Nike's End of Men

&gt; All that striving for greatness is indivisible from the selfish need to inflict cruelty on your dominated foe. Take away the latter and there is no sports. It’s just exercise.<p>I cannot empathise with someone that has this mindset.<p>It seems like the author thinks that all masculinity is toxic - or, at least, that it&#x27;s called &quot;toxic&quot; by progressives or whatever - and I would strongly disagree with this. When people use the phrase &quot;toxic masculinity&quot;, they don&#x27;t mean &quot;masculinity (which is toxic, by the way)&quot;: they mean &quot; the parts of masculinity that are toxic&quot;.<p>There&#x27;s also a whole paragraph dedicated to saying that women aren&#x27;t at the peak of sports excellence, and shouldn&#x27;t be covered by Nike&#x27;s clothing range. I don&#x27;t think the author has watched any women&#x27;s sports games before writing this piece.<p>I have plenty more issues with this writing, but I&#x27;m gonna stop here because I feel like I might be falling for a rage-bait article.

Whilst I dont nessecarily disagree with the authors points, and they make some good ones, they seem to forget that historically, masculinaty wasn&#x27;t about &quot;humiliating your enemy&quot;, in fact that would be seen as poor form and unsportsman like. Obviously that differs from sport to sport and culture to culture, and some sports even maintain that (particularly some of the more aggressive sports oddly enough, like rugby). Sports haven&#x27;t changed from aggressive to soft, they&#x27;ve changed from polite to aggressive to soft, and probably took another form before they were polite.<p>So yeh, I think he makes some good points, but as always, its a bit more complicated than that

the article is meandering. On the one hand these new &#x27;woke-ads&#x27; are annoying, but to claim that the &#x27;end of men&#x27; is the end of Nike as a brand is hyperbolic or even wrong.<p>Instead of pulling up nike ad after nike ad, comparison to two other industries might have made sense. Drinking and smoking. Like Nike shoes they have something in common, namely being historical male vices and once being advertised by cowboys and other virile heroes.<p>However many cigarette companies as well as alcohol producers have very successfully switched to targeting women, or sometimes I guess, with questionable ethics, teenagers.<p>This honestly reads a lot like a male anxiety type post, no accident that the NBA and China make an appearance because aside from feminism the middle kingdom is another source of status fears these days for American men seemingly.

These comments and whoever flagged this article seem to be so focused on getting offended at the tone that they missed the thesis and why this article is appropriate for HN:<p>&gt; The idea is that a company, as its aims grow more expansive, starts catering less to the locked-in core customer and more to a potential whale which demonstrates some interest. Sure, you can just keep doing what’s made you rich, but how can you even focus on your primary business with that whale out there, swimming so tantalizingly close?

&gt; So yes, masculinity is toxic<p>If all you can make of it is toxicity, then perhaps you should start looking for the problem inwards.<p>&gt; Michael Jordan was a hypercompetitive alpha male asshole who viciously humiliated not just his opponents, but his teammates as well.<p>He&#x27;s a champion and did what needed to be done to elevate the team up to that standard, and keep it there. I&#x27;m sure he&#x27;d have bought them a &quot;Snickers&quot; if that worked better.

I think the arguments are okay and the story is fun if you don&#x27;t get sucked in to the obvious provocation. I don&#x27;t necessarily agree with him but at least he expresses a decently well formed thought.

When it comes to the business of athletics, nobody seems to acknowledge the fact that men’s leagues have a decades-long head-start when it comes to marketing and brand-building (as well as a centuries-long head-start when it comes to power in many cultures).<p>If women’s sport was the “default” today, imagine the uphill climb men would face.<p>If a company is thinking long-term, investing in women’s sports today is an absolute no-brainer. There’s an essentially untapped audience of billions of people. It might take a few decades to reap the rewards (and in the meantime, you get the side benefit of being socially conscious today), but the results are there for the taking.

I keep wondering what Nikes Chinese TV adds look like

&gt; It wouldn’t shock you to learn that Carlos hated the new Nike ads I texted to him. His exact words were, “I don’t want fucking activism from a sweatshop monopoly.”<p>As somebody who grew up in Oregon, this is precisely it. I don&#x27;t just want Nike to change its outward branding; I want Nike to stop advertising. I don&#x27;t just want friendlier campus life for women; I want Nike to stop employing. I don&#x27;t just want Nike to move its sweatshops from one country to another; I want Nike to stop enslaving.<p>Nike should stop existing. Anything less is neoliberal simpering.