“It's not peaches and cream either for men”

Society sees the success of outlier men and concludes that men overall have the better of the lives.<p>The truth is that the majority of males in nature and in society, on average, has a worse lives because the dynamic of being a male causes a feast for a few and a famine for most.<p>Genetics gambles more with males than females because males can produce, rarely, a very large genetic return that females can&#x27;t. This is easily explained by the rate limit of children for females but not for males.<p>This shows up in intelligence, strength, genetic disorders, etc. Male genetics are just more varied.<p>The average of mens lives, by rule, will therefore be worse for most and great for a few.<p>I know this is a sensitive subject but it would be nice to have a real conversation about it.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of evidence that males are, on average, the more miserable of the sexes but their misery is ugly and ignored. They die sooner by suicide and drug overdose. They have less friends, and are more depressed. There&#x27;s a lot of reasons for this but I believe genetics is at the core.<p>Society could help here by recognizing this and trying to push against it - promoting a more social man, for example. But the predisposition is here to stay.<p>Individually, I&#x27;d say being more compassionate and outgoing to those creepy&#x2F;ugly&#x2F;weird males is something we all should think to do. Society seems to give us a pass at being not nice to these guys. I certainly don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s right though I admit guilt at times here.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Variability_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Variability_hypothesis</a>

I have a friend who is preparing himself for divorce and he is terrified of what may happen.<p>As I tried to counsel him a bit to help him down from the worry ladder, I thought to myself how scary it is that even despite our current point in history, divorce has rarely if ever worked well for men, and most of what I say to console him is likely meaningless comfort.<p>With all the problems in the world, worry is what kills the most of us. I manage it by only focusing on what I can control and by staying out of the spotlight of scrutiny and shame as a man myself. It&#x27;s probably also the reason why I&#x27;ve chosen to not get married unfortunately as well to this day.

&gt; there was a space and place you could talk about your feelings. In the last, you know, 10 years or so [post-transition] I can’t find those spaces necessarily for men, and I don’t know if men necessarily make those spaces for each other.<p>I know that I am not interested in those kinds of spaces. I do not know if this is genetic&#x2F;nature or cultural&#x2F;nurture. Either way, I have zero interest in creating or participating in such spaces. I don&#x27;t know of any man in my family, friend, coworker, or acquaintance circles who would be interested either.<p>But, I keep seeing these messages that there is something wrong with me for not wanting to create or participate in these types of things.

While I agree with most of the suggestions in the article: support racial justice, have better support systems for men, denounce and resist the tough masculinity expectations, etc.<p>I also can&#x27;t help myself but point out that it is very bad to extrapolate from a sample of outliers.<p>There might be some lessons to learn from the experience of a few transgender men, but I&#x27;m not sure they speak towards the experience of cis gendered men or women, they most likely speak more towards the experience of transgender men.

&gt; &quot;What continues to strike me is the significant reduction in friendliness and kindness now extended to me in public spaces. It now feels as though I am on my own: No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being.&quot;<p>That hits close. That&#x27;s how I have felt my entire life, and when I expressed anything else as a child I got &quot;be a man&quot;. Now that I&#x27;m a an adult about to early retire, I&#x27;m thankful for that capacity to bear down and focus, but given my gout I wonder at what cost.

Imagine someone mutilating your junk at birth and nobody taking offense or seriously believing that’s wrong, downplaying and mocking your concerns of autonomy.<p>…Welcome to earth little man, it’s only going to get worse from here.

It&#x27;s true that certain things are tougher on men than women. Obviously the reverse is true to a larger extent.<p>However, I think &quot;traditional masculinity&quot; is mostly positive. Men are taught to deal with their problems on a personal level, suck it up, not blame external factors, and so on. Being tough is a good thing. No man is an island, but everyone (man and woman) should strive to be a promontory. Blaming society or culture or your parents or the world or God is usually not useful, even if it&#x27;s true.<p>For these reasons, I find it a little disturbing when people start talking about &quot;support systems for men&quot; or when men are pushed to &quot;be vulnerable and talk about our feelings&quot;. We have to thread a needle here: we should help people who cannot make it on their own but we also need to acculturate people to take responsibility for their lives, for their choices, for mistakes and failures. It&#x27;s very hard to help people who struggle without making them weaker. One way it may be possible is for parents (and society) to be hard on kids while they&#x27;re young but gradually ease up on them as they age. Being tough on a 5 year old is likely to help him. Being tough on a 30 year old who has mostly finished developing may just be cruel.

