G'day Nicholas,
Thank you for this refreshing, well written article.

I appreciate your style and your encouragement (and challenge!) for men.

Regards,

Pete

>men need discipline, persistence, order and dependability<
Well young men who may well have none of the above, may find they gain/develop all of it from a (perhaps even enforced) period of military service.
And then add/get the needed empathy through humanity missions.
Like being first in after a natural disaster, and taking care of disaster victims and their needs.
And there's nothing more heart wrenching than to see an emaciated mum trying to suckle a skin and bone infant on a bone dry nipple!
Try looking into eyes that have lost everything except hope; (bless you and or, thank God you're here) and then try to deny your emotions or natural human empathy!
In the words of a song and a father's advice; "one doesn't have to fight to be a man"!
Just putting the needs of others first for awhile,(even if that also means emptying the wallet a few times during your life/going without a beer for a few weeks) will do nicely!
Rhrosty.

Thanks for the good, positive piece Nick. I think you hit the nail on the head with your focus on community.

The past few decades have seen the community in most Western countries become fragmented and the functional roles filled by organised corporate entities of various kinds. The family has lost its place as the fundamental social organisational unit, replaced by a rigidified set of overlapping structural elements that have emerged from the inexorable rise of managerial culture. At the same time, a rhetoric of self-determination has become prevalent, which has lead to the rise of a kind of tribalism based not on mutuality of need, but on need of mutuality. Self-esteem has become an abstraction that justifies an abstract emotionality as the primary driver of sociality. You can do whatever you want (as long as there is a social structure that enables and justifies it) and I must never do anything that might cause you to feel (not think, but feel) bad about that choice.

What has been lost is the recognition that self-esteem, the regard of others and happiness generally are not gifts or elephant stamps awarded by teacher for having neatly tied shoelaces, but require effort to earn and the value of any of them is directly proportional both to what effort is put in and even more importantly, why.

This applies to men and it also applies to women. My only criticism of your piece is that in focussing on the negative impacts on men you are to some extent perpetuating those aspects of ideological/political/cultural tribalism that you correctly point out has created dysfunction.

Men and women are both poorly served by the present model. We're in this together and the sooner we start acting that way, the better.

What we need to do is close the humanities departments of all universities, plaster over the navels of all folk like Nick, so they can't sit around all day cogitating on the damn things, trying to dream up new problems for them to solve.

If we had less people like Nick making up problems, then telling other people they had these problems, there would be a lot less people believing they have problems.

So Nick, please stop dreaming up problems to label people with. We did just fine for thousands of years, without specialists to tell us we were sick, & we will do just fine without you dreaming up new ways for us to be sick.

'As an example, when I asked friends and colleagues what percentage of men they thought were the perpetrators of child abuse, the answers were in the 80-90% range. New data from the United States shows only 45% of child abuse perpetrators were men.'

Here we go again ... still. I've seen this little statistical sleight-of-hand so many times now.

This 'statistic' is arrived at by lumping neglect in with abuse, which are really separate issues with very different motivations. As women are still expected to be the primary carer of children, they spend an overwhelmingly longer period of time with children than do men. Consequently, they feature significantly higher in the 'neglect' statistics (70-90%, according to most surveys). However, women still feature very low in the 'abuse' statistics, especially after factoring in the huge gender imbalance of time spent with children.

This of course severely distorts the overall 'abuse' figures, to make it look as if women are much more violent towards children than men are - when in reality, the opposite is the case.

That's not to say that neglect is not a serious issue - of course it is - but it does not constitute proactively violent abuse. Quote the neglect/abuse statistics by all means, but don't manipulate them to downplay male violence, which is still the number one global problem that negatively affects all men, women and children everywhere.

And the tribalism continues.