I used to work for a short time as an IT teacher. The kids there were wonderful, even the troublemakers weren't that bad. What struck me is that clearly for some of the boys I seemed to be the only male figure they could related to in their lives: direct, available, happy to just be there and listen, sharing a common passion. They would come to me very often to talk about anything, not just computers. The younger ones also tried to hug me, which of course I had to stop, which is a pity as I believe these kids should be hugged as much as they need, obviously not necessarily by me.
Relationship with fathers are not easy even at the best of times, there are a bunch of factors that complicate things. Somewhat ironically, having a relationship with a stranger can be much easier and liberating. It's a bit like talking about your problems with a barman.
I have much easier relationship with other son's peers than him. And I love him to no end and we do lots of hugs and are generally close.
But your own kids have seemingly this special superpower to get you pissed off to extreme levels (both for men and women) that no other situation in adult life can ever come close to. We as adults learnt the easy or hard way some form of basic empathy required when communicating with others, while kids lack it. Like doing 20x the same thing that pisses you off while ignoring your kind calm words - where else do you experience it, in your face, with big grin on top of that?
I've see it many times - people who are otherwise calm and relaxed get turned to 11 in seconds by their offsprings doing something stupid, arrogant or dangerous. Bonus points if its any form of unprovoked aggression towards other kids, especially younger/weaker.
I have lived in a country where communication between adults and minors is not frowned upon in the slightest and so I have been a male mentor for a bunch of girls in an orphanage for many years.
(Once I perish, no one is going to remember any of my business projects, clean codebases and unit test coverage. But that little hobby of mine - oh, these deliverables are gonna last).
Anyways. Happy to be a mentor to teenagers but it seems to me that in the US that's impossible on multiple levels.
Whole bunch of factors involved in this which HN is ill-equipped to deal with. But I think paranoia about "grooming" should probably be counted as a factor as well. A lot of people are going to be suspicious about an adult man who wants to hang out with children. So everything gets tangled up and shut down in the name of safeguarding.
If you ask the question "what proportion of girls and young women have a male mentor", the problem becomes even more obvious.
Yeah, this is also a huge part of it. Society has made it incredibly dangerous for any man to be around children, because a single allegation is enough to destroy a life.
In fairness, a single act of abuse can wreck someone's mental health for their whole life as well. It's a difficult problem that requires lots of human effort.
Abusers are not evenly distributed over all men, so the target group is not "men" but "men who we knew were probably sketchy anyways, and some we unfortunately didn't know about".
This article is based on this https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4451-1.html which is NOT a peer reviewed study but a "research report", which doesn't mean it's wrong or false or fake, but it means that you have to read it with extreme precautions.
Nothing in there has been double-checked by reviewers :/
I assume you're talking about the "would you rather encounter a man or a bear?" thought experiment. I do think some people (presumably men) respond in disturbing ways to the women's responses that choose the bear. But I think choosing the bear is questionable at best, and involves ignorance and bad faith. I think, even if I'm wrong and the better answer is "the bear", there was more room for discussion and reflection so that the future answer is "the man". I guess such a simplistic hypothetical is not the best way to get mutually distrusting parties to come to an understanding.
You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women. It's completely orthogonal.
People in power want you to have this "I don't have what I want because this other minority takes it from me", but it's simply wrong, even though this argument seems to capture the mind of simple-minded people.
We don't have what we want because we're in a ruthless capitalist society, directed by stupidoes like Trump and Musk
> You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women. It's completely orthogonal.
Knee-jerk much? How on earth did you get "put down women" from what I wrote?
> People in power want you to have this "I don't have what I want because this other minority takes it from me", but it's simply wrong, even though this argument seems to capture the mind of simple-minded people.
Where did you read that in the tiny little snippet I wrote?
Let me be clear, so that there is no misunderstanding -
1. Men dominate the bottom of almost every ranking. This is just another ranking.
Maybe before we try to fix this specific ranking, we should be asking ourselves why men are at the bottom in every ranking.
> You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women
The reverse of this has been what's been dominating for a decade. Anything pro-men (or even just neutral) can be accused of being anti-woman, which creates a chilling effect as female-dominated HR departments can make life very difficult for men looking to provide for their families.
Absolutely untrue. Feminism has NEVER been against men. Only people who half-ass reading about feminism, and rely too much on stupid far-right videos on TikTok believe that
To be fair, no one person or even group defines "feminism", or "masculinity", or anything of the sort. It's a big cafeteria, and there's a lot of food to be flung around.
Discrimination along protected attributes such as gender would be highly illegal though, so no doubt you’d have tons of evidence to present beyond “gossipy HR ladies”.
I didn't mention gossip at all. Are you pretending to quote something I never said, to just perfectly illustrate the bad faith nonsense that is ever-injected into even simple conversations about this topic?
It might be worth Googling James Damore as an early example of this chilling effect.
> to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women
For sure you don't have to put women as a whole down. But society and media these days are generally dominated by the most toxic voices. Toxic feminism is a big issue, that's what we have to put down for this particular purpose.
I think there is a big problem around "man things" and "girl things" that has cost a lot to society, the women scientists who thought it wasn't for them, the men teachers and nurses who thought the same, and all the knowledge kept from people seen as being the wrong gender for it (cooking, cleaning, car repair ...) and i think the solution and a necessary step for the advancement of humanity is the recognition that the importance of sex is overinflated in society, and that a lot of things attributed to sex are actually social constructs, like gender.
