> you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men.
There's no reason to believe such a society can exist any more than believing it's possible for a thing to be both dry and wet at the same time. It's dubious whether such a society is even desirable, and even if it is, it's been debated since time immemorial and isn't a practical way to address real world issues. You might as well ask why the world can't be more like Star Trek.
If a society equally values the contributions of men and women in all contexts, then, by definition, it must be using an inequitable metric to ascribe value to their contributions.
No two people are identical, and the range of difference between the two most extreme men almost certainly exceeds the range of difference between the most woman-like men and the most man-like women. Given the obvious differences between humans, nobody expects that every single person will contribute identical value, or should be valued identically.
However, there is a very, very, very long history of the inverse. In nearly every area of life, the activities and contributions most commonly fulfilled by women are under-valued, while the activities and contributions most commonly fulfilled by men are over-valued. This can be seen historically, as the primary occupants of careers shifted from one sex to the other. The early computer programmers (women) were treated as doing secretarial work, while modern computer programmers (mostly men) are compensated like rock stars. Conversely, early school teachers were highly respected and well-compensated when they were mostly men, and respect and compensation both dropped relative to other careers as teachers became more likely to be women.
These are systemic biases so ingrained that we don't think about them. People are lining up to respond to this comment to helpfully explain to me that those earlier programmers weren't the same, or that modern teachers are every bit as respected and well-compensated as they should be, or whatever.
The Venn diagram of all men and all women is not a circle, because of course there are differences. But there is much overlap between the two circles, and women are mostly not valued equally where the circles overlap, and the non-overlapping areas of each circle are valued completely differently as well.
When you see it, it's clear as day. When you don't or won't, it sounds silly. Feel free to dig in to the truth of it, or dismiss it as folklore.
I could easily do the same and claim that men are undervalued. They are sacrificed in wars, make up the main portion of the homeless and they do the hardest and dirtiest work to provide the modern infrastructure of the world.
They have no support structure, can't fail and are constantly pissed on in culture and media.
Neither of us is telling the whole story.
My point was to focus on the center of the venn diagram, where men and women do the same or similar jobs, especially jobs in which the balance has shifted over time, so that we can see that even in the midst of a general undervaluing of humans, separate from the extreme undervaluing that happens at the edges, women are undervalued even more than usual.
For some reason, many people find it hard to understand this.
One can still compute a mean afterward and potentially find that it differs, but that is no judgment of inherent value / not a causative factor for the value judgment being made.
And even then, there might sometimes be benefit to treating people more equally than they are on some metrics. Maximizing efficiency often means sacrificing resiliency, after all.
In my opinion, the only thing we should do with that information is accept that (1) men and women are different, (2) disparity of outcome may be the result of those differences, as opposed to systemic bias, and (3) insisting on equality of outcome will, invariably, produce grossly inequitable results in some contexts.
You are wrong. Feminism as a broad social movement, and as an academic discipline, explicitly sought to question and attack the social structures and behaviors that were often insisted to be "innate" about female psychology and well being. Basically no one would find that offensive today. It's profoundly mainstream.
Many more people would find it offensive to imply that social media addiction, or that an increasing trend of suicidal ideation as a result of social media use, is somehow a result of femaleness tout-court. That's downright archaic.
Social media companies take advantage of the ways women are socialized into an incredible and unnecessary focus on their bodies by pouring rocket fuel on it.
> You are wrong
But also:
> Many more people would find it offensive ... Is somehow a result of femaleness tout-court
But the person you're replying to seems to be saying that if there is some ingrained female-related cause, it couldn't be discussed today.
How does the second thing I quoted from you not directly agree with the comment you replied to?
On the other hand, the entire posted article goes at length to study the social impact of social media for young people and young girls in particular and routinely references the heightened effect of the hyper focus on bodies for young girls.
Their comment is just a naked assertion. Would people find it offensive? Well, if the entire basis for your point is a strawman, then yes. But as far as I can tell, there is no causal evidence between femaleness and social media addiction or suicidal ideation. The need to leap to biological causation is unwarranted and unsupported.
Acting like they're already agrieved is a rhetorical slight of hand without substance.
