Men’s Fashion is in Precipitous Decline and Jordan Peterson Bears Some Responsibility
One Last Word on the Unsavory Topic of Male Abandon
“You’re an idiot” —Hugh Laurie ~ “House”
A couple months ago, a guy about my age maybe two or three years older, came to my house to examine our boiler. While my mom was out, I let this guy inside, and I showed him to the basement cellar. While he looked at the boiler before I paid him, I noticed he had an ear piercing. A big rock like a diamond, about the size of an ear bud, sparkled like a turn indicator, uselessly from his ear lobe.
Why the hell does this guy have a shiny rock attached to his ear… I thought, though not in as many words, nor in as many as, What does he think that’s doing for him? Is that working for you? As a guy whose job is to fix the heating, how’s the big stud in your ear working out?
I Suppose I hate Fashion
Since then at the grocery store where I work, I have begun noticing quite a lot of guys with ear piercings, rocks, earrings, and tattoos, and not only men (every woman has a nose piercing now, and their attention-seeking behavior is arguably worse, but men are the subject of this article). Contemporary society is a veritable bazaar of self-immolation for social validation. And the span of the last several weeks, does not describe the first occasion it dawned on me that men were losing the facility to dress and look half decent.
Let me be absolutely frank. Men these days look terrible. Terrible. I feel like every other guy I see has some kind of stupid piercing, an earring, a fucking go-tee, or a haircut all short on the sides but long in the middle, maybe just a gelled leaflike limp frond of hair glistening, sticking up against his forehead. Where in the fucking fuck are men getting these just horrible sartorial ideas from?
In Love with Themselves
It’s endless the sea of dopey jackasses pervading public life with their gross conflicting desires to look cool, look cute, look edgy, but normal, essentially harmless, but tough, yet benign, or safe. Sort of a perfect storm of spiritless vacuity and tastelessness.
Everywhere I go I am hostage to bear witness to all manners of beards and hairstyles, piercings, earrings, strange pony tails or buns, strange tattoos and jacked arms. Why is everyone ripped and pierced? Why does everyone look like a prison inmate? It’s as if it were each and all a part of one fashion, and that fashion were called: distracting—as if the creative purpose of which were simply to distract whoever looked in your direction. I don’t know much about fashion, because fashion doesn’t interest me (like sports, I could care less), however I understand that to be fashionable, the goal partly is to provoke attention to stimulate aesthetic experience. Fine. But if any of this attention-seeking gimmickry qualifies as fashion, then I suppose I hate fashion.
Big arms that, by making their heads look small, make their appearance that much more dopey; tattoos; ear piercings; necklaces; chains; and bracelets!! What the hell is the point of all this jewelry? Since when did it become permissible for men to wear jewelry in the first place? Is jewelry not feminine? Is there not something tribal or premodern, or primitive, about jewelry tattoos and piercings, barbaric? And why does everybody have a beard? Does no one have a white collar job? Is there something about your face you’re afraid to let other people see? Or do you just want to prove how much hair you can grow for validation? It’s disgusting. Shave your face, you insecure loser!
Here is a great example of what I mean. I searched “men’s fashion 2020” on Google, and then once I got a bunch of unrealistic runway people, grimacing I clicked casual or “street style,” and then I landed on a million pictures of just the kind of idiot I’m trying to describe.
Next Luxury/ Pinterest/ @andremersdorf
Since when has it become acceptable to look like this? Comment if you disagree. I would be fascinated to hear your reasoning. To me this guy looks absolutely horrible. But this picture reminds me, there was one other distracting accessory I forgot to mention. Hats! Every guy wears some kind of stupid baseball cap everywhere, frequently backwards.
@renegeart an instagram (this was on the website “Medium,” prefacing an article on how to dress)
NBC Universal/Syfy/ Getty Images
This is Joe Rogan by the way, the legendary multimillionaire bald bodybuilder skeptic, the patron saint of reason and commonsense young jocks today worship, because he does courageous things like smoke weed with Elon Musk mid-broadcast. Since I forgot to include a pic two posts ago, here he is. I thought you should see.
