Role models don’t have to be para social relationships with attention economy celebrities.

Look within your own community, those are the people that can have a bigger more direct effect anyway. Camp counselors, teachers, neighbors, creatives, local government officials, coaches, etc. there are all sorts of people who don’t suck who are doing great things right near you, right now, who not only have time to mentor kids, but actually want to.

Even if we accept the premise, which I do not, I still do not understand why a role model would have to be of the same gender as the child.

Can't a boy look up to the character and actions of a woman, and vice versa? Do they also need to have other matching traits, like skin color, ethnicity or sexual orientation?

I have so called mixed-race children and it would be silly to limit them to aspire to be like historical figures that look like them, because I can't even think of one example.

I also grappled with this issue until I lived in a community that was highly, highly gendered. Children naturally try to mimic the social behaviors around them. If these social behaviors are gendered, they will attempt to gender themselves and view these behaviors through the lens of social expectations of gender. Especially if they are proactively gendered by the adults in their community (i.e. socialized as male or female with explicit expectations), as most communities do.

I don't really have any beef with gender roles, but sometimes the roles communicate simply antisocial behavior. One very easy example of this is the high rate of deadbeat dads in comparison to rates of single dads. And yea, maybe some people just shouldn't be around children, but once you observe how this passes down generations with your own eyes it's very difficult to un-see.

In these situations simply having a healthy adult that does align with gender expectations on some level, but not another level, that's an alternative can equip children to make decisions about their own life and how they want gender to figure into their own self-image and relationship to the community.

What I don't get is that Andrew Tate and Elon Musk are also, erm, not very masculine by the standards of many if not most communities here in america except in the sense of "thinking being an asshole is funny". Neither is Trump, for that matter.

But the root of that problem is indoctrinating children that they are expected to follow certain paths because of their gender or skin color. Not the absence of role models that match those traits.

My sister and I were educated in a gender-agnostic fashion and neither of us fell into the trap of thinking that we must do this or that because of our gender. As a result, we each carved our own different path. I don't see why my children will be any different, unless their own peers indoctrinate them with arbitrary gender roles.

Gender roles aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Calling it "indoctrination" is unlikely to convince many to see the benefits of abandoning gender entirely (or gender roles, not sure which one you're advocating for).

You can either get along with people or not, you can either communicate with people or not, it's really up to you. But this doesn't change the fact that kids will be raised in this environment, and it's our collective responsibility to care for them regardless of how you judge the parenting. That, or we collectively bear the consequences of shirking this duty.

Anyway, what is the idea of a role model if not a positive case of indoctrination? What are we even discussing here?

> One very easy example of this is the high rate of deadbeat dads in comparison to rates of single dads.

Unlike women, men don't have a say in the birthing process but are nonetheless saddled with the consequences. Unlike women, they have no recognized right to unilaterally relinquish parenthood and the costs associated with it. Being a "deadbeat dad" is the result of a lack of agency against the legal fiction of paternal obligation. It's not like these men would prefer to be deadbeats if availed the free choice of parenthood rather than the legal imposition of it. If there was a database of every abortion undertaken and every child given away by a woman, akin to the Federal Case Registry for child support, it would be evident that women are just as likely to be deadbeats as men.

> In these situations simply having a healthy adult that does align with gender expectations on some level, but not another level, that's an alternative can equip children to make decisions about their own life and how they want gender to figure into their own self-image and relationship to the community.

In a world of 8 billion people and countless permutations of social cohesion, it takes a severe case of naïveté or hubris to believe that "healthy" is or could ever be a well-defined term and not a moving target only a small proportion of people have the wherewithal to live up to. Gender expectations are all simplifications and fictions that often put people into neat little boxes without accounting for their individual circumstances. This has done more to harm self-image than build it, especially when people fall short of these expectations and later resent themselves or the world for their perceived inadequacy to fulfill standards they never consented to.

> Unlike women, men don't have a say in the birthing process but are nonetheless saddled with the consequences.

Men don't have any say in whether or not they have unprotected sex? No. You've lost me. Not a single absentee father I've ever met has accused their baby mommas of sexual assault. That would obviously be a wildly different situation than the general trend I'm describing. It's also hugely offensive.

If you don't want kids, you have a responsibility to not have unprotected sex. Take some damn accountability for your actions and accept the consequences.

> Not a single absentee father I've ever met has accused their baby mommas of sexual assault

When did anyone say anything about sexual assault? Sexual assault isn't the only way to violate an individual's agency in matters of parenthood. But since you brought it up, there have also been cases where a male victim was raped and still had to pay child support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermesmann_v._Seyer

> If you don't want kids, you have a responsibility to not have unprotected sex. Take some damn accountability for your actions and accept the consequences.

