Many men seem to be in agreement: college is stupid and unnecessary
October 13, 2024 12:17 AM Subscribe
When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important. Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. from Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? [Matriarchal Blessing]
Is this an American or Western issue, or is it worldwide? If it's just the US, that's going to lead to more and more immigration for professional jobs
Beyond that, given the professionalism of society over the past hundred years or so, this will further exclude men without generational wealth from many places in society. I'm expecting something where the absolute top level is majority men due to wealth/discrimination/the patriarchy and the majority of the profession is female. I'm thinking of something like cooking, where it is a female coded activity, but just if the celebrity chefs are male.
posted by Hactar at 1:00 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
Beyond that, given the professionalism of society over the past hundred years or so, this will further exclude men without generational wealth from many places in society. I'm expecting something where the absolute top level is majority men due to wealth/discrimination/the patriarchy and the majority of the profession is female. I'm thinking of something like cooking, where it is a female coded activity, but just if the celebrity chefs are male.
posted by Hactar at 1:00 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
I think this is all true, but one other point I’m curious about here is if women feel they need a degree more in order to make it in a male dominated world. Do men have an easier time without a need to “prove” their worth with a degree?
posted by glaucon at 1:09 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
posted by glaucon at 1:09 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
Well, [het] boys are missing a trick here. A common outcome from college is hitching up with your life-partner. If the class is ratioed toward the opposite sex then chaps have more choice (and the women may set their bar lower?).
20 years ago, as an M.50, I enrolled in a samba school. Like a lot of these after-work ventures, the sex ratio was at least 80F:20M. After a few months the other old buffer sat next to me at the tea-break and wondered "I dunno why we can't recruit more young fellows here: look at all these fit young . . . drummers".
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:33 AM on October 13 [11 favorites]
20 years ago, as an M.50, I enrolled in a samba school. Like a lot of these after-work ventures, the sex ratio was at least 80F:20M. After a few months the other old buffer sat next to me at the tea-break and wondered "I dunno why we can't recruit more young fellows here: look at all these fit young . . . drummers".
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:33 AM on October 13 [11 favorites]
As I listened to the Freakanomics podcast, I was confused why they kept skirting around the thing that has actually changed—So uh, is this your first experience with Freakonomics?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:31 AM on October 13 [42 favorites]
Anecdotally from Australia, hitting 40s the people who went into trades are financially better off than my cohort who went into "higher education".
posted by chmmr at 2:43 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
posted by chmmr at 2:43 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
I had a male chemistry professor point this out in 2004 and speculated across all professions they would be degraded as "women's work" and would slowly result in a professions requiring a degree would result in pay cut/status loss for every one in those fields. He was pretty prescient. Even my med school professors failed to see this 10 years later. Still males get quite a bit of privilege in these fields if they do it that to some degree I think the male flight is bonkers.
posted by roguewraith at 3:06 AM on October 13 [11 favorites]
posted by roguewraith at 3:06 AM on October 13 [11 favorites]
As an Australian undergraduate in the late '80s I started out in mathematics and computer science, both heavily male-dominated at the time, as we all know. Then I drifted into political science, which was more balanced but still male-dominated overall. For most of my working life I've been in a UK education school, which is the opposite: the staff are more balanced (though predominantly women), but the students are mostly women.
Part of it has to be the valuing of various professions—the literal valuing in economic terms. If there aren't enough computer scientists and the pay goes up, men flock to computing; if the pay for teachers goes down, men abandon teaching. But it's a chicken and egg problem: does the pay go down because men are abandoning it, or vice versa?
The post quotes Anne Lincoln: "So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school." That can't be boys thinking "ew, girls" as if they're nine—for heterosexual boys the urges that BobTheScientist mentions would outweigh any lingering traces of that. But by this stage, the young male student has already soaked up society's patriarchal rules and instinctively knows that a female-dominated profession will pay less, and for boys who have been raised to think that pay = status and pay = "being able to provide for your eventual family", that's going to loom large in their choice of courses and schools. Larger than any concerns about finding a date or a life partner in class, because they might just think, "Sure, there won't be many women in engineering classes, but I'll meet some from other faculties." And maybe they're right—but then we end up with a society full of male engineers married to female nurses who don't understand each other's work and daily lives as well as couples from similar professional backgrounds will.
Another chicken-and-egg issue in the blog post:
Other reasons I came across while researching for this article include: ... Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.
More boys are going to lean right if they've drifted away from the humanities and social sciences (because they don't pay as well and are seen as female-dominated) and end up getting all their views on society and human nature from uniformed or bigoted male blowhards (whether podcasters, politicians, or their mates down the pub). Keeping boys in the humanities and social sciences is just as important as encouraging girls to stick with maths and science. "Men leaning right" isn't some God-given fact of nature; male-dominated societies ushered in communist revolutions in Russia and China last century.
I know from my own experience that moving out of male-dominated disciplines into a more balanced one, and then into one where men are in the minority, has an impact on how you're perceived by others, as well as on how you see the world yourself. The effects are subtle, but they're there. I don't know if I could sum them up without giving it all some long and serious thought, and it would all be personal anecdote, so I won't try right now. But some of it is captured in the blogger's previous post on why patriarchy makes it harder to be a man than a woman, which is worth reading in conjunction with this one. (There's a statistic in there about DNA studies of past male reproductive success—and lack thereof—that tells us a lot about how we've ended up with the patriarchy. Whether you're a man or a woman, think of the worst men you know and then imagine them shaping the rules for society for millennia to come.)
posted by rory at 3:13 AM on October 13 [26 favorites]
Part of it has to be the valuing of various professions—the literal valuing in economic terms. If there aren't enough computer scientists and the pay goes up, men flock to computing; if the pay for teachers goes down, men abandon teaching. But it's a chicken and egg problem: does the pay go down because men are abandoning it, or vice versa?
The post quotes Anne Lincoln: "So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school." That can't be boys thinking "ew, girls" as if they're nine—for heterosexual boys the urges that BobTheScientist mentions would outweigh any lingering traces of that. But by this stage, the young male student has already soaked up society's patriarchal rules and instinctively knows that a female-dominated profession will pay less, and for boys who have been raised to think that pay = status and pay = "being able to provide for your eventual family", that's going to loom large in their choice of courses and schools. Larger than any concerns about finding a date or a life partner in class, because they might just think, "Sure, there won't be many women in engineering classes, but I'll meet some from other faculties." And maybe they're right—but then we end up with a society full of male engineers married to female nurses who don't understand each other's work and daily lives as well as couples from similar professional backgrounds will.
Another chicken-and-egg issue in the blog post:
Other reasons I came across while researching for this article include: ... Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.
More boys are going to lean right if they've drifted away from the humanities and social sciences (because they don't pay as well and are seen as female-dominated) and end up getting all their views on society and human nature from uniformed or bigoted male blowhards (whether podcasters, politicians, or their mates down the pub). Keeping boys in the humanities and social sciences is just as important as encouraging girls to stick with maths and science. "Men leaning right" isn't some God-given fact of nature; male-dominated societies ushered in communist revolutions in Russia and China last century.
I know from my own experience that moving out of male-dominated disciplines into a more balanced one, and then into one where men are in the minority, has an impact on how you're perceived by others, as well as on how you see the world yourself. The effects are subtle, but they're there. I don't know if I could sum them up without giving it all some long and serious thought, and it would all be personal anecdote, so I won't try right now. But some of it is captured in the blogger's previous post on why patriarchy makes it harder to be a man than a woman, which is worth reading in conjunction with this one. (There's a statistic in there about DNA studies of past male reproductive success—and lack thereof—that tells us a lot about how we've ended up with the patriarchy. Whether you're a man or a woman, think of the worst men you know and then imagine them shaping the rules for society for millennia to come.)
posted by rory at 3:13 AM on October 13 [26 favorites]
The trades are still very much of a boys' club. Women have no choice but to go to college if they want to make a living wage in adulthood; men have other options. This is a straightforward case of the "female tax" - like makeup, haircare, clothing fashion cycles, and so on.
> That can't be boys thinking "ew, girls" as if they're nine
That is EXACTLY boys thinking "ew girls" as if they are nine. Or perhaps more accurately, "ew girlY".
> blogger's previous post on why patriarchy makes it harder to be a man than a woman
Oh jeez hahahahaha thanks for the laugh but reading that title is funny enough for me, the blog post itself might kill me. Phewww.
posted by MiraK at 3:16 AM on October 13 [23 favorites]
> That can't be boys thinking "ew, girls" as if they're nine
That is EXACTLY boys thinking "ew girls" as if they are nine. Or perhaps more accurately, "ew girlY".
> blogger's previous post on why patriarchy makes it harder to be a man than a woman
Oh jeez hahahahaha thanks for the laugh but reading that title is funny enough for me, the blog post itself might kill me. Phewww.
posted by MiraK at 3:16 AM on October 13 [23 favorites]
The post's full title is "I'm a feminist and I think it's harder to be a man than a woman" (subtitle: "Systemically women have it worse, but behaviorally, men are more limited"). Sure, "it's harder to be a man than a woman" is click-baity, and I wondered whether I should even mention it because of that, but the post itself has useful stuff in it, and deserves to be read in conjunction with this article. It concludes:
It would be a whole lot easier without patriarchy.
As for "ew, girls", yes, nine-year-olds are all "ew, girls" and "ew, boys", but high-schoolers thinking about college aren't. I can only guess what it's like to be a teenager whose body and mind is flooded with oestrogen, but I know what it felt like to be a teenager flooded with testosterone.
posted by rory at 3:31 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
It would be a whole lot easier without patriarchy.
As for "ew, girls", yes, nine-year-olds are all "ew, girls" and "ew, boys", but high-schoolers thinking about college aren't. I can only guess what it's like to be a teenager whose body and mind is flooded with oestrogen, but I know what it felt like to be a teenager flooded with testosterone.
posted by rory at 3:31 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
I suppose I had better add that I personally don't go around thinking "it's harder to be a man than a woman": I only have direct experience of one side of the equation, and I don't know how I could even begin to weigh up "a lifetime of being paid less and having to battle against glass ceilings" against "a lifetime of repressed emotions and social limitations that cause lasting psychological damage" or any of the many other factors on both sides that would go into that overall calculation. Her saying "harder" was, as I said, click-baity; I included it in the link because that was the title of her post, adding the "patriarchy" to give some indication that there was more to it, but clearly that wasn't enough.
But I do think that it's hard to be a man. It's hard to be a woman. It's hard to be a girl; it's hard to be a boy. Being human is hard. Life is hard.
The trouble arises when people think that the hardships they face as individuals, or as boys, or as girls, or as members of any group, imply that the converse is true, that members of other groups have it easy. That way lies endless New York Times articles about why we should be more understanding of Trump voters' bigotry because white people in the midwest have it so hard. Screw that—fight capitalism (and racism, and the patriarchy) and stop being bigots.
A lot of gender discussion online feels as if it's focussed on the clear and undeniable injustices that result from raising girls to think of themselves—and boys to think of girls—as being made of sugar and spice and all things nice, without a corresponding focus on what it means to raise boys who are told they're made of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails (and to raise girls to think of boys that way).
The voices of trans people who have personal experience of both camps seem particularly helpful in cutting through that. I liked how Davis's "harder" post highlighted some.
posted by rory at 4:13 AM on October 13 [29 favorites]
But I do think that it's hard to be a man. It's hard to be a woman. It's hard to be a girl; it's hard to be a boy. Being human is hard. Life is hard.
The trouble arises when people think that the hardships they face as individuals, or as boys, or as girls, or as members of any group, imply that the converse is true, that members of other groups have it easy. That way lies endless New York Times articles about why we should be more understanding of Trump voters' bigotry because white people in the midwest have it so hard. Screw that—fight capitalism (and racism, and the patriarchy) and stop being bigots.
A lot of gender discussion online feels as if it's focussed on the clear and undeniable injustices that result from raising girls to think of themselves—and boys to think of girls—as being made of sugar and spice and all things nice, without a corresponding focus on what it means to raise boys who are told they're made of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails (and to raise girls to think of boys that way).
The voices of trans people who have personal experience of both camps seem particularly helpful in cutting through that. I liked how Davis's "harder" post highlighted some.
posted by rory at 4:13 AM on October 13 [29 favorites]
As for "ew, girls", yes, nine-year-olds are all "ew, girls" and "ew, boys", but high-schoolers thinking about college aren't.
Agreed, I think it's different by this age. My hunch is that men are* simply attracted to, in groups, the company of other men. We regard other men as our peers - i.e. the people who we compare ourselves against, that we are in competition/co-operation with, the ones against whom our social status is defined. A social context where you can't associate with those peers - because it's dominated by older men, or by women, or by younger men, or whatever - doesn't offer the scope for a young man be (socially) a man in this way; so young men will seek out a social context (workplace, university, musical group, etc) where they can.
* this statement shouldn't be taken as absolute; a few exceptions would not disprove it. I'm talking about men being mostly, in general, on average, psychologically different from women; enough to make a difference at the population level as the OP observes.
posted by vincebowdren at 4:24 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
Agreed, I think it's different by this age. My hunch is that men are* simply attracted to, in groups, the company of other men. We regard other men as our peers - i.e. the people who we compare ourselves against, that we are in competition/co-operation with, the ones against whom our social status is defined. A social context where you can't associate with those peers - because it's dominated by older men, or by women, or by younger men, or whatever - doesn't offer the scope for a young man be (socially) a man in this way; so young men will seek out a social context (workplace, university, musical group, etc) where they can.
* this statement shouldn't be taken as absolute; a few exceptions would not disprove it. I'm talking about men being mostly, in general, on average, psychologically different from women; enough to make a difference at the population level as the OP observes.
posted by vincebowdren at 4:24 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
Whether or not men think "ew girls" past the age of 9, they *definitely* think "ew girly" all the time, forever.
They see a classroom full of women and it makes them go "ew girly" on the whole subject itself. Men don't want to learn or do or be anything that's girly.
This is a real and pervasive thing, and there isn't anything complicated or mysterious or unusual about it. It's misogyny.
> Systemically women have it worse, but behaviorally, men are more limited"
LOL it really does sound like reading that article will kill me. Has that person never heard of, say, stiletto heels? Have they never seen women try to get elected to leadership positions? I really cannot stand people who find themselves unable to say patriarchy makes things hard for men, without saying patriarchy makes things hardER for men than for women. SMH.
posted by MiraK at 4:30 AM on October 13 [22 favorites]
They see a classroom full of women and it makes them go "ew girly" on the whole subject itself. Men don't want to learn or do or be anything that's girly.
