Women on Men
Women saying men fall short, the gender skew in entry level jobs, Detroit's comeback and more in this week's digest.
Next week’s podcast will be up on Tuesday in order to coincide with my guest’s book release.
Also, if you’d like to see more civility in our society and politics - and who doesn’t? - check out the Project Civility National Summit being hosted in Carmel, Indiana on Sept 26 and 27. An an extra bonus, coming would be an opportunity to see Carmel!
Women on Men
On the heels of its crazy piece about “heterofatalism” and a Modern Love piece asking where all the men went, the New York Times is back with yet another opinion piece taking men to task called “Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’.” (gift link)
Much of the time, Mr. Lioi said, his straight male clients tell him that they rarely open up to anyone but their girlfriends or wives. Their partners have become their unofficial therapists, he said, “doing all the emotional labor.”
That particular role now has a name: “mankeeping.” The term, coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends.
“What I have been seeing in my research is how women have been asked or expected to take on more work to be a central — if not the central — piece of a man’s social support system,” Dr. Ferrara said, taking care to note that the dynamic isn’t experienced by all couples.
There’s an element of truth in this. Way too many men don’t have friends, and rely on women as emotional supports. This actually isn’t healthy for romantic relationships. Your wife should not be your therapist. Many men do need to get more male friends (or maybe even an actual therapist). But a few points are worth noting:
This article is a good example of the manosphere concept of “female solipsism,” in which even the problems facing men are framed in terms of how they negatively affect women. It’s similar to men getting fewer college degrees than women. This is very often framed in terms of how it affects women’s romantic prospects rather than how it affects the men themselves. Women have social permission to center themselves and their needs, wants, and desires in ways that men do not. (This isn’t going to change, btw).
Men are regularly told, especially in church settings, that they need to be more attentive to their wives’ needs. For example, when a man comes home from a hard day’s work, he’s instructed to spend time attentively listening to his wife tell her all about her day and her problems and challenges - and to simply absorb that rather than try to offer proposed solutions. But the message to women is that they shouldn’t have to provide emotional support to their husband or boyfriend.
This is an example of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Men are constantly told to be more emotionally expressive, involved, and vulnerable. But then when they turn to their wives for emotional connection, that’s also bad.
Another female Times op-ed writer says that the boy crisis is overblown, which I won’t address in detail, but is pretty much what you’d expect. (Richard Reeves responded to some of the article’s claims).
Oliver Traldi on X put together this humorous 2x2 matrix of the Times’ recent pieces by women on men.
And as Mark Hemingway put it on X:
Masa Chips
When I asked whether I should post more lifestyle content, I got positive feedback, so I’m going to be experimenting with that. Part of it will be curated product recommendations. Some of these will have affiliate links for me, others will not. But in all cases these will be products I genuinely recommend.
First up is MASA Chips. These are seed oil free tortilla chips with clean ingredients that are delicious. The ingredients in this lime flavored version are: organic corn, 100% grass fed beef tallow, sea salt, and lime. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Look for them in boutique groceries in your town. I bought some in East Nashville when I was visiting there recently. You can also order online, but there’s a minimum quantity of six.
Let’s be clear: this is snack food and we shouldn’t eat too much of it regardless of the ingredient list.
I am not an affiliate for this product.
Detroit’s Comeback
My latest piece in Commonplace looks at Detroit’s comeback, and the role that good leadership played. I particularly cite former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, businessman Dan Gilbert, and Mayor Mike Duggan. But there are others as well.
Detroit is on the way up. To understand the significance of that, you must know that for decades, Detroit was a byword for American urban decline. It was the major American city that people pointed to as the exemplar of intractable urban problems. A local in nearby Cleveland made a viral humorous fake tourism video for his city that ended with the tag line, “At least we’re not Detroit.” Critics in cities like Chicago that are facing challenges will invoke, usually speciously, the specter of Detroit as a possible future for their city if bad decisions are made.
