SmokeAndMirrors
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For those who posted to pour scorn on men as "whining" about the way men are being treated in American society, you're just proving my point, are you not?
To be clear, the OP was not a call to order a bride from Russia or turn to other foreign women. The main point was the way men are being treated and regarded in American society. If you claim not to know what I'm referring to then you are being willfully blind and disenginious. The discussion started with marriage because marriage is the locus of many of the legal and societal sanctions against men, and American women are particularly inclined to take full advantage of the lack of fairness, even regarding it as their birthright. Which is why so many men are voting with their feet and avoiding the roles of husband, father, and provider.
It goes far, far beyond male dissatisfaction over the loss of traditional male roles and into the realm of unreasonable hatred and bigotry being directed toward men for no more than being men. Legal sanctions against men and disrespect of men are also strong on college campuses, and so we have seen a drop in male enrollment.
But it starts even earlier than that, with boys being shunted to alternative schools and drugged for acting like boys instead of like girls, which is what teachers, which are almost all women, prefer. It isn't any wonder that by they time they leave high school many young men have had their fill of academe.
You haven't provided evidence,
most Japanese women don't have any professional pursuits
and having large #'s single adults despising sex is not universal
In that case, every nation except a few Arabic nations are "post-feminist"
Already posted the proof and your claim is just another invention of yours
Nope
Yeah, people are having more sex which means more people despise sex and are sexually inactive
Neither of us believe it.
*Yawn* We have already agreed that the marriage rate has dropped.
Chikako Ogura, professor of gender studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, draws little comfort from government proposals to reverse the trend, such as adding child-care facilities and prodding employers to grant maternity leave.
The critical problem is that people aren't getting married at all. Young women have jobs and reject a marriage that won't deliver a more comfortable life, she says. Studies show men spend on average less than 10 minutes a day on housework while working women put in two hours.
"Women are looking for a marital partner who'll allow them to do whatever they want. They want a marriage that's perfect, economically and mentally. There aren't that many men who can offer that," Ogura said. "And they're all taken."
*Sigh*
And we have another example of you posting an article that contradicts what you said. For one thing, it only shows the last several years. As the chart I posted shows, if you go back to the 80's the rate was much higher. In addition, your own article states
Your own link does not support your belief that these women have careers or their attitude towards work represents a societal shift.
Chikako Ogura, professor of gender studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, draws little comfort from government proposals to reverse the trend, such as adding child-care facilities and prodding employers to grant maternity leave.
The critical problem is that people aren't getting married at all. Young women have jobs and reject a marriage that won't deliver a more comfortable life, she says. Studies show men spend on average less than 10 minutes a day on housework while working women put in two hours.
"Women are looking for a marital partner who'll allow them to do whatever they want. They want a marriage that's perfect, economically and mentally. There aren't that many men who can offer that," Ogura said. "And they're all taken."
They aren't buying new apts. They live at home with their parents. Remember?
If you're going to claim that the men make enough to support a family, in spite of all the posted evidence that they do not, then feel free to do your own research
No, they're the worst.
Poverty is measured by household income.
It was the link that *you* posted that said crowding played a role!!
Your argument is so inane that now you're arguing that your own sources are wrong.
yes - men are the true victims here in America......victims....
When exactly, after 2100? :roll:
Sure they do. Nearly 70% of Japanese women have jobs, which they apparently prefer to either marriage or motherhood.
I never claimed that it was.
And India, and most of Africa, and the non-urban parts of China, etca, etca.
How do you figure?
How much more sex do you think everyone was having back when it was the cultural norm to marry in one's teens or early twenties rather than their later twenties or thirties?
Again, promiscuity really only benefits the hyper-desirable anyway. Most people fare far better in committed relationships as far as sexual intimacy is concerned.
And it has dropped primarily because women are selecting against it, favoring professional pursuits (no matter how limited) instead.
Once again, and with emphasis, if they wanted to be married, they would be.
And? So what?
Japan has been in a state of recession since the late 1980s, of course employment is down. This is true of men and women alike.
It doesn't change the fact that women still seem to prefer even temporary employment over marriage.
No, but this link, which you have so conveniently ignored, most certainly does.
Japanese women are increasingly passing up marriage
You were saying?
Your own source shows that the vast majority of the single men who are going unmarried in Japan make between 2-6 million yen each year.
How does that compare to costs of living? How does it compare to the costs of raising a family?
Why do you keep evading this question?
Nope. You claimed that they do not have enough money to support families. No hard evidence has so far been presented to support this claim.
It is on you to prove it.
Prove it.
Which is exactly why I do not own a "household." I would be impoverished. :lol:
When and where?
