Haters and Losers

What's going on with men?

i’m sorry but why did they make the hats way uglier since 2016

Before anyone gets mad at me for the title, I will note that it is a reference to a famous Donald Trump tweet about Memorial Day

Today is International Men’s Day, and because we’re not allowed to make jokes about men anymore, I decided to take it seriously and ask: why are young men Hitler?

Are we Kenough?

In all seriousness, as written before, the politics of men and women, particularly young, have diverged somewhat. I still stand by my original take, and I’ve expanded about it a little bit in a recent post about South Korea, but overall it seems that men have serious issues that we’re not addressing as a society

Well, what are men’s issues? Besides “mean feminists on Twitter saying kill all men”, there’s plenty going on, such as literally losing their grip strength advantage on women, but they mainly relate to education: men are doing consistently worse at school than women, causing lifelong penalties to earnings and employment. Men do worse than women at all levels of education, particularly in college: men enroll and graduate higher education at much lower rates. These issues are especially bad for men from the poorest families, even if men still dominate the top spots of society. Overall, this responds to fields where men drew large advantages over women becoming less prominent in the economy. Some of these issues, for instance involving welfare, are due to weird statistical issues, but men are usually behind women in some aspects.

Traditional masculinity, as a whole, seems to be in a sort of crisis: men don’t have the same type of economic edge over women as in the past (more on this later), which comes as a consequence of major macroeconomic trends: because of the general loss of high-paying blue collar jobs, men’s wages have not grown very much on aggregate, since they are overrepresented in this group versus women, who are overrepressented in white-collar jobs, because of the disparity in education access. Exactly why blue-collar wages have not grown much is a bit of a mystery, but it is largely attributable to three factors: first, the significant decline in unionization in the workforces of most first-world countries, which has shifted earnings away from blue-collar jobs particularly after other major trends. The second, and most important one, of these trends is automation, whereby a very significant share of the non-educated workforce has been eliminated (routine-heavy jobs, like manufacturing), leading to polarization between “white collar” jobs and non-routine service jobs like janitorial services or care work. This shift in blue and white collar job markets has disproportionately affected men and benefitted women. Lastly, many people are pointing to deindustrialization generally and separately from automation and loss of union density, which is in large part attributable to international trade (this one is very controversial so I’ll not focus on it much), especially the entry of China into the WTO.

This blue collar versus white collar disparity in general became especially stark after the Great Recession, when the economy split off into two tracks: the wealthy and college educated, who prospered, and the blue-collar types, who did not. From 2007 to 2016, the US economy added 8.4 million white collar jobs on net; for the blue-collar labor market, of the 5,600,000 jobs lost, only 84,000 were recovered. This means that, as a whole, women faced a much more favorable on average labor market, while men faced a much more adverse one.

Even in white-collar professions, men are losing their edge: while many disparities persist (see my post on girlboss-ism for a rundown), women seem to have greater interpersonal skills, which are in higher demand than ever, and tend to prioritize and demand flexibility, which is also in greater demand from employers. While men do enjoy some advantages over women, particularly in schmoozing with managers and seeking promotions, men are also held back by the fact that older, more senior workers are not retiring and thus blocking their advancement (for various very complicated reasons, but in general since more older managers are men, and younger workers are more female, then by pure math junior men are most impacted), which is also shifting the composition of the gender wage gap itself.

They’re eating cat

Another problem is that, as part of a broader decline in dating, friendship, and sex, men’s decline in economic status has been matched by a decline in partnership appeal. As my girlfriend has said, men used to have mostly economic draws for women (money), so that sufficed to attract partners - but since women have their own money now, this doesn’t seem to be as much of a draw.

Women have careers that are more meaningful to them, both because of their impact and their accomplishment and pride. Even if this disparity in meaning contributes to the gender pay gap (since these “meaningful” careers for women generally pay less), it also leads to a stark “satisfaction” gender gap that runs the other way. Thus, if women have more meaningful jobs, they they will be less likely to want to give them up (even temporarily) for a family. This comes, as I’ve stated a quadrillion times already, from the gender pay gap being largely about motherhood and social norms around it: beyond the “womanhood penalty”, there’s a separate earnings penalty for mothers and a premium for fathers. Gender penalties for women are less about preferences and more about social norms: straight couples seem to prioritize the man’s couple consistently when they have to move long-distance, and straight households appear to maximize the earnings, not of the couple or even of the breadwinner, but of the man specifically. Contrarily, for non-straight couples, behavior is more economically rational: gay households earn about the same as straight households while each individual gay man earns less, and lesbians make more than straight women after both marriage and parenting, and have shorter commutes than gay women, while gay men have shorter commutes than straight men - pointing to LGB couples in general “sharing” the fatherhood premium and motherhood penalty generally equally.

As a rule, when women’s wages are higher, they expect more from their partners, not just in terms of money but also in terms of actual quality of a match. Given how bad the dating scene is for women, it is not surprising that women aren’t settling, especially considering that even men who say they want an equal partnership are remarkably sexist. In fact, men are less likely to be “fully committed” to having a relationship, and it just seems that men aren’t bringing enough to the table for women to be interested in marrying them outside of earnings potential. Importantly, the marriageability of men is not related to how much money they make: when men have higher earnings, marriage or fertility rates don’t seem to go up much. That more educated men also have more progressive values could help explain the seeming “hypocrisy” of marriage-agnostic liberal elites having high marriage rates: they simply like their dating pool more.

