqbumaZo&list=RDeUWZqbumaZo&start_radio=1
one of my favourite songs too xx
Internet porno really undermines what is good about male sexuality. And twists it. Its especially hurtful to simple and vulnerable men and teens. It kills the good in men. It’s normalizing is such a slap in the face to straight men, who aren’t nihilists. It’s such an insult. Teaching kids the language they use. Gaslighting them about how they feel about it. Emotionally traumatizing and messing up teen boys for 20 years. Why no mention of this?
Great post. I’ve had many of the same thoughts and you’ve articulated them very effectively.
I’ll add another element that encourages men (especially cis/hetero/white men) to dislike all the groups of people you’ve mentioned.
It’s a social psychology principle called reciprocity of liking. In a nutshell, we like people who like us.
In our current culture of grievance, members of oppressed and marginalized groups regularly express anger toward groups they perceive as the offenders: women against men, non-whites against whites, trans folks against cis folks, etc.
The problem is while these grievances are valid, it can feel to those men without any claim to diversity that everyone is against them, is angry with them, doesn’t like them.
And it’s hard to like people who don’t like us. So they want to burn it down.
Thank you for answering the question. It might well help my Grandson
You know what we need men to do? Raise kids. Clean the house. Wash the dishes. Make a meal and have it on the table for when your wife, who makes more money than you, comes home. Organize community events to help maintain social cohesion. Volunteer at a charity to help the homeless. Work in early education for very little money. Take pride in your spouses achievements and be supportive. Learn how to go down on women.
When you do this, you will feel acknowledged and accepted. You will have a place in the village.
A young man who will burn down a village that rejected him to feel its warmth is a monster. You are justifying annihilation for selfish gratification.
Women have been asking men to more for a long time. We have a place for men: beside women. How can this be any clearer?
Or, maybe, when men say there's no place for them, they really just want gender segregation.
Do monks have a crisis of meaning or purpose? All male social organizations devoted to some kind of higher purpose (and to supporting their members in their pursuit of that higher purpose) seem like they could solve most the problems that the author is talking about.
I'm struggling with this one. You're coming from a good place but I can't get past what I see as "coddling" to these angry, young men.
I agree a big part is definitely unencumbered capitalism. But we've also lost something besides the 1950's dominance, which good riddence. These men aren't expected to get out and take hits. To learn and grow from it. To add to their communities. To be a role model. To just be fucking better.
They say they care about this country but the majority of recruits in the military are people of color. They're like sheep who want to be lied to because they refuse to do their part to build upon the narrative that was handed to them.
To go forth and make this country better for everyone. I have no idea who told them they're owed something because I don't remember it being that way. Maybe it was Elon Musk, Andrew Tate, or Jordan Peterson.
Somehow we need to get back to a manhood that is about becoming a better human being. Hell maybe we never really had it in the first place? If we lost it or never had it then it's time we thrown out the narrative and start fresh.
Hi Jeremy, I appreciate the conversations you're trying to spark with this newsletter. Men absolutely need to be talking with each other about mental health, how we see ourselves in relationship and society etc....
This post was interesting and made me think about my own experience being taught how to be a boy and how my sense of self as a man grew out of those formative experiences. For me so much of the "story" I inherited taught me not to need other people, not to understand my self in relationship with others. When viewed in the context of this story of self imposed isolation that final quote you shared can be inverted to "A young man who rejects the embrace of the village may seek burn it down to feel its warm." This puts a very different spin on what is a troubling and problematic framing of men's rage and violence (as pointed out by an above commenter). The question becomes; how much of men's rage and violence is born of our own rejection of ourselves and of the relationships we could be cultivating? In my experience the answer is a lot of it is. It also and importantly makes male rage men's problem, not the village's.
This doesn't take away from the larger context of capitalism that you rightly use as framing. None of us are born with a story that encourages us to reject relationship, seek isolation and view ourselves as lone players in a world based solely on competition and hierarchy; those stories are taught. What is re-framing does do is refocus the story of men on becoming or rather re-becoming relational beings. Learning to write stories of relationship is something any and all men can do for the benefit not only of themselves but also others in the village.
Towards a more relational world,
bevan
At the end of the day capitalism has come for white men and they are completely unprepared to navigate it. They believed that capitalism worked for them not that they were the stormtroopers for capitalists until they made themselves redundant.
There is a profound lack of empathy and introspection in white men. This is a result of privilege. Everyone else figures out pretty quick that the mythology doesn't apply to them and has to learn the skill of comparing reality to the mythology. Everyone has their blindspots but having struggled makes it easier to recognize other peoples struggles. More importantly there were other people that had gone before that knew the deal. Generations who could give insight and context. Old white men are as blind or blinder as young white men. Old white men remember when the myth was at least somewhat true.
Regarding the quote “A young man who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth." I think he used a poor word choice when he said "I agree" I read that to mean that it was a true statement not that he felt like it was good or right. I don't think he is accepting the behavior rather that is what we are seeing happen and we have to address it. We are seeing it and you are right it is a messed up narcissistic, nihilistic, unreasonable response but dismissing it as messed up doesn't provide us with a solution.
We can absolutely ask the question "what is wrong with men and boys and how do we fix it?" where the focus isn't about making them feel better but rather how do we protect ourselves and get them to stop hurting people and electing fascists. Making them feel better may be part of that strategy. I honestly don't know how to get through to these people and I don't know what leverage we have.
I think the question then becomes how does one, exactly, organize around class, when it seems we trust others based on self-similarity in readily perceivable traits (color of skin/eyes, speech and mannerisms, etc).
I think the U.S. Civil War, for example, in which a small group of rich white men convinced the vast majority of their fellow white yet poor af “brethren” to fight and die so that black people would remain slave labor — and thus keep down poor white people’s wages — encapsulates this perfectly.
"What should men be fighting back against?"
The Federal Reserve, that's what.
The Fed is the epitome of musty, rusty, crusty, dusty toxic patriarchy & bureaucracy from the old world order. The Fed is the cancer at the heart of late stage capitalism.
Thank you for these thoughts and explanations. As a women who experienced the 3rd wave of feminism in the late 1970s/80s in Berlin, I never believed that 'feminism' was against men, and I vehemently argued against that division. At the time (or a little later), I also remember a 'men's movement' in certain circles... which seems to have fizzled out and never had much impact.
The waves of feminism did give women some sort of 'new identity', temporarily, with a certain amount of solidarity and inner strength (although the promised 'equality' never really happened). And the 'trans' and 'gender-identity' movement, trying to abolish the concept of 'woman' altogether, didn't help either.
The 'us against them' narrative didn't work back then for women, and it doesn't work now for men. It is a distraction from the real distribution of power (the 'c' word)...
What we're both saying is that this whole blaming an apparently 'other' group of fellow humans for our own experience of struggle with life is not getting to the root causes.
Thank you for your work!!
Young men are not disaffected because ‘capital’ robbed them of their deeply cherished dreams of cosplaying Ned Flanders in a Xeroxed suburb. This is bad analysis.
Why are they then?
Lmfao, my thoughts exactly. This entire post contains so many faulty assumptions that are a result of cookie cutter academic sociology/feminist narratives, which as the commenters have proven, are not up for debate at all within said institutions. Mens collective response to this has been to build entirely new informal institutions revolving around male/masculine podcasting, YouTubing and other social media influence. Ultimately, big tech efforts to censor such efforts backfired and fueled the “us vs them” narrative, and for the moment they seem to be trying to embrace this rather than continue to censor it. I have no idea how sustainable or lasting this male “movement” will be, especially since its nativism flies in the face of capitalist interest (see the H1B outrage against Elon).