Of Boys And Men

Summary

Podcast Summary: "If Books Could Kill"
Episode: "Of Boys And Men"
Release Date: March 6, 2025
Hosts: Michael Hobbes & Peter Shamshiri

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In this compelling episode of "If Books Could Kill," hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri delve into the pressing issues facing boys and men today, guided by Richard Reeves's book, "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It." The conversation navigates through educational disparities, workplace challenges, mental health struggles, and the intricate political landscape surrounding gender issues. With a blend of humor and critical analysis, Michael and Peter offer listeners a nuanced exploration of men's contemporary struggles.

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1. Introduction to the Episode

The episode opens with a playful banter between Peter and Michael, setting a candid tone for the discussion ahead.

• [00:00] Peter: "Do it, Peter. Zing us. Zing. Give us a zing about the men and the boys."

• [00:03] Michael: "Am I doing a Boyz II Men pun or just saying dudes rock and being done with it?"

They acknowledge that this episode marks a significant departure as they step into a topic where they feel more qualified, presenting themselves as a gay man and a straight man ready to tackle gender issues sincerely.

• [00:32] Peter: "No, I think this is the first episode we've ever done where we're actually qualified to talk about the topic. We're like a gay man and a straight man."

2. Exploring "Of Boys and Men" by Richard Reeves

Peter introduces Reeves’s book, emphasizing its aim to separate genuine concerns about boys' struggles from what he perceives as biased narratives.

• [01:07] Peter: "The book is called 'Of Boys and Men.' I feel like there's been a lot of discourse about the crisis of boys, what is happening with the boys and the men, especially since the election."

3. The Education Gap

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the persistent gender achievement gap in education, where girls consistently outperform boys from early schooling through higher education.

• [05:24] Michael: "Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be school ready at age 5."

• [08:21] Michael: "Dudes rock. Dudes rock."

They scrutinize Reeves’s proposed solution of "red shirting"—holding boys back a year to align their developmental timelines with girls—and critique its practicality and potential stigmatizing effects.

• [11:15] Peter: "The first problem with this idea is childcare."

4. Workforce Challenges

Transitioning to the workplace, Michael and Peter discuss how men have been adversely affected by economic shifts, such as automation and the decline of blue-collar jobs, leading to decreased earnings compared to women.

• [30:05] Michael: "In real terms, yeah."

Reeves suggests affirmative action to encourage men to enter traditionally female-dominated fields like healthcare and education, a proposition the hosts find controversial and legally problematic.

• [31:39] Michael: "Maybe we can do an affirmative action trade."

5. Masculine Mystique and Mental Health

The hosts address the mental health crisis among men, highlighting alarming statistics on suicide rates and substance abuse. They explore societal norms that discourage emotional expression and the lack of supportive structures for men.

• [43:54] Michael: "If men in America are basically a lot more prone to suicide, then we need to look at variables that exist in America."

• [46:10] Peter: "Men are more likely to be using drugs and alcohol, and drugs and alcohol for everybody are oftentimes precursors to suicides."

They advocate for changing societal norms around masculinity to foster environments where men feel comfortable seeking help and forming meaningful relationships.

6. Political Analysis: Left vs. Right

A critical segment of the episode examines how both progressive and conservative ideologies handle men's issues, often to men's detriment.

a. Progressive Failings:

Reeves argues that the political left tends to pathologize male behavior under the guise of "toxic masculinity," preventing constructive dialogue and inadvertently pushing men towards online manosphere communities.

• [54:23] Michael: "Lacking any coherent or consistent definition, the phrase now refers to any male behavior that the user disapproves of."

b. Conservative Exacerbations:

Conversely, conservatives are critiqued for amplifying male grievances for political gain without providing substantive solutions, often fostering a sense of victimhood among men.

• [64:18] Peter: "Men asked the question about spousal earnings early in the survey were much more likely to say they would vote for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton."

The hosts highlight the detrimental effects of partisan rhetoric on men's self-perception and societal roles.

7. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Wrapping up, Michael and Peter express a mix of frustration and hope. They acknowledge the complexity of addressing men's issues amidst polarized political landscapes but emphasize the necessity of moving beyond partisan blame to find constructive, bipartisan solutions.

• [80:44] Michael: "Progressives see any move to provide more help to boys and men as a distraction from the fight for girls and women. Conservatives see any move to provide more help to girls and women as motivated by a desire to put men down."

• [81:00] Peter: "We need to come to a shared recognition that many of our boys and men are in real trouble, not of their own making and need help."

The episode underscores the urgency of addressing the multifaceted challenges faced by boys and men today, advocating for empathy, understanding, and collaborative efforts to foster gender equality that benefits all.

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Notable Quotes:

• Michael at [10:04]: "Boys drive faster because of their brains."

• Peter at [16:09]: "Why are we such worse drivers?"

• Michael at [46:10]: "Men are more likely to be using drugs and alcohol, and drugs and alcohol for everybody are oftentimes precursors to suicides."

• Peter at [53:44]: "They're classifying any male behavior they dislike as toxic masculinity."

• Michael at [59:17]: "We don't even fucking understand what consciousness comes from."

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This episode serves as a thought-provoking exploration of the systemic issues affecting boys and men, challenging listeners to reflect on societal structures, cultural norms, and the political narratives that shape gender dynamics today.

Transcript

[Peter]

Do it, Peter. Zing us. Zing. Give us a zing about the men and the boys.

[Michael]

Am I doing a Boyz II Men pun or just saying dudes rock and being done with it?

[Peter]

Just keep saying that at, like, 15 minute intervals throughout the episode. That's all I need from you as I recite tedious statistics.

[Michael]

Yeah, I can't wait to say dudes rock 25 times while you read to.

[Peter]

Me about, like, literacy rates. Yeah, they're dropping out. They're angry, they're sad.

[Michael]

I'm ready to get yelled at by everyone. It's just like two guys talking about gender issues. Maybe that's the thing is.

[Peter]

No, I think this is the first episode we've ever done where we're actually qualified to talk about the topic. We're like a gay man and a straight man.

[Michael]

Oh, that's a good point.

[Peter]

That's why I didn't do any work for this episode. I'm a man.

[Michael]

So true.

[Peter]

Read about men.

[Michael]

All right. Okay, Peter.

[Peter]

Michael, what do you know about Of Boys and Men?

[Michael]

Finally, a book on my expertise. Dudes.

[Peter]

So the book is called Of Boys and why the Modern Male Is Struggling, why It Matters and what to Do about it by Richard Reeves. I hope the reasons why we're doing this episode are clear. I feel like there's been a lot of discourse about the crisis of boys, what is happening with the boys and the men, especially since the election. And there's so much bad faith garbage going around. Like, I also read Josh Hawley's book about this, which basically the same book, but, like, totally bad faith with no real solutions. And I have been trying for the last couple months to sort of separate the good faith crisis of boys stuff from the bad faith stuff. So we are going to attempt to do a good faith episode about a good faith book and talk about the boys.

[Michael]

Well, this is a book about men and boys, so we will not be apologizing.

[Peter]

Yep.

[Michael]

You got a problem with us? Blame God for putting us in charge.

[Peter]

Okay, so I want to just dive into the book. I think this is a good encapsulation. A lot of the good faith points that he's getting at, but then I think a couple of the blind spots as well. So I am going to send you the first couple of paragraphs.

[Michael]

I have been worrying about boys and men for 25 years. That comes with the territory when you raise three boys, all now grown men. My anxiety has spilled over into my day job. I work as a scholar at the Brookings Institution, focusing mostly on equality of opportunity or the lack thereof. Until now, I have paid most attention to the divisions of social class and race. But I am increasingly worried about gender gaps and perhaps not in the way you might expect. It has become clear to me that there are growing numbers of boys and men who are struggling in school, at work, and in the family. I used to fret about three boys and young men. Now I'm worried about millions.

[Peter]

And then he has a little bit of extra meta stuff about the book.

[Michael]

Even so, I have been reluctant to write this book. I've lost count of the number of people who advised against it. In the current political climate, highlighting the problems of boys and men is seen as a perilous undertaking. One friend, a newspaper columnist, said, I never go near these issues if I can avoid it. There's nothing but pain there. Some argue that it is a distraction from the challenges still faced by girls and women. I think this is a false choice. We can hold two thoughts in our head at once. We can be passionate about women's rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men. Sure, yeah.

[Peter]

I think his kind of conclusion here is correct. Right. There's nothing precludes you from caring about gender equality in a way that protects girls and protects boys. Like that is kind of fine. I also think one of the threads of like irritation that I had throughout this book is that he's constantly talking about like you're not even supposed to say it. There's a weird like, almost like Schrodinger's crisis of men going on where in society people are talking about this constantly. There have been numerous bestselling books, cover stories of magazines, but every single person who discusses it says we're not discussing it. A couple paragraphs later, he lists a bunch of best selling books like the End of Men. There's one called man out, there's one called Manning Up. There's one called Man Interrupted. John Gray, the Men Are From Mars guy wrote the Boy Crisis. And then Richard Reads does not mention this, but apparently Maureen Dowd wrote a book called Are Men Necessary?

[Michael]

The subtitle is Just yes and we should Respect them. Maureen Dowd.

[Peter]

So we are also going to go through roughly the same structure of the three ways in which boys are falling behind. So we've got education, work and family.

[Michael]

I just want a note to our listeners, everyone who's like, we want good faith dissections of books that are actually a little bit better. Have a really strong point. Prepare to be bored.

[Peter]

Okay?

[Michael]

I can't wait till this book gets stupid.

[Peter]

One of the Most common comments we get is like, why don't you do a good book? And like, you're gonna see how bad this is.

[Michael]

You won't admit this. I'll admit this. It's a shit talking podcast. You're like, oh, I'm doing journalism. I have 200 pages of notes. My notes are longer than the book. I'm just like Googling dumbest books 20, 25.