I have not read this, but I really like the philosopher David Benatar. A book he wrote <i>The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys</i> may be interesting.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;B007VJU7C4&#x2F;ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;B007VJU7C4&#x2F;ref=dbs_a_def_r...</a><p>I like his book &quot;Better Never to Have Been&quot;

From the perspective of a straight white man who constantly deals with severe mental health issues, I don&#x27;t want some kind of space or forum to have my issues heard.<p>I recognise that my thought process that leads me to conclude that probably falls into the category of &quot;toxic masculinity&quot;, but my issues are my own, and, regardless of whether or not I am in a &quot;space&quot; that allows for me to share my feelings, I personally feel that offloading your issues onto people who aren&#x27;t trained professionals is selfish and can be harmful.<p>From my perspective, what men need is to be able to destigmatize seeking professional help for mental issues.

When I think of spaces for men I think of my lounge, not some community centre club. I think of having a bonfire with friends. That is what I think of when I hear &quot;a space and place&quot;.<p>Weirdly I guess it isn&#x27;t about the space or the place. For me it is about listening, showing interest, talking a little less, not judging, and not avoiding awkwardness with jokes.<p>It is easy to make these spaces, you don&#x27;t even need to find a space. Just listen.

&gt; there was a space and place you could talk about your feelings. In the last, you know, 10 years or so [post-transition] I can’t find those spaces necessarily for men, and I don’t know if men necessarily make those spaces for each other.<p>We do, we just don&#x27;t put labels on it, it&#x27;s informal, usually unscheduled and happens in various context and settings. You&#x27;re out doing X and topic Y comes up. I personally don&#x27;t like the topic of safe-spaces because no space is truly safe when you discuss actual dark or contrarian thoughts.

As a brown immigrant man, most of the sublte form of racisms I face come from previleged white women. My hypothesis is unchecked narrative of victimization is enabling racism. Most of these women don&#x27;t probably think they are doing anything wrong to begin with since it&#x27;s women empowerment.

I&#x27;m not really convinced by the content of the article but I&#x27;m not sure that I could provide useful or constructive criticism about that, so I&#x27;ll leave that part out and focus on sharing something that helped me recently.<p>I&#x27;ve always tried to be reliable and here for people around me, but had a very hard time talking about my problems. I thought that in a way I was doing a favor to these people by &quot;giving&quot; and not &quot;taking&quot;. It turns out that it wasn&#x27;t true, and that you need a level of reciprocity for a healthy relationship. These days I try to open more to my friends about my problems and struggles, and I feel better thanks to that.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I have useful advice on how to meet new people though. This is a part I&#x27;ll try to explore a bit more in the coming years.

I’m surprised there wasn’t any suggestions of positive mens spaces in the OP, nor in the comments. I’d be really interested in participating in more approachable and considerate male spaces. Does anyone have some they can share?<p>For those interested in a pro-mens issues space, I spend some time on r&#x2F;menslib subreddit on Reddit [0]. It’s specifically focused on mens issues, but in a way that actively affirms specific movements like feminism, racial equality, and lgbtq progress.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;menslib" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;menslib</a>

Isn&#x27;t one of the basic insights of feminism that patriarchy is bad for men, too?

&gt; Some of that is on men who are already creating communities, for example by adopting the right community rules to ban toxicity and allowing (respectful) discussion of topics like mental health. Often, communities for men are taken over by trolls shifting the conversation to blaming women, instead of focusing on the problems men face in an overly gendered society.<p>This is the biggest barrier to getting men&#x27;s issue into the broader public discourse. It is frustratingly difficult to gain any traction and form communities for men&#x27;s issues because men&#x27;s rights appropriating misogynists use them as lightning rods organize and &quot;legitimize&quot; their crude hatred of women. Feminism has the same problem but managed to reach critical mass in large part by leveraging academia as a way to organize, raise the quality of the discourse and distribute it. It&#x27;s fundamentally an education and exclusion problem. You need the history and literature to be taught and known by a large body of people so the movement can identify and shake off the nutjobs.

i&#x27;ve often thought that a lot of racial disharmony could be resolved if we could try on each other&#x27;s skins for a minute. i suppose this is the closest we have to such a thing.<p>maybe the vr metaverse will be useful after all?

Full agree.<p>Having strict gender definitions isn’t good for anyone. I’m looking forward to people getting to be people, both emotionally supported and taken seriously at work.