There's more to birth than just unprotected sex. If you're suggesting that sex necessarily implies parental responsibility, that's on you to prove. The law already recognizes that sex is not an agreement to parenthood for women. However, the law is incoherent and inconsistent when it comes to men, a number of whom may not even be the biological fathers of the children they're "responsible" for.

> Unlike women, men don't have a say in the birthing process but are nonetheless saddled with the consequences.

The say is in not having sex. You have the individual agency to pay child support. If you can't, people will call you a deadbeat dad. Sorry.

> The say is in not having sex

Why is that unacceptable to say to women, but acceptable to say to men? When people say that to women they call them sexist, but the same people say that to men themselves, so obviously there is sexism here.

I think if you accept that for men, you should accept it for women, and vice versa.

> Why is that unacceptable to say to women, but acceptable to say to men?

Because this is typically in response to allegations of rape? I haven't really noticed any stigma associated with this sentiment outside of that context.

You can look up to the character and actions of people of any gender, sure!

However, a teenager in a society with gender roles is probably going to explore which of those they're going to adopt and which they're going to ignore. Could be they'll want to adopt a male gender role, in which case it's good if they've got positive examples of how to do that.

I grew up in and around factories - where I saw that skilled workers can be incredibly gentle, careful, calm, thoughtful and honest at the same time as being hard-working, providing for their family, and having a unquestionably male gender identity.

Women can model all those virtues - but they can't model them as a way of being a man.

If your teen wants to adopt a male gender role but the only examples they've seen are from the entertainment industry, they'll have a rather blinkered view.

> Can't a boy look up to the character and actions of a woman, and vice versa?

I believe, in life, girls can look up to men but boys do not look up to women. I suspect, but am not sure, that is built into the biology of each.

> I have so called mixed-race children and it would be silly to limit them to aspire to be like historical figures that look like them, because I can't even think of one example.

I agree. However, I think that we can make observations that show it does happen. E.G. the non-historical release of the Black Panther movie.

(I assume by gender you mean sex or cisgender.)

The problems facing the two sexes are different and the expectations of them are different, at least in many societies. The expectations of a young man have been around self-sacrifice, self-control, and self-reliance, and looking towards female role models for cues on that would lose a lot of nuance particular to the male condition.

Women do not have the same physical capabilities of men in either size or strength, and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of restraint. Women have, by and large, a different way of processing emotions than men, and and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of how to handle things like intense anger. Women are rewarded for consensus and co-support in a way that men are not, so you're not gonna see the same modeling of how and when to step out of line and take your licks. Women do not have the same utility in things like warfare or manual labor, and so you're not gonna see the same modeling of patriotic duty or chivalry.

It's fine and well to have role models for other purposes, mind you--plenty of great examples of other qualities--but you can't look towards women for how to be a good man with the same efficacy you can look at men. The opposite argument is of course laughed at out of hand: nobody would seriously suggest that a young woman look towards men to learn how to be a proper woman.

I see no difference in what it means to be a good person, whether you are a man or a woman.

If you find that laughable, perhaps we were raised very differently. The suggestion of learning "how to be a proper woman", as you put it, rather than "a good person" indeed suggests a degree of sexism that doesn't align with the values I embrace.

If this is true, why all male coded things are being feminised? Why are boys turning away from these things?

I think this is the wrong framing. You should not be expecting to find role models on the internet to begin with. This is not an environment designed to produce examples of healthy human life. (This was also generally true of TV, btw, excluding PBS.) I do have many people, including some men, on the internet I respect and try to model my own behavior on. None of them are trying to rake up views on YouTube, twitch, or any social media platform. hasanabi is the closest this gets and he's clearly trying to cater to teenage boys/young men and is irrelevant to my life, although I do admire his commitment to being a bulwark against reactionary takes.

Secondly, we need to be teaching emotional identification, regulation, and how to make yourself happy without comparing yourself to others. How to be a valuable member of a community. None of this is specific to men, of course, but the masculinity of that will reveal itself in how people choose to present themselves—nobody is saying men shouldn't try to provide for the people around them or shouldn't protect them or shouldn't be a basis of emotional stability. Notably, it's also masculine (to others) to abandon your family and community. Two very different conceptions that are equally real in our society. If you start from the assumption of some platonic ideal of "masculinity" you'll end up very confused.