[Peter]

I do think the world owes me a dumb one after this. So the first thing we're gonna talk about is the gender education gap.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Peter]

This is like a very long and detailed part of the book and I'm not gonna read long excerpts because it's basically just like a litany of statistics. But I will read a couple of the statistics. So actually, let me send these to you.

[Michael]

Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be school ready. At age 5. A 6 percentage point gender gap in reading proficiency in 4th grade widens to an 11 percentage point gap by the end of 8th grade. In math, a 6 point gap favoring boys in 4th grade has shrunk to a 1 point gap by 8th grade.

[Peter]

So basically girls are ready for school earlier than boys. And this little tiny gap just gets bigger the longer they're in school.

[Michael]

And due to some sort of structural problem, girls are closing our natural God given math advantage.

[Peter]

Math is one of the only areas where like, it's either equal or boys are doing better. But like in every other subject, like, girls are like very decisively ahead.

[Michael]

Oh, you mean we're only better at the fundamental laws of the universe. Let's go boys.

[Peter]

Keep it. Stay in that frame, Peter. Keep that voice. Keep that voice on the rest of the time.

[Michael]

The whole time, no matter what it is. Just cheering on the boys. Let's go.

[Peter]

You know, as you follow this into college, we all kind of know this statistic that like colleges are now roughly 60% female.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Peter]

He also mentions that basically boys have benefited from a massive nationwide affirmative action policy for decades. So I'm going to send you these paragraphs.

[Michael]

Almost every college in the US has mostly female students. Last bastions of male dominance to fall were the Ivy League colleges. But everyone has now swung majority female. The steady feminization of college campuses may not. Is that really the terminology we're using?

[Peter]

You're supposed to say pussification. Yeah, it's pussification.

[Michael]

The vagin. Vaginafication.

[Peter]

The increasing vaginality.

[Michael]

Yes, vaginality. There's the word. The steady feminization of college campuses may not trouble too many people. But there is at least one group whose members really worry about it. Admissions officers. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, writes Jennifer Delahunty Kenyon College's former dean of admissions, fewer males and as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive. In a provocative New York Times opinion piece plaintively headlined to all the girls I've rejected, she said publicly what everyone knows privately. Standards for admission to today's most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men.

[Peter]

This is like a huge self own on the part of boys. Like, we need affirmative action to be going to college and we're still only like 40% of enrollment.

[Michael]

It almost justifies the fact that we had to keep them back, that they're doing so well at school now because it's like as soon as we let them go to school, they're better than us.

[Peter]

Yeah, I know. Dominating.

[Michael]

And now they call us stupid and they have to write books about how we're stupid.

[Peter]

There is actually like an anti sexism case for why women are attending college and doing so much better at school is literally that the returns to education are better for women. They had to go to college to get into the middle class, whereas men assumed, I don't really have to go to college and I'll be okay. Oh, I mean, how can you prove these things right? But there's like some economic work saying like that actually explains the entire gap. It's like women were behind, so they had to get educated. That was the only reliable way to get money.

[Michael]

Dudes rock. Dudes rock.

[Peter]

So again, this is an extremely well established trend that girls are doing better than boys in school. Obviously the causes of this are like, very difficult to suss out. I've noticed that most conversations about this focus on like, the US context that like, oh, it's the feminist movement or whatever, like changing understandings of gender. But like, this is a really remarkably global trend.

[Michael]

So it's like a global feminist conspiracy.

[Peter]

Yes, exactly. That's. We need to go bigger.

[Michael]

Illuminati feminism. Yeah.

[Peter]

So I read this super interesting Norwegian government report because the Scandinavian countries were some of the first to show this trend. So as. As early as 1956, girls were doing better than boys in Scandinavia. And among OECD countries, basically wealthy countries, it flipped from boys to girls, an achievement in 1966.

[Michael]

Imagine while mad Men was happening, women in Norway were doing better than.

[Peter]

It's fucking wild.

[Michael]

That's crazy.

[Peter]

What. What Reeves says is that the only thing that explains it is basically the timing of brain development between boys and girls. So Girls go through puberty about 18 months earlier than boys do. And that has all kinds of processes in the brain that are extremely important for schooling. So here is what Reeves says about.

[Michael]

Adolescence is a period when we find it harder to restrain ourselves. But the gap is much wider for boys than for girls because they have both more acceleration and less braking power. The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the CEO of the brain, are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about two years later in boys than in girls. The cerebellum, for example, reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys.

[Peter]

So basically, like, all of the things that allow you to decide, like, should I stay up late playing video games or should I do my homework and go to bed early, all of those mechanisms are appearing much earlier for girls than for boys.

[Michael]

I mean, to state the obvious, this clocks.

[Peter]

I know, right? I was thinking myself to.

[Michael]

If there's any, like, definitive quality of the teenage boy, I know it's lack of impulse control.

[Peter]

So do you know what his solution is? This is, like, the main kind of headline to come out of this and something he's talked about a lot publicly in, like, in interviews and stuff. Do you know what his solution is to the gender achievement gap?

[Michael]

My guess would be that each person transitions to the other gender right before puberty.

[Peter]

Damn it. You got there before me. My joke was gonna be that, like, the only thing we can do about this gap is puberty blockers for all American girls. We're now doing it for around 5,000 kids. We need to get that up to 25 to 30 million.

[Michael]

There's no reason to enter puberty before the brain is fully developed. At the age of 25, you rent.

[Peter]

A car, then you get armpit hair.

[Michael]

When I write an article for the Atlantic, that's like, they won't let you say it. This is what it's about.

[Peter]

So his actual solution to this is basically red shirting.

[Michael]

Hell, yeah.

[Peter]

So because boys are, like, a little bit delayed in development, if you just hold every single boy back for a year, that will essentially equalize the maturity levels of girls and boys, and then they'll start on an equal footing. This idea has actually been around since the 1970s, and so this is already roughly. I've seen different statistics, but it's somewhere between 5 and 10% of kids are held back for a year. That means that there's a decent amount of literature comparing kids who are held back for a year versus kids who are not held back for a year. And the data is very clear that kids who are held back for a year do really well.

[Michael]

That makes sense because if you put me back in fourth grade right now I would dominate every aspect from reading to math to sports.

[Peter]

So the first time I read this chapter, this idea honestly sort of sounded fine to me. Reeves has established enough credibility that I really trusted him at this point that as I was reading through this chapter, I was double checking statistics and like, everything checks out. But then once I got to the later sections of the book, I was like, okay, I think I need to circle back to the data underneath this red shirting idea. So the first problem with this idea is childcare.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

So he's like, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. We're also going to have universal pre.

[Michael]

K. I do sort of. I understand. You just, you need a place for the boys to just mill about for another year. Yeah. See, this is. As soon as something requires is a massive social program, you know, it's a no go in America.

[Peter]

So I think the thing of adding like, oh, footnote, asterisk, we're just going to add universal pre K to this does to me point to like, one of the flaws in the book that begins to show up here is that I think one of the things that is appealing to him about this is because it seems like, oh, we're just making the structural change. It's not ideological. Right. We're not like having different curricula in the classroom. We're not hiring a bunch of teachers.

[Michael]

Right. But there. But the right is going to see this and be like, oh, you think boys are dumb and weak?

[Peter]

Exactly.

[Michael]

Every guy's just graduating high school at the age of 20. You think the right's gonna be okay with that?

[Peter]

This is also something that he sort of, he kind of waves away. But if you look at the data on kids who are held back now, holding back kids that, you know, fail, you know, fourth grade or something, and so they just repeat the grade is actually like catastrophically bad for them because it's really stigmatizing. Right. It's like you get held back. The whole fucking school knows why you were held back. All of your friends are no longer in your class anymore.

[Michael]

Presumably a lot of the social stigma goes away in his situation. Right.

[Peter]

This is his argument. Yeah, that, that if it's all boys, then it's not like, well, Jeff is dumb. It's like, well, every, every boy in the class is one year older.

[Michael]

Girls are in first grade and they're just. They're just passing. They pass a room in the hallway and they're like, what's in there? It's. That's the boys your age milling.

[Peter]

It just sort of feels like, oh, man, this group of people is so broken. Every single one of them has to get this remedial thing. I mean, there's no way to prove it, right. Because it's never been tried. But to me, I don't actually think the stigma would go away. I think it's like, it would be humiliating for boys. Just like, as a class, even if you're a gifted, even if you're a smart kid, boy, you're then going to school a year later. Cause, oh, you can't handle it. Your sister is more mature than you.

[Michael]

Right. Or you have to test up or something like that because you know that some parents would want their kids to have access to first grade or whatever when the girls do. So you'd probably implement a testing system or something like that. You can see it being tricky very immediately. And I think what this requires is a nationwide consensus that boys are biologically dumber at this age. And there is no way that you're going to get people to believe that that is true.

[Peter]

It's also not true. I mean, I also looked into the biological evidence on this. It's the whole biological theory is that, like, boys are worse at controlling their impulses, and boy brains and girl brains are different. And the actual evidence that there's a sort of biological basis for this kind of behavior is pretty thin. I mean, brain evidence is, like, pretty hard to link to behavior because we're just talking about regions of the brain, right? It's like, well, boys, boy brains have this part that's bigger, and girl brains are, like, a little bit denser. But to then say, like, that's why girls do homework, it's like, well, maybe it could be also that they're socialized to do homework.

[Michael]

I mean, we don't even fucking. We barely understand what consciousness comes from.

[Peter]

Yeah, exactly.

[Michael]

So the idea that we understand exactly where impulse control comes from. Right. Is a little misguided.

[Peter]

Also, even this thing of, like, boys have worse impulse control than girls, even that is just like a thing that people say. It's kind of an urban legend. Girls have different impulses than boys. And what happens during adolescence is it's true that you have a huge increase in your. It's called sensation seeking. Like, you want things that give you pleasure, but at the same time, you're Also getting much more ability to control your impulses.

