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I'm flirting with a rather incendiary view.
Over the COVID era and the recent excessive developments in the LGBT movement, I've been looking into radical feminist worldview where my gripes with a lot of society overlaps with some of theirs. At least, a section of theirs. I can't help but think that they are at least partially correct in their analysis of gender dynamics, regardless of the solutions they purport. I also agree with them that men are by default degenerates that need tons of rigorous external tempering to get right. And that access to porn is a bad idea, I've personally seen what crippling porn addiction can do to a man. Now I don't buy into the rest of the grift attempting to promote what they regard as feminine features in men, and indeed such attempts at social engineering can be pretty disastrous. I watched this video last night about what it means to be a man in a sedentary, urbanite lifestyle that doesn't really key into our more primal instincts like before, say, the Second World War. A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis. Combine with this the growing wealth inequality. The consumption of various media that bring to life our escapist fantasies across all genres like high fantasy or superheroes or science fiction or even highly romanticised high school dramas, actually serves to remind them exactly how mundane our life really is. Going forward, I think it'll only get worse as it festers with no easy solutions. Worse still, we're pursuing the wrong solutions by regurgitating the myth that all behaviour is socialised and not evolutionary, that we could get men to "unlearn" masculinity and "learn" femininity. In the end, such attempts will not only push the rejects over the edge, it might also risk creating more rejects. In many ways, I see Tyler Durdan as the "proto-red pill" media in how the persona gives the rejects what they desire and giving them an opportunity to pursue hightened competition in dominating in actual fights. The more woke the culture gets, and the more progressives freak out over the "red pill media" gaining traction and blame it as the source of "male entitlement" rather than a symptom of something a bit more complicated, the more these rejects' perception of society will overlap with the red pill crowd's. I realise the second part of my comment seems completely contradictory to what I'd said in the beginning, but what I'm trying to say is that radfems are correct in their analysis that the "degenerate phase" is the default phase of men and it requires significant external pressures to correct. Part of the problem could be that young boys being coddled might potentially give way to the mentality that life is a template where a series of events fall into place like they're a given like so: school -> girlfriend -> college -> job -> success. But if the habit of actively working towards your every goal isn't imbibed into you since a very young age, once reality confronts you, you become a doomer and just give up like you could do nothing about it. Like you were just born in the wrong household/class/society/whatever. I don't think the mainstream media is ever going to address this head on without being bogged down by what goes within the overton window of the culture war.
I know its a rather chaotic hodge podge stream of thoughts, but I hope I made sense in getting my point across.
It's not a secret I have a strong dislike of radical feminism and its theory, to put it mildly. The feminist theory of 'patriarchy' (I know other people like to use patriarchy to mean other things) is wrong, and this includes the idea that men are 'default degenerates'. I guess I also am disagreeing with many other commenters here too, but in a milder form.
Men are not inherently degenerate. Men are inherently risk-takers, driven and ambitious compared to women. Men need a proactive 'purpose' in a way women do not. Part of this is the male social role - masculinity is determined by a man's ability to protect and provide, but of course there is a innate biological element to it. This drive that men have can go in any number of directions, good or bad, productive or degenerate. But given that humans are, on average, pro-social creatures that generally prefer to cooperate, this drive tends towards good and productive. If the natural state of men is degenerate, then how does civilisation exist? Given that men literally built civilisation, at the very least in the literal physical sense.
The problem arises when society fails to provide young men at large with a pro-social way to harness their drive, which has to indicate a systematic failure with society, given that I believe the natural tendency is to be pro-social. If men can't be or aren't allowed to proactive within the society, they will 'degenerate'. Men need a sense of identity, a sense of community, a family, to channel their efforts into something productive. Without those things, they're going to just lash out and/or become 'degenerate'. That energy has to go somewhere. The crisis of masculinity is exactly when society fails to provides those things. There is an oft used proverb of dubious "African" origin which describes men pretty well here - the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. It should really not be surprising that the men who are the most 'degenerate' historically have been men who have existed on the fringes of society.
I think men are violent by only insofar that men are agentic. I don't think it's really possible to separate men's propensity towards violence from their tendency to exert agency in other ways and in other parts of societies. Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women. It is the same drive that causes men to commit violence that also causes them to compete with other man for status, climb the corporate ladder, engage in physical labour. So it is not so much that men are violent per se, but rather that men are and expected to be agentic beings which necessarily includes the domain of violence.
Related to this, I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.
Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599
"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."
In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.
"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."
Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full
"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."
I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund
This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=AsgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA210&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=nine%20out%20of%20every%2010&f=false
"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235720134_Who_are_the_Heroes_Characteristics_of_People_Who_Rescue_Others#:%7E:text=It%20was%20found%20that%20males,%2C%20violence%20and%20traffic%20accidents
When it comes to men there's very much a tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.
And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.
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