Thanks for a substantive article. I learned a lot.
I want to introduce another set of data that I think are relevant to these massive cultural changes, even though I am not sure how they are relevant.
I turned 16 in 1964. I took my driver's license test at 8:00 in the morning on my 16th birthday in a Model A that I had restored (I passed....in case you are wondering).
Now, many teens are not even getting driver's licenses. Everybody had one in our day (my wife's and my day). And we cruised main street, just like in American Grafitti. Many kids souped up their cars, many girls had cars.
Kids these days can use a smart phone much better than we can, but wouldn't know how to shift gears in a car with a standard transmission if there was a life-and-death issue with their phones and they needed to get it to a phone doctor.
What's going on? I could do some off of the top of my head hypotheses about it, but I really don't get it.
Now cars all look the same. Unibody "SUVs." There is no beauty to them, as there were to our cars. Our cars were unique. Bob had a 53 Chevy. Keith had a 57 Chevy with a souped-up 283 in it. etc. etc.
Kids used to "meet up" in places with their cars. Now they do it sitting on their couches. Cars were the medium for socializing--face to face.
We used to LOVE our cars. And love cruising. We had a freedom that we don't see kids having these days. We went where we chose. When we chose. FREEDOM!!! (Thanks, Mel Gibson).
Many of us boys knew how to fix our cars. We learned from each other, buying parts for J.C. Whitney catalogs.
ahhh, the good old days. Go ahead, call me an old fart. I'll admit it. I need to sit on my porch and yell to kids to get off the grass. But, boy, am I glad that my days as a young fart were spent in the 50s and 60s. Driving around my Model A.....proudly.
Interestingly, I’ve noted that there’s a great deal of harmony among people attending car show/cruise night events despite what are sure to be vast political differences among attendees. It stands to reason that abilities associated with restoring and maintaining older or unusual vehicles are working-class male, so a lot of the people displaying cars are no doubt MAGA people. Yet everyone present has a good time and a lot of pleasant exchanges occur, with a lot of respect shown for the people displaying their vehicles. And since auto repair and restoration are male-coded, it’s an opportunity for all to show respect for a “male phenomenon”, which is certainly of value in an era where there’s been a lot of misandry on the Left. And there’s the patriotic and nostalgia elements too, since the most popular cars are likely to be older American-built vehicles. It’s something everyone can get behind, and a lot of families with young kids attend. In metro L.A., of course, all races attend and everyone gets along famously, sharing their appreciation for the displayed vehicles. In other words, the events are great unifiers.
I bought my first Honda in 1983, and was disappointed when I found out that there were so few colors to choose from. I think there were four. Then American manufacturers went down the same path. You and I are from the generation when a buyer could order a baby blue Cadillacs or an aqua T-Bird, and Candy Apple Red was a custom color of choice.
I do landscape painting as a hobby. I learned that the range of pigments available to artists has become more limited because the car companies no longer support production of a wide range of colors. Turns out that the auto industry has been the main source of income for the pigment producers, so as car colors go, so goes the range of pigments available to artists and house painters.
"politicians are not going to resolve the sexual identity crisis plaguing the young through new laws and executive orders."
So what? I just want males to stop stealing sports trophies from females, and I to stop forcing incarcerated women to share prison cells with males. That CAN and should be accomplished with laws and executive orders. What people do in their personal (rather than public) life is not my concern.
Most prisoners are in state institutions and practically all sports are regulated at the state level. I suppose the Feds could threaten to withhold funds as has been done in many other areas.
I take issue with the idea that women who choose to be homemakers and raise their children rather than hiring someone to "watch" their children are subordinate.
What women didn't realize when they gave up this role is that they were the most powerful person in the home, as they directed and molded the men and women of the future. Every crisis we have in society can broadly be traced back to this feminist movement.
We have children who don't know how to respect or behave. We have parents who don't know what their kids are doing in school or elsewhere. We have suicidal men whose jobs and roles as breadwinners and protectors have been taken, leaving them unmoored. We have single parent households that can barely survive, where kids lose the stability afforded those with 2 parent homes. And, we have an economy that creates make-work jobs in order to employ everyone at the lowest possible rate while we could easily employ only necessary jobs with high wages.
Ask women if they'd rather be at home with their kids. Not all, never all but you'd be surprised to find out how many of them are resentful they have to leave their kids or can't afford to have them. Societies were built over thousands of years with family units. Erase them and you erase a unit for good.
No society can survive with the current status quo of crashing childbirth and reproduction. Homosexality and transoidism are major elements of this decline, and so has been the economy which with its DEI alienates young men of marriage age and provides disinclination to form families. Government can only do so much. No political party should embrace this. The GOP is closer to a real family-friendly environment. As long as the Democrats cling to these now-outdated sexual ideas, they will continue to decline. A great place to start to understand this is George Gilder's "Men and Marriage." Almost all of his predictions are coming true.