It’s hardly fair to call that a “leap”, especially given the comparatively limited body of evidence in support of your preferred hypothesis.
And yet the charts look wildly different.
That said, much of those studies where later found to be mostly wrong, and testosterone tend to be a bad predictor and a very weak influence on behavior. It seems more that hormones have a stronger influence on shaping culture than it has on shaping behavior.
Please, present reputable published evidence for "innate" biological causation for the female sex in relation to the mental health effects of social media use and its impact on suicidal ideation. The absence of evidence is the not the proof of some grand conspiracy.
For instance, a greater tendency among girls to express aggression through social violence rather than physical violence is universal across all cultures. Few would say this is not an inmate difference, and it has obvious roots in sexual dimorphism. This is significant with respect to social media because you can't punch someone through a screen, but it amplifies the ability to carry out social violence. Group chats, and threads denouncing rivals are a very effective tool of social violence.
Failure to recognize this innate difference in how boys and girls express aggression could lead to platforms failing to recognize the importance of curtailing this behavior, leading to greater harm.
The world can be more like Star Trek, and might move in that direction a bit more quickly if there weren't so many people premature playing a victim before they try to undermine the effort.
Second no, just because Haidt is not advocating in his bodies of work for feminism doesn't mean he is against a more equal society.
Before absconding boys from harm, maybe we should check twice on their health. They are often forgotten or their difficulties brushed off in studies. How are addictions progressing? Obesity maybe? Why are they all on 9Gag? Let’s check their level of racism and misogyny, it might be a proxy for self-esteem. Have right-wing groups gotten more expressive recently? Are we taking proper care of the boys?
Can we ensure, if we measure something where girls are particularly exposed, that we also measure an area where boys are particularly exposed, before assuming boys are exempt from harm.
> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”
Powerful stuff.
> Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men. They want a partner who is emotionally open and empathetic, the opposite of the age-old masculine ideal.
> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”
I think it’s pretty clear that the harm isn’t caused by equity, but that the equity exposes the harm caused by other things.
> Women are tiring of their stereotypical role as full-time therapist for emotionally distant men
> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”
> The same emotional deficits that hurt men in the dating pool also hamper them in forming meaningful friendships.
At first glance the article is even-handed, but reading closely you notice that not a single trait of women is described using negative terms, but men are described as needing women to be their therapists, as "not having more to give" women, and as having "emotional deficits."
This is basically an inversion of the ancient trope that women are defective men, and just as harmful.
The inversion would be if the claim was that a trait of men is causing this maladjustment, but the claim is instead that men are misprioritizing an equal relationship with a woman in favor of career and unequal relationships that they're now struggling to find.
Also I dunno if you missed this quote, but it's firmly discussing actions women are taking that impact these single men:
> Heterosexual women are getting more choosy. Women “don’t want to marry down,” to form a long-term relationship to a man with less education and earnings than herself, said Ronald Levant, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and author of several books on masculinity.
The article also ended on a hopeful note, giving an example of a group of men who do prioritize relationships, with their Man of the Year trophy, saying literally:
> “We treat friendship as a luxury, especially men,” Ritter said. “It’s a necessity.”
Given the stats on enrollment in colleges, on who is preferred for tenure track in academia, and so on and so forth, well ... that's just not gonna work out.
Of course, nobody cares about men in and of themselves, so that's not really a problem.
It's always been a selfish behavior void of love, but I suppose that one can find rationalization in needing stability and protection if one is to start a family.
Now, however, as women match earnings or even out-earn the typical guy, they still won't marry down. Which creates selection criteria of an "impossible man". Acceptably attractive, stable high earner, emotionally advanced (yeah, right).
Meanwhile, men do marry down. And none have an ever increasing list of demands. Just noticing the asymmetry here.
Anyway, men won't emotionally "improve" because that is a strictly female value assessment. We're not broken, we're just different. My girlfriend gives me a daily update of all the ups and downs and gossips in her dealing with colleagues at work. I do not give a shit about any of it, but will pretend to care.
Neither of us are broken, we're different. And that is fine.