This is a real and pervasive thing, and there isn't anything complicated or mysterious or unusual about it. It's misogyny.
> Systemically women have it worse, but behaviorally, men are more limited"
LOL it really does sound like reading that article will kill me. Has that person never heard of, say, stiletto heels? Have they never seen women try to get elected to leadership positions? I really cannot stand people who find themselves unable to say patriarchy makes things hard for men, without saying patriarchy makes things hardER for men than for women. SMH.
posted by MiraK at 4:30 AM on October 13 [22 favorites]
Anecdotally from Australia, hitting 40s the people who went into trades are financially better off than my cohort who went into "higher education".
I can’t speak for Australia, but the article (which I think just deals with the US) suggests there are a lot fewer Blue Collar jobs than previously — it’s a little murky, since the linked article lumps together a lot of things, but says that there were about 20% fewer Blue Collar jobs in 2020 than in 2000, so the idea that young men are flocking to trade schools for job opportunities seems suspect, although, if you can get through the process successfully, it can pay pretty well.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:46 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
I can’t speak for Australia, but the article (which I think just deals with the US) suggests there are a lot fewer Blue Collar jobs than previously — it’s a little murky, since the linked article lumps together a lot of things, but says that there were about 20% fewer Blue Collar jobs in 2020 than in 2000, so the idea that young men are flocking to trade schools for job opportunities seems suspect, although, if you can get through the process successfully, it can pay pretty well.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:46 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
In the US, college has gotten to be super expensive. Student loans are designed to be exploitative. For many students of any gender, it's a financially predatory system. But it's a fascinating intersection of class issues, gender issues, age, money, politics, etc.
posted by rikschell at 4:54 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 4:54 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
I teach biology and environmental science to college students. My classes are overwhelmingly women, both traditional college aged and not. The few men I see are either 1) traditional aged students who want to pursue a health care professional school (MD, PA, etc.) or 2) non-traditional aged veterans or dads (or both) who have worked lower-paying, mostly physical jobs and desperately want to make more money and not do physical labor anymore.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:12 AM on October 13 [10 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 5:12 AM on October 13 [10 favorites]
Dear christ. The goal posts of masculinity don't just move, but they swap sides. Shit is exhausting. I have seen exactly this sentiment cropping up in my family, which is full of intellectuals and teachers.
What should be part of this conversation, and folks are pointing it out here, is that colleges in US (including state schools) are rapaciously capital endeavors. There is plenty of value to be found there, often in the form of those challenging "liberal ideas," but going into unthinkable amounts of debt to do something that is genuinely challenging and unpleasant is a legitimately hard sell for young people. And if men are socialized to find those ideas and that environment even more socially and morally challenging? If men are socialized to define their sense of masculinity as something that objects to the feminine? Yeah, college is going to start to seem like not just an expensive deal, but an objectionable one.
What a couch fire our higher education system has become. What a trash fire, our gender politics.
posted by es_de_bah at 5:15 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
What should be part of this conversation, and folks are pointing it out here, is that colleges in US (including state schools) are rapaciously capital endeavors. There is plenty of value to be found there, often in the form of those challenging "liberal ideas," but going into unthinkable amounts of debt to do something that is genuinely challenging and unpleasant is a legitimately hard sell for young people. And if men are socialized to find those ideas and that environment even more socially and morally challenging? If men are socialized to define their sense of masculinity as something that objects to the feminine? Yeah, college is going to start to seem like not just an expensive deal, but an objectionable one.
What a couch fire our higher education system has become. What a trash fire, our gender politics.
posted by es_de_bah at 5:15 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
I think the author has decided on a conclusion that fits their worldview and then worked backward.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:27 AM on October 13 [15 favorites]
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:27 AM on October 13 [15 favorites]
I guess I should note that I teach at a regional public university, and no one is going into "unreasonable amounts of debt" or usually any debt at all at our institution. Most of our students have tuition covered entirely by the state Hope scholarship, Pell grants and/or veterans benefits, and the ones who don't (mostly immigrants who aren't eligible for those programs) are paying out of pocket by working ridiculous hours, usually alongside their families.
Student loans are pretty rare at our institution, except among the nursing students who literally can't work while finishing their program (there are of course very few men among the nursing students). But our tuition is so low, and the nursing shortage so severe, that someone with a BSN will have no trouble paying off those loans.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:30 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
Student loans are pretty rare at our institution, except among the nursing students who literally can't work while finishing their program (there are of course very few men among the nursing students). But our tuition is so low, and the nursing shortage so severe, that someone with a BSN will have no trouble paying off those loans.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:30 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
Is it possible that more men are stupid now? It certainly doesn't seem impossible.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:48 AM on October 13 [17 favorites]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:48 AM on October 13 [17 favorites]
I think the author has decided on a conclusion that fits their worldview and then worked backward.
Eh, it makes more sense to read this as a reaction piece to the Freakanomics podcast episode, but whatever.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:51 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
Eh, it makes more sense to read this as a reaction piece to the Freakanomics podcast episode, but whatever.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:51 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
Has anyone asked whether women are just smarter and better?
posted by Brachinus at 5:57 AM on October 13 [19 favorites]
posted by Brachinus at 5:57 AM on October 13 [19 favorites]
Well, the enrollment cliff is here in North America....this combined with the generalized (not just gendered) decreased perceived value proposition for college outside of Ivy and Ivy-esque colleges (whose value, frankly, primarily lies in networking and status-marking) will mean less colleges for everyone and those colleges that remain will be quite 'lean' (i.e. impoverished).........so hurrah for bad choices all round!
posted by lalochezia at 6:04 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
posted by lalochezia at 6:04 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
Is it possible that more men are stupid now? It certainly doesn't seem impossible.
Researchers are finding that as girls increasingly go to college to get more knowledge, boys, by contrast, are going to Jupiter to get more stupider.
posted by officer_fred at 6:12 AM on October 13 [56 favorites]
Researchers are finding that as girls increasingly go to college to get more knowledge, boys, by contrast, are going to Jupiter to get more stupider.
posted by officer_fred at 6:12 AM on October 13 [56 favorites]
against "a lifetime of repressed emotions and social limitations that cause lasting psychological damage"
You portray this as a one vs the other situation, but it's not like being read as female suddenly means that aren't rules on your behaviour, emotions you can't express, etc, etc. Women get all that too, it just expresses a little differently.
posted by Dysk at 6:17 AM on October 13 [13 favorites]
You portray this as a one vs the other situation, but it's not like being read as female suddenly means that aren't rules on your behaviour, emotions you can't express, etc, etc. Women get all that too, it just expresses a little differently.
posted by Dysk at 6:17 AM on October 13 [13 favorites]
If some number of men think being around too many women in college is emasculating or diminishing, wait until they find out what it's like to have limited job options because the world only needs so many plumbers and find themselves stuck taking the abuse of a "low-status" or "girly" job anyway.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 6:17 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 6:17 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
You portray this as a one vs the other situation, but it's not like being read as female suddenly means that aren't rules on your behaviour, emotions you can't express, etc, etc. Women get all that too, it just expresses a little differently.
I didn't mean it as either/more, rather as "yes, and". I completely agree with the refinements of the point that you've made here, Dysk.
posted by rory at 6:21 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
I didn't mean it as either/more, rather as "yes, and". I completely agree with the refinements of the point that you've made here, Dysk.
posted by rory at 6:21 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
Whether or not men think "ew girls" past the age of 9, they *definitely* think "ew girly" all the time, forever. They see a classroom full of women and it makes them go "ew girly" on the whole subject itself. Men don't want to learn or do or be anything that's girly.
Seventeen-year-old boys looking at a class full of young women when making college choices are going to know, unconsciously at the very least, that a female-dominated profession in a patriarchal society won't (on average) bring the financial rewards that a male-dominated profession will, and that will have an influence on their choices, but that isn't the same as thinking "ew, girly". And it isn't the only factor they'll consider when weighing up what they're going to do with their life (which at that age it feels as if their college choices will determine absolutely—even though it often doesn't). Another big one will be what they've already done well in at school, and/or what they've enjoyed there—are they "good at" maths, or did they do well in English? And that will have been influenced by the patriarchy: by girls absorbing the message that girls "aren't good at" maths, and by boys absorbing that they should "go outside and play rather than having your nose stuck in a book"; by how much they see their mothers managing the family finances or their fathers reading for pleasure; by how their mothers and fathers and siblings and grandparents and friends and strangers react to them as a girl or as a boy from birth onwards. It's the patriarchy, and yes, the patriarchy fuels misogyny the same way capitalism fuels classism and inequality, but a boy deciding on college courses isn't inherently misogynist any more than someone in a well-paying middle-class job is inherently classist or inherently a believer in paying some jobs ten times as much as others.
I'm quickly going to hit my limits here in trying to argue for nuance over black-and-white pronouncements about men and women, boys and girls, because it all feels too personal. I was that boy raised in a strongly male-dominated society: a rural town in the most rural state in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. I was in high school at a time when my state saw 50% more suicides than the national average and three times as many men killing themselves as women, including one of my high school friends the year after he left school. It was the last state in Australia to decriminalise homosexuality, years after I went through high school; the kids I knew from that time who were gay only came out after they left. It was a patriarchal, heterosexist and racist culture, and the only reason it wasn't more classist was because the state as a whole was the poorest in the country. That's the culture I was raised in. But I wasn't just some direct product of it, some perfect reproduction and perpetuation of 1970s and '80s racism and sexism and the rest. The attitudes of the surrounding culture didn't just pass into me like the iodine added to bread and table salt.
No: I was a boy in a classroom full of girls (French in Grade 8, the year we had a choice of which language to continue; I was literally the only boy in the class). I was that boy channeled over time into a science degree because I was good at maths, even though I also loved reading and writing and art, because the further you went the more you had to choose one or the other. And those choices seemed so freighted with importance: will you get a job to support yourself, and what kind of job will you get? So I didn't go to Art School, which I suspect I would have enjoyed more, or study history or English, which I suspect I would have too. I started a BSc with only one arts subject out of my four in first year (and even doing that was considered unusual), and ended up majoring in it alongside my maths & comp sci subjects while struggling to maintain my enthusiasm for the latter. I did well enough to pursue a PhD on the politics of a region that by the 1990s was old news as far as Australia's national interests and focus were concerned, all while people with a bare computing degree were starting to make serious money as the Internet exploded. When I couldn't get a job in my new specialist area, I brought some of my computing training back into play, and at one point even looked at throwing myself into it completely—I even went to the Bay Area to sniff around for work (not long after I signed up here, as it happens), and had an offer, but for an entirely technical role where it was clear I'd be surrounded by bro culture; I wanted a hybrid role in a more balanced workplace. Which is what I did end up with eventually in Scotland, and I'm grateful for it.
I swear on a stack of graphic novels that my decision to go into maths and computer science at the age of 18 was in no way shaped by looking at art school or remembering the number of girls who were in my high school English and history classes and thinking "ew, girly". My dad taught at the local School of Art, so I didn't see it as somehow beneath me. I think now that it's because of flukes of timing—my obsession with computers at 14-15 was more recent than my obsession with comics from 8-13—and because the signals from the different disciplines were telling me that maths was what I was best at. But some of that was a trick of the light: in my school system it was possible to get astronomical scores in maths that just weren't possible in the humanities and social sciences. I know perfectly well now, as someone who's navigated both cultures and marked a gazillion essays, that an 80 or 85 for a social science assignment is damned impressive, but when you're a kid—and 16-17-year olds are still kids—you don't know that.
Boys making choices about where to go to college and what subjects to pursue are still just kids. Yes, some boys will be thorough misogynists—we all witnessed Gamergate and know about incels—and a lot more will be blind to the patriarchy and to the misogynist tendencies it can inculcate in any of us, but this is a structural problem that needs a deeper response than "men are misogynists who see female-dominated courses as girly, that's all there is to it".
posted by rory at 6:23 AM on October 13 [14 favorites]
Seventeen-year-old boys looking at a class full of young women when making college choices are going to know, unconsciously at the very least, that a female-dominated profession in a patriarchal society won't (on average) bring the financial rewards that a male-dominated profession will, and that will have an influence on their choices, but that isn't the same as thinking "ew, girly". And it isn't the only factor they'll consider when weighing up what they're going to do with their life (which at that age it feels as if their college choices will determine absolutely—even though it often doesn't). Another big one will be what they've already done well in at school, and/or what they've enjoyed there—are they "good at" maths, or did they do well in English? And that will have been influenced by the patriarchy: by girls absorbing the message that girls "aren't good at" maths, and by boys absorbing that they should "go outside and play rather than having your nose stuck in a book"; by how much they see their mothers managing the family finances or their fathers reading for pleasure; by how their mothers and fathers and siblings and grandparents and friends and strangers react to them as a girl or as a boy from birth onwards. It's the patriarchy, and yes, the patriarchy fuels misogyny the same way capitalism fuels classism and inequality, but a boy deciding on college courses isn't inherently misogynist any more than someone in a well-paying middle-class job is inherently classist or inherently a believer in paying some jobs ten times as much as others.
I'm quickly going to hit my limits here in trying to argue for nuance over black-and-white pronouncements about men and women, boys and girls, because it all feels too personal. I was that boy raised in a strongly male-dominated society: a rural town in the most rural state in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. I was in high school at a time when my state saw 50% more suicides than the national average and three times as many men killing themselves as women, including one of my high school friends the year after he left school. It was the last state in Australia to decriminalise homosexuality, years after I went through high school; the kids I knew from that time who were gay only came out after they left. It was a patriarchal, heterosexist and racist culture, and the only reason it wasn't more classist was because the state as a whole was the poorest in the country. That's the culture I was raised in. But I wasn't just some direct product of it, some perfect reproduction and perpetuation of 1970s and '80s racism and sexism and the rest. The attitudes of the surrounding culture didn't just pass into me like the iodine added to bread and table salt.