In other words i think a post gender society would allow the distribution of occupations and knowledge to better match the populations skills and interest and children having access to better mentors.
yes i remember Contrapoins patreon only video about "mommy and daddy politics" where she says conservatives imagine the government as a patriarchal father figure
I don't have an answer to that, I just want to highlight how blurred the line is between what the community tolerates and what it doesn't. There is a thread with a similar discussion, but somehow the one that comes from fiction didn't trigger the same reaction as this article, which deals with science: Arthur Conan Doyle explored men’s mental health through Sherlock Holmes | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46068015
> This is not right and it's making HN a worse place.
I think so too, but It's not a strong opinion from me. Some things are offtopic. The problem is that there are no other good discussion places to discuss this. Maybe it's because such topics attract a lot of people with strong opinions who don't engage in good-faith discussion (I'm not talking about you or that one guy).
> One guy (234000 karma) doesn't.
I think one guy flagging is not enough for article to be [Flagged].
If I'm mistaken, the mods can clarify how many flags does it take to bury a post, and if there are people with special flagging rights or if karma plays a role in flagging.
One of the saddest things I heard was a young kid say he's never heard the word masculinity unless it was paired with the word toxic before it. With that kind of attitude is this any wonder?
It is difficult to get society to accept that maybe it's time to balance the constant public and media validation of women with some public and media validation of men.
Disney has seen a bunch of Marvel flops since they switched the focus to Marvel properties that target women (they've since publicly indicated a course correction on this).
Take a bunch of IP that primarily males are interested in (super-heros), water it down so that it's less male focused, and then find that neither males nor females are interested.
One of my most crank opinions is that superhero stuff is (a) for kids, (b) inherently a bit fascist even if you make it textually anti-fascist, and (c) ultimately like popcorn, something that should be only a small part of a more varied diet.
Now, that's not a terribly strong opinion, and I know it'll make a lot of people mad, but I have personally got fed up with the oversupply of superhero stuff and believe that there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like. Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions. Probably the problem is that audience has now fragmented, moving the genders further apart.
> One of my most crank opinions is that superhero stuff is (a) for kids,
You must not have seen The Boys (Prime Video) :-)
>
> ... there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like.
Maybe has the same problem that changing super-hero movies has - you make less money.
The movie Killers with k-Something-Heigl, that guy from The Butterfly Effect and Tom Selleck was a rom-com that I enjoyed, but AFAIK it wasn't as popular with females as standard rom-coms, and wasn't as popular with males as action movies.
> Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions.
That's not why people see movies, though; I might find that entertaining, and you might find that entertaining, but it's a pretty hard sell if if doesn't make enough money.
> It is difficult to get society to accept that maybe it's time to balance the constant public and media validation of women with some public and media validation of men.
But its up to men to do the work. Women needed decades and decades to figure out what it meant to be a women and how to get what they wanted. They took the time and effort to organise, resulting in suffragettes and women's clubs and feminism and all that. Men could so far skip this all and just coast by on being the default. And now we're stuck with the situation that there are barely any male role models (except incredibly vile and toxic ones like Tate and Peterson), and trying to figure out what it means to be a man in a world that is rapidly changing, where men no longer can just be the breadwinner.
Not only that, but women are also demanding more from men (more emotional maturity, more support with chores and child raising, having a fully developed personality). And too many men seem either incapable or unwilling to change, preferring to lash out against 'woke' and voting for extreme rightwing politics that aims to put women back in the kitchen.
What work would this be? Any organisation to the benefit of males would instantly be shutdown.
What do you have in mind that won't get backlash? I mean, after all, even just a quantitative study has elicited, in this thread, much anti-male sentiment in the form of strawmen.
So I am curious how you see male-advocacy groups proceeding in a manner that has no or limited backlash.
Yeah “society” had millennia of that. It’s quite telling that perhaps less than a decade of taking women seriously led to a a vitriol filled backlash full of Tates, Trumps and the manosphere.
It’s also quite telling that your main complaint is Disney superhero movies. It’s difficult to think of something more juvenile and unimportant.
> It’s quite telling that perhaps less than a decade of taking women seriously led to a a vitriol filled backlash full of Tates, Trumps and the manosphere.
1. It's been about 30 years since the "strong independent women" meme first started in popular media.
2. Where is the vitriol and backlash in my post to which you are referring to?
Your response looks like a canned one that can be inserted into any discussion about males.
> It's been about 30 years since the "strong independent women" meme first started in popular media.
Much longer than that. While there was significant pre-war feminism, it really took off in the 1960s. Perhaps what people mean is a sort of post-"Bechdel test" world, where people will be sharply criticized if they make a piece of media that only has (properly characterized) male characters.
I see it as a co-existence problem. Trying to insist on male-only spaces or male-only values isn't going to fly any more. A lot of traditional masculinity is framed around being "not a woman", an inherently denigratory concept. It needs a programme that is (a) positive and (b) a concept of personhood and value that's not tied to gender.
lol title IX was only in the 70s. Post bechdel whatever, it was only a handful of years ago that women could finally speak out en masse about not being sexually assaulted on film and TV sets.
My friend’s son was four and had to have it explicitly explained to him that men can be scientists, too! Based on all the books he’d been read and other media, he assumed only women were scientists.
My son wants to be female because every super hero that's interesting to him, it's female (he is 4).
We learned to coast with this, but I did complain about the lack of cool male characters for young kids: the female ones seems to be better curated and more abundant
So we can all be schooled in the important manly things such as the '6 Card Games Every Many Should Know' or 'The Dale Carnegie That Will Instantly Improve Your Relationships'?
No, so we can all be schooled in "Why Every Man Should Be Strong"[0], "How to Set a Table"[1], "9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches"[2] or "Win the War on Debt: 80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money"[3]. You used probably the weakest reason to discredit the idea of men improving themselves. That's not a "good" manly behavior.
