Japanese men exhibit increasingly non-masculine traits, the world is going to end.

Today I woke up to a nice article. The topic is Japanese men, and more specifically recent statistics demonstrating that they've grown rather disaffected with the world of relationships.

Good.


From my perspective, the superficial issue with the way men and women relate on a sexual or relationship level comes down to an issue of supply and demand. Women, via slut-shaming, are commonly cast as the supply, which they are socially pressed to keep as low as possible, while men, via masculinity tests, are pushed towards trying to acquire as much of it as possible and establish it as their entire reason for being. If you try to attack just one of these roles, you'll never arrive at the solution. Like in economics, if you constrain a market away from equilibrium, you end up with either a shortage or an excess, the former of which leaves people willing to engage in the market unable to, and the latter with people unnecessarily engaging in commerce. If you instead drop the social conventions altogether (I know, easier said than done), however, things will approach equilibrium and you end up with the best sustainable society. Obviously it won't be perfect, since people are assholes, but there really isn't anything one can do it that.


Now, how does this relate to Japan? Slut-shaming in much of the Western world has diminished, but there hasn't been a corresponding drop in pressure for men to perform. Instead, groups like Pick-Up Artists instead preach about the necessity of sex to the male ego, and use it to inject thinly-disguised misogyny into the operating procedures of men's brains. Japan, which majorly exports it's culture into Western nations, is leading the charge in terms of men not having to have sex to live their lives. It's like some kind of revelation that, while sex is good under appropriate circumstances, it's not some kind of end-all-be-all manna of life. If you want to see the signs of how men are treated, look at the terms used to describe these kinds of men: "soshoku-danshi", translated as grass-eater. The concept of men being the predator, the tiger, the meat-eater, the king of the jungle, this is what Patriarchy is made of. The grass-eaters should be embraced by society as a new kind of social order, a social order that isn't dependent on social validation from one's elders. This is good, and let's hope it spreads.