There's Something Absolutely Wrong with what we do to Boys...

[C0ckney]

But we plainly were redirecting it. The violence in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan (w/the Russians), and sundry other mini-states were fights between us and various communist powers we didn't dare battle directly due to the threat of nuclear bombardment.

i don't think it's a case of redirection. more powerful states were intervening and fighting wars in less powerful states before nuclear weapons were invented. proxy wars are as old as the hills. some good examples might the various conflicts which surrounding the hundred years war, for example the breton civil war, the castilian civil war, the portuguese civil war (among others), where england and france backed different sides so as to get a ruler who was friendly to their interests on the throne. or more recently the great game between england and russia, where side back a different king/prince/warlord for similar reasons. these things happened, alongside great power wars. now we don't have great power wars. that's the big change.

A simple comparison of butchered corpses to total number of people available to kill is misleading; the wars were just as brutal, but in undeveloped countries even the ghastliest atrocities didn't rack up as high of a body count.

i'm not sure this is true. wars in undeveloped countries can have very high body counts, something as low tech as the rwandan civil war/genocide springs to mind. also, in percentage terms, wars hundreds of years ago could have enormous body counts. the 30 years war killed around 1/3 of the german population. during the english civil war, around 40% (estimates vary) of the irish population perished. the actual technology of war has become more deadly sure, but things like improved medical care and food supplies have lessened the death toll as well.

I've heard two major criticisms of Pinker, aside from the charge of simplistic arithmetic. The first is that modern medicine makes it possible to survive much more serious wounds. Most of the people who died in our Civil War would have survived today, albeit crippled for life (as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan). The second is that the world's population rose dramatically in the latter half of the twentieth century, due to vastly improved farming techniques, so that a per-capita violent-death statistic only reflects the failure of war to keep up.

that's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't actually go very far. we have much better medical care, but weapons are deadlier. we have the ability to wipe out human life completely, but we choose not to. also, it's worth pointing out that we're not just talking about war here. we're also talking about murder, rape and other kinds of violence which occur in peace time, and which have all fallen drastically.

[Boris Godunov]

Why not? Have you never seen boys scolded for showing emotions? Never seen or heard of a young man being stuffed in a locker at school because he was too effeminate?

This appears to be the opposite of what Alby is saying, though. He thinks the masculine boys should be free to shove those sissy-boys into lockers as is their proper right in the natural order. They need an outlet for their masculinity!

[notyoueither]

This appears to be the opposite of what Alby is saying, though. He thinks the masculine boys should be free to shove those sissy-boys into lockers as is their proper right in the natural order. They need an outlet for their masculinity!

Yeah, I don't think Albie's solution to a problem we both agree exists is very practical.

For one example, women by and large are not going to accept rolling back the clock on gender roles in the family. That one place where every man was a king is gone and it's never coming back, but some expectations persist such as he will have a higher income than she will.

In important ways we're still trying to socialise men as if it were the 50's. Expectations and pressures on men need to change.

[Guynemer]

For one example, women by and large are not going to accept rolling back the clock on gender roles in the family. That one place where every man was a king is gone and it's never coming back, but some expectations persist such as he will have a higher income than she will.

I honestly don't see this as a common perception.

[The Mad Monk]

****ing facists thought the samje way as you alb. you just dont ****nig no it . **** off.

I think that's a little overboard, ne?

[The Mad Monk]

I honestly don't see this as a common perception.

You're reading the wrong things, then.

[Elok]

Re: casualties: a quick search says less than a million died in Vietnam, over twenty years. WWI killed 37 mil over the course of about four. Total war between industrialized nations is far, far bloodier than the extended proxy-war dick-waggling which replaced it. I know proxy wars are old news--the American Revolution was one--but I doubt all those Vietnamese would have died if we'd still been having straight-out slugfests with our enemies. I have a hard time saying, "it's a good thing that all those peasants got firebombed, instead of a far larger number of people whose countries were actually hostile to one another." That's a cynical kind of math.

I guess what I'm getting at is that most of the reduction in violent deaths is a quirk of historical forces, far more than it is a deliberate result of better policy or what-have-you. And looking at it as anything other than a fortunate fluke requires a certain amount of naivete IMO. Nukes, horrible as they are, have likely saved more lives than penicillin. And we don't use them not out of any humane impulse, but because the retaliation would likely incur too heavy a penalty.

We've stopped exploiting most foreigners for their resources, because the resources we used to exploit them for happen to have become too common and cheap to invade for. It's more efficient to use them as a market for cheap manufacturing labor and sundry low-end consumer goods. Exceptions include oil, which we mostly exploit indirectly by dicking around in their politics, and the various stuff we get out of various African nations, where they murder each other for the privilege of dealing with the people who exploit them. I think one of the big reasons our Afghanistan experiment is doomed to fail is that the country's too useless to bleed the way the Brits bled India. Unless we want opium, and even then the war wouldn't pay for itself.

