Talking points: culture, masculinity
Broad-brushing things doesn’t help us progress. Broad-brushing people is even worse. Young men are facing what feels to them a hostile landscape, and it’s causing some serious issues. Listen in.
(00:00:00) – The abusive relationship analogy
(00:05:36) – Porn DOES contribute
(00:08:16) – The new narrative
(00:11:03) – Is there a more positive vision for men and masculinity? And a message to guys who are struggling
Transcript
Why are men in such decline?
Why are so many young men checking out of work, more men living at home than ever before, you know, less young men are having sex than ever before, going to college, like less young men are going to college than ever before. Why is this happening?
I think there’s many reasons. I’ve talked about a few of them before, but the one that I don’t think has gotten enough attention is the decades-long campaign of demonizing men and speaking to men and about men as the fundamental problem with every issue in existence, basically. And I’m going to use a relationship analogy, okay?
Imagine that you’re dating somebody and that person starts to tell you that you are a problem, that you’re causing them harm, that you’re damaging them, that you’re a problem in the relationship, that any type of dysfunction that happens in the relationship is your fault, and then it gets worse, right? They start to say they don’t need you, they don’t want you, they actually would be better off without you, the world at large would be better off without you, that you’re a piece of garbage, that, you know, that so many of the issues that they face in life are because of you.
You would either move into a very defensive and attack-oriented stance and position, or you would just start to slink out of that relationship. You’d either, hopefully, you’d exit that relationship entirely, you’d be like, why the hell am I here? Or you would just, you would check out, right? You would literally just check out of that relationship and be like, why in the hell am I in this relationship with you?
But we have made it commonplace, culture, society, has let it become commonplace to make blanket statements about men as being the fundamental systemic problem with society. I mean, imagine the lack of ingenuity and intellectual honesty that you’d have to deploy in order to just blame an entire sex for all of the problems and completely remove any type of personal responsibility for your part in the equation, right? Telling men that they’re not needed, they’re not wanted, that they’re all rapists, that they’re pieces of garbage, that, you know, they’re all narcissists, that they’re all, you know, violent, that they’re all terrible, that society would be better off without you.
What we’re experiencing now in this mass checkout within our society and this massive shift, I mean, I’ve been watching post-election in America as this whole conversation around how men determined this election and how it was misogynistic and all of this sort of intellectual rigmarole that has unfolded in so many political commentators and just individuals, again, blaming men for what happened.
And I think what you’re seeing is the consequences of blaming men for absolutely everything, demonizing men for absolutely everything for decades. And when you do that, there will be consequences. Men will check out, men will start to go into decline as they have. They’ll stop showing up into college spaces because, I mean, let’s face it, I probably wouldn’t want to go to college if I was a 19-year-old kid in today’s world, especially if I was a 19-year-old conservative kid. Like, I would not want to go to a college space, you know.
And even if I was, and I mean, I was very liberal as an early, I got a music degree, you know, but if I was 19 or 20 again, and I was looking at going back to college or going to college, I mean, I’d have some real reservations about whether or not I was welcome on that college campus, whether I would be wanted in that space. And we as human beings are creatures of belonging, and we don’t generally want to go into spaces and places where we do not feel like we belong or that we have to fight for a sense of belonging. And, you know, places like college campuses have always meant to be, they’ve always been a little bit more liberal-leaning, but they’ve always meant to be a place for discourse of difference.
And we’ve lost any type of capacity to disagree without being highly disagreeable. We’ve lost any capacity to disagree with somebody and say, you know what? I don’t agree with what you’re saying, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to try and annihilate you and de-person you online and get you completely canceled. But this has been the modality that we’ve taken. And so many men have been inundated with the conversation that you’re the problem, you’re contributing to the issue, society would be better off without you, or society would be better off if you just acted more like a woman. If you just showed up more like a woman, then you would be, you know, then you’d be accepted. And then men in relationships hear the same thing, right? I don’t need you, I don’t need you around, I’m better off without you, or I’m, you know, whatever it is, I’m a strong, independent woman, I don’t need you. And then that man ends up checking out of that relationship in some capacity because relationships are reciprocal, right? Relationships are meant to be a reciprocal thing. But if you show up in a relationship with somebody and they’re saying, I actually don’t need you to contribute anything to me, then the question starts to manifest of, well, then why am I in a relationship with you? Because I thought we were contributing to one another for one another’s betterment.
So, obviously, there’s many different reasons that we could give why men are struggling, right? I mean, you give men access to porn, you give young, horny men access to pornography, oftentimes way earlier than they can handle. I mean, the fact that there’s no age restrictions on pornography and any 12-year-old boy can go online and watch and see more naked women than literally any man in the span of human history pre-internet saw in his entire life is just insane. You know, that has a very damaging detrimental effect to a young man’s psyche, to a young boy’s psyche, because it skews his sense of what should be accessible. And porn is low-risk, right? Something like pornography is low-risk. There’s no real risk of rejection, but in the real world, the stakes are very, very high.
And so we’ve created conditions for young men where everything’s kind of anti-risk, right? We have helicopter parenting, we’ve got very low-risk sexual gratification acquisition, so you can just go online and watch a whole bunch of porn and get sexually gratified, but you don’t actually have to work for it at all. Whereas in the real world, you have to go and work, you have to go get rejected. There is a high level of risk to approaching a woman, talking to her and asking for her phone number. There’s a very high risk that she’s gonna say no or I’m in a relationship or some form of rejection will happen.
So when you couple telling men for a very long time, you’re the fundamental problem with pretty much everything in existence right now, and you’re not needed, and you couple that with giving them environments that are not conducive for sharpening and helping to develop certain masculine qualities, like being risk smart, being able to take risks, having the resiliency to take risks, those are, generally speaking, things that men thrive off of.
