Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing That’s Most Worth Having
Boys Get Everything, Except the Thing That’s Most Worth Having
Modern boyhood is an apprenticeship in loneliness.
Gift article, no paywall
I hope folks can start getting the help they need. Feeling lonely every day leads to suicidal ideation, that leads to suicide. If there's one thing I wish men were worse at it's that but if suicide was a professional sport women wouldn't even make the team.
I don't see it happening. I've been in this boat for like twenty years. I don't have anyone who visits or hangs out with me. I only see my coworkers on the work floor, which is 1-2 days a week tops. Also, no one I know considers it an issue worth debating, let alone take action over. "Let them sort their own issues out".
If I want to get drunk with strangers, that's always an option, but it doesn't really interest me so I pass.
There's hope yet! Women are getting better at the sport every day!
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
He spent the vast majority of his free time online — playing video games, watching porn and hanging out on Discord, the heavily male-skewed communication platform, where users gather in communities devoted to topics ranging from the innocuously nerdy to the utterly horrifying.
I have spent the last few years talking to boys as research for my new book, as well as raising my own three sons, and I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness.
They have lived their whole adolescence not just in the digital era, with a glorious array of virtual options to avoid the angst of real-world socializing, but also in the shadow of a wider cultural reckoning around toxic masculinity.
For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized.
The extreme misogyny, the gleeful hate speech, the violent threats and thrum of menace make it hard to summon much sympathy for male concerns, and easy to forget the ways that patriarchy harms them, too.
The prescription for creating a generation of healthier, more socially and emotionally competent men is the same in the wider political discourse as it is in our own homes — to approach boys generously rather than punitively.
The original article contains 1,452 words, the summary contains 233 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I have spent the last few years talking to boys as research for my new book, as well as raising my own three sons, and I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness.
maybe even we don't know, when you live every day lonely you stop caring about it
For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized.
AutoTLDR bot managed to capture the very essence of this piece. All you need to know is in here. A two-pronged assault on masculinity with no obvious (non-toxic) way out.
I'm so relieved to have gone through adolescence before the age of social media. It was an extremely difficult part of life (for all of us, some more than others) already. I can't imagine how completely terrible it must be now.