I think there might be some of that happening on YouTube, James from Speeed[0] (who used to be in Donut Media before) has been mixing the usual car-related content with wholesome masculinity stuff, and I feel that should be the future of making masculinity be seen less as "being tough" to being a resilient, dependable, empathetic person.
I don't think his channel is the only one, it's the only one I'm exposed to so kinda tells me there should be quite a bit more of those around, hopefully that way of masculinity gets traction instead of Andrew Tate-esque buffoons.
> You used probably the weakest reason to discredit the idea of men improving themselves
Those examples you posted that actually are good would also seem to me to be universally important for everyone across all genders. '80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money' seems useful for everyone, and while I doubt a lot of people are going to need '9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches' immediately, what makes that specifically 'manly' and not good for anyone either going seriously outdoors or prepping.
Yes, I picked those examples deliberately, but I don't see why any of the qualitatively good ones are 'manly'.
> Those examples you posted that actually are good would also seem to me to be universally important for everyone across all genders. '80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money' seems useful for everyone, and while I doubt a lot of people are going to need '9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches' immediately, what makes that specifically 'manly' and not good for anyone either going seriously outdoors or prepping.
For the same reason "Be strong and independent" is a message targeted only at women, even though it can easily double as a universal message.
> Yes, I picked those examples deliberately, but I don't see why any of the qualitatively good ones are 'manly'.
What was your goal? What was your argument? I said that we need men to be more manly (strong and able to do things that are historically considered to be done by men) and you said that those can be also done by women? I would consider woman able to change a tire, play cards and start fire without matches to be manly. If she wants to, she can of course.
Currently the problem is that we indirectly say to men that being strong is for women and not for men. We say to women "be more manly" and to men "be more womanly", which just perpetuates old cliches, but in reverse.
I think the thread has been a bit derailed in terms of my intention, which was more to point out that I don't feel like the qualities that are mentioned in the original article (mentorship, guidance figures, schoolwork, relationships, future planning) are really represented well by a clickbait website with articles mostly split between 'Top N things you really need to do for X' and things that would be useful to anyone.
I'd even say the 'Get Style', 'Get Strong', 'Get Social' and 'Get Skilled' categories always appear to wander towards (while never approaching) Andrew Tate territory, in terms of their goals.
> Currently the problem is that we indirectly say to men that being strong is for women and not for men. We say to women "be more manly" and to men "be more womanly", which just perpetuates old cliches, but in reverse.
This I agree with, but I don't feel that website is a good example of a role model for the qualities that the original article mentioned were missing.
> I'd even say the 'Get Style', 'Get Strong', 'Get Social' and 'Get Skilled' categories always appear to wander towards (while never approaching) Andrew Tate territory, in terms of their goals.
I agree. Going into "Andrew Tate" territory represents that toxic masculinity for me, it's the far end of spectrum of manliness. But we men don't need to go all the way into absurdity when trying to be more manly. But not all of us are in the same place. Some are too close to unmanly end, some are too close to toxic end. artofmanliness contains articles for both of those people, to move them closer to the center of good manliness (expressed by ideals 'Get Style', 'Get Strong', 'Get Social', 'Get Skilled' and I would add 'Be dependable', 'Be honest').
And being womanly is not an end of spectrum of manliness. Being unmanly (0 of qualities we mentioned, a weak man without style, social or any other skills) is the lowest end of spectrum of manliness.
> This I agree with, but I don't feel that website is a good example of a role model for the qualities that the original article mentioned were missing.
You would have to look more. You have only seen a small sample from each section.
It does feel a bit cruel that we were told to be vulnerable and open, and then when men said we’re lonely got accused of asking other people to fix our problems and that we just needed to deal with it.
Also I don’t think I’d risk being e.g. a teacher - the girls in my high school would casually joke about accusing their teachers of being creeps if they failed a test, etc.
I think one problem we have (always had, but worse now that there are so many more opinions to be exposed to) is that we expect "society's" opinions to be consistent, despite being made up of millions of different people.
Of course there are going to be people telling others to be vulnerable and open, and of course there are also going to be people telling others not to complain because that's dumping their problems on other people.
> we were told to be vulnerable and open, and then when men said we’re lonely got accused of asking other people to fix our problems
The discrimination pendulum swinged the other way. And as with a lot of discrimination, the criticism is in reality aimed at what you are, not what you do. So you will never get it right in the eyes of those critics. On the other hand the roles of men in society are changing and it's not at all clear "to what". "Be a man but don't really be one, it's complicated".
Well we have data showing that people have fewer close friends, men in particular, than in decades past. This used to be what the loneliness epidemic referred to, but somehow it got turned in to being about dating.
I mean, I’m lonely and I’m married. Middle age is a tough time for friendships.
Too many lonely men seem to think that women can and should fix all their problems. That if only they had a relationship all their shit would be over.
While the first step should be to join a hobby club or do some volunteer work or find a sport to do (and definitely not the gym or running or any other solo sport). Just find something where you regularly interact with people, and especially the same people over a longer period of time.
What about their dad’s & uncle’s? Mum’s male friends? I don’t know, external (outside the family) isn’t the only source of “mentorship” and we should stop trying to pretend it is
I don't think it's generally believed that a mentor has to come from outside. In fact, I think it's because mentors coming from close family is not prevalent that pushes these boys and men to find mentors elsewhere.
2. The article is right. Boys without good fathers/mentors are worse off in many ways. Readers, please consider helping Boys and Girls Club, scouting organizations, etc.
all those fellowships and fanboy cultures and follower counts and network and everybody gets all they want to evolve and raise their children to be witty and snappy and vibe with that pan all the chill kids are playing in those pretty red forests nowadays and some researchers found a shortage of male mentors?
is this one of those "we want you" recruiting scarcity tactics?
