The Left Is Paying a High Price for Getting Men Wrong
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Friday, April 18, 2025 06:53
VIEWED: 364
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https://www.newsweek.com/left-paying-high-price-getting-men-wrong-opin
ion-2060735
Uh... Yeah. Ya think?
You got a lot of women wrong too. Most women aren't college "educated" white Karens.
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Instead of this material reality, the left often talks about masculinity as a cultural or ideological construct. But for many working-class men, masculinity is tied to their everyday lives: how they earn respect, support families, or find purpose at work. Masculinity has long been structured around functions—provider, protector, builder—that still shape how many men understand their place in the world. As those roles have eroded, particularly in places where stable work has disappeared, the left has offered few alternatives that feel tangible or aspirational. Meanwhile, masculinity remains one of the only frameworks that confers dignity: so much so that it's being used to position a return to manual labor as more meaningful than upward mobility.
This disconnect often falls along class lines. Some of us are afforded the emotional and social freedom to distance ourselves from masculinity without fearing a loss of our identity or belonging. For men who have been raised to see work as a central part of who they are, performing the masculinity they were taught to admire is important to them, even if the labor market no longer supports it. Young men also want to know where they fit, growing up as the first digital natives where societal goalposts keep shifting. The task isn't to dismiss or idealize masculinity—but to take seriously the ways it still functions as a source of value to prevent its weaponization
When economies fail and meaningful work can't be found, men suffer. They drink, or drug, spend endless hours on the internet, or join gangs or the military or terror groups. It happens so often, in so many places and so many cultures, that I suspect its biological not cultural.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This ..Quote:
Instead of this material reality, the left often talks about masculinity as a cultural or ideological construct. But for many working-class men, masculinity is tied to their everyday lives: how they earn respect, support families, or find purpose at work. Masculinity has long been structured around functions—provider, protector, builder—that still shape how many men understand their place in the world. As those roles have eroded, particularly in places where stable work has disappeared, the left has offered few alternatives that feel tangible or aspirational. Meanwhile, masculinity remains one of the only frameworks that confers dignity: so much so that it's being used to position a return to manual labor as more meaningful than upward mobility.
This disconnect often falls along class lines. Some of us are afforded the emotional and social freedom to distance ourselves from masculinity without fearing a loss of our identity or belonging. For men who have been raised to see work as a central part of who they are, performing the masculinity they were taught to admire is important to them, even if the labor market no longer supports it. Young men also want to know where they fit, growing up as the first digital natives where societal goalposts keep shifting. The task isn't to dismiss or idealize masculinity—but to take seriously the ways it still functions as a source of value to prevent its weaponization
When economies fail and meaningful work can't be found, men suffer. They drink, or drug, spend endless hours on the internet, or join gangs or the military or terror groups. It happens so often, in so many places and so many cultures, that I suspect its biological not cultural.
I share that suspicion.
Men, in general, are goal oriented and are lost if they don't have any purpose.
Fortunately, I never joined the military or any gangs or terrorist groups. A lot of that was luck. First, I started dating a girl right around the time I was in the process of joining the Marines just tell my parents to go fuck themselves. That girl saved me from the biggest preventable mistake of my life. Second, I hung around with some real dipshits in my late teens and early 20's, but even the poorest of us weren't surrounded by gang culture, even if they tended to gravitate toward it. Third, there really isn't much reason or opportunity for most Americans to ever consider turning to terrorism unless they're in prison or currently in the process of getting their college "education".
But I've done plenty of drugs and drank enough booze for 3 lifetimes. And to this day I spend WAY too much time staring at shiny rectangles, whether I'm watching YouTube, playing a video game or scratching that OCD itch and working months on end while neglecting everything else to finish a project that could never be finished in my lifetime.
Sometimes I do real good for a long time. I get some shitty employment for a while and/or I put a lot of work into my house. Then other times I don't, and I spend nearly an entire year making something really awesome, but that can and will never be monitarily beneficial to me, and at the end of the year all I've really done is burnt off one more year's worth of gasoline in the tank that saw a dip below the half-empty mark arguably a decade ago already.