No one is asking women to stop having careers, or stop going to college. Rather, my point is that the article treats the women's perspective unquestioningly as reality — men aren't emotionally available enough, and aren't successful enough, and those are facts, not merely biased perspectives of a single gender.
I don't know how to fix this problem. Undoing a century of feminism is a non-starter. But you can't fix this by telling men to be better. They need the same kind of societal consideration and institutional support that women get.
> it's firmly discussing actions women are taking that impact these single men
Sure, it's stating that these are things women do. But the phrasing is neutral at worst. There's no implication that women wanting to "marry up" in a world where most men are now "lower" than them is an unreasonable desire.
> Of course it's on the men to adjust
Why? How? Even if men can somehow just become more emotionally available (assuming that the problem is on the mens' side and not womens' for expecting men to act like women), how do you suggest men fix issues like not being more academically successful as women, or not earning more than them?
Boiling all this down to a single question (I'm curious how you would answer): How can you possibly reconcile a world where men and women are equal, but women still only want to marry men that are older and more successful than them?
Imagine that in this particular article we'd say to teen girls: your mental health issues are imagined, just be sane and normal. Do better.
Wildly unacceptable, but perfectly normal to talk about men that way.
Right now, single women are earning more than single men (and have greater home ownership). Yet most women would prefer than men earn more than they do. Put those two things together and you create this untenable situation where women desire only a fairly small fraction of men. And that's just from an economic perspective and what people will admit to right now, nevermind anything else.
Seems to me misandry would be a better proxy for self-esteem. I do know men who are very much misandrist. I'm not just talking about them "going woke" I'm talking about kids whose fathers abandoned them or whatever and they feel a lot of resentment when they look around and see this is a common story. As men collectively become more productive, more empathetic, less toxic, and all this stuff I only hear more and more people pleading that we ratchet up criticism of men to the point Gilette think's it's a good idea to run an ad directed by women about how men need to do better and do this and that wrong and just need to get their shit together [1]. Meaning advertising directed by women about how men aren't good enough is being paid for by men's razor sales.
Similarly, I would say that self-hating racism is a better proxy for self-esteem than racism in general. In fact this shit is out of control in Incel communities to the point they have terms like "currycels", "ricecels", etc. You know why they feel this way? Is it because they themselves are racist towards towards others? No it's generally because they look at dating site stats and see how women are racist towards them and internalise the racism of others and hate themselves.
I don't know I see the idea that the key towards self-esteem is holding people other than yourself in high esteem and think they're totally absurd on its face. If an Indian Man or Black Man or White Man or Asian Man doesn't like people like themselves, if they don't look up to proud Malcolm X like role models, their self-esteem is always going to be shit. Men nowadays are often told that their success individually or collectively is proof that they have perpetrated some wrong against another group which is this Kafkatrap where you are either an oppressor or a loser. The key to male self-esteem is eliminating self-hatred, mores than eliminating hatred of others.
I think it’s pretty awful having one gender succeed at the expense of another, whichever way around that goes. For society to be healthy we need everyone to thrive.
It's overly inclusive to insist on talking about everything all the time, lest we leave someone out... We'll talk about the men, lots of people are talking about the men, but let's take a second to talk about how women are feeling, okay?
There is a large external pressure for studies to show that there are no differences between men and women while there is also demand for studies that show negative outcomes of women in comparison to men. The same problem happens again and again with these studies in that nothing explains the negative outcomes of women. Except one explanation that is instantly discarded for being socially untenable.
The intersectionalist looks at the studies and declares, "It must be something - let's keep looking!" while the sexist takes a look and nods.
Nobody is going to risk their careers or their funding when they can continue being paid to investigate other avenues of explanation. The suffering of people will continue until a more acceptable explanation is found.
And because I don't wish to speak between the lines: There are psychological and emotional differences between men and women. And, from all the humans I've known at least, women tend to give more of a shit about the opinions of other people than men give a shit about the opinions of other people. While the toxic negativity of social media impacts both genders I would honestly be shocked if it didn't impact women more if for no reason other than because they care more.
It's lonely.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/101249738/increases-in-...
The fact that 85% of killed reporters were men...ah, well.