It started with the paradox of women unhappiness. Which wasnt a paradox at all, fully understood. Yet for some reason 1 political side refused to understand. Ideological blindness.
Then a large amount of $, time, and effort was spent on women to solve this problem, but since they refused to understand the cause. It really was just a boost to women. This shifts men behind. Government intentionally caused this.
Then men needed a role model. Men would need to work extra hard to just come up to parity. But government didnt like the messaging of those role models, so they censored their speech and deplatformed them.
Creating the gap/shortage in role models; but men moved to beyond their control. This new role model became huge. He'd talk for hours upon hours with anyone who would listen.
The people who wanted to censor/deplatform but couldnt. So they publicly killed him.
People are going to misread the article and go off in their own direction but the problem is clearly capitalism. It's always been capitalism. Lower income boys have drastically less access to male mentors than higher income ones and the article even states this.
Low family income means less options. Most of your mentors at a young age are going to come from schooling, which still generally has a gender tilt towards women for multiple reasons. But lower income schools are going to be more resource starved with larger classes and less time for teachers to interact with students individually.
edit: fixed wording to better emphasize what I meant
Low income families skew nonconventional/single parent which fractures the extended family unit, less likely to have uncles etc around to step in as a mentor.
Smaller family sizes over the previous generation have also contributed to this.
I have 9 uncles in total (including all my aunts' partners). My kid has one.
Also, if you grow up in a household that rents (moves often or is surrounded by neighbours who move often), you are less likely to have long term reliable neighbours available to form adult-child relationships with.
Yes lower income boys are hit way harder, but it's not like the issue disappears at the higher end.
> 72 percent of boys from households earning $100,000 or more reported having a male mentor for schoolwork.
> A similar trend appeared regarding relationship advice. Only 45 percent of boys in the lowest income group had a male mentor for relationships. This compares to 67 percent of boys in the highest income group.
Even 30% of rich kids don't have access to a proper male role model, those are terrible numbers!
$100,000 isn't even 'rich' nowdays, that's below middle class especially if we're talking about an actual family unit. I can guarantee that if this research further stratified things into $100-200k, and $200k+ you would see the results continue to improve as people cross the threshold into middle class.
This survey can be seen as comparing people in poverty level income vs everyone else.
A lot of the lower income kids are from single parent homes (which is why they can't cross the $100.000 threshold), those will obviously have less access to a male role model.
If you correct for that the numbers would likely get closer, not further apart.
Yes, sorry, I meant single parent. I don't mean to fight against the idea that income is correlated to the problem, just that "lack of male role models" cannot be reduced to income inequality.
I believe poverty is the natural state of man and I wonder how non-capitalism (= socialism?) makes people rich?
What I think you mean is that equal access to education is a promise of the state that is too often broken.
But then we're talking about incompetence or corruption at the state level, paid for and sustained with your taxes, and you have those problems in socialism, too.
I appreciate this comment creating somewhere for people to discuss flagging. In my ideal HN you wouldn't be down voted but there would be a rigorous comment thread underneath it.
Tbh I do not know but I'm sick and tired of seeing these threads devolve in the most cringe way possible. Tech already has a bad reputation in this respect and HN really isn't helping. And reading some of the comments in this thread that assessment was spot on.
> Tech already has a bad reputation in this respect and HN really isn't helping.
You are part of HN, now is your chance at helping.
Discussion means that you will see opinions that are plainly wrong. That's a good place to argue and present better opinions. If you don't present better opinions, no one will be convinced. If you don't voice your opinions, you might not known that they are wrong or harmful. I've voiced a lot of opinions on HN, which after correcting by others, helped me become a slightly better human.
I used to work for a short time as an IT teacher. The kids there were wonderful, even the troublemakers weren't that bad. What struck me is that clearly for some of the boys I seemed to be the only male figure they could related to in their lives: direct, available, happy to just be there and listen, sharing a common passion. They would come to me very often to talk about anything, not just computers. The younger ones also tried to hug me, which of course I had to stop, which is a pity as I believe these kids should be hugged as much as they need, obviously not necessarily by me.
Relationship with fathers are not easy even at the best of times, there are a bunch of factors that complicate things. Somewhat ironically, having a relationship with a stranger can be much easier and liberating. It's a bit like talking about your problems with a barman.
I have much easier relationship with other son's peers than him. And I love him to no end and we do lots of hugs and are generally close.
But your own kids have seemingly this special superpower to get you pissed off to extreme levels (both for men and women) that no other situation in adult life can ever come close to. We as adults learnt the easy or hard way some form of basic empathy required when communicating with others, while kids lack it. Like doing 20x the same thing that pisses you off while ignoring your kind calm words - where else do you experience it, in your face, with big grin on top of that?
I've see it many times - people who are otherwise calm and relaxed get turned to 11 in seconds by their offsprings doing something stupid, arrogant or dangerous. Bonus points if its any form of unprovoked aggression towards other kids, especially younger/weaker.
"which of course I had to stop".
I want to go back to a world where I can be affectionate toward children without an implication of something more sinister.
Most of the world outside of North America is still this way.
I have lived in a country where communication between adults and minors is not frowned upon in the slightest and so I have been a male mentor for a bunch of girls in an orphanage for many years.
(Once I perish, no one is going to remember any of my business projects, clean codebases and unit test coverage. But that little hobby of mine - oh, these deliverables are gonna last).
Anyways. Happy to be a mentor to teenagers but it seems to me that in the US that's impossible on multiple levels.
