The Sound and Fury of American Antipathy

We won't have to wait long before we experience what we're becoming

There are reasons American men and women are at odds politically. It’s because they’re at odds, period.

Many men have become disaffected. It’s not because they dislike women, or anybody else in particular, though there is some of that. It’s because they seem to feel they’re on the outside, looking in. That’s partly their own fault, but what does it mean if an entire gender is losing its edge and we lay all the blame at its doorstep? It means we think they don’t count for much.

If one really wants to understand what it feels like to be an American man on the outs, walk through a busy hospital, a microcosm of what makes institutional America tick. Keep track of those wearing the uniforms. 

You’ll probably see mostly women and people from foreign lands wearing scrubs. The most interesting facet is that the people with the relatively well-paid but less-skilled jobs – like transportation, reception, security and housekeeping – aren’t usually American men, either. 

Not just white men are scarce, but to a lesser but substantial extent, Black men, too.

No sympathy as long as women are unequal? Understandable. But as women catch up, men are falling behind, or at least, they perceive that they are.

Some American men feel the sun setting on them while reckoning others enjoy the warmth on their faces.

Women have for decades been heading to college in greater numbers than men, and now, they’re collecting 60% of bachelor’s degrees. The number one reason given is that the opting-out men say they don’t need a degree for good employment. 

This is largely an excuse by young men who made the decision – maybe the non-decision – for other reasons.

Photo by Baim Hanif on Unsplash

You can tell, because 36% of men 18-34 are living with their parents. It’s under 30% for women, according to the Pew Research Center.

Men with “good employment” don’t live in their mothers’ basements.

One of the real reasons for lower college attendance is that boys are increasingly lost in high school, where the taste for higher education typically develops. It starts out because boys’ brains usually develop a little slower, so they need some TLC to avoid significant lack of interest.

When I was a boy, starting in seventh grade, I took full-year courses in drafting, metal shop, wood shop and auto mechanics (open to girls, who were rarely interested). These courses were reasons to go to school. Across the country, most of the courses have been wiped out, usually to shift the funding to college prep curriculum.

And boys, more slow-witted and restless, are left with art and music. Some boys like those things, but not as much as the girls do. Discontented boys tend to look at less-meaty academic pursuits as “girlie and gay,” according to Niobe Way, an influential author and professor of developmental psychology at New York University.

Boys this age tend not to raise their hands in class. They may have a point, because the opinions of 16-year-olds are not exactly steeped in wisdom, and the boys, seeing this, hold back further. 

Not everybody does. That’s why boys may look at class participation as girlie and gay, too. 

Who’s going to tell them different? Female teachers outnumber males by 8%, and the men are often busy just trying to preserve order. And it’s much easier for all teachers to deal with responsive girls than try to drag precious morsels out of the stubborn boys.

So the girls appear stupid and naive to boys who don’t talk. The boys look stupid and arrogant to the girls.

More boys opting out of college makes a difference for them beyond economics. They’re deprived of the intellectual leavening that more readily opens people to new ideas. They also miss the social benefits of campus life.

We know that boys and men have a harder time making friends than girls and women. Now, when they can hide on the Internet from life, it’s solidified. The number of young men with no close friendships is five times what it was in 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life.

Younger men seem more likely to be unhappy. Their suicide rates are climbing steadily, to just under 24 per 100,000 for 15-24-year-olds in 2021, and 30 for 25-55. For women, it’s 6.1 and 7.4, respectively, one-fourth the male rate. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

The difficulty males have forming and keeping friendships doesn’t go away, especially if they marry. They tend to settle for the husbands of their wives’ friends as their own friends.

But they’re not getting married. Not much, anyway. 

Pew reported last year that 63% of adult men were single (unmarried, not living with a partner and not in a committed relationship). For women, 34%.

As for the discrepancy, the women are said to likely be lesbian or bisexual. I’m guessing that a few straight women think they’re in a more committed relationship than their partners do. But still.

In 1990, 71% of Americans, 25-54, lived with a spouse or partner. Now, 62%. 

Sex between men and women has dropped to 30-year lows, with 30 percent of men under 30 chaste in 2019, and 20 percent of women. 