Re: crime, the Economist had an article on that recently. They noted that, in America at least, it might have to do with our policy of locking up anyone who does anything for any reason. Also, on their WWI-centennial coverage, they noted that we were saying much the same rosy stuff as Pinker says now, back in 1913...

[Guynemer]

You're reading the wrong things, then.

EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP MISUNDERSTANDING ME RIGHT NOW.

I do not think the perception that "men must make more than women to be a proper man" is very common nowadays. DOES EVERYONE UNDERSTAND ME NOW?

[Guynemer]

Also, to get back to the suicide issue:

Yes, more men kill themselves, but more women attempt suicide. Men are more likely to succeed because they use more lethal methods, namely firearms.

[Ban Kenobi]

People who deliberately use ineffective means to kill themselves might just be seeking attention.

[notyoueither]

I honestly don't see this as a common perception.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/fashion/23whopays.html?ref=style&pagewanted=all&_r=0

Putting Money on the Table

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: September 23, 2007


FOR Whitney Hess, a 25-year-old software designer in Manhattan, the tension that ultimately ended her recent relationships was all right there, in the digits on her pay stub.

The awkwardness started with nights out. She would want to try the latest downtown bistro, but her boyfriends, who worked in creative jobs that paid less than hers, preferred diners.

They would say, “Wow, you’re so sophisticated,” she recalled. A first look at her apartment, a smartly appointed studio in a full-service building in TriBeCa, would only reinforce the impression. “They wouldn’t want me to see their apartments,” she said, because they lived in cramped surroundings in distant quadrants of Brooklyn or the Bronx.

One of them, she said, finally just came out and said it. “Look,” Ms. Hess recalled him saying, “it makes me really uncomfortable that you make more money than me. I’m going to put that out on the table and try to get over it.”

But he never got over it, she said.

“The sad thing is that I really liked the guy,” she said. “If that hadn’t been an issue with him, we’d probably still be dating.”

Ms. Hess’s quandary is becoming more common for many young women. For the first time, women in their 20s who work full time in several American cities — New York, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis — are earning higher wages than men in the same age range, according to a recent analysis of 2005 census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York.

For instance, the median income of women age 21 to 30 in New York who are employed full time was 17 percent higher than that of comparable men.

Professor Beveridge said the gap is largely driven by a gulf in education: 53 percent of women employed full time in their 20s were college graduates, compared with 38 percent of men. Women are also more likely to have graduate degrees. “They have more of everything,” Professor Beveridge said.

The shift is playing out in new, unanticipated ways on the dating front. Women are encountering forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet, and are trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.

A lot of young women “are of two minds,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, a research organization. “On one hand, they’re proud of their achievements, and they think they want a man who shares house chores and child care. But on the other hand they’re scared by their own achievement, and they’re a little nervous having a man who won’t be the main breadwinner. These are old tapes running in their head: ‘This is how you get a man.’ ”

YOUNG affluent women say they are learning to advertise their good fortune in a manner very different from their male counterparts. For men, it is accepted, even desirable, to flaunt their high status. Not so for many women.

“Very, very early in a date,” said Anna Rosenmann, 28, who founded a company called Eco Consulting LA, in Los Angeles, and earns up to $150,000 a year, “a man will drop comments on how much his sales team had made for the year, which meant his bonus was blah, blah, blah.”

But, she said, “that’s not how we were raised.”

Instead, she said, she starts out dates being discreet. “I don’t talk about myself,” she said. “When people ask me, I’m going to be very honest. But I definitely don’t say, ‘My name’s Anna, I’m 28 and I own a business.’ ”

Ms. Rosenmann said that dating considerably older men helps her avoid innuendos from younger men who feel threatened by her professional success. She said that when she has gone out at night with men her own age and has to turn in early to be fresh for work, they have commented , “Oh, Anna’s an adult, she has a real job.”

So as not to flaunt her own salary, Lori Weiss, a 29-year-old lawyer in Manhattan, has found herself clipping price tags off expensive clothes she buys on shopping binges, or hiding shopping bags in the closet just so men she was dating would not see them lying around and feel threatened by her spending power.

“A lot of guys don’t want to admit they have a problem with it,” she said, referring to income disparity. “They don’t want to be ‘that guy.’ But I think it’s ingrained.”

She said one boyfriend “wasn’t too comfortable with me paying for things” on dates, so to make him feel better, she would surrender to his wishes. The two would just “stay home and cook, or just get something cheap,” she said. “We’d skip a movie.”

Women said the income disparity becomes obvious in all facets of dating: where you live, what you like to do for fun and how you travel. It often comes down to minimizing who they are — successful, focused women — with their dates, who may be lagging a bit behind.

Although these women often say it is men who have issues around their higher salaries, sometimes it is the women themselves who are uncomfortable with the role reversal.

Hilary Rowland, 28, bought her first condominium when she was 18, using money she had earned from an online business started when she was 15. Last spring, Ms. Rowland, who lives in New York, started dating a 34-year-old musician.

