To_Mandalay
1yr ago
There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male.
There are a lot less than there used to be and will probably be even less going forward.
There's differences that show up in the modern age too. Engineering is predominantly male (though not as male as the trades), despite vast effort made to change that. But do men get credit for this? No, we get rhetorically beat up for it.
Yes, there are other sex differences. But upper body strength, and what flows from it like fighting, killing, other feats of physical strength was for a long time the single most important sex difference. It absolutely dwarfs most others, even if you assume all other sex difference are 100% innate. Its shrinkage as a relevant factor in modern society is hugely impactful and probably couldn't be otherwise.
A huge portion of the seething over women having "fake email jobs" and what have you probably comes down to the fact that a huge portion of men also have "fake email jobs" nowadays. You can say "well the majority of cutting edge research in XYZ field is still done by men" or whatever, but that's a tiny proportion of all men so it doesn't really matter for the average person. It used to be the case that a miner or a steelworker or farm laborer could tell himself he was doing a job only a man could do and that was a source of pride and identity for him, though even by the 19th and early 20th century the anxiety about the softening of manhood was already well-advanced, evidenced by all of those intellectuals who argued that regular warfare was necessary to maintain racial/national virility. But nowadays a guy who works as a cashier at wal mart or does some rote office job understands full-well that a woman could do his job just as easily and it probably grates psychologically.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
What is more cruel and violent than the plain imposition that you will never own your home, you will never have a loving wife, you will never have a loyal husband, you will never sire children and all you will ever do is pay for pensions working a job you hate while your black rectangle beams images of happier people into your mind as everything in your vicinity including your own life gets slowly but surely worse in every regard. Perhaps the threat of the punishment that awaits you if you dare to contest such a fate?
Being eaten by wolves. Having your head bashed in by a rival war party. Pretty much any given day in the life of a pre-modern man. On feast days Russian peasants used to get drunk and beat each other senseless for fun, and then go home and beat their wives. This is just "words are violence" but right-wing.
Actually none of what you describes strikes me as a fraction as unpleasant as the life of the average person a few centuries ago, which is probably why humanity collectively abandoned that lifestyle as soon as it was materially feasible. "A job you hate" is not fun but it's probably more fun than starving to death because there was a bad frost and the crops all died.
As for "everything slowly but surely getting worse in every regard" idk what specifically you have in mind but most right-wing complaints about everything getting worse are just tautological complaints that everything is getting less right-wing which naturally isn't convincing to anyone who doesn't already buy into all right-wing premises.
All this has happened before, and will happen again.
It hasn't. Cyclical theories of history were always bullshit, though they may have been facially plausible in 1800 . Humanity is in entirely uncharted territory. The past offers no lessons, because it actually is different this time. Modern people aren't 16th century peasants. They aren't even 20th century proletarians.
All of the "weak men strong times" stuff, the idea that the stultifying atmosphere of modernity will ultimately lead to some great revolt for the restoration of meaning, virtue, whatever, none of it has any contact with reality. Angsting about meaning is itself a luxury available to the excessively wealthy, as everyone is in modern developed countries by western standards. Approximately nobody is going to forsake material comfort to embark on some great vitalist crusade, because material comfort is what most people actually care about first and foremost. Even people who are "struggling" today live like kings compared to the average person 100 years ago, let alone 200.
It would take a total collapse of industrial civilization to produce the global warlordism that you dream of, and that's possible, though I don't think it's very likely.
I don't even know what "we can totally be post-industrial and back to virility and violence" would actually even look like in practice. Like a based fascist party takes over the US tomorrow and then, what, invades Mexico for fun? Resurrects gladiatorial combat? Nukes China?
I remember when right-wing twitter personality Alaric the Barbarian made a post about how young men need GREATNESS and ADVENTURE and should not settle for the drudgery of living in suburban Indianopolis and someone reasonably said yeah posting photos of Greek statues and larping as a Germanic warlord is cool and everything but what actually are you concretely suggesting people do and he replied uhhh run for dogcatcher.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
All that stuff is good, but none of it can really replace the visceral knowledge that you are directly responsible for keeping yourself and your family alive, which was reality for the vast majority of men for the vast majority of history, but no longer.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
“There is an epidemic amongst men in this country,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist who helped organize the call, told The Hill.
