A number of older, male writers offering social commentary have expressed their awareness of generational differences between younger and older men, but they often miss the point by a longshot. The cutoff point in changing attitudes seems to be somewhere around 40, although there is no sharp boundary — some older men – particularly those who were unfortunate enough to be affected by currently widespread trends in the early stages – have a good grasp of what the younger male cohort is going through. And there remain a number of younger men who, for whatever reason (most likely a sheltered life), still haven’t caught on. However, these older men generally decry what they call a lack of manliness in the younger generation of men. They’ll say that they are eternal boys, they never grew up, etc. Adjectives such as “weak,” “pansies,” and “effeminate” are often thrown around in describing young men.
Oddly, the older men who ascribe to the idea that they are tougher and manlier than the younger generation go weak in the knees around young women. They have an atavistic need to shelter and protect young women, who are, in their eyes, “little angels.” This makes it all too clear that the blame is being laid squarely at the feet of young men, which, to young men, is a very familiar scenario. Guys under 40 grew up as the villains and the “problem.” When priests molested them, it was covered up or considered unimportant, even as hysteria over violence against women rose to a fever pitch. When violent crime spiraled out of control amongst youth in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the solution was to lock up boys and young men under draconian sentences. Earlier, in the 1970s, boys’ very masculinity was questioned, and called a “social construct.”
In the meanwhile, successful men continue to avoid putting any responsibility on the shoulders of women. None at all. Some, such as Daryl Green, a black entrepreneur and advice columnist, suggest that society shares some of the blame for what has happened to young men, which is fair, but he and countless others neglect to point out that the law itself is a barrier, just as it would have been to his own success in the South before Jim Crow. Typically, Green has nothing to say abut the behavior of young women, who are given a free pass, as usual.
Given the social and judicial beatings boys and young men have been subjected to for the past four decades, is it any wonder that they have given up on trying to take on a traditionally masculine role? When there is some older, male judge ready to throw a guy in the slammer or otherwise sanction him because some pretty young thing sheds crocodile tears in the courtroom, what’s a guy supposed to do? If he tries to “man up,” he’ll just get a harsher sentence or lose any hope of custody of his children. Still, the only solution offered by older men is to stop acting “weak,” despite the fact that any overt display of masculine strength is deemed dangerous and suspect by social convention.
One wonders what it is that keeps older men ignorant of the turmoil in their wake. Is it a form myopia, induced by a nostalgia from their younger days, which were much easier and more carefree in many ways than what the current generation of younger men face? Is it due to resentment that they no longer have the freedom that they once did to live in the era of “free love,” and are now bogged down by work, responsibility and the physical deterioration of age? Perhaps, from their point of view, young men have it easy — they are young, after all. Or could it simply be a final grasp at the reins of power and strength before their inevitable decline into irrelevance?
Perhaps it’s time to turn it around, and ask what is really so manly about exercising power to berate and belittle those with a lower social status. When a wealthy older man stomps on younger men who have no advantage in society whatsoever, is he really any better than someone who pushes little kids around or kicks cats? What kind of real man sits in a white tower dealing out judgment to younger guys who are struggling under the new social reality? And does it really make him more of a man because some cute young woman bats her eyes at him, knowing full well what power she has over his addled old ego?
4 responses so far ↓
1 miles // May 25, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Men are weaker now economically because of several factors:
1 Insourcing of hispanic labor in construction, landscaping, cleaning crew, and some factory jobs.
2 Outsourcing of about a third of our manufacturing base.
3 Insourcing of tech help from Pakistan, India, China.
All of the above have hurt men much much more than women.
The pink workforce hasn’t been affected by massive insourcing (yet), but it will be. The next generation of latinas can indeed speak English (and Spanish) well enough to be getting officegirl work. This will put them in direct competition with white and black women, and of course this will make wages there stagnate. Ive been told that on the West Coast, many hispanic mortgage shoppers want to talk to “hispanic” realtors and loan officers.
Our child support and alimony laws simply nail men even when they weren’t at fault. Whether its your fault or not, your wife can leave you and you still pay out the ying yang, even if she left you for another man. Until that is fixed, men are going to be getting screwed big time in court and will be wary of marriage.
Women these days do not have to “settle” for a guy who is in their league. They can be a once-a-week fuck for a guy (or two guys) who is out of their league. I lived for years with two part time bouncers/students. Both very large, very good looking men. The kind of men you dont see every day (envision men with the size of “the Rock” with movie star faces, yes you got it) . It was eye opening. They brought home gal after gal night after night from their jobs. Some of these women were babes, but many of them just average chicks. They’d both tell me, “it beats what I had in my hand”. They’d keep these gals on a string for a few months, and tell them to fuck off when they had too many “on their train”. Both of these men ran through -HUNDREDS- of women. I noticed something about the gal’s attitudes after being with these two: they’d begin to think they were “hot” babes because P and R were fucking them. Men aren’t like that, but women are. If they snag a hot guy for a while (while he is looking for someone else), they will think that means they are mega-babes in their minds. Women are willing to delude themselves in this way and will “hook up” with men-who-can-do-better once or twice a week, holding out for months at a time instead of settling for a guy of about the same attractiveness. Men are happy to fuck a different women every single day. Ive seen R sleep with two and even three (once) different women on the SAME day before (our old townhouse was a riot back in the day, just hysterical. There I was with my same girlfriend, and there they were with dozens of them, the ultimate odd couple). So what we end up with is the lower 60% of men with long-periods between girlfriends, and a second 20% with mixed success, and a top 20% who can have sex with more than one woman per week, with a subset of the top 5% (what these two were) who can have a different gal every day if they really want it. People end up delaying marriage until they are in their 30′s, because they are so busy having fun during their 20′s, and when women are forced to “settle”, they really think they are “settling” and are only marginally attracted to men who are pretty much their equal physically because they think they are “hot babes” since some top tier men are willing to screw them on the side once a week. Thats what I saw out there anyway. Its been a decade since then, but I doubt things have changed much.