Separation II, Edvard Munch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

For whatever reasons that’s going on, it’s likely an indication that men and women are not as chummy as they used to be.

The viral sensation of the spring, Man or Bear? got it out in the open. Women were asked, if lost in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a random man? Almost everybody picked the bear, including some of the men who were asked what they’d want for their wives and daughters.

The national political rhetoric about a key issue was as unbounded as almost anything that might happen in the woods.

An unrelenting barrage of accusations, mostly by rank-and-file Democrats of both sexes, against men of all stripes continued month after month, in an addled revenge for the loss of Roe vs. Wade. It’s a mystery how accusing half the electorate of evil intent was going to win an election. 

White men seemed to stand accused of the principal responsibility for killing Roe, yet the slaying was perpetrated by a gender-unspecific cadre of conservatives. This seemed buttressed Nov. 5 by the fact that seven states passed referendums protecting the right to abortion, and four of those states helped elect Donald Trump. 

It’s an unfair attack on women to accuse them of being one-issue voters. Even if it’s women saying it.

We heard a lot about how Hispanic men in Pennsylvania shunned Kamala Harris just because she was a woman “who belonged in the kitchen.”

But there’s more than misogyny going on here, since Mexico elected a woman president this spring. 

Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Panama, Guyana, Brazil and Costa Rica all preceded Mexico in electing women presidents.

There are lots of reasons why Hispanic men and women voted the way they did Nov. 5 that have nothing to do with gender politics. I’ll have more to say about the election when better stats than those now available come in.

Right now, I’m talking about … talking. How people have come to talk to each other in recent years. Where that’s going.

I’ve heard people increasingly getting in the faces of others in public when asked to follow rules. Not onerous rules, necessarily. Any rules.

“You can’t tell me what to do.”

It started during the pandemic, when a tranche of people resented masks, quarantines, social distancing, vaccines and other efforts to protect them. 

Now, idiotically, some seem entitled to act like Chads and Karens because despite themselves, they are still alive: So there!

In general, what I’ve seen and the stories I’ve been told involve men trying to intimidate women and women challenging men. Most of the aggressors are white people. Their targets can be anybody.

The logic they employ usually … isn’t.

Different people have famously enlisted themselves in an effort to get all liberals to express themselves the same way, let alone conservatives. With patience, it’s relatively easy to take. But you haven’t lived until a 23-year-old schools you on how to talk.

This all might be entertaining if it were happening in some other country. Maybe someplace like Turkmenistan, a nation that exists only because of fossil fuels, and has Ashgabat, a capital city full of white marble monuments that nobody visits. But it’s our great big country that’s the envy of much of the world. Where we live.

And we’re diligently avoiding talking to people we’ve known for years because we can’t stand each other.

This week, a woman of my acquaintance reasonably blessed with charm and intelligence said she entered a coffee shop full of “serene” suburbanites and let them have it, loudly. Maybe she just couldn’t bear ignoring people she thought had quietly gone bananas.

“I don’t care anymore. … I was saying hello to (patrons) and I just started yelling.

“You should feel disturbed,” she had said, when one person complained that they had found her disturbing, and, while walking out, suggested she get her head examined.

“I’m not making any progress with this person,” the woman allowed. “But it was very cathartic (and directed toward) the bystanders.”

Her message: “If you voted for Trump you’re not an anti-racist … you’re an assimilationist. You’re an accommodationist.”

Nothing she said was obscene or irrational. Not even very insulting, unless a listener had a particularly good command of English vocabulary.

But it’s extraordinary that it took place at all. Soon, it won’t be.

Just wait for Thanksgiving.

Some of us haven’t been very cautious about how we speak — and act — for the last few years. That has prepared the turf for the rest of us who have remained guarded in our behavior:

“I don’t care anymore.”

The encounters between men and women, neighbor and neighbor, Democrats and Republicans, that have often lacked usual restraint won’t be weird anymore. Further escalation should be expected as the pain of being cheated of justice, community and treasure bumps up against the pain of defending a new landscape that’s likely to be increasingly indefensible.

We’ve had our head start with problematic communication. Personal conflict won’t be confined to uninhibited or intemperate speech for long. Or any speech at all.

Look out below.