Why are young men in crisis?

MarciKS said:
Fuzzy first of all how would you like it if some woman told you that your place was in the kitchen not out being a man? You wouldn't find that at all degrading?

And I don't see how we can blame whether or not they've had sex as a reasonable excuse for going on a killing spree. I haven't had sex in over 20 yrs. I have yet to have the desire to smoke everyone out.
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MarciKS, before you drag me out and lynch me. The line about women in the kitchen, I believe, is what the "crisis" expert was hinting at, while not mentioning it.
 
MarciKS said:
I have never really understood feminists. I don't think either s*x should be tearing the other down but we don't seem to know how to build each other up. You know what I mean? I do feel that men have certain advantages that women will never have. Here in KS men still get more pay for the same job. Things like that. But let me ask you this...in all the years you men have been alive have you ever felt equal with your spouses?

I have noticed just from observations at work that a lot of the young women aren't interested in the young men anymore. They wanna go to school and do something with their lives. They don't want someone who is gonna do dishes in McDonald's his whole life and spend his weekends smokin dope and playin video games in his underwear. Like I do minus the dope. LOL!
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I DO know what you mean....well put!

Most men (in my age-bracket, at least) do not feel equal to their wives. Not after they become fathers, for sure. We are absolutely dumbfounded by what happens there. We walk away from the delivery room yelling "You won't believe what my wife just did!!!" We don't feel as strong as our wives, or as organized, or as patient or forgiving (and not just in the delivery room; every day), and most of us know we can't do anything in the kitchen as well as her.

BUT!!! Who's the person she nudges awake when there's a noise in the house at 3 in the morning? Who does she send downstairs in his underwear to check it out? Men have traditionally been the protector and provider for thousands of years. Even God said so. Then the 20th century rolls around, and tradition flew out the window.

Back in the 1970s, women screamed "role reversal" and she got a job while he became Mr. Mom. Ok...things change. Some guys rolled with it better than others, but by the 80s we were mostly on board with it. You couldn't get by on 1 income, anyway. But then the male-bashing started, like I said earlier. Why, I don't know.

But here's where we are now - young men feel un-needed, un-appreciated, and un-loved. They feel they have nothing to strive for aside from scoring highest on vid games. They don't have goals aside from maybe hoping they'll get lucky enough to catch the eye of a rich lady. They feel setup. Flamboozled. They feel useless. Influencing those feelings is male instinct (imo), lost traditions, changing values, and being told they're toxic, overaggressive, dumb, etc. Young guys read this crap in articles and see it on "influencer" videos and hear it from girls who also read it in articles and saw it on videos.

So, there's that, but I want to add; it is illegal for employers to pay a woman less than a man for the same job. Employers can lose their license, pay a hefty fine, and even go to jail for violating the equal pay laws. The way to stop this from happening is to report it. There's a phone number on that big Labor Laws flyer hanging in the break-room or some other prominent location. There's even a "hotline" for anonymous tips. Also, the equal pay laws need to be better defined, because as they are now, employers can get away with saying "Well, she's not doing exactly the same job." :rolleyes:
 

JimBob1952 said:
Whatever the crisis is that's ailing young men, please don't blame it on women. Asking what's due you and fixing the wrongs of the past -- as women are doing -- shouldn't cause a crisis for anyone.

Drugs, alcohol, awful food, video games, social media, broken families, dead-end jobs, a culture that emphasizes pleasure and immediate gratification over achievement and compassion, ready availability of high-powered semiautomatic weapons, lack of exercise and constructive play, social isolation...so many reasons for despair, very few answers.
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Plus you've got all these "liberated" young ladies feeling absolutely free to say "F***-off, loser!" to every young man who dares to approach her before he's accumulated the wealth she's heard about from her favorite youtuber.

That struggle is real, I'm not joking.
 
Murrmurr said:
Plus you've got all these "liberated" young ladies feeling absolutely free to say "F***-off, loser!" to every young man who dares to approach her before he's accumulated the wealth she's heard about from her favorite youtuber.

That struggle is real, I'm not joking.
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Where are you getting your information from?
 
