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Get back in the office and work dickhead!

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Parker, Feb 21, 2011.

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  1. Parker

    Parker
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    First suggestion, be easy on me.

    Where Have the Good Men Gone?

    I just think a discussion of this article would be great. Basically it says that men are not becoming adults these days and it is a problem for women. Adulthood, defined by the female author, is getting married and popping out kids. That is the ultimate end-game no matter what. Also men enjoying the things men enjoy, are signs of men not wanting to grow up.

    If you can refocus this or make it better, but the article is an interesting read.
     
  2. DrFrylock

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    This thread is going to be awesome.

    Personally I'm fascinated by this social trend, which is undeniable from the demographics. People are waiting longer to get married, have kids, etc.

    I would want to be married before I have kids, but I'm deeply undecided about kids in the first place. I have my life in order, I am very happy, and I don't see how adding kids to that would be anything but a huge roll of the dice. Me and my girlfriend went to a party recently which was a birthday party for a two-year-old. All her friends were there with their kids. Every single person there except us had some kids and they all looked like they had just come off the worst day at work ever. This was on a Sunday afternoon. They were tired, disheveled, and depressed-looking. Looked like lots of fun to me. All the parents were going home to watch The Princess and the Frog for the 158th time and try to wash the sour milk smell out of their clothes; my girlfriend and I went to see True Grit and have a nightcap. Winner: us.
     
  3. KIMaster

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    The article wasn't completely terrible; it's certainly true that Western men today are more infantile and less mature in their 20s than they used to be back in the day. (And that includes me...)

    Then again, the exact same is true of women. How many females are in their mid to late 20s and still "in school"? How many women, just like the Star Wars or Playstation guy examples, are painfully ignorant and child-like, incapable of talking about anything outside of a soap opera or celebrity? A lot.

    It's a broader social trend than any one gender, and there are some interesting possible causes for it.

    And then, the author mentions things like settling down and getting married, which I see as a completely different trend. (I don't believe it has anything to do with maturity) And then, she goes into a variety of random pop culture references, half-true facts, and semi-relevant personal anecdotes, none of which support her thesis.

    I can take a stab at a focus;

    Focus- Do you think men are less mature than they used to be? How about women? Why?

    Alt Focus- Do you think there is a link between maturity and getting married/settling down?
     
  4. Crown Royal

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    Whore logic eagles attack with your whore logic talons!

    I'm sorry, did somebody forget to fucking inform me that after you're a teenager you're supposed to strap down and become a prisoner in your own life because that's what you're supposed to do.

    Well, guess what? We're actually allowed to do whatever the hell we want because it's OUR FUCKING LIFE. If a guy doesn't want to be strapped down with a career and the same routine over and over at 25 years old then who could blame him? Nobody has to do ANYTHING at a certain age. Our twenties are the last part of our lives where you can TRULY cut loose without being judged, as if that matters anyway.

    Sure, men may be a little less mature than they used to be. Who cares? Times change, and I'd rather NOT be living in the sexually repressed 50's where everybody wore the same clothes and had the same basic, tired routine every single day of their lives. Live THAT kind of existence? NEVER.

    This women that once again doesn't know men well enough to be trash talking them collectively says they'd rather play video games or talk about Star Wars. Okay for one, the isn't 1985. 85% of video games nowadays are designed for adults only. I mean, have you ever played "Manhunt"? FUCK. Another, how many men do you know like to talk about Star Wars? I mean, the ones that actually leave their parent's basements. This article backs up NOTHING of the what the point trying to be made is.

    Women can be as easily attacked with the same half-cocked thesis as men. Who watches terrible, immature shows? Women. You think MEN watch all that stupid reality shit on MTV? Who's more likely to keep taking useless post-secondary education to fill their life-void? Women. You could write an article just as long with the same thesis just by altering the gender and a few situations. Stupid tabloid magazines? Twilight? Pop Music? Soap Operas and their nightime melodramas that are TWICE as bad? Women.