I loved the article linked, and I want to read more about trans folks (both directions) and how they saw differences in their lives, personally. Beyond that, I find it very hard to live life as a man (I can&#x27;t compare to a woman&#x27;s life, so I won&#x27;t say theirs is harder or easier on average compared to mine) and I have been a man since birth.<p>NOTE: I&#x27;m not looking for troll comments in replies (or for folks to try and rope me into some toxic anti-something culture&#x2F;group). I understand this is a sticky subject, so please take the most-positive interpretation of my words below, as I am not a good writer or speaker.<p>When I recently discovered, at mid-life, that I could have been a stay at home dad, I was amazed that I went through my whole life striving for a career when all I really want is to take care of my home and kids, and have someone else make the money and do the career stuff. It never even occurred to me that I could choose to do the &quot;woman&#x27;s work&quot; as a full-time homemaker, and find a partner that had a career. Now, I am stuck being the career person for at least another 5 or 10 years (while my wife tries to build a career, which she prefers over home-making) and I have to go through daily crap that I hate, rather than spending all my time with my son and maybe other kids I could have had. I&#x27;m just lucky my wife enjoys working and wants to build a career to support our family.<p>When I got married, my wife didn&#x27;t want to change her name (for various reasons that are extremely valid) and I didn&#x27;t mind that. However, I wanted to have the same name as my possible future kids because it&#x27;s hard to do things like pick them up after school. So, I changed my name to my wife&#x27;s last name. Lucky for me, the state that I resided in and the state that I was married in were both of the 9 out of 50 (at the time, not sure today) which allowed a man to take the last name of his wife when married (again, I am not sure about same-sex marriages so I can&#x27;t comment). If not, I would have had to spend thousands and months of my time to change my name. Interestingly, I also had several people comment straight to my face (or behind my back, which I heard about) that me changing my name wasn&#x27;t what a man did, it wasn&#x27;t manly, etc.<p>The biggest issue: I also have trouble finding my own spaces where I can be supported, not even just with other men. Sure, traditionally men gathered in pubs or lodges and they could talk about men&#x27;s issues, and perhaps those still exist today. However, there is no club or place for a guy like me, who is not into sports or anything, and where I would rather talk about my problems and how to solve them without blaming women, getting crass about sex and women&#x27;s bodies, or talking about the things I enjoy. Sure, I can go to a game store and talk to folks about my hobbies, or I can discuss things here on HN about tech, but that&#x27;s not my everyday life. Also, I found that after 10 years with various &quot;professionals&quot;, that a therapist is NOT a replacement for friends and an open environment. I want to discuss my issues with stress and anxiety, I want to discuss my marriage issues, and I want to talk about my hobbies with men who won&#x27;t tell me to divorce my wife, get a girlfriend on the side, or tell me to &quot;suck it up&quot;. I basically want to be accepted much like women seem to accept each other, and will just listen to each other even if they don&#x27;t understand or don&#x27;t care about some topic. I have tried to make friends with women in groups, but they are always thinking I have ulterior motives, and I don&#x27;t disagree with their pattern-matching in that area because many men do have ulterior motives for befriending women. When I was in college, one of my favorite things to do was go into the dorm room next door with the 3 women who lived there, and I would sit and talk to them about various topics, I don&#x27;t even remember what. I never thought about sex or relationships with them, I just enjoyed time with them as friends. After a while, other men in the dorms would tell me I should stop hanging out with them, because I would turn into a woman, or they would say &quot;so and so is such a BITCH, why are you in there all the time? are you fucking them?&quot; In any case, I stopped going in there, through social pressure, and to this day I regret caving to that pressure.<p>Anyways, this was just on my lunch break, so I have to go work, but I have this empty hole inside myself that needs a social connection where I can talk and not be judged, and where I also don&#x27;t get that toxic social negativity about blaming some other group for my problems. Women, feminists, liberals, etc. are all blamed for the problems I face, but I don&#x27;t see anything in their platforms that say, &quot;We&#x27;re out to get &#x27;ok_dad&#x27; and everyone should make his life harder in subtle ways&quot;. I just want to be me, and be accepted for it, and for people not to ascribe my anger&#x2F;stress&#x2F;anxiety as some nebulous factor of my personality only due to being a man or being some ethnicity or class or whatever.<p>AGAIN: I do not want to get into a fight over this, here on HN or anywhere else, so please don&#x27;t try to pivot my words into hating some other group or try to blame my ills on another group or person; my problems are my own and the ones that are structural in society are due to the weird things that happen when different groups interact, not because some group is trying to make my life, or men&#x27;s lives, harder.