Many puzzling sociological developments can be explained through opinion polls. According to recent YouGov polls carried out in the US and Britain:
(1) Only 30% of American 18-29 year old men describe themselves as “completely” masculine, compared to 65% of over 65s.
(2) If you are of the opinion this isn’t a great trend then prepare to get triggered even harder – Only 2% of 18-24 year old men describe themselves as “completely” masculine (relative to 56% of over 65s), while 14% of 18-24 year old women describe themselves as “completely” feminine (versus 59% of over 65s).
(3) “British masculinity is a fraction of America’s.”
(4) … and is quickly becoming a dirty word. 42% of young British men have a negative impression of masculinity, more than the 39% who have a positive impression of it. In fact, they appear to dislike masculinity even more than young British women, of whom only 27% have a negative impression of “masculinity.”
This is known as a push poll.
What is bad about this development?
@mitleser
You mean, what is bad about males becoming emotional pussies instead of being loyal, responsible anchors to their future families?
In the lifeboat of life there are the navigators and the “people” people.
The navigators are no nonsense, concerned with exact time and place, know about the world outside themselves such as the Earth’s ocean currents and the causes of weather and are aware of the Earth in the larger context of astronomical space. Their universe is not self-centered. When rationing the biscuits and water, everyone receives an equal portion. If worse comes to worse, then the lion’s share should go to the navigator and rowers because, without his skill and their muscle, the craft has no chance of reaching safety.
For the “people” people on the other hand, human interaction is everything. Not hurting people’s feelings trumps cold reason. When rationing the water and biscuits, they will want to give the most to the neediest, the injured, infirm or those suffering most from deprivation.
Navigators seem to embody manly traits, “people” people are feminine. As long as one is hale and strong, then it is obvious to prefer masculine traits. Injured however, it’s easy to see why men prefer female nurses to male.
What development?
Absent in this study are comparative data from decades past.
Feelings like these probably substantially depend on person’s age.
The development is yet to be qualified.
The rowers in the lifeboat too are oriented towards the outside world, the realm of things. They are concerned with the state of the gear, repairs, efficiency, bodily health and so on, again, what many regard as manly virtues.
But some men in the lifeboat neither row nor navigate. In America today, the black man hides himself among the women, the “people” people. In Conrad’s Nigger and the Narcissus, the black man looks impressive enough but quickly feigns illness and confines himself to the infirmary because, as Tiny Duck has commented elsewhere on this site, he situates himself there to get sympathy and be relieved of work duty as well as (here in America) to hopefully gain access to the white wymmens whom he finds soft targets for his pleas for compassionate special consideration.
Sensing his failure to find a place in the world of men due to his lack of manly skills, and sympathetic for his consequent vulnerability, white wymmens do fall for his line and some do adopt pet Negros. These relationships rarely last because in the long run, most decent, respectable women tire of a black man’s inadequacies, machinations and special pleading. They find him tyrannical and boring–remember we’re talking about a guy here with an average IQ of 85 who therefore, has a very limited intellectual range. Very few women want to play nurse to a man who is a shirker, a loser in life’s lottery and an arrogant one at that, one who doesn’t hesitate to become violent when his shortcomings are pointed out to him.
The man most responsible for the plight of today’s Negro is Jesse Jackson. In the speech in which he said that the negro would never return to the fields as a stoop laborer, he condemned the black race to marginal irrelevancy. It they would not do that for which they are economicaly best suited, then what is left for them?
Cultural poisoning.
You are obviously part of the problem – a victim of “American popular culture” and government schools.
This study look very vague.
Like my answer now.
Culture strike genes???
This study can be
False,
The masculinity concept can be understood differently today than in the past by the most of the British men…
We have to look to the English young men today.
And remember avg people are very conformist. And they no have full consciousness that they lies compulsively about themselves, the reality etc, make a hard traffic of pragmatizations (old “rationalization”) in their heads.
