Masculinity in the 21st century: are we in trouble?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000...apters.reviews
It's a long read, but it sure is interesting
This is something I've been thinking about recently. Being between jobs really helps you in putting things into perspective...
So, I've come across the following job specification: blah, blah, blah, WOMEN ONLY, blah blah blah.
Wtf? It's for a office job. Why must it be a woman? The answer I received: women are more focused and mature.
:confused:
I don't want to be branded a delirious mysogynist right away, so let me say that I don't harbor ill feeling towards the female gender and that I make an effort to avoid gender-based generalizations and to consider each person individualy. But the fact that there are both physical and social differences between men and women is indisputable.
It is said that, in general, men occupy more power positions and still receive better pay than women. However, I've felt, specially when I was in school, that people generally though of boys as less apt - both in academics and social skill-wise.
My brother teaches improv classes for extra $$$ and something he said the other also caught my interest: "I find it curious how most of the female students base their comedy in putting men down".
I honestly still don't have a formed opinion on the subject, so I'd like to ask you people what are your views on the state of masculinity on today's society, since most of you are older and more experienced than I am.
Some interesting tidbits...
Quote:
(...)The courts and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to aggression, delinquent behaviour, risk taking and social mayhem, men win gold.
And yet, for all their behaving badly, they do not seem any the happier. Throughout North America, Europe and Australia, male suicides outnumber female by a factor of between 3 and 4 to 1. The rise in the number of young men killing themselves in much of the developed world has been rightly termed an epidemic.
(...)
(...) We have become accustomed to thinking of 'real' men as those who labour in the iron, steel and coal industries, in shipbuilding, lumberjacking, pre-mechanised farming. Our martial heroes have been almost entirely male, in the fantasies and the realities of hand-to-hand combat, of sheer physical guts, the will to survive, athletic derring-do. What price all that brute strength, might and energy now, when more people are employed making Indian curries than mining coal, when computerised robots and not sweating men assemble cars and when the male predilection for violence, far from saving national pride, threatens world survival?
(...)
Male preoccupation with their pen1ses would appear to be based on fear, right enough: not on the Freudian fear of castration, but on the Adlerian fear of ridicule. Are we up to it? ask today's men anxiously, peering at their shrivelled pen1s and analysing their social skills; are we up to competing, succeeding, achieving, conquering, controlling, asserting, pontificating, as well as getting it up?
