Are Young Women Doing OK?

There's a big moral panic about the decline of young men. What about the other side?

The culture war around gender — from what gender is to how genders should behave — has raged forever, but it feels like it got a lot worse and more tedious in the last six or seven years. Everyone has a take (which is a much bigger problem in the modern ecosystem about everything anyway) and now guys like Musk are framing life up as “humanists vs. extinctionists” and stuff like that. It’s a very complicated tapestry that involves:

1. Legacy gender roles and assumptions

2. Declining fertility rates in industrialized countries

3. The existing world vs. the encroaching world

4. How little we support new moms (especially in the USA)

5. The narrative that men are in decline and women are on the rise

As for (5) above, I agree women have probably had a better last two decades than men, collectively. But I also don’t think the conversation needs to be a dichotomy. Ideally, if you believe in the nuclear family concept, what you’d want is a strong woman and a strong man, who complement each other in various ways, to come together and have their preferred number of offspring. You’d also like to see their community support them, good jobs be available in their area, and a general safety net (family or financial) for the tougher times.

It does feel sometimes like the online narrative very much skews towards raising up women and attacking men, which is justified at some level — men can be assholes, absolutely, self included — but is also potentially leading to this whole concept of “now boys are afraid to approach girls.” Did we #MeToo and #GirlBoss a bit too close to the sun?

A while back I wrote about the general decline of masculinity — ah, who the f*ck am I kidding, I’ve written about it 12 times — in an article entitled “So Seriously, Are The Boys All Right?”

Well, now YouTuber Shoe On Head has a good video flipping that script: