The demise of Men?

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The Quechua Indians of the Andes Mountains are able to work in copper mines, and farm potatoes, in the high altitudes- partially because they have lungs better adapted to high altitudes than outside races.

But also because they can stave off fatique by chewing the local coca leaves.

But then Columbus discovered america. Then centuries later a nineteenth centurey german chemist isolated cocaine from coca leaves. By the nineteen eighties cocaine was the biggest drug addiction problem and the biggest illegile industry in the world. But even powdered cocaine wasnt good enough. So they distilled cocaine down to crack. Crack was even more addictive than old fashioned powdered cocaine.

So what had been a local herb chewed by locals for thousands of years with effects comparable to a cuppa joe is now a lethally addictive substence the ruins the lives of millions and supports huge drug cartels.

And the sad thing is that it now competes with other substences like XTC and chrystal meth- that dont even have natural sources.

Better living through chemistry!

Just as chemistry is perfecting ever more addictive substences, the IT industry is perfecting every more compelling virtual worlds. So its predictable that computer games would become a new form of literal addiction.

doesnt the mere fact that we are talking about a subset kind of invalidate a collective noun like guys?

the evolution of culture started with language, something that might have taken centuries to really start going but after that the relative culture change is far higher than simply reacting to nature(or conversely one could argue that even today cultural evolution, even at this speed, is a reaction to nature, net result is equal)

because there is a relative absense it doesnt take much to shake that world view, something mirrored in many meetings between what we today see as relatively uncultered(i would argue they arent uncultured, their culture simply has different goals and foster different wants, over time resulting in less immediately visible "culture", the oral culture or tradition can instead be arbitrarily complex and structured )

also people will research the most trivial of things, often for its own sake, one cannot inherently say that because it is researched it is important or significant(in essence without research one wouldnt know)

again as long as we put this into context and realize we are talking about subsets often within subsets there really isnt much more to say, i agree there is an effect, what i dont see is causation nor proper context to any actual real world implications of said in the general population (ie. the average user of porn, video games, movies or social sites(lets face it, it allows for as much instant gratification as any of the others))
i also question the scale implied by the wording used, even places where this is already recognized and treated it is far from a majority that has issues.

and i dont see it as being an issue unless you have a certain personality type or set of circumstances that lends itself to that(as it is with so many other things).

@natural plastic
did the drug cause the want or did the want cause the drug?
through history there have been plenty of cultures using large amounts of quite serious drugs, many ancient as well.
ayahusca can kick the butt of even hardened psychonauts not to speak of salvia.

the point is that we have always used quite heavy drugs, the chemical revolution wasnt the start nor the height of it seen in relation to how much of the popuation uses it.
there were a couple of hundred years where there were opium in almost everything, if the analogy holds the majority should all be doing heroin, yet only a fairly small percentage today uses it compared to (opium)then.

Hey ho, video games completely ruined me.

They are the reason I became a programmer. Now I make all my money off that profession.

boo hoo.

And, masturbation per se was never an issue until Christianity took over the Western World, severely curtailed opportunities for coitus, and monks were trying very, very hard not to masturbate in their cells.

If our primary social goal is to limit coitus to heterosexual married couples who are trying to procreate children, then the obvious solution is to promote masturbation. The pornography producers are actually providing us with an extraordinarily valuable social service.

Fewer teen pregnancies mean more people making it through high school, finding responsible employment, and fewer unwanted children.

And, if the guys can satisfy their urges on their own, they aren't out trying to bone chicks, and the girls can concentrate on their studies with reduced fear of harassment by boys who want to get in their panties.

Hurrah for internet pornographers!

This article is idiotic. A good rebuttal is here. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... ry/257661/

This TED talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grtJlJK7p5A talks about how silly the public were and felt about the dangers of comics back in the days.

It is nice to work out a correlation between that utter sillyness and the fear caused by video games.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/94896326/The-Demise-of-Guys-Why-Boys-Are-Struggling

The data in the article are useful. However, I would suggest a different interpretation.

Back in 1979, the late historian Christopher Lasch wrote a book called, The Culture of Narcissism. The basic premise is that people in Western societies are becoming more self-involved. That has, it seems to me, increased over the last 33 years.

Both women and men are influenced by this culture of narcissism. However, because women are, in many societies, raised to be more "sociable," they are, at least for now, somewhat less narcissistic.

Haven't read the original article yet, and this is surely politically incorrect, but if men in general are "in decline" or "in demise" perhaps one of the things we should look back at is "women's lib." As a male who accepted the idea of women's lib when it became big sometime in the 1970s... part of what I think got lost in that was the sense guys used to have that they were responsible for bringing home the bacon, being the provider. If women are just as capable of doing any job as men, then the other side of that coin is that guys don't have to believe that they're the only ones who can support the family.

Joseph Campbell talked about some of this stuff in his mythology writings, as well... the ways that in, umm, tribal societies, the men have their role and the women have their role... and, yeah, the women probably do more of the work than the men, but the men understand their role and when the time comes for them to step up, they do. And when it comes to stuff like cleaning up the kitchen, writing thank you notes... guys just aren't wired that way.

So, again, I get that this is politically incorrect, but it's kinda based on my own falling apart of the last few years, and I just see so many other guys who get laid off and their wives end up going to work 'cause the guys just can't pull themselves together anymore. So if guys are in decline, maybe it has something to do with the ascendancy of women... not that the ascendancy of women is a bad thing, but it may be one of the factors in the decline of men.