The wife sent me this OpEd by Andrew Yang:
The data are clear: The boys are not all right
Here is one of the biggest problems facing America: Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country.
The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.
Many boys are thus often growing up raised by single mothers, the share more than doubling between 1980 and 2019, from 18 percent to 40 percent. A study from 2015 found that “as more boys grow up without their father in the home, and as women … are viewed as the more stable achievers, boys and girls alike [may] come to see males as having a lower achievement orientation. … College becomes something that many girls, but only some boys, do.”
On a cultural level, we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic and start promoting positive masculinity. Strong, healthy, fulfilled men are more likely to treat women well.
Everything he said is correct and we need to fix it.
But I don’t think we will.
Remember the Obama Life of Julia ad?
Simply, everything done by a husband or father in Julia’s life was replaced by government.
Strong men protect and defend society. Weak men don’t.
The weakening of men allowed government agencies to step in and fill the role, with the added benefit that the weakened men were unlikely to rise up in armed resistance.
As Miguel often reminds us, qui Bono?
Men have been denigrated by society and are dropping out.
Women are less likely to find husbands and fathers to help raise children.
Women turn to drugs, alcohol, and consumerism to fill the void left by a lack of a husband and children.
When they do have children they are raised with the help of government programs.
The lack of skilled men encourages corporations to seek out workers overseas, lowering costs.
Everyday the most tinfoil hat conspiracy theories become evidently true.
I’m left to the conclusion that the destruction of men in Western society was a deliberate act to create a dependent serf class that is incapable of being independent and raising children without government and lacks the capability to mount a violent revolution against the system that crushed it.
If it wasn’t, explain to me how anything would be different.
My wife and I used to run a Marriage Ministry. Over the years we met with over a thousand couples, mostly military, free of charge. An illness took me out for a couple years, and when I was healthy again, we looked at getting back to it. Through prayer and discussion, we instead moved into the Youth Ministry as volunteers.
We’ve been working with these young men and women for a couple years now, and I am practically a surrogate dad to probably 20 of them now. My wife and I are able to model a loving and happy marriage, and because we are transparent and honest (sometimes brutally so) with them, we’re trusted. We teach them life skills, and our own youngest two are part of the group and so a large portion of them are at our house most of the time hanging out together.
It’s been amazing watching the change for some of them that a positive male role model can have. They know that we’re there for them, because we live it.
Whether it’s through a church, or some kind of community program, I can’t recommend getting involved in their lives enough. It’s paid dividends that are beyond measure for the community, as well as personally.
Thank you.
Kim Du Toit noted this in one of his more popular posts. Take a look at the portrayal of father figures in the media starting probably around the late 80’s/early 90’s to today. Fathers went from being the ‘head of the family’ and strong figures to incompetent dolts completely dominated by their wives and kids. Any ‘strong’ character is shown as some sort of violent biker or thug type who needs to be shown how to really care.
Combine that w/ the financial incentives set by the gov’t. Single woman w/ kids? Money, housing, benefits, etc. Married couple or single male w/ kids? Get a job ya bum. Better for women to not have a man around.
What does it say about the mass media today, when the first shows that comes to mind if I wanted to show my child a media portrayal of a strong father figure, are the Cosby Show and The Fresh prince of Bel-Air (the original Will Smith vehicle, not the new one), Seventh Heaven, and hell Little House on the Prairie?
I’m a 49 year old white male, btw.
And yes I know, 2 of the 4 of those have leads with “troubled” pasts.
There are 2700+ comments on that op-ed. I read a few of them. A lot are attacks on Yang, often attacking him for things he did not say. A few are supportive.
DuToit’s essay was called “The Pussification of America” and it was right on point; I’m hoping he’ll re-reun it someday on his new blog.
“Many boys are thus often growing up raised by single mothers, the share more than doubling between 1980 and 2019, from 18 percent to 40 percent.”
It’s more than mere acceptance of single mothers, it’s encouragement, especially by people not smart enough to understand that males and females are not just a little different, they’re hugely different and require different very significantly different parenting styles, styles that women cannot do because they’re not men.
As for the issue of “Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students,” some of that might be a positive in that a percentage of those “missing men” may have figured out that most of higher education is little more than a debt funded dollar-generating scam for the colleges and that good careers with very good pay are available outside of the post-university ghetto.
Good point on “debt scam”. Not so much for STEM fields though even there you have to be a bit careful (for example, an MS in Physics is an utter waste of money, though a Ph.D. is useful). But the “fuzzy topics” — as Robert Heinlein tagged them — are hardly worth studying at all and certainly not at the expense that colleges charge.