“I usually always fly business or first,” she said in an e-mail message. “The one trip where he paid for the flight — we stayed at a friend’s place — he didn’t tell me the details, then flew us economy on a 6 a.m. flight with a two-hour stop-over, from Salt Lake City, to save money. I would have rather paid myself and flew business at a regular hour.”

“When we broke up,” she added, “he was upset that I gave my ‘ex’ more gifts than I gave him. Meanwhile, the only gift I’d gotten from him was a small notepad.”

Ms. Rowland, like some other women interviewed, said that she has come to the conclusion that it would be easier to date someone in the same economic bracket.

“I love traveling, going to the opera and good restaurants,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be Per Se, but good food is important in my life. It’s sometimes hard to maintain the lifestyle I’m used to when I’m in a relationship with a guy who makes less than me, since I don’t want to be paying for the guy I’m with all the time.”

The discomfort over who pays for what seems to be not really about money, plain and simple. Instead, it is suggestive of the complex psychology of what many of these women expect from their dates (for him to be a traditional breadwinner) and what they think they should expect (Oh, I just want him to be a nice guy).

On a first date at a lounge in Hell’s Kitchen, Thrupthi Reddy, 28, a brand strategist in Manhattan, watched her date down several cocktails to her one, then not even flinch when she handed the waitress her credit card. Initially miffed, she recognized her own contradictions.

“You wonder if you’re being a hypocrite,” she recalled, “because all date long I’m telling him how independent I was, and how annoying it was that men wouldn’t date strong independent women.” (The relationship ended after six months.)

Michael R. Cunningham, a psychologist who teaches in the communication department at the University of Louisville, conducted a survey of college women to see if, upon graduation, they would prefer to settle down with a high school teacher who has short workdays, summers off and spare energy to help raise children, or with a surgeon who earns eight times as much but works brutal hours. Three-quarters of the women said they would choose the teacher.

The point, Professor Cunningham said, was that young professionally oriented women have no problem dating down if the man is secure, motivated in his own field and emotionally supportive.

At least, that’s what their responses are in surveys. Talk about the subject with women a bit older — those who have been out of college long enough to be more hardened — and what you hear is ambivalence, if not downright hostility, about the income disparity.

Jade Wannell, 25, a producer at a Chicago ad agency who lives in a high-rise apartment building, started dating a 29-year-old administrator at a trucking company last year. “He was really sweet,” she said. But “he didn’t work many hours and ended up hanging out at home a lot. I was bored and didn’t feel challenged. He would finish work at 3 and want to go to the bar. The college way of life is still in them at that age. All they want to do is drink with the boys on Saturday. I was like ‘Let’s go to an art gallery’ and all he wanted to do was go to the bars.”

TO her, his lack of income masked a greater problem: a lack of drive.

“I have to say that I didn’t like his career, I didn’t think he had the goals of someone I would eventually like to be with or have respect for,” she said, adding, “It wasn’t the job, it was the passion.”

Unyi Agba, 27, an advertising executive with a small firm in Boston, almost always dates professional men, but when she goes out with someone earning less money, there is tension. “This is a topic that’s traveled in my own female circles a lot in the last year,” she said. Across a restaurant table with a man who earns less, “it’s never explicitly said, but there are nuances,” she said. “Things are said like, ‘Boy I’m going to be really broke after this dinner.’ "

And her response?

“Silence.”

Additional reporting was contributed by Ellen Almer from Chicago, Kristi Ceccarossi from Boston and Paula Schwartz.

[The Mad Monk]

EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP MISUNDERSTANDING ME RIGHT NOW.

I do not think the perception that "men must make more than women to be a proper man" is very common nowadays. DOES EVERYONE UNDERSTAND ME NOW?

I understood you perfectly.

I understood that you misunderstood nye.

[notyoueither]

By the way, we see this at work on this very forum. KH's wife earns more than him, chortle, chortle...

Base only

as if there would be something wrong with a man earning less than his PHd educated wife who is employed in medical research (or some such quite high paying profession).

The pressure and expectation is internalised in men, but it isn't innate. It's socialised. It can also be a bit of a problem when more women are better educated and higher earning than many men.

[Kidlicious]

EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP MISUNDERSTANDING ME RIGHT NOW.

I do not think the perception that "men must make more than women to be a proper man" is very common nowadays. DOES EVERYONE UNDERSTAND ME NOW?

I understand that and you are wrong. Men are expected to provide for women. It's a gender role. This is why the suicide rate is so high.

[Kidlicious]

Yeah, I don't think Albie's solution to a problem we both agree exists is very practical.

For one example, women by and large are not going to accept rolling back the clock on gender roles in the family. That one place where every man was a king is gone and it's never coming back, but some expectations persist such as he will have a higher income than she will.

In important ways we're still trying to socialise men as if it were the 50's. Expectations and pressures on men need to change.

It's worse for men than it was in the 50's because most men at some time in their life become unemployed and the divorce rate is so high because women just don't have to be married anymore. That leaves a lot of men with no job and no family. Most people don't care because he's a man. To them he's a dead beat. The only future for men is to undo socialization and resist socialization.