I don't think men should be compelled to take that role any more than women should be compelled to have children, but I do think it's a role we slot into naturally.
Just because we can't give birth doesn't mean our only use is violence or hard labor.
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One challenge here is the broad generalizations of how men and women “are”, and that any skills / abilities / proclivities humans have must be tossed in one of these two buckets, but never both. Does not compute.
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I agree. I am not objecting to it.
What I am trying to say is that, given the vast majority of women can bear children and, well, no men can, we have some job openings in high-risk-to reproductive-health-fields, even in the event that women could do everything better than us.
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This is not some kind of attempt to label "natural" roles (except that, typically, women can give birth and men can fertilize eggs), but rather to say that the conservative image of man as warrior or worker ONLY is ridiculously naive and a bit condescending.
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I realize I'm always putting myself at risk of being branded as a gender fundamentalist, since they employ such arguments in bad faith.
But I think it's a real antidote to male despair to realize we can take risks with fewer repercussions than women, and to embrace that.
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And not, for example, that you have to be some fictional "alpha male" to get something good out of your life.
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Peterson is completely right to point to male depression and suicide rates being very problematic.
It is true that the traditional roles are dying, and no new roles are offered up. This is a problem.
He just happens to be offering bad solutions.
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Ironically this doesn't seem to be much of a problem in Norway, both as it is and as I remember it, so I can understand if it's a confusing premise.
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I do think that part of his appeal is coming at that question directly. The moment in the NYT piece where he tells that young client “of course you are depressed, your situation sucks” is very affecting.
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Exactly. I've wondered about doing the same thing, minus the conservative crank angle, but, in an ironic echo of Peterson, I hadn't thought my life was together enough to qualify.
Maybe in a decade or so.
Out of curiosity, why is the popular answer to this question typically something about taking responsibility for yourself, and not about making the bigger system better?
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The latter is orders of magnitude more difficult than the former.
However, they're not unrelated.
I always love citing this: vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?
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