Biggest forces at work:
- Aging population
- Healthcare eating the economy
- Free agency/gig work growing, full-featured paycheck jobs in retreat
- Death of the public (and social capital therefore retreating to the domestic sphere)
This trend is much more obvious to men than to women, thanks to higher human sensitivity to losses over gains. Understandably, given they are starting from a much lower base of power, gains seem trivial and the absolute gap in agency and power still seems insurmountable.
This isn’t the result of conscious, intentional political change. It is a side effect of unraveling of industrial era institutions and a sort of natural regrouping around institutions already dominated by women.
Don’t expect all guys to retreat sullenly to video games, flirt with radicalization and mass shooting fantasies, or be able to participate in the last great patriarchal show: securitization and financialization of everything. The majority will attempt entryism by masculinization.
“Bro” anything is entryist masculinization of a traditionally feminine activity.
Growth hacking = bro-marketing/PR was an early example.
1% genuinely different male approach, 9% rebranding, 90% survival desperation energy showing up in a placid place.
The essential femininity of “bro” behaviors hit me forcefully when I caught a random episode of the Bachelorette a few years ago. I was racking my brains trying to tag the dynamics and then it hit me: the word I was looking for was “catty”. The guys were competing like girls.
I was thinking recently of Virginia Woolf’s line that to write “a woman must have money and a room of her own”.
Increasingly true for men. The era of big-dick-energy male novelists writing 800 page tomes in nice wood-paneled studies while being waited on by women is over.
If work gets shallower/less meaningful and home becomes more central, the superficially “traditional” model means that men get sent out into the bullshit fray and women stay back doing everything important, no revolt necessary
I think it is oppression if there’s not much leverage, agency, or discretion in the spending and it’s largely a bill-paying chore. What’s changed is that spending has become strategic, with a lot of room for creative imagination, lifestyle choices, etc.