New Yorker article

The premise of the article is that men/boys AND women/girls are struggling, but since women/girls are generally ignored, we only hear about men and boys "in crisis."

I chuckled quite a bit as I read the article. Here are some pertinent excerpts.

quote:
The good man of the reasonable center, in Galloway’s view, adheres to a code indistinguishable from that of the Boy Scouts: mental and physical fitness, emotional resilience, hard work, financial prudence, caring for others. Few could object to any of this. But the person it describes—a kind and conscientious sort, who aspires to make a decent living and who looks after their loved ones—seems blessedly gender-free. So why make this about manhood? Even the Boy Scouts have gone coed.

quote:
There is no question that the generations-long erosion of the U.S. manufacturing base, and the diminution of the unionized pension jobs that this sector had offered, disproportionately harmed working-class men. (This is perhaps especially true for Black men, whose access to these steady, well-paying jobs greatly expanded following the victories of the civil-rights movement.) Ongoing industrial collapse has shaped many of the statistics that are central to the man-crisis discourse. Yet, if you tilt some of the most commonly cited data points this way or that, you can just as easily argue on the behalf of a woman crisis as a man crisis—or, perhaps most accurately, for an ongoing multidirectional crisis affecting us all.

The college gender gap, for instance, could be evidence of a rudderless, demoralized generation of young men, but it might also be the product of differing economic incentives. A paper published last year by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce examines the labor landscape of rural America, noting that women need more education to earn the same amount of money as men, and that the less education a worker has, the more this gender gap widens. The over-all trajectory for the lowest-earning men is not good, certainly, but it’s not clear that their female counterparts are faring better.

quote:
Emanuel, in his Washington Post op-ed, endorses a double standard with even greater frankness. The cost of housing, he writes, “is, of course, a problem for all Americans—men and women alike. But, unpopular as it might be to say in some quarters of my party, the crisis affects one gender with particular potency.” In other words, men and women pay the same bill, but we are obligated to understand that the social and spiritual price it extracts from men is higher. (If women want an emergency to call their own, it can be that they are not having enough babies.)

quote:
What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hours as an I.C.U. nurse, but such feelings do not disturb the order of the universe. This person’s duties to protect, provide, and procreate are real, but they do not take the capital “P.” This person’s opinions matter, but not decisively. The Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights. Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly.

“You need Dad,” Galloway, who has two sons, said on a recent podcast. The nuclear family he imagines seems to be one in which the mom is the default parent (“They look to her for nurturing. When they really have a problem, I find they go to Mom”), while the necessary dad is the authority figure to whom Mom can appeal as the occasion demands. “There are certain moments when my partner needs me to weigh in,” Galloway explained. “I don’t know if it’s the depth of my voice, my physical size.” Boys, he went on, “begin tuning out their mom over time.” One might wonder how boys lose these frequencies in the first place. One might long for a deep voice to explain it.

My favorite paragraph:

quote:
The deeper one sinks into our nation’s alleged man-boy problem and its potential solutions, the more the woman reader may begin to feel something stronger than resentment or intellectual disdain. She may begin to feel a chauvinistic gratitude in her sex. The familiar flatness of feeling a little degraded seems preferable to the anger, entitlement, and alienation that (we are told over and over) gnaws away at so many male specimens. What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter. To have to move out of your parents’ house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it is gender-affirming but because life is full of tasks that need doing, and you are the person who does them. At least then you know who you are.