Men, Withdrawing From Work and Life
Understanding the gender wars from the inside out
Darby Saxbe, a psychologist and Substacker, has been publishing a series on feminism and men (“Has Feminism Been Bad for Men?”), the most recent of which is here. They’re all worth reading. In this latest article she covers feminism’s impact on men in “culture, specifically education, male mental health, and misandry” and touches on this idea that men have withdrawn from certain parts of working and public life, and why that is.
She doesn’t dwell on it but that has raised all kinds of political and cultural problems that respectable parts of our culture are continually wrestling with, including a couple of I don’t really believe are happening such as inreased male “toxicity” and a drift towards political extremism. I’ve written about both the problems (such as they are) and the system responses a number of times, see here, here and here.
Without disagreeing with anything she said, I wanted to elaborate on the few of the points and add a male perspective, because I think understanding these problems from the inside out - not the fact of them so much as how they are subjectively experienced - is often what’s missing. (Darby is thoughful and empathetic and that’s not a criticism of her.)