There’s a period of time in a man’s life where he will take a tremendous amount of risks, and some of them are stupid. You know, I mean, some of the risks that I took when I was a young man were absolutely, I mean, just dumb, they were just plain dumb. But those stupid risks that I took helped to inform and helped to rein in my risk-taking ability or a skill, right? Taking a risk is a skill set, and if you as a young man haven’t had the opportunity to take real risks, to develop that skill, then you’re gonna feel less capable within the world and within society.
But the main piece here that I really wanna drive home is we are creating a narrative where it’s become socially acceptable to hate on men in a way that we would never allow with women. We would never, ever allow individuals on any side of the political spectrum to just point blank say women are the fundamental problem and to spew hatred around women. I mean, misandry has become so commonplace and so socially acceptable that I literally have young men reaching out to me saying things like, I grew up in a household where my mom just hated men, and she told me how bad men were, and she told me how she hoped I never became like my father or any of the men that I was around, and so I never really had any kind of role model or idea of what type of man I should be because it just seemed like she just hated men all the time.
And so this type of blatant misandry has become so commonplace that a lot of men don’t even, it’s not even that they don’t even know how to become a good man, it’s that they don’t even want to take the risk to do that because it seems like there’s no winning, there’s no possibility that you could ever develop yourself into a man that society and culture is going to approve of.
And that’s problematic, right, that’s problematic. I mean, on the one hand with women, what we’re saying right now is you do whatever it is that you want. We’re sort of giving women, again, this sort of like blank check of go be whoever and whatever you want. We’re not gonna put any labels on it, we’re not gonna define anything. If you never want to have kids and stay single and work a job for the rest of your life and have five cats, like cool, power to you. There’s some hate around the quote unquote trad wife, right, if you want to be a traditional wife and stay at home and raise kids, there seems to be some commentary around that. But for the most part, it’s like ladies go off and do whatever you want. But for men, there is this huge movement constantly telling men, you need to do this, you need to act like this, you can’t do these things, you can’t say that things, this is misogynist. I mean, everything’s misogynistic now. To the point where if you’re a man who cares about being in shape, you’re a misogynist somehow because you want to keep your body in shape. I mean, it’s gotten to the point where it’s so ridiculous that I think the average man looks out on social media and looks out on the content and the conversation around masculinity and just kind of throws his hands up and is like, I’ll be back when y’all are done with this bullshit. Like, I’ll check back into society when you start to like end this nonsense because this is crazy.
And so I think to wrap this up, what I really want to drive home is that we need a more positive vision for men and masculinity. You know, if you’re somebody out there, if you’re a man that’s trying to work on himself or if you’re a single mom trying to raise a son, you need to have a positive vision for men and masculinity. And we need to eradicate this absolute bullshit garbage notion that we can tell men that the world is better off without them. Men already kill themselves way more than women do. And they do that in part, if you look into the data and the research, which Richard Reeves has talked about a lot, they do that in part because they feel useless, right? A man’s ability to contribute to family, to friends, to society, to culture is incredibly important to him. And when we take that away and we say, you’re not wanted, you’re not needed, I’m going to reject the opportunities for you to develop the skills to contribute, to provide, to add value for your life and the people around you, then men will fundamentally suffer.
And we see this happening. And so we need to create more positive visions, role models, opportunities for men to step into. Second, guys, if you are somebody that is struggling personally and you’ve got caught up in this rhetoric of all men bad, all men the problem, world would be better off without men, and you’re not really too sure where to start, start to pursue some type of adventure IRL, in real life. Get off of online forums. Get off of the online conversations. Pursue adventure in real life. Like go hike in the woods. Go camp. Go touch grass. Go sleep under the stars. Plan a solo trip somewhere that seems wild. Like, you know, motorcycle through Thailand. Backpack through Italy. I don’t know what it is for you. Go pursue some adventure in real life.
Maybe that just means that you go to the local bar and you talk to a woman. You know, and that’s the adventure that you pursue just to see what happens, just to see how it goes. Start to pursue some real adventure in your life so that you have some aliveness. I mean, I think I read through a lot of the comments of men that are struggling, whether they’re young or they’re old, and my gosh, does it sound bleak. You know, I think for a lot of the men that are out there, it just feels and sounds bleak. And how you combat when you feel bleak and hopeless in life is by saying yes to adventure. I mean, this is the whole point of most of what Homer wrote about in the Odyssey and the Iliad, right? It’s like we have to say yes to adventure. Otherwise, stagnation and mediocrity and a kind of bleak, mundane cover just starts to come over our psyche and our hearts and our souls. So say yes to adventure.
And then lastly, as I was talking about before, start to take risks. We need to encourage young men and men in general to take some risks, to start to fail, and to start to develop the ability to know how to take risks, to get better at saying yes, this is a smart risk that I can take. But if we don’t allow them to fail and stumble and get things wrong, if you never allow yourself as a man to develop the skill of being able to have some discernment around what a good risk is and what a terrible, shitty risk is, you will suffer as a man because there is some type of correlation, and maybe I should do another video on this, there’s some type of correlation between you having a very deep level of self-respect as a man and your ability and your competency in being able to take risks because risks take you on a very specific adventure.
So take some risks today, tomorrow, this week. Let that be your mission for a little while. And for the love of all that is holy, can we all stop feeding into this narrative that men are just point blank the problem to everything and that the world would be better off without men? The world would literally collapse in a matter of hours if men just disappeared. Everything would fall apart immediately because men are necessary and so are women.
So anyway, I’d love to hear why you think men are in decline. I’d love to hear your take and your thoughts on this conversation, specifically about the demonization of men over the last few decades. And don’t forget to man it forward. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. Until next week, Connor Beaton, signing off.