And look at this! For some reason along with a bunch of magazines that get delivered to my house which I do not read, like The New Yorker, it humiliates me to say, I also get GQ, even though I swear I’ve never read it, a so-called “men’s magazine” in my mail. And I just want to share with you the table of contents, of their most recent issue called “Features,”
Look at this total bullshit “Welcome to the Sensible Sneaker Revolution” is one article…—“the Wild New Era of High-End Men’s Jewelry” …
The “New Dawn” {of} “Men’s Accessories” … “and Jewels” !!!!
Part of the Reason I Deplore New York City, or, How a Repressed Authoritarian Part of Me Came to Miss Sumptuary Laws
It’s especially bad in New York City. Every time I go to New York City now, which is much less (I have a laundry list of reasons I hate to go, but I tell people it’s because of crime), I see a downright oppressive amount of dopey losers sitting in fancy restaurants and somehow getting away with wearing plain white undershirts and Dodger’s baseball caps indoors at nice bars. In a restaurant where a meal between three people costs $300, I’ve watched guys eat fine food wearing baseball caps and undershirts. And of course they have their massive biceps out and their disgusting tattoos for all the world to see in the midst of dinner. It’s very frustrating because I’ll be sitting in my blazer and a oxford collar shirt and pleated khakis with a single malt scotch in front of me, and if it weren’t for these losers, I would have thought that I looked nice (if not a tad refined), however I am made to feel as if it were I who were out of touch, in these NYC bars. I always get stared at like I’m being a dick. Somehow I’m the asshole for looking like an actual fucking gentleman, for looking good!
I’m not sure if that’s just New York City, where up is down and where progressive phony “awareness” in every aspect is considered to have a direct relationship to one’s intelligence, where the more homeless one pretends to look with a hoodie and a trenchcoat the more fashionable you are, and the more complacently indifferent you are to crime, insane traffic or homelessness the more normal you are—New York City where everything one takes to be commonsense is the reverse—but at any rate I would argue an abrupt slackening in standards for male dress is dissolving men’s willingness, let alone the social expectation, to look the part of a gentleman. “Business casual,” “athleisure…” And also white shoes. Everyone wears white sneakers. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of white shoes. Since when did it become socially permissible for men to wear white shoes?
If you’re a full grown man and you post up at a bar for dinner at a fancy restaurant—where a coat check girl takes your damn coat—you are a loser if you’re not wearing black shoes, and a proper restaurant should throw you out otherwise. I was actually having dinner at the Polo bar last year where a guy at the table next to me was wearing a sleeveless shirt. This flouting of social rules brings out an authoritarian instinct in me. The health inspector general should make it illegal for men to wear sleeveless shirts, exposing their hairy repulsive arms, in restaurants.
Jordan Peterson as Purveyor of Cultural Decline
In my last post, I tried to describe the looming threat of men beginning to behave like barbarians as an entitled belligerent reaction to civil society, sanctioned by opportunists like Josh Hawley. Here we observe men not even succeeding in nor desiring to look like gentlemen anymore, either. Almost as if it had become unfashionable and bad, to look decent. And coincidentally the self-appointed spokesman for lost young men, doesn’t have the faintest abstractest notion (for all his bold ideas) of how to dress either. Here’s Jordan Peterson.
Lars Pehrson/ SvD/ TT NEWS AGENC
Get a fucking load of how bad that suit is. How do you expect to get lost young men back on their feet, look up to you, and toughen up dressed like that, looking like that? His clothes look thrifted. Not even. Pulled out of the sewer perhaps. Maybe that’s the point though.
Jordan B Peterson
Can a suit possibly get more hideous?
Piers Morgan
And this was how he looked on Piers Morgan as I mentioned the other day (since my blog post, I went back and watched the whole interview; fucking ghastly; he actually said even worse things about Ukraine than I had heard). He loves to wear these horrific blue suits, with a pair of brown leather brogues. And there he goes with another sacrilegious tie!
But maybe this is the point. Maybe wearing clothes that looked like they were filched from a sewer makes you more masculine or something. Which brings us to Josh Hawley, leader of the American masculinity “revival.”
Maybe it’s a Sign of Masculinity to Have Appalling Taste
Stefani Reynolds/ Getty Images
Perhaps similar to the way to Hawleyan man, it’s masculine to be ignorant and uneducated—as refinement is feminine and elitist—so perhaps it’s masculine too to have no dress standards either!