The "masculinity crisis" is probably down mostly to the traditional foundations of masculine identity, what distinguished it fundamentally from femininity going back several thousand years at least, e.g being physically powerful and being good at killing people/animals are less and less relevant than ever in industrial and post-industrial society and are only going to become more so.
Probably not actually "fixable" short of a Kaczsynskian collapse of civilization and why all proposed solutions whether they be left-wing "build a positive masculinity" stuff or right-wing "retvrn" will fail.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
This one made me laugh.
My daughter is 4. I imagine her twenty years later being disgusted by the betahood of Western whites, somehow avoiding the trap of burning coal, and marrying a based Eastern European, Russian, or Chinese dude and living in those kinds of countries happily ever after.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Love you too.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Just paying the guys in that Kamala ad to read a random selection of themotte.org comments out loud with no alterations would have been much more viscerally repulsive normie-scaring than what they actually did.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Doubt it, the following (calling them racist, sexist, homophobic, islamophobic and implying "some" of them were irredeemable) was just too juicy to pass up.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I don't believe there was some smaller number she could have used that would have failed to inspire the same reaction her actual comments did. It was just the usage of "Trump supporters" and "deplorables" in the same sentence which made for a great soundbite. About comparable to Mitt Romney's "47%" remark.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
So if she had said "1/3" surely there would have been no complaining and right-wingers wouldn't have ridden the "THEY CALLED TRUMP SUPPORTERS DEPLORABLES" hobby horse for the next several years.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
"Basket of deplorables" was such an anodyne remark. Especially since she hedged it by admitting she was being "grossly generalistic" and then went out of her way to clarify Not All Trump Supporters. And then proceeded to backpedal even further almost immediately and apologize for saying even that much. "Some of my opponent's supporters are bad" is probably near the mildest sentiment a politician running for office can express without total rhetorical capitulation.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
The difference is the left being weird is already priced in and has been for centuries, while the right's whole schtick is supposed to be that they're the normal people party defending normal people who just wanna be left alone from degenerate leftist freaks, so the left gets a lot more mileage out of pointing out the tradcath/nazi frog/yarvinite/etc. fringes of the right who want to reverse the French Revolution or whatever. Especially since Trump's VP pick has significantly closer ties to those circles than your average right-wing pol, even if it's overstated for propaganda purposes.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
You allow more guns, you get more gun crimes, including against the politicians that allowed it. If it was practically impossible for private citizens to purchase firearms in the United States, Donald Trump almost certainly wouldn't have almost gotten shot in the head last week.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
"You guys" meaning the category of right-wingers he wishes would take violent terroristic action, using the specific example of mass-killing prominent antifa figures, a category he presumably identifies with (or else why would he be mad they're not doing terrorism?).
A few replies down he says that Anders Breivik made "a fair effort" so it's fair to say he's pro-mass shooting in principle but takes issue with its practice. Real right-wing terrorism never been tried.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Right-wingers have been doing this cope for decades. Does anybody remember "Generation Zyklon"?
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
You guys do terrorist attacks all the time though. Every couple months one of you ODs on 2016 /pol/ memes and shoots up a synagogue or a mosque or a crowd full of blacks and Mexicans.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I said "almost"
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
It's debatable whether the "sex recession" is even real. Recent data doesn't show the same kind of numbers that made people on the internet freak out in 2018. If it is real, it doesn't appear to be a problem of men in particular, since women report similar, and sometimes higher rates of no-sex. The idea that an increasingly small minority of men are exercising some kind of sexual monopoly appears to have little to no basis in reality.
men have always been the disposable gender
This is an old redpill bromide but not really true. In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
...Is to obviously discard any information that could be contrary to your assertion.
What information? Do you disagree with the statement that the general opinion of pre-modern thinkers was that women were inferior to men? Can you find any such figures who disagreed? Maybe you can, I'm sure there were a handful, but they're going to be vastly outnumbered by those who held the contrary position. Mary is a goddess*. She is inimitable. The fact that according to Christian mythology she was once a mortal woman is irrelevant to the role she actually occupies in existing religious practice. She should be compared to her fellow divinities, not mortal men, and she is certainly inferior to God the Father and to her own son. Having warrior and scholar goddesses didn't stop the Greeks from pacing such onerous restrictions on their women that it surprised their own contemporaries. The divine and human spheres are different, and the reverence of female divinities says little more about the role of women in actual existing human society than the frequency of incest in stories of the gods says something about the acceptability of incest between actual flesh and blood human beings.
