[lbo-talk] The new disparity: women vastly outnumber men

[brad bauerly]

I think I would seek to understand this with a bit more emphasis on gender
roles.  The shifts in the economy over the last 20 odd years has aggrandized
work that is more feminine in nature or at least less hyper-masculine.
Young men know that they will not get a good paying job that uses the
physical skills that they have been taught from day one (even in the womb I
would argue people are assigned and socialized to gender roles) are an
important part of being a male.  So they either deny their socialized
masculinity (not necessarily a bad thing) and get a non-physical job or they
say fuck school in a hyper-masculinized move.  Again, I would point to the
material shifts in the economy and how this opens up and closes certain
things for differentiated groups.  Although the approach that seeks to
understand it as shifts in individual subjectivity and rationality has a lot
of interesting things to say sometimes too.

Brad