He is correct that our academic system is currently set up to advantage girls over boys. Which is not least of the reasons why girls are outperforming boys at it.
That's true.
It's unfair that the system unfairly rewards intelligence and hard work when it should reward self-indulgent whining.
Nope, not in the least. It is unsurprising that PEOPLE, women or men, would not want to date someone who talks about them like objects and believes they're all in cahoots against them, rather than looking within for the reason they might be having issues.
I am perfectly well aware of issues affecting men, and I have written about them extensively on DP, to the chagrin of most liberals, and to the speechless confusion of most conservatives. But almost every time you see someone whining about how it's all a feminist conspiracy, it's a guy who need look no further than his mirror to see the source of his problems.
There is no "hatred" of men on a larger social level. This is a society whose current incarnation of feminism is essentially no different from the 1950's (they just call it "crunchy earth mother" instead of "Stepford wife"). There is institutional bigotry against men, but this is a result of patriarchy, not feminism -- after all, it isn't feminism that believes women are incapable of supporting themselves, now is it.
We drug girls too. We just drug them with downers instead of uppers. We send them to a different kind of prison, called mental hospitals. Our homogenization of children affects both sexes.
Your inability to see how these issues affect both sexes -- and this is a common growing pain at the mid-way point of any civil rights movement -- is the problem here. You have a comic book view of reality in which women are evil villains, and that simply is not reality.
Unless the boomers live forever, in about 15-20 years
they prefer to be married
Sure you did. You even posted some stat about how people in the US are not having sex
Unlike you, correctly
According to what you've said in other threads, more people are having more promiscuous sex. I believe the term you used was "epidemic"
No, it's dropped because the men are not fulfilling their part of the bargain by making enough money to be the provider
Chikako Ogura, professor of gender studies at Waseda University in Tokyo, draws little comfort from government proposals to reverse the trend, such as adding child-care facilities and prodding employers to grant maternity leave.
The critical problem is that people aren't getting married at all. Young women have jobs and reject a marriage that won't deliver a more comfortable life, she says. Studies show men spend on average less than 10 minutes a day on housework while working women put in two hours.
"Women are looking for a marital partner who'll allow them to do whatever they want. They want a marriage that's perfect, economically and mentally. There aren't that many men who can offer that," Ogura said. "And they're all taken."
If you wanted to be married, you would be too.
Wrong again. I posted the facts which show that they prefer marriage.
That quote confirms what I've been saying. The men are failing by not being able to be the provider.
This is just like how you read a quote that spoke about Japan being so crowded and lacking privacy and claiming that all it spoke about was technology.
Those men can't even afford to date.
It's been proven. Now it's on you to refute it
I posted the quote showing that they're the worst on gender equality.
Women account for fewer than 0.8% of the CEOs at Japanese companies that have shares listed on the stock market. In the USA, women head nine (1.8%) of the Fortune 500 companies.
• Japan ranks well below average — No. 38 out of 58 countries studied — in providing economic opportunities to women, according to a recent study by the World Economic Forum. (The USA ranked No. 17, and Sweden was No. 1.)
• Women are the top executives at just 5.64% of all registered Japanese companies, a percentage that has been rising but at an excruciating pace — from 5.53% in 2000, according to the research firm Teikoku Databank.
• Just 3% of Japanese companies have a woman on their boards, vs. more than 86% for U.S. companies, according to Corporate Women Directors International, a non-profit organization dedicated to getting more women on corporate boards. The 27 Japanese companies in the Fortune Global 200 last year had just three female directors — 0.7% of their total directors, lowest in the world.
But you're not impoverished.
And neither are the vast majority of Japanese who aren't getting married
That's true.
It's unfair that the system unfairly rewards intelligence and hard work when it should reward self-indulgent whining.
And yet we still see that boys outscore girls on objective tests and there is a divergence between test scores and letter grades. If they're both supposed to be measuring content mastery, then something is amiss. If grades measure busy work, and girls are more compliant in terms of completing busy work than boys, which they are, then this goes a long way to explaining why we see girls earning higher grades and boys scoring higher on objective tests.
So now the question becomes, how much should we reward busy work?
Worries about the declining academic performance of boys, a topic of increasing alarm this past decade, have intensified recently. It seems that boys are being judged both unduly harshly and leniently at school. A new study on gender disparities in elementary-school performance — the first study to examine both objective and subjective performance — found that boys were given lower grades than girls, even in cases (such as math and science) where their test scores were either equal to or higher than the girls’ test scores.
Fun fact: Testosterone levels in males are down significantly (20 percent) since the 1980's, and it's not aging related.
