Trump officials like to show how masculine they are by performing physical feats, but A: performing physical feats is not a substitute for character or competency, and B: they often perform their feats with fake reps where they don’t go all the way and are not actually working the muscle properly the way the exercise is designed.
So, not only do they emphasize the less important traits, they do so poorly.
The workplaces that have grown recently, are ones that tend to employ more women. And, the workplaces that have shrunk, are ones that tend to employ more men.
The big growth happened in private education and health services.
The world has changed. There are fewer traditionally masculine jobs. The culture and politicians glorify these obsolete jobs. This creates a mismatch that leads to bad policy.
Modern farms and factories employ more machines than people. As we get richer, we tend to want more services than hard things.
If we want job growth for men, men will have to do the jobs that are growing. Which they can, but we need to not label these jobs as jobs for women.
“”In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.””
Wolves don’t actually have alpha males. That idea was based on a study of wolves forced together in a zoo. In nature, wolves live in families. The mother and father of a family aren’t best understood as “alphas”, they are best understood as the mother and father of a family.
In Chimps, there isn’t just one dominant leader. The apparent alpha often does not lead in combat with other chimps, and the leader leads by cooperation and aid, not just force.
“For Russian men, war now advertises itself like any other job.
Offers for front-line contracts appear on the messaging app Telegram alongside group chats and news alerts, promising signing bonuses of up to $50,000 — life-changing money in a country where average monthly wages remain below $1,000. The incentives go beyond cash, with pledges of debt relief and free childcare for soldiers’ families and guaranteed university places for their children. Criminal records, illness and even HIV are no longer automatic disqualifiers. For many men with little to lose, the front has become an employer of last resort.”
We need to channel masculinity in such a way that is moral and productive for society. This isn’t an excuse for toxic masculinity, but it requires an acceptance that not all masculinity is toxic and we need masculinity to be a force for good. We should also recognize that there are different ways to be masculine and that not all men are masculine.
“”Overwhelmingly, it turns out that the men with the most relationship options (wealthier, higher-social-status men) marry women similar in age to them and with high educational attainment,” writes demographer Lyman Stone in an article published this week for the Institute for Family Studies. “Relationships with large age gaps are more common for low-income men than for high-income men.”
Stone found that, contrary to stereotypes that proliferate online, the wealthier a man is, the more likely it is that his wife has a graduate degree and the less likely it is that there is a considerable age gap between them. Further, high-earning men were mostly married to high-earning women. The average wife of a top 1 percent–earning man also earned over $100,000.
“The simplest explanation for these trends,” Stone wrote, “is that high-earning men who have more romantic options prefer to marry women who are more like a peer. When men have power to influence their mate options, they tend to use that power to find a peer-age woman for companionship and partnership in life.”
…
yet there’s a coterie of tweets—and online personalities—devoted to insisting that high-achieving men find high-achieving women repulsive and instead choose to marry from America’s veritable cornucopia of smokin’ hot Applebee’s waitresses.”