Just doesn’t this guy look atrociously bad? Let alone ummasculine—I called him a vampire two posts ago because of his coffin-dweller bloodless white skin, and emaciation—where the hell does one get such an ugly tie?
REX Shutterstock
Look at him here. Same exact tie except blue was switched for red. He must have liked the design so much, with that teal colored stripe, he couldn’t resist getting the tie in two different colors. Is that even teal though? Is there a name for that color? And, observe the way he styles his hair. He cuts it short but then tries to pull off an arrogant flip, which only futilely puffs it up slightly.
How do men like Jordan Peterson or Josh Hawley attempt to reach “struggling young men” looking the way they do? Aren’t male role models supposed to look a little more inspiring? They’re not even good looking guys either. They look like they’re on hunger strike. They’re craggy, wrinkly, sanctimonious and earnest to the point that it provokes revulsion, in the case of Peterson; and gawky, gangly, nerdy and awkward in Hawley’s case.
Moreover, Hawley’s egocentricity-inferiority, approaches the stereotype of the skinny guy who was bullied to pieces in high school and now has all this repressed rage as an adult, inner demons, emotional scarring and bears deep resentful grudges against his tormenters whom he sees everywhere in life—his victimization breeding lifelong insecurities he will always have to compensate for by blaming other people for hurting him, and everything hurst him; as a bullied but narcissistic male youth develops a persecution complex. Hawley just looks like a caricature of a mass shooter I guess. Skinny, white, pale with awkward disproportionate features. A weak constitution
Matt Rourke AP
Hawley’s appearance brings to mind the guy who stabbed those college kids to death in Idaho. Does not every maniac look exactly like this? Blinks at a tectonic pace, edgy mood, cold manner, gets angry easily for no reason, narcissistically entitled and superior.
Maybe it’s Also Masculine to be Very Unhealthy
This failure to look the part of what they purport to endorse reminds me a little of when I was watching a video about right wing militia movements. Here the men have the opposite problem of Hawley and Peterson’s thinness. One of the things that struck me about the guys in these militias, (in places like Georgia), was all the guys were rotund. I was cracking up. How does one of these militias expect to save the republic when all its members are morbidly obese? I went back to the video and took some screenshots. Before they went on a training exercise, they actually ate breakfast; and one of the guys said to the interviewer, “as soon as we get our bellies full,” then they’ll get moving. Look at these stupid children. One of the guys, was identifying himself as “a Christian, a patriot…” He should also add, “and a fat ass who can’t stop eating.”
Pictures from Vice
Hypocrites and Losers
Shouldn’t evangelists for male identity look a little more imposing? Couldn’t they at least dress the part of role models given they can’t walk the talk at all?
Hawley for example, so concerned with resurrecting American masculinity, was caught on camera fleeing the insurrection he helped to incite, pell mell out of the capitol. They showed the surveillance footage at the January 6th hearings. It was probably the only time anyone laughed during the duration of the solemn inquisition. Then it was all over the internet. Since writing his “masculine virtues” book, he has just been pilloried nonstop about this nonstop. And Jordan Peterson—this guy going around instructing men how to climb what he calls the “dominance hierarchy”— as I mentioned in my last post, got himself publicly scorned with the severest disdain by Olivia Wilde, one of the most gorgeous actresses in Hollywood.
If you want to inaugurate a return to “masculine virtues,” shouldn’t you lead the uprising you incited against a democratic government, rather than running for dear life in the opposite direction? And if you presume to lead by example and be a spokesman for struggling young men, shouldn’t you not travel the world crying your eyes out on anyone’s podcast who will listen to you, and shouldn’t you try not to offend the hottest actress in Hollywood?
Take the cheapest most stereotypical male role model that comes to mind, James Bond. Bond attracts women, right? He sleeps with them doesn’t he? Bond wouldn’t get treated with the most repulsed contempt by one of the hottest young women in America.
Photofest
I thought to be an exemplary/archetypal man, it had something to do with getting beautiful women to like you, not repulsing them.
Why We Should be Hopeless about Men
But maybe looking back at those guys with piercings tattoos, tight white tee shirts and baseball caps, the guys I talked about in the beginning, maybe even if Hawley and Peterson could repurpose their looks and behavior a little, to look more like people who might have a better chance of motivating young men—maybe even then they would fail and it would make no difference, because young men are already so far gone. I mean just look at the dopey hapless bastards in the first two photos.
