[Billthedrill]

Not much development to the article, really - it's a series of comments from academics and journalists who appear to be observing the problems rather than living them. They're bound to get it wrong. The very last person I would ask about the challenges modern men face as opposed to those of a past generation is a feminist scholar who has faced neither; indeed, I'd be wary lest such observers may be the actual cause of the problems, hence the last to be able to address them.

I would offer this as a member of an older generation: short of a time of conscription in a war with little chance of surviving, there has never been a time where the institutions trusted with cultural maintenance have been as systemically hostile toward men in general and young men in particular as now. "Toxic" masculinity, really? The toxicity is quite in the other direction. If women in such institutions bristle at the notion that they should live up to the expectations of men, how is it that the reverse is considered invalid? When the inhabitants of such institutions - the schools, the press, popular culture, corporations, politics - when these individuals settle on a scapegoat for their own unhappiness it may be addressed on an individual basis; where it is the institutions themselves that have adopted that sort of open hostility as a collective culture the alternative left is open rejection of them. This accounts for changes in percentage of various activities pondered by the article's commenters. Dropping out is not a gesture of defeat in that sense, it's a rational response to an irredeemable environment and a search for a new one.

[PIF]

My take on that is to ask the question: when do boys know they are men? Girls know they are women when they have their time of the month and other women come to them teaching them about their life to come: mothers, wives, culture makers.

Men? At what point? Once and for eons boys would be sent off into the wild - if they came back, they were men. They became warriors and hunters (and later farmers) that fed and protected the tribe. They participated in shows of force against enemies - death was rare.

Later, when men became “less” valuable, the boys were sent off to war - many died, but those that returned were men. Other men came to them and taufht them about their life to come : warriors, hunters, fathers.

Now boys can join the military if they are fit enough, if they meet other qualifications. But most don’t see any point as there are too many other things they can do. Unfortunately, there are few other trials that equal the survivability challenge - only fishing crab in the Bering Sea comes to mind.

No one teaches boys anything about their lives to come. As a result many males remain boys for most of their life, lost in drugs, criminality, identity issues, and other anti-social pursuits. Each time a boy fails to know he is a man, society becomes weaker, the culture begins to rot. As the weakness and rot progress, the entire society begins to collapse and eventually disintegrates.

We now are on in that later process.