Who You Gonna Believe?

Bartlett:

Link.  Or Frum:

Link.  Or heck, let's just relax with Alyssa:

Link.    Just as wild speculation, I'd guess that people in earlier generations also felt a letdown in their 20s as the burdens of adulthood came crashing around their shoulders.  For men of my cohort, you woke up one day married and with kids and a mortgage and not the slightest idea how it all happened.  Oh, and the high likelihood that if you did not meet these new responsibilities, you would go to jail.

Cato on Men

I just now caught up with the August offering from Cato Unbound which addresses an Underbelly fave: the decline of men.    The presenntation is a bit of a disappointment.  Kay Hymowitz' centerpiece essay offers up an array of interesting factoids but little by way of new analysis.  The comments are mostly same-old same-old, 1970s stuff.

Hymowitz does offer an interesting venture on what she calls the "existential explanation" of male decline:   men have pretty much lost their role as responsible providers for wives and children.  In the past, Hymowitz rightly said, men undertook the "dangerous, boring, dirty, exhausting jobs."  And they did it "because people were depending on them."  That demand is gone, and we don't know quite what to do about it.

In a way, I can relate.  In my day, I knew that if I married--more generally, if I got somebody pregnant--I'd have to support the dependents or go to jail.  The current lot doesn't seem to face so stark a choice. But the interesting thing is we kind of liked it.  "Marriage made man out of me," guys my age would have said--I said it myself.  Not so much any more.

So far so good, but I think the exact workings of this mechanism remain poorly understood, in a number of respects.   One, as to the nature of male responsibility.  Granted, marriage relates (or related) to shaping up.  But men like responsibility generally, and and they find it in many places outside marriage.  The military.  Sports teams.  If they are really lucky, an interesting and challenging job.    The decline of challenge in marriage may be related to the decline of challenge in employment.  It might--I am more tentative here--relate to the folkloric habit of men to lie around all day watching ESPN: even as passive observers, sports present them with a challenge and a set of responsibilities that they desire.

Another difficulty involves correlation/causation in marriage.  We talk as if it is marriage that shapes men up.   But it may be that the ones who choose to marry are the ones who have shaped up, or are ready to shape up.  Marriage may be just an incident of a more general pattern.   If this is so, then if and insofar as men find challenges and responsibilities elsewhere, marriage itself may just not be that big of a deal.  Sex, of course, will no doubt continue to being a big deal.  But if, in general, getting laid is just not as much of a problem as it used to be, we might morph into a pattern in which the linkage between marriage and responsibility simply unwinds.

The F-35 and the Decline in the Dignity of Work

John Henry told his captain
"Lord a man ain't noth' but a man
But before I let that steam drill beat me down
I'm gonna die with a hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord 

I'll die with a hammer in my hand"

The Economist throws a moment of light onto an important but too often ignored aspect of the defense procurement issue: toys for the boys. Urging restraint in spending on F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the E notes in passing "the affection of service chiefs for fast jets flown by brave chaps;" Link. Exactly right; there are are many motivators of warfare but one of the least appreciated is the sheer fun of it all: how you gonna keep em down on the farm after you've seen Tom Cruise in Top Gun? 

But in fairness, it is not just the military. There's a pervasive underlying theme here which you might call the dignity-of-work problem. That is: one of the many things that seems to have gone bollwackers in our society over the last generation is the disappearance of almost any job that could give a person a sense of self-worth. Okay, it's the money, but it's not just the money: people took pride in some fairly nasty jobs if they got to do them (at least somewhat) on their own terms. Steel puddlers, auto assembly workers, shoe cutters--a lot of these were grinding, boring, dangerous, but they facilitated a kind of labor aristocracy that you're just not going to find in a call center. Granted (that is) part of our problem is that we are being replaced by robots. Another part is in our remaining jobs, we're forced to act like robots just to keep employed [is it not a delicious irony that Homer Simpson the paterfamilias leads an employment life of worthless irrelevance; but that Homer Simpson the cartoon character thrives because he is cheaper for the studio than a real actor?].