No: I was a boy in a classroom full of girls (French in Grade 8, the year we had a choice of which language to continue; I was literally the only boy in the class). I was that boy channeled over time into a science degree because I was good at maths, even though I also loved reading and writing and art, because the further you went the more you had to choose one or the other. And those choices seemed so freighted with importance: will you get a job to support yourself, and what kind of job will you get? So I didn't go to Art School, which I suspect I would have enjoyed more, or study history or English, which I suspect I would have too. I started a BSc with only one arts subject out of my four in first year (and even doing that was considered unusual), and ended up majoring in it alongside my maths & comp sci subjects while struggling to maintain my enthusiasm for the latter. I did well enough to pursue a PhD on the politics of a region that by the 1990s was old news as far as Australia's national interests and focus were concerned, all while people with a bare computing degree were starting to make serious money as the Internet exploded. When I couldn't get a job in my new specialist area, I brought some of my computing training back into play, and at one point even looked at throwing myself into it completely—I even went to the Bay Area to sniff around for work (not long after I signed up here, as it happens), and had an offer, but for an entirely technical role where it was clear I'd be surrounded by bro culture; I wanted a hybrid role in a more balanced workplace. Which is what I did end up with eventually in Scotland, and I'm grateful for it.
I swear on a stack of graphic novels that my decision to go into maths and computer science at the age of 18 was in no way shaped by looking at art school or remembering the number of girls who were in my high school English and history classes and thinking "ew, girly". My dad taught at the local School of Art, so I didn't see it as somehow beneath me. I think now that it's because of flukes of timing—my obsession with computers at 14-15 was more recent than my obsession with comics from 8-13—and because the signals from the different disciplines were telling me that maths was what I was best at. But some of that was a trick of the light: in my school system it was possible to get astronomical scores in maths that just weren't possible in the humanities and social sciences. I know perfectly well now, as someone who's navigated both cultures and marked a gazillion essays, that an 80 or 85 for a social science assignment is damned impressive, but when you're a kid—and 16-17-year olds are still kids—you don't know that.
Boys making choices about where to go to college and what subjects to pursue are still just kids. Yes, some boys will be thorough misogynists—we all witnessed Gamergate and know about incels—and a lot more will be blind to the patriarchy and to the misogynist tendencies it can inculcate in any of us, but this is a structural problem that needs a deeper response than "men are misogynists who see female-dominated courses as girly, that's all there is to it".
posted by rory at 6:23 AM on October 13 [14 favorites]
> Seventeen-year-old boys looking at a class full of young women when making college choices are going to know, unconsciously at the very least, that a female-dominated profession in a patriarchal society won't (on average) bring the financial rewards that a male-dominated profession will, and that will have an influence on their choices, but that isn't the same as thinking "ew, girly"
It is, though. That's definitely a part of what makes it "ew, girly". It's a snap judgement that anything that's female dominated is less desirable, lower status, and yes very likely to be lower paid, and boys having attitude of maybe that's good enough for girls but WE are better than that. That's exactly what "ew girly" is, that is what it means. It is a nuanced and complicated attitude.
I'm afraid you're falling into the trap of seeing something obvious - cultural reality of pervasive misogyny - that women have already figured out, and deciding that no, women can't already have figured this out, it can't be "that simple" (as if misogyny is simple!), it must need "more nuance". As if misogyny as an explanation is lacking in nuance!
If you as a man hear the word "misogyny" and you think it means something black and white, like men are evil and women are good, like us vs. them, etc. -- that's on you. It may just be your defensiveness that's getting in the way here.
Like, there's morning I really object to in your comments here, you're on point about many of the things you're saying, but damned if you aren't trying your hardest to pretend that misogyny is somehow too simple an explanation for clearly misogynistic attitudes and the consequences thereof. Look at how many times you repeat that it's a chicken and egg problem, or that it can't be so simple. Nooooo it has to be something "more complicated " because surely boys aren't evil! As if that's what misogyny means.
posted by MiraK at 6:36 AM on October 13 [23 favorites]
It is, though. That's definitely a part of what makes it "ew, girly". It's a snap judgement that anything that's female dominated is less desirable, lower status, and yes very likely to be lower paid, and boys having attitude of maybe that's good enough for girls but WE are better than that. That's exactly what "ew girly" is, that is what it means. It is a nuanced and complicated attitude.
I'm afraid you're falling into the trap of seeing something obvious - cultural reality of pervasive misogyny - that women have already figured out, and deciding that no, women can't already have figured this out, it can't be "that simple" (as if misogyny is simple!), it must need "more nuance". As if misogyny as an explanation is lacking in nuance!
If you as a man hear the word "misogyny" and you think it means something black and white, like men are evil and women are good, like us vs. them, etc. -- that's on you. It may just be your defensiveness that's getting in the way here.
Like, there's morning I really object to in your comments here, you're on point about many of the things you're saying, but damned if you aren't trying your hardest to pretend that misogyny is somehow too simple an explanation for clearly misogynistic attitudes and the consequences thereof. Look at how many times you repeat that it's a chicken and egg problem, or that it can't be so simple. Nooooo it has to be something "more complicated " because surely boys aren't evil! As if that's what misogyny means.
posted by MiraK at 6:36 AM on October 13 [23 favorites]
Going to break ranks and admit that I don't see too much of a problem here.
College has 3 traditional purposes:
1. Education for its own sake. An inherent good,
2. Credentialling for a place in our class system. Not so good.
3. Preparation for a particular profession.
150 years ago some of our young people enrolled in college to prepare for their place in the landed gentry. That wasn't quite so bad. It's better for our upper class to at least pay lip service to being cultured and educated than not to. It gets bad when this form of finishing school becomes all about learning how not to walk on the grass in Oxford and eat your meals just-so and other ridiculous affectations instead of actually learning something academic,
It got so bad in the University of Virginia in the 1850s that the president had a nervous breakdown, left to Boston to recover from it (only time in the history of the city that someone would come and stay to recover his nerves..) and he then decided to start up a school modeled after a French polytechnic, now known as MIT.
Today, it's worse. Much. Much. Worse. Kids are enrolling to get credentialed into the middle class. To secure a place in the 50th percentile, and a decent dental plan. It's corrosive to the mission of the schools. It sparks a bidding war, causing tuition to rise, and when that bidding war involves borrowed money, offered by 18 year olds who are not making an informed decision, you get, well, let me gesture at all this.
Something had to give. And it's time something started to give.
College should be about #1 to the extent possible. Truly a liberal arts education, which should mean education for its own sake (not "light on the math, please"). If you can afford to sink 4 years of your life into it. By that I mean not just tuition and room and board. The magic of compound interest makes the money you earn in the 18-22 years worth much more than money earned later.
If you're 18 and from a wealthy enough backround that you can check box #1, DO IT. Whatever you choose to study, you'll make sure at least someone is studying it. If you don't have the money, don't do it.
If you want to train into a profession, go to a polytechnic. No shame,.
But as for class credentialing, if colleges do it at all, it should once again be only for credemtialling into the upper class. Not the middle class.
posted by ocschwar at 6:36 AM on October 13 [10 favorites]
College has 3 traditional purposes:
1. Education for its own sake. An inherent good,
2. Credentialling for a place in our class system. Not so good.
3. Preparation for a particular profession.
150 years ago some of our young people enrolled in college to prepare for their place in the landed gentry. That wasn't quite so bad. It's better for our upper class to at least pay lip service to being cultured and educated than not to. It gets bad when this form of finishing school becomes all about learning how not to walk on the grass in Oxford and eat your meals just-so and other ridiculous affectations instead of actually learning something academic,
It got so bad in the University of Virginia in the 1850s that the president had a nervous breakdown, left to Boston to recover from it (only time in the history of the city that someone would come and stay to recover his nerves..) and he then decided to start up a school modeled after a French polytechnic, now known as MIT.
Today, it's worse. Much. Much. Worse. Kids are enrolling to get credentialed into the middle class. To secure a place in the 50th percentile, and a decent dental plan. It's corrosive to the mission of the schools. It sparks a bidding war, causing tuition to rise, and when that bidding war involves borrowed money, offered by 18 year olds who are not making an informed decision, you get, well, let me gesture at all this.
Something had to give. And it's time something started to give.
College should be about #1 to the extent possible. Truly a liberal arts education, which should mean education for its own sake (not "light on the math, please"). If you can afford to sink 4 years of your life into it. By that I mean not just tuition and room and board. The magic of compound interest makes the money you earn in the 18-22 years worth much more than money earned later.
If you're 18 and from a wealthy enough backround that you can check box #1, DO IT. Whatever you choose to study, you'll make sure at least someone is studying it. If you don't have the money, don't do it.
If you want to train into a profession, go to a polytechnic. No shame,.
But as for class credentialing, if colleges do it at all, it should once again be only for credemtialling into the upper class. Not the middle class.
posted by ocschwar at 6:36 AM on October 13 [10 favorites]
So many things have changed about college in the last few decades that might factor into this. I think one of them is the atmosphere in the college classroom. The reactionary alumni crowd would probably put it that college has become too PC or woke or whatever language they use to suggest that it's really just a conspiracy against their group (white men or whatever). In my experience, it's been more like faculty and administrators have become a little more observant of bias and made however half-assed an attempt to correct it, which in turn has made it feel less welcoming to the upper middle class white male crowd. Sometime in the 90s, iirc, a professor commented to me that if you really keep track of how often you call on people in class, you will be calling on the men more, even if you are a woman and even if there are more women in the class. I think just by people starting to pay attention to this kind of thing, college doesn't give middle class white men the same experience of having their egos validated on a daily basis.
posted by BibiRose at 6:39 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
posted by BibiRose at 6:39 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
54 years on from the Title IX equity law prohibiting sex discrimination in any school or educational program that receives federal funding...
Back then access to (higher) education was sign posted by chauvanism, sexism, and consequent lopsided male:female ratios.
Women were justifiably ablaze with rage, and its wonderful to see how much has changed.
Cant help but wonder though: if numbers favoring men were used then to justify a law that would level the playing and benefit women, couldn't we just as justifiably apply that same rationale to today, and argue that Title IX should now be amended to favor men?
posted by BadgerDoctor at 6:47 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
Back then access to (higher) education was sign posted by chauvanism, sexism, and consequent lopsided male:female ratios.
Women were justifiably ablaze with rage, and its wonderful to see how much has changed.
Cant help but wonder though: if numbers favoring men were used then to justify a law that would level the playing and benefit women, couldn't we just as justifiably apply that same rationale to today, and argue that Title IX should now be amended to favor men?
posted by BadgerDoctor at 6:47 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
Is it possible that more men are stupid now? It certainly doesn't seem impossible.
I dunno, a brief glance at human history, politics, and literature (all of which I, a woman, studied in college) suggests that men have been quite stupid for a very long time. This is not to say that women have been, comparatively and collectively, intellectual giants, but, with scant exception, we've only recently been empowered to make the kind of world-altering stupid decisions men have been making for centuries, so we don't yet have a set point of reference.
Maybe men are a little more stupid now. Maybe we all are. But if men want to tough guy themselves back into the being superstitious, dark ages manual laborers because somehow they are worred about education not being manly enough, that's their tragedy just as much as it is mine.
posted by thivaia at 6:47 AM on October 13 [15 favorites]
As the mum of a son who got into three fine arts programmes but was then de-enrolled (long story involving miscommunication on the part of the university) and who is on his second gap year but is adding to his high school credits to go to a different university, all I can say is - it’s complicated.
When my kid was locked out of his classes, he didn’t recover quickly. This is a kid who is pretty resilient in some ways, but had been focused on one goal (OCAD U, one of the top Canadian art schools) since grade 4.
As a boy, he had gotten a lot of questions about that goal outside of our immediate family. The drumbeat was “Will you be a good earner?” At the first major road bump I’ve seen him struggle with that. He also spent the first 6 months after failure, when he could have easily just reapplied the following term, playing games and chatting on Discord. He’s since picked himself up admirably but I did wonder if he was falling off the “young man in the basement” cliff.*
His friends, arts high school friends and martial arts friends, are who have come and dragged him out. I like to think my parenting helped some but - he’s a young man, it’s his friends who count more. I wonder how many boys are able to form the kind of great relationships I see that my sin has. I am grateful to my kid’s luck here. I’m also proud of him. There’s no rush for him to find his way, but I also got scare when it seemed he gave up on looking.
I don’t have girls but my impression is that overall girls were more praised for having big goals with slightly less questioning about whether their goals would finance a million dollar home (which is what a surbuban 1200 ft bungalow goes for here.)
Vet school would seem to be lightning in a bottle that way: a still relatively prestigious degree path, capitalizing on the STEM-based programs that have been present and visibly recruiting young women, and a caring profession - where your loans will probably not be paid off forever.
I’m not sure it’s so much as “ew girly” (I have seen that some although not among most kids in my sphere) as “computer science and business and medicine pay off.”
I work in higher ed at a prestigious Canadian university on the scrappier campus and our compsci, business, and pre-med-ish programs are hopping. Humanities and social science are softening. I actually have been given the mission of turning this around (ha ha - no seriously) and I’m looking forward to the fight but it’s really complex. Parriarchy is real but I think capitalism also hits the mix.
*panicked, cried in the car where he couldn’t see me, spent hours wondering if I should give ultimatums, decided I could later, took him to an art workshop 4 hours away for a week, and wished I could trust in a deity to sort this out for me.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:50 AM on October 13 [11 favorites]
When my kid was locked out of his classes, he didn’t recover quickly. This is a kid who is pretty resilient in some ways, but had been focused on one goal (OCAD U, one of the top Canadian art schools) since grade 4.
As a boy, he had gotten a lot of questions about that goal outside of our immediate family. The drumbeat was “Will you be a good earner?” At the first major road bump I’ve seen him struggle with that. He also spent the first 6 months after failure, when he could have easily just reapplied the following term, playing games and chatting on Discord. He’s since picked himself up admirably but I did wonder if he was falling off the “young man in the basement” cliff.*
His friends, arts high school friends and martial arts friends, are who have come and dragged him out. I like to think my parenting helped some but - he’s a young man, it’s his friends who count more. I wonder how many boys are able to form the kind of great relationships I see that my sin has. I am grateful to my kid’s luck here. I’m also proud of him. There’s no rush for him to find his way, but I also got scare when it seemed he gave up on looking.
I don’t have girls but my impression is that overall girls were more praised for having big goals with slightly less questioning about whether their goals would finance a million dollar home (which is what a surbuban 1200 ft bungalow goes for here.)
Vet school would seem to be lightning in a bottle that way: a still relatively prestigious degree path, capitalizing on the STEM-based programs that have been present and visibly recruiting young women, and a caring profession - where your loans will probably not be paid off forever.
