• Pentacat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    18 hours ago

    Not bagging on you, but men mature late. People also tend to learn from experience and relationships in high school tend to be mutual torment in a lot of ways. Boys/men, being on the winning end of that, snap out of it later because they don’t see the problem until a few heartbreaks.

    • I’ve heard that statement a lot, but absent the context of what “maturity” means, it doesn’t explain much about the social process of men’s prolonged immaturity

      we can also trouble this idea by pointing out the devaluation of young men in extremely patriarchal, heteronormative communities, where they are treated as a nuisance to be discarded to reduce competition for younger women and older men pairings. whether exiled by religious leaders or driven to the remote man camps of the oil fields by political economy to “find their fortune” (re: permission and place among stabilized, complex community).

      I think unless we are willing to dig deeper into what this society indoctrinates young men to believe about themselves and the expectations they internalize in that window of early adulthood, we won’t get far in liberating ourselves from its shackles or their generational regrowth.

      this story has been going on a lot longer than Andrew Tate and the manosphere, the PUA grifters, etc. certainly it has metastasized, but the foundations were already old when my grandparents were young.

      • Pentacat [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 hours ago

        For sure. It’s a recipe that has been around for decades, but today’s “solution”—due to the internet—is more troubling in part because a lot of those old economic “opportunities” have dried up. The culture doesn’t even offer the old, shitty ways for men to “make it” anymore.