If you can figure out how to sell this to a bunch of teenage boys you can conquer the world. Personally, I think men are gonna need to feel a generation of pain or two before the obvious incentives are going to align with boys learning to take care of themselves.

All of my role models as a child were fictional characters, only about half of them were men, and little of their attraction had to do with helping me feel secure in my masculinity. So perhaps I'm just missing the point entirely.

LeBron James, Michael Phelps, Richard Feynman, Keanu Reeves, Fred Rogers, Desmond Tutu, Linus Torvalds, Elie Wiesel.

Media centrality somewhat matters

Make a large enough list of men, I’ll find the example of why any of these folks are terrible role models.

Linus Torvalds famously loves to verbally abuse others working with him, just for one small example…

So?

Doesn’t mean he can’t be a role model. Just don’t emulate all behaviour exactly from any person.

People have flaws. Every single one of them.

The issue is that one has no control over what gets modeled by those looking at "role models".

Many of the best role models are the kind of folks who large systems or structures refuse to teach about en mass because these role models are uniquely subversive. Malcolm X vs Martin Luther King Jr being the classic example of this.

I know that list was off the top of your head, but if a quickly-assembled list of male role models includes guys who died almost 40 years ago that probably indicates that there aren't enough of them.

This is the most boomer comment I’ve ever read. On what planet are these any child’s role model? Elie Wiesel? Desmond Tutu? Those are like NPR lifetime achievement award winners, they have no social capital among any generic guy under 18. 0

How can you say that no positive male role models exist when the most positive male role model Northernlion streams Monday through Friday from 12-5pm

Any non bold role models?

No

I have no kids, but perhaps positive role models can be found in more specific categories like music. For example, I think Jacob Collier sets a great example. And I think my parents had similar concerns. I was raised on gangster rap and Eminem, and my parents were very concerned about that. But overall, I think I turned out alright. My feeling is that it’s much more important to have role models closer to home. The light that Elon Musk and Andrew Tate are cast in can be greatly influenced by the people around your kids if not directly by parents

Shouldn’t a parent be a role model of their own

Oh yeah, you are, but I'm talking about outside in the culture. This becomes very important in the teens.

> This becomes very important in the teens.

It's the parent's job to make sure it doesn't. Glorifying hyper-successful figures isn't healthy without understanding how they came to be hyper-successful (99% cases it's inheritance/nepotism/luck).

For a teenager that is not locked and isolated?

When I think about it, it makes sense.

By the way, could you share some female role models who appeal to girls? What I noticed is that some people look good when viewed at a distance. But it sometimes happens that when you look closer, or time passes, the people who seemed very positive (Bill Cosby and many others) show some other aspects.

Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo.

Hell, even AOC or Kamala Harriss altrought not cool, they are not openly toxic. There is no female equivalent of Trump o, you have to be a man to consistently fail upwards and be enabled that consistently.

What did we, as a society, expect, after nonstop browbeating, criticism, tone policing, and pathologizing of all expressions of traditional or stereotypical masculinity (for the last decade from more or less all of academia, corporate newsrooms, marketing departments and ad agencies, HR departments have more or less socially ostracized most natural male behavior, including very non-toxic male bonding behaviors, like having heated but respectful ideological debates). This even extends to what essentially amounts to pharmacological abuse of boys - when 8 year old boys full of energy can't sit still and pay attention to a boring middle-aged women dispassionately lecturing about boring grammar, the boy is ruled cognitively defective (ADHD) and prescribed powerful amphetamines, nearly as a default course of action!

We have bent over backwards as a society to accomodate women where society was previously was much more genuinely unfair to women than it is right now. Women are heavily preferred over men in hiring, resumes otherwise identical. Try submitting your own resume to several dozen companies, half with your real name, half with a name that conveys the opposite gender. Almost nobody ever actually does this and thus nobody ever seems to recognize it's true, it's just shouted down as "misogynistic" while completely ignoring the point that men genuinely are disadvantaged and women are genuinely privileged in many (but not all) aspects of society today.

There are dozens of homeless shelter beds available to women and children only for every 1 bed available to homeless adult men. Young women have access to more gender-specific scholarships than men do, even though women now outnumber men in both university admissions, university graduations, and job placement. Unmarried women under 30 in major metro areas have already been out-earning their male peers for a decade now.

Yes there is still an economic penalty for motherhood, and yes all of the advances we've made in women having equal rights are fantastic and wonderful examples of progress in the right direction, and yes, there is still more work to be done to advance the interests of women's rights and equality.