It's difficult sometimes keeping yourself focused, on-point and making "progress" for yourself when you've put yourself into a situation where you hardly ever need to do any real work for yourself, and you don't have anybody else you need to support.
My aunt is one who bucks the trend as far as generalities with femals go, and has been a hard working physical gal all of her life. Even when she was married she never stopped working full time. For the last few years I could tell that the grind is really starting to get to her because of her age, but now that the one year to retirem
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This ..Quote:
Instead of this material reality, the left often talks about masculinity as a cultural or ideological construct. But for many working-class men, masculinity is tied to their everyday lives: how they earn respect, support families, or find purpose at work. Masculinity has long been structured around functions—provider, protector, builder—that still shape how many men understand their place in the world. As those roles have eroded, particularly in places where stable work has disappeared, the left has offered few alternatives that feel tangible or aspirational. Meanwhile, masculinity remains one of the only frameworks that confers dignity: so much so that it's being used to position a return to manual labor as more meaningful than upward mobility.
This disconnect often falls along class lines. Some of us are afforded the emotional and social freedom to distance ourselves from masculinity without fearing a loss of our identity or belonging. For men who have been raised to see work as a central part of who they are, performing the masculinity they were taught to admire is important to them, even if the labor market no longer supports it. Young men also want to know where they fit, growing up as the first digital natives where societal goalposts keep shifting. The task isn't to dismiss or idealize masculinity—but to take seriously the ways it still functions as a source of value to prevent its weaponization
When economies fail and meaningful work can't be found, men suffer. They drink, or drug, spend endless hours on the internet, or join gangs or the military or terror groups. It happens so often, in so many places and so many cultures, that I suspect its biological not cultural.
I share that suspicion.
Men, in general, are goal oriented and are lost if they don't have any purpose.
Fortunately, I never joined the military or any gangs or terrorist groups. A lot of that was luck. First, I started dating a girl right around the time I was in the process of joining the Marines just tell my parents to go fuck themselves. That girl saved me from the biggest preventable mistake of my life. Second, I hung around with some real dipshits in my late teens and early 20's, but even the poorest of us weren't surrounded by gang culture, even if they tended to gravitate toward it. Third, there really isn't much reason or opportunity for most Americans to ever consider turning to terrorism unless they're in prison or currently in the process of getting their college "education".
But I've done plenty of drugs and drank enough booze for 3 lifetimes. And to this day I spend WAY too much time staring at shiny rectangles, whether I'm watching YouTube, playing a video game or scratching that OCD itch and working months on end while neglecting everything else to finish a project that could never be finished in my lifetime.
Sometimes I do real good for a long time. I get some shitty employment for a while and/or I put a lot of work into my house. Then other times I don't, and I spend nearly an entire year making something really awesome, but that can and will never be monitarily beneficial to me, and at the end of the year all I've really done is burnt off one more year's worth of gasoline in the tank that saw a dip below the half-empty mark arguably a decade ago already.
It's difficult sometimes keeping yourself focused, on-point and making "progress" for yourself when you've put yourself into a situation where you hardly ever need to do any real work for yourself, and you don't have anybody else you need to support.
My aunt is one who bucks the trend as far as generalities with femals go, and has been a hard working physical gal all of her life. Even when she was married she never stopped working full time. For the last few years I could tell that the grind is really starting to get to her because oNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I agree with all of that.
I'd also add that we don't really know how modernity and the trappings of it have warped our instinctual needs over time, and how differently people in differing parts of the world are affected by that.
The people in the so-called richest countries in the world are the ones not having babies at a rate that would grow or maintain equilibrium. And that's including the fact that if you dive deeper into those nations, the poorest people are the ones still the likeliest to have kids.
Everywhere on the planet where your logical side would think they wouldn't want to have more kids, they're having more. And the people who are the most financially well off are the least likely to have more.
I can see why this would be the case. There's a million things to do at any time. If all else fails, there's a show you've been meaning to catch up on.
When is the last time that you were bored?
I remember that while I was growing up I felt it often until I started reading books. But even then, it still crept up from time to time.
If it weren't for the occasional 4 hour power outage I get around here, I'd have probably forgotten what that even feels like.
And I'll tell you what.... It feels pretty bad when you're not used to it anymore.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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