    Just do what you want with your life, and fuck whoever judges you. Putting goal due dates on your life will make your life suck because you'll always be stressing yourself out when you fail, which is a human trait if there ever was one. I got married at 29 and had my daughter at 31, so the bitch that wrote this dreck would prbably crucify me for not being mature, since I'm probably a decade late. Fuck that, and fuck her.

    "Where have to good men gone?" They're avoiding you. Especially when you say this:

    Yes, television. That's the problem. The hypnotic influence of fiction.
     
  5. Juice

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    The reason she doesn't understand what she's talking about is very simple. She thinks men were put together and upstanding in their 20s until now, when in fact it's the opposite. Men have always been as they are now, but certain generations were forced into that state of maturity much quicker. What's the catalyst? War. Our fathers and grandfathers seemed to have it together because they were drafted in service at 17 or 18 for WWII or Vietnam. This forced their generations to give up their generational versions of XBox and TV to go fuck up some Germans or Viet Cong. 100 years before that, you had 14 year old boys going to fight the Civil War and coming back as a proverbial grown up. So she wants to know where all the good men have gone? Maybe she should turn off that MacBook her dad bough her for graduation, get moving in the kitchen and maybe shell find one.
     
  6. Erasmusman

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    I am at the moment reading 'The Last Knight of Liberalism', it tells the tale of the life of Ludwig von Mises a early 20th century economist and the intellectual father of the 'Austrian School' in the United States.

    What struck me about him and his contemporaries is how quickly they had reached certain milestones in their life and how quickly they had acquired the attributes of a grown up. I say here the 'attributes', because the author also quotes some passages from books written by von Mises and these passages strike me as terribly immature. One passage in particular idolizes the life of a scholar and that this makes it difficult or impossible to get married. The passage, in essence, screams 'boys good, woman icky'. Von Mises was nearly 40 when he wrote that and had achieved nearly all the outward attributes of an accomplished adult male. His mindset towards women however was not so. In his defense, I don't think many of his contemporaries had a mature mindset.

    What I try to illustrate with this is that a distinction has to be made between the inner mind and the outer attributes of adultness. The author of the article only focuses on the outer attributes to define an adult and this is I think the great weakness in the thesis.

    The author of the article does not care whether or not men actually 'grow up', as long as they act in accordance with the stereotype the author has about what an adult male should act like.

    Don't believe me look at how often the author focuses on displayable character traits. The author even explicitly talks about the playing of roles and men being actors on the stage of life. This is not about being a man, this is about playing a man.
     
  7. bobdobolina12

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    Jesus Christ on a mountain bike, I'm glad I read that first thing in the morning. That article reads like something a derelict would scream at passing cars on a street corner. Throwing around a few references to slacker movies, stories of past relationships, and the odd bit of barely usable data doesn't make for an effective argument. It makes for a long-winded message board post.

    Since I'm sure other members will pick her apart like Peyton Manning against a high school team, I'll limit myself to this: Are men becoming more like the guys of pop culture, or is she merely using The Simpsons and Knocked Up as a lens to view the men she encounters? I find it hard to believe that any men idolize or identify with these slobs, and I would almost certainly fall into her definition of a "guy". I love a good pick-up game of basketball, a session of Madden, or a trip to the strip club as much as the next "guy", and I have no intentions of being married or raising critters anytime soon. That being said, I still work, read, go to school, and subscribe to all the traditional manly values. I'm certain that I am not alone, and am probably a member of the majority. If someone who has more time/ education on this matter could bolster this argument, I'd appreciate it.

    Since I need to get to class, I'll end on this:
    Why were you dating any of those people in the first place!?
     
  8. audreymonroe

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    This isn't entirely on focus, but this article/thread immediately made me think of the book Guyland, which my group of friends passed around a few months ago. It's a (mostly) great sociological study about guys in the 16-25 range and this extended adolescence trend. The huge oversimplification of the book is that his theory is that white men are pissed that they have been losing power over the past 30-40 years or so as women and minorities are gaining equality, and the behavior articles like these are complaining about is either acting out against that or small attempts to reclaim that power. He connects this idea to everything from hazing to sports to rape/rape culture. As a lady, reading this was pretty damn terrifying at times, and I wish enough people here have read it to get enough of a discussion going about the book itself. If you haven't, it's worth a read.