Pepper said:
Where are you getting your information from?
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Mostly from the boys I talk to around here. Almost every day boys from about 13 to 19 years old come and talk to me about troubles at home and at school and problems with gangs and all kinds of stuff. Sometimes they come alone, sometimes in groups of 3 or 4. Most of them don't live with their dads. But I also hear it from my grandsons and nephews.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
My bad. I believe that is what the 'crisis' expert was hinting at, but not saying.
BTW, promise me you won't get together with MarciKS. :)
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that comment was totally incalled for since i did nothing but ask you a question which you could have bothered to explain rather than point your teddy paw at me.
 
MarciKS said:
that comment was totally incalled for since i did nothing but ask you a question which you could have bothered to explain rather than point your teddy paw at me.
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Marci, I apologize. It was a poor attempt at humor. I think the "crisis" expert was inferring that women were the cause of the " young men's crisis". That's what I meant with "back in the kitchen" as to what he alluding to.-not me.
Again, sorry, I got you confused with somebody else.
 
This thread may not referring to this directly, but what the majority of posts seem to be referring indirectly is a group of young men referred to as "Incels". (a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile toward women and men who are sexually active.) Unfortunately, there will always be people (male and female) who will be considered unattractive to the opposite sex - and some will always blame the rejectors rather than taking a good look at themselves. I feel a degree of compassion but I don't even pretend to know what the solution is - or even if there is one. I suspect that it has been around since the beginning of humans and exists in every society.
 
I think it's a bigger problem than just incels. A lot of men are isolated, into substance abuse, cut off from society.

Pardon the gross generalization, but women are better at making friends, forming communities and helping each other out. I base this on close observation of two wives, a mother and three sisters, plus various female friends.
 
I'm not familiar with much of what members are posting herein nor with media that addresses it. Not issues I've had interest in or bothered to understand. So web searched some. Posted this on page 1 that mentioned ills of pornography:

https://www.seniorforums.com/threads/why-are-young-men-in-crisis.74610/#post-2226202

The below link is an essay covering what some others have posted about loneliness and sex, presented in a more understandable way than the OP's video or member postings.

https://gen.medium.com/young-american-men-are-facing-a-crisis-69e7233bc93e

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Another facet of the issue no one has mentioned is immigration both legal and illegal. I'm not a fan of excessive immigration and see it as a source of a list of societal frictions. Limited immigration at historical levels has great value but that is not what has been ongoing. It isn't the only facet of causes affecting the subject in this forum thread but most definitely a factor few will mention for PC reasons.

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It has not been the American public that wanted all this excessive immigration but rather Wall Street, their Ivy League elites, retail and real estate corporations, others that subscribe to the dominant capitalist narrative, and those that see voters for their parties, that constant endless population growth is necessary for our economic system. It's not one party but both though their motivations are different. One will regular read whiny opinions in media how the slowing birth rates of Caucasian Americans and our wealthy is a serious ill (for their $$$ interests). So they backdoor control their many politicians to monkey wrench any ways that decrease it. To hell with our planet's ecosystems and ordinary working class Americans.

https://www.urban.org/sites/default...0-The-New-Demography-of-America-s-Schools.PDF
snippet:

Like all immigrants, children of immigrants are heavily concentrated in the six states with the largest populations: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey. Together these six states accounted for two-thirds of all immigrants and 69 percent of all elementary school children of immigrants in 2000; this was down slightly from three-quarters of all immigrants and 73 percent of children of immigrants in 1990. Nearly half (47 percent) of California’s students in PK to 5th grade are children of immigrants. Nine other states had percentages for children of immigrants above the national average (19 percent): Nevada, New York, Hawaii, Texas, Florida, Arizona, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New Mexico. In 6th to 12th grade, the share of children of immigrants in California was 46 per-
cent—also much higher than in any other state.
 
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I don't believe the premise of this thread, which itself is appears to be a fallacy of begging the question. And the statistics used to support the premise (as presented in the video) seem wildly unrealistic to me, like someone just made them up to start a debate.
 