Men are not doing alright. And our response to it is nothing at all or...do better.
If we assume that there's really zero genetic involvement, and it's all just environment: If you treat girls like boys (have to achieve something to be valued, no inherent value), you'll get tougher girls and fewer issues with social media. But you'll also get more girls killing themselves and being violent towards others when they fail to achieve things that get them recognition.
Not sure if that's a huge improvement.
> What does it say about our society that we are not equipping girls and women in the same way?
The issue is with girls using social media, not with society somehow favoring boys and giving them all the great tools and what not. Boys are insulting each other in a shooter games or trolling people while girls are on social media. If one group hikes through a forest and another swims through a river and some of the latter drown, it's not the better equipment the hikers were given that kept them from drowning.
I'll take a stab at it:
1. During most of homo sapiens evolution as hunter gatherers, women were more likely to congregate in centralized groups while men hunted in small groups. It is documented that gossip is an integral activity among the women of a tribe moreso than their male counterparts. Without the inhibitions produced by in-person interaction, women gossiping on social media are more likely to produce negative interactions than their male counterparts who have a much lessened propensity to gossip.
2. From an evolutionary standpoint, a woman's reproductive fertility is closely associated with their appearance. Men are hardwired to pay close attention to a woman's looks whereas women are hardwired to care more about a man's ability to "protect and provide". Since social media promotes visibility of the most attractive women, this has the effect of reducing feelings of self-worth for the female users moreso than the male users.
Sounds like one of those truisms that people love to repeat. Like all other instances, this one likely isn't grounded in anything concrete
I think both ideas can be pretty toxic to their respective genders. The problems just show up differently. Social media, online bullying and body shaming hurt girls more than boys. And video game addiction, desperation due to purposelessness and suicide seem to hurt men more than women.
Every human deserves to have a life in which they flourish. We should, as much as we can, work to tackle all of these problems.
Idk. I feel like this is just culture trying to make up stories for each gender to define what deviance is supposed to look like
It reminds me of how some people gravitate towards mbti types or enneagram even though they're obviously pseudoscience
Are gender norms different though? Yes. But I don't think they should be. And the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true
Regardless of how much the differences are cultural or innate, gender specific outcomes certainly show up in the data. Eg, this chart from the linked article:
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8...
> the first step to overcoming them is disregarding the stupid stories that sound true
Yeah; it would help immensely if we could teach everybody that they're essentially healthy and worthy of love. Good, consistent parenting acts as an inoculation against these problems. When we're talking about the kids with the worst mental health outcomes, they're probably disproportionally poor, and more often than not come from single parent households. I suspect more support for struggling families would make more of a difference to the mental health outcomes of kids than somehow overcoming gender norms. It seems like a much more tractable solution, too.
Convincing regular people to not buy into the expectations of their own gender sounds like a borderline impossible task.
If the media was to be believed, video games were inevitably going to raise a generation of men ready to shoot up schools at the slightest provocation. Lots of research later, we started finding the men who grew up playing multiplayer video games were more strategic and often made better leaders. The fact that overwatch has guns doesn’t actually matter much in practice. However, the experience of getting a bunch of random people to cooperate is a lifelong skill that carries over into lots of other areas of life.
Most of what I learned about working in teams, I learned from playing world of Warcraft in my early 20s. If you can run a successful raid every week with 40 strangers, working with a team in an office is easy.
Here in Australia we play all the same video games as American kids do, and we don’t have school shootings. The problem isn’t the video games.
The Christchurch shooter was an australian (to our eternal shame). But he shot up a school in New Zealand instead of in australia because it was easier to buy guns in NZ. (Was easier. They pushed through stricter gun controls after that incident).
I hang out with fewer gun owners than many but I am from Tennessee. It is kind of like getting people to recognize the need to do something about climate change. Most everyone recognizes it as a problem now, but solutions are someone else's business. "The ability to affect the problem is upstream, what am I going to do about it? What am I supposed to do about schools, sell my gun and be without it when something crazy happens?" That is even before addressing that they can be fun, like a collectible or a sport.