[Michael]

Okay, so earlier when I said everyone sees the gap between boys and girls, you just let me reinvent you.

[Peter]

I let you do that because I was gonna.

[Michael]

Interesting.

[Peter]

This is what I do on this show. I'm like, yes, yes, Peter, wait six minutes.

[Michael]

There are things that feel related to impulse control that you see, like teenage girls get into that you just tend not to see teenage boys get into. And I always wonder how socialized that is versus, you know, some developmental brain shit or whatever. Boys would never do the Slender man killings. It's not a morality thing. It's that the lore is too deep.

[Peter]

I mean, one thing that really stuck out to me and that I really remember from this period in my life too, is that when you go through puberty, yes, you have more impulses, yes, you have more ability to control your impulses. But at the same time, you also start to care what other people think about you. This sort of hormonal blast that you get is part of what makes you aware of, like, am I popular? Do other people like me? How am I fitting in? Like, this is really when, like, teen hierarchies start to form. And so the fact that people's behavior changes around like 12, 13 could be the biology of the brain. Like, their myelin sheaths are getting thicker, but it could also just be like, well, they care about what other people think. Like, it's just so hard to untangle this stuff.

[Michael]

Why are we such worse drivers?

[Peter]

That's actually such a fascinating example to me because part of that is probably like, boys are more risk seeking. Like, you can easily say that's like a biological thing or like there's some evolutionary crank shit that I'm like, totally skipping. So I'm like, boys, Boys had to be risk taking to fight mammoths or whatever. Fine, Right. Also, like, boys are also socialized in a way to be like, you're a fucking pussy if you drive slow. So, like, are boys driving fast because of brains or because of social. We just don't know.

[Michael]

The only way to know would be to find one of those boys who was raised by wolves and give him a car and see how fast he goes.

[Peter]

This society wide thing that he's proposing, that has never been done, by the way. There's never been a randomized control trial of this. Proposing this for the entire country at once basically relies on a little bit, at least unestablished biological theory. And then also the evidence for red shirting itself is pretty thin. Mostly because it is true at the most basic level that like, boys who are held back a year do a lot better. However, most parents who hold back their kids are like really wealthy parents who read like cute books about like cute little one weird trick ideas to help their kids do better in school. So the idea of red shirting was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.

[Michael]

This is why 3 weeks ago you texted me being like, did we talk about red shirting?

[Peter]

Exactly.

[Michael]

When we discussed outliers. And I was like, that was two and a half years ago.

[Peter]

I had to check the transcript. I was like, did we talk about it? I don't want to talk shit on anybody who does this with their boys. I think there's all kinds of reasons why you would or would not do this. I'm not judging anybody. But as a policy for every single boy in the country, there's not that much evidence. And to the extent that we can say anything, there's a couple of natural experiments where because this has become such a craze, some states have changed their criteria for birthdays and they'll move the cutoff up to, all of a sudden you have boys who would have been in first grade, they're now going a year later. And so we do have some data on that. But it appears that at first you do see huge gains. If you're a year older than the other kindergartners, you're 20% older than the.

[Michael]

Other kids, and then it decreases.

[Peter]

Yeah. By the time you're a freshman in high school, you're 3% older than the other kids. There's also the last thing I want to mention is that if you look at the studies, even the ones that, that Richard Reeves cites in his book, Race and Socioeconomic class have a way bigger effect than like your birth month.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

It's perfect Malcolm Gladwell bait. Right. It's like, did you know that like, boys born in October do better than boys born in December?

[Michael]

Yeah, yeah.

[Peter]

But like, we're talking about tiny little things. And then if the main determinants of like, outcomes and stuff is mostly like, how rich are your parents and like, how good is the school that you go to.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

It just isn't the case that like, we can one weird trick our way to like, the gender achievement gap going away.

[Michael]

You can't talk about nationwide massive societal change kind of solutions when we haven't even quite pinpointed the problem. Right. Like, we have ideas.

[Peter]

Right.

[Michael]

I don't think from what I've heard that we know enough to be like, pass A law boys have to start school later.

[Peter]

Before we move on to the work stuff, I just want to talk really briefly about, like the actual causes of the gender achievement gap or at least the extent to which we know what they are. The researchers seem to have settled on this thing like kind of conscientiousness, or they call them non cognitive skills, that boys and girls are roughly the same amount of intelligence. Like, boys are not dumber than girls, but girls are much higher in conscientiousness and other sort of like, I can get things done, like putting off gratification kinds of skills. To me, it's like, this stuff is really interesting, but also it doesn't really solve the problem, right? It's like, why are boys falling behind? Ah, they're less conscientious. Well, why are they less conscientious? Then we're just back to like, is it biology or is it socialization?

[Michael]

Again, because we're punishing boys who lash in class. They get yelled at and then they don't do as well in school. And I speak from personal experience. I got yelled at all the time.

[Peter]

And look where you are now.

[Michael]

And now I'm a podcaster.

[Peter]

You should do scared straight presentations in middle schools. And now I'm a podcaster.

[Michael]

As a young boy, back when I was on my ADHD meds, I was a gifted student. It was when I went off the meds that they were like, oh, you're actually stupid. You're actually dumb as hell.

[Peter]

It was the Adderall the whole time.

[Michael]

That was just chemical.

[Peter]

So there is actually some evidence that boys are discriminated against in school. So boys tend to do better on things like standardized tests where there's no teacher discretion, where it's just like, you fill in the bubbles and everybody's graded on the same criteria when they aren't.

[Michael]

There to judge us.

[Peter]

Well, honestly, like, as soon as there's teacher discretion, it's like an essay or whatever. Like, teachers know the kids. Teachers are overwhelmingly female, especially in earlier grades, especially in elementary school. And so it's fairly plausible that teachers might just be giving less grace to boys, especially considering that boys are much more likely to act out. They might then get into the cycle of punishment where they act out. And then teachers are like, oh, he's one of the boys that acts out. I'm not going to give him a good grade. That's at least plausible. Although there's been tons of work on this, because it's a really big deal, right? If boys are facing discrimination in schools, like systematically. It's like that is something that we should be concerned about. And so as people have looked into this more, it appears that this effect only shows up or primarily shows up for poor boys.

[Michael]

Because if you're a rich boy acting out and you get in trouble, then your obnoxious ass parents go yell at you and they don't have time for that.

[Peter]

There's this theory that basically social deprivation seems to harm boys more than girls. Boys raised by single mothers have worse outcomes in life, whereas girls raised by single mothers basically do the same as people not raised by single mothers.

[Michael]

Well, then it sounds to me like that's also discrimination, but this time from the mothers. There's no one in this world more discriminated against than the little misbehaving boy. That's my personal belief.

[Peter]

That's who you. We are getting representation. You are qualified to talk about this.

[Michael]

As a young troublemaker, when I was.

[Peter]

A kid, as a young troublemaker with a wasted life, with the outcome that you have, who has ended up where you are. New Jersey podcaster, if you would.

[Michael]

If you. I should have never told you I moved to New Jersey. If I. If you had asked 9 year old me who's got it the hardest, I would have been like, probably little boys who make trouble. Probably little boys who like to have a little bit of fun sometimes.

[Peter]

So the other thing, the other thing I wanted to say about, like the gender achievement gap is that like, it is wild how consistent it is, but it's also really interesting how much it varies. So if you look at race, Asian kids, girls are 3% more likely to graduate from high school than boys. If you look at black kids, boys are 19% less likely to graduate from high school.

[Michael]

Wow.

[Peter]

The gender gap is like everywhere. But it varies a ton across income levels, across countries. Like in some countries it's really big. In some countries it's really small. Which also indicates to me anyway, that it's fairly malleable.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

So I'm going to send you one of many charts that I'm going to send you this episode. I love sending you charts. Okay, so what are you saying? Tell me what you see.

[Michael]

This is a chart from Brookings, state by state breakdown of whether girls are more likely to graduate high school on time. Girls are more likely to graduate high school on time in every single state.

[Peter]

Yes.

[Michael]

However, the gap between girls and boys is about as or even less significant than the gap between certain states.

[Peter]

Exactly.

[Michael]

If you look at Virginia, the best performing state, boys are like 91% graduating high school on time, girls, 95. If you look at Arizona, it's like 73 and 80, something like that. So you're seeing the same gap between boys and girls. However, also seems obvious that state by state policy is playing a big role here.

[Peter]

This is precisely what I wanted to get at, is that you do see a gap between girls and boys. It's always the same trend, but in the smallest state, it's 2%. So in Vermont, girls are 2% more likely to graduate from high school, and in the worst performing state, it's 9%. So girls are 9% more likely to graduate in New Mexico. And you can also see in the trend line, you can see that as the states do better in general on kids graduating from high school on time, the gender gap tends to be smaller. They're graduating more kids and they're graduating more boys relative to girls.

[Michael]

I don't mean to open a can of worms here, but this reminds me a lot of, like, race and IQ stuff where people will be like, here's this racial gap in iq. And even if you imagine that IQ is like this very important metric, the gap that you're looking at is often less than the generational gap. When you're talking about a gap between two groups, just because it's real doesn't always mean that it's the most important thing happening.

[Peter]

Yeah. Because you've got a 20% difference in graduation rates between Arizona and Virginia.

[Michael]

Enormous gaps.

[Peter]

Right. 75% of kids are graduating versus 95% of kids. That's huge. Right. And then you've got this gender gap, which is roughly. Usually it's like 4 or 5%, but at biggest it's 9%. If we can address something, it's probably just the overall graduation rates. Like, it's really bad that there's this huge disparity.

[Michael]

What's happening in the American Southwest. Arizona and New Mexico are the worst two states.