Classical conservative man were mainstream and today even the “liberal” media trying to create a “perfect” man prototype and obviously trying to inculcate this in the majority of masculine population seems no have a visible cultural preponderance among them, us.
In the past culture based on this sexual-cultural aspect was more rigid than today.
Gramscianism force people to be more honest about themselves and also more relaxed.
In Japan similar situation is happening??
But Japanese population at least by now still wasn’t ((re))indoctrinated to give less value to the masculinity. Cultural modernization in Japan seems had been little imposed and with virtually no gramscianism in the schools or in the media telling to impressionable minds that they are guilt or that the man is inferior than the woman. Just a more relaxed televisive culture. Seems seems seems
Gramscianism stimulate a “selfish’ life style and when people are living for themselves they tend to be more sincere about themselves too.
They have “free” choice.
Without a cultural reinforcement of superiority/virility most men still will feel as a “men” in the similar way that their grandparents feel??
Oh Gawd!!! Lack of impulse control equals lack of manliness. No doubt about it.
5371, I had to look up “push poll”, but, yeah, it does give that impression.
FWIW-I’ve had two unused phrases simmering in my notes: “patriarchal, authoritarian, masculine, well-ordered” and “strong, masculine, white male”. No deep-think to them–they refer to the clichéd world where father, indeed, was presumed to know best, and women and racial minorities deferred to that presumption.
Would a high-roller underwrite a well-crafted poll or questionnaire designed to gauge–somehow–the state of masculine, white male America? Would it be too politically incorrect to have a poll question that asks something like: “Just thinking of yourself as a heterosexual, white man, are you better off or worse off than you were five years ago?”
Really**
Generally upper manliness tends to correlate with sexual impulsivity, higher risk to cheating, to commit violent attitudes towards other men and others.
Men tend to be less socially self-controlled than women.
”Lack of impulse control”
Every psychological concept seems very very vague…
Lack of impulse control can be anything, this must to be contextualized.
”Manliness” would be what
men who think only in
beer, sex, war games and football/soccer**
and ”womanliness” would be what
women who think only in
social frivolities, apperance and find a super-mega–man* provider(beta), romantic(omega) and looking-childish attractive-behavior or sexually dominant troglodyte (alpha) **
Does thinking oneself to be masculine make it so? Is there a masculinity test one can take that’ll produce a numerical score? Perhaps the poll really measured the level of modesty and unwillingness to brag on the part of the respondents. The word means different things to different people. If some guy were to tell you that he was at the top of the chart in masculinity wouldn’t your thinking be that you were talking to a delusional egotist?
We have to keep this in perspective.
In the chain of hominids, humans rule because of what I call the “navigator” set of skills. A gorilla is stronger than a human male, has more impressive pectorals, a more “alpha” face i.e. heavier jaw, brow ridges etc., a hairier chest and so forth but this doesn’t make the gorilla an “alpha” male in the human species. A donkey is more “well hung” than a human but this attribute won’t put a man on the moon or make the trains run on time.
And just so, while some races may embody atavistic traits, this does not make them superior humans, but rather, less. Not to say that there is no place for them, only that the traits which some shallow thinkers regard as Alpha are those which we share with animals, not those by which we differentiate ourselves from them.
I take it my reductionist approach will not be considered adequate by either side-
I am physically and, I am forced to presume, genetically male.
Therefore by definition I am 100% masculine. No other answer is possible short of hermaphroditism, which on inspection I do not appear to have. I could go in for another look, but I’m not currently at home alone so decorum is called for.
Therefore all my physical qualities, personality quirks and behavioral traits by definition fall within the male spectrum of possibility and can be considered masculine traits, even if they are also feminine traits available to women. Call them human traits.
I therefore do not understand what these hermaphrodite poll responders are talking about.
