As an early/mid GenX, my empathetic view based off of real-world observations:
Young men are still being nailed to the wall with patriarchal standards, such as having good incomes and prestigious careers and owning a house and being (largely) debt-free. Without these, the vast majority of women will consider these men as “non-persons”, and utterly ignore them in terms of potential romantic candidates. Exhibit № 1: the “666 man” rule that now enjoys non-trivial levels of use among young(er) women.
Unfortunately, the tools and paths to achieve these benchmarks are almost completely denied to young men, especially in comparison to prior generations like the boomers and the earlier half of GenX. And then they face twice as much competition for those benchmarks as their grandfathers did. That alone is a massive hammer blow against “success”.
Unless the expectations being piled on young men get radically lowered to be more in-line with actual opportunities, the current chasm will continue to widen, with more and more men being left behind.
What also bothers me about this article is the intellectually bankrupt usage of the so-called “gender wage gap” of 17%, which compares the wages of all men against the wages of all women. That’s no different than comparing a 26yo male junior lawyer to a 26yo female barista and complaining about the barista’s low wage.
Adjusting for the job itself, certifications pursued, hours worked, availability to work and the nature of the work itself, the actual “wage gap” almost vanishes to 1.5-3%, depending on industry. In many larger metro regions - and keeping all other things the same, such as specializations, education, time worked, etc. - young women under the age of 30 actually out-earn men of the same age by up to 20%. And yet, that is always conveniently ignored.
So do I agree with Galloway? Broadly, yes.
And he is worlds better than the 1ncel movement, which has an overarching tendency to blame women instead of focusing on self- improvement.
But while I think that helping men is an important part of the solution, there are insurmountable and systemic societal and economic barriers that young men have no power to affect, and never will.
Helping men will only go so far, and I fear that it will be nowhere near enough.
Let the patriarchy dissolve. It was a bad idea all around: domestication, no partnership theology, calling non residents out there barbarians, borders, myth of the state, competition for competitions sake.
Dissolve the mythic residue from all of it: cause and effect folk science explanations.
I would agree with the vast majority of your sentiment.
Unfortunately, biology and evolution has seen fit to make the sexes noticeably different, for which some amount of “division of labour” makes absolute rational sense.
And the flip side of the problem involves a majority of women demanding “the patriarchy” when they overwhelmingly choose men who are taller, stronger, wealthier, and in more prestigious positions than they themselves are.
You will rarely ever see a female CEO or well-paid female member of upper manglement date and marry a younger male barista who makes a tiny fraction of what they do, but flip the genders and it happens all the time.
There are few if any true differences in mental abilities. The construction of gender in social societal terms is being dismantled. There are casualties, and there is backlash in masculine reverb and even terror but the construct of patriarchy is dying - that’s what needs to be discussed, not Galloways take.
Navigation is just one such major mental difference, where women are far more effective with waypoints and landmarks in familiar spaces, whereas men are better at dead reckoning over unfamiliar land.
But I’m NOT talking about mental differences, but physical ones:
• grip strength,
• overall strength,
• height,
• gait,
• physiological responses to stressors,
• ability to better survive physical (unarmed) combat,
• some forms of physical endurance (each sex has its own specialty),
• reaction time,
• lactation,
• childbirth,
• and many more
All of which confer a distinct advantage to one sex over the other.
For example, the reason why we have the trope of the pickle jar being opened effortlessly by the man and the woman being entirely unable to open it, comes down entirely to gender differences to how collagen exists in the palms of the hand. Women have collagen running in just one direction, which allows extreme forces to begin tearing the skin and causing pain at much lower levels of force applied. Meanwhile, men have cross-linked collagen which allows extreme forces them to impart far more force on something in their grip before experiencing tearing and pain.
Strength is another male feature which completely blows women out of the water: almost all men are stronger than almost all women. It’s why female Olympic athletes can and frequently are trounced by teenage male athletes.
And of course, there is the big doozy: it is impossible for a genetic and physical male to become pregnant and give birth. And while a tiny handful of men have been able to lactate with sufficient stimulation, it is still exceptionally rare to achieve and may rely on non-typical (for a man) hormonal balances to achieve.
So physical differences can and do lend themselves very logically and rationally to a limited range of separation of concerns.
These mental differences do not confer dominance. This is obvious! Don’t fall back upon ye old patriarchal arguments splitting hairs on hippocampal endocrine adjustments.
Physical prowess is no longer convincingly conferring a definitive route to dominance unless there’s a patriarchal overreach into coercion that defies growing universal regularities of equalities in bills of rights etc.
The fact women give birth does in no way restrict them into submission.
Please reject all patriarchal myths in order to discus partnership goals.
Humans are not like other primates, we’re a mix of evolutionary and biological factors that result in a continuum rather than a strict dichotomy, humans fall somewhere between "tournament mating" species and "pair-bonding" species. We’re not locked into any certain gender dominant if you know endocrinology and evolution.
There is no true dominant outcome once the mental playing field is leveled. Male aggression is uniquely equalized in feminine control.
If you read my comments, at no point did I ever veer into anything approaching dominance.
Having a physical advantage is not dominance. It is merely capability with regards to the objective in play, which is where the argument of division of labour comes into play.
You want to have people play to their capabilities and (metaphorical) strengths. It’s how a society (or any cohesive unit of people, actually) maximizes its effectiveness and utility for everyone concerned.
To not do so is akin to having two people paint a wall, and for the sake of appearances you have the tall one paint near the floor and the short person paint up near the ceiling. Unless other attributes significantly overcome the massive disadvantages of the height difference, it would be madness to force them to paint the wall like this.
Young men are still being nailed to the wall with patriarchal standards, such as having good incomes and prestigious careers and owning a house and being (largely) debt-free. Without these, the vast majority of women will consider these men as “non-persons”, and utterly ignore them in terms of potential romantic candidates. Exhibit № 1: the “666 man” rule that now enjoys non-trivial levels of use among young(er) women.
Unfortunately, the tools and paths to achieve these benchmarks are almost completely denied to young men, especially in comparison to prior generations like the boomers and the earlier half of GenX. And then they face twice as much competition for those benchmarks as their grandfathers did. That alone is a massive hammer blow against “success”.
Unless the expectations being piled on young men get radically lowered to be more in-line with actual opportunities, the current chasm will continue to widen, with more and more men being left behind.
What also bothers me about this article is the intellectually bankrupt usage of the so-called “gender wage gap” of 17%, which compares the wages of all men against the wages of all women. That’s no different than comparing a 26yo male junior lawyer to a 26yo female barista and complaining about the barista’s low wage.
Adjusting for the job itself, certifications pursued, hours worked, availability to work and the nature of the work itself, the actual “wage gap” almost vanishes to 1.5-3%, depending on industry. In many larger metro regions - and keeping all other things the same, such as specializations, education, time worked, etc. - young women under the age of 30 actually out-earn men of the same age by up to 20%. And yet, that is always conveniently ignored.
So do I agree with Galloway? Broadly, yes.
And he is worlds better than the 1ncel movement, which has an overarching tendency to blame women instead of focusing on self- improvement.
But while I think that helping men is an important part of the solution, there are insurmountable and systemic societal and economic barriers that young men have no power to affect, and never will.
Helping men will only go so far, and I fear that it will be nowhere near enough.