[Peter]

It's the strip malls and the Scorpions. This is my airport bestseller. So the thing is, I want to say, yes, the gender achievement gap obviously matters. I think it's probably something to do with, like, poverty and deprivation. And there's other things that we can do. Like, there's. There's deliberate strategies that states and countries have done to, like, identify the boys that are at the highest risk for dropping out and do, like, targeted interventions on those boys.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

The biggest problem with, like, my explanation that it's like, something to do with deprivation is basically the Scandinavian countries.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Peter]

Norway and Finland have extremely high rates of income equality. And Also have huge gender gaps and have tried to close the gender gaps for literally decades and have failed. I don't want to replace Richard Reeves's like one weird trick with like another weird trick of mine, like, let's make class sizes smaller or something. Yeah, it's like countries that have been working on this for decades have not done it, and it does not appear that there's like any obvious fix.

[Michael]

Can I articulate what I believe is like a slightly good faith, ified version of the right wing theory of why this is happening?

[Peter]

Do it.

[Michael]

That there are sort of cultural elements within school administration that are biased against young boys. That teaching and school administration full of anti boy libs.

[Peter]

I read some like, fairly credible academic work that was like, kind of trying to posit this in like a polite way. Like the curriculum have changed. One of them was like, we should make sure that boys are reading literature with male protagonists.

[Michael]

Name one book that had a male protagonist that you read when you were in school.

[Peter]

There's also my favorite biological crank theory was there's this weird theory that boys, they hear different frequencies than girls and so they can't hear their female teachers.

[Michael]

Scientifically, we're just tuning these bitches out.

[Peter]

It's so dumb.

[Michael]

I actually literally can't hear women. That's. Dude, women. Women be talking. The paper, the academic paper. I know, God damn, dude, that rules. I. The audacity. The audacity to be like, I can't even hear him. I can't even hear him.

[Peter]

Okay, but to take vaguely seriously this like, bad faith case. Boys have been told that, like, masculinity is toxic and they're, you know, maybe they're afraid of raising their hands or maybe it's just like giving them really low self esteem. The problem with it, of course, I mean, first of all is the international comparisons because they have completely different sort of feminist movements in other countries, but also among the states, we just saw, like, Arkansas has one of the largest gender gaps.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

And so we don't see a clear correlation between like curricula and outcomes between girls and boys. It's not based on the content.

[Michael]

Yeah, that does seem pretty devastating to the cultural argument. Right.

[Peter]

So that was gender achievement. We've solved nothing. We learned nothing.

[Michael]

What are you talking.

[Peter]

It's a problem with no solutions.

[Michael]

We just found out that boys can't hear girls.

[Peter]

That's the only thing you're gonna remember.

[Michael]

There's gonna be one in joke running out of this episode. And it's. I can't hear women. Women speak At a frequency I can't hear my academic paper.

[Peter]

Okay, so now we are going to talk about how the boys are struggling in the workplace.

[Michael]

I will say this. We've cracked a bunch of jokes and we'll continue to crack a bunch of jokes, but there's a real issue being identified here, right? The clear gaps at the education level. And I imagine we're about to hear about more in the workplace. Due to the feminization, the increased vaginality.

[Peter]

Of HR since the 1980s, women have earned around 33% more. Men have earned 10% less.

[Michael]

In real terms, yeah.

[Peter]

Okay, if you look at like men with no high school diploma, they are earning 23% less than they did in 1979. Women are earning more, 4% more.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Peter]

If you only have a high school diploma, you didn't go to college. Men are earning 18% less, women are earning 6% more. Among Americans with bachelor's degrees, men earn about 20% more than they did in 1980. Women earn about 40% more than they did in 1980.

[Michael]

A lot of this seems like it might be a little less gendered and more about like the post union order shaking out.

[Peter]

And Reeves talks about men were concentrated in industries that were vulnerable to automation and outsourcing. All of this like sort of blue collar work has faded as this kind of like pink collar work or these like knowledge jobs have increased. So you know, you think about like nurse practitioners or various middle managers, a lot of these are kind of like knowledge work and require a lot of like what he calls is like emotional intelligence rather than kind of like technical intelligence.

[Michael]

I was waiting for us to talk about emotional intelligence.

[Peter]

He says, you know, STEM fields, women are gaining ground in that area. But the biggest growth in the economy over the last 40 years has been in what he calls a heal profession. So healthcare, education, administration and literacy. His solution is basically just like a huge. He actually says this at one point like affirmative action to get men into these like heel positions. Like getting them into these like more kind of feminine coded stuff like nursing and teaching.

[Michael]

Maybe we can do an affirmative action trade.

[Peter]

He does say that we should have a 2 to 1 hiring preference for men in these heel positions. And he's like, hell yeah.

[Michael]

Just straight up illegal discrimination.

[Peter]

And he says, he's like, before you say it's illegal, before you say it's illegal, that's, that's what's been happening in stem. If you actually look at the numbers.

[Michael]

Yeah, but not as an actual, not as an actual overt express policy. That doesn't make his thing, his idea, legal.

[Peter]

He also, he says there should be like male targeted scholarships and fellowships to get men into these fields.

[Michael]

That's about to get going. Yeah, it's guys only for scholarships from here on out.

[Peter]

So anyway, this is his plan, like a big affirmative action thing. He also has this kind of like somewhat strange section about how ultimately we're not going to get to gender parity because like people just have different preferences.

[Michael]

Hell yeah.

[Peter]

So here is him talking about the advances that have been made and potentially the limits of those advances.

[Michael]

There has been a strong movement to get more girls and women into STEM careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It has been pretty successful too. Women now account for 27% of workers in these occupations. A big jump from the 8% share in 1970, though still, of course a long way from parity. That is a big increase, but that's also a 50 year span.

[Peter]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also still three to one ratio between men and women in STEM. It's still a really big disparity.

[Michael]

Should we expect to get to 50, 50 gender parity in all these jobs? Probably not. On average. Remember, men are more attracted to things, women to people. Even under conditions of perfect gender equality, more men than women will likely choose these career paths not because of sexism or socialization, but because of real differences in preferences. Okay, how is he separating out socialization from those preferences?

[Peter]

Yeah, this is, this is one of the only places where he was laundering this weird right wing argument. Yeah, well, I don't know if we could really do much more because like they just have different preferences. And honestly, if tech was like 55% men, I feel like, honestly I'd be like, yeah, whatever.

[Michael]

Even if it gets to like six, I feel like a lot of the broader social concern starts to fall off. But like you look at the influence of tech right now on broader society and it's hard not to feel like perhaps the male dominated element of that culture is causing some slightly bigger problems than it might appear to at a glance.

[Peter]

Right, yeah. The persistent testicality of existing fields can also be a problem. And also, I mean, this is kind of what we're getting to now because the obvious counter argument to what he's saying is like, well, why should we do all this effort to put men into the workforce when men earn more than women?

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

He has a whole section where he acknowledges that among full time workers, women earn 82 cents to the dollar. Among all workers, if you include part time workers, it's 67 cents to the dollar. Which is a huge gap.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Peter]

So his argument about this is that first of all, we need to acknowledge the fact that the gender wage gap has gotten much better over time, which I don't find difficult to acknowledge at all. And I don't see, like, feminists arguing about this or like, I don't know.

[Michael]

What feminists are saying because I literally can't hear them. But.

[Peter]

Even their writing, even when they write articles, it just shows up as like hieroglyphics. For me, I don't know, maybe that's my cochlear. That's the shape of my ears. Doesn't know.

[Michael]

I'm sorry, it's the Westworld. Doesn't look like anything to me. It's when they're looking at their fucking schematics.

[Peter]

So his other thing is that, like, it can be deceptive to say women are 82 cents for every dollar that a man makes, because there's a huge amount of overl. So 40% of women earn more than men's median earnings.

[Michael]

Okay, well then who cares?

[Peter]

Exactly. We're done here.

[Michael]

What's the percentage of boys who are back in town today as opposed to in the 1980s? Sorry that I couldn't. I've been waiting on a Boys are back in town.

[Peter]

I was thinking of. How long have you been holding that?

[Michael]

I wanna see a chart that's like girls on the x axis, boys on the Y, and then it's want to have fun versus back in town.

[Peter]

So the thing is, I'm going to go through this stuff relatively quickly. Because you're familiar with all this stuff.

[Michael]

Yeah, yeah.

[Peter]

He says the one word explanation for the pay gap is children.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Peter]

So if you look at the gender wage gap early in your career, there's almost no difference. But then over time, throughout their sort of 20s and 30s, women leave the workforce to have kids.

[Michael]

Right. This is something that was brought up in Lean in, if you recall that. Yeah. Women will leave the workforce even for a short period, which negatively impacts their income. And what Sheryl Sandberg said was, if you can afford it, just pay for the childcare. Even if it is like extremely expensive, and basically washes out your earnings because your future earnings will return on that investment. Although she didn't say if you could afford it. I had that qualifier because she's an elitist lunatic.

[Peter]

Also, it does. I mean, as a factual matter, that does roughly appear to be true. Right. If you stay in the workforce, your wages are going to be way better. Later, he notes that, like, for every kid you have Your wages fall further behind. There's these studies of lesbian couples in Scandinavia where, you know, both women. Right. They're. But they're both experiencing gender discrimination at roughly the same level, as we would assume.

[Michael]

Careful what you say. This is most of our listeners.

[Peter]

The study was called Lickety Split the Lesbian Experience in Sweden. But he says, like the. The lesbian partner who leaves the workforce to have a baby will have a huge hit to her earnings, whereas the lesbian partner who stays in the workforce does not have a hit to her earnings. Earnings, which indicates that we're not talking about gender discrimination. We're talking about, like, leaving work and coming back is very bad for your earnings.

[Michael]

Right. So not gender discrimination at the workplace level. We're talking about, like, ultimately, social expectations of women.

