Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men

At Amazon, Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.

Nicholas Eberstadt, Men Without Work

At Amazon, Nicholas Eberstadt, Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition.

A Generation of American Men Give Up on College: ‘I Just Feel Lost’

This isn't new, though indeed folks don't talk about it on campus, at all (at least at my college, and I surmise others, most others, in fact). 

Props to WSJ for the excellent reporting here. 

ICYMI, Christina Hoff Sommers has written on this stuff, here: The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men.

And from the article:

The number of men enrolled in college this year trails women by record highs, part of a nationwide education gap. Nobody wants to talk about it. https://t.co/RzPzSDIDPd

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 8, 2021

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.

No reversal is in sight. Women increased their lead over men in college applications for the 2021-22 school year—3,805,978 to 2,815,810—by nearly a percentage point compared with the previous academic year, according to Common Application, a nonprofit that transmits applications to more than 900 schools. Women make up 49% of the college-age population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

“Men are falling behind remarkably fast,” said Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, which aims to improve educational opportunities for low-income, first-generation and disabled college students.

American colleges, which are embroiled in debates over racial and gender equality, and working on ways to reduce sexual assault and harassment of women on campus, have yet to reach a consensus on what might slow the retreat of men from higher education. Some schools are quietly trying programs to enroll more men, but there is scant campus support for spending resources to boost male attendance and retention.

The gender enrollment disparity among nonprofit colleges is widest at private four-year schools, where the proportion of women during the 2020-21 school year grew to an average of 61%, a record high, Clearinghouse data show. Some of the schools extend offers to a higher percentage of male applicants, trying to get a closer balance of men and women.

“Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant who previously led the admissions offices at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. “The question is, is that right or wrong?”

Ms. Delahunty said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become “higher education’s dirty little secret,” practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter.

“It’s unfortunate that we’re not giving this issue air and sun so that we can start to address it,” she said.

At Baylor University, where the undergraduate student body is 60% female, the admission rate for men last year was 7 percentage points higher than for women. Every student has to meet Baylor’s admission standards to earn admission, said Jessica King Gereghty, the school’s assistant vice president of enrollment strategy and innovation. Classes, however, are shaped to balance several variables, including gender, she said.

Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered. Baylor created a “males and moms communication campaign” a few years ago to keep high-school boys on track, she said.

Among the messages to mothers in the campaign, Ms. Gereghty said: “ ‘At the dinner table tonight, mom, we need you to talk about getting your high school transcripts in.’ ”

Race and gender can’t be considered in admission decisions at California’s public universities. The proportion of male undergraduates at UCLA fell to 41% in the fall semester of 2020 from 45% in fall 2013. Over the same period, undergraduate enrollment expanded by nearly 3,000 students. Of those spots, nine out of 10 went to women.

“We do not see male applicants being less competitive than female applicants,” UCLA Vice Provost Youlonda Copeland-Morgan said, but fewer men apply.

The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. For the most part, white men—once the predominant group on American campuses—no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson, of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal.

No college wants to tackle the issue under the glare of gender politics, said Ms. Delahunty, the enrollment consultant. The conventional view on campuses, she said, is that “men make more money, men hold higher positions, why should we give them a little shove from high school to college?”

Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”

The pandemic accelerated the trend. Nearly 700,000 fewer students were enrolled in colleges in spring 2021 compared with spring 2019, a Journal analysis found, with 78% fewer men.

The decline in male enrollment during the 2020-21 academic year was highest at two-year community colleges. Family finances are believed to be one cause. Millions of women left jobs to stay home with children when schools closed in the pandemic. Many turned to their sons for help, and some young men quit school to work, said Colleen Coffey, executive director of the College Planning Collaborative at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, a program to keep students in school.

“The guys felt they needed to step in quickly,” Ms. Coffey said.

It isn’t clear how many will return to school after the pandemic...

I don't trust this Framingham study. 

I'm at community college. I've been teaching online since March 17th last year. I suspect just as many women have been working outside the home to support their families as have men.

Who know, though? I'd have to see the data.

Either way, boys and young men are indeed getting screwed. Gender identity theory, and whatever other brain dead ideological abominations, have left men high and dry. 

Still more.

Helen Smith, Men on Strike

At Amazon, Helen Smith, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters.

American Men Are Failing

This is actually sort of depressing.

Watch, from Tucker's show last night:

You Can Rip My Cargo Shorts Off My Cold Dead Booty!

I don't care about freakin' fashion trends. I've got about five pairs of cargo shorts and they're not going anywhere. My wife loves 'em. I've got a big black booty that doesn't look good in skinny-dude Bermuda shorts.

That's just not gonna fly.

And now here comes a "debate" on the fashion-ability of the genre? Get out of here!

From Nicole Hong, at WSJ, "What Happened After I Wrote That Cargo Shorts Story."

Here's the earlier piece that kicked off the debate, "Nice Cargo Shorts! You’re Sleeping on the Sofa."

More, at Galore, "WHAT TO DO IF YOUR BOYFRIEND STILL WEARS CARGO SHORTS."

Even PC political scientist Dan Drezner weighs in, "A Very Important Post about … cargo shorts."

