{ 2009 05 21 }
Pro-Womyn, I Swear
- Hormones - Apparently the success of erectile dysfunction drugs has stimulated the makers of Androgel to try to convince American men that their real problem is a lack of testosterone. If that sentence piqued your interest, then you might try taking the “Do You Have Low T?” quiz. Yes, they’re also trying to re-brand testosterone as “T,” much as Gatorade recently forsook its unmistakable name in favor of the letter G.
On the other hand, even if you really are suffering from decreasing testosterone production, then this article suggests you might do just as well to institute some holistic medicine. To be specific, the viewing of pornography has been shown to increase testosterone production, among other things. By way of anecdotal evidence, I’ll say that I know at least a handful of gentlemen who maintain regular regimens including exercise and pornography, and none of us has yet fallen prey to any malady of note.
- Ladies - We used to keep abreast of the goings-on amongst Slate’s resident yentas, and in they’ve branched into their own website in the interim since our last update. Perhaps they didn’t think Jezebel was as dignified as the movement.
Word over there is that women are unhappier than they’ve been in 35 years. According to the story, “women have historically had higher self-reported levels of happiness than men,” but now the numbers are dropping, possibly because, with more or less equal opportunities in all fields, they can’t decide what to do with themselves. If that assessment is accurate, then this isn’t news. Disappointment at the proverbial path not taken is much older than Robert Frost.
Meanwhile, the piece asking “Are Men the Second Sex Now?” spends 7 paragraphs celebrating the success of Second-Wave feminism and two shorter ones contemplating the circumstances of contemporary men. Measured it isn’t. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see this sentence written in relation to the male presence on the underside of a growing education gap: “Because, unlike women, men do not have hundreds of men’s studies departments, research institutes, policy centers, and lobby groups working tirelessly to promote their challenges as political causes.” If we did, everyone involved would be demonized as a reactionary oppressor. For similar reasons, mass contributions go to fight breast rather than prostate cancer, despite the fact that the former is a possibility while the latter is essentially inevitable.
- Guys - The previously linked Newsweek article included its own link to this piece from last fall, which considers the inarguable extension of adolescence toward 30.
Its jumping-off point is Guyland, a book that I haven’t read but may well have railed against in the past. By all reports, this tome by Dr. Michael Kimmel of SUNY Stony Brook predicates adulthood upon “leaving home, completing one’s education, starting work, getting married, and becoming a parent” before raising the alarm that, although 65% of 30-year-old American males had done all that in 1960, only 31% had done so in 2000. Thenceforth, the book appears to recount the horrors unleashed by packs of recent college graduates aimlessly getting drunk and playing video games.
In his Times review at the time, Wesley Yang made the excellent point that Kimmel fails to establish any increasing of prevalence among the many unhealthy habits he identifies. As Yang puts it, “Kimmel asserts that the pressure to behave like a loutish Guylander is stronger now than ever before — a statement that the youth-extending urban hordes will recognize as absurd on its face”
Yang’s rebuff is all well and good, but, much like the book it reviews, it fails to take into account the economic implications of gender equity. The 30-year-olds in 1960 would have been settling down in the ’50’s, when women made up no major part of the workforce and a smaller percentage of the populace was college-educated. Thus, the educated members of the workforce could expect to have decent jobs not long after graduation. Also, the rare occurrence of two-income households kept housing prices reasonable. Neither of these circumstance obtains today. In fact, as the Newsweek review reports off-handedly, “Since 1971, annual salaries for males aged 25 to 34 with full-time jobs have plummeted almost 20 percent.” Courtship costs money. Weddings cost money. Children, in all reality, are a luxury item. Faulting a demographic for turning to largely homosocial interaction and video games, which require only a modest capital investment, while the members of that demographic are earning less and seeking housing in a market inflated by the income-density of two-income residences, seems an exercise in normative dictatorship.
The economic argument, by the way, doesn’t even touch on the fact that, for all our societal growth, courtship trends imply that women still favor men who are more more successful and not younger than themselves. Good luck to the 22-year-old new hires seeking wives.
It’s not so much a failure to clear the bar as the failure of the bar to remain still.
burnham | 21-May-09 at 10:30 pm | Permalink
On the ladies: I sometimes think that feminism has opened women to the paradox of choice. Now that there are many more options, each choice is less rewarding when weighed against all other choices. When there was only one option, kitchen and babies, people were happier.
On the ladies: I think that feminism has opened women to the paradox of choice. Now that there are many more options, each choice is less rewarding when weighed against all other choices. When there was only one option, kitchen and babies, women were happier with that choice.
And men are facing difficult times too. Law and Order: SVU, CSI, etc, have hyper-sensitized society to the image of men = predators. Fearful of false allegations, fewer men are teachers, fewer men help in children’s groups. If you see an older man and young girl together, is your first thought a father with his daughter? I also really hate all the advertisements that portray men as dumb and incompetent. Make that same ad while swapping genders and there would be uproar. Without a lobbying group men don’t complain, but would hope that men are taking note; I am.
50 years ago society expected you have a house and a wife and play with your kids. Nowadays that pressure is removed and men are scared to be around children. Why not sit around and play video games?
Levi Kafka | 26-May-09 at 9:15 am | Permalink
No offense, Burnham, but I’d like to take this opportunity to note — for all the servers and routers around the world caching this content — that the words used in comments on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of the management.
That said, your Paradox of Choice reference is spot on; it was even used in the originating piece. The burden of such choices, however, is outweighed by its intrinsic good.
As to the matter of male vilification, one might argue that one-hour procedural dramas serve more to inculcate the populace with an omnipresent conception of the state than to paint phallus-wielders as deviants. Keep in mind that many of the heroes are men, as well.
Still, the point that men — particularly Caucasian men — are at a loss for defensive measures in the realm of politics and public relations is unlikely to be refuted in this forum. Certainly, I’m not going to do it.