Whole bunch of factors involved in this which HN is ill-equipped to deal with. But I think paranoia about "grooming" should probably be counted as a factor as well. A lot of people are going to be suspicious about an adult man who wants to hang out with children. So everything gets tangled up and shut down in the name of safeguarding.
If you ask the question "what proportion of girls and young women have a male mentor", the problem becomes even more obvious.
Yeah, this is also a huge part of it. Society has made it incredibly dangerous for any man to be around children, because a single allegation is enough to destroy a life.
In fairness, a single act of abuse can wreck someone's mental health for their whole life as well. It's a difficult problem that requires lots of human effort.
Some risk of more severe harm vs guaranteed harm on all male population. I'd take the chances
Abusers are not evenly distributed over all men, so the target group is not "men" but "men who we knew were probably sketchy anyways, and some we unfortunately didn't know about".
This article is based on this https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4451-1.html which is NOT a peer reviewed study but a "research report", which doesn't mean it's wrong or false or fake, but it means that you have to read it with extreme precautions.
Nothing in there has been double-checked by reviewers :/
Maybe it’s because boys have been told a literal wild animal is preferable to any of the male adults around
I assume you're talking about the "would you rather encounter a man or a bear?" thought experiment. I do think some people (presumably men) respond in disturbing ways to the women's responses that choose the bear. But I think choosing the bear is questionable at best, and involves ignorance and bad faith. I think, even if I'm wrong and the better answer is "the bear", there was more room for discussion and reflection so that the future answer is "the man". I guess such a simplistic hypothetical is not the best way to get mutually distrusting parties to come to an understanding.
This will not change anytime soon; the "women are wonderful" talk is as relevant as it has ever been.
Regardless of the criteria you choose to establish a ranking, males dominate the bottom of that ranking.
You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women. It's completely orthogonal.
People in power want you to have this "I don't have what I want because this other minority takes it from me", but it's simply wrong, even though this argument seems to capture the mind of simple-minded people.
We don't have what we want because we're in a ruthless capitalist society, directed by stupidoes like Trump and Musk
> You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women. It's completely orthogonal.
Knee-jerk much? How on earth did you get "put down women" from what I wrote?
> People in power want you to have this "I don't have what I want because this other minority takes it from me", but it's simply wrong, even though this argument seems to capture the mind of simple-minded people.
Where did you read that in the tiny little snippet I wrote?
Let me be clear, so that there is no misunderstanding -
1. Men dominate the bottom of almost every ranking. This is just another ranking.
Maybe before we try to fix this specific ranking, we should be asking ourselves why men are at the bottom in every ranking.
> You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women
The reverse of this has been what's been dominating for a decade. Anything pro-men (or even just neutral) can be accused of being anti-woman, which creates a chilling effect as female-dominated HR departments can make life very difficult for men looking to provide for their families.
Absolutely untrue. Feminism has NEVER been against men. Only people who half-ass reading about feminism, and rely too much on stupid far-right videos on TikTok believe that
To be fair, no one person or even group defines "feminism", or "masculinity", or anything of the sort. It's a big cafeteria, and there's a lot of food to be flung around.
Ummm… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto seems pretty overtly against men.
(It’s literally the society for cutting up men)
this is literally a handpicked "misandrist manifesto". This is absolutely not about feminism.
Discrimination along protected attributes such as gender would be highly illegal though, so no doubt you’d have tons of evidence to present beyond “gossipy HR ladies”.
I didn't mention gossip at all. Are you pretending to quote something I never said, to just perfectly illustrate the bad faith nonsense that is ever-injected into even simple conversations about this topic?
It might be worth Googling James Damore as an early example of this chilling effect.
ok so no evidence of highly illegal mass gender based discrimination.
> ok so no evidence of highly illegal mass gender based discrimination.
This seems like a very roundabout way of saying there was no evidence of discrimination against women :-/
Where are you going with this? Because if "no evidence == did not happen", then that's true for the decades prior to the 90s, right?
> to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women
For sure you don't have to put women as a whole down. But society and media these days are generally dominated by the most toxic voices. Toxic feminism is a big issue, that's what we have to put down for this particular purpose.
I think there is a big problem around "man things" and "girl things" that has cost a lot to society, the women scientists who thought it wasn't for them, the men teachers and nurses who thought the same, and all the knowledge kept from people seen as being the wrong gender for it (cooking, cleaning, car repair ...) and i think the solution and a necessary step for the advancement of humanity is the recognition that the importance of sex is overinflated in society, and that a lot of things attributed to sex are actually social constructs, like gender.
In other words i think a post gender society would allow the distribution of occupations and knowledge to better match the populations skills and interest and children having access to better mentors.
A lot of people on bluesky have very good "wow, everything is gender now" observations about just how stupid US politics has become.
yes i remember Contrapoins patreon only video about "mommy and daddy politics" where she says conservatives imagine the government as a patriarchal father figure
Why is this flagged?!
dang, mods, this is getting ridiculous. A couple of people are deciding what the community is discussing. Something needs to change.
I don't have an answer to that, I just want to highlight how blurred the line is between what the community tolerates and what it doesn't. There is a thread with a similar discussion, but somehow the one that comes from fiction didn't trigger the same reaction as this article, which deals with science: Arthur Conan Doyle explored men’s mental health through Sherlock Holmes | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46068015
>the community tolerates and what it doesn't.
But it's not the community, is it? It's literally a couple of people that can flag and bury a post. One or two, not more than that needed.
Because it takes like three people to flag a link or comment into the void.
Because HN is about technology, and original link is about social issues. Tech-oriented people are famously bad at dealing with social issues.
downvoting is one thing. flagging is another.
the HN community wants to discuss this issue (37 points / 65 comments). One guy (234000 karma) doesn't.
