Of Boys And Men
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Do it, Peter. Zing us. Zing. Give us a zing about the men and the boys. Am I doing a boys to men pun or just saying dudes rock and being done with it? Just keep saying that at like 15 minute intervals throughout the episode. That's all I need from you as I recite tedious statistics. Yeah, I can't wait to say dudes rock 25 times while you read to me about like literacy rates.

They're dropping out. They're angry. They're sad. I'm ready to get yelled at by everyone. It's just like two guys talking about gender issues. Maybe that's the... 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. Oh, that's a good point. That's why I didn't do any work for this episode.

I'm a man. So true. Read about men. All right. Okay. Peter. Michael. What do you know about of boys and men? Finally, a book on my expertise. Dudes.

So the book is called Of Boys and Men, 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 the

There's so much bad faith garbage going around. Like I also read Josh Hawley's book about this, which is basically the same book, but like totally bad faith with no real solutions. And I have been trying for the last couple of 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. Well, this is a book about men and boys, so we will not be apologizing. Yep. You got a problem with us? Blame God.

for putting us in charge. Okay, so I want to just dive into the book. I think this is a good encapsulation of 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. 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. And then he has a little bit of extra meta stuff about the book.

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, 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, 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 about

cover stories of magazines, but every single person who discusses it says we're not discussing it. A couple of paragraphs later, he lists a bunch of bestselling 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 Reeves does not mention this, but apparently Maureen Dowd wrote a book called Are Men Necessary? The subtitle is just yes, and we should respect them. Maureen Dowd.

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

Prepare to be bored, okay? I can't wait till this book gets stupid. One of the most common comments we get is like, why don't you do a good book? And you're going to see how bad this is. 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 2025. Yeah.

I do think the world owes me a dumb one after this. So the first thing we're going to talk about is the gender education gap. Okay. This is like a very long and detailed part of the book. And I'm not going to 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. Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be school ready at age five. A six percentage point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to an 11 percentage point gap by the end of eighth grade. In math, a six point gap favoring boys in fourth grade has shrunk to a one point gap by eighth grade. So basically girls are ready for school earlier than boys. And this little tiny gap just gets bigger the longer they're in school.

And due to some sort of structural problem, girls are closing our natural God-given math advantage. 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. Oh, you mean we're only better at the fundamental laws of the universe? Yeah.

Let's go, boys. Keep it. Stay in that frame, Peter. Keep that voice. Keep that voice on the rest of the time. The whole time, no matter what it is, I'm just cheering on the boys. Let's go. You know, as you follow this into college, we all kind of know this statistic that like colleges are now roughly 60% female. Yeah. 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. Almost every college in the U.S. 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

Is that really the terminology we're using? You're supposed to say pussification. It's pussification. The vaginification. The increasing vaginality. 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.

So 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. It almost justifies the fact that we had to keep them back, that they're doing so well at school now. I know. Because like as soon as we let them go to school, they're better than us. Yeah, I know. Dominating. And now they call us stupid and they have to write books about how we're stupid. There is actually like an anti-sexism case for why women are attending college and doing so much better at school. It's literally that the returns to education are better for women. They had to go to college because.

Oh, interesting, yeah. Dude's rock. Dude's rock.

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 U.S. 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. So it's like a global feminist conspiracy. Yes, exactly. That's we need to go bigger. Illuminati feminism.

Yeah. So I read this super interesting Norwegian government report because the Scandinavian countries were some of the first to show this trend. So 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 in achievement in 1966. Imagine while Mad Men was happening, women in Norway were doing better than men.

wild. That's crazy. 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 pros and

processes in the brain that are extremely important for schooling. So here is what Reeves says about it. 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 breaking 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 or

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. I mean, to state the obvious, this clocks. I know, right? I was in myself, too. If there's any