Raddragn said:
This thread may not referring to this directly, but what the majority of posts seem to be referring indirectly is a group of young men referred to as "Incels". (a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile toward women and men who are sexually active.) Unfortunately, there will always be people (male and female) who will be considered unattractive to the opposite sex - and some will always blame the rejectors rather than taking a good look at themselves. I feel a degree of compassion but I don't even pretend to know what the solution is - or even if there is one. I suspect that it has been around since the beginning of humans and exists in every society.
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It exists all through the animal kingdom as well. Not every critter can attract a mate.
 
dseag2 said:
I just watched a segment on Bill Maher (yes, I know) in which his panelists talked about the reason so many young men are so angry and possibly becoming domestic terrorists. I posted a while back about how I didn't understand why so many 20-something men were involved in shootings, etc. so I thought this was insightful...

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This thread has really been all over the map, and gotten way off track, but there's hope. I agree with @dseag2, there is a segment of young men who, for a wide host of reasons, have become disenfranchised and disconnected. It's my belief that some of these young [broken] young men choose to join extremist causes, or become the 'lone wolf' that stalks society with an automatic weapon.
The U.S. is not alone by any means, as we know, in some middle Eastern countries young disenfranched men are recruited as terrorists, some of which are prepared to undertake suicide missions[like 9-11].
 
sch404 said:
I disagree strongly with the notion that young men or boys in the U.S. are generally in some sort of 'crisis.' Even when children come from impoverished single parent homes, most of them turn out quite well. Adversity while growing up is often the mother of strength and character in adult life. The fact that we seem to be having so many 'new' problems with shootings and mass murders must, in my view, be attributed to: 1) the breakdown of family culture. Some people should simply not have children. "The apple does not fall far from the tree" and; 2) the ready availability of semi-automatic military type assault weaponry that has absolutely no reason to exist in any civilized society. Unfortunately, the U.S. has ceased being the civilized society it once was. When I grew up around all the guns my WW2 vet NRA father used to have, semi-automatic assault rifles were simply not part of the landscape. Hunting deer with an assault rifle would have been anathema to someone like my dad. How these crazy weapons became 'mainstream' without opposition is simply a reflection of how crazy many of our adult male citizens have become in the U.S. In short, boys and young men are not the problem. Old men are the problem. Old crazy men.
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I agree with various comments other people made, but was most drawn to yours.

While I agree some people should not have children, the "breakdown of family culture" is largely to blame for the way things are these days. Young men who want traditional households (breadwinner, housewife, kids) are often bucked every step of the way. If you've seen some of those 'men's rights' sites, they claim SAHM and even WAHM are 'gold-diggers,' 'leeching' off the government and/or their husbands, like men are fools and are being used.

In came 'welfare reform,' and families that need any help at all no longer have the option of taking care of their own children. In this area, daycares accept babies 'from birth.' So- who is raising the kids- everybody except their own parents!
Good-hearted but misguided individuals come up with programs, places, activities to keep kids busy and supervised. I don't know how far it's become, but there's been talk of year-round schools in which kids attend throughout the entire year. In other words, using schools as a babysitting service.
Quite a few years ago, I noticed a small city in California that advertised "Thanksgiving Camp"- instead of being at home with their families for holiday dinners, for kids to have 'activities with their friends.'

Pop culture came onboard- social workers and counselors have more authority than parents; kids are told they can get 'new parents' or become 'emancipated.' Whichever 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' happens to be present is considered a 'parent.'

On the side of shooting, etc., I haven't heard anything about more recent incidents but nearly all the prior shootings involved individuals who were on psychiatric drugs. 'Cocktails' of this junk are given to kids even even babies.

Connected to that is the modernism that nobody is capable of functioning on their own, and that everything is a 'mental health issue,' that there's something wrong with everybody. While kids these days have pressures my generation did not have- social media, violence, pandemic, etc.- the majority of issues I've read kids can't cope with are the same as most of us had: bullying, loss of parent, etc. They lack the resilience most of us had- because they hear from every direction that they can't cope with life.
 