[Peter]

Exactly. And also he also notes that even within the same employer, you find wage. You know, the thing you always hear about, like, women making less money than men for the same job. This does show up in the data. But he finds a large scale study of, like, a transportation authority where they looked at all the wage data and appears that men are working more hours in the same job. Like, men are available for overtime, more men are available for, you know, Sunday shifts, which end up producing more pay in a way that women are not. And you can also trace that back to childcare if you want to. Yeah, as far as I was able to tell, this stuff is all kind of like, as a descriptive matter, roughly. True, the gender wage gap appears to be driven mostly by women choosing different occupations than men. The thing of, like, women earning less for the same job does happen. But as far as, like, the broad societal phenomenon, it's mostly women clustered in jobs that pay less.

[Michael]

This is why the gender wage gap debate gets so hot. Because the real question ideologically is, do you think that needs to be remedied or not?

[Peter]

Exactly right. And to me it does. But to him, he doesn't really say it, but to him, he thinks we should shift the focus to men.

[Michael]

I don't know. It's very weird to me how, like, in his mind, some biological differences in outcome need to be remedied. Like.

[Peter]

Exactly.

[Michael]

If you imagine that at the elementary school level that boys are. They got a case of the bad brain. Your solution to that, if you're him, is all join hands across America and hold them back a year so they can do better. But then you see women choosing childcare over work and that results in lower income. He's like, so we can ignore it.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Michael]

I don't get it.

[Peter]

This whole question of like women are choosing to be in lower paying occupations also feels like a weird. Like to me, it's not necessarily a refutation of discrimination.

[Michael]

Well, the fact that someone is in a job does not mean that they chose the job per se.

[Peter]

Right. And a lot of his argument rests on this idea that men and women kind of inherently have these different preferences. Right. As he said earlier, men like things and women like people. And so it turns out the thing oriented, the men oriented industries just happen to pay more. But the fact that women dominated fields pay less is partly the result of sexism. Yeah, there's this really interesting article called the Cost of caring from the 1990s where they looked throughout the economy and like every job associated with caring for another human being pays way less than a comparable job with the same level of education.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Peter]

There's also some interesting work about sectors as they become more female dominated, the wages go down. So the wages for housekeepers have gone down by 21% in the last 50.

[Michael]

Years due to the slow decline of the butler.

[Peter]

You've got like computer programming, which used to be seen as like a fairly menial task that was mostly done by women. That has then of course become this like massive powerhouse and pays really well as it has become more male dominated.

[Michael]

I think that there probably are many women and men for that matter, but maybe more women who see two paths. One lower paying but more fulfilling to them for whatever reason. But that's different than people whose choices are narrowed to lower paying paths and have to go down one of them or feel some kind of social or cultural pressure to go down one of those paths. And it's not super easy to tease out the causes there.

[Peter]

If 50% of the population is having to choose between having kids and having a stable career, that's also a problem. You can chalk it up to whatever you want to, but it feels bad and wrong that only women have to make that choice.

[Michael]

That's the obvious problem. Again, just because women are foregoing income to take care of their child does not mean that that is a choice that they want to have to make.

[Peter]

I also think it's a little telling that most of his statistical case for like why we should shift the focus from women to men relies on relative statistics. Right. He's talking about like since 1980, men are doing worse, women are doing better. But men and women were in very different economic positions 50 years ago. And as soon as we get to absolute statistics, he's like, ah, yeah, well you know, men do earn more money than women.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

Women are more likely to live in poverty than men. And if you look at most industries, the overwhelming majority of, like, top managers and CEOs are still men. Yeah, there is still sexism in the world.

[Michael]

Let's not get into politics, you know.

[Peter]

Because, like, if you. I mean, the. Even. Even Reeves admits that, like, you know, if you look at high level lawyers, like high level lawyers and firms, it's still only roughly 20%. If you look at Fortune 500 CEOs, it's around 10%. Venture capital going to women is about 3%. College professors. It's now 48% of college professors are women. But among tenured faculty, it's only 35% of women. We also know that women were historically marginalized for most of American history. Like, women could not vote until 1920. Women could not attend college often until the 1960s. Anytime someone is, like, looking around to society and saying, like, yeah, this historically marginalized group, the reason they make less money is because of their choices. I always think, like, we actually need really good evidence of that.

[Michael]

It's so annoying to have these conversations because for some reason, the conversation often revolves around, like, is there sexism?

[Peter]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael]

When the actual question is, like, how exactly is sexism manifesting?

[Peter]

Right.

[Michael]

But instead of having like a normal conversation about how they manifest, where they manifest, what might be done to address it, if anything, everything just gets turned into an argument about, like, whether this is real and whether we should care.

[Peter]

I also think a lot of men would like to stay home.

[Michael]

I wouldn't know anything about it. So it's been five years since the last time I was in the office. Five days a week, dude, I could.

[Peter]

Not do it anymore if I got a real job.

[Michael]

No way. I will die on the streets before I go back. And you can talk all you want about how it was Peter's choice to die on the streets.

[Peter]

So we've talked about how men are falling behind in education, how men are falling behind in the workforce. His third category of the way that men are downtrodden is basically like a cluster of things that I'm calling the masculine mystique.

[Michael]

We are no longer needed to do man stuff. Yes, we're sad because our purpose in the world is no longer there and we're adrift and we have to elect Donald Trump. Joe Rogan, help us.

[Peter]

Part of this manifests in men being three times more likely to have deaths of despair. This is the idea that men, especially kind of working class white men, mostly in rural areas, are dying of things like poisonings, which means like alcohol overdoses or fentanyl overdoses.

[Michael]

Yeah. Sadness adjacent.

[Peter]

White males are about 70% of the suicides. This is actually like a uniquely American thing that in basically every developed country, the ratio of male to female suicides is around one in two. Men are twice as likely to kill themselves as women. However, in America, it's one to six.

[Michael]

If men in America are basically a lot more prone to suicide, for example, than men in other countries, then we need to look at variables that exist in America. Right.

[Peter]

Yes.

[Michael]

I think the place to start, and I'll let you take the lead, is American women. What do you think they're doing?

[Peter]

This is kind of one of the problems always of talking about suicide rates is that partly you can chalk it up to, like, sort of male malaise. Fine. But there's also, like, logistical issues of just like, access to guns.

[Michael]

That's what I was actually thinking. Might explain that is just the fact that if you have a brief suicidal thought, the suicide machines are all around us in America. What?

[Peter]

One way in which Reeves is totally correct is that I do think, like, these problems, like these specifically male aspects of things like opioid overdoses and suicides are genuinely under researched. So the one study I found was basically like, we think we're the first people to do this. Women are just as likely to get opioid prescriptions as men, but they're like 2/3 less likely to die of overdoses. And we don't really know why. We need qualitative research. We need quantitative research.

[Michael]

I believe it was Drill who on Twitter said that everyone wants to talk about mansplaining, but no one wants to talk about man's pain. That's so true.

[Peter]

There's only one study of male suicides in America. They took a data set of around 70,000 suicides, and they looked at all of the contributing factors. Men are more likely to be using drugs and alcohol, and drugs and alcohol for everybody are oftentimes precursors to suicides. Men are more likely to have as a precursor a breakup or a fight with a romantic partner. If they're younger, it's typically a fight with a family member that triggers it, typically their parents. They're much less likely to seek or get medical help. They're about half as likely to have a diagnosed mental health condition than women are who kill themselves. Around 40% of them were drunk or high at the time.

[Michael]

That's a lot.

[Peter]

I really think Reeves is onto something and I think he's correct, correct that, like, this needs much more attention. But the act of helping men with this would require doing a bunch of, like, woke bullshit about the nature of masculinity. Right, Right. If you look at the pattern of male suicides, men are being discouraged from reaching out at every link in the chain. We're not identifying mental health problems early.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

We then have the normalization of using drugs and alcohol to cope with emotional problems, which. Which is a huge part of American masculinity. Right. We then have these precipitating incidents where men do not have people that they can reach out to. They also have fucking guns in the house. And so at every stage of this problem, the norms of masculinity are playing a huge role.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Peter]

Breaking that cycle requires, like, updating norms of masculinity that, like, it's okay to reach out. It's okay to ask your friend for help. Help. It's okay to, like, form intimate friendships with other men. One of the things I read said that, like, friendships between men changed pretty significantly during the gay rights movement because men were like, oh, well, I don't want my buddy to think I'm gay. And, like, if I express any affection or anything or talk about, like, hey, it's really nice being like, a close friend with you. She's gonna be like, what are you, a homo?

[Michael]

I had a nice weekend with my best friend a couple weeks ago, and I had to text him, no homo afterwards. It's relentless. But you have to constantly guard the boundaries of your heterosexuality.

[Peter]

So at this point, we're like, two thirds of the way into the book, and so far, I genuinely thought this was going to be the first book that I was going to, like, recommend on the show. There really are areas where men are falling behind. I don't agree with everything. We've kind of been quibbling as we've gone along here. But in general, this is a responsible presentation of, like, a genuinely really interesting and important issue.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Peter]

The part where the book just completely goes off the rails is the minute he gets into political analysis. So chapter eight is called Progressive. The Political Left is in Denial.

[Michael]

Hell, yeah.

[Peter]

And we start with an anecdote from his son's school, which I'm going to send to you.

[Michael]

Litter boxes.

[Peter]

Not going. If that's level 10, this is, like, level 7.

[Michael]

Here's what happened. A boy at the school created a list of his female classmates ranked in terms of their attractiveness and shared it with a number of his friends, some of whom added their own opinions. Months later, one of the girls saw the list on another boy's Laptop. A number of girls complained to the school administration. The boy who created the list was reprimanded and given detention. A protest ensued. It was the last straw for us girls of this boys will be boys culture, one of the young women involved told the Washington Post. Part of a statement read out at a protest outside the principal's office was the following. Demand. We should be able to learn in an environment without the constant presence of objectification and misogyny. Large meetings were held in the school to discuss culture. The boy who created the list apologized personally to the girls in question and to the Washington Post.

[Peter]

Alright, and then we. So that's the story. Those are the set of facts. We then have his conclusion.