It's the only way the species can continue. I ... I can't think of anything more prestigious.
Necessary doesn't equal prestigious. Actually it often indicates the opposite, since the mundane and commonplace is rarely exalted.
*Yes I know it's not latria it's dulia etc. etc.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I know it's ackshually dulia but if you don't assume Catholic doctrine is true, from an anthropological perspective Mary clearly occupies the role of a goddess in the religion.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention
Children really require much less attention than WEIRDos think they do. Historically you could mostly ignore your babies between feedings. And once they becomes ambulatory you can just let them do whatever pretty much except when they have to do work around the house or in the fields. They'll probably be fine, horrifying as most moderns find the prospect. High child mortality was due to illness which pre-modern mothering was powerless to prevent, no matter how attentive or caring, not due to kids wandering off and getting eaten by bears.
This is still the case in a lot of undeveloped countries, or at least it was a few decades ago. I've talked to people who grew up in Latin America in the 70s but essentially lived pre-modern peasant existences and described parenting as being very hands-off.
Like what does a modern "neglectful" mother do? She probably lets her kid eat whatever, doesn't take him to the doctor, doesn't buy him new clothes, lets him go wherever he wants with whoever he wants whenever he wants. None of these were factors in the pre-modern world (everybody was eating the same thing, nobody was going to the doctor for yearly checkups, everybody wore the same clothes all the time) except for the last one which would only result in death at the margins.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Men and women are both created in the image of God.
Maybe, but to what extent? Augustine believed the woman was not as much the Image of God as the man. Aristotle said without much qualification that woman was inferior to man.
Women historically had been protected or privileged over men in things likely to result in death like drowning on a sinking ship
This actually isn't really true. Someone linked the wikipedia page for "women and children first" which makes clear this is not some ancient code of conduct but a rather recent 19th century phenomenon, observed only sporadically. Men tended to fare better in shipwrecks, the Titanic being the glaring exception, because they were better swimmers.
or serving in combat.
The idea that being exempted from combat is a privilege is itself a pretty modern one. For a very long time bearing arms was one of, if not the highest honor. Free men could bear arms, not slaves or women. Probably the oldest conception of what it means to "be a man" is to be a great warrior who can kill a lot of people.
"Where's all that 'male privilege' when it's time to get drafted?" is a complaint that belongs to the post-modern and especially post-industrial era where warfare has been stripped of all the glory and honor that historically attended it, and been reduced to merely an unpleasant duty not dissimilar from digging ditches or pulling wagons.
Occasional woman through history who have fought as soldiers or warriors, whether disguised as men or otherwise, tend to draw praise or at least neutral curiosity, while men who took on the role of a woman with regards to child-rearing or other tasks assigned to the female sphere were viewed as worthy of derision at best.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Mary is a goddess, it's not really comparable.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Healthy women have deep-seated, base, mammalian urges to reproduce and nourish healthy offspring. It is hardwired in them to feel pleasure through these behaviors. The bond a mother has with her children and how they give great meaning to her life is a story in every culture in existence.
A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.
Women are forsaking these genetic behaviors for what reason? For whose benefit?
Cuz they don't feel like it, I guess? Really nobody is forcing women not to have kids. It's not a matter of it being too expensive or anything. You can be flat broke in a western country and your kids will have an infinitely more comfortable existence than those of the peasant woman in 1312 who popped out twelve children. If women really want to have kids, they can, it's not hard.
The ancients had a pretty fatalistic view of history. They tended to view themselves as degraded versions of their ancestors, hence the stories of bygone golden ages. The idea of eternal progress is largely a Christian one. Furthermore the life of the average Roman was closer to the life of an Egyptian 1000 years earlier or a medieval 1000 years later than any of them are to the life of the average US citizen in 2024. It really is different this time.
Obviously modern civilization will not last forever, just because nothing does, whether it degrades into something resembling a past state or advances into something else. But that doesn't really make the fate of the Romans or the Turks instructive.
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