Oddly enough, one place where you actually get to do something, some of the time, is the public sector. Girls throw their undies at firefighters not just because firefighters save babies but because they save babies using their courage and pluck. But without meaning to denigrate the work of fire fighters, one reason they get to use their courage and pluck is that they get to play with such cool toys. Garrison Keillor had a cute bit a few years back about the showdown in Lake Wobegone between the folks who wanted to spend money on something worthy and boring (maybe day care) and those who wanted to blow it all on a new fire truck. Just as a guess I'd suspect that the most successful daycare program would be the one that used some fancy new mechanical dingus to get the kid back down out of a tree. And the toys are designed, ironically, not so much to supplant as to affirm and ratify the role of the heroic individual: no matte how fancy the steam drill, John Henry still gets to swing the hammer.

The public sector seems--well, not uniquely but at least notably--qualified to provide these kinds of opportunities and the boy-toys that support them. I have heard it said that in commercial aviation, you need two things in the cockpit: the pilot and his dog, the dog's job being to bite the pilot if he tries to touch the controls. Of course the military goes the same direction as more and more "warfare" gets carried out over a computer screen from Las Vegas. But the public sector does seem to be better positioned than the private sector to keep the boy-toy model alive. It's one reason that I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the demise of the F-35.

Addendum: Just a few pages on, here's a further bit of support for this view re the greatest of all boy-toys, the space program:

It is a common mistake to think that humans in space conduct “space exploration” and “space science” ... . Space exploration, in the sense of discovering new information about the space environment, is done with sensoring and data-gathering instruments, supported and controlled by robotic spacecraft. This was true in the earliest days of the Apollo programme, and will be true for any future human-crewed space project. Humans would not be sent anywhere in space without our first obtaining a thorough understanding of that environment.


Nor do humans carry out significant science in space. High-precision, ultra-clean instruments, designed to measure specific parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and other aspects of the space environment, are used to generate scientific data in space. Human crews would interfere with, rather than contribute to, the ability of the instruments to perform their mission. Human crews would provide biological contamination and disturb the ultra-high stability required of typical scientific instruments in space.

Well, yes, Tom Cruise might reply, but where's the fun in that?

From the Wise Women of the Tribe

My friend Ignota, after long years has at last extricated herself from an unpropitious marriage.  Her husband was a piece of business; his father was the same.  Ignota's mother-in-law, counseling Ignota's daughter, advises:

Do not marry a man who is interesting

Dorothy Parker would have understood:

Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horses' necks
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man who solicits insurance!

Go here.

The Banality of Loughner

   I've been reading a lot of the tuff about what a nutter young Loughner is.  See link, link,link, link, etc.  I'll vote otherwise: I'm struck by how near normal.

Look, I didn't say "normal;" only "near normal."  And when I say "near normal," I suspect I mean "for an 18-to-20-year-old boy" (sic).  Let's face it: most late adolescent males are pretty weird; it's just that most of them get their bearings again before they take he lives of half a dozen people.   I mean, here's Christopher Beam in Slate:

[Loghner] claims to be a "conscience dreamer" concerned with "English grammar structure" and "mind control" who wants to see the United States return to the gold standard.

Chris baby! Is that the best you can do?  But isn't that awfully close to what you expect--dare I say want--young people to do?   I'm actually a newbie to the idea of "conscience dreamer" (did he mean
"conscious dreamer?"), but I certainly remember the shock of disorientation when I first realized how much of the world seemed to be in my head (thanks to Bishop Berkeley for getting me into that pickle, and Samuel Johnson for getting me out of it).   I admit I am still trying to work out the meaning of grammar structure, and in particular its relation to freedom, state sovereignty, etc. (one reason why I read Boing Boing).   As to "the gold standard," it has sunk into me lately that the case against it is not quite so ironclad as I thought: as James Ridgeway at Mother Jones says, "Concerns about currency stretch from extreme conspiracy theorists to traditional libertarians" (gold still loses, though).

Kent Slinker, the math teacher quoted in Beam's piece, saysLoughner sounded  "someone whose brains were scrambled."  Beam paraphrases: "[Loughgren] e was a mess. He didn't perform well on tests. He would ask questions that didn't make any sense. "...He was mentally checked-out.  But Slinker also says "I never sensed violence from him," and that is just the point--from the sound of things he was just a bit more weird than what (I suspect) they saw in a community college philosophy class every day.