The Neoliberal Case for Discouraging Young Men, to Combat the Moral Decline of Society
What I don’t get is why if you’re Peterson or Hawley, you would even want to help or associate with struggling guys at all. My question is: how much more of a loser do you have to be to even have the impulse to help the dopey losers men are these days? Is it too harsh of me to pose the question whether someone you want to help, should first deserve to be helped?
It’s not yours, it’s not mine, and it should not be Jordan Peterson’s fault if say reading levels are plummeting, or so many people are so shamelessly obese that we don’t even notice how fat people are anymore, etc. Like I said in my last post, where I pointed to the increasing tendency of men to withdraw from the labor force, with the growth of the welfare state, perhaps young people could use less help. Perhaps we care for people too much. Jordan Peterson said in the Piers Morgan interview that he hopes to “encourage” people.
I think society is too encouraged already. Less encouragement, not more, is what society needs. Encouragement is what causes customers at the grocery store I work for to buy lobster tails and crab legs with food stamps. Encouragement is what causes hysterical rioters (grown men) in costumes to storm, and literally take shits on, the Capitol. Encouragement is what causes incels to see Jordan Peterson as a spokesmen for their patriarchal resentment of the advancement of women’s freedom to choose in market society which we should be celebrating—as just vindication of the potential for markets and individualism to make people free.
People like Peterson and Hawley make these postliberal arguments that society depends on traditional marriage and/or that governments should subsidize traditional families. But society does not depend on sacraments—who can say what society depends on?—and it needs the opposite of tradition. For the sake of individual freedom, (the only thing that ever did anyone any good in the world) and for the sake of economic growth and sane budgets, I would argue we need to terminate the programs and policies that we have already that encourage subordination and dependency, like paid leave, subsidized childcare, and the child tax credit, and SNAP benefits. These are very expensive entitlements which disincentivize women’s participation in the labor force and raise taxes, putting a ceiling on upward mobility, and slowing growth, while fostering dependent families.
Women should work more and make more money before they have kids, and when they have kids, they should have them when they want, and when they have the resources, without state interference. The choice to have a family should fall to one’s own ability and circumstances, and no one should be living beyond their means. Family is not a right. Dependency needs to be discouraged, and independence and liberty (which means respect for the liberty of others) and personal responsibility, is what needs to be promoted. And the only means by which we can hope to promote individual freedom is to stop patronizing, fostering, and rewarding irresponsibility, impulsivity and dependency.
So young men, not least, need to be discouraged. Young men need to stop looking up to Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson for comfort or inspiration. We need to cut men off. Young men need to stop working out so much and making narcissistic sculpture out of their bodies just to raise their pitiful self-esteem, chasing “endorphins” and taking pictures in the mirror. And they need to stop getting tattoos and wearing jewelry and being so indifferent to how vain and self-conscious they look to scrutiny from judgmental people like me. No one should be so comfortable with appearing so self-absorbed and infantilized, with ridiculous beards, tattoos, jewelry, hair styled with hair product, and worst of all: cologne. Like Jesus. Josh Hawley claims feminism has made men feminized—No! Men are feminizing themselves! Obviously…
I remember a guy in my dorm in my freshman year of college who was showing me his teeth whitening strips casually in conversation. That is not normal and it is utterly inappropriate to be that superficial! He had no shame whatsoever. Occasions like those really make me worried it’s only a matter of time before men just get spray tans and start wearing makeup as it becomes normalized for men simply not to be or to dress like decent men. We only had a grotesquely fat, male spray tanner, with whitened teeth for our last president anyway. How do we know our next president will even wear a suit, and not a sleeveless v-neck wifebeater tee shirt and chains?
What is needed is welfare reform, so men can get jobs and stop freeloading while they cry their eyes out in self-pity and gravitate to gurus like Jordan Peterson for the comfort to blame feminism for their failures. It’s obscene how, statistically speaking, men are passively freeloading on the patronage of the entitlement state while evidently looking up to Jordan Peterson for rationalizations and contemptible hope, rather than actively doing productive things with their lives. And in my opinion, to be a productive man involves mainly working and advancing oneself; personal ambition; not looking vain; keeping your chin up; having confidence in one’s prospects no matter what; having a stiff upper lip and being loath to express dishonorable petty emotions that offend decency and betray weakness and insecurity; a proper self-respecting gentleman would shun exhibitionism, publicity and celebrity of every kind; having taste; delicacy, courtesy, prudence; great self-restraint; deep respect for the dignity of all people, and reserve— the way men are supposed to.