I think we can and should be trying to advance the rights and equality and well-being of both men and women. It doesn't need to be a either-or or a win/lose. Win/win solutions are possible.

That said, until the left is ready to stop verbally assaulting anyone who questions whether loading up young boys with amphetamines is a good idea as "misogynistic", I'm not sure where the strong, positive, kind, respectful male role models are supposed to be coming from.

I'm not advocating for reducing the support we offer to women, I'm advocating for increasing the support (not necessarily financial, even just emotional support and interpersonal kindness goes a long way) for boys and men.

Women tend to be pretty skilled at setting up healthy support networks for themselves, men seem to struggle with this much more. Many men are socially isolated, touch deprived (haven't even been hugged in months or years), and have been subject to physical, emotional, or even SA. But any time these issues are brought up, the immediate reaction is judgement and condemnation - there's an automatic assumption that those men must have done something wrong, and that is just how people respond to their actions, but that's just as much an example of uninformed victim-blaming as people criticizing the clothing choices of women who've been SA'd.

We have to be willing to recognize that not all boys and men are inherently evil, stop mentally accusing them of being inherently evil before taking the time to understand their lived experiences, and treat them with the same respect and decency we expect women to be treated with.

And no, I don't mean to excuse, justify, or defend actual toxic masculinity traits like bullying, SA, being socially domineering, etc. Those are still serious social ills that must be addressed by our society, including with criminal charges when appropriate.

It would just be nice if those men didn't get sentences that were twice as long on average as women do for committing the exact same crime. For some reason, this is morally reprensible when it's being done to ethnic minorities, but everyone seems to think it's perfectly fine when it happens to men.

I don't 100% disagree with this, but I think it's being way exaggerated.

There has definitely been an overcorrected counter-reaction in popular culture since the 1970s and 1980s where you all the sudden see lots of sitcoms and films depicting men as incompetent, weak, etc. and the women as more competent and well adjusted. The Simpsons comes to mind as a classic example. This is a reaction against the fact that up until the 1970s virtually all women in popular culture were depicted as borderline children, with rare exceptions.

Still: I can with no difficulty list many strong male leads in media from this era onward. They're not hard to find. My wife and I just got done binging The Expanse, which had many including the main character (as well as many strong female characters). Action and comic book films are loaded with down-right ridiculously over-powered male leads.

Are modern HR departments too strait-laced? Yeah, they probably are, and this too is probably an over-correction. It's a reaction to the days when sexual harassment of women in the workplace was just standard expected behavior, and in many cases a woman was expected to "put out" for her superiors to rise in certain professions. It probably is possible for HR to chill out a little without us going back there.

Is there a need for more positive depictions of men in popular culture and better male role models? Why yes, that's what I'm arguing. I don't think there are enough, and I think the "manosphere" mostly pushes misogynistic trash and a desperate caricature of masculinity that comes of -- to me at least -- as weak and pathetic. It comes off that way to most women too. A guy saying he's an "alpha male" is identifying himself as fragile and emotionally stunted.

> This even extends to what essentially amounts to pharmacological abuse of boys - when 8 year old boys full of energy can't sit still and pay attention to a boring middle-aged women dispassionately lecturing about boring grammar, the boy is ruled cognitively defective (ADHD) and prescribed powerful amphetamines, nearly as a default course of action!

This is a hill I will die on, because I've seen it first hand: ADD/ADHD is absolutely 100% real.

Is it sometimes mis-diagnosed or over-diagnosed? Sure. But I have seen -- in my immediate friend and family circles -- many cases of people of all ages for whom ADD treatment was absolutely transformative. Like going from "possibly developmentally disabled, unable to learn to read" to straight A student. I've seen some adult examples too.

It's like this: about 60% of the population wear or could benefit from glasses, contacts, or some other kind of vision correction. That's more than half. Why? Because if it doesn't stop you from reproducing, it stays in the gene pool. Having perfect vision was not a requirement for survival, so evolution did not hyper-optimize for it.

Why wouldn't the same thing be true for things like the brain and central nervous system? It would be surprising if half the population weren't walking around with brains that, if mildly tweaked, could function much better.

Do eyeglasses emasculate men? Is it more masculine to be unable to read small text, or unable to make things out from a distance?

BTW -- plenty of girls have ADD/ADHD. It is not gender-specific. I would be willing to believe that it might be over-diagnosed in men, but it's probably under-diagnosed in women. A woman who can't focus and is either a manic-pixie-dream-girl or too passive carries less of a social stigma than these things do for a man.