Do not misunderstand: I don't for a moment want to excuse a mass killer.  And I don't suppose it would be feasible (even if prudent?) to look away all disturbed late adolescent males--but who was it who said we should just send 'em all away to a desert island somewhere, to wear torn underwear and drink milk out of a carton (oh--that was "all males of any age?"--sorry).  Werther; Rameau's nephew; the Underground Man, Steven Daedalus:  their name is legion.  Until we breed 'em out, we're going to have to do something to keep them defanged and at least unthreatening.  But the melancholy truth will be the task of distinguishing the murderous instinct from ordinary alienation may not be as easy as we'd like.

Oy, Men...

I doubt if any human being, however poetic or however material, ever looked upon the scenes of this world, material or spiritual so-called, with a more covetous eye.  My body was blazing with this keen sex desire I have mentioned, as well as a desire for material and social supremacy--to have wealth, to be in society et cetera--and yet I was too cowardly to make my way with women readily.  And at the same time I doubt sometimes whether my so-called passion--vigorous as it was--was not much more than a thing of the mind than the body.  Love of beauty as such--feminine beauty first and foremost, of course, but in addition to that all natural forms which were somehow included with and supplemented the feminine lure--was the dominating characteristic of all my moods: joy in the arch of an eyebrow, the color of an eye, the flame of a lip or cheek, the romance of a situation; spring trees, flowers, evening walks, the moon; the roundness of an arm or leg, the delicate tracery of an ankle or foot; spring odours, moonlight under trees, a lit lamp over a dark lawn--what tortures have I not endured on account of these!  Not even music at its zenith, or color at the end of a master's brush or the poignant phraseology a de Maupassant, a Flaubert  or a Daudet (via Sapho) has ever expressed for me the sweet agonies that I myself have endured contemplating the charms--the public, conservative, fashionable charms, if you will--of those enticing flowers, girls, in their delicious setting, the beauty of life itself.

--Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days 128-9 (Black Sparrow Press 2000)

[The book has a complicated history but it seems to have been composed mostly in 1920-21.]

 

Inequality Update: Men and Education

Felix Salmon showcases another spine-tingling chart on the increase in inequality. Felix highlights the particularly invidious effect on men, but I'm just as impressed with the parlous state of those with low education. Put them together and you've got a situation that is unwholesome in the extreme. No society has ever fared well with a large free-floating population of surplus males, particularly not if they are young and (at least reasonably) healthy.

In my day--the 1950s--there were alternatives of sort. You could join the Army. You could go into the mills and do piecework for $35 (sounded like pretty heavy sugar to a high school kid). These days, you can deal drugs. You can turn yourself into a skinhead. You can stay drunk (these alternatives are not exclusive).

And they are not inevitable. Male life expectancy in Russia is actually creeping back up (after bottoming out in the 90s at around 58). In Dresden, the response to a skinhead epidemic has been to fight back. And drug gangs. Well, drug gangs...

I may be silly to treat Felix's numbers as news. Testosterone poisoned young males are always and everywhere a social problem. In some times and places, they are easier to deal with than others. But a precipitous drop in (legal) income cannot help.

The Single Life: An Update

Tom McMahon has a provocative post up about the difficulty of the life of a single mom. It proves, I think, just the opposite of what he seems to think it proves.

I gather he thinks it shows the tragic foolishness of trying to shoulder the whole burden of single motherhood. What it really shows, I think, is that no matter how bad her life is now, she finds it easier than putting up with a man.

Why do women take up with men? In an ill-ordered society, they want strong men to breed them strong sons to protect them from the vicissitudes of the world. In a better-ordered society, they want men who will help raise the children. Or at least to pay the bills.

But none of these reasons work any more. Say what you like about our problems, we really aren't so anarchic as to require strong sons. And no matter what you see on (some) sitcoms, men really aren't much help around the house.'

Which leaves money but these days (perhaps outside the professional class), men are far more likely to be a liabillity than an asset. They're falling behind in general employment numbers and in education. And in the current recession, they are falling off the cliff (cf. passim).

Sure you have to multitask, to do everything at once. But hard as it is, it appears to be easier (in many cases) of putting up with the deadweight baggage of a male presence.

Men, in short, are surplus. Except perhaps for the occasional transitory idyll, but as Andy Rooney would say, why buy the pig when sausage is cheap?