[Michael]

He posts pictures of all the girls.

[Peter]

That's the real cri. That's the real crisis of boys.

[Michael]

Boys have no idea what's hot anymore. This is the last third of the book.

[Peter]

Okay, so here's his.

[Michael]

What was instructive about the incident was the way it was immediately framed, especially in media coverage, as an example of toxic masculinity. If that really is the case, the term has acquired such a broad definition that it can be applied to almost any antisocial behavior on the part of boys or men. It is one thing to point out that there are aspects of masculinity that in an immature or extreme expression can be deeply harmful. Quite another to suggest that a naturally occurring trait in boys and men is intrinsically bad. Indiscriminately slapping the label of toxic masculinity onto this kind of behavior is a mistake. Rather than drawing boys into a dialogue about what lessons can be learned, it is much more likely to send them to the online manosphere where they will be reassured that they did nothing wrong and that liberals are out to get them. Okay, I guess the, the good faith sort of read on. This is like. Like you want to use language that does not ostracize and potentially radicalize young boys.

[Peter]

That's his case. Yeah.

[Michael]

There's probably something to that. Like, I don't think that that's totally wrong in a vacuum. However, there's also a sort of natural output of this that's like, hey, you really need to like tiptoe around this shit so that we don't upset these kids and radicalize them. And that will reach a point where it's like, well, are you allowed to punish this? Yeah, like socially, in school, whatever. It seems to me like what happened here was that his kid goes to a very rich school. The kind of school where when something like this Happens, which probably happens at almost every high school in the country to some degree, right?

[Peter]

Yes.

[Michael]

It gets widespread press coverage. And maybe the girls at the school, this is an opportunity maybe to organize.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Michael]

So they do a protest and then all of a sudden the Daily Mail is like, I don't know about this. Right.

[Peter]

That's absolutely what happened. This is also in the wake of MeToo.

[Michael]

That's right.

[Peter]

2018, it was 40 girls at this high school showed up outside of one of the administrator's offices when they found out that A, the boy had made the list, B, it had been sent around a bunch of their friends. Like, what really hurt the girls was that a lot of their male friends had weighed in on this list and they were like, what the fuck? I thought we were friends. And you're like, oh, she's a seven or whatever. And then the administrators, when they found out that the boy had done this, they gave him like one day of detention and, like, weren't gonna put it on his record. And the girls were pissed off about this. And so 40 of them showed up at the administrator's office and was like, we want to talk about the culture at this school. And then they had like a roundtable thing which was supposed to be 45 minutes, but ended up going on for four hours where like, girls told stories of like the fucked up shit that had happened to them at the school. And the boy was there. Part of it was like the punishment for the boy was like, he had to listen to the way that part.

[Michael]

Of the punishment for the boys listening to the girls was like, okay, you.

[Peter]

Had to sit there. And then according to this Washington Post article, the boy gave like a very heartfelt apology. He's like, okay, you're right. This was a really fucked up and stupid thing to do. I shouldn't have done it. I also like the fact that the, the Post did not name the boy. This was a dumb thing that a 16 year old boy did, but, like, it doesn't need to ruin his life. It's like, yeah, this boy did this dumb thing. The girls were mad.

[Michael]

Everyone talked about, what else do you want here?

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Michael]

If what you're saying is a 16 year old boy doing this shit shouldn't get widespread press coverage, I agree 100%. I don't understand the complaint that, like, you can't call this toxic masculinity.

[Peter]

This is what, like, jokerfied me is that like, he's like, oh, you can't just put that label on anything. But like, this feels like a very clear Cut. Example of toxic masculinity to me. Yeah, like boys behind the girl's back being like, oh, she's more like a 4. And not telling the fucking girls for months.

[Michael]

And the fucking. Right, dude, how many people say that the left does language policing, right? And then, like, we have been introduced to, like, a relatively useful term. Maybe it's not always used correctly, but can be used to describe incidents like this. Toxic masculinity. You use the term and they're like, ugh.

[Peter]

It's like they'll call anything toxic masculinity these days. Even a boy writing down the looks of his female classmates and sharing it with all the other boys. So from this anecdote, the whole point of this anecdote, of course, is that it's emblematic of, he says, four major failings of the political left on issues related to boys and men. The first issue is a tendency to pathologize naturally occurring aspects of masculine identity, usually under the banner of toxic masculinity.

[Michael]

Got it.

[Peter]

So this is what he says about that.

[Michael]

Lacking any coherent or consistent definition, the phrase now refers to any male behavior that the user disapproves of, from the tragic to the trivial. It has been blamed, among other things, for mass shootings, gang violence, rape, online trolling, climate change, the financial crisis, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and an unwillingness to wear a mask during the COVID 19 pandemic. Lumping together terrorists and delinquents, it ultimately poisons the very idea of masculinity itself. I mean, look, at the end of the day, Brexit was toxic masculinity. Now, that's the one I disagree with the most. The idea that the British are doing anything of an excess of masculinity.

[Peter]

I just want to point out the dynamic here. This is an entire chapter dedicated to the problems of progressives.

[Michael]

Right?

[Peter]

The ways that progressives are not helping boys. The first category is a complaint about people using a term. Yeah, this is the life cycle of every trendy term. People also overuse, like Sweet Summer Child.

[Michael]

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. That said, I don't think it's crazy to think that the left in online social spaces can use language that ostracizes certain groups. Right. That's why I don't joke about white people. I specifically carve out ethnic groups within white people. Italians, Irish. It's important to be specific so that people know that you're not talking about everyone.

[Peter]

I think also, like. Like 80% of fucking discourse now is like, leftists should talk different online.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Peter]

We need to acknowledge the fact that there's a vast right wing apparatus explicitly designed to find the dumbest leftists saying the dumbest shit and bring it to the nation's attention. The Daily Mail did not cover this thing at the Washington D.C. high School to like, bring attention to like the plight of women in high schools.

[Michael]

That's. That's the other side of what I was just saying. So, like, I think it's true that certain language that is employed by the left can be ostracizing. The problem with trying to address that internally is that there is this right wing media apparatus that will elevate that language no matter how often you use it.

[Peter]

Exactly.

[Michael]

And so it's sort of unclear how much we can do to address the problem. Right.

[Peter]

Internally on the left, your political strategy cannot be that, like tens of millions of people need to show perfect discipline in the vocabulary that they use. That's not a real strategy.

[Michael]

Dude, Median Republicans are like retweeting gas chamber memes right now.

[Peter]

Yeah, no shit. Yeah.

[Michael]

Where's the fucking Atlantic article?

[Peter]

So that was the first problem with progressives on the issue of boys and men. The second flaw in progressives is male problems are seen as the result of individual failings of one kind or another, rather than of structural challenges. So I'm going to send you this.

[Michael]

Usually progressives are reluctant to ascribe too much responsibility to individuals for their problems. If someone is obese or commits a crime or is out of employment, the progressive default is to look first to structural, external causes. This is a valuable instinct. But there is one group that progressives do seem willing to blame for their plight. Men.

[Peter]

And then he gives us some examples.

[Michael]

Carol Harrington believes that the term toxic masculinity plays an important role here since it naturally focuses attention on the character flaws of individual mental rather than structural problems. If men are depressed, it is because they won't express their feelings. If they get sick, it is because they won't go to the doctor. If they fail at school, it is because they lack commitment. If they die early, it is because they drink and smoke too much and eat the wrong things. For those on the political left, then victim blaming is permitted when it comes to men.

[Peter]

So we're back to toxic masculinity again.

[Michael]

I think you can flip this and also say that the right suddenly sees structural problems when it comes to their in groups.

[Peter]

Yeah, totally. Yeah.

[Michael]

They will say men are experiencing this and this and this. There must be something wrong with broader society. Right. Whereas when it's black People, women, right. They're like, that's natural hierarchy at work, baby.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Michael]

I have seen some of this. There are jokes like, men will do X before going to therapy. Right. Like, I've made those jokes. Sure. You know, those jokes are predicated on an individual explanation rather than a structural one. I think that's right. I would excise the term toxic masculinity from this discussion because I think that toxic masculinity in and of itself does imply something structural.

[Peter]

This is, to me, what is so interesting is that even in his own examples, he's citing what I think are structural factors. So if men are depressed, it's because they won't express their feelings. That, to me, is structural. It's like, well, it's not your fault you haven't been diagnosed with something. It's not your fault you're not taking antidepressants. You've grown up in a culture that tells you you're not supposed to express your pain.

[Michael]

Yeah.

[Peter]

Like, that's taking away the blame from the inside.

[Michael]

That's the thing is, I think you can say a lot of this stuff and still embrace the structural explanation. Maybe it's more accurate to say that a lot of people occasionally speak flippantly about structural problems in a way that.

[Peter]

They wouldn't with other groups. I think that's true.

[Michael]

I'm not going to pretend that this is a problem that is limited to the left in broader society. This is true of almost every group. Right. We live in a very individualistic society. Most people ascribe other people's problems to those people.

[Peter]

So his third reason why progressives are fucking up this issue is is an unwillingness to acknowledge any biological basis for sex differences.

[Michael]

I was so excited for this to get transphobic.

[Peter]

This is why it's so important to me to stress that, like, Richard Reeves is a good faith dude, not transphobic. Because when I saw this little chapter heading, I was like, oh, God, here it comes. Jesus Christ. But he goes out of his way to defend trans people.

[Michael]

Nice.

[Peter]

He's like, the political right is saying that trans people threaten, like, sports and bathrooms and stuff. It is garbage. They are doing this to reify traditional sex roles. They do not mean it. Trans people do not pose any threat to masculinity.

[Michael]

My apologies to Richard Reeves. You've done nothing wrong other than the attempted shoe bombing.

[Peter]

So here is his case that the left denies biology.