This is not right and it's making HN a worse place.
> This is not right and it's making HN a worse place.
I think so too, but It's not a strong opinion from me. Some things are offtopic. The problem is that there are no other good discussion places to discuss this. Maybe it's because such topics attract a lot of people with strong opinions who don't engage in good-faith discussion (I'm not talking about you or that one guy).
> One guy (234000 karma) doesn't.
I think one guy flagging is not enough for article to be [Flagged].
One or two people flagging is enough.
If I'm mistaken, the mods can clarify how many flags does it take to bury a post, and if there are people with special flagging rights or if karma plays a role in flagging.
One of the saddest things I heard was a young kid say he's never heard the word masculinity unless it was paired with the word toxic before it. With that kind of attitude is this any wonder?
It is difficult to get society to accept that maybe it's time to balance the constant public and media validation of women with some public and media validation of men.
Disney has seen a bunch of Marvel flops since they switched the focus to Marvel properties that target women (they've since publicly indicated a course correction on this).
Take a bunch of IP that primarily males are interested in (super-heros), water it down so that it's less male focused, and then find that neither males nor females are interested.
> Marvel
One of my most crank opinions is that superhero stuff is (a) for kids, (b) inherently a bit fascist even if you make it textually anti-fascist, and (c) ultimately like popcorn, something that should be only a small part of a more varied diet.
Now, that's not a terribly strong opinion, and I know it'll make a lot of people mad, but I have personally got fed up with the oversupply of superhero stuff and believe that there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like. Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions. Probably the problem is that audience has now fragmented, moving the genders further apart.
> One of my most crank opinions is that superhero stuff is (a) for kids,
You must not have seen The Boys (Prime Video) :-)
>
> ... there should be more movies that mixed-gender adult audiences would like. Maybe find a way of doing an action-romcom that men will like.
Maybe has the same problem that changing super-hero movies has - you make less money.
The movie Killers with k-Something-Heigl, that guy from The Butterfly Effect and Tom Selleck was a rom-com that I enjoyed, but AFAIK it wasn't as popular with females as standard rom-coms, and wasn't as popular with males as action movies.
> Characters that have human level ability and must find human level solutions.
That's not why people see movies, though; I might find that entertaining, and you might find that entertaining, but it's a pretty hard sell if if doesn't make enough money.
> It is difficult to get society to accept that maybe it's time to balance the constant public and media validation of women with some public and media validation of men.
But its up to men to do the work. Women needed decades and decades to figure out what it meant to be a women and how to get what they wanted. They took the time and effort to organise, resulting in suffragettes and women's clubs and feminism and all that. Men could so far skip this all and just coast by on being the default. And now we're stuck with the situation that there are barely any male role models (except incredibly vile and toxic ones like Tate and Peterson), and trying to figure out what it means to be a man in a world that is rapidly changing, where men no longer can just be the breadwinner.
Not only that, but women are also demanding more from men (more emotional maturity, more support with chores and child raising, having a fully developed personality). And too many men seem either incapable or unwilling to change, preferring to lash out against 'woke' and voting for extreme rightwing politics that aims to put women back in the kitchen.
> But its up to men to do the work.
What work would this be? Any organisation to the benefit of males would instantly be shutdown.
What do you have in mind that won't get backlash? I mean, after all, even just a quantitative study has elicited, in this thread, much anti-male sentiment in the form of strawmen.
So I am curious how you see male-advocacy groups proceeding in a manner that has no or limited backlash.
Yeah “society” had millennia of that. It’s quite telling that perhaps less than a decade of taking women seriously led to a a vitriol filled backlash full of Tates, Trumps and the manosphere.
It’s also quite telling that your main complaint is Disney superhero movies. It’s difficult to think of something more juvenile and unimportant.
> It’s quite telling that perhaps less than a decade of taking women seriously led to a a vitriol filled backlash full of Tates, Trumps and the manosphere.
1. It's been about 30 years since the "strong independent women" meme first started in popular media.
2. Where is the vitriol and backlash in my post to which you are referring to?
Your response looks like a canned one that can be inserted into any discussion about males.
> It's been about 30 years since the "strong independent women" meme first started in popular media.
Much longer than that. While there was significant pre-war feminism, it really took off in the 1960s. Perhaps what people mean is a sort of post-"Bechdel test" world, where people will be sharply criticized if they make a piece of media that only has (properly characterized) male characters.
I see it as a co-existence problem. Trying to insist on male-only spaces or male-only values isn't going to fly any more. A lot of traditional masculinity is framed around being "not a woman", an inherently denigratory concept. It needs a programme that is (a) positive and (b) a concept of personhood and value that's not tied to gender.
lol title IX was only in the 70s. Post bechdel whatever, it was only a handful of years ago that women could finally speak out en masse about not being sexually assaulted on film and TV sets.
Co-existence indeed.
My friend’s son was four and had to have it explicitly explained to him that men can be scientists, too! Based on all the books he’d been read and other media, he assumed only women were scientists.
My son wants to be female because every super hero that's interesting to him, it's female (he is 4). We learned to coast with this, but I did complain about the lack of cool male characters for young kids: the female ones seems to be better curated and more abundant
Sites like artofmanliness.com seem to be more and more needed in today's world.
So we can all be schooled in the important manly things such as the '6 Card Games Every Many Should Know' or 'The Dale Carnegie That Will Instantly Improve Your Relationships'?
No, so we can all be schooled in "Why Every Man Should Be Strong"[0], "How to Set a Table"[1], "9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches"[2] or "Win the War on Debt: 80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money"[3]. You used probably the weakest reason to discredit the idea of men improving themselves. That's not a "good" manly behavior.
