I'm curious, can you give examples? I hear this issue pretty loudly from the right, but not really much from the left. I know ordinary people talk about this issue, but it isn't the same as people in positions of power or influence.
A hugely shared article from 2 months ago in WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/christine...
Also in the Atlantic last year:
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/21-r...
This is just off the top of my head, but it's easy to do a Google search.
Second, an administration not having "an agenda" for an issue as intractable/abstract as mental health is not a sign that they don't genuinely care.
That said, I certainly agree that the president - in fact, all presidents, left or right - have paid no more than lip service to men's societal struggles, image issues, mental health, etc, but that is clearly not the driving thesis in this thread.
It's precisely about how while liberals are recognizing the negative effects of the crisis of masculinity, they haven't been able to converge on solutions. And how that's a problem.
Disclaimer, I'm not very familiar with either The Atlantic, nor who runs allsides.com and whatever biases they may have.
Why this is relevant to the discussion:
The gun suicide rate is up for teens: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/07/27/guns-s...
Men are far more likely commit suicide by gun: https://preventfirearmsuicide.efsgv.org/about-firearm-suicid...
Unfortunately, the news tends to focus hard on the "mass shooting" angle instead of the suicide rate when discussing safe storage and red flag laws.
This is the crux of 90% of fallacious criticisms of political parties. A lot of people in power are immoral and don't care about certain issues for identity-politics reasons, but as well there are reasonable people in power who can only give so much attention to so many topics at any given time, and some issues naturally become more associated with one party than another. In a perfect world that would be fine and everybody would understand that just because the news articles and speeches concerning a particular party don't divvy their focus on particular issues in the same manner as one personally would given one's own specific politics, that doesn't mean "the left" or "the right" "don't care" about X issue or are "silent on" issue X. That phrasing is usually an oversimplification used as an excuse to bash a party disliked by the writer/speaker for other reasons. The two specifics reasons this pattern is fallacious is:
A. It implies that the people in power generally don't care about the issue, which may only appear true if you do not have a holistic sample of their opinions and policies, which is not something the media facilitates.
B. It implies that the voter base of those people must generally agree with them on the particular issue.
Multiple Democratic presidents have not done anything substantial to address some of the issues you mentioned. Not saying that the GOP is better, they are objectively far worse. But the Democrats have squandered every chance to really help this country in meaningful drastic ways.
Shit, Biden was THE biggest friend to Corporate America while he was in the senate, and that didn't stop while he was VP, nor as President. You think someone who was completely bought and paid for by the healthcare lobby was going to allow Obama to deploy a government-backed healthcare option, instead of the mess we got with the ACA?
Are you talking about Biden, or every single Republican here?
I'm well aware that the GOP sucks, but the corporate wing of the Democratic party has put their foot down and voted with the GOP for way too long...especially on issues that are popular across the country even among different political demographics. Drug reform, immigration, education, healthcare, gun control, etc... Corporations donate lavishly to both parties because it's just too easy and cheap to do so, plus the promise of having whatever party is in power completely subservient to your interests is quite appealing if you're a CEO.
I'd love a president who actively goes out of their way to fuck Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Healthcare, Bio Oil, etc... but the last politician to attempt to do that on the national level was Bernie, and he got shafted.
Things were pretty non-masculine back in the late 70s and early 80s but nobody seems to care about that. I hate using the catch all of blaming social media but it does play a part in the attention to "issues".
I could post a bunch of links but here are two relevant ones: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/masculinity-for-the-modern... https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/boys-arent-growi...
Also the article tries to pin male graduation rates to masculinity but makes no mention of 300% tuition and crippling debt.
I hate these types of articles that try take one issue and make it the scapegoat for all these complex problems. This over simplification of lifes complexities and how much things suck really need to stop.
A common example would be the topic of male suicide, which is usually addressed as either "well, women try to kill themselves more often and that's totally not an indicator of attention seeking behavior versus genuine depression and fatigue with life" or "toxic masculinity and the patriarchy creates all of the problems for men". Both of which ignore pangender expectations and influences on the average (versus in-power) male experience.
There's no doubt that the American left (and other Western nations' equivalents) diminishes male issues or treats them as unimportant due to the perspective that men created and control all of those issues. Useful for political influence, but useless for discourse or problem solving.
The usual rhetoric I hear about toxic masculinity is very far away from the contents of that book. It is really easy to use that phrase in an aggressive way. Though, interestingly enough, Pixar’s Buzz Lightyear movie was written by someone who has thoroughly studied this. By that token, so can the contrast between Iron Man and Captain America in the MCU.
Ironically enough, some of the very problems brought up by the right can be understood in an insightful way with this lens.