I’m not sure it’s so much as “ew girly” (I have seen that some although not among most kids in my sphere) as “computer science and business and medicine pay off.”
I work in higher ed at a prestigious Canadian university on the scrappier campus and our compsci, business, and pre-med-ish programs are hopping. Humanities and social science are softening. I actually have been given the mission of turning this around (ha ha - no seriously) and I’m looking forward to the fight but it’s really complex. Parriarchy is real but I think capitalism also hits the mix.
*panicked, cried in the car where he couldn’t see me, spent hours wondering if I should give ultimatums, decided I could later, took him to an art workshop 4 hours away for a week, and wished I could trust in a deity to sort this out for me.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:50 AM on October 13 [11 favorites]
> if numbers favoring men were used then to justify a law that would level the playing and benefit women, couldn't we just as justifiably apply that same rationale to today, and argue that Title IX should now be amended to favor men?
Ah but numbers favoring men weren't the (only) factor used to justify the law back then.
If we now live in a world where men are systematically discriminated against and that's what leads to lower numbers in college, where men are forbidden from going to college through actual laws or strong social norms, where men face hostile environments in college and hostility from professors and fellow students on the basis of their gender i.e. people telling them they don't belong there, and all these social political institutional barriers against men is what's leading to those lower college numbers.... Yeah! Sure! Let's amend the law today and make it easier for men to attend college.
Because that was the standard women had to meet back in the day to win Title IX. Let's be clear about that.
> I don’t have girls but my impression is that overall girls were more praised for having big goals with slightly less questioning about whether their goals would finance a million dollar home (which is what a surbuban 1200 ft bungalow goes for here.)
I think you have a point here. There is a lot less explicit social pressure on girls to be providers. But the fact that a certain profession becoming feminized tends to become lower paid, and the fact that an all girl class in and of itself is enough to turn boys away due to the presumption of lower status and lower pay (which feeds into the lowering of pay) - that's.. ew , girly.
posted by MiraK at 6:54 AM on October 13 [12 favorites]
Ah but numbers favoring men weren't the (only) factor used to justify the law back then.
If we now live in a world where men are systematically discriminated against and that's what leads to lower numbers in college, where men are forbidden from going to college through actual laws or strong social norms, where men face hostile environments in college and hostility from professors and fellow students on the basis of their gender i.e. people telling them they don't belong there, and all these social political institutional barriers against men is what's leading to those lower college numbers.... Yeah! Sure! Let's amend the law today and make it easier for men to attend college.
Because that was the standard women had to meet back in the day to win Title IX. Let's be clear about that.
> I don’t have girls but my impression is that overall girls were more praised for having big goals with slightly less questioning about whether their goals would finance a million dollar home (which is what a surbuban 1200 ft bungalow goes for here.)
I think you have a point here. There is a lot less explicit social pressure on girls to be providers. But the fact that a certain profession becoming feminized tends to become lower paid, and the fact that an all girl class in and of itself is enough to turn boys away due to the presumption of lower status and lower pay (which feeds into the lowering of pay) - that's.. ew , girly.
posted by MiraK at 6:54 AM on October 13 [12 favorites]
Interestingly in 1960 only 7.7 percent of Americans had attained a college degree.
What this says to me is the period where college was a fast track to success was a short one. Ditto the music, film or publishing industries which have never been more inclusive, because the stakes have never been lower.
Men receive that they are supposed to be rich -- even the Ted Lasso/Tim Walz/"girldad" type of positive masculine trope depends on being perceived as a quiet provider.
There are vanishingly few ways for anyone to get rich who isn't already rich, which is why I suppose you might see more men retreating into entrepreurial, explicitly male-coded arenas like crypto. That they're being duped should go without saying.
posted by mathjus at 6:58 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
What this says to me is the period where college was a fast track to success was a short one. Ditto the music, film or publishing industries which have never been more inclusive, because the stakes have never been lower.
Men receive that they are supposed to be rich -- even the Ted Lasso/Tim Walz/"girldad" type of positive masculine trope depends on being perceived as a quiet provider.
There are vanishingly few ways for anyone to get rich who isn't already rich, which is why I suppose you might see more men retreating into entrepreurial, explicitly male-coded arenas like crypto. That they're being duped should go without saying.
posted by mathjus at 6:58 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
Seventeen-year-old boys looking at a class full of young women when making college choices are going to know, unconsciously at the very least, that a female-dominated profession in a patriarchal society won't (on average) bring the financial rewards that a male-dominated profession will, and that will have an influence on their choices, but that isn't the same as thinking "ew, girly".
Your experience is obviously your real experience, but I think you are not getting how unusual you might be. Or Oz is just very different from the US.
Having also been an 18 year old boy with a bunch of other 18 year old boys in the US, for "this is how it is for boys overall" I would put way way way more weight on "Doing stuff that mostly girls do means you're gay" and only a tiny weensy bit any kind of notionally-rational projection about income or opportunities.
this is a structural problem that needs a deeper response than "men are misogynists who see female-dominated courses as girly, that's all there is to it"
As another man, I disagree. It's a perfectly fine first approximation.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:00 AM on October 13 [13 favorites]
Your experience is obviously your real experience, but I think you are not getting how unusual you might be. Or Oz is just very different from the US.
Having also been an 18 year old boy with a bunch of other 18 year old boys in the US, for "this is how it is for boys overall" I would put way way way more weight on "Doing stuff that mostly girls do means you're gay" and only a tiny weensy bit any kind of notionally-rational projection about income or opportunities.
this is a structural problem that needs a deeper response than "men are misogynists who see female-dominated courses as girly, that's all there is to it"
As another man, I disagree. It's a perfectly fine first approximation.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:00 AM on October 13 [13 favorites]
I teach Software Engineering at the university level and women have gone from 15% to 22% of the total since 2015. While this is below the overall 33% for the entire school it is certainly higher than when I was a student. But it's still predominately male.
What's interesting about computing is that women were once predominate in the field and only over time, as salaries increased, did men begin to outnumber them. Software development as a career is still well-paying, which makes it attractive, but how generative AI will impact this remains to be seen. I suspect it will just lower the number of students overall, rather than improve the gender ratio.
posted by tommasz at 7:01 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
What's interesting about computing is that women were once predominate in the field and only over time, as salaries increased, did men begin to outnumber them. Software development as a career is still well-paying, which makes it attractive, but how generative AI will impact this remains to be seen. I suspect it will just lower the number of students overall, rather than improve the gender ratio.
posted by tommasz at 7:01 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
I’m skeptical of these generalizations because there are so many different colleges and types of college in the US.
One thing that jumps out to me in thislist of majors by gender vs (albeit from 2017) is that a lot of the top woman-dominated majors are preprofessional: nursing, education, social work, medical admin, design.
And I’m wondering in particular how much of this gender skew is the growth of female-dominated health professions requiring at least an associate’s degree. Like, your x-ray tech went to college but your HVAC tech went to trade school.
And “health professions” absolutely outnumber engineering and computer science programs by degrees granted at both the associate’s and bachelor’s level, according to federal statistics from 2022.
posted by smelendez at 7:12 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
One thing that jumps out to me in thislist of majors by gender vs (albeit from 2017) is that a lot of the top woman-dominated majors are preprofessional: nursing, education, social work, medical admin, design.
And I’m wondering in particular how much of this gender skew is the growth of female-dominated health professions requiring at least an associate’s degree. Like, your x-ray tech went to college but your HVAC tech went to trade school.
And “health professions” absolutely outnumber engineering and computer science programs by degrees granted at both the associate’s and bachelor’s level, according to federal statistics from 2022.
posted by smelendez at 7:12 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
Much like a car isn't much use when you have no roads, the rules for men are only useful in an environment dominated by their peers. In a group where the numbers make the policing of girls impossible, the rules for men become a detriment for their well being. But opting out seems impossible or at least really really difficult and dangerous. Retreating from such spaces however solves the problem instantly. What a choice!
posted by Ashenmote at 7:14 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
posted by Ashenmote at 7:14 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
Seventeen-year-old boys looking at a class full of young women...
....are suddenly thinking, "I don't want to be the minority, that's a terrrrible place to be!"
They know which end of the stick they'd rather be holding.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:30 AM on October 13 [14 favorites]
....are suddenly thinking, "I don't want to be the minority, that's a terrrrible place to be!"
They know which end of the stick they'd rather be holding.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:30 AM on October 13 [14 favorites]
Your experience is obviously your real experience, but I think you are not getting how unusual you might be. Or Oz is just very different from the US.
Having also been an 18 year old boy with a bunch of other 18 year old boys in the US, for "this is how it is for boys overall" I would put way way way more weight on "Doing stuff that mostly girls do means you're gay" and only a tiny weensy bit any kind of notionally-rational projection about income or opportunities.
You didnt specify where in the US or when this was. I am also from the US, was an 18 year old boy once myself, and I couldn't disagree more. The notion of anything being "girly" never once crossed my mind when considering majors or courses. What WAS drilled into me, again and again and again, was the need to be self-sufficient and build a career.
My experience growing up pretty much perfectly reflects rory's excellent comment, so I won't repeat it here. Suffice to say I was always talented in math/science but personally preferred the creative arts - math/science won out (went for engineering) because it was perceived as the only way I could stay afloat in our capitalist hellscape.
posted by photo guy at 7:30 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
Having also been an 18 year old boy with a bunch of other 18 year old boys in the US, for "this is how it is for boys overall" I would put way way way more weight on "Doing stuff that mostly girls do means you're gay" and only a tiny weensy bit any kind of notionally-rational projection about income or opportunities.
You didnt specify where in the US or when this was. I am also from the US, was an 18 year old boy once myself, and I couldn't disagree more. The notion of anything being "girly" never once crossed my mind when considering majors or courses. What WAS drilled into me, again and again and again, was the need to be self-sufficient and build a career.
My experience growing up pretty much perfectly reflects rory's excellent comment, so I won't repeat it here. Suffice to say I was always talented in math/science but personally preferred the creative arts - math/science won out (went for engineering) because it was perceived as the only way I could stay afloat in our capitalist hellscape.
posted by photo guy at 7:30 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
Is this an American or Western issue, or is it worldwide?
cf. Afghanistan [ap]
posted by HearHere at 7:33 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
cf. Afghanistan [ap]
posted by HearHere at 7:33 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
One thing that stands out to me FTFA:
You sit down, you accept that you don't know sht and you accept that your teacher is right
and you have to shut up and listen.
Obedience is what school requires, which is a feminine trait.
For Gen X male me, that shows that ideas of masculinity have been mutated by social media into something that I cannot recognize.
When I was young, an essential part of being male was being stoically wiling to "You sit down, you accept that you don't know sht and you accept that your teacher is right."
Whether that was your teacher, your drill instructor, or the senior tradesman in your apprenticeship, you had to put in the time with eyes and ears open, and mouth shut. Nowhere is that more true than on the factory shop floor. You sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, learn how to do things properly, or someone dies. IF anything, objecting to this model is what was coded as feminine by toxic masculine types.
posted by ocschwar at 7:36 AM on October 13 [23 favorites]
You sit down, you accept that you don't know sht and you accept that your teacher is right
and you have to shut up and listen.
Obedience is what school requires, which is a feminine trait.
For Gen X male me, that shows that ideas of masculinity have been mutated by social media into something that I cannot recognize.
When I was young, an essential part of being male was being stoically wiling to "You sit down, you accept that you don't know sht and you accept that your teacher is right."
Whether that was your teacher, your drill instructor, or the senior tradesman in your apprenticeship, you had to put in the time with eyes and ears open, and mouth shut. Nowhere is that more true than on the factory shop floor. You sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, learn how to do things properly, or someone dies. IF anything, objecting to this model is what was coded as feminine by toxic masculine types.
posted by ocschwar at 7:36 AM on October 13 [23 favorites]
Yeah, that doesn't square with the "I'm the authority on everything, whether I know anything about it or not" model of modern masculinity, espoused by professional podcasters whose real fields of expertise are mostly limited to going to the gym and an encyclopedic knowledge of energy drink flavors.
It would be ironic if men ultimately became creatures that mostly focused on personal fitness and trivia, and women made all the money. To be honest, speaking for men, I think this is the future a lot of us secretly crave. Work is hard. If we could all aspire to be himbos...I mean, I think Joe Rogan and Jake Paul and even Pete Davidson basically ARE himbos, and their lives seem great, honestly. I'm not sure I'm kidding. I think what keeps men from embracing a future where their main focus is being pretty for women is that it doesn't sound very manly. But if you spin it right, like "I'm a pro MMA fighter" or "I'm a leading brand ambassapreneur" a lot of dudes would be all for it, I promise.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:49 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
It would be ironic if men ultimately became creatures that mostly focused on personal fitness and trivia, and women made all the money. To be honest, speaking for men, I think this is the future a lot of us secretly crave. Work is hard. If we could all aspire to be himbos...I mean, I think Joe Rogan and Jake Paul and even Pete Davidson basically ARE himbos, and their lives seem great, honestly. I'm not sure I'm kidding. I think what keeps men from embracing a future where their main focus is being pretty for women is that it doesn't sound very manly. But if you spin it right, like "I'm a pro MMA fighter" or "I'm a leading brand ambassapreneur" a lot of dudes would be all for it, I promise.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:49 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
If you as a man hear the word "misogyny" and you think it means something black and white, like men are evil and women are good, like us vs. them, etc. -- that's on you.
I'm glad you said "if", because I don't think that. I wasn't reacting to your use of the word "misogyny", I'm reacting to the idea that "ew, girly" is a necessary and sufficient explanation of boys' study and life choices. If you'd just said "It's misogyny" and I'd just said "In some cases it will be, but that can't be all there is to it—but it's definitely a result of the patriarchy" instead of taking a thousand words to say it, maybe it wouldn't have looked as defensive.
So, I agree that some individual boys will be thinking "ew, girly" about a discipline or college as a whole and not applying because of it. If that "some" isn't comprehensive enough and you would say "all", well, we disagree on that.
I was drawn to this thread because on Tuesday I'm going to be teaching three classes of twenty students each in which over 90% of the students will be women. The reasons for that disparity aren't black and white and there's more than just one. They also include global inequalities, the marketization and marketing of higher education, national and local policy choices around education and immigration, cross-cultural differences in the value placed on different disciplines, social class, the effects of China's one-child policy, the impact of austerity and the cost-of-living crisis in the UK, and racism, and misogyny.