BuzzFeed's New 'Dude a Day' Newsletter Features Guys Who Look Exclusively Homosexual

I don't know?

I guess for the ultra hip BuzzFeed readership, to be a hot guy nowadays means being homosexual.

How lame.

Here, "So, BuzzFeed Has a Newsletter About Hot Guys Now."

How about a guy like Jason Statham? He's not gay right? He's engaged to Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.

Or Daniel Craig? He's married to Rachel Weisz.

So no, you don't have to be homo to be hot. Please make a note of it.

Here's That Creepy New Old Spice 'Mom Song 60' Advertisement

At WSJ, "Old Spice Ad With Creepy Moms Goes Viral."



Also at Hot Air, "Poll: Did Old Spice cross the line in Mom’s Song ad?"

The Men of Huffington Post

Or, the homosexual stud-muffins of Huffington Post.

They've got a calendar for that.

I just saw Arianna tweeting on this, but here's a glimpse from May:

Meet Gay Voices editor @NoahMichelson & check out the rest of the #menofhuffpost calendar: http://t.co/TeyabEho9s pic.twitter.com/XX6aDQ9KZV
— Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) May 29, 2013

The traditional American male is dead. Masculinity is dead. No wonder everyone's so jazzed about Helen Smith's book. I need to get a copy. The homosexualization of America is in full swing.

Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage

Dr. Helen Smith, wife to Glenn Reynolds, is interviewed at the Wall Street Journal's Digital Network, via Instapundit.

The "Insta-Wife," as Glenn often calls her, has a new book, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters.

'Refuel' — BMW, the Ultimate Driving Machine

I just saw this ad yesterday and loved it!

See the BMW Blog, "Video Ad: BMW 5 Series Refuel reintroduces the “Ultimate Driving Machine” slogan."

Research Update: Sexual Attraction Will Usually Interfere With Male-Female Platonic Relationships — Especially For Men!

Well, I can attest to this by personal experience, LOL!

At London's Daily Mail, "Sex WILL always get in the way of the male-female relationship." (Click on image below for full size.)

It is perfectly normal to have friendships with the opposite sex and most people would swear that they are platonic.

But according to a new study, there is nearly always attraction between male and female friends and the most common cost is dissatisfaction with current romantic partners.

Researchers from University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire also found that in a test group of 400 adults, if there were feelings of attraction expressed from only one member of the friendship, it was most often from the man.

Associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study, April Bleske-Rechek believes that because platonic inter-sex relationships are a relatively new concept in the history of human evolution, men are still controlled by their mating instincts.

The participants in the study, which was split into two parts, ranged in age between 18-52 and the findings were reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

The first experiment split 88 pairs of friends up into different rooms and without asking anyone to identify themselves proposed a series of questions.

This exercise aimed to glean information about the individuals' attraction to their companions, desire to go on a romantic date and perception of whether their friends were interested in them romantically.

The results showed that men more frequently admitted attraction to their female friends while also overestimating their friend's romantic feelings towards them.

Women on the other hand were less likely to fancy their friends or assume that the males had those kinds of feelings for them.

It's hard out there for a hunk!

Dr. Helen Smith — 'On Fire but Blacked Out: The Thomas Ball Story'

At Pajamas Media:

As one of my commenters pointed out in a post I put up on the case, when a woman burns her husband to death in his sleep, it’s seen as a major wake-up call regarding violence against women, and is immortalized in an award-winning movie starring Farah Fawcett titled The Burning Bed.

But somehow, when a man like Thomas Ball burns himself up, it is not seen as a wake-up call for how men are treated unjustly by the court system. Instead, some “compassionate souls” see his death as yet another wake-up call regarding the needs of women. Do men ever matter to these “feminists,” or do they get pleasure out of men’s pain? I am thinking the latter.

RTWT (via Dr. Helen on Bloggger). And then compare to Rob Taylor at Red State, "The Death of Morality and the End of America." Red State? Some people writing on the right are really on the left, although they they think they're more right than the conservative right. But to be honest, the dude's not right in the head. Seriously. Psychologically FUBAR, IMHO.

Male Being and Unhappiness

An excerpt from a rant by Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon (via Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology):

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.

Adams' blog is here.

I'm interested in this primarily in that I've been following the Thomas Ball suicide. I'm politically incorrect. But I'm also happily married. Society develops normative regimes to control and satisfy men and their desires. There's something about Adams that's extremely discomfiting, and that's saying a lot. That said, Adams' rant bothers me less than Amanda Marcotte's response to Tom Ball's self-immolation. It's all wrenchingly interesting, in any case.

And here's a radical feminist take, FWIW: "Scott Adams' defense of rape mentality."

Wikipedia Removes Thomas Ball Page

And Dr. Helen Smith asks, "Why has Wikipedia removed the Thomas Ball page?"

Following the link takes us to A Voice for Men.

Now, lets imagine a world so totally twisted that the media totally blanks this as a news item. That dismissive and scant reporting of this act of political self immolation is written off with throw away lines calling you, the burned corpse – a deadbeat, a lone nut.

Imagine all that. It's pretty far-fetched, but try.

At the video, the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc in Saigon, June 11, 1963.

A Voice for Men made a copy of Thomas Ball's page.