The ideas tossed around are often regulations at the consumer level, and the societal momentum is thoroughly against those in general.
If an uncharacteristic law was introduced along the lines of, "no more new guns" then some in my area would begin manufacturing themselves. I already see cardboard signs advertising squirrel rifles.
Climate change might be exactly the right metaphor. Despite widespread public support for action, the australian federal government is still doing very little about the problem. Its not a good look.
And even if they were comparing themselves to others, the context of it would be in the video game, rather than what their real world circumstances are.
On one end you have lads playing video games who turn out to be good managers/workers in tech. On the other end, you have socially stunted lads who gradually find themselves falling down the "incel" rabbit hole.
Interestingly, according to modern society, girls could avoid this effect by simply choosing to identify as boys, thus making them 'really boys' and no longer affected as harshly by the psychological effects of social media
I agree that's an interesting question. I think it's that girls are (conditioned to be?) more sociable than boys. After a divorce, many more men find themselves friendless than women, because the mens' social networks were really their wives.
The stereotype that women gossip isn't wrong; women chatting about nonsense is simply maintaining social networks. Men maintain social connnections through team sports and work. I don't happen to believe it's "conditioned" - I think women are different from men, and behave differently. On the whole. (And for "women", read "girls and women")
So if women communicate verbally more than men, it's not surprising that women make greater use of social media.
The body-image thing obviously isn't about verbal communication, and I think it's a distinct phenomenon. I see a lot of young women in the street, with lots of exposed skin despite the wintery conditions; and with orange make-up applied with a trowel (they're always staring down at their fondle-slab). I don't know why young women want to look tacky, like a porn actress.
Women are valued moreso than men. Men are 10x more likely to die at work, have little to no access to domestic violence shelters, and if war comes, the only people who will be conscripted to potentially die will be men.
Men not graduating as much as women, must be mens fault for not studying enough. Women not earning the same as men, must be mens fault. Boys being isolated and depressed, must their video gameing and porn habits. Girls getting mental illness from social media, must be social expectations we stack on girls and women. Men getting worse outcomes in hospitals? Must be their behavior. Women getting worse outcomes in hospitals? Must be bias by doctors against women. Why are there more men in prisons? Must be testosterone. Why more women at home taking care of children? Must be cultural.
Any observable difference between men and women, can be describe as either being caused by external factors like social expectations or internal factors like behavior and hormones. Whenever I see researchers doing a comprehensive and deep study to explain why something is observed more in one gender than the other the usual answer is a tiny bit of biology and a huge (dominating) dose of culture. Such answer generally does not change base on gender, so if we are asking why social media is causing mental illness more in girls and boys, the answer is likely a tiny bit of biology and a huge dose of culture.
By contrast, if a man spends too much time playing video games, he’s seen as lacking discipline (something within his control), not as a victim of society or corporations (something outside of his control).
The obvious reading is that GP simply meant any cultural pressure for women to (over)value appearance (or conversely the lack of cultural immunity to such pressures), regardless of whether it comes from men or women, because it has always come from both (historically, and today).
So I fail to see how they are taking away agency from women and attributing it to men.
(2) If you live in the English-speaking parts of the West, our cultural awareness absolutely has an equivalent of this for men and boys. It’s sometimes called “toxic masculinity” (we can debate whether it’s the appropriate choice of words, but the awareness exists).
If a boy or a man man spends too much time playing video games, because he is repressing his emotions, some would certainly ask whether it’s because society has never taught him to process emotions and display vulnerability. (I had a roommate like this.)
And conversely, if a girl or woman spends too much time on social media (but stripped away from context), you’d bet “poor self-discipline” is on the list of hypotheses too in people’s minds, rightly or wrongly.
I think this is trying too hard to conjure bias _ex nihilio_, or at least lumping GP’s reasoning with what you’ve seen elsewhere.
(3) Part of what people do is influenced, or inspired, or sometimes constrained by culture. Admitting this does not take away agency from people.
flipping both axes, there’s also the perception that women today “choose to” have fewer kids, and focus instead on self-directed fulfillment. that’s the internal framing you speak of, ignoring that the ability to have this choice meaningfully sits atop a bunch of external societal change over the last century.
so… i’m not really sure how these framings get selected for that perception you and i have in the end. is it just a tendency to “glass half-empty” it? maybe coupled with the incentives of outlets which most prominently discuss these things? i can’t say i’ve spoken much about these topics with a co-ed crowd IRL.