As David French wrote in his New York Times op-ed the other week, reacting to a right wing politico’s asinine tweet which was this,
“all a man wants is to come home from a long day at work to a grateful wife and children who are glad to see him, and dinner cooking on the stove. This is literally all it takes to make a man happy. We are simple. Give us this. And you will have given us nearly everything we need.”
French wrote “…while many men demand respect, what they need is purpose, and the quest for respect can sometimes undermine the sense of purpose that will help make them whole. To put it more simply still: What men need is not for others to do things for them. They need to do things for others: for spouses, for children, for family and friends and colleagues.”
He says, “The true challenge to American masculinity is far upstream from politics and ideology. It’s not fundamentally about what ideological combatants say about men — that they have become “toxic” on the one hand, or “feminized” on the other. Rather the challenge is much more about a man finding his purpose.”
He concludes “Virtuous purpose is worth more than any other person’s conditional and unreliable respect. It is rooted in service and sacrifice, not entitlement. And those qualities bring a degree of meaning and joy far more important than the gifts that others — the “grateful” spouse who cooks dinner, the implausibly reverential children — can ever offer.”
Men need ask nothing or expect anything from other people. That’s correct. French diagnoses the problem that we have become too inward looking. It’s a very good point and I couldn’t have said it better myself. One should live outwardly rather, pushing forward, looking ahead. Not looking down, not looking in or looking back. Like Kennedy said that we should focus on what we do should for our country. Not that I like JFK (perhaps that man is even a precursor to our narcissism problem), but that’s an example of a better message.
But I wouldn’t even go so far as French that men need a “purpose.” That sounds to me like only a prescription for more entitlement that can make the problem worse. Men think they’re entitled to respect just for existing right now. Now is David French saying, no, actually men need a metaphysic? Jesus. And I don’t appreciate how French aligns “purpose” with self-abnegating altruistic behavior, like performing services or kind acts for other people. Life is much too short and too sweet for kind acts and self-denial for me. Unlike David French I’m not a Christian. Since I don’t believe in a supreme being that rewards virtue, I avoid performing acts of self-denial to please Him and exalt myself. As an atheist, I prefer my life unsupervised.
I like David French, but I disagree with him here. Men do not need to perform acts of self-denial for “purpose.” I would only go so far as to say men need to stop behaving like fucking children.
Towards a Theory of the Real Problem with Young Men, as an Erosion of Taste, Manners, and Standards, Respectability, Expectations, and Decorum: the Death of the Gentleman
I’m afraid my morals sound a bit Victorian or Puritanical. But honestly men need to stop watching Jordan Peterson, men need to stop working out so much, and stop eating so much food. Instead men need to go to work and concentrate on working, not their skin, not their hair, not their teeth, and not their body. Self-indulgence in general—not “the left” in particular—is the real scourge of contemporary society. And self-help, or “self-care,” or “self-love” is only the latest most deceptive rationalization for self-indulgence as well as a license for gluttony.
Self-help books and motivation videos are indeed some of the most reliable barometers for predicting failure. Whoever watches and reads them is almost certain not to accomplish their goals. No successful people have ever read self-help. Did Bill Gates read self-help books? I’m sure he didn’t. Would Mark Zuckerberg have watched Jordan Peterson videos in college? No. Actual high achievers don’t spend hours in the gym or take life advice from egomaniacal gurus and therapists. Self-help is false hope for the lazy who are already incapable of helping themselves, who because they are lazy pray to be saved or otherwise reduce themselves to following the prescriptions of people who write such books and make podcasts just for money. Successful people moreover who actually achieve things don’t work out just to feel endorphins before they have a planned meal with a protein shake. Weak men only do these things from feelings of acute inadequacy, just to feel more secure, and to chase away a persistent low mood.
