No Country for Young Men
The powers that be really are conspiring to make life worse for the young American male.
It is not exactly novel to point out that there is something very wrong with American men. They’re lonely. They’re aimless. They’re sexist.
“What about men?” can be an exhausting conversation, because in truth, women and girls have worse off on a whole variety of measures, from wealth to pay to basic rights (men’s rights to make choices about their own bodies in America don’t change when they cross state lines; women’s do). If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, though, you know that I cover women’s issues to men’s at a ratio of roughly 100:1. And it’s also true that women and men don’t live in cordoned gender bubbles; we are each other’s partners, parents, children, siblings, neighbors, friends. Our lives are indelibly intertwined. Just as all of the discrimination and unfair treatment women face impacts men, too, when men suffer, many women do as well.
And I’ve been struck lately by just how determined our tech titans, corporate heads, and political leaders seem to be when it comes to exploiting — and eventually immiserating — young men.
I read this Atlantic piece (gift link) by McKay Coppins with growing alarm, as Coppins, a practicing Mormon who believes he simply does not have an addictive personality and agrees to try out sports betting for this exact magazine assignment, finds himself pulled further and further into the world of online gambling. You really should read the piece yourself, but what struck me the most was less the usual hook ‘em tactics we’ve long seen from industries from gambling to cigarettes to junk food to social media, but how phone-based sports betting has taken something that was previously one of fairly extremely popular few male-coded social activities — watching sports — and made it insular and atomized.
Coppins writes about going to a real-life sportsbook with two friends:
We settled into recliners facing a wall of massive TV screens. I had expected the sportsbook lounge to be more glamorous, more fun, than the apps I’d been using—a classic sports bar on steroids. But the communal experience I craved was curiously absent. Everyone seemed to be paying attention to different games, or rooting for different sub-outcomes within the games. I tried to bond with some guys nearby who, like me, had money on the Chargers. But they were preoccupied with a prop bet, and barely noticed when Justin Herbert completed a perfect 27-yard touchdown pass to Ladd McConkey with 45 seconds left in the first half.
Gambling had made us all care much more about the games, but it had also atomized us—taking the last and purest expression of American monoculture and turning it into a hyper-individualized, every-man-for-himself portfolio of micro-bets.
And it really is every man for himself. Sports bettors are overwhelmingly male. Compulsive sports betters are almost universally male. “Neuroscientists have sought to explain this phenomenon,” Coppins writes. “Men are, on average, less psychologically affected by financial loss than women, and more prone to optimism (rational or otherwise) about their financial future; this combination naturally leads to more risk-taking. There are complicated brain-chemistry factors involved that have to do with testosterone, and dopaminergic systems, and kappa-opioid receptors, all of which seem to add up to a Jim Gaffigan joke about how men are morons compared with their wives. Whatever the reason, the gender split is undeniable: Men make up about 70 percent of sports bettors in America and, according to one study, 98 percent of online sports bettors who qualify as ‘problem gamblers.’”
Betting platforms know this. I see virtually no ads for sports betting platforms on my social media pages. My husband, who like me is not a gambler nor much of a sports-watcher, gets them with regularity. And when you watch ads for sports betting, they’re strongly male-coded. They know the audience they’re trying to bring in, and it’s young men — and particularly less-educated young men, who may not be as savvy or sophisticated, and who may be looking for an easy fix to their financial problems. Nearly half of men believe they could land a passenger jet with zero training. Of course a lot of them also believe that they can beat the house.
Men are also significantly more likely than women to use generative AI, and male students significantly more likely to use it than female students. There are a few ways of interpreting this data. One working paper notes that “If this global disparity persists, it risks creating a self-reinforcing cycle: women’s underrepresentation in generative AI usage would lead to systems trained on data that inadequately sample women’s preferences and needs, ultimately widening existing gender disparities in technology adoption and economic opportunity.” From this vantage point, more men using AI than women affords those men a competitive edge, and trains AI toward a male default. That second concern — AI defaulting to how men experience the world — is a concern I share.
But I actually take the opposite view on the question of who is gaining (or maintaining) a competitive edge: By outsourcing more and more of their cognition and creativity to AI, men may be making themselves less functional, literally de-equipping themselves from competing in the future. They may be saving a little bit of time now (or, more likely, just taking on more and more tasks and they hand more over to the robot). But in the long run, they’re training themselves out of complex cognition and the critical, creative, and logical thinking skills that make for great human creation.
