Perspective, Gender, Division, Grift and Good Will

 We've all heard that old chestnut that says, "Perspective is everything." 

I stumbled across a conversation on Bluesky, started when someone posted the screenshot below.  

This falls right into the middle of a few different areas of interest for me, so I did a quick Google search of the title. It revealed this is a headline and general perspective a slew of publications generally considered right wing or tabloids have run with. This also isn't new information either. The same Google search revealed this is a study taken from the dataset of another study conducted in Sweden in 2019. What's also interesting is that the same search produced this, a Forbes article titled, Men Are Just As Emotional As Women, from 2021. It details a study finding exactly what the title suggests. 

You know what else I found? The Durham University post announcing the paper these headlines are being drawn from. What's left out of the headline these right wing rags and tabloids are running with (as well as the pieces themselves) is that the study found a rise of diagnoses in both genders. The announcement for the paper includes this interesting tidbit, "Contrary to expectations, this effect was more pronounced for urban and educated women." I can't help but put this together with the male version of trying to make fetch happen that the columnist and commentariat class is calling the "male loneliness epidemic," and the way they've couched it in terms of being the fault of feminism and women expressing their experiences with sexism and misogyny. 

There is an interesting, worthwhile conversation in the idea that where heterosexual relationships are concerned, women earning more than men is correlated with a rise in mental health diagnoses for both men and women. These publications are excluding women and their mental health from that consideration. It's a choice to put the well being of men ahead of women. The headline isn't exactly wrong or untrue, but it is purposefully misleading. It's part and parcel for the grift that has become the attention economy. 

This is the same thing happening with the "male loneliness epidemic." The history of women expressing their distress under traditional gender norms, in a formal sense, is a few hundred years old. It came to take up a prominent place in the sociopolitical life of the US with the movement for suffrage. Of course it took on new dimensions, urgency and popularity beginning in the 1960s. This means that for roughly sixty years, women have been expressing the many different ways traditional gender norms are harmful to their well being. Across a number of different metrics, including economic parity, domestic violence, health care access and treatment, even things as simple as how a woman presents herself in public setting, it's clear we haven't collectively treated women's concerns with the urgency that 50% of the population being deeply unhappy and unfulfilled would suggest. It seems to me, that in the interest in social stability, some urgency is necessary. Instead, we're being presented with a "male loneliness epidemic" as the fault of women expressing these concerns. 

It's depressing to survey all of this, which to me looks like what would colloquially be referred to as a metric fuck ton of evidence suggesting traditional gender norms are failing all of us (which in my mind means men, women and everyone who identifies as otherwise), and recognize there's a paucity of men speaking to any of this from a perspective that doesn't boil down to "women need to get back in the kitchen and shut the fuck up." There are a handful of men who've been raised to some level of status and recognition based on their desire or willingness to address these issues from a less strident position. I know I'm not alone in finding the majority of them lacking, at best, and laughably transparent in their attempts to create pipelines to right wing extremism, at worst. I look at someone like Scott Galloway, and find it odd that the kind of people being given legitimacy as a reasonable voice are so often those who've had no trouble at all capitalizing on the current state of gender conflict. Galloway is a marketing expert, and it seems the only reason he's been lifted to this position is his ability to promote himself, and not say anything too discomfiting about traditional masculinity. 

As someone whose only reason to have considered not identifying as a man is how terrible traditional masculinity categorizes and defines what that is, what I should be which inherently effects to who I can be, it's insulting to see how many of the people who claim to have men's well being at heart offer solutions that amount to little more than being angry at women, and leaning into superficial signifiers of masculinity. If it didn't seem so conspiratorial, I'd say this is so prevalent specifically because lonely, aggrieved, angry men are easier to manipulate. Fear, including that of loneliness, is historically one of the most effective ways to manipulate a population. 

It's also telling that capitalism itself rarely comes under scrutiny in these conversations. Marx diagnosis of alienation within capitalism rings true, but it's verboten to speak of Marx. One doesn't have to take Marx prescription for treatment as gospel to recognize his diagnosis has validity. So many of these conversations are related to capitalism in some way, yet they're so often happening without treating it as a real contributor to the conditions creating these anxieties, harms and outcomes. I also don't think it can be discounted that we are currently experiencing a period of time and conditions which make it profitable to exploit these divisions. I can't help but wonder if it's a service to women if they find themselves equally responsible for the crimes and failures of capitalism, laboring under the same anxieties, crippling expectations and dehumanization capitalism has been subjecting men to for a few centuries. It might be equity, in a sense, but I'm suspicious that it would be better for anyone other than the few women who have the good fortune to reach the top of the economic pyramid, as has been true for men. It is, I think, short sighted to attribute women also experiencing a rise in mental health diagnoses as their salaries and status in the capitalist system rise as being solely the result of men's inability to cope with it. It discounts the many ways capitalism has contributed to the ways masculinity is maladjusted in its ability to recognize women as deserving of equity and suggests by nature of being women, women wouldn't be as subject to those forces. Why is it urban, well educated women are experiencing this more than women who don't fit that description? 

I do think there has been a degree of division in these conversations, along gender lines, that isn't serving us well. To some degree, it's the nature of attempting to have these conversations publicly. Women's reticence to engage with men is justified, considering how normalized harassment is in response, and how virulent the deployment of that harassment too often is. At the same time, the basis of these questions and discussions is how we can live together that gives the greatest number of people be afforded a healthy sense of well being and fulfillment. In the most practical sense, we're stuck together, and it's in our collective best interest to see this as a shared project in learning how to live together. 

I can't help but wonder if there are enough people of good faith, people who recognize the necessity of having to live together in the most equitable way possible, and have the patience to work through the misunderstandings and miscommunications that are guaranteed to be part of that process for even the most dedicated of us, to start offering new perspectives, opening up new avenues we can follow toward a better tomorrow. I also can't help but think it may be that this is something for what we think of as "the left" to undertake with urgency, as a way to start undermining the offensive the right has been executing for almost a decade now, and which helped carry Trump to another electoral victory.