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05/27/2009: "We are witnessing the passing of working-class masculinity (concurrent with the passing of the white race)"
There used to be a lot of room in the world for men with muscle who didn't relate all that well to books or people. There was lots of dangerous and dirty work to do. They were the men who manned the ships, fished the seas, chopped down the trees and supplied the cannon fodder for countless wars. They mined the coal and made the trucks and bashed the metal in the mills. They worked exclusively alongside other men in jobs that did not require them to put on a social mask, and did not call for aptitude in managing their emotions.
This identification of masculinity with hard physical work (no empathy required) is deeply embedded in the history of the human race. For eons, it has been the most common way to be a man. People are pretty adaptable, and education can work wonders. But no matter how much education and retraining we offer, we are not going to transform factory workers and high-school dropouts into customer-care representatives or nurses' aides any time soon. It's their wives and daughters who will get those jobs. And in a world where even trash hauling has become tightly service-oriented (check out 1-800-GOT-JUNK), many of these men will be permanently stranded.
In the new world of work, the old values of working-class men are an anachronism. And what we are really asking of them is not to retrain or upgrade. We are asking them to abandon their very idea of masculinity itself.
[ The author of this isn't very clear on whether she thinks this development is a good or bad thing - but no doubt she thinks its just unavoidable anyway. In this modern society it is not just that men are expected to give up their masculinity in order to be included, but white people are being increasingly pushed out as undesirables simply on the basis of race. Laws are brought in regularly which discriminate in favour of non-whites for jobs. They are called "minorities" and yet whites have long been the minority in this global village we are supposed to embrace and either are now or will soon be the minority in every city in the west. ]
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/we-are-witnessing-the-passing-of-working-class-masculinity/article1150054/