And yes there is a "glass half-empty" aspect to it, but the aspect I want to highlight is that problem and solutions are generally framed internal when men as a demographic is described. The suggested solution is not that society should do anything to help men, but rather than men must change themselves.
Naturally we can flip this. We can creatively frame it as an historically injustice that men was forced to work exclusive to provide for women who did not support themselves, and now men are free to choose to spend time on other things like say video games. A hostile society however looks down on this and thus physiologically harming those men who choose to do something else than perusing a carer as a breadwinner for a wife and family. The problem is with society and it is society where the change should occur.
The above is obviously an extreme way to frame it and exist only illustrate how the framing impacts the discussion. I generally do not see such explicit framing when reading scientific studies, through they often align to a degree with the cultural framing that the author inhabits. Meta studies in social science often highlight when multiple studies on the same subject have conflicting results because the framing is made in conflicting cultures.
This is an extremely reductive take.
The depressing part about social media isn't just about beauty, it's about success in general. Social media made it very easy to show the image of success without actually being successful.
If you're basing your understanding of reality on social media, you will think that life is extremely unfair to you. Apparently all your friends are always eating at expensive restaurants, driving luxury cars, going on fancy vacations, and getting flowers every day.
This leads to a weird state where pretty much everyone is faking their success, but thinks everybody else's success is real. Which, if you think about, can be quite depressing.
You raise a lot of worthwhile questions. It's certainly possible this piece isn't written in good faith, or that Haidt has become fixated on a particular theory and gone into some confirmation bias spiral. This might be part of a broader push to rein in 'big tech'. I know little to nothing about him as an individual, and have doubts about his theory here, but submitted it because it seems to have the position and traction required to become a political football with longer-term ramifications.
Couldn't the why be due to (at least in part) these innate gender differences?
They're not trying to win boys' approval, instead girls' approval.
Social ranking amidst young girls is natural behavior, what changed is that the limits of the physical world that kept it in check were removed, and now we see the fly-wheel effect.
At what point did "society" ask for duck lips? Where exactly did specifically men ask for it and actively select for it? If anything, they widely reject it. The expectation for duck lips does not exist, it was spontaneously fabricated by female influencers and that puts the idea and "expectation" in young girls' heads.
In other words, for as a long as we richly reward female influencers setting exactly the wrong example and being awful role models, this carries on.
Even platforms like 4chan or reddit are less toxic in a way because they are more impersonal. That is a huge difference compared to social media where you need to present yourself and people compare themselves to each other, a main source of social pressure. One kind of platform is centered around topics, the other kind is centered around people. Twitter is perhaps a mix in between.
Do you believe the common users on a platform primarily consisting of boys do value other users more? In a way that might even be true, but it certainly isn't about the appreciation of those you communicate with.
Granted, some equations change for public figures. There is a reason there are PR agencies for that and that was even before social media.
Girls tend to impose expectations on each other. There isn't some "traditional authority" who does so. Who would that be exactly? The parents? For teenage girls?
I suggest that TikTok may not be bad at all. My feed is cats and farm animals.
But girls are higher on 'neuroticism' than boys, and I suggest that's a strong correlating aspect. Whey they are higher on that I have no idea but they are.
I'm a little confused about Haidt's pearl-clutching in this instance, when he has elsewhere argued against "coddling" and bugaboos like "intersectionality" and "identity politics". While there is certainly much to criticize in these areas, you would think one solution to this issue would be to advance a society in which women are valued equally to men. Reading between the lines of his body of work, it appears Haidt wants to return to a type of mid-century traditionalism, where children and young people are both protected and challenged by traditional adult authority figures (who are conveniently mostly people like him and his collaborators). I'm not so sure that's the direction we should be going in, but heavy-handedly cutting off the exploration at "social media as cause" certainly precludes any further analysis of an underlying dynamic.