Men aren't complicated creatures, but judging by today's media, you'd think they were rocket-science equations that only the most brilliant of minds can solve.
Sadly, the ignorance around men in society is a self-inflicted wound. Western civilization has become so gynocentric that it has fallen over into anti-male territory. Since I was a kid, I can recall women on talk shows and feminist activists declaring men to be unimportant to child-rearing, and that anything a man could do, a woman could do better.
Today, we live in a world where men are absolutely treated as second-class citizens, being passed over for jobs, education, and even personal relationships if they don't reach a certain level of success.
This has left many men dejected, miserable, and, even worse, has resulted in a rash of suicides. Despite having their legs cut out from under them by modernity, men are still expected to suck it up and deal. Any vulnerability or reaching out is considered a weakness and frowned upon by pop culture.
Many men, especially young men, are not doing well, and The Times is finally taking notice. However, being the media, it's looking for answers everywhere except where it should:
A new study that surveyed 2,000 British men and women aged 18-45 revealed that men are at an unprecedented crisis point. They have rejected old ideas about masculinity, they desperately want to care for their community and aspire to be tender, involved fathers. Yet they despair of being able to fit into the seemingly contradictory demands made of them by their female romantic partners and society at large, with nearly half considering giving up on love entirely.
This fits with a demographic shift towards men and women remaining single: the proportion of Americans aged 25-34 living without a spouse or partner has doubled in five decades to 50 per cent for men and 41 per cent for women. In the UK the Office for National Statistics last month predicted a 20 per cent rise in single households by 2032, with the steepest surge in the 35-44 age bracket.
Kudos to The Times for at least getting that much of this is societal expectations, but that's about as far as it gets before it derails itself and points the finger back at men. Take, for instance, this little tidbit:
More men were unwilling to undertake the compromise or self-improvement relationships require. When faced with the idea “I would have to change too much about myself, such as my values or behaviours, to make a serious relationship work long-term”, 44 per cent of men agreed, compared with 33 per cent of women.
The "self-improvement" verbiage here reeks to high heaven of bias, but it also reveals to me that the author is lost on where the real problem lies.
Allow me.
The issue is hypergamy, and funny enough, hypergamy is at the center of a lot of women's problems as well.
Hypergamy is marriage into a higher class or social group than the one someone belongs. This has been a feminine practice for a very, very long time and rightfully so. A woman naturally seeks out a worthy man who can provide, protect, and contribute strong genes. It's an animal instinct, but human women found that the easiest route from A to B is to find and marry a rich man, or at the very least, a man who is richer than they are.
Given that throughout history, men were typically the breadwinners and women stayed at home with the children, this wasn't that big of an issue. Women, being primarily unable to fend for themselves economically, found that their pool for a suitable man was pretty large.
But then modernity came about. The 1960s saw a wave of feminism that encouraged women to break their shackles, leave the home, and make their own way outside the oppressive patriarchal system that kept them barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Women did just that, and over the decades that would follow, social justice and modern feminism would see corporations only too eager to put women in the workplace because it made them look progressive and ahead of the social curve.
Colleges took the same route, accepting more women than they do men under the same philosophy that women needed to have more advantages than men because doing so "leveled the playing field."
Fast forward to today, and women out-earn men in 40 major cities. Women are enrolled and graduate from college more than men by around 66 to 60 percent, respectively.
The feminists of the '60s era must be very proud and happy that they paved the way for their daughters and their daughters' daughters to find success for themselves in an environment once dominated by men... but their daughters' daughters aren't. Their unhappiness is building, according to Oxford University:
While women, on average, report higher levels of life satisfaction and overall happiness than men, women experience worse outcomes in both mental health and reports of negative ‘affect’, or negative emotions.
This trend, which has been described as a paradox, has widened over the same period – meaning women’s wellbeing, particularly in the affective domain, has dropped relative to men.
But while there is clear evidence of a relative decline in women’s wellbeing on a global scale, the findings show vast differences in the size of the gender wellbeing gap across different countries.
In addition to two decades of global data, the research team also looked at long-run trends in Europe and the USA since the 1970s, and reviewed existing literature in search of explanations for the relative decline in women’s wellbeing.
What's funny is that, if you hit social media, you'll find a lot of women making comments about how miserable they are going to work and wish they could be a housewife or stay-at-home mom. Oftentimes, it comes in the form of a joke, sometimes an angry rant, but young women aren't pleased.
Their only way out of this life and back to something a bit more based in natural gender roles is to find a good man and marry him, but this is where hypergamy comes into play.
These modern young women are successful, make more than most men, outrank them in the corporate world, and as such, their natural compunction to find a man richer than them causes their pool of qualified candidates to shrink significantly. These high-earning women are now limited to a very small percentage of very high-earning males.
And here's the worst part. Men are not hypergamic by nature. The woman he considers to be a good match for him doesn't have to be highly successful and self-sufficient. In fact, a woman can find herself having points deducted the more successful she is in the business world. This highly successful man could very well choose a woman like her, but he'd be just as happy choosing the woman who works as a waitress at a diner he happened into one day.
This means these successful women are competing for a very small group of men against an extremely wide group of competitors. Many will enter, few will win.
This is a bad situation for women, but it's even worse for men, because not only are the men in the lower income brackets being passed over as a love interest, but their job prospects aren't nearly as good as they used to be, either. So, they're not climbing a ladder, not getting into meaningful relationships, and the prospects they do have are extremely limited.
That's not even beginning to discuss the expectations on men in the modern dating world, which is mentioned by The Times:
Some 62 per cent of men agreed that “women have too many expectations of how men should be in relationships these days”. Most surprisingly, nearly half of women agreed with that one.
If men are to be okay, then our culture has to accept that there are two genders and each of them wants different things naturally. Men want to be providers. They want to be protectors. They want to be respected. Women want to be provided for. They want to be protected. They want to be loved.
Modern society has told us that these things should be flipped, and no one is benefiting from it.