    Honestly, I'm not a fan of this article (and, if you care, the most prominent feminist media outlet wasn't a fan of it either). I won't go into the reasons why, because I'm sure ya'all will cover that, but I do think the heart of her point is valid.

    Focus: I think it's difficult to compare maturity to previous generations mainly because the timeline has become so shifted. Like whoever said above, there were reasons why men appeared to mature so much earlier in previous generations and, frankly, I wouldn't want the time of manliness from back then today (Oh hey Mad Men). It's easy to say that men are less mature today, but can you blame them? While it used to be that people were expected to be settled down by their late twenties, expectations have shifted even in the time that I've been growing up, where 30 used to be "the scary age" and now it seems to be that it's generally accepted if people still haven't figured things out in their thirties and 40 is the new point of maturity. I have been finding it strange how rarely I can tell the difference between people in their twenties and thirties these days, in either men or women. If I were to attempt to compare the two, the main thing that I think separates them is that women are more concerned with being mature than men are.

    Alt-Focus: I can honestly say that I can't think of a single guy in his twenties or thirties who I have considered "a real man" off the top of my head. But, I can also say that I don't think I could give you a definition of what I would consider "a real man" that separates all of these guys from that ideal. I think a guy can be a man before he's shifted his focus to marriage and kids, but I'm not sure how exactly, and it would be interesting to hear other people's definitions. Changing priorities is definitely part of it (I don't think I could ever consider a man mature if he never wants to grow out of hookup culture), but so is a change of attitude. His relationship to his career, his views about women, and whether or not he has a sense of the world outside of the little bubble of his life are more important to me than how he spends his free time. The cliche is usually that an immature man spends his time playing video games and watching sports and, to me, that doesn't necessarily indicate that he's immature. So what? But, if the reason he's so afraid of commitment in a relationship or a job is because it means he has to sometimes shift his focus away from getting to spend time playing video games and watching sports, than that's not mature. (Conversely, if a woman expects a man to stop spending his free time doing those things just because he's in a relationship with her, I don't think that's mature either...unless that's always his priority.)

    In fact, I think that's what's usually at the heart of comparing maturity to immaturity: the level of selfishness in a man. If there's one thing that ties all of these things together, I say it would probably be that.

    And, for the record, this kind of thinking:
    is immature, no mature what era you're living in. I don't care if you got married and had a kid at "the right time."
     
  9. Juice

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    She lives in Brooklyn, no wonder all she sees as men are hipsters.
     
  10. Binary

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    Maybe I'm naive, but I always find this kind of theory to be absolute horseshit.

    It's not just guys that are entering prolonged adolescence - women are doing it, too. We now have a culture where less of a focus has been placed on family and having children as soon as possible, and more of a focus on the individual. Many of us are now in a position to have lots of disposable income and no family obligations, and boys as well as girls are enjoying a longer period of "me-time."

    Any dipshit with a pen now proposes some utterly speculative but controversial/upsetting/scary social theory and sells books out of it. Most of it isn't even well researched or grounded, let alone plausible or real - correlation does not equal causation. Even more frustrating is every time I get roped into reading one of these pieces of trash, the gaping logic holes are readily apparent and should at least be acknowledged by anyone who reads critically instead of reading with the expectation of being told what is true.
     
  11. Noland

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    Calling marriage and children the keystone of adulthood is downright silly. I've been married a long time and have three children, but I know some people my age that are married with children that in no way should be called adults.

    Hemingway said it best:

     
  12. Sherwood

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    It's all the results of the increased cost of living not being reflected by an increase in salary. I would argue, and I'd be right by the way, that men of my cohort (I'm 27) are being more responsible by NOT diving into marriage and having children right away. I'm far better off working until my early to mid 30s, and waiting until I have enough income to comfortably afford children before having them.

