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New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

https://www.psypost.org/new-research-highlights-a-shortage-of-male-mentors-for-boys-and-young-men/
27•ashishgupta2209•1h ago

Comments

Urahandystar•51m ago
One of the saddest things I heard was a young kid say he's never heard the word masculinity unless it was paired with the word toxic before it. With that kind of attitude is this any wonder?
yetihehe•40m ago
Sites like artofmanliness.com seem to be more and more needed in today's world.
sunrunner•24m ago
So we can all be schooled in the important manly things such as the '6 Card Games Every Many Should Know' or 'The Dale Carnegie That Will Instantly Improve Your Relationships'?
yetihehe•12m ago
No, so we can all be schooled in "Why Every Man Should Be Strong"[0], "How to Set a Table"[1], "9 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches"[2] or "Win the War on Debt: 80 Ways to Be Frugal and Save Money"[3]. You used probably the weakest reason to discredit the idea of men improving themselves. That's not a "good" manly behavior.

[0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/why-ev...

[1] https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/etiquette/how-to-se...

[2] https://www.artofmanliness.com/skills/outdoor-survival/9-way...

[3] https://www.artofmanliness.com/career-wealth/wealth/money-sa...

lelanthran•34m ago
It is difficult to get society to accept that maybe it's time to balance the constant public and media validation of women with some public and media validation of men.

Disney has seen a bunch of Marvel flops since they switched the focus to Marvel properties that target women (they've since publicly indicated a course correction on this).

Take a bunch of IP that primarily males are interested in (super-heros), water it down so that it's less male focused, and then find that neither males nor females are interested.

wincy•26m ago
My friend’s son was four and had to have it explicitly explained to him that men can be scientists, too! Based on all the books he’d been read and other media, he assumed only women were scientists.
lelanthran•40m ago
This will not change anytime soon; the "women are wonderful" talk is as relevant as it has ever been.

Regardless of the criteria you choose to establish a ranking, males dominate the bottom of that ranking.

oulipo2•37m ago
You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women. It's completely orthogonal.

People in power want you to have this "I don't have what I want because this other minority takes it from me", but it's simply wrong, even though this argument seems to capture the mind of simple-minded people.

We don't have what we want because we're in a ruthless capitalist society, directed by stupidoes like Trump and Musk

lelanthran•30m ago
> You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women. It's completely orthogonal.

Knee-jerk much? How on earth did you get "put down women" from what I wrote?

> People in power want you to have this "I don't have what I want because this other minority takes it from me", but it's simply wrong, even though this argument seems to capture the mind of simple-minded people.

Where did you read that in the tiny little snippet I wrote?

Let me be clear, so that there is no misunderstanding -

1. Men dominate the bottom of almost every ranking. This is just another ranking.

Maybe before we try to fix this specific ranking, we should be asking ourselves why men are at the bottom in every ranking.

close04•28m ago
> to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women

For sure you don't have to put women as a whole down. But society and media these days are generally dominated by the most toxic voices. Toxic feminism is a big issue, that's what we have to put down for this particular purpose.

philipallstar•19m ago
> You don't understand much if you think that to fight the lack of mentors for men, you have to put down women

The reverse of this has been what's been dominating for a decade. Anything pro-men (or even just neutral) can be accused of being anti-woman, which creates a chilling effect as female-dominated HR departments can make life very difficult for men looking to provide for their families.

CalRobert•29m ago
It does feel a bit cruel that we were told to be vulnerable and open, and then when men said we’re lonely got accused of asking other people to fix our problems and that we just needed to deal with it.

Also I don’t think I’d risk being e.g. a teacher - the girls in my high school would casually joke about accusing their teachers of being creeps if they failed a test, etc.

close04•16m ago
> we were told to be vulnerable and open, and then when men said we’re lonely got accused of asking other people to fix our problems

The discrimination pendulum swinged the other way. And as with a lot of discrimination, the criticism is in reality aimed at what you are, not what you do. So you will never get it right in the eyes of those critics. On the other hand the roles of men in society are changing and it's not at all clear "to what". "Be a man but don't really be one, it's complicated".

