Being a Man in the 21st Century (Part 1)
Manhood is changing. It's every bit elementary, and as complicated, as that.
Two recent events prompted me to write nearly manhood today. The showtime was the release of The Shriver Written report, a report of the status of women in the United States. The second was the publication of The Art of Manliness, a book of advice on manhood based on the popular blog of the same name.
The Shriver Study'due south nearly stunning finding is that women now make upwardly one-half of the American workforce, and are the main breadwinner or co-breadwinner in ii/iii of American families. While I think the report goes likewise far in calling u.s. "a woman'due south nation" – for one affair, women nonetheless earn much less, both in terms of boilerplate almanac income and lifetime income, than men – it does highlight a pregnant modify in American culture. People my age and lower will near likely never know a workplace in which men and women don't figure at least equally.
The Art of Manliness is one sign of this alter. While I haven't read the book yet, I've been following the blog since its inception, and to boil information technology down to its essence: men are non quite sure how to exist anymore.
Masculinity has been constructed over the last century almost entirely around the idea of men as providers and protectors, and frankly, women don't need that any more than. Already in at to the lowest degree a dozen major metropolitan areas, women earn on average more than than men. Women are waiting longer to get married, and are more often the initiators of divorce – with their ain incomes, they can beget to be pickier about their spouses, both going into marriage and when deciding whether to proceed their relationships.
This has all happened in the context of larger social changes that have eliminated a great many jobs that were traditionally the sole province of men – the manufacturing and heavy labor jobs that relied on a powerful physique and a kind of working course swagger, most of which have been either automated or off-shored. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, a new noesis economy has sprung up, privileging communication, inventiveness, and self-motivation over brawn and emotional control. While at that place's no inherent reason why women should do ameliorate in these emerging businesses than men, the fact is that men take largely given over the field while wasting time twiddling our thumbs over the loss of jobs where "men could exist men".
What do I mean? Well, women at present make upwards the bulk of college and grad school students, even in many areas in science and technology traditionally considered to exist men'southward domains. Boys nearly never read – only some i out of 5 young developed books are read by boys, who take determined that reading books is for sissies. Boys are more than likely to drib out of high school (35% of boys vs 28% of girls in 2003).
Basically, instead of learning how to be men in a irresolute world, we've been boys, dragged kick and screaming into a earth where women are increasingly equal players. Waaahhhh!
Emphasis on "kicking" – instead of figuring out how to do this new matter, we've focused nearly of our energy on simply emphasizing the characteristics that traditionally defined masculinity, namely toughness and physical brawn. Even our toys have been affected! For example, beneath are two pictures of Luke Skywalker dolls. On the left is the Luke that I had when I was a boy, right afterwards the first movie came out. On the right is a more than contempo version of the same character.
As you can see, the farm male child from Tattooine has been working out quite a scrap since his debut in 1977! The same bulking up tin be seen in almost all figures aimed at boys – they've get more muscular, conveying a greater impression of raw physical ability.
This wouldn't be especially remarkable if not for the fact that physical power is less and less needed in our lodge – fifty-fifty in the military. These toys embody ideals that are increasingly disconnected with the reality that we live in, a kind of ironic nostalgia for a fourth dimension when "men were men". (Ironic because, when we wait back at those men, they were quite a bit softer and less physically imposing than we think!)
In the cease, the exaggerated accent on toughness and physical strength are misleading – and besides creating a great deal of violence in our club, they are preventing united states of america from thinking in constructive means about the kind of men we could be in today's world. And that's too bad, considering the changes we're living in are largely positive – men are, or could be, much more connected with their families and their partners, women are getting the opportunity to develop identities that aren't solely defined by motherhood, and the workforce is getting a much larger puddle of people to describe talent from. Win-win-win!
I'll be back later in the week with a follow-up to this post describing some of the ways I retrieve men can more than productively engage the society we alive in – without sacrificing some core sense of our identities as men. But before I practice that, I wanted to get a sense of what yous see as masculine in the new century. Men, how is your life different from your fathers'? Women, what do you want and await from the men in your lives? Permit's get a discussion going!
Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/being-a-man-in-the-21st-century-part-1.html
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