Curious about pegging the start of the '60s in the late 50s. You could make a case that the start of the protests were in the Civil Rights movement ( Montgomery bus boycott in 1955)but it was overwhelmingly black in those days and the white reinforcements didn't arrive until the actual 60s and your article was about white people. Other analyses peg the start in 1963 (November 22, specifically). Or 1964 with the advent of The Beatles and the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. Gay rights didn't emerge as a movement until 1969 with the Stonewall incident. Of course, gay bars had existed for many years or the incident couldn't have happened in the first place. Feminism as a mass phenomenon and more open sexuality was a product of The Pill rather than the theoreticians. I think 1960 is the wrong date though. It would have to wait for sufficient market penetration (pun not intended but there is no other word) to be effective so it was gradual.
If you want to go all Islamic, you could look at the writings of Sayyid Qutb from 1949-50. He attended school at Colorado State College of Education (now University of Northern Colorado). Greeley is sort of a backwater, even today and 1949 is hard to imagine. College students in those days would have been Greatest Generation. As might be expected from the re-founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he didn't like us, especially the women. "The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.[11]" He didn't much like blacks either. "Jazz" music is his music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other. "
The end of the 60s is somewhere between Kent State (1970) and the end of the draft (officially 1973 but it started petering out several years before). Those two events changed the risk calculus on both ends.
I am interested if whether there is some sort of biological reason for the increase in "gender fluidity" and decline of interest in reproductive sex. While there have always been non-binary humans in some number, it does appear that the number has grown considerably. This could all be the result of modern social mores and what it is fashionable to confess, but might it also be at least in part due to the large amount of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our environment? High levels of estrogen mimicking compounds - contained in plastics, certain cleaning products and other modern chemicals - are known to adversely affect male fish to the point that the begin to develop ovaries. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that the prevalence of these compounds may also be affecting homo sapiens. This is something that should be addressed by governments.
There's a social reason. Women and girls have been baited with the promise that they could get jobs and play roles and behave in ways in the past were reserved for men--and then found out they couldn't. The trans ideology just rehearses the old time religion that all this guy stuff is 'gendered' male, so if they really want it, if they really have these 'male gendered' preferences, interests, and behavioral dispositions, well then they must have a male 'gender identity' or be 'non-binary' or whatever. Solution: cross-sex hormones and double masectomy. I'm a gender misfit--I have 'guy' preferences and like 'guy' stuff but I am not in some way opposite gendered, don't have any problem with my body, and I'm completely heterosexual. The problem isn't bodies: it's the imposition of social roles. Lighten up on the sex roles and there will be far fewer people declaring themselves non-binary, gender fluid, or trans.
I completely agree except that it seems pretty drastic and unfair. Can’t we just accept that women can wear pants, drive race cars, be presidents and do other thing traditionally reserved for men than require women to get mastectomies? Also, how do you explain all the men who now believe that they are women?
Until gender identity ideology came roaring out of the universities' queer and gender studies departments, very few women had the notion that they were born in the wrong body. It was almost exclusively a male phenomenon.
Some researchers believe that a substantial portion of the men with gender problems are autogynephiles, that is, men who derive sexual gratification from thinking of themselves as a woman being had sexually by a man. Some may be content simply with cross-dressing. Others may feel the need to undergo the charade known as a sex change.
This was my point: women SHOULDN'T have to get their bodies remodeled to wear pants, drive race cars, etc. What vexes me about the whole trans thing is that it's a conservative solution: fix people's bodies to fit their assigned social roles--then you don't have to change the social roles.
As to the number of men who now believe they're women current there are far fewer than vice versa. Before the NHS shut down the Tavistock Clinic that dispensed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minor there were many more girls who experienced 'late onset gender dysphoria' in their teens than boys. And this supports my suggestion because it's around puberty that girls get hit with the social gender requirements.
As for men there really aren't that many men or women overall in the population that have declared themselves trans. It's just very audible and visible now. There have always been people who have various kinds of body dysphoria--including people who want healthy limbs amputated which was in the news a few years ago. It's real. Now you don't hear about it. Now it's been taken up as a political cause.
I hap hazardly finished watching CSpan when I discovered this article. The nuclear deterrents was the subject of titterings by the NNSA. I am not a robot.
Thanks for a substantive article. I learned a lot.
I want to introduce another set of data that I think are relevant to these massive cultural changes, even though I am not sure how they are relevant.
