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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.
I can feel the emotional appeal of this kind of "men in trouble" narrative, but I don't think it matches empirical reality all that well. Consider one of Fight Club's most famous quotes:
Sounds like a real crisis of masculinity. But where's the data? Male suicides per capita have been largely static or declining in almost all Western countries including the US. Reported mental health issues have increased, but this increase is driven more or less exclusively by worsening mental health in women; male mental health as measured by referrals has been relatively stable over the last twenty years - link to some UK data here.
I feel like this pattern is borne out among my friends and acquaintances too. I'm in my 30s, and I know quite a few women who have had serious mental health crises (usually associated with high stress jobs, especially in combination with parenting), whereas my male friends have mostly thrived, and now are happily ensconced in their careers and having kids. Quite a few of them had rocky spells in their 20s, but that's a normal part of growing up, especially for men where risk-taking is more common.
I don't know why so many right-wing Zoomers are obsessed with the evils of porn. I don't think porn is necessarily a great thing, in the same way that watching loads of TV isn't ideal for you, but I've yet to see anyone blow up their life with (legal) porn, whereas I've known people blow up their lives with alcohol, opiates, cocaine, gambling, and reckless driving, none of which are exactly new (though the opiates are getting worse). And when I look at subreddits like /r/loveafterporn, I'm much more inclined to see the person with the mental illness as being the controlling/BPD or psychodrama-seeking wife who is treating her husband's porn use as an existential threat to the relationship, rather than the poor guy who's jacking off to legal teens behind his wife's back.
More broadly, I think some of the male Zoomer doomerism (Zoomerism?) is just a matter of people looking for a romantic narrative around their gender generation. Which is fine, Palahniuk was doing it for GenX in Fight Club. But absent supporting data, I'm inclined to view it as a narrative rather than fact.
OBJECTION! Break it down by age group:
https://sprc.org/scope/age
Suicide among the ages of 15-34 demographic has increased, if there's an overall decrease it is because rates among 50+ demos (i.e. boomers) is decreasing.
But young people killing themselves is, ceteris paribus, MUCH more concerning than older people offing themselves. It should be extremely alarming if there is any significant increase in suicide rates among teens and young adults. And there is. This cannot be shrugged off.
The CDC confirms that the AGE ADJUSTED suicide rate has increased in the past 20 years!
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db309.htm
INCREASED 30 fucking percent.
THERE'S the data.
/images/16632506901989577.webp
Eyeballing it, it looks like it went from 14/100k to 18/100k. 30%, yes, but doesn't seem that big overall.
This is a stat that should not be increasing in a healthy nation.
4 extra lives per 100k, just gone. With all the various second-order effects, especially on friends and family, that must imply.
And consider that this stat is just successful suicide attempts, so doesn't capture all the people who might be contemplating or having made unsuccessful attempts.
I defy anyone to explain this as a positive or neutral indicator.
While the loss of life is tragic, in the long term we're optimizing for mental resilience.
Interesting point if only because it brings us into a debate over whether it requires greater mental fortitude to actually commit a suicide or to continue living with whatever pain lead to the ideation in the first place. Is suicide, in most cases, actually a case of mental 'weakness?'
Pointing out, perhaps, that women have higher rates of (many) mental illnesses and yet a lower suicide rate than men, which is usually ascribed to men choosing much more effective means of killing themselves and, likewise, actually doing it with full intent of succeeding.
While an interesting debate, I'm instead going to rephrase:
While the loss of life is tragic, in the long term we're optimizing for not being stressed to the point of suicide by the demands of modern society. Whether that's through us becoming stronger or us becoming weaker is, I think, immaterial to the widely-agreed on fact that it's better if your population isn't suiciding in droves.
No. We're not selecting for that. Because modern society is changing too fast for selection pressures to react.
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