Male America Great Again

These young men feel so pathetically small and alienated that this is how they think they can get their power back. And no one should ever have that kind of power over someone.

This more than anything feels like the prevailing pathology of men in this cohort. They feel small. They are looking for a way to get their power back. They do not deserve that power, obviously, but they do feel entitled to it. And women, to an extent, are enabling it.

Sophie Kemp, “New Tyrannies”, LA Review of Books (Nov 14th, 2024)

The chattering class has made much of men’s rightwards turn in the election, though the exact figures are not clear (it seems that young women also moved right). What, exactly, is going on?

First, political differences don’t seem attributable to policy or policy-related disagreements: men and women agree on most political issues, consider the same issues importand, and, on the aggregate, prefer the same parties for each issue. So party ID shifts are more attributable to broad culture-based differences than about policy or partisanship. The real reason why this far-right ideology was able to “blossom” is structural and based in economics: men have, in fact, been left behind. I have broader opinions about what is happening, politically, but overall across the world electorates have been re-polarized around trust, which is in large part related to declining economic potential (see the South Korea post for more, but in general low-trust and zero-sum mindsets are widely shared by the losers of the post-2007 economy).

Men’s declining economic possibilities, per se, have resulted in increased resentment as a whole, particularly in a gendered manner: in Europe, there is a strong association between male job insecurity and sexism. Parts of Europe with growing unemployment also have higher levels of male support for beliefs that women’s advancement and opportunities came at their expense. In China, men who scored higher on measures of economic deprivation also scored higher on measures of hostile sexism. And British men who grew up in high-deprivation, high-unemployment regions report feeling more hostile to feminist and progressive attitudes. 

This is also, problematically enough, a coordination problem: men largely think the state of things, or even reactionary RETVRN stuff, is bad. Most men think a lot of positive “feminine” traits, like being considered caring, are undervalued - and this cuts across partisan identities or political ideology. The zero sum mindset underpinning the reactionary turn is sustained by uncoordinated expectations: sexist views, in men, are less common than we think, and keep men back from expressing their real beliefs. This can be reflected, for example, in the fact that female Youtubers received sifnificantly more negative feedback than men but only when likes and dislikes were public, at the same time as men tend to overestimate the number of men who share regressive views that they themselves don’t hold and disagree with. When Saudi women were first allowed to drive, their husbands responded by allowing them to do so, but curtailing their rights elsewhere - thus securing the man’s dominance. Likewise, Saudi husbands are actually overall fairly supportive of their wives working, but voice opposition in order to secure the approval of other men, while women are overall misinformed about their labor market outlook and the desires and aspirations of other women. Qataris express concern for women working, particularly in close proximity to men, mainly as a product of other people’s opinions of them. And in the US, single and “taken” women answer surveys about ambition similarly in private, but differently (more conservatively) in public, in order to not scare away potential boyfriends - which they are socialized to do by other women.

Men haven’t just been left behind economically, they’ve also been left behind in meaning. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman touches on this in his book Liquid Modernity: he makes the argument that, in the past, social roles were enforced outwardly, and the dominant role was “producer” - for men, as breadwinners and in blue collar labor; for women, of children as homemakers. However, changes to technology and socioeconomic organization have shifted the social role to consumer, for which conformity is enforced inwardly. Bauman makes of it that, without meaningful blue-collar work or meaningful social roles, men enter a sort of quiet crisis of meaning. This is because, in my view, feminism hasn’t penetrated the private sphere enough for men to derive meaning as fathers, or as carers in profitable “pink-collar” care economy jobs. Meanwhile, thanks to the permissibility of frivolity for women, the “lesser sex” has more options for meaning than ever: as consumer, as girlboss, and as tradwife. The reactionary “your body, my choice” movement is, thus, quite simply a desire to put women back in their place - out of the office and back to the kitchen, not as workers but as breeders.

Conclusion

It should be noted that there are still significant disparities affecting women - the gender pay gap, unequal labor market outcomes, sexism at a societal scale, lower influence at equal positions, sexual violence, etc. Even if men do hold a disproportionate share of power, wealth, and status in society, there seems to be a large number of men who are falling very much behind. Ignoring these issues isn’t a good idea, and some have blamed them for the radicalization of men into far right, misogynistic belief systems. I don’t think that “men are becoming far right nutjobs because feminists aren’t nice enough” is a correct take - men want their "rightful" place on a social sphere that they were socialized to believe would have them at the top, and instead just spat them out and chewed them out. But men do face significant issues, which are largely due to insufficient penetration of feminism in public life. So who knows - we need to get more, not less, woke.

I’ll get around to the part about how feminism has unequally penetrated the public and private spheres, leading to a lot of frustration for men and women, at some latter time - but it’s mostly the institutions and development stuff plus some Claudia Goldin.