The fact is that there are some disenfranchised young men. There always was, and most probably always will be. Now, whether that amounts into a "crisis", depends on data, which is seriously lacking in this discussion. My objection is to the "crisis" expert, who seems to offer veiled accusations that the "crisis" is caused by women withholding affection and sex.
 
fuzzybuddy said:
My objection is to the "crisis" expert, who seems to offer veiled accusations that the "crisis" is caused by women withholding affection and sex.
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That one requires a leap of imagination to be sure. First, we have to identify an actual crisis, rather than make one up. If we can do that, then we have to establish that women are actually withholding affection and sex at some unprecedented level. Then we would have to determine what specifically results when that happens. To say that women withholding sex leads to _______ (insert any current crisis of modern society), is the non sequitur fallacy: (Does not follow logically), unless one can make an actual connection.

Sometimes Bill Maher drives me nuts, but that only happens when I listen to him.
 
I just watched the Maher segment - hadn't watched it before - had previously read several articles on that particular subject. I was underwhelmed by the individual advocating this point of view. He almost seemed to be whining. He seemed to feel that women should be acting like those of the early 1900's and WWII war females - devoting their time and attention to inflating male egos and dispensing gratuitous sex. Most women want to be valued for who they are and they are gradually becoming unwilling to play that role. There's something very wrong with the way we are bringing up our young men that they need a near constant flow of positive input and sex from females to feel like valuable human beings. They need to be able to feel valued for who and what they are. on their own merits.
As for being evaluated for income , that certainly makes a certain amount of sense if the plan is to start a family. That takes a fair amount of money - and anymore it even takes two good incomes.
Again, I point out that we are going through a period of adjustment in social and sexual values. It will take a while for things to settle down and establish a new normal. (Just in time to start another one :) )
 
dseag2 said:
I just watched a segment on Bill Maher (yes, I know) in which his panelists talked about the reason so many young men are so angry and possibly becoming domestic terrorists. I posted a while back about how I didn't understand why so many 20-something men were involved in shootings, etc. so I thought this was insightful...
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Raddragn said:
I just watched the Maher segment - hadn't watched it before - had previously read several articles on that particular subject. I was underwhelmed by the individual advocating this point of view. He almost seemed to be whining. He seemed to feel that women should be acting like those of the early 1900's and WWII war females - devoting their time and attention to inflating male egos and dispensing gratuitous sex. Most women want to be valued for who they are and they are gradually becoming unwilling to play that role.
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This topic is too important to be defined simply by what the participants may have said in the video. It is seeking to discover what goes wrong in the socialization of some young men, that produces the anger and alienation that ultimately leads to violent outcomes. More material that's read worthy: googling young men alienated and angry
 
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Have been looking for some authoritative report or research piece , (something other than opinion) addressing the angry-alienated young man condition. An article- Parental alienation: the impact on men's mental health summarizes the dynamics in play with parental alienation, and the effects on children.

" Parental alienation is defined as a mental state in which a child, usually one whose parents are engaged in a high-conflict separation or divorce, allies himself strongly with one parent (the preferred parent) and rejects a relationship with the other parent (the alienated parent) without legitimate justification. Parental alienation may affect men's mental health: a) parental alienation negatively influences mental health of male children and adolescents who are victims of parental alienation. Alienated children/adolescents display guilt, sadness, and depressed mood; low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence; distress and frustration; lack of impulse control, substance abuse and delinquent behavior; separation anxiety, fears and phobias; hypochondria and increased tendency to develop psychosomatic illness; suicidal ideation and suicide attempt; sleep and eating disorders; educational problems; enuresis and encopresis; b) parental alienation negatively affects the mental health of adult men who were victims of parental alienation when they were children and/or adolescents. Long-term effects of parental alienation include low self-esteem, depression, drug/alcohol abuse, lack of trust, alienation from own children, divorce, problems with identity and not having a sense of belonging or roots, choosing not to have children to avoid being rejected by them, low achievement, anger and bitterness over the time lost with the alienated parent; c) parental alienation negatively influences mental health of men who are alienated from their children. Fathers who have lost some or all contact with their children for months or years following separation or divorce may be depressed and suicidal"
 

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