CalRobert•12m ago
Well we have data showing that people have fewer close friends, men in particular, than in decades past. This used to be what the loneliness epidemic referred to, but somehow it got turned in to being about dating.

I mean, I’m lonely and I’m married. Middle age is a tough time for friendships.

Vinnl•7m ago
I think one problem we have (always had, but worse now that there are so many more opinions to be exposed to) is that we expect "society's" opinions to be consistent, despite being made up of millions of different people.

Of course there are going to be people telling others to be vulnerable and open, and of course there are also going to be people telling others not to complain because that's dumping their problems on other people.

fzeroracer•25m ago
People are going to misread the article and go off in their own direction but the problem is clearly capitalism. It's always been capitalism. Lower income boys have drastically less access to male mentors than higher income ones and the article even states this.

Low family income means less options. Most of your mentors at a young age are going to come from schooling, which still generally has a gender tilt towards women for multiple reasons. But lower income schools are going to be more resource starved with larger classes and less time for teachers to interact with students individually.

edit: fixed wording to better emphasize what I meant

sirwhinesalot•13m ago
Yes lower income boys are hit way harder, but it's not like the issue disappears at the higher end.

> 72 percent of boys from households earning $100,000 or more reported having a male mentor for schoolwork.

> A similar trend appeared regarding relationship advice. Only 45 percent of boys in the lowest income group had a male mentor for relationships. This compares to 67 percent of boys in the highest income group.

Even 30% of rich kids don't have access to a proper male role model, those are terrible numbers!

fzeroracer•6m ago
$100,000 isn't even 'rich' nowdays, that's below middle class especially if we're talking about an actual family unit. I can guarantee that if this research further stratified things into $100-200k, and $200k+ you would see the results continue to improve as people cross the threshold into middle class.

This survey can be seen as comparing people in poverty level income vs everyone else.

sirwhinesalot•1m ago
A lot of the lower income kids are from single family homes (which is why they can't cross the $100.000 threshold), those will obviously have less access to a male role model.

If you correct for that the numbers would likely get closer, not further apart.

haritha-j•12m ago
Ah yes, the answer to the problem of inequal income distribution is of course capitalism.
dmichulke•3m ago
When you say "capitalism" you mean poverty?

I believe poverty is the natural state of man and I wonder how non-capitalism (= socialism?) makes people rich?

What I think you mean is that equal access to education is a promise of the state that is too often broken. But then we're talking about incompetence or corruption at the state level, paid for and sustained with your taxes.

egorfine•22m ago
I have lived in a country where communication between adults and minors is not frowned upon in the slightest and so I have been a male mentor for a bunch of girls in an orphanage for many years.

(Once I perish, no one is going to remember any of my business projects, clean codebases and unit test coverage. But that little hobby of mine - oh, these deliverables are gonna last).

Anyways. Happy to be a mentor to teenagers but it seems to me that in the US that's impossible on multiple levels.

jacquesm•21m ago
I'm flagging this based on previous experience with similar threads.
dmichulke•1m ago
Where do you think this should be discussed if not here?
cal_dent•17m ago
What about their dad’s & uncle’s? Mum’s male friends? I don’t know, external (outside the family) isn’t the only source of “mentorship” and we should stop trying to pretend it is
pjc50•10m ago
Often missing as well. Lot of isolated single mothers out there.
pjc50•12m ago
Whole bunch of factors involved in this which HN is ill-equipped to deal with. But I think paranoia about "grooming" should probably be counted as a factor as well. A lot of people are going to be suspicious about an adult man who wants to hang out with children. So everything gets tangled up and shut down in the name of safeguarding.

If you ask the question "what proportion of girls and young women have a male mentor", the problem becomes even more obvious.

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New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men

https://www.psypost.org/new-research-highlights-a-shortage-of-male-mentors-for-boys-and-young-men/
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