Thinking Ape - 21st Century Man Down

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I've been listening to him for quite a while, this is a little over an hour and a half but it's a keeper.

It seems like you could draw a venn diagram of issues where you have issues that can simply be called 'human issues' - they can sometimes get misplaced as mens or womens issues because each gender (leaving aside intersex just for the sake of dealing with this dynamic) experiences life only as what they are, much like these can indeed be confused with race issues, and then there are issues that - by the mechanics and balances of how society works - hit each gender in their own way. The later can be emergent from anatomy, emergent from how the genders interact, increasingly as of late these have been rather ugly side effects of economy and technology that have been brutalizing both genders but each in their own way.

I remember Jonathan Haidt saying that social media has been brutalizing girls in that female bullying is quite often character assassination and sniping, and rather than being able to at least hang it up when they get home from school and get some void space to pull themselves back to themselves there's no buffer - it's 24/7.

What Thinking Ape hits here is something that hit me in earnest in my 30's, ie. an absolutely ice cold sense that society is not only indifferent to my survival and health as a male but might even be for me checking out early if I were found not to fit in. If women are seen as beauty and trophy objects from the standpoint of all the clothing, make-up, and skin care products that can be marketed to them men are seen as success objects which then also entails that their worth is their gadgets, their golf game, how much they're spending on fire arms, or whatever else.

I'll put the disclaimer on this as always because, for whatever reason, it really isn't ever obvious these days unless specifically stated - this is a video on men's issues not because women's issues are less important, it's a men's issues video because it's two guys with a lot of insights on some of the grim realities of what guys are dealing with talking. Same could be said that if two women were talking about women's issues in depth it wouldn't be to diminish men's issues, it would be because their specific position, and them (like these guys) being in the top fraction of one percent in terms of insightfulness and deep thought on these things would have a natural corner on that market.

IMHO both genders need to care about these issues because of these technologies (I'd think both genders are turning into digital natives) are hitting both genders and also what hits each gender hard has the potential to sour relations and so it's critical for as many people I think as possible to chew on what's happening and think carefully on what some of the least invasive things are that could be done to at least undermine the strength of some of the more fundamental underlying issues keeping us fenced into this situation.