I turned 16 in 1964. I took my driver's license test at 8:00 in the morning on my 16th birthday in a Model A that I had restored (I passed....in case you are wondering).
Now, many teens are not even getting driver's licenses. Everybody had one in our day (my wife's and my day). And we cruised main street, just like in American Grafitti. Many kids souped up their cars, many girls had cars.
Kids these days can use a smart phone much better than we can, but wouldn't know how to shift gears in a car with a standard transmission if there was a life-and-death issue with their phones and they needed to get it to a phone doctor.
What's going on? I could do some off of the top of my head hypotheses about it, but I really don't get it.
Now cars all look the same. Unibody "SUVs." There is no beauty to them, as there were to our cars. Our cars were unique. Bob had a 53 Chevy. Keith had a 57 Chevy with a souped-up 283 in it. etc. etc.
Kids used to "meet up" in places with their cars. Now they do it sitting on their couches. Cars were the medium for socializing--face to face.
We used to LOVE our cars. And love cruising. We had a freedom that we don't see kids having these days. We went where we chose. When we chose. FREEDOM!!! (Thanks, Mel Gibson).
Many of us boys knew how to fix our cars. We learned from each other, buying parts for J.C. Whitney catalogs.
ahhh, the good old days. Go ahead, call me an old fart. I'll admit it. I need to sit on my porch and yell to kids to get off the grass. But, boy, am I glad that my days as a young fart were spent in the 50s and 60s. Driving around my Model A.....proudly.
Interestingly, I’ve noted that there’s a great deal of harmony among people attending car show/cruise night events despite what are sure to be vast political differences among attendees. It stands to reason that abilities associated with restoring and maintaining older or unusual vehicles are working-class male, so a lot of the people displaying cars are no doubt MAGA people. Yet everyone present has a good time and a lot of pleasant exchanges occur, with a lot of respect shown for the people displaying their vehicles. And since auto repair and restoration are male-coded, it’s an opportunity for all to show respect for a “male phenomenon”, which is certainly of value in an era where there’s been a lot of misandry on the Left. And there’s the patriotic and nostalgia elements too, since the most popular cars are likely to be older American-built vehicles. It’s something everyone can get behind, and a lot of families with young kids attend. In metro L.A., of course, all races attend and everyone gets along famously, sharing their appreciation for the displayed vehicles. In other words, the events are great unifiers.
Great points!
I bought my first Honda in 1983, and was disappointed when I found out that there were so few colors to choose from. I think there were four. Then American manufacturers went down the same path. You and I are from the generation when a buyer could order a baby blue Cadillacs or an aqua T-Bird, and Candy Apple Red was a custom color of choice.
I do landscape painting as a hobby. I learned that the range of pigments available to artists has become more limited because the car companies no longer support production of a wide range of colors. Turns out that the auto industry has been the main source of income for the pigment producers, so as car colors go, so goes the range of pigments available to artists and house painters.
"politicians are not going to resolve the sexual identity crisis plaguing the young through new laws and executive orders."
So what? I just want males to stop stealing sports trophies from females, and I to stop forcing incarcerated women to share prison cells with males. That CAN and should be accomplished with laws and executive orders. What people do in their personal (rather than public) life is not my concern.
Most prisoners are in state institutions and practically all sports are regulated at the state level. I suppose the Feds could threaten to withhold funds as has been done in many other areas.
I take issue with the idea that women who choose to be homemakers and raise their children rather than hiring someone to "watch" their children are subordinate.
What women didn't realize when they gave up this role is that they were the most powerful person in the home, as they directed and molded the men and women of the future. Every crisis we have in society can broadly be traced back to this feminist movement.
We have children who don't know how to respect or behave. We have parents who don't know what their kids are doing in school or elsewhere. We have suicidal men whose jobs and roles as breadwinners and protectors have been taken, leaving them unmoored. We have single parent households that can barely survive, where kids lose the stability afforded those with 2 parent homes. And, we have an economy that creates make-work jobs in order to employ everyone at the lowest possible rate while we could easily employ only necessary jobs with high wages.
Ask women if they'd rather be at home with their kids. Not all, never all but you'd be surprised to find out how many of them are resentful they have to leave their kids or can't afford to have them. Societies were built over thousands of years with family units. Erase them and you erase a unit for good.
The key questions through all of this change are1)are women happier and 2) are children better off.
I find it interesting that these think pieces about culture treat males as complete afterthoughts.
It is like the opinions of women are all that matters, and males are just malfunctioning widgets that need to be re-engineered.