It's like the difference between observing that gentrification contributes to and is a product of structural racism and saying that a young couple buying a run-down house and doing it up are motivated by their own racism.
posted by rory at 7:49 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
I'm glad you said "if", because I don't think that. I wasn't reacting to your use of the word "misogyny", I'm reacting to the idea that "ew, girly" is a necessary and sufficient explanation of boys' study and life choices. If you'd just said "It's misogyny" and I'd just said "In some cases it will be, but that can't be all there is to it—but it's definitely a result of the patriarchy" instead of taking a thousand words to say it, maybe it wouldn't have looked as defensive.
So, I agree that some individual boys will be thinking "ew, girly" about a discipline or college as a whole and not applying because of it. If that "some" isn't comprehensive enough and you would say "all", well, we disagree on that.
I was drawn to this thread because on Tuesday I'm going to be teaching three classes of twenty students each in which over 90% of the students will be women. The reasons for that disparity aren't black and white and there's more than just one. They also include global inequalities, the marketization and marketing of higher education, national and local policy choices around education and immigration, cross-cultural differences in the value placed on different disciplines, social class, the effects of China's one-child policy, the impact of austerity and the cost-of-living crisis in the UK, and racism, and misogyny.
It's like the difference between observing that gentrification contributes to and is a product of structural racism and saying that a young couple buying a run-down house and doing it up are motivated by their own racism.
posted by rory at 7:49 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
College is dumb, not because it's "girly" (that's preposterous) but because you've gotta sell an organ to afford it.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:50 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:50 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
It's a snap judgement that anything that's female dominated is less desirable, lower status, and yes very likely to be lower paid
Let’s be real, boys in high school aren’t thinking about the ultimate pay scales of their professions nearly as much as we all wish they were. It is a snap judgment that female dominated spaces will be *uncomfortable* for them because they will require them to follow a lot of rules that they don’t want to follow around speech and behavior. And right now, we don’t teach boys that these rules are important to follow for their own sake; they are taught that these are masks they must put on in the presence of women. And they want to be around back slapping men making back slapping jokes; they want to have the praise of men and the competition of men. It really isn’t as reasoned out as people are suggesting.
posted by corb at 7:56 AM on October 13 [19 favorites]
Let’s be real, boys in high school aren’t thinking about the ultimate pay scales of their professions nearly as much as we all wish they were. It is a snap judgment that female dominated spaces will be *uncomfortable* for them because they will require them to follow a lot of rules that they don’t want to follow around speech and behavior. And right now, we don’t teach boys that these rules are important to follow for their own sake; they are taught that these are masks they must put on in the presence of women. And they want to be around back slapping men making back slapping jokes; they want to have the praise of men and the competition of men. It really isn’t as reasoned out as people are suggesting.
posted by corb at 7:56 AM on October 13 [19 favorites]
There's overtime and bonus opportunities galore
The young men like their money and they all come back for more
But soon you're knocking on and you look older than you should
For every bob made on the job, you pay with flesh and blood
Great Big Sea summing it up for the more intense blue collar opportunities out there.
posted by ocschwar at 8:03 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
going to college was always a bit gay, effete, feminine. i definitely understood what my electrician/bank robber deadbeat dad uncle meant when he called me a fancy college boy. in some ways i wonder if this is just a reversion to the mean for men, who yes dominated universities until recently but didn’t go to college much all the same in the era before co-ed because many fewer people went to college at all back then, even for baby boomers.
posted by dis_integration at 8:17 AM on October 13 [10 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 8:17 AM on October 13 [10 favorites]
I have so many reactions to TFA.
I should start by acknowledging the superficial plausibility of the assertion that "male enrollment declining beyond 50% is because too much female enrollment makes the environment too unattractive to men." But I also have to observe that it's not presented so much as an argument as an example of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is a fallacy not an argument.
I was a college student for kind of a long time, kind of a long time ago, and various things that TFA apparently thinks are new ("Biology is the easiest STEM major") are in fact ancient truisms. I was around that environment for long enough that I could observe the earliest steps of women getting into chemistry majors after they'd successfully colonized biology departments. They had no presence in physics at that time, IDK about now, and you seldom saw them in pure math(1). But anyway hierarchies in STEM date back to Newton probably.
One topic that TFA fails to notice is the declining value of bachelor's degrees generally. College was never supposed to be a job-training program, it was a finishing school for elites. The BA or BS degree was primarily a class marker, not a training credential, and its value for getting into a high-paying career was mainly as a signal that the possessor was "the right sort of person" to be working at the kind of place that pays well for doing things much easier than ditch-digging.(2) You might be able to make a pretty plausible argument that declining (White) male enrollment is just an acknowledgement that a degree is no longer a reliable signal that you're entitled to play life on easy mode. It's a leading indicator, as it were, of the declining value of college itself for influencing SES outcomes.
At least, I claim that's plausible.
(1) I was engaged in a fool's pursuit of Renaissance-manhood generalism, which is why I saw the deparmental majors' versions of all of these courses.
(2) Not pointing at engineering school or teaching school degrees here, which are job-training programs, kind of, and which only relatively recently have become the kind of University programs that have professorships and advanced degrees. Med school and law schools are even more recent than teacher's colleges I think.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:31 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
I should start by acknowledging the superficial plausibility of the assertion that "male enrollment declining beyond 50% is because too much female enrollment makes the environment too unattractive to men." But I also have to observe that it's not presented so much as an argument as an example of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is a fallacy not an argument.
I was a college student for kind of a long time, kind of a long time ago, and various things that TFA apparently thinks are new ("Biology is the easiest STEM major") are in fact ancient truisms. I was around that environment for long enough that I could observe the earliest steps of women getting into chemistry majors after they'd successfully colonized biology departments. They had no presence in physics at that time, IDK about now, and you seldom saw them in pure math(1). But anyway hierarchies in STEM date back to Newton probably.
One topic that TFA fails to notice is the declining value of bachelor's degrees generally. College was never supposed to be a job-training program, it was a finishing school for elites. The BA or BS degree was primarily a class marker, not a training credential, and its value for getting into a high-paying career was mainly as a signal that the possessor was "the right sort of person" to be working at the kind of place that pays well for doing things much easier than ditch-digging.(2) You might be able to make a pretty plausible argument that declining (White) male enrollment is just an acknowledgement that a degree is no longer a reliable signal that you're entitled to play life on easy mode. It's a leading indicator, as it were, of the declining value of college itself for influencing SES outcomes.
At least, I claim that's plausible.
(1) I was engaged in a fool's pursuit of Renaissance-manhood generalism, which is why I saw the deparmental majors' versions of all of these courses.
(2) Not pointing at engineering school or teaching school degrees here, which are job-training programs, kind of, and which only relatively recently have become the kind of University programs that have professorships and advanced degrees. Med school and law schools are even more recent than teacher's colleges I think.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:31 AM on October 13 [8 favorites]
It occurs to me that one way to test my hypothesis it to identify programs that are job training programs, like most all of the engineering disciplines, maybe chemistry, maybe comp sci, and med school, and compare the elasticity of male enrollment there with increasing female enrollment. If those programs don't show declines in male applicants beyond 50%, that would be consistent with my hypothesis.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:36 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:36 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
Look at how many times you repeat that it's a chicken and egg problem, or that it can't be so simple. Nooooo it has to be something "more complicated " because surely boys aren't evil!
Okay, I looked. I used the phrase twice, the second time in relation to the idea (that the blog author rejects too) that "right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable [at college, and] more men than women lean right". Is it that boys aren't choosing college because men are more right wing, or that men are more right wing because fewer of them are going to college and learning there that reality doesn't align well with a right-wing worldview? It seems to me that both are in play. Either way, the connection with misogyny in relation to this point is indirect.
it can't be "that simple" (as if misogyny is simple!), it must need "more nuance".
You're quoting words I didn't say, MiraK. I would never say that misogyny is simple, any more than racism is.
Nooooo it has to be something "more complicated " because surely boys aren't evil!
Again, you're putting words into my mouth here. Seriously, search this thread for the words "simple" and "complicated". I did argue "for nuance". You seem to be as well, in saying that misogyny is nuanced. It is, I agree.
I spoke about the specifics of my own upbringing in that later comment to indicate my own familiarity with the negative side of male culture: specifically, the misogynist, homophobic, racist side of male culture. I would never claim that it doesn't exist, or that there aren't plenty of thoroughly deplorable boys and men, and/or men and boys who do deplorable things. Some of them used to beat me up at school, and I've encountered others as an adult. Not as many now, fortunately, because I've ended up in a female-dominated workplace.
posted by rory at 8:38 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
Okay, I looked. I used the phrase twice, the second time in relation to the idea (that the blog author rejects too) that "right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable [at college, and] more men than women lean right". Is it that boys aren't choosing college because men are more right wing, or that men are more right wing because fewer of them are going to college and learning there that reality doesn't align well with a right-wing worldview? It seems to me that both are in play. Either way, the connection with misogyny in relation to this point is indirect.
it can't be "that simple" (as if misogyny is simple!), it must need "more nuance".
You're quoting words I didn't say, MiraK. I would never say that misogyny is simple, any more than racism is.
Nooooo it has to be something "more complicated " because surely boys aren't evil!
Again, you're putting words into my mouth here. Seriously, search this thread for the words "simple" and "complicated". I did argue "for nuance". You seem to be as well, in saying that misogyny is nuanced. It is, I agree.
I spoke about the specifics of my own upbringing in that later comment to indicate my own familiarity with the negative side of male culture: specifically, the misogynist, homophobic, racist side of male culture. I would never claim that it doesn't exist, or that there aren't plenty of thoroughly deplorable boys and men, and/or men and boys who do deplorable things. Some of them used to beat me up at school, and I've encountered others as an adult. Not as many now, fortunately, because I've ended up in a female-dominated workplace.
posted by rory at 8:38 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
I think the “ew, girls” response, by age 16 or 17, has been replaced by its final outcome: men don’t listen to women. Or rather, the patriarchy socializes them not to listen to women. Some men certainly do listen to them! More than ever! And they are the joy of my life, particularly the ones who raised me.
But the fact is that young men in particular, the ones who feel they need to prove their manhood, often don’t want to be in a position of listening to women. It may or may not be a conscious decision, but if they look around and see women as classmates, colleagues, professors—they’re gonna feel that’s not the place for them. They may not even think they’re being sexist; they’re just going to look for somewhere they think they should be.
I once read that medicine itself became a devalued profession in the USSR because so many women were encouraged to enter it. I can’t speak to that, but it made sense.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:38 AM on October 13 [10 favorites]
But the fact is that young men in particular, the ones who feel they need to prove their manhood, often don’t want to be in a position of listening to women. It may or may not be a conscious decision, but if they look around and see women as classmates, colleagues, professors—they’re gonna feel that’s not the place for them. They may not even think they’re being sexist; they’re just going to look for somewhere they think they should be.
I once read that medicine itself became a devalued profession in the USSR because so many women were encouraged to enter it. I can’t speak to that, but it made sense.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:38 AM on October 13 [10 favorites]
America’s New Millionaire Class: Plumbers and HVAC Entrepreneurs [WSJ]
posted by chavenet at 8:41 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
posted by chavenet at 8:41 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
And the other thing I'd like to see drilled-down-upon is the crosstabs for the male applicant demographics in programs where male applicants have come to make up less than 50% in recent decades. If the decline is mainly among White male applicants, that also would be consistent with my "leading indicator" hypothesis.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:48 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:48 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
Uh. Anyone click through to the link to (a summary of) Dr. Lincoln's research? Because, quoting her directly: "Also, fewer men than women are graduating with a bachelor's degree, so they aren't applying because they don't have the prerequisites." That seems like a huge thing to overlook in this author's analysis.
posted by brook horse at 8:53 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
posted by brook horse at 8:53 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
I (white, male, 50s) teach at a public university known for being inexpensive and friendly to first-generation college students. I also have a daughter in middle school and another one in high school. So I have some relevant experience, here.
In college: the top 5-10% of my students are about evenly divided along gender lines, but the entire rest of the top 50% is women. A male student giving a speech after an award said "all the girls on campus are reading three books at once, and all the guys owe $5k to Draft Kings", and absolutely everyone was like yes that is the truth. The women just outclass the guys in all but a very small number of cases. The guys are SALTY about this—but what they're really mad about is that the girls won't date them.
The major complaint is that the minute a woman looks at their profile and sees "conservative" or "moderate", it's game over. "I have to pretend to be some kind of fuckin' liberal just to even get swiped on", is a pretty common complaint. And then the women are all like you're goddamn right, and I'm like why pretend? Why not actually adjust your beliefs? They almost unanimously have this frame that they work out and dress and groom themselves properly and this ought to entitle them to female companionship, and because it doesn't, that's the women's fault.
What they share with my older daughter's male classmates is having been thoroughly poisoned by the Fortnite --> Jordan Peterson --> Joe Rogan --> Andrew Tate --> Trump pipeline: that modern society discriminates against guys for being guys, which itself runs the gamut from "embodying old-school not-necessarily-terrible-but-outdated images of masculinity as being earner/protector and therefore deserving a female companion who provides sex, housework and nurturing", which is terrible but maybe not deliberately so, all the way to "women aren't really people and shouldn't have bodily autonomy nor the right to vote", which then gets bafflingly combined with "why don't I have a girlfriend?" The girls, except for one or two pick-mes, are equally unanimously "get fucked, and not by me: I'm going to college so as to NOT be dependent on a man."
None of this should be particularly surprising to anyone here, but the part that's genuinely weird to me is how much of the boys' and mens' dysfunction is due not just to parental neglect, but to active encouragement of these counterproductive attitudes. I only have daughters, and it's been surprisingly easy to raise them to be assertive, dream big, not become dependent on boys' thinking they're pretty for their self-esteem, etc: the shitty motifs of '80s culture that made life such a challenge for my own female classmates in high school have all kinds of intellectual infrastructure raised against them, now. But not a single goddamn thing has changed about the way (middle-class, at least) parents raise boys: you can like only six things (war, cars, sports, video games, misogyny and gross body humor) and if you like anything else or don't like those things, you are Cast Out from being a Real Boy. The number of otherwise functional seeming parents I've gaped at over the years for imposing/encouraging this has to be in four digits at this point. In the '80s we could at least plausibly say that parents didn't know any better, but now? Sheesh, way to trap your son in a cesspool from which he's unlikely to escape without a lot of pain and self-reflection. There are next to no good progressive/feminist role models for boys and young men: the reactionary ones are extremely well-funded, and a lot of progressive models/institutions are frankly shitty to boys and young men.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:54 AM on October 13 [53 favorites]
In college: the top 5-10% of my students are about evenly divided along gender lines, but the entire rest of the top 50% is women. A male student giving a speech after an award said "all the girls on campus are reading three books at once, and all the guys owe $5k to Draft Kings", and absolutely everyone was like yes that is the truth. The women just outclass the guys in all but a very small number of cases. The guys are SALTY about this—but what they're really mad about is that the girls won't date them.