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A third key leader came from the private sector, billionaire Dan Gilbert, who made his fortune in the mortgage company business. Through his real estate arm Bedrock Detroit, Gilbert bought up a large number of buildings in the city’s downtown and set about rehabilitating them. He purchased over 100 buildings and had invested $5.6 billion into them as of 2018. He moved his firm, now called Rocket Mortgage, and its 1,700 jobs into downtown Detroit in 2010, even before the bankruptcy and its associated municipal turnaround.
Gilbert’s strategy was to do well by doing good. He took a market-based approach, investing in properties and projects that, if successful, would turn a profit as well as help revitalize the city. There have been some controversies around public subsidies to his projects, but these subsidies are ubiquitous in America’s downtowns. There’s no doubt that Gilbert has had massive skin in the game when it comes to investing in downtown Detroit. And he hasn’t stopped.
Click over to read the whole thing. Also check out this NYT piece - published after mine so it wasn’t my inspiration - on downtown Detroit being back (gift link).
Leadership is a key factor at the local level. So many cities today have weak or dysfunctional civic leadership. It’s hard to believe that Detroit, which was a byword for corrupt and poor leadership for years, is now ahead of the pack. The city is hardly a boomtown, but the change is incredible.
Entry Level Job Struggles
AI is starting to have a very strong negative effect on entry level hiring, according to the Wall Street Journal.
With each new class after 2020, an ever-smaller share of graduates is landing jobs that require a bachelor’s degree, according to a Burning Glass Institute analysis of labor data. That’s happening across majors, from visual arts to engineering and mathematics. And unemployment among recent college graduates is now rising faster than for young adults with just high-school or associate degrees.
The great John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times, notes this is concentrated among men - but that women shouldn’t rest easy.
He writes:
The unemployment rate for recent male graduates has risen steeply from less than 5 per cent to 7 per cent over the past 12 months. For young female graduates in the US, joblessness is unchanged over the same period, if not falling slightly. Most striking of all, recently graduated young men are now unemployed at the same rate as their non-graduate counterparts, completely erasing the college employability premium.
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Looking across all sectors, the key dynamic appears to be a well-worn story: women opt in much greater numbers for healthcare jobs, where employment continues trending steeply upwards, seemingly immune to the cyclical bumps that afflict most male-dominated sectors even at the graduate level.
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Recent US research finds that women are, if anything, at slightly higher risk of occupation displacement from generative AI than men, and if AI does start to displace junior white-collar roles on a significant scale, women’s much higher participation in higher education could leave them especially exposed.
Click over to read the whole thing.
Clearly there’s a lot of turbulence and uncertainty when it comes to the career prospects for young people, regardless of the role of AI in that.
Best of the Web
The Free Press: How to De-Addict Gen Z from Porn
After Babel: Let Kids Be Loud
Richard Reeves: Obama on the male malaise: 8 takeaways
NYT: Under Trump, a New Focus for a Birth Control Program: Helping Women Get Pregnant
Institute for Family Studies: Is Marriage Back? Divorce is Down, Family Stability is Up - Brad Wilcox has a related piece in the Atlantic.
Poll: Trump Administration Performance
I want to start periodically using Substack’s poll function to take your temperature on what you are seeing in the world. For this week’s poll, I’m asking your view of Trump’s performance:
New Content and Media Mentions
The Substack Tectonic School wrote a review and interaction with my book Life in the Negative World.
New this week:
Mistakes Must Be Acknowledged and Corrected - Admitting when we’re wrong can set a better example for leadership and trust
And my podcast this week was with Jason Jewell, Chief Academic Officer of the State University System of Florida, on that state’s higher education reform efforts.
Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.
I tried to tell my progressive sister (whom I love and is one of the kindest people I know) that men were in trouble. She flat-out denied it. She cited all the progressive arguments. One of them is that her sons are doing fine (which they are). That is one of the problems with progressivism. Even if your own life is good, you still fall for all the c--p.
It seems like this progressive women-whining comes primarily from the same old tired left wing news media like the NYT. If people are getting their social and cultural cues from them then they are already predisposed to this nonsense and will suffer the consequences.