No society can survive with the current status quo of crashing childbirth and reproduction. Homosexality and transoidism are major elements of this decline, and so has been the economy which with its DEI alienates young men of marriage age and provides disinclination to form families. Government can only do so much. No political party should embrace this. The GOP is closer to a real family-friendly environment. As long as the Democrats cling to these now-outdated sexual ideas, they will continue to decline. A great place to start to understand this is George Gilder's "Men and Marriage." Almost all of his predictions are coming true.
Married men with kids are the engine of growth. Guys without families can get by on very little. That production and tax revenue is significant.
Curious about pegging the start of the '60s in the late 50s. You could make a case that the start of the protests were in the Civil Rights movement ( Montgomery bus boycott in 1955)but it was overwhelmingly black in those days and the white reinforcements didn't arrive until the actual 60s and your article was about white people. Other analyses peg the start in 1963 (November 22, specifically). Or 1964 with the advent of The Beatles and the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. Gay rights didn't emerge as a movement until 1969 with the Stonewall incident. Of course, gay bars had existed for many years or the incident couldn't have happened in the first place. Feminism as a mass phenomenon and more open sexuality was a product of The Pill rather than the theoreticians. I think 1960 is the wrong date though. It would have to wait for sufficient market penetration (pun not intended but there is no other word) to be effective so it was gradual.
If you want to go all Islamic, you could look at the writings of Sayyid Qutb from 1949-50. He attended school at Colorado State College of Education (now University of Northern Colorado). Greeley is sort of a backwater, even today and 1949 is hard to imagine. College students in those days would have been Greatest Generation. As might be expected from the re-founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, he didn't like us, especially the women. "The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.[11]" He didn't much like blacks either. "Jazz" music is his music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other. "
The end of the 60s is somewhere between Kent State (1970) and the end of the draft (officially 1973 but it started petering out several years before). Those two events changed the risk calculus on both ends.
I am interested if whether there is some sort of biological reason for the increase in "gender fluidity" and decline of interest in reproductive sex. While there have always been non-binary humans in some number, it does appear that the number has grown considerably. This could all be the result of modern social mores and what it is fashionable to confess, but might it also be at least in part due to the large amount of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our environment? High levels of estrogen mimicking compounds - contained in plastics, certain cleaning products and other modern chemicals - are known to adversely affect male fish to the point that the begin to develop ovaries. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that the prevalence of these compounds may also be affecting homo sapiens. This is something that should be addressed by governments.
There's a social reason. Women and girls have been baited with the promise that they could get jobs and play roles and behave in ways in the past were reserved for men--and then found out they couldn't. The trans ideology just rehearses the old time religion that all this guy stuff is 'gendered' male, so if they really want it, if they really have these 'male gendered' preferences, interests, and behavioral dispositions, well then they must have a male 'gender identity' or be 'non-binary' or whatever. Solution: cross-sex hormones and double masectomy. I'm a gender misfit--I have 'guy' preferences and like 'guy' stuff but I am not in some way opposite gendered, don't have any problem with my body, and I'm completely heterosexual. The problem isn't bodies: it's the imposition of social roles. Lighten up on the sex roles and there will be far fewer people declaring themselves non-binary, gender fluid, or trans.
I completely agree except that it seems pretty drastic and unfair. Can’t we just accept that women can wear pants, drive race cars, be presidents and do other thing traditionally reserved for men than require women to get mastectomies? Also, how do you explain all the men who now believe that they are women?
Until gender identity ideology came roaring out of the universities' queer and gender studies departments, very few women had the notion that they were born in the wrong body. It was almost exclusively a male phenomenon.
Some researchers believe that a substantial portion of the men with gender problems are autogynephiles, that is, men who derive sexual gratification from thinking of themselves as a woman being had sexually by a man. Some may be content simply with cross-dressing. Others may feel the need to undergo the charade known as a sex change.
Is there any explanation why there seem to be more autogynephiles tha there used to be?
This was my point: women SHOULDN'T have to get their bodies remodeled to wear pants, drive race cars, etc. What vexes me about the whole trans thing is that it's a conservative solution: fix people's bodies to fit their assigned social roles--then you don't have to change the social roles.
As to the number of men who now believe they're women current there are far fewer than vice versa. Before the NHS shut down the Tavistock Clinic that dispensed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minor there were many more girls who experienced 'late onset gender dysphoria' in their teens than boys. And this supports my suggestion because it's around puberty that girls get hit with the social gender requirements.
As for men there really aren't that many men or women overall in the population that have declared themselves trans. It's just very audible and visible now. There have always been people who have various kinds of body dysphoria--including people who want healthy limbs amputated which was in the news a few years ago. It's real. Now you don't hear about it. Now it's been taken up as a political cause.
I hap hazardly finished watching CSpan when I discovered this article. The nuclear deterrents was the subject of titterings by the NNSA. I am not a robot.