Posted on 01/04/2014 4:59:57 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
In my work as an anthropologist, I’ve become convinced that American lifestyles are increasingly diverging between “hyper-achievers” trained early on to succeed, and those often labeled “slackers” whose lives revolve around entertainments of various sorts. You won’t be surprised to learn that a disproportionate percentage of “slackers” are men. Males, particularly in the working class, are working less, earning less, and are increasingly disconnected from families and from society as a whole. The future prospects for many working-class men seem very dim.
In analyzing these trends, many point to the effects of economic restructuring, with its loss of well-paying working-class jobs that resulted in a bifurcation of high-paying jobs for the educated and low-paying jobs for the uneducated. But men are struggling even when well-paying working-class jobs are available, and many have problems just graduating from high school or getting needed technical training. Early on, they fall behind females in school, and they never catch up: women earn a growing majority of college and graduate degrees, as the below chart shows. Some colleges even resort to a type of male affirmative action in order to keep gender proportionality somewhat equal. Women are getting more education, whereas men are not, at a time when it is economically imperative. What is going on?
Dr. Leonard Sax’s Boys Adrift lists video games among the causes of boys’ school struggles, not because they drive boys to violence, but because they create a need for stimulation, crowd out reading, and lessen boys’ focus in school and other activities. (Boys play console games, commonly used for sports and violent games, at four times the rate of girls.) Rates of ADHD have skyrocketed, and the causes of this are unclear, but overstimulation may play a role. These patterns can also lead later in life to heavy television viewing, often of sports (witness the domination ESPN has over the male gaze), and heavy online activity, such as viewing porn.
After we go to school, we need to look at family. One explanation for poor and working-class men’s instability points to the fact that so many were raised with single parents, as economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman report. This has created a vicious cycle contributing to generational poverty, since education lags in these homes and children often fall behind their peers from two-parent families. With low rates of marriage and high rates of divorce among less-educated Americans, men raised by single parents are unlikely to reap the gains of a lasting marriage themselves. “What happens to a lot of guys who become unmoored from family life, they become unmoored from everything…they are just living without attachments and by the time they are 40 or 50 years old, the things that kept these men from falling away—family and community life—are gone,” according to Kathryn Edin.
These unstable family dynamics lead individuals to seek connections and groups where they can fit in, and contemporary society offers a plethora of subcultures that supply this need. In the inner city, gangs are often a family substitute, a way to connect with other males. White working-class males are prone to take on a “southern rebel identity” that rejects middle-class roles and education, career and family. This particular form of masculinity opposes authority, promotes drinking and using drugs, and can be misogynistic, as ethnographer Jason Eastman describes.
The origins of various subgroups can sometimes be found in high school cliques, such as “cowboys,” “skaters,” “burnouts,” “stoners,” or others. They are tied together by common activities, music or other symbols and forms of popular culture. Men also tend to be attracted to more risk-taking activities, whether in leisure or crime, which sociologist Stephen Lyng describes as “edgework.” Once men get criminal records, as many in gangs and other marginal groups do, it’s much harder for them to obtain jobs—which reinforces their place on the edge of society.
All of these things mentioned above—early reliance on stimulating entertainment, lower educational attainment, disconnection from families and role models, and the attractions of different, “edgy” subcultures—contribute to a widening gulf between those more connected to family, work, and society, and those without these commitments. While men are losing connections, women continue to participate in the labor force, attend religious services more often, and belong to other community and civic organizations. This is partly because many have dependent children and need to support them, whereas men can to a large extent avoid this responsibility.
Men who are not committed to families enjoy all the options that a consumer culture gives them, have more independence and freedom, and thus are found in a wider array of subcultural activities that take men away from consistent work and commitment to families. At the same time that non–college-educated men have fewer economic opportunities, they have more opportunities to indulge in various consumerist activities. That’s a recipe for ever-widening gaps between these men and the rest of society.
Absolutely!! I hope he eventually gets the support he needs.
There were a variety of influences upon the Founders, the Iroquois Confederation among them. It’s not entirely wrong to say that there was native influence but it was more of a very basic idea of organizational structure than anything else. Individuals prone to PC proselytizing greatly overstate the reality of the matter, as always when attempting to eradicate the historical import of old, dead white men.
I’d google the Confederation but I’m afraid I’ll have to read more about how James Madison really was a Mohawk. (Sorry, I’m one of the few Americans left who doesn’t think Indian culture is all it’s cracked up to be.)
There were the so-called civilized tribes less prone to savagery with somewhat advanced notions of intertribal organization. The glorified image isn’t really at all about the natives, it’s about discrediting the Founders. I say that having Cherokee ancestry several different ways. Life was different in the frontier south along the Blue Ridge. Indian wives were not uncommon. There were raiding parties and periodic broader outbreak of hostilities but the people largely got along individually, English and European settlers and indian alike. A lot of genetic swamping, really. The smaller tribes were either absorbed into larger ones or slowly were absorbed into the white population by intermarriage.
So few are. Dilbert and Office Space are highly realistic documentaries, not comedies. :)
ping
I’m surprised there’s not more people going berserk at these “just for appearance’s sake” interviews. I’m sure some human resources personnel consider what might happen if their boss starts asking questions when someone’s resume fits the job like a glove and is not interviewed. In my opinion many are practicing age discrimination, you will not even get an interview if you don’t give a chronological resume. Why are companies allowed to ask you when you graduated high school on a job application, get my point. That practice should have ceased years ago.
Shop and home ec classes should definitely be stressed more. My shop teacher was missing one finger, we all were paying close attention. :)
His parents should be proud; working in a craft is nothing to be ashamed of and living a debt free life is ten times better than being a debt ridden pampered academic bureaucrat.
Things changed when we adopted the Victorian idea of being ‘in trade’ as something to be ashamed of. As if working in a defined skill and working with your hands was ‘lower class’ and ‘common’ and go figure, we’ve been nothing but a bunch of pampered spoiled intellectuals since. College used to be for someone with a real talent that could only be nurtured in a university classroom, but now it’s just a place for overgrown kids with no real focus.
In the past, by the time you got to university, you had already figured out what you wanted and who you were and you were ready for four years of real studying and THEN after graduation, making a living. Now university is a requirement, uprooting people from their homes and in Occupy Wall Street, it was a gathering of a bunch of morons from around the country, getting together to throw a collective temper tantrum and desecrate New York.
I’m sick of jobs being determined by how well someone does an interview. If they have the skills and such on the resume, there is no need for an interview at all.
As for Human Resources, I think this sort of thing needs to be retired. Few of them are realistically sending the right people and I don’t know how people with a degree in Women’s Studies is able to get an executive position in a business.
” if those skills are good enough, shouldn’t you be able to attract your own customers?”
Exactly; if someone knows they are hot stuff, why bother trying to impress a potential boss and why not go into business for yourself?
A lot of people looking for jobs are sometimes the type that want to be taken care of. These days the real talented ones are building their own businesses and are just working at setting up their own show.
Indian culture was NOT all hemp and communing with nature. They are after all the ones that conceived and practiced scalping.
Happy New Year! Got proof?
And discovered the wheel! Oh, wait...
I will have to research, but I do know that the working class for reasons beyond me has been held as something to be ashamed of.
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