The major complaint is that the minute a woman looks at their profile and sees "conservative" or "moderate", it's game over. "I have to pretend to be some kind of fuckin' liberal just to even get swiped on", is a pretty common complaint. And then the women are all like you're goddamn right, and I'm like why pretend? Why not actually adjust your beliefs? They almost unanimously have this frame that they work out and dress and groom themselves properly and this ought to entitle them to female companionship, and because it doesn't, that's the women's fault.
What they share with my older daughter's male classmates is having been thoroughly poisoned by the Fortnite --> Jordan Peterson --> Joe Rogan --> Andrew Tate --> Trump pipeline: that modern society discriminates against guys for being guys, which itself runs the gamut from "embodying old-school not-necessarily-terrible-but-outdated images of masculinity as being earner/protector and therefore deserving a female companion who provides sex, housework and nurturing", which is terrible but maybe not deliberately so, all the way to "women aren't really people and shouldn't have bodily autonomy nor the right to vote", which then gets bafflingly combined with "why don't I have a girlfriend?" The girls, except for one or two pick-mes, are equally unanimously "get fucked, and not by me: I'm going to college so as to NOT be dependent on a man."
None of this should be particularly surprising to anyone here, but the part that's genuinely weird to me is how much of the boys' and mens' dysfunction is due not just to parental neglect, but to active encouragement of these counterproductive attitudes. I only have daughters, and it's been surprisingly easy to raise them to be assertive, dream big, not become dependent on boys' thinking they're pretty for their self-esteem, etc: the shitty motifs of '80s culture that made life such a challenge for my own female classmates in high school have all kinds of intellectual infrastructure raised against them, now. But not a single goddamn thing has changed about the way (middle-class, at least) parents raise boys: you can like only six things (war, cars, sports, video games, misogyny and gross body humor) and if you like anything else or don't like those things, you are Cast Out from being a Real Boy. The number of otherwise functional seeming parents I've gaped at over the years for imposing/encouraging this has to be in four digits at this point. In the '80s we could at least plausibly say that parents didn't know any better, but now? Sheesh, way to trap your son in a cesspool from which he's unlikely to escape without a lot of pain and self-reflection. There are next to no good progressive/feminist role models for boys and young men: the reactionary ones are extremely well-funded, and a lot of progressive models/institutions are frankly shitty to boys and young men.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:54 AM on October 13 [53 favorites]
....are suddenly thinking, "I don't want to be the minority, that's a terrrrible place to be!"
Agree, but also it's not just the minority; people used to privilege don't want to accept a majority that is anything less than an overwhelming majority. I remember an editorial cartoon from the 60s of a large office with two black employees at desks next to each while everyone else is white, and one white coworker says to another white employee, "See, this is what I'm talking about. They're taking over!"
This is why your movie can have one token minority character, but if you have two then it's "forced representation."
It's the Smurfette Principal. It's why the Bechdel-Wallace Test is so simple but powerful.
This is why "male flight" as a reference to "white flight" is such a keen insight on this matter.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:01 AM on October 13 [14 favorites]
Agree, but also it's not just the minority; people used to privilege don't want to accept a majority that is anything less than an overwhelming majority. I remember an editorial cartoon from the 60s of a large office with two black employees at desks next to each while everyone else is white, and one white coworker says to another white employee, "See, this is what I'm talking about. They're taking over!"
This is why your movie can have one token minority character, but if you have two then it's "forced representation."
It's the Smurfette Principal. It's why the Bechdel-Wallace Test is so simple but powerful.
This is why "male flight" as a reference to "white flight" is such a keen insight on this matter.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:01 AM on October 13 [14 favorites]
Obedience is what school requires, which is a feminine trait.
Well either the military is the height of femininity or misogyny is a bunch of Calvinball bullshit.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:06 AM on October 13 [16 favorites]
Well either the military is the height of femininity or misogyny is a bunch of Calvinball bullshit.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:06 AM on October 13 [16 favorites]
This post and last month’s “How is it that so few men like women?” post are, in my mind, interconnected. Specifically, I want to highlight this fragment of a comment there:
> just because a man is heterosexual and wants to have sex with women does not in any way mean he likes or respects women, or even really thinks of them as people on the same level he may see himself.
Which supports here a simple understanding of why male flight happens in college and in jobs: Everyone wants to be around people they like and respect; and for a lot of men, that might be their primary selection criteria for a post-mandatory education.
posted by Callisto Prime at 9:21 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
> just because a man is heterosexual and wants to have sex with women does not in any way mean he likes or respects women, or even really thinks of them as people on the same level he may see himself.
Which supports here a simple understanding of why male flight happens in college and in jobs: Everyone wants to be around people they like and respect; and for a lot of men, that might be their primary selection criteria for a post-mandatory education.
posted by Callisto Prime at 9:21 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
Also, all-male educational institutions stopped practicing corporal punishment, but they weren't and aren't usually encouraging their students to freely follow their interests, run around the classroom, speak out of turn, challenge orthodoxy and authority, etc. The same goes for schools in societies that are even more male dominated than our own.
posted by Selena777 at 9:23 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
posted by Selena777 at 9:23 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
(war, cars, sports, video games, misogyny and gross body humor)
Notice that all of these are just consumer hobbies. Even war. There are places on the Internet where toxic masculine types can see HD footage from very recent combat in Ukraine and the Middle East. (Recommendation: DO NOT go into those spaces. Just take my word for it.)
At best you can make money from these by being a more (something) aficionado of them than your peers so they pay you in Youtube monetization ro something.
Cars is kinda sorta a livelihood, but then you have to be willing to change the head gasket of a girlie car like a Kia. ew..
posted by ocschwar at 9:24 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
Notice that all of these are just consumer hobbies. Even war. There are places on the Internet where toxic masculine types can see HD footage from very recent combat in Ukraine and the Middle East. (Recommendation: DO NOT go into those spaces. Just take my word for it.)
At best you can make money from these by being a more (something) aficionado of them than your peers so they pay you in Youtube monetization ro something.
Cars is kinda sorta a livelihood, but then you have to be willing to change the head gasket of a girlie car like a Kia. ew..
posted by ocschwar at 9:24 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
*Are* the last two consumer hobbies?
posted by Selena777 at 9:30 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
posted by Selena777 at 9:30 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
But not a single goddamn thing has changed about the way (middle-class, at least) parents raise boys:
Not so. I have a son and I do talk with other fathers of sons. Our authority is being challenged by the electronic devices in their pockets. And bear in mind that challenging a model of masculinity requires being willing to represent a less-masculine existence by the terms of that model. If for example, I say "real men change diapers", I am implicitly saying that by the standard I am attacking, I am girly.
posted by ocschwar at 9:31 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
Not so. I have a son and I do talk with other fathers of sons. Our authority is being challenged by the electronic devices in their pockets. And bear in mind that challenging a model of masculinity requires being willing to represent a less-masculine existence by the terms of that model. If for example, I say "real men change diapers", I am implicitly saying that by the standard I am attacking, I am girly.
posted by ocschwar at 9:31 AM on October 13 [4 favorites]
*Are* the last two consumer hobbies?
IF you're into misogyny or grossness, you consume podcasts and other content that celebrates them. So yes.
posted by ocschwar at 9:32 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
IF you're into misogyny or grossness, you consume podcasts and other content that celebrates them. So yes.
posted by ocschwar at 9:32 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
Urging my nephews to go to a trade school and get a decent paycheck, and not be saddled with student debt and a useless bachelor degree...Or the military...maybe firefighter or peace officer.
posted by Czjewel at 9:34 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
posted by Czjewel at 9:34 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
The thing about obedience as a "feminine" trait is that most K-12 teachers are women. I don't think obedience is coded as "feminine" or "masculine," but guys who care deeply about masculinity often have problems specifically with obeying women.
A boy who is growing up with misogynistic messages - whether they're from his family or his peers or podcasts - is often a boy who thinks he shouldn't have to listen to his teachers. And if he starts disengaging academically in 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, college isn't even going to be on his radar.
posted by Jeanne at 9:42 AM on October 13 [18 favorites]
A boy who is growing up with misogynistic messages - whether they're from his family or his peers or podcasts - is often a boy who thinks he shouldn't have to listen to his teachers. And if he starts disengaging academically in 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, college isn't even going to be on his radar.
posted by Jeanne at 9:42 AM on October 13 [18 favorites]
The major complaint is that the minute a woman looks at their profile and sees "conservative" or "moderate", it's game over. "I have to pretend to be some kind of fuckin' liberal just to even get swiped on", is a pretty common complaint. And then the women are all like you're goddamn right, and I'm like why pretend? Why not actually adjust your beliefs?
So I think this is also partially a problem with most romantic selection moving to dating sites where the rejection process is a simple swipe. Because “rejection on principles” has *always* been a thing, but you used to have to engage in an in person argument first before you got to that stage. Which had a double effect: men could see that women *would* have been interested in them if not for their beliefs, but also, they had to engage in argument and have their beliefs challenged. And I think a lot of people were genuinely moved, as a result. There was some pretense, but also some genuine movement.
It is hard to ask people to change their beliefs without new information and without a reasonable hope that their changed beliefs will matter in some way. And that is another reason online dating is poison.
posted by corb at 10:05 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
So I think this is also partially a problem with most romantic selection moving to dating sites where the rejection process is a simple swipe. Because “rejection on principles” has *always* been a thing, but you used to have to engage in an in person argument first before you got to that stage. Which had a double effect: men could see that women *would* have been interested in them if not for their beliefs, but also, they had to engage in argument and have their beliefs challenged. And I think a lot of people were genuinely moved, as a result. There was some pretense, but also some genuine movement.
It is hard to ask people to change their beliefs without new information and without a reasonable hope that their changed beliefs will matter in some way. And that is another reason online dating is poison.
posted by corb at 10:05 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
Do men have an easier time without a need to “prove” their worth with a degree?
Do men have an easier time? Yes
posted by theora55 at 10:06 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
Do men have an easier time? Yes
posted by theora55 at 10:06 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
Not so. I have a son and I do talk with other fathers of sons. Our authority is being challenged by the electronic devices in their pockets.
Anecdotally, you're in a real minority. Good for you, though. In my experience, it's the MOTHERS who are creating all kinds of problems for their sons. This may be a small sample size, or the mothers' more likely to be the parent present at a school function, so I cannot be sure. My question for you is, HOW do you try to keep your sons away from the Internet Misogyny Pipeline, or to deconstruct it? Note that this is not my accusing you of not doing the job, but rather curiosity as to how you try to get it done.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:11 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
Anecdotally, you're in a real minority. Good for you, though. In my experience, it's the MOTHERS who are creating all kinds of problems for their sons. This may be a small sample size, or the mothers' more likely to be the parent present at a school function, so I cannot be sure. My question for you is, HOW do you try to keep your sons away from the Internet Misogyny Pipeline, or to deconstruct it? Note that this is not my accusing you of not doing the job, but rather curiosity as to how you try to get it done.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:11 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
Over a number of years, the GOP has slashed funding for college. Because they want to reduce taxes, and they can afford to send their kids, so who cares about other young adults? There was, for a while, a PR campaign questioning the need for 2ndary education.
I'm a boomer, college was affordable for most with grants and manageable, low interest loans. Lots of people got the chance to have professional jobs, join the middle or even monied classes. There was so much innovation - Bill Gates famously didn't finish college, but a lot of the early tech innovators sure did, and it showed. I think we'll see a dramatic reduction in the kind of innovation that has driven growth.
Plus, education can help people be better thinkers and makes life better for a lot of us. It also seems to make people more politically liberal, maybe it's the exposure to ideas. So they shut that down.
In the old USSR, medicine became a woman's field. prestige and pay went down. Sexism is universal, alive, and well.
posted by theora55 at 10:13 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
I'm a boomer, college was affordable for most with grants and manageable, low interest loans. Lots of people got the chance to have professional jobs, join the middle or even monied classes. There was so much innovation - Bill Gates famously didn't finish college, but a lot of the early tech innovators sure did, and it showed. I think we'll see a dramatic reduction in the kind of innovation that has driven growth.
Plus, education can help people be better thinkers and makes life better for a lot of us. It also seems to make people more politically liberal, maybe it's the exposure to ideas. So they shut that down.
In the old USSR, medicine became a woman's field. prestige and pay went down. Sexism is universal, alive, and well.
posted by theora55 at 10:13 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
Urging my nephews to go to a trade school and get a decent paycheck
This type of attitude drives me up a wall, as if the only reason to choose to go to college (or not) is the eventual resulting paycheck. Urge your nephews to give a shit about more than their income.
posted by axiom at 10:40 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
This type of attitude drives me up a wall, as if the only reason to choose to go to college (or not) is the eventual resulting paycheck. Urge your nephews to give a shit about more than their income.
posted by axiom at 10:40 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
"...as if the only reason to choose to go to college (or not) is the eventual resulting paycheck."
When you grow up poor, it's frequently, "get training/experience to work a day job while you (maybe) struggle with what you want to do".
If you even get that.
I never could become a hippy because I never could believe you didn't have to struggle like hell. And maybe not make it then.
posted by aleph at 10:44 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
When you grow up poor, it's frequently, "get training/experience to work a day job while you (maybe) struggle with what you want to do".
If you even get that.
I never could become a hippy because I never could believe you didn't have to struggle like hell. And maybe not make it then.
posted by aleph at 10:44 AM on October 13 [5 favorites]
Great article. One of the first comments on it made me LOL, i.e. "[h]ow quickly do you think we could reach the tipping point for Congress and CEOs?"