I cant stress enough how many of these gals were simply 5′s on the scale of 10. Some were 4′s, and if they had absolutely nothing going on………both would “take blow jobs” from 3′s while they’d get her off with their hands. Ive seen R bring home two gals who were “best friends” several times. Most men out there have no idea that there is a subset of men who are like this, and THAT is where women are having sex. I honestly think that many men delude themselves that the single women out there aren’t having much sex. They’d be wrong. They are getting laid………………with the same few guys. When women don’t have to have men financially, they can do this. They only are willing to “settle” when they are getting older and want to have some kids, but resent the men they have to “settle” for, even those guys pretty much match them in attractiveness.
Since we started having pre-marital sex, an average 23 year old gal can go out there tonight and get sex every night of the week. But an average guy cannot go out there and get sex every night of the week. Until she is ready to have kids, why would she settle for him? They dont now, they wait until they have to.
I dont think there is anything we can do to change this, but we -can- make divorce laws fair so these average guys arent financially robbed by women when they do finally get one to marry them.
2 novaseeker // May 26, 2009 at 11:59 am
Welmer –
I think this is spot on. Older men dissing younger men instead of trying to help them.
I think there are several reasons for this.
One is, as you point out, they grew up in a different era, and their view of the situation is just divorced from the reality young men face. I think this is particularly the case not with 40+ but with 50+ men. I’m 42, graduated from HS in 85 and college in 89 … it was already *quite* bad at that point in terms of many women tending to float “up” the chain, resulting in a very lopsided distribution of sex among men. I think for men ten years older than me, the world was a different place. Things were changing for them a lot, but the changes hadn’t solidified in the culture yet. So I think a good number of the 50+ men are just out to lunch.
A second, related, issue is that a good number of all men suffer from chivalry and the delusions about women it brings about. We want to think well of women, we are trained to think well of women, it makes us angry when we do not think well of women, and so on. So when older chivalrous men critique younger men as needing to “man up”, they are missing the boat by a wide margin, because chivalry itself is based on a false view of women.
A third point is that many of these men are just as addicted to female approval as anyone else, and perhaps moreso. They like the female approval they get for blaming young men for the situation men find themselves in today, and they have no price to pay themselves, because they are older, established, and removed from the young.
And a fourth reason is that many of these men are feminists themselves. They are feminists because they don’t think that women should be like they were pre-1960 .. but they have no clue as to how younger women are behaving today, and the situation young men find themselves in. In other words, they think women are still in the situation they were in prior to the 1970s, with the idea that “women have made some progress, but much remains to be done” and so on. They have no clue how much raw power young women have today and how marginalized most young men are from everything — from life itself in many ways.
So, in my mind, it’s because these men are out to lunch and divorced from reality. The larger issue, though, is the failure inside male culture to draw together in a cohesive, trans-generational way. Men always did this, through means of rites of passage, or men’s societies and so on, where information, mores, advice and so on were shared inter-generationally. That stopped happening in the past few decades. A part of the reason for that was, as I’ve written about here before, the attack on male spaces by women, opening them up to women and simultaneously making them unavailable as trans-generational meeting spaces for men. And a part of that is due to the plague of fatherlessness, which fundamentally cuts off the most significant trans-generational communication in a boy’s life. But it also relates to a more fundamental failure on the part of older men to give more of a damn about what is happening to young men in this culture.
It is a scandal, and we need to do better. Men need to realize that our entire sex has been under a sustained, millenial attack from women for about five decades now, and many men are crumbling under the assault — with no help at all forthcoming from other men, and instead much jeering. The sheer scope of the betrayal is breathtaking.
3 Men’s Sanctuaries | Welmer // May 26, 2009 at 3:02 pm
[...] it. Novaseeker, who seems to be psychic at times, wrote about men needing their own spaces in a comment on my last post, and, since I was thinking the same thing, I thought I’d write about it today. I think [...]
4 whiskey // May 27, 2009 at 6:25 pm
I think that’s right Novaseeker, and one of the things that stands out for me in looking at the promotional material the NFL uses is the sort of fatherly tradition of older coaches/younger men that it promotes. That’s probably why the NFL is still beloved while Major League Baseball is not.
The NFL, inexplicably, held on to it’s traditions while MLB did not.
I do agree that older guys don’t get it, they don’t associate with younger women who speak frankly, and have no idea what younger guys go through.
I DO see a profound feminization, in men, and I see it in older men (post 50) as well as younger ones, because women seem to demand it in all but the most uber-macho guys. Higher voices, semi-gay mannerisms, sort of ineffectual, “Mo Rocca” type personas (if you’ve seen the guy, on Colbert’s show, you know what I mean).
But younger (and to be fair, older guys, particularly in media/entertainment/law) guys are only feminized because women demand it. Women hate assertive guys who are also sort of “beta.”
And yes oh yes, older men are fools for female approval. They’ll do almost anything to get it. It’s pathetic, really.
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