Realistically, it’s a balance. It tends to shift toward the ‘people’ people in times of peace for obvious reasons. Thing is, we’re never going to have a real war (the reason I want to avoid a war with Russia at all costs), because everyone knows thanks to nuclear weapons it will be the last one we ever have.
Where do nerds fit in? It’s a lower-status masculine archetype that seems to have significant positive externalities in terms of developing superior technology and so on. Manly men didn’t invent the wheel or penicillin, but women didn’t either.
[Manly men didn’t invent the wheel or penicillin]
Show your work, please.
I saw impulse control mentioned above a couple of times. I may not be the most alpha of men but I’ve known all types and I’ve seen some of the kinds of impulse control failure a man can have.
I’ve also known women.
They may be more socially controlled or controlled in social situations, though I have my doubts outside a pretty narrow set of behaviours. But I refuse to believe that women have better impulse control overall than men.
In one old Star Trek episode the sentient robot Nomad scanned Uhura’s brain. It asked Kirk for clarification why this “unit” was different from other human units. Kirk replied she is a woman. The robot replies “A mass of conflicting impulses”.
Mad Men era mild misogyny aside, I have seen women at all levels of capable professionalism, but I’ve never seen anything to prove Nomad wrong.
Depend on the type of nerd you are talking about. Today we have the geeks for example who tend to be very masculine, social and combative.
Generally, [seems], nerds are very ((cognitively masculine)) and this thinking style tend to reverberate via some and decisive way in its personality types, (predominantly [ INTP ] ones) and similar, what generally happen with all of us, but differently of course because our personal/individual and subgroup specific combinations.
You are talking about alpha, beta, omega ”triarchy”*
If was, typically, knowledgeables tend to say that nerds and specially the typical nerds tend to fit in the beta-conformist type than in others, of course, pure types tend to be problematic, a pure alpha is likely to be a high functioning psychopath, a pure beta is likely to be a sponge bob with more testosterone (provider) and less ass or unsexuality as he does, ;), and a pure omega is likely to be a emo-boy, but this definitions are [not perfect and reasonably arbitrary] because we are talking about many set of aspects that define human and male behavior.
Typical nerds tend to be highly smart, cognitive and analytical ones, very conformist (who have envy about popular alphas and masturbate for popular women, specially during adolescence and based absurdly-anecdotally in 90’s teen movies), not so sexual and social, moderately conservatives, very logical but not completely rational (wise), non-combative, the nice guy that generally is not a homossexual but is not also a extraverted or socially-prone, more pure maths than engineering (abstract than concrete).
summarize,
a proto-asperger.
???
I think he want to say
” alpha men, sociable, extraverted, normie, etc” = manly man.
Interesting and part of a larger picture. For example, both sperm and testosterone levels are supposedly declining in W. Europe. I suspect this is an evolutionary development–strong aggressive males and not especially valuable these days. Actually, they are a problem.
I’m beginning to see more and more young Asian women holding hands with blacks. I’ve been told that young Asians in particular are virtually sexless and if an Asian woman wants vigorous sex, black males are the solution. But they won’t marry them, of course. In Japan and China many young males are not dating, have little interest in sex and thus young women have given up marriage.
All very disturbing.
define masculine and feminine — for specific cultures and social contexts.
any surveys on more fundamental anxieties such as weakness versus strength or character + integrity ???
I’m pretty sceptical of this poll, since many women and most liberal men reject the concepts of masculinity and femininity anyway. You have to be somewhat political incorrect just to recognise the existence of these concepts, yet alone have an objective discussion on gender variance.
It also doesn’t really tally with social science data, for example studies of children show girls are much more like to engage in gender atypical behaviour than boys, yet this study says women are more connected to their femininity than men are to their masculinity. All this study really shows it that men have become more dismissive of masculinity to fit in with liberal political norms, it says little about whether or not men have actually become more feminine.
George Clooney for example, is a raving left-liberal, yet you don’t see him acting anymore feminine than actors from 50 years ago.