Leonard Pitts Jr.: What is wrong with American men?

[MissMillie]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/leonard-pitts-jr-what-is-wrong-with-american-men/ar-AAZpcW9?li=BBnb7Kz

That said, it is insufficient merely to indict men. Other countries have men -- and for that matter, private gun ownership. Yet they don’t have the random gun violence this country does.

Which suggests the question is not “What’s wrong with men?” but “What’s wrong with American men?” What is it in our culture, in the things we teach them, in the way we socialize them, that so often leaves boys and men with this grotesque sense of entitlement, this ability to decide that because they are having a bad day, because they got their feelings hurt, because life hasn’t gone as they wished, they have a right to whip out a gun and make innocent strangers pay?

**********************************

Well, I suppose we COULD subscribe to Tucker Carlson's theory that what "is wrong with American men" is.... errr.... American women

https://news.yahoo.com/tucker-finds-way-blame-women-025659939.html

[Joinfortmill]

1. Someone needs to sue his ass, or kick it.

[Ray Bruns]

2. Too much soy milk.

[ancianita]

3. From a woman's perspective, war, and all things --money, grooming, domination, toys & tools-- war.

Nope on Carlson, who's only clever by half.
The first war was the gender war, where 'genital' difference couldn't be merely lived with peacefully, but had to drive sexual dominance. From that came patriarchy and all its power systems, over time, which includes the flawed definition of manhood, which it's taken millennia for men to even grok.

This is my well read, decades long held, feminist opinion.

I can 'discuss' but I'm not gonna argue here. You asked, I offered an answer.

Also, I love Leonard Pitts.

[Orrex]

4. :thumbsup:

[Wahyee]

5. +1

[MissMillie]

8. Oh, I'm w/ you on all of that.

And of course, I could never be serious about subscribing to anything Carlson says.

Not to take away from your point, the thing that came to mind for me was how conservatives LOVE to tout "personal responsibility," but always go looking for a scapegoat to defend their bad behavior (or in this case, the behavior of the white male--representing their patriarchal "power&quot .

[Hugh_Lebowski]

12. "Patriarchal Society" existed long before Human's existed

Look at our closest relatives, the Chimpanzee.

Females aren't free in Chimpanzee society. The dominant males rule. Females are sexually 'possessed' by the Alpha male, and all the younger offspring in their social units are his.

I'm not saying humans can't overcome this. We have, in some ways at least, despite recent setbacks.

We also have a lot of Bonono Ape genes, and that's a society where the females mostly have the power, and that's in no small part because they're all (female and male both) so promiscuous that the males don't even know which 'children' running around ... are theirs. This creates a very different social dynamic from the Chimps. They're much more peaceable, groups don't war with neighboring groups, males don't murder babies of other males, etc. And everybody takes care of all the kids in the group. Incidentally, Bonobo's tend much more vegetarian than their chimp cousins.

Point is, none of this 'gender war' stuff is remotely 'new' to homo sapiens, it's part of our evolutionary heritage, and to me it's off-base to not start with that understanding. Patriarchy is not just some crappy thing human males came up with purely cause they're shitty. It's a species survival strategy that does 'work' in the natural world.

But there are others that work as well. I lean strongly towards the Bonobo way

[ancianita]

13. There is the evolutionary component.

War in nature, however, is survival competition, and yes, evolutionary heritage. Also part of nature's heritage are hunting, raping as sex, eating or killing one's mate or one's young.

There is no pre-patriarchal system to war in nature.

War was the human male's decision to not live with mere genital equality of difference. Not to live with equality of different powers.
War was the human male's decision to win-lose over difference -- might makes right in order to "own" all that came from winning -- control of women, children, inventions, food -- to force human females to 'take the deal' on pain of death. That decision was the start of human patriarchy. Females who fought the deal were killed off. The other females who internalized that trauma passed it on to their children.

Bonobo are not a model for human civilization, though they don't kill their own and have adaptive strengths.

On a lighter note, I love Bonobo. This is one example he gives of the panic of realizing the deal.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

14. Ever read about this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

During the four-year conflict, all males of the Kahama community were killed, effectively disbanding the community. The victorious Kasakela then expanded into further territory but were later repelled by another community of chimpanzees.
[snip]
Of the females from Kahama, one was killed, two went missing, and three were beaten and kidnapped by the Kasakela males.[12] The Kasakela then succeeded in taking over the Kahama's former territory.

Neither war, nor patriarchy/subjugation of females is unique to the human species. While I'm not saying that 'makes it okay' ... it's think it's handy to understand where these tendencies came from. Damn near everything about human behavior has close parallels with our primate cousins. We are very similar to them, just with bigger brains and most importantly, a much stronger ability to communicate with one another.

And there's been times in the history of humanity where wars were fought for survival. Resources run out in one place, group of humans there then tries to take over another place with existing humans because if they didn't, they'd starve or have no water or the like.

Interestingly this chimp war sounds like was basically fought over secession. Much like the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

[ancianita]

16. No. Know why? Chimpanzees never told Goodall or other anthropologists how long they'd

been at war, or why they warred. Have chimpanzees articulated their wars as essential to their natures? No. Only humans can study and write about it.