Men really ARE becoming more like women.
As Reuters reported in 2006:
A new study has found a “substantial” drop in U.S. men’s testosterone levels since the 1980s, but the reasons for the decline remain unclear. This trend also does not appear to be related to age.
The average levels of the male hormone dropped by 1 percent a year, Dr. Thomas Travison and colleagues from the New England Research Institutes in Watertown, Massachusetts, found. This means that, for example, a 65-year-old man in 2002 would have testosterone levels 15 percent lower than those of a 65-year-old in 1987. This also means that a greater proportion of men in 2002 would have had below-normal testosterone levels than in 1987.
“The entire population is shifting somewhat downward we think,” Travison told Reuters Health. “We’re counting on other studies to confirm this.”
Travison and his team analyzed data from the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, a long-term investigation of aging in about 1,700 Boston-area men. Data from the men were collected for three time intervals: 1987-1989, 1995-1997, and 2002-2004.
***
The researchers observed a speedier decline in average testosterone levels than would have been expected with aging alone.
***
It’s likely that some sort of environmental exposure is responsible for the testosterone decline, Travison said, although he said attempting to explain what this might be based on the current findings would be “pure conjecture.”
Men’s Health wrote in 2007:
In the summer of 2006, Travison attended an Endocrine Society meeting where another researcher, Antti Perheentupa M.D., Ph.D., from the University of Turku, in Finland, presented evidence of a similar decline. The Finnish results suggested the change was happening among younger men, too. A man born in 1970 had about 20 percent less testosterone at age 35 than a man of his father’s generation at the same age. “When I saw another group reproducing our results,” says Travison, “that was convincing to me that we were seeing a true biological change over time, as opposed to just some measurement error.”
Yup. Some of the environmental stuff going on has a uniquely bad effect on men. Like your link says, we don't know everything in play, but there seem to be two major players from what I've read.
1. High exposure to synthetic materials and hormones that either introduce more estrogen, cause testosterone to convert to estrogen at higher rates, or that synthesize directly into estrogen in the body.
2. Obesity, which also leads to increases of conversion to estrogen.
Both of these things are affecting people at all ages in the US, even children. The effect this has on women is extremely early puberty -- as much as 5 or 6 years younger than what is biologically normal. This has a negative affect on mental health and may also increase cancer risk. We won't know for sure for another 50 years.
But the effects on men might well be even worse. It throws their entire systems out of whack, essentially subjecting men to a semi-"man-opausal" state very early in life. To what extent, again, we really don't know yet.
But I'm not sure what this has to do with my post that you quoted. If we are to make a guess that young men today are likely to be living in a hormonally altered state somewhat similar to what older men normally would, they're still men.
People are not simply their hormones, and even if they were, the balance even of an altered man is extremely different from that of a woman, and lacking other female hormones almost entirely.
If given the chance to re-marry would you marry (another) American woman?
Increasingly the answer is "no".
Men are increasingly disrespected by American women. They face extreme economic and social disadvantages in family law that makes it possible for a wife to divorce them and take most of what they have including their children for any reason or no reason. They are constantly told that they are worthless and stupid. Disrespect for men has become standard practice. Men are disrespected by their wives – they’re disrespected publicly, they’re disrespected privately, they’re disrespected and then told that they have no right to be upset about it because they aren’t worthy of respect in the first place.
Disrespect of men is a joke to Americans now.
The result has been that men are increasingly dropping out of society. They don't marry, they don't go to college because they see no reason to break their humps to get ready to provide for a family -- they aren't going to be having a family.
Lots has been written about this phenomena, most of it in the strain of "why is it that men are so childish now." But men are not dropping out because of arrested development. They are acting rationally in response to myriad laws, attitudes and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the twenty-first century.
Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters: Helen Smith: 9781594036750: Amazon.com: Books
I wanted to make the point that a biological basis exists for making the claim that men today are not as "manly" as they were in the past, and it may not all be culturally induced.
The cultural shift has been for females to take on more masculine roles, and for males to become more submissive and "feminine," in a word. What I'm bringing to light is that this cultural trend is mirrored and accompanied by a change in the average level of testosterone in men over the past few decades.
It kind of makes me wonder if the cart is pushing the horse...
Only if we're assuming leaving the house or wearing pants is "masculine."
But taking the biological approach to this, this doesn't make sense.
Women have been hormonally hyper-feminized as well. So it doesn't make sense for women to be supposedly getting "more masculine" when they are having the same feminizing exposures that men are, and it's showing by the fact that they are experiencing puberty earlier.
