Why, a hexvex of course!

  • 4 Posts
  • 269 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Often people say “life is what you make of it”, but that’s not quite true. You can try to steer your life by your actions, but in reality fortune plays a greater role than you can imagine.

    I have been very fortunate in my life, most people I know have not been. From broken dreams, blossoming mental illness, to just plain old death - a lot of the people I care about have been robbed of joy in their lives.

    It’s not something they gave up through weakness of character, it was something taken from them. When you are young, you’ve maybe only had a couple of bad rolls, but when you’re older odds are you’ll be worse off (the probability of misfortune often being higher than that of fortune).


  • I think this is an agree to disagree point - my view is that the need to socialise men is only half the solution, and that tackling the rampant socially acceptable iniquity would be a more urgent one (as the longer it goes on, the more disruptive the eventual correction).

    Maybe we should try both, surely one dies not preclude the other? That way we’ll be sure to fix the issue!


  • You raise some excellent points here, however I’m not entirely swayed.

    Your point about raising men with a good social culture is a good one, however it has its roots in the fallacy which really lies at the heart of the matter - that only men need fixing.

    As a man, I’ve sat through a work conversation where a group of women (including my direct senior) have openly denigrated men in humour (I found it edgily funny). If it had been the other way around, the men involved would be talking to HR the next day, no laughs involved. The standards to which both parties are held need to be the same, though what those standards are is anybody’s guess.

    Equality, equity, justice: that lovely ladder graphic. If you give students extra resources, their outcomes are better. “Women in stem”, “women’s networking day”, all aimed in one place at one group. In our drive to redress imbalance against women, we have created one against men. It isn’t the fact that young men feel isolated and need socialising that’s stopping them, it’s the fact that the deck is rigged against them and we celebrate that rigging.

    What you see with the “manosphere” (never heard it called that before, I like the name), is the froth and bubbles. The boys who are angry, but who can’t do anything about it, are the ones who tumble in there and become monsters instead.

    The solution isn’t simple, and while socialisation will help a little, there needs to be fundamental changes to the social world before we can move forward. If your argument were to be, say, socialising both men and women to be kinder to one another, I’d be with you.