Margaret Thatcher, who Despised Feckless Men, is Turning in Her Grave Somewhere
If Jordan Peterson wants to put the weight of the world’s sloth on his shoulders, that’s his prerogative. I have a few reservations for his sake: his efforts are hopelessly irrational, because he is only a mentally unstable egomaniac with highly disturbing besides embarrassing cult-leader tendencies; it’s counterproductive, because Peterson only coddles entitled young people with more comforting illusions than they need; and it’s patently ridiculous in principle, because men’s failures are obviously principally a consequence of their own moral failure to be sufficiently independent to acquire and maintain respectability.
I saw this one of hundreds of saccharine comments on one of Jordan Peterson’s videos where this guy was saying ‘maybe the reason 90% of Peterson’s followers are male is because so many of us are “healing.”’
If You Have Weltzschmertz, Then You’re A Loser
Here we have a great example of how corrosive figures like Peterson are for a free and individually responsible society. If you’re struggling (and perhaps there is no word in the English language used more loosely nowadays), it is not Peterson’s duty to help you. And if you find comfort in a community online of supposedly oppressed men, then shame on you. Get a god damn life. And shame on Peterson for giving such self-pitying wimps comfort. Healing. From what? Why do people feel like they are permitted to make such brazenly pathetic assertions these days about being in some kind of spiritual pain, without feeling the obligation to clarify what in the fuck they’re even talking about?
Self-respecting individuals, gentlemen and ladies, on the other hand, know better and find more creative, more decent ways to live, on their own—without vulgar “community” online, without help, without appeal, and don’t make self-immolating victims and martyrs of themselves.
In consideration of all the woke people who have sought to censor Peterson left and right because of all the attention-seekingly outrageous things he says, Piers Morgan asked him what he thinks of himself. Morgan asked him whether he conceives himself as a “net force for good.” Through tears Peterson nodded and choked up he answered, “Net?” Wiping tears, “Not in all the details but net? Yes. I believe I am a net force for good.”
Piers Morgan Uncensored
FOR THE LOVE OF HUMANITY THIS HAS TO STOP
You’re On Your Own
It’s so funny that Peterson and Hawley think society or “the left” failed young men. It’s the other way around. It’s obviously young men who are failing society. For fuck’s sake it’s Peterson and Hawley who are failing young men!! I don’t care how much of a Marxist lens you want to approach the problem with, such men could not fail so badly as they are nowadays if their circumstances (the left or modern life or any set of circumstances) were entirely or even partly to blame. This may sound heavy-handed, but I would argue, no one could possibly fail as badly as guys are failing now, not unless it were mainly men’s own feckless fault. And if you really care about people, you should desire to hold them to account for their actions or lack of them. And do them and yourself the favor to expect better of them.
Furthermore, I don’t care if a shitton of dudes are killing themselves nowadays and struggling with drug addiction. How are these so-called “deaths of despair” social issues worthy of public debate, as if they should be addressed with public policy? How could they be? What does impartial society at large have to do with a lone sad bastard who freely chooses impulsively to kill himself? Have men not always been killing themselves since the dawn of man? What difference does rising male suicide make? Is suicide not always in a state of rising by the way so long as men aren’t killing other people or starving?
Rich Country Issues
Why is suicide a problem now? We’re never ever going to stop sad people from committing suicide! And how is drug addiction a social issue either? What, is it society that makes someone addicted to a substance? Are we really going to say people are victims of systemic drug abuse? How can we blame society for certain individuals’ wayward propensity to make stupid decisions and abuse drugs? The distracting masturbatory caterwauling about the deaths of despair nowadays really really really annoys me. Unless you really believe that everyone can and should be changed, and unless you’re a social reformer, which on this blog, we are not, then you can hardly help the dumb, the unlucky, and unintelligent from making bad decisions, and we understand, it is arrogant, misguided and foolish, at worst evangelical and even sometimes unethical to try and messianically point people in the right direction.
There are no deaths of despair. There are only miserable people who kill themselves, addicts with drug issues, and drug dealers who are criminals, and doctors overprescribing people drugs so long as they can get away with it. So rising male suicide and the opioid crisis is not a fucking social or a cultural issue. And therefore, it is not “the left,” or society, or feminism—and it is not just men alone, but it is the attention-seeking right wing crackpots (like Josh Hawley, or Jordan Peterson or JD Vance), these modern day Jesuit missionaries, who attempt to problematize and politicize these things, giving self-pitying men victim narratives, who are the ones who are really failing young men.