[Michael]

One of the rallying cries of the modern political left is that science is real. While conservatives succumb to myth and misinformation Progressives carry the Enlightenment torch of reason. At least that is how they see things. The truth is that there are science deniers on both sides. Many conservatives deny the environmental science of climate change, but many progressives deny the neuroscience of sex differences. For many progressives, it is now axiomatic that sex differences in any outcomes or behaviors are wholly the result of socialization. When it comes to masculinity, the main message from the political left is that men are acculturated in certain ways of behaving. Generally bad ways, of course, in this version, which can therefore be socialized out of them. But this is simply false. Men do not have a higher sex drive just because society valorizes male sexuality. Even if it does, they have more testosterone. Likewise, aggression. Remember, boys under the age of two are five times more likely to be aggressive than girls. This is surely not because one year olds have picked up gender cues from around them. Does the political left deny this?

[Peter]

This is the thing. I was waiting this whole section for him to give an example.

[Michael]

Right?

[Peter]

The whole thing is kind of bizarre. Like, I was very careful when we were talking about, about like boy brains and girl brains earlier not to deny biology, right? That like, it's a basic fact that girls go through puberty roughly 18 months before boys do. That's biology. It's not threatening to my worldview to admit that in my experience, what people are objecting to is biological explanations for behavior. Right. Boys drive faster because of their brains. That I think is much more difficult to prove.

[Michael]

But that's the thing is like, when you're talking about the left denying that, are you just talking about a few dipshits online? Because that's where it starts to feel like you really are right. I'm really not sure that I've seen intelligent people on the left just say everything's socialization. I don't think that's a common belief.

[Peter]

The fourth and final progressive mistake on this issue is the conviction that gender inequality can only run one way. That is to the disadvantage of women. Oh, so here is his.

[Michael]

Now I'm getting pissed.

[Peter]

More concrete examples.

[Michael]

In 2021, President Biden created a White House Gender Policy Council, a successor to the previous Council on Women and Girls, which had been abolished by Donald Trump. But while the name changed, the mission did not. The formal charge of the new council is, quote, to guide and coordinate government policy that impacts women and girls. In October 2021, the council published a national strategy on gender equity and equality, the first in US History. The strategy is entirely asymmetric. No Gender inequalities related to boys or men are addressed. The fact that women now outnumber men in college is noted, but only in order to highlight the fact that women hold more student debt than men.

[Peter]

And then he lists a bunch of other examples of. They mention, like, women need access to health insurance, but men are more likely to be uninsured than women. But he throws in there that the mandate of this agency is to guide and coordinate government policy that impacts women and girls.

[Michael]

Right?

[Peter]

It's a government report about women and girls. It's gonna focus on women and girls. Like a black empowerment council is not gonna mention the problems faced by white people. That's just not in the mandate of the group.

[Michael]

When I was in college, I dated a classic women's studies feminist type of girl. And the way that she brought me into that was to be like, here's how this stuff affects men.

[Peter]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael]

That was like very formative for me, just having someone articulate that to me and having it click in my brain. The idea that we should be reading this much into one policy council from the Biden administration, just completely isolated from any broader context. I don't know about that.

[Peter]

It's genuinely fascinating to me that he's so diligent and so interested in this issue. Until he gets to political analysis, he's Gen X, right? I guess, yeah.

[Michael]

There was lead in the paint. At the end of the day, you can get close to being a fully formed, well rounded, intelligent human being as Gen X, but you can never get all the way there.

[Peter]

We then get to chapter nine, Seeing Red. The political right wants to turn back the clock. So now we're gonna talk about what conservatives are fucking up.

[Michael]

Okay.

[Peter]

He says conservatives have paid more attention than progressives to the growing problems faced by boys and men. But their agenda turns out to be equally unhelpful. We have not talked about the Democratic agenda on this at all. We've only talked about the way that people talk online. But okay, fine. The number one problem is many conservative fuel male grievance for political gain. And so he talks about how the gender gap in voting is the largest it's ever been. In 2016, Trump won men with a 24 point lead among white men. He won them 62 to 32.

[Michael]

That's because there's never been a presidential candidate with that much raw masculinity. When I see an 80 year old man draped in silk with a rub on tan over half of his face, I think about returning to nature.

[Peter]

So here is his case for this.

[Michael]

Some conservatives go as far as to claim that there is a war on men or a war on boys. This language validates and fuels a sense of victimhood. In the US A third of men of all political persuasions believe that they are discriminated against. And among Republicans, the number is right. This is false. While the problems of boys and men are real, they are the result of structural changes in the economy and broader culture and the failings of our education system rather than of any deliberate discrimination. But on the political right, as on the left, attitudes on gender issues float free of the facts.

[Peter]

Throw a little dig on the left.

[Michael]

Yeah, yeah, right. You can't say anything bad about the right without an equivalent jab on the left. There's something that I'm going to try to articulate here. But when the rhetoric of the right does not align with reality, these folks, by which I mean like centrist types, will say, you know, this isn't true, but this fuels the right. Right. When they're talking about right wing misinformation, they almost talk about it like it's a political strength.

[Peter]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael]

And when they're talking about left wing misinformation, they talk about it like it's a political weakness. It's never like this fuels the left. This gives the left energy, even though that's probably just as true.

[Peter]

The thing that really stuck out to me was in the US a third of men of all political persuasions believe that they are discriminated against. And among Republicans, that number is rising. Why wouldn't you say what the number is?

[Michael]

I do believe that's true. Just anecdotally. When I was an employment lawyer, when I first started, you would almost never see cases brought by men and white people saying that they were discriminated against. When I was wrapping up my career, I say wrapping up like I was doing it on purpose. When I was about to get fired.

[Peter]

When it was being wrapped up for.

[Michael]

Me, I was seeing this relatively often, a couple times in my own practice, and then my friends were reporting it to me. And then I've spoken to employment lawyers I know recently, and they're like, it's all over the place now. The right wing grievance machine has sort of like hit the legal system.

[Peter]

It all starts with Barry Weiss's article about the rapping library. I mean, the thing that is really weird about this construction is that the percentage of men who think that they are discriminated against is rising among both Republicans and Democrats. So to say it's rising among Republicans is Like a little wormy because it's happening. But also, Republican men are twice as likely to think that men are discriminated against as Democrats. It's around 40% of Republicans and around 20% of Democrats. And it's very slightly rising between 2012 and 2016, which is the poll that he's citing. It's really fucking weird to not mention the basic political dynamic of this, which is that it's overwhelmingly concentrated on the right. In the previous chapter, he's like, this is the problem with progressives. They say this online. And here he's like, well, political leaders are lying. They're saying that you're under attack if you're a man. And men are voting for Donald Trump and right wing, basically authoritarian parties in record numbers.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

These are not equivalent problems. Right. Unlike the progressives and conservatives. Conservatives, it's like, oh, yeah, by the way, they're fucking lying to men. And it's working.

[Michael]

I'm happy to criticize the rhetoric that emanates from the left, but when you start to talk about like, well, what. What are the politics that we should be doing? You need to address the fact that the right wing is the one that is completely detached from reality.

[Peter]

Right, Exactly.

[Michael]

You can't do this sort of like, here's what the left gets wrong, here's what the right gets wrong. When what the left gets wrong is like the use of rhetoric on the Internet that you don't necessarily agree with. And then what the right gets wrong is that, like, almost all of them believe that men are discriminated against incorrectly.

[Peter]

And they're like, banning abortion. This is actually affecting right.

[Michael]

It manifests in policy much more directly.

[Peter]

Yeah, I don't like seeing certain phrases on the Internet. And also, thousands of women are dying of sepsis. Right. So that was the first problem with conservatives. The second is conservatives overweight the importance of biological sex differences for gender roles. He now takes a weird left turn, which I was not expecting. So here are the first couple paragraphs of this. I know.

[Michael]

Respected among scholars for his work on personality traits, Jordan Peterson came to fame for refusing to use the preferred pronouns of a transgender student in protest of new Canadian laws on trans writes. His 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life sold more than 5 million copies. For anyone serious about understanding what is happening with young men, Peterson's appeal is an important data point. By Peterson's own reckoning, they account for 80% of his audience. Peterson's own reckoning sounds a little low. Men flock to him because unlike so many, he does not mock or patronize them. He makes them feel heard. Peterson stumbled across a gigantic reservoir of unmet human need. Need. His genuine compassion for the plight of young men marks him out from the people of the left who want to excoriate them and the people on the right who want to exploit them. He's a genuine intellectual wrestling with real and important issues.

[Peter]

Dude. Richard, no, he's writing this in like 2022, man.

[Michael]

What the fuck?

[Peter]

Jordan Peterson, just like a blithering weirdo who tweets like 300 times a day about, like, people are too fat in magazines now.

[Michael]

Like, the dude is a right wing psychopath, bro.

[Peter]

This is such an example of, like, the weird moral affirmative action that men get. So Reeves says men flock to him because unlike so many, he does not mock or patronize them. He makes them feel heard.

[Michael]

Yeah, but he does mock or patronize women.

[Peter]

Exactly. It's not that he's, like, showing empathy for them. Finally, empathy for men. He says misogynistic shit. He says that women wear lipstick because they're like horny sluts.

[Michael]

I don't wanna start talking go down an evolutionary psychology rabbit hole here, but I love that in evolutionary psychology you get to make up a potential explanation of some behavior and then some bizarre political outcome flows from it. Where you're like, women are putting on lipstick to simulate the flushing of the lips during intercourse and therefore sexual harassment in the workplace. I don't know.

[Peter]

But also the fact that you can just rise to prominence on a lie, right? He said that you're going to go to jail for misgendering trans people, which is a straightforward lie. He then spends his entire career as a public intellectual, also fucking lying. Like, most of what he says is just him saying stuff. And he still even now gets this bizarre laundering where we're like, well, he was hearing some real concerns. I think a lot of men are, like, right leaning and they want their existing ideology to be sold back to them as intellectual, which is all Jordan Peterson was doing. The fact that you can't decipher what the fuck he's saying is why he was popular, right? You're like, ooh, a smart person is saying this. And I feel good, right? What if women are all sluts? What if I'm being held down? All he's doing is the same victim ideology that fucking Rush Limbaugh was doing. It's the same shit.