[0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/why-ev...
[1] https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/etiquette/how-to-se...
[2] https://www.artofmanliness.com/skills/outdoor-survival/9-way...
[3] https://www.artofmanliness.com/career-wealth/wealth/money-sa...
I think there might be some of that happening on YouTube, James from Speeed[0] (who used to be in Donut Media before) has been mixing the usual car-related content with wholesome masculinity stuff, and I feel that should be the future of making masculinity be seen less as "being tough" to being a resilient, dependable, empathetic person.
I don't think his channel is the only one, it's the only one I'm exposed to so kinda tells me there should be quite a bit more of those around, hopefully that way of masculinity gets traction instead of Andrew Tate-esque buffoons.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@SpeeedCo
What's are the differences supposed to be,between male and female? Genuine question
> You used probably the weakest reason to discredit the idea of men improving themselves
Those examples you posted that actually are good would also seem to me to be universally important for everyone across all genders. '80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money' seems useful for everyone, and while I doubt a lot of people are going to need '9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches' immediately, what makes that specifically 'manly' and not good for anyone either going seriously outdoors or prepping.
Yes, I picked those examples deliberately, but I don't see why any of the qualitatively good ones are 'manly'.
> Those examples you posted that actually are good would also seem to me to be universally important for everyone across all genders. '80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money' seems useful for everyone, and while I doubt a lot of people are going to need '9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches' immediately, what makes that specifically 'manly' and not good for anyone either going seriously outdoors or prepping.
For the same reason "Be strong and independent" is a message targeted only at women, even though it can easily double as a universal message.
> Yes, I picked those examples deliberately, but I don't see why any of the qualitatively good ones are 'manly'.
What was your goal? What was your argument? I said that we need men to be more manly (strong and able to do things that are historically considered to be done by men) and you said that those can be also done by women? I would consider woman able to change a tire, play cards and start fire without matches to be manly. If she wants to, she can of course.
Currently the problem is that we indirectly say to men that being strong is for women and not for men. We say to women "be more manly" and to men "be more womanly", which just perpetuates old cliches, but in reverse.
> What was your goal?
I think the thread has been a bit derailed in terms of my intention, which was more to point out that I don't feel like the qualities that are mentioned in the original article (mentorship, guidance figures, schoolwork, relationships, future planning) are really represented well by a clickbait website with articles mostly split between 'Top N things you really need to do for X' and things that would be useful to anyone.
I'd even say the 'Get Style', 'Get Strong', 'Get Social' and 'Get Skilled' categories always appear to wander towards (while never approaching) Andrew Tate territory, in terms of their goals.
> Currently the problem is that we indirectly say to men that being strong is for women and not for men. We say to women "be more manly" and to men "be more womanly", which just perpetuates old cliches, but in reverse.
This I agree with, but I don't feel that website is a good example of a role model for the qualities that the original article mentioned were missing.
> I'd even say the 'Get Style', 'Get Strong', 'Get Social' and 'Get Skilled' categories always appear to wander towards (while never approaching) Andrew Tate territory, in terms of their goals.
I agree. Going into "Andrew Tate" territory represents that toxic masculinity for me, it's the far end of spectrum of manliness. But we men don't need to go all the way into absurdity when trying to be more manly. But not all of us are in the same place. Some are too close to unmanly end, some are too close to toxic end. artofmanliness contains articles for both of those people, to move them closer to the center of good manliness (expressed by ideals 'Get Style', 'Get Strong', 'Get Social', 'Get Skilled' and I would add 'Be dependable', 'Be honest').
And being womanly is not an end of spectrum of manliness. Being unmanly (0 of qualities we mentioned, a weak man without style, social or any other skills) is the lowest end of spectrum of manliness.
> This I agree with, but I don't feel that website is a good example of a role model for the qualities that the original article mentioned were missing.
You would have to look more. You have only seen a small sample from each section.
I've been reading Kate and Bret for decades (!) now.
Amazing site and filled with great male content.
But, umm, anyone know of any other good male-centric sites out there?
All I got is Esquire.com, and it's clearly not the same kinda thing.
It does feel a bit cruel that we were told to be vulnerable and open, and then when men said we’re lonely got accused of asking other people to fix our problems and that we just needed to deal with it.
Also I don’t think I’d risk being e.g. a teacher - the girls in my high school would casually joke about accusing their teachers of being creeps if they failed a test, etc.
I think one problem we have (always had, but worse now that there are so many more opinions to be exposed to) is that we expect "society's" opinions to be consistent, despite being made up of millions of different people.
Of course there are going to be people telling others to be vulnerable and open, and of course there are also going to be people telling others not to complain because that's dumping their problems on other people.
Also, by "society" often people mean "twitter", which is hardly an organic cross section of public opinion.
I agree in one sense, but in another, the extremes seen on Twitter are not where the madness ends. The Overton window shifts slowly.
> we were told to be vulnerable and open, and then when men said we’re lonely got accused of asking other people to fix our problems
The discrimination pendulum swinged the other way. And as with a lot of discrimination, the criticism is in reality aimed at what you are, not what you do. So you will never get it right in the eyes of those critics. On the other hand the roles of men in society are changing and it's not at all clear "to what". "Be a man but don't really be one, it's complicated".
Well we have data showing that people have fewer close friends, men in particular, than in decades past. This used to be what the loneliness epidemic referred to, but somehow it got turned in to being about dating.
I mean, I’m lonely and I’m married. Middle age is a tough time for friendships.
Too many lonely men seem to think that women can and should fix all their problems. That if only they had a relationship all their shit would be over.