I'm very glad to see the comments both here and on the article about how men are recognizing this situation and stepping up to address it. The thing is that women are not going back to a situation where they are expected to stay out of public life, so boys need to learn how to operate in an egalitarian environment or face serious consequences. I hope we see more men like Tim Walz out there. We need models of masculinity and positive behaviour that don't require dominance or the rejection of femininity for everyone's sake.
I just hope this work can happen fast enough.
posted by rpfields at 10:47 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
I'm very glad to see the comments both here and on the article about how men are recognizing this situation and stepping up to address it. The thing is that women are not going back to a situation where they are expected to stay out of public life, so boys need to learn how to operate in an egalitarian environment or face serious consequences. I hope we see more men like Tim Walz out there. We need models of masculinity and positive behaviour that don't require dominance or the rejection of femininity for everyone's sake.
I just hope this work can happen fast enough.
posted by rpfields at 10:47 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
So I think this is also partially a problem with most romantic selection moving to dating sites where the rejection process is a simple swipe. Because “rejection on principles” has *always* been a thing, but you used to have to engage in an in person argument first before you got to that stage
My first impulse was to agree with this; but on reflection, I feel like knee-jerk rejection may be a feature of internet dating, not a bug. Minor differences that people can compromise on in person might actually be big differences that people should not compromise on at all, but are more inclined to when they have to see the heartbreak in a partner's eyes...or smell the pheromones coming off a physically appealing partner who totally sucks as a human being...or question how safe they are if they contradict this person with whom they are sharing a space in isolation from others.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:03 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
My first impulse was to agree with this; but on reflection, I feel like knee-jerk rejection may be a feature of internet dating, not a bug. Minor differences that people can compromise on in person might actually be big differences that people should not compromise on at all, but are more inclined to when they have to see the heartbreak in a partner's eyes...or smell the pheromones coming off a physically appealing partner who totally sucks as a human being...or question how safe they are if they contradict this person with whom they are sharing a space in isolation from others.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 11:03 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
I really liked outgrown_hobnail's points about conservatism and college, above.
To those I would add that, having failed to get the preponderance of educated, intelligent people teaching at and attending universities to dispense with their facts/logic/empathy based worldview and embrace conservatism, is it that surprising conservatives are just pushing people to disdain/forego university entirely?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:05 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
To those I would add that, having failed to get the preponderance of educated, intelligent people teaching at and attending universities to dispense with their facts/logic/empathy based worldview and embrace conservatism, is it that surprising conservatives are just pushing people to disdain/forego university entirely?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:05 AM on October 13 [6 favorites]
My question for you is, HOW do you try to keep your sons away from the Internet Misogyny Pipeline, or to deconstruct it?
My son't not at an age where I have to take affirmative actions just yet. So I have no set answers.
posted by ocschwar at 11:07 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
My son't not at an age where I have to take affirmative actions just yet. So I have no set answers.
posted by ocschwar at 11:07 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
"...may be a feature of internet dating, not a bug."
It's a bug AND a feature!
And maybe floor wax...
"...or question how safe they are if they contradict this person"
Always an issue. Why first meeting or two, cup of coffee or such, in well lighted public spaces to gauge the % wacko. Going to (hopefully) be in that enclosed space eventually.
posted by aleph at 11:08 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
It's a bug AND a feature!
And maybe floor wax...
"...or question how safe they are if they contradict this person"
Always an issue. Why first meeting or two, cup of coffee or such, in well lighted public spaces to gauge the % wacko. Going to (hopefully) be in that enclosed space eventually.
posted by aleph at 11:08 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
I didn't look at college/s insane costs, years of commitment, possibly crippling debt and total lack of guarantee of return, and go "Ew, girls". Come on.
posted by wafehling at 11:08 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
posted by wafehling at 11:08 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
Sounds like you think about it more than a lot of guys I knew.
posted by aleph at 11:10 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
posted by aleph at 11:10 AM on October 13 [2 favorites]
I don't think we have to choose between "college is increasingly expensive" and "college is increasingly for women" as mutually exclusive explanations.
College is becoming more expensive because it's increasingly seen as a special privilege students should have to pay dearly for, whereas that opportunity used to be seen as a critical public right.
We don't have to view it as a weird coincidence that the more women wanted a college education, the more people seem to think it should cost and the harder they think it should have to be to manage to get.
Or that the "It costs too much. Go work in the trades!" option presented as an alternative is heavily gendered as male.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:12 AM on October 13 [12 favorites]
College is becoming more expensive because it's increasingly seen as a special privilege students should have to pay dearly for, whereas that opportunity used to be seen as a critical public right.
We don't have to view it as a weird coincidence that the more women wanted a college education, the more people seem to think it should cost and the harder they think it should have to be to manage to get.
Or that the "It costs too much. Go work in the trades!" option presented as an alternative is heavily gendered as male.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:12 AM on October 13 [12 favorites]
I think we'll get more online/work-it-on-your-own, with study groups and such, to bring the costs down, with exams you show up in person for. Whether this will still be called "College", I can't say.
And of course the traditional ways will still be there. Maybe to a shrinking audience, maybe not. I can think of several ways that could happen, doubt I'll still be alive to see it.
posted by aleph at 11:16 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
And of course the traditional ways will still be there. Maybe to a shrinking audience, maybe not. I can think of several ways that could happen, doubt I'll still be alive to see it.
posted by aleph at 11:16 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
or question how safe they are if they contradict this person with whom they are sharing a space in isolation from others.
So to be clear, I’m not referring to this happening on first dates, I’m referring to this happening in pre-date spaces: at the coffee shop, the bookstore, the bar, a protest, the university commons: safe spaces with a lot of people around - before numbers or private information are even exchanged. Also, I don’t think people so much “compromise on things you shouldn’t compromise on” so much as “figure out what’s actually important”. Like: “anarchist or communist” probably not actually that important if you’re not living in the 1930s. “Believe in abortion?” Very important.
I think that we also gained from those kinds of conversations as we were forced to defend our own ideas, and became more adept at arguing them against people who didn’t agree with us. It made us better political fighters as well as the romantic angle.
posted by corb at 11:39 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
So to be clear, I’m not referring to this happening on first dates, I’m referring to this happening in pre-date spaces: at the coffee shop, the bookstore, the bar, a protest, the university commons: safe spaces with a lot of people around - before numbers or private information are even exchanged. Also, I don’t think people so much “compromise on things you shouldn’t compromise on” so much as “figure out what’s actually important”. Like: “anarchist or communist” probably not actually that important if you’re not living in the 1930s. “Believe in abortion?” Very important.
I think that we also gained from those kinds of conversations as we were forced to defend our own ideas, and became more adept at arguing them against people who didn’t agree with us. It made us better political fighters as well as the romantic angle.
posted by corb at 11:39 AM on October 13 [3 favorites]
"... I’m referring to this happening in pre-date spaces"
Sorry. Old enough where those *were* dates. At least if they didn't happen by accident.
Also, I still believe there's more to be picked up in person from the other person. Even if it doesn't come up in conversation. Better for % wacko evals.
posted by aleph at 11:49 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
Sorry. Old enough where those *were* dates. At least if they didn't happen by accident.
Also, I still believe there's more to be picked up in person from the other person. Even if it doesn't come up in conversation. Better for % wacko evals.
posted by aleph at 11:49 AM on October 13 [1 favorite]
But not a single goddamn thing has changed about the way (middle-class, at least) parents raise boys: you can like only six things (war, cars, sports, video games, misogyny and gross body humor) and if you like anything else or don't like those things, you are Cast Out from being a Real Boy.
I have a 22-year-old son, and I haven't seen this at all. He and his male friends mostly aren't like this a bit, especially when it comes to gender and sexuality stuff. They are musicians, and the ones who are in college are music majors, so maybe we're a weird little subset. But even when he was in grade school and middle school, kids were so much less horrible to each other than when I was a kid in the '80s and gender conformity was ruthlessly enforced.
posted by Daily Alice at 11:53 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
I have a 22-year-old son, and I haven't seen this at all. He and his male friends mostly aren't like this a bit, especially when it comes to gender and sexuality stuff. They are musicians, and the ones who are in college are music majors, so maybe we're a weird little subset. But even when he was in grade school and middle school, kids were so much less horrible to each other than when I was a kid in the '80s and gender conformity was ruthlessly enforced.
posted by Daily Alice at 11:53 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
The Taliban won’t allow women to be educated because it makes them harder to control.
The American Taliban, aka the Republican Party, has essentially the same goals.
When a stereotypically masculine American male who is not highly attractive and lacks the charisma of athletic or artistic accomplishment looks at a college full of women, he doesn’t see greater opportunities to find mates, he sees a bunch of women who are out of control, cannot be controlled, and may very well not be interested in him as a mate at all because they don’t need him to support them or their children — and more to the point, don’t see him as a desirable partner to father their children.
Men like that need a society in which women cannot freely choose their mates or support children by themselves, and Patriarchy has handed that to them for the the last two or three hundred generations and more, and they are not about to give it up without a huge fight, the huge fight in which we are currently engaged.
posted by jamjam at 11:54 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
The American Taliban, aka the Republican Party, has essentially the same goals.
When a stereotypically masculine American male who is not highly attractive and lacks the charisma of athletic or artistic accomplishment looks at a college full of women, he doesn’t see greater opportunities to find mates, he sees a bunch of women who are out of control, cannot be controlled, and may very well not be interested in him as a mate at all because they don’t need him to support them or their children — and more to the point, don’t see him as a desirable partner to father their children.
Men like that need a society in which women cannot freely choose their mates or support children by themselves, and Patriarchy has handed that to them for the the last two or three hundred generations and more, and they are not about to give it up without a huge fight, the huge fight in which we are currently engaged.
posted by jamjam at 11:54 AM on October 13 [9 favorites]
I don't think we have to choose between "college is increasingly expensive" and "college is increasingly for women" as mutually exclusive explanations.
College is becoming more expensive because it's increasingly seen as a special privilege students should have to pay dearly for, whereas that opportunity used to be seen as a critical public right.
Holy fuck, what timeline did you grow up on? Higher education in the US has always been for the privileged. There was a time when one State offered free tuition at its University, but by and large college was historically for the affluent, no question.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 12:00 PM on October 13 [2 favorites]
In the 80's and early 90's, conservatives were worried that violent action movies were rotting kids brains.
I'm coming to think that they were kind of right. Except it's all the conservatives who got the brainrot.
The modern conservative view of masculinity seems to be like trying to act like a B-grade action movie hero, then getting extremely pissed off that it doesn't turn out like in the movies. Trying to be a bad ass and flex on everyone you meet when you aren't have a contrived plot to make you always right doesn't get you respect and get you the girl, it makes you an asshole that no one wants to date. And then they're blaming everyone else for not conforming to that script.
posted by Zalzidrax at 12:05 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
I'm coming to think that they were kind of right. Except it's all the conservatives who got the brainrot.
The modern conservative view of masculinity seems to be like trying to act like a B-grade action movie hero, then getting extremely pissed off that it doesn't turn out like in the movies. Trying to be a bad ass and flex on everyone you meet when you aren't have a contrived plot to make you always right doesn't get you respect and get you the girl, it makes you an asshole that no one wants to date. And then they're blaming everyone else for not conforming to that script.
posted by Zalzidrax at 12:05 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
Holy fuck, what timeline did you grow up on?
I grew up on the one where my tuition for a respectable state college in the middle of a notably Black city was less than a fourth the cost the same school is now, even after adjusting for inflation.
How is the skyrocketing cost of college news to you?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:16 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
I grew up on the one where my tuition for a respectable state college in the middle of a notably Black city was less than a fourth the cost the same school is now, even after adjusting for inflation.
How is the skyrocketing cost of college news to you?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:16 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
People seem to be forgetting *why* Conservatives have such a thing for education. Or other than the traditional reasons.
They *still* blame it for "losing" the Vietnam war, i.e. the student protests. And really, Universities have long been a hotbed of rebellion against the Powers that Be. That started the hatred and Republican economics continued it.
posted by aleph at 12:17 PM on October 13 [8 favorites]
They *still* blame it for "losing" the Vietnam war, i.e. the student protests. And really, Universities have long been a hotbed of rebellion against the Powers that Be. That started the hatred and Republican economics continued it.
posted by aleph at 12:17 PM on October 13 [8 favorites]
I mean, if you want to argue that me calling the opportunity to go to college a public right is overstating the way that state college costs were, for the most part, subsidized and controlled to be affordable, fine.
But the whole idea that college has always been exclusively for the privileged is pretty silly to most of who went to a college circa 1980-2000 with the word "State" in the name. Harvard? Sure. Notre Dame. You bet. Memphis fucking State? Puh-leeze.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:24 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
But the whole idea that college has always been exclusively for the privileged is pretty silly to most of who went to a college circa 1980-2000 with the word "State" in the name. Harvard? Sure. Notre Dame. You bet. Memphis fucking State? Puh-leeze.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:24 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
Not to mention all the Agricultural, Teacher, Mining, and other Colleges. The public education movement at the turn of the last Century makes today look sick.
Which it is but I (mostly) blame Future Shock + bad actors.
posted by aleph at 12:28 PM on October 13 [5 favorites]
Which it is but I (mostly) blame Future Shock + bad actors.
posted by aleph at 12:28 PM on October 13 [5 favorites]
Yeah, I think the kids are allright. Well, some of them anyway...
I have four kids, two AFAB, two AMAB. Males are (tries to do math), 27 and 19. Neither have turned into assholes.
And when one of our FAB children decided that they were trans, the youngest immediately took on referring to them as "my brother". It was pretty astonishing.
But I have never used my college degree. Looked decent on a resume I guess. And I did meet Ms. Windo in college. But even after I had gotten it, realized as I wasn't going to work for companies in the field, (Geology). And so went back to school to switch to Botany/Ecology, then life happened, moved, started a different school, and then the need to "be a man" and provide for us caused me to not make it through spring term two years in a row.
I see plumbers, electricians, contractors as pretty amazing. I can't do that. Way more employable than my knowing cool stuff about rocks and fossils and carnivorous plants...
posted by Windopaene at 12:34 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]
I have four kids, two AFAB, two AMAB. Males are (tries to do math), 27 and 19. Neither have turned into assholes.
And when one of our FAB children decided that they were trans, the youngest immediately took on referring to them as "my brother". It was pretty astonishing.