    Or, I could be like everyone I know who has kids already. None of whom are married, none of whom have any money to speak of. None of whom are particularly happy.

    Keep in mind though, I'm in the NY/NJ metro area, so it's especially fucking expensive to live here.
     
  13. E. Tuffmen

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    This article says more about the person that wrote it than anything else. The whole discussion of what makes a man a man is ridiculous. You never hear anyone asking what makes a woman a woman. I'm a man because I was born with balls and a dick and I have testosterone coursing through my veins. Anything else is simply a discussion of character.
     
  14. audreymonroe

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    Wow. There is so much wrong about that statement. I don't even know where to begin.

    Your sex is a male because you were "born with balls and a dick and [you] have testosterone coursing through [your] veins." Everything else is gender, and that has endless opportunities for debate and discussion.

    I'm too tired to go any further with either of these things because there are entire papers and books and courses and degrees and careers about them, but it needed to be said.
     
  15. Binary

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    Everything else is most certainly not gender. Gender is essentially your mental association to a self/sexual identity and has little to nothing to do with wanting or not wanting kids, and certainly has nothing to do with wanting or not wanting to grow up and stop playing video games. It's an especially important distinction as more and more mental health fields are dealing with gender identity problems.

    What this ridiculous author in the original post is discussing has nothing to do with gender and has everything to do with choices and priorities and lifestyle.
     
  16. Nom Chompsky

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    I'm always a bit bemused when people bemoan the current dearth of traditional masculinity/femininity.

    It's funny, I was talking to a white, female friend of mine about the idea of Mad Men-themed parties. We'd both been invited to one, the sort that are all dark liquor, indoor smoking and authenticity. Being the good party-people we were, we decided that we'd get into the spirit and do things 50's style.

    So she went and had a terrible time, and I stayed in the elevator all night, wearing a little hat and smiling obsequiesly.

    Articles like this like to pretend that you can neatly excise the settling down/square jaw/dark suit notion of masculinity from the women are chattel/men are expendable/children are ornaments spectre of patriarchy. It's not that simple; when women have greater access to opportunity and agency, they don't have to get married young to avoid dying poor and alone. When men don't feel the need to dowry up and settle into a life of searing migraines and furtive wanks, they have a chance to be people. Fully functioning, dynamic people -- not cogs in the great machine of society.

    And imagine if you didn't happen to be born a straight, cis white male.


    Co-sign.

    Pretending that lifestyle is somehow synonymous with gender is basically at the heart of sexism.
     
  17. audreymonroe

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    You're right. That's not what I was saying, and I didn't think that's what the other guy was saying either. I didn't put it back in context with the article.
     
  18. Juice

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    Sociology 101 at TiB University
     
  19. Misanthropic

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    The heart of her point is simply this - unless men are married and have kids, they have not yet "grown up". Who has bestowed upon Ms. Hymowitz and her ilk the authority to define what it means to be an adult? I'd love to ask her if, as long as they are married and have kids, one could be a lazy drunkard who burns the dog with cigarettes and still be "grown up".

    She supports her argument with no valid data, taking the lazy route by relying on anecdotes and citing movies as examples. The absurdity of this is astounding. Having seen such seminal "80s" movies as Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club, St. Elmos Fire, etc., I can say with great confidence that those movies no more reflect what it was like to be a teenager or college student in the 1980s than "Knocked Up" accurately reflects the sociology of today's man in his twenties.

    By her definition, Bill Gates, despite being wildly successful, wasnt an "adult" until he was 40 years old, Nicolaus Copernicus, Leonardo DaVinci, and Michalangelo were never "adults", Derek Jeter still isn't an adult, and a large proportion of gays and lesbians will never be adults.
     
  20. Frank

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    I'm surprised that we made it a full page without a single person pointing out that she looks like a complete bitch, rendering anything she has to say about anything moot.

    [​IMG]

    I want my money back
     
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