While the first step should be to join a hobby club or do some volunteer work or find a sport to do (and definitely not the gym or running or any other solo sport). Just find something where you regularly interact with people, and especially the same people over a longer period of time.
I was talking about friendships, not dating.
What about their dad’s & uncle’s? Mum’s male friends? I don’t know, external (outside the family) isn’t the only source of “mentorship” and we should stop trying to pretend it is
I don't think it's generally believed that a mentor has to come from outside. In fact, I think it's because mentors coming from close family is not prevalent that pushes these boys and men to find mentors elsewhere.
Often missing as well. Lot of isolated single mothers out there.
Why is this flagged?
1. Why would this possibly be flagged?
2. The article is right. Boys without good fathers/mentors are worse off in many ways. Readers, please consider helping Boys and Girls Club, scouting organizations, etc.
does shortage refer to actual size?
all those fellowships and fanboy cultures and follower counts and network and everybody gets all they want to evolve and raise their children to be witty and snappy and vibe with that pan all the chill kids are playing in those pretty red forests nowadays and some researchers found a shortage of male mentors?
is this one of those "we want you" recruiting scarcity tactics?
It started with the paradox of women unhappiness. Which wasnt a paradox at all, fully understood. Yet for some reason 1 political side refused to understand. Ideological blindness.
Then a large amount of $, time, and effort was spent on women to solve this problem, but since they refused to understand the cause. It really was just a boost to women. This shifts men behind. Government intentionally caused this.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/upshot/boys-falling-behin...
Then men needed a role model. Men would need to work extra hard to just come up to parity. But government didnt like the messaging of those role models, so they censored their speech and deplatformed them.
Creating the gap/shortage in role models; but men moved to beyond their control. This new role model became huge. He'd talk for hours upon hours with anyone who would listen.
The people who wanted to censor/deplatform but couldnt. So they publicly killed him.
People are going to misread the article and go off in their own direction but the problem is clearly capitalism. It's always been capitalism. Lower income boys have drastically less access to male mentors than higher income ones and the article even states this.
Low family income means less options. Most of your mentors at a young age are going to come from schooling, which still generally has a gender tilt towards women for multiple reasons. But lower income schools are going to be more resource starved with larger classes and less time for teachers to interact with students individually.
edit: fixed wording to better emphasize what I meant
Low income families skew nonconventional/single parent which fractures the extended family unit, less likely to have uncles etc around to step in as a mentor.
Smaller family sizes over the previous generation have also contributed to this.
I have 9 uncles in total (including all my aunts' partners). My kid has one.
Also, if you grow up in a household that rents (moves often or is surrounded by neighbours who move often), you are less likely to have long term reliable neighbours available to form adult-child relationships with.
Yes lower income boys are hit way harder, but it's not like the issue disappears at the higher end.
> 72 percent of boys from households earning $100,000 or more reported having a male mentor for schoolwork.
> A similar trend appeared regarding relationship advice. Only 45 percent of boys in the lowest income group had a male mentor for relationships. This compares to 67 percent of boys in the highest income group.
Even 30% of rich kids don't have access to a proper male role model, those are terrible numbers!
$100,000 isn't even 'rich' nowdays, that's below middle class especially if we're talking about an actual family unit. I can guarantee that if this research further stratified things into $100-200k, and $200k+ you would see the results continue to improve as people cross the threshold into middle class.
This survey can be seen as comparing people in poverty level income vs everyone else.
A lot of the lower income kids are from single parent homes (which is why they can't cross the $100.000 threshold), those will obviously have less access to a male role model.
If you correct for that the numbers would likely get closer, not further apart.
I assume you mean single parent but housing scarcity does indeed relate to precarity.
Yes, sorry, I meant single parent. I don't mean to fight against the idea that income is correlated to the problem, just that "lack of male role models" cannot be reduced to income inequality.
When you say "capitalism" you mean poverty?
I believe poverty is the natural state of man and I wonder how non-capitalism (= socialism?) makes people rich?
What I think you mean is that equal access to education is a promise of the state that is too often broken. But then we're talking about incompetence or corruption at the state level, paid for and sustained with your taxes, and you have those problems in socialism, too.
Ah yes, the answer to the problem of inequal income distribution is of course capitalism.
> People are going to misread the article and go off in their own direction but the problem is clearly capitalism. It's always been capitalism.
Of course it is, because as we all know capitalism only affects males /s
[flagged]
I'm flagging this based on previous experience with similar threads.
I appreciate this comment creating somewhere for people to discuss flagging. In my ideal HN you wouldn't be down voted but there would be a rigorous comment thread underneath it.
I think this thread has not been so bad so far, but it is early.
thanks for your service, tireless soldier (234004 karma)
what would HN be without you, thank god we have you to protect us all
Where do you think this should be discussed if not here?
https://www.themotte.org/
The issue with moving topics elsewhere is that the most important part of a forum is the community. Forums are not interchangeable.
Tbh I do not know but I'm sick and tired of seeing these threads devolve in the most cringe way possible. Tech already has a bad reputation in this respect and HN really isn't helping. And reading some of the comments in this thread that assessment was spot on.
> Tech already has a bad reputation in this respect and HN really isn't helping.
You are part of HN, now is your chance at helping.
Discussion means that you will see opinions that are plainly wrong. That's a good place to argue and present better opinions. If you don't present better opinions, no one will be convinced. If you don't voice your opinions, you might not known that they are wrong or harmful. I've voiced a lot of opinions on HN, which after correcting by others, helped me become a slightly better human.
I would happily bet that I've done more to help HN and its denizens than you have.
Besides, after 18 years here some things have become a little predictable.