I also didn't read the article the way you did. The chimp wars were over scarcity of fertile females and territory. Goodall was accused of "anthropomorphic" bias; then later male anthropologists gathered consensus to not only refute her claims that human presence can influence chimp communities; but to have a "final word" that chimpanzees are more inherently predatory and violent.

Thanks for the read, though. Well and good, and beside my point. Claiming "it's complicated" in reference to my answer to MissMillie doesn't try to answer the OP, but serves to derail the thread.

So here is my final response to your offering.

One doesn't have to be an anthropologist to know that chimpanzee wars are fought by instinct.

Your offering of a chimp parallel might be "handy" as a way for men to "understand" their brothers in the war against women over millennia; it might be interpreted to even imply that humans haven't evolved from chimp instincts that much. Duly noted.

Human wars are fought by interests and by design. That's why there have been war colleges. Particularly in America, as only one breakdown of my answer to Pitts.
In another breakdown I could draw a correlation between men and war in the histories listed below.

Humans can read enough of their history to know that chronicles by "winners" are far more HIStory than what other modern historians have learned. And so humans learn more about the human causes and agents of war that no warring animal would ever dream of. Men know the most about war for reasons far beyond instinct.

From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World (2008) in four volumes:

-- From Eve to Dawn, A History of the Women in the World, Volume I: Origins: From Prehistory to the First Millennium. Foreword by Margaret Atwood. The Feminist Press at CUNY. April 1, 2008. ISBN 978-1558615656.
-- From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World, Volume II: The Masculine Mystique: From Feudalism to the French Revolution. Foreword by Margaret Atwood. The Feminist Press at CUNY. April 1, 2008. ISBN 978-1558615670.
-- From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World, Volume III: Infernos and Paradises, The Triumph of Capitalism in the 19th Century. Foreword by Margaret Atwood. April 1, 2008. ISBN 978-1558615830.
-- From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World, Volume IV: Revolutions and Struggles for Justice in the 20th Century. Foreword by Margaret Atwood. The Feminist Press at CUNY. April 1, 2008. ISBN 978-1558615847.

The War Against Women. Summit Books. 1992

[DownriverDem]

6. Maybe it goes back

to the 1970s when men started to lose out to women and minorities when it came to job opportunities. I've heard that from men who lost out on jobs back then. Young men of today seem lost and lacking in goals related to job opportunities. Where I live (Michigan) there are plenty of opportunities in the trades. You learn and get paid at the same time. The anger is real, but opportunities are real.

[MissMillie]

10. Yeah, there's grievances to be sure...

Cheap goods being imported instead of manufactured here, corporate greed, higher education is less affordable and so is health care.

And there are plenty of RW pundits to tell the white man that their life is horrible because of women, immigrants and people of color.

(Oh yeah, and we're not allowed to teach history in schools anymore, so the narrative is driven by the Tucker Carlson et al--and conservative men will watch and buy into it, because it's easier to find a scapegoat than it is to come up with solutions.)

But hell... women just lost autonomy over their own bodies. How many do you think will be headed to the local Wal-Mart, church, or town parade with an AR-15 to kill innocent people?

[Upthevibe]

7. A friend of mine and I have this conversation quite

often.

We talk about how women are more inclined to discuss, come to a compromise, consensus, etc.

Does it start with the Testosterone and then takes off from there?

I don't know. And, what's the percentage of mass shooters that are white males:

"Of the 172 individuals who engaged in public mass shootings covered in the database, 97.7% were male. Ages ranged from 11 to 70, with a mean age of 34.1. Those shooting were 52.3% White, 20.9% Black, 8.1% Latino, 6.4% Asian, 4.2% Middle Eastern, and 1.8% Native American." See link below:

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/public-mass-shootings-database-amasses-details-half-century-us-mass-shootings Feb 3, 2022, National Institute of Justice

[Diamond_Dog]

9. IDK about other countries

But men in America seem to take concepts like compassion, education, equality, compromise, discussion, teamwork, community, etc. as weak. And God forbid any American male be seen as weak. It’s like that’s the biggest insult you can give them.

[Jade Fox]

11. And they would literally rather kill themselves than be seen as weak....

An article I read (that I will try to post) about suicide among white men contained the shocking statistic that 70% of suicides in this country are white men, mostly killing themselves with their own guns.

[lambchopp59]

15. "Rugged individualist cowboy"

My father was so obsessed with self-reliance he betrayed his own denial of dependence to an embarrassing extent. Pointing out "no man is an island" to him elicited physical violence.
"Toxic male" exemplified, he passed away obsessed with Fox News pundits and angry at the whole world.
He was the violent toxicity I ran away from at 16, only to return 4 decades later to have him painstakingly committed to a lock down nursing home to stop my mother's physical abuse.
All his kids dealt with long term, brain-scrambling, complex PTSD.
We are now aged and Omegan, there will be no more of our family line.
I suspect many citizens, especially in undereducated rural areas experience similar upbringing, and can be prone to lashing out nonsensically.
A polluted, stinking, hazardously accessed yet very incognito freeway bridge in 1970's San Francisco was a more peaceful refuge to me than home.