Reporting From the Titanic

I knew that Kathleen Parker was a defender of traditional maledom, and an acerb critic of hairless meterosexuals. I didn't know the backstory:

I’m an expert on family in the same way that the captain of the Titanic was an expert on maritime navigation.

Looking back affectionately, I like to think of home as our own little Baghdad. The bunker-buster was my mother’s death when she was 31 and I was three, whereupon my father became a serial husband, launching into the holy state of matrimony four more times throughout my childhood and early adulthood. We were dysfunctional before dysfunctional was cool.

Going against trends of the day, I was mostly an only child raised by a single father through all but one of my teen years, with mother figures in various cameo roles. I got a close-up glimpse of how the sexes trouble and fail each other and in the process developed great em-pathy for both, but especially for men.

Although my father could be difficult – I wasn’t blinded by his considerable charms – I also could see his struggle and the sorrows he suffered, especially after mother No 2 left with his youngest daughter, my little sister.

From this broad, experiential education in the ways of men and women, I reached a helpful conclusion that seems to have escaped notice by some of my fellow sisters: men are human beings, too.

Lest anyone infer that my defence of men is driven by antipathy towards women, let me take a moment to point out that I liked and/or loved all my mothers. In fact, I’m still close to all my father’s wives except the last, who is just a few years older than me and who is apparently afraid that if we make eye contact, I’ll want the silver. (I do.)

My further education in matters male transpired in the course of raising three boys, my own and two stepsons. As a result of my total immersion in male-dom, I’ve been cursed with guy vision – and it’s not looking so good out there.

Catch of the Day: MR on the Boy Girl Thing

Just follow the link, and note that the comments are better than you might expect, too.

More on "Bad Guys Get the Girls"

Regular readers of Underbelly will not be surprised to learn that chicks go for bad guys. But here are a couple of researchers who offer some thoughts on just which bad guys, and why (link):

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators.

But being just slightly evil could have an upside: a prolific sex life, says Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. "We have some evidence that the three traits are really the same thing and may represent a successful evolutionary strategy."

Might be profitable to tie this together with a comment over at TigerHawk (link):

The way that I know how out of touch I am is that the two things that turned me around from voting for GWB just because he wasn't the coward snake in the grass Kerry was his "Bring it on," and "Wanted dead or alive." My reaction was finally a man who will be a man. I became an ardent supporter at that point and I haven't wavered.

I don't know where I'll put my strong loyalties after he leaves office. I find Barack Obama, the poster boy for Beta males, beneath contempt. I do not trust John McCain, who seems to be more interested in not having people mad at him than in actually standing up. I'll vote for him because the other guy is so repulsive, but I can't see myself feeling any great loyalty to him.

My guess is that the commentator--she's a she, apparently--speaks for a fairly large market niche. Forget the guys who change didies--this chick wants a guy who will breed strong sons, who can beat the sand out of their adversaries. Beta male, indeed--as in "hah, when I want you, I'll throw you a bone."

Masculinity Test

I swear (writes Charlotte Allen in the Washington Post) no man

• watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to. (Check, but she never asked).

• bakes cookies for his dog. (Check, but no dog).

• feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club." (Oh, checkeroo).

Couldn’t have written this column 20 years ago, could she? HT Turcopilier.

Update: Whoo-wee, watch the pile-on here ('How the Washington Post editors decided this was worthy of publication is a total mystery"), here ("I'm having trouble believing this was actually published"), here ("depressing piece of self-loathing claptrap"), here ("Is it possible the article is some kind of bizarre performance piece ... ?"), here ("why on earth would the WaPo publish it on page B01?"), here ("this just might be the dumbest thing ever written"), here ("The editor responsible for that drivel has shown just remarkably poor editorial judgment here"), here ("being able to occupy a niche like this makes you a better troll"*), here ("Rarely have I read a newspaper column that shocks me for its sheer breadth of nonsense"), here ("if you’re so dim, how about leaving the big-shot publishing gigs to people who are capable of serious thought?"), here ("Charlotte Allen is stupid" ), here ("I have read many stupid things in my life. But I believe written by Charlotte Allen and published by the Washington Post is literally the fucking stupidest"), here ("There’s so much that’s bad about this article I can’t even begin to quote it all"), etc. etc. (link).

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*Actually some interesting stuff in this one.
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But cf. here ("one of the top pieces on the Post's normally policy-wonkish list of most-viewed articles").