[Michael]

Not being able to clock Jordan Peterson as right wing is, it just reflects a massive deficiency in your ability to analyze politics. I don't know what you would need to think that he's right wing if you don't know it.

[Peter]

Now, he also has this weird tic where he just admits all of the problems with Peterson. So the rest of the section, right, he's talking about how conservatives overweight the importance of biological sex differences, right? And he's like, well, Jordan Peterson is an important figure and we should listen to him. And he's making men feel heard. Also, he is lying about the lobsters. So he has a saying, lobsters exist in hierarchies. And so hierarchies are natural. I mean, this is garbage, even if it was true. But it's also wrong about lobsters. He says the science here is not very good. Lobsters don't actually have brains, it turns out, out for what it's worth, I think his use of lobsters is better seen as simply part of his storytelling style. I see Peterson as the latest incarnation of the mythopoetical strand of the men's movement, which uses allegory to evoke an older, deeper form of masculinity.

[Michael]

Dudes rock.

[Peter]

Recall that last chapter was almost exclusively dedicated to, like, random people, including teenage girls, calling things toxic masculinity. That's singled out for scorn by Reeves. And here we have one of the nation's most important public intellectuals. For years, millions of books sold. This guy is just constantly lying and lying to men in order to sell them on a right wing ideology that's making them worse, that is making them believe a bunch of things that are not true and are not helping them. Here Reeves is like, oh, isn't he really just a bard?

[Michael]

An older, deeper form of masculinity where you cry all the time on camera and dress like the fucking Riddler.

[Peter]

So the third problem with conservatives is, he says, conservatives see the solution to men's problems as lying in the past rather than the future. So here's this.

[Michael]

In a fascinating study conducted before the 2016 election, Dan Casino, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, added an unusual question to a survey of voting. Do you earn more, less, or about the same as your spouse? Half the respondents got the question early in the survey before being asked about voting, and the other half got it after declaring their voting intention. The results were striking. Men asked the question about spousal earnings early in the survey were much more likely to say they would vote for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. This was a small poll of around 700 registered voters. But Casino's experiment hints at the potential for politicians to activate and exploit male anxiety about loss of status so I'm.

[Peter]

Very skeptical of this whole, like these priming studies. I don't know, a lot of these have totally failed to replicate. So I went back to this study that Reeves is citing, like, most of the statistics he cites in this book. Like, this is correct. It's actually, it's a 24 point shift in voting preference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump depending on whether you prime people with this. Like, does your spouse make more than you? And what's wild is he also tested it with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump because maybe it just pushes people more toward Republicans. Right? It's not about gender. Yeah, no, there was, there was no effect when you did it with Bernie Sanders. It was only when you did it with Hillary Clinton.

[Michael]

Wow.

[Peter]

Again, what frustrates me about this book is that Reeves is looking at a real mechanism here. Right. That it's very easy to prime men to see basically any societal phenomenon as a threat to their masculinity. This is basically the story of the Republican Party over the last 40 years.

[Michael]

Right?

[Peter]

Like, I was so struck reading Josh Hawley's book. The whole thing is basically an exercise in just like telling men that everything they see around them, every form of social advancement, is a threat to their masculinity. So I want to do a bonus episode actually, like specifically on this book because it's kind of a rich text. And also I did a bunch of reading on like the history of the men's rights movement, which is super fascinating. And I want to talk about it. So here's what Josh Hawley says.

[Michael]

Leftists have advocated expanded welfare payments and disability insurance. Scare quotes to the point one need not actually be disabled to claim government support. More recently, they have championed universal basic income. This latter idea would have the federal government guarantee every adult in America an income stream generous enough to live on whether he works or not. One liberal candidate for president recently ran an entire campaign on it.

[Peter]

Dynamo liberal Andrew Yang, everyone's favorite leftist.

[Michael]

The message is that work is optional, replaceable, and that a check is just as good as a job. And what that means in practice is a check is just as good as a man. Because if government can supply everything a father or husband once did by working, what's the point of manhood? This is what my college girlfriend was talking about when she said that this shit constricts men too.

[Peter]

It's wild, dude.

[Michael]

You are your job, dude.

[Peter]

And also he's literally saying that like other people getting disability insurance or like you getting unemployment benefits when you're fired makes you less of a man.

[Michael]

Right.

[Peter]

Why? This is completely made up.

[Michael]

These guys are sort of mentally trying to harken back to hunter gatherer societies. We were out hunting and providing, but those societies were super communal. You obviously relied on the broader group to provide you and your family with shit. All of this modern masculinity stuff is basically invented tradition. It's just hard not to see that it just happens to align with like Republican policy in the post Nixon era. They're just like, food stamps are gay for this.

[Peter]

I also read Stiffed, which was Susan Faludi's follow up book after Backlash, both of which I really recommend. She frames all of this as like.

[Michael]

A betrayal by women.

[Peter]

What she says is that it's basically like it's oligarchs who did this to you. It's like rich people. It's like the Elon Musk's of the world who completely fucked you over and, and told you, whispered in your ear the whole time, that the person you should be mad at is like the immigrant that stole your job or the woman who's your boss.

[Michael]

Elon Musk talking to you about masculinity. Think about that. You ever seen him do the X jump? My God.

[Peter]

I think this is the thing to keep in mind is that they want us to be fighting. They want this dumb war of the genders to be going on. Are women better, men better? So that they can take your job and fucking send it to China? That's been the dynamic for the last 40 years.

[Michael]

We should be focusing our anger at the Chinese.

[Peter]

I just think it's so frustrating that it's like we get such clear eyed diagnoses of the problems in our sort of intellectual life as Americans. But the minute it comes to solving them, everyone pretends to be half as smart as they actually are. Like, well, there's problems on both sides.

[Michael]

What's interesting is that he's getting very bogged down by the aesthetics. And he seems to understand that the right wing is pitching to men but offering them nothing. Right? So credit where it's due. But he's unwilling to sort of say the opposite, which is okay, the left is not pitching to men, or at least not doing it very effectively. But that is where the better solutions to these problems lie.

[Peter]

I don't want to blame individuals, I want to look for structural solutions. The thing is, I don't really blame Richard Reeves for this. I think there is a sickness among serious punditry where you cannot be taken seriously as an intellectual unless you do this pantomime. Of both sides have problems. If Richard Reeds wrote a book where he was like, the right offers no solutions for men, and it's actively making all of the problems worse. And the left could be doing more. Has some problems, but fundamentally is on the side of downtrodden men, Everyone would write off the book. It's like, oh, it's too partisan. And it's so bizarre. Especially on this issue in particular, where conservatives, everyone just admits openly. They're like, oh, yeah, conservatives are, like, actively trying to bring back this, like, fake 1950s family. They're not doing anything for boys. Like, you think fucking Josh Hawley's gonna restore your factory job. They're not doing anything. The reason why work is so much more precarious is mostly because of fucking Republicans. This is like, the basic political dynamics are so clear on this. Everyone just admits to it. Like, throughout this book. He's like, oh, well, yes, yes, conservatives are trying to bring back, like, the fake traditional family.

[Michael]

But.

[Peter]

But both sides have problems.

[Michael]

This is the problem with the social media era, where everything gets analyzed through what the, like, bulk of rhetoric online looks like.

[Peter]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael]

What happens when one side is in power versus another? Yeah, right.

[Peter]

What do they do?

[Michael]

Who's funding mental health that men can access? Right? Yeah, yeah. Who wants to fund schools and give them the resources to help boys? Right? I understand that he wants to do this sort of like, no one's talking about this maneuver because that allows everyone who's reading it to feel okay. As opposed to a book that's, like, by the way, generic. Democrats are just, like, 10 times as good on this shit as Republicans. Now, you lose Republicans, right? Or you lose moderate fence sitters who like to believe that they are, like, above politics.

[Peter]

We're just gonna end with the final.

[Michael]

Two paragraphs of the Will the boys ever be back in town?

[Peter]

Will women ever speak at a frequency that men can hear?

[Michael]

Right now, there is a distinct lack of responsible leadership on this front. Politics has become like trench warfare. Both sides fearing even the slightest loss on any ground. While moms and dads worry about their kids, Our leaders are trapped in their partisan positions.

[Peter]

Our political leaders have political views that are different.

[Michael]

Progressives see any move to provide more help to boys and men as a distraction from the fight for girls and women. Conservatives see any move to provide more help to girls and women as motivated by a desire to put men down. My hope is that away from the heat and noise of tribal politics, Away from politics.

[Peter]

We can do political things. Away from politics.

[Michael]

When I see the term tribal or tribalism in the context of politics now it is like a beacon. This is an Atlantic reader. My hope is that away from the heat and noise of tribal politics, we. We can come to a shared recognition that many of our boys and men are in real trouble, not of their own making and need help.

[Peter]

One side is trying to increase their wages and the other side is saying that it's gay to get unemployment insurance.

[Michael]

Definitely a shame that we got here from the first chunk of this book, which was pretty interesting. It almost makes it even more depressing because when you're like, there are real discrepancies between boys and girls in elementary schools and the outputs of that might be. Be really bad and dangerous, and we should be thinking about addressing them. Well, they might be dismantling the Department of Education. So how does that go? Right again. He wrote this. Probably wrote this about three years ago, and the winds have changed. But as we deal with fascism ascending, the people who are like, the problem is tribalism.

[Peter]

I know.

[Michael]

Become more and more delusional. Yeah. And so my tolerance for the, like, partisanship is the issue crowd is waning.

[Peter]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael]

Imagine how much Bari Weiss would be pissing me off now if I could hear her when she spoke.

[Peter]

Sa.