Since 2008 the number of American men under 30 reporting no sex has nearly tripled... [in an] increasingly winner-takes-all sexual marketplace generated by the retreat of monogamous norms and an increasingly polygynous, app-dominated hookup culture"
"While it’s important not to slip into victim-blaming rhetoric that sees the problem as women’s sexual freedom, the challenges facing unattractive, low-status men seem hardly to register on Bates’s radar".
Indeed. And it's not just a challenge there either. It's emotional too.
Female friends hug each other all the time. Male friends don't.
Female friends talk to each other about their problems and worries all the time. Far too few male friends do.
So imagine what it's like for men who have no physical contact or emotional support.
What do they do? Where do they go? In some cases, they find people they *appear* to have something in common with... on these disastrous online forums.
Yet do we have men in the public sphere modelling different behaviour? Instead, we have Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro.
We still have a 'man up' culture; we still have a massive epidemic of male suicide. And in effect, we have a society which:
1. Expects emotionally intelligent men (quite right too)
2. Doesn't teach them emotional intelligence AND frowns on them showing their emotions!
That isn't just mad. It'll cause mental illness. Male suicide isn't just about inability to find a role in a very different modern world; shame about not finding a partner or whatever.
It's about being expected even now to keep things bottled up always.
What do I think of hookup culture, incidentally? I loathe it. Albeit: what consenting adults get up to is also none of my damn business.
But I loathe it because it encourages shallowness, selfishness and narcissism and treats human beings as commodities.
It's also quite remarkable how many 'liberals' (in the American sense of the term) care for others in a political sense... then behave in staggeringly callous, selfish ways in a sexual sense.
I dunno - maybe that's just a balance? Human beings are complicated, after all.
But if you object to capitalism and neoliberalism treating people as commodities, it might be an idea not to do exactly that in dating, love and sex,
Can't have it both ways basically.
Laura Bates' work is excellent and the abuse she receives is vile. Abhorrent. I can't imagine what it's even like to be on the receiving end of all of that.
But we *do* need a broader discussion on all this. @J_Bloodworth's piece is a very good place to start from.
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Here's what a credible media would be asking the Prime Minister:
- Why did you lie to the British people at the election? How was that election legitimate given you won it because of that lie?
- Why have you ignored your own scientific experts? How many will die as a result?
- Why are you imposing massive fines on ordinary people while your advisor gets away with it?
- Why did your advisor avoid council tax?
- Why have you spent billions of public money on a track and trace system that doesn't work and is run by your cronies in the private sector?
- The polls suggest Joe Biden is heading for a landslide victory. He's already said he won't give the UK a free trade deal if we have no deal with the EU. What are you going to do about that?
- Do you think a nation of 67m is more powerful than one of 330m and a bloc of 445m?
Seriously. How can you spend an entire referendum campaign ignoring anything that actually matters and obsessing with everything that doesn't - and then spend the shambolic years afterwards doing the exact same thing, again?
In the campaign, there was:
- No mention of the impact on Northern Ireland
- Nonsense that we could be like 'Switzerland' or 'Norway'
- No mention of what a customs union even was
- No mention that we can't have tariff-free access AND leave the single market
There isn't if you control the world's reserve currency, like the US. There probably hasn't been while the UK economy was a safe haven from the euro, and one of the four or five strongest economies in the world.
But now? After the disaster of austerity and with No Deal Brexit?
Grace talks about power relations. Ratings agencies have absurd, unaccountable amounts of power... but won't the UK automatically face problems, big ones, if the agencies downgrade us?
At a much much lower level, Uruguay would be screwed without its investment grade rating.
What happens to children when you spend THIS length of time making them feel afraid of everything?
What happens to children whose parents can't magically keep them homeschooled over this length of time?
What happens to parents who can't work because their children are never at school?
How can the left - THE LEFT! - be this oblivious to what would happen to poorer children if none of them went to school until a vaccine had been distributed?
This has been a dark year, at the end of the darkest four years many of us have ever known in Western politics.
It's not just been about right wingers enriching themselves and impoverishing everyone else - it's been the triumph of lies over reason.
Fake news. Dark money and even darker data use. Fears exploited; science and evidence ignored.
"Where?", we wondered, "is all this leading?" For huge chunks of that time, the answer has looked like: "Fascism. The end of democracy. The return of the nightmare years".
The post-mid-1990s liberal left had a lot to answer for that. Because when you abandon millions and millions of people - when you cosy up to big business and except neoliberalism with all its excesses - where do you expect them to go? What do you expect them to do?
In Uruguay, which has one of the best records in the world in fighting Coronavirus, the salaries of all public workers - including the President, his ministers, all MPs, but excluding medical workers - earning over 80,000 pesos a month were CUT by between 5% and 20% from March.
In the UK, which has one of the worst records in the world in fighting Coronavirus, MPs are on the verge of receiving not one, but TWO inflation-busting pay rises during the course of the pandemic.
These things are not coincidental. To put it mildly.
Uruguay is a VERY expensive country and 80,000 pesos a month, especially before tax, is not a huge salary at all.
But the example of solidarity was set from the top down. "If we're going to ask you to make sacrifices, so will we".