By your logic, women should be getting more "submissive" as well. Although I see no basis that being a doormat is an inherently "feminine" quality, rather than simply the quality of someone with no self-esteem, which is what we have been raising women to be for centuries in the West, after all.
I think a much more reasonable explanation is that this is a weird time in the women's rights movement, where older women who remember severe sexism are still alive and exist in mens' families, and yet the younger women they're dealing with are more empowered. I think this creates a sense of shame in some younger men.
Because my experience with it is that young men are still very beholden to the cold and silent machismo culture in most of their day-to-day lives, but something in them is triggered when it comes to dealing with women in specific capacities -- sexual and domestic, mostly. This shows no indication of being some sort of physiological issue, and it makes no sense that it would be. But it does have all the hallmarks of a psychological/sociological issue, and that would make sense given where we are in history.
Thanks to you, my wife is now hysterical. She also coughed water all over the keyboard.
She doesn't believe the men you are describing exist, and if they do they need to stop whining and strap on a pair.
An example of women becoming less feminine is how many women are now leaving their small children in daycare or with nannies and returning to work, whereas in the past they would have seen their primary responsibility as being the caretaker of their children.
Another one is the growing number of women who don't want to have children, or who want fewer of them. The definition of femininity is that she is female to a high degree, and, biologically, the very definition of a female is she is the gender who bears and rears the children.
Anyway, are you sure that bio-similar estrogen would cause early puberty? I know that puberty is occurring younger and younger for many girls, and I agree that this is not a good thing at all, but I haven't seen any reports as to what would case it.
How can someone be so incredibly ignorant as to write off over 150 million women as potential mates - almost all of whom they have never even met - strictly on the basis of their present country of residence?
Obviously someone who is capable of demeaning people from sentient individuals into lumps of insignificant, human flesh.
Dude... that's how it's supposed to be.
This idea of a completely isolated immediate familial unit is relatively new to human history. Babies used to be socialized by the entire tribe -- often while mommy was off gathering food.
Dude... that's how it's supposed to be.
This idea of a completely isolated immediate familial unit is relatively new to human history. Babies used to be socialized by the entire tribe -- often while mommy was off gathering food. As a matter of fact, babies' brains are specifically designed to excel at meeting new people. Humans abandon their young more often than any other primate, and babies compensate for this by making themselves appealing even to non-familial people. They learn to schmooze before they even learn to lift their own heads.
But regardless of the facts of the matter, you are equating the entirety of femininity with breeding continuously, locked away in a house somewhere. You have a frankly frightening idea of what is ok and healthy for human beings. And let's not forget, women are indeed human beings.
Uh, yes, hormones are a trigger for puberty. Really, dude? And besides that, it isn't just synthetics. It is also increased internal production due to obesity.
Is this comment supposed to be an argument in support of the modern practice of day care? The people in the tribe who occasionally cared for children when the mother didn't actually have the child strapped to her or accompanying her, were a close kinship group. Modern day-care is nothing of the kind. Mothers didn't hand their children off to strangers from another tribe.
As for socialization, it wasn't the tribe that was the agent of socialization, it was, as is the case today, mostly parents, relatives and same age peers-playmates. The village chief or medicine man wasn't socializing the kids. When the children got older, then they began to interact more with adults, just like present-day kids get socialized at schools by teachers and by their swimming coaches or dance teachers.
I'm not getting your point. Why is this relevant?
Do you have any links to support this claim?
What's OK and healthy is whatever she decides is OK and healthy for her. Let's not confuse the issue. Nonetheless, if a woman chooses to prioritize breadwinning over child-rearing then that is a shift from a feminine to a more traditionally masculine role. Remember the definition of a female: of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring.
If a female chooses to explore the non-feminine aspects of her humanity then that's fine, but let's not muddy up the issue and let's continue to call a spade a spade.
"Hormones" covers a lot of ground. I asked about phytoestrogens specifically.
I also wonder about the effects of birth control pills on female hormone levels.
Prove it. They make 2 to 6 million dollars a year.
Why is that "not enough" to date?
According to at least one study I have already posted, many men who can afford to date and marry (40%, as a matter of fact) simply prefer not to.
For the most part I agree and I would never want to be with someone who put nationality as such a high priority.
On the other hand, the U.S. as a whole does have a prevailing culture, just like it does in France, or China, or anywhere else. If you choose an American women you are choosing someone who comes from a particular culture, one whose values you may or may not share.
Should we ask him to define what a "man" is? Could be interesting?
There are FAR too many women in the world who are forced to 'put up with crap' through no fault of their own.
Fortunately, the numbers of these women are slowly diminishing as women's tights continue to grow.
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