But I have never used my college degree. Looked decent on a resume I guess. And I did meet Ms. Windo in college. But even after I had gotten it, realized as I wasn't going to work for companies in the field, (Geology). And so went back to school to switch to Botany/Ecology, then life happened, moved, started a different school, and then the need to "be a man" and provide for us caused me to not make it through spring term two years in a row.
I see plumbers, electricians, contractors as pretty amazing. I can't do that. Way more employable than my knowing cool stuff about rocks and fossils and carnivorous plants...
posted by Windopaene at 12:34 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]
Let’s be real, boys in high school aren’t thinking about the ultimate pay scales of their professions nearly as much as we all wish they were.
------------------------------
Most East Asian kids are raised to prioritize their grades, which will determine the schools they get into, which will determine their careers and therefore lives. I started learning about the pay scales of various professions and the educational paths to them in elementary school.
I went to university in the late 90's. The only consideration was optimizing my career prospects within the constraint of my abilities. Mostly everyone in my (Asian Canadian) friend circle in high school was like that, regardless of gender. None of us gave serious consideration to which majors/subjects we actually enjoyed, much less stuff like classroom gender balance.
posted by fatehunter at 12:36 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
------------------------------
Most East Asian kids are raised to prioritize their grades, which will determine the schools they get into, which will determine their careers and therefore lives. I started learning about the pay scales of various professions and the educational paths to them in elementary school.
I went to university in the late 90's. The only consideration was optimizing my career prospects within the constraint of my abilities. Mostly everyone in my (Asian Canadian) friend circle in high school was like that, regardless of gender. None of us gave serious consideration to which majors/subjects we actually enjoyed, much less stuff like classroom gender balance.
posted by fatehunter at 12:36 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
As a woman who would have vastly preferred trades to college, and been better at the life it led to. I knew myself well enough to know that the lifetime of sexism and bullying and exclusion would have made those professions miserable for me.
Once again, something that was male and is becoming female is being devalued while the other options are being made too hostile to women for any but a very few. And those few cannot expect any particular level of respect or trust from employers, coworkers, and clients.
posted by tllaya at 12:41 PM on October 13 [8 favorites]
Once again, something that was male and is becoming female is being devalued while the other options are being made too hostile to women for any but a very few. And those few cannot expect any particular level of respect or trust from employers, coworkers, and clients.
posted by tllaya at 12:41 PM on October 13 [8 favorites]
I dont have much to add, misogeny doesnt need more evidence.
Statistical under-representation is only prima facie evidence of discrimination because there is no need to reinvestigate the entire history of our society and rediscover anew that it is a white het christian patriarchial wealth dominated society. Thats why male or white under-representation needs further investigation compated to protected classes. Context.
The money a job is paid and its prestige has nothing to do with the nature of the work or its product, because money is not an accounting token of goods and services ( thats why there is not a discrete answer for how much water does a dollar buy) but is a comparator of social relationships and power. You will find more people willing to walk your dog than to wipe your ass, and the ass-wiping work is worse, but it will pay less. Has nothing to do with supply and demand, has nothing to do with importance, or skill or training. money marks status and the people who are stuck wiping asses also get stuck getting paid less and treated worse because of their status.
If lower social status folks start to join your profession, the wages will go down even if the supply and demand and nature of the work are unchanged. This is empirically testable in any number of professions over the 20th century. You can not merit your way to equal pay and equal treatment, the market will not produce equality, that is a function of power and that is why laws and regulations are needed to create income equaility etc.
Conservatives made an uneasy alliance with nerds during the cold war because tech advancement was so important in wwII. They wouldn't even teach reading or have the bible in your language if it was up to them. If you have ever met homeschooled children, they get very little education but are very deeply practiced at what they got.
Colleges have tried to take over the pipeline for the trades, and to the extent they do, lower status folks will find a way in and then the proud boys will migrate to some even more esoteric identity,
Institutional education was not created and still is not funded to be an education. It was a class marker that got hijacked as a job training system. Rember, lawyers and doctors didnt need college until recently. The "college as universal destination" is a coup on the part of college to get more money. That college is required for jobs that dont need or use it just goes back to class policing.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 12:49 PM on October 13 [6 favorites]
Statistical under-representation is only prima facie evidence of discrimination because there is no need to reinvestigate the entire history of our society and rediscover anew that it is a white het christian patriarchial wealth dominated society. Thats why male or white under-representation needs further investigation compated to protected classes. Context.
The money a job is paid and its prestige has nothing to do with the nature of the work or its product, because money is not an accounting token of goods and services ( thats why there is not a discrete answer for how much water does a dollar buy) but is a comparator of social relationships and power. You will find more people willing to walk your dog than to wipe your ass, and the ass-wiping work is worse, but it will pay less. Has nothing to do with supply and demand, has nothing to do with importance, or skill or training. money marks status and the people who are stuck wiping asses also get stuck getting paid less and treated worse because of their status.
If lower social status folks start to join your profession, the wages will go down even if the supply and demand and nature of the work are unchanged. This is empirically testable in any number of professions over the 20th century. You can not merit your way to equal pay and equal treatment, the market will not produce equality, that is a function of power and that is why laws and regulations are needed to create income equaility etc.
Conservatives made an uneasy alliance with nerds during the cold war because tech advancement was so important in wwII. They wouldn't even teach reading or have the bible in your language if it was up to them. If you have ever met homeschooled children, they get very little education but are very deeply practiced at what they got.
Colleges have tried to take over the pipeline for the trades, and to the extent they do, lower status folks will find a way in and then the proud boys will migrate to some even more esoteric identity,
Institutional education was not created and still is not funded to be an education. It was a class marker that got hijacked as a job training system. Rember, lawyers and doctors didnt need college until recently. The "college as universal destination" is a coup on the part of college to get more money. That college is required for jobs that dont need or use it just goes back to class policing.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 12:49 PM on October 13 [6 favorites]
" Rember, lawyers and doctors didnt need college until recently."
Oh, it went back a bit further than that.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60950-3/fulltext
"The first American medical school: the formative years"
[snip]
In 1765, students were admitted to “anatomical lectures” and a course on “the theory and practice of physik” at the College of Philadelphia. Thus began the first medical school in the USA—at that time, of course, “America” simply consisted of 13 colonies. Eventually, after various convulsions and name changes, the College of Philadelphia would transmute into the University of Pennsylvania and the two courses of lectures into the university's Perelman School of Medicine.
In Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, small groups of physicians sometimes gathered together to create proprietary medical schools, offering lectures and collecting fees from the students. For the professors, these fees helped supplement their incomes from private practice. In addition, a young man (no women allowed) seeking a career in medicine could serve as an apprentice, working with an established physician, until he was regarded as sufficiently competent to set up his own practice. At the best medical schools in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, students could also experience practical bedside teaching in hospitals.
posted by aleph at 2:58 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]
Oh, it went back a bit further than that.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60950-3/fulltext
"The first American medical school: the formative years"
[snip]
In 1765, students were admitted to “anatomical lectures” and a course on “the theory and practice of physik” at the College of Philadelphia. Thus began the first medical school in the USA—at that time, of course, “America” simply consisted of 13 colonies. Eventually, after various convulsions and name changes, the College of Philadelphia would transmute into the University of Pennsylvania and the two courses of lectures into the university's Perelman School of Medicine.
In Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, small groups of physicians sometimes gathered together to create proprietary medical schools, offering lectures and collecting fees from the students. For the professors, these fees helped supplement their incomes from private practice. In addition, a young man (no women allowed) seeking a career in medicine could serve as an apprentice, working with an established physician, until he was regarded as sufficiently competent to set up his own practice. At the best medical schools in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, students could also experience practical bedside teaching in hospitals.
posted by aleph at 2:58 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]
This post and last month’s “How is it that so few men like women?” post are, in my mind, interconnected.
The key blog posts discussed in both are by the same author, Celeste Davis.
posted by rory at 4:22 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
The key blog posts discussed in both are by the same author, Celeste Davis.
posted by rory at 4:22 PM on October 13 [4 favorites]
It may be being in Toronto but I don’t find most of the young men I know - and due to my prior role in martial arts, I know quite a few - are as limited as some of the discussion here. I know many young men who are interested in the arts, environmental science, public health, and much more. Fully rounded young adults, but sometimes perhaps less able to break out of views around being strong or providers in some way. Several have taken on responsibility for younger siblings or grandparents in ways that are quite real. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still grappling with things but I just don’t recognize the real humans I see around me in some of these posts.
My question for you is, HOW do you try to keep your sons away from the Internet Misogyny Pipeline, or to deconstruct it?
I do think a solid grounding in the arts and a wider range of activities helps. A kid whose chosen sport codes masculine from day one (hockey, here) doesn’t always make friends with both girls and a variety of boys. I’m not out of the woods yet - my younger son has a peer group that is more traditionally boy like although his very best friend is a girl and his current best friend at school is non-binary - but I think the things I do right were
1) being in play groups with girls and boys, and a wide variety of backgrounds
2) taking my kids to a variety of arts-related things and watching a wide variety of media with them even if I loathed some of their choices. This was both to show women like trains too/screen ‘girl’ things but also because we talked about them. Lately we watched some Joe Rogan together (mostly him talking about Steven Seagal) and honestly not sure anything make Joe Rogan uncool as quickly as your mom laughing both with and at him. I have watched so much Ryan Trahan I’m pretty sure I lost brain cells, but we can talk about it.
3) get behind their choices - traditional or not - so they could keep making them. My oldest wore “Hulk green” nail polish up to grade 2. My youngest asked me to drive him to an Instagram fade-cutter legend.
3a) sometimes ban things. I banned the Barbie TV show because it made my boys talk to each other meanly (not the Barbie movie obviously). I did not ban Thomas the Tank Engine but I did occasionally say we had to stop with the industrialist, capitalist, sexist-why-are-the-few-girl-trains-always-presented-as-problems show for a few weeks. Like, use this power sparingly but apply it to values.
4) marry a man like my husband
5) do media literacy at the dinner table as a part of the conversation. Plus liberal arts. A kid who knows about (at a very basic level) Machiavelli, Descartes, Nietzsche, Kant, etc and who has learned some basic history is just less impressed by internet gurus. But also talk about stuff. And by that I don’t mean critique my kids’ choices as choices. Just examine them. During the Depp/Heard trial my son, who was also a big fan of Pirates of the Caribbean, very much consumed and believed pro-Depp material. I prioritized connecting with him on it, while making it clear that I personally disagreed and why. The last thing I wanted was for him to shut down taking about it. I honestly can’t tell you what his end opinion was (or is) but we had some great conversations about certain media machines and also about consent.
6) Love ‘em. Like…relationships first.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:33 PM on October 13 [11 favorites]
My question for you is, HOW do you try to keep your sons away from the Internet Misogyny Pipeline, or to deconstruct it?
I do think a solid grounding in the arts and a wider range of activities helps. A kid whose chosen sport codes masculine from day one (hockey, here) doesn’t always make friends with both girls and a variety of boys. I’m not out of the woods yet - my younger son has a peer group that is more traditionally boy like although his very best friend is a girl and his current best friend at school is non-binary - but I think the things I do right were
1) being in play groups with girls and boys, and a wide variety of backgrounds
2) taking my kids to a variety of arts-related things and watching a wide variety of media with them even if I loathed some of their choices. This was both to show women like trains too/screen ‘girl’ things but also because we talked about them. Lately we watched some Joe Rogan together (mostly him talking about Steven Seagal) and honestly not sure anything make Joe Rogan uncool as quickly as your mom laughing both with and at him. I have watched so much Ryan Trahan I’m pretty sure I lost brain cells, but we can talk about it.
3) get behind their choices - traditional or not - so they could keep making them. My oldest wore “Hulk green” nail polish up to grade 2. My youngest asked me to drive him to an Instagram fade-cutter legend.
3a) sometimes ban things. I banned the Barbie TV show because it made my boys talk to each other meanly (not the Barbie movie obviously). I did not ban Thomas the Tank Engine but I did occasionally say we had to stop with the industrialist, capitalist, sexist-why-are-the-few-girl-trains-always-presented-as-problems show for a few weeks. Like, use this power sparingly but apply it to values.
4) marry a man like my husband
5) do media literacy at the dinner table as a part of the conversation. Plus liberal arts. A kid who knows about (at a very basic level) Machiavelli, Descartes, Nietzsche, Kant, etc and who has learned some basic history is just less impressed by internet gurus. But also talk about stuff. And by that I don’t mean critique my kids’ choices as choices. Just examine them. During the Depp/Heard trial my son, who was also a big fan of Pirates of the Caribbean, very much consumed and believed pro-Depp material. I prioritized connecting with him on it, while making it clear that I personally disagreed and why. The last thing I wanted was for him to shut down taking about it. I honestly can’t tell you what his end opinion was (or is) but we had some great conversations about certain media machines and also about consent.
6) Love ‘em. Like…relationships first.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:33 PM on October 13 [11 favorites]
Sorry, I promise I'm reading this whole thread and did read TFA, but the phrasing of women "colonizing" departments threw me for about eight different loops. The absolute fuck?
posted by lauranesson at 7:15 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]
posted by lauranesson at 7:15 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]
These Metafilter discussions about gender are always depressing. The rage against misogyny is palpable. Yet I don't see that misogyny in my peers. I know some male assholes, who are assholes towards everyone they don't fear. Yet they are known quantities and are avoided to the extent possible, except when they come and occupy your city ( and roughly half of those fascist assholes were women). So I invite all women who are oppressed by the patriarchy to the sub-Arctic where there is a desperate need for employees of all kinds and much fewer assholes.
posted by SnowRottie at 8:32 PM on October 13 [1 favorite]
posted by SnowRottie at 8:32 PM on October 13 [1 favorite]
but the phrasing of women "colonizing" departments threw me for about eight different loops
There's a charitable reading that the poster used that term in the sense "to establish a presence in" rather than the sense of "to appropriate/take over" but uh, at the least a bad choice of words.
posted by axiom at 9:03 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]
There's a charitable reading that the poster used that term in the sense "to establish a presence in" rather than the sense of "to appropriate/take over" but uh, at the least a bad choice of words.
posted by axiom at 9:03 PM on October 13 [3 favorites]
Many men seem to be in agreement: college is stupid and unnecessary.
ftfy
posted by evilDoug at 10:01 PM on October 13 [1 favorite]
ftfy
posted by evilDoug at 10:01 PM on October 13 [1 favorite]
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posted by HearHere at 1:00 AM on October 13 [25 favorites]