And it doesn’t help their malephilia that you could make the same argument about girls. Apparently over the last few years the number of girls who have had suicidal thoughts (as if the mere thought of suicide flitting across your consciousness constituted an emergency ) at least has increased significantly. I think I read that one third of teenage girls have pondered suicide over the last few years since the pandemic (as if no one else had, and as if it would make no sense if society were to have more suicidal thoughts during a global pandemic). Now I acknowledge that’s a lot of anxious young women, however, what is to be done?
And if, as some argue like Jonathan Haidt, girls are depressed because all they do is stare at their phones and feel inadequate, how is that “big tech’s” fault, as both Republicans and Democrats would argue? I agree with the consensus that social media makes young girls especially more prone to anxiety and depression. I read that girls are more liable to be victims of cyberbullying too. But the fact is even without the internet, kids are going to bully other kids anyway. That’s what young people do. They bully each other. Can’t fix that. There’s always going to be the popular crew and the unpopular, and that’s just life. The cool and the uncool. The nerdy and the athletic. The pretty and the ugly. And for quite long before social media, girls have been obsessed with being skinny, and comparing themselves to other girls, and feeling envious and depressed. Women since the dawn of mankind have had this problem. Women have low self-esteem as a consequence of wanting too desperately to be attractive or useful to someone else, and to be loved. Rather than blame social media it would be a greater help to women if we could raise and teach them not to be people pleasers.
In a Women in American History course I took in my senior year of college, I remember asking my classmates why we should blame the fashion industry or advertising for girls’ mental health issues? Is it not girls who decide they have to look as good as models who are the agents of their own issues? I think I mentioned that when I see a male model, I don’t struggle with the desire to look like him. The girls in my class just said that I don’t know what it’s like to be a girl. And I just responded what difference does it make though? No matter what social pressure dictates, as humans, don’t we have the free agency to listen to pressure or not, for which we’re responsible? And all the girls just smiled at me like they understood my argument, but nevertheless they considered it idealistic and naiive. I think that’s unfortunate.
Exhortation to Reasonability
Maybe simply parents should resume to have more dominant roles in their kids’ lives and teach their girls and boys not to do drugs or use social media. Parents should become parents again, rather than that we should blame “big tech.” The questions we should really be asking is why parents let their middle school age kids have iphones and social media in the first place. My parents didn’t get me a phone until I was in ninth grade, and that was a flip phone. My parents never let me or my sister get an Xbox or a Play Station console either, even though at times I wanted one. My parents never let me or my sister watch tv or go online during the school week. That’s what parents are supposed to do. They’re supposed to discipline their kids. In the grocery store the other day, I rang up a boy who was easily thirteen or fourteen, and he had an ear piercing. Who the hell raises that?
As I said in my last post, and as I have said in this one, I agree with Peterson and Hawley. There is something wrong with young men these days. However, similar to what Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom— that contrary to the predominating view that fascism was the inevitable outgrowth of capitalism, Nazi Germany in fact was only the final consequence of state socialism—so in my considered neoliberal theory, as opposed to rebels against the decline of males, Peterson and Hawley are just the most lamentable outcomes of that same decline.
—Jay
Certainly not. I don’t subscribe to Peterson’s vulgar self-help gimmicks marketed to self-pitying people who are losers, which I believe fits into an ideology of male victimhood polluting the American right. I do not endorse “getting in the game.” I don’t see life as a vulgar sex and money ladder that men should be climbing. You’re right that if torn skinny jeans are attractive to women then they’re a part of the problem too. However I disagree that the purpose of clothes is too attract others. Perhaps that’s actually the thing or part of what I take issue with. We should not be dressing to appeal to others. And attraction should not be the purpose of our dress. I think one’s clothes should reflect one’s character and their dignity and should show taste. One’s clothes should be about himself, not others. One’s clothes should not make a crass statement.
As usual too long for me to read the whole thing. But from the first third I'd say
1. Clothes and looks are badges that people wear to attract other people. So the torn jeans and backwards hats and earings must have attractive value. So women who are attracted to men in torn jeans are part of the problem (if there is one)
2. Many slovenly people are that because they've given up on getting what they want. Is Peterson's prime directive "dont give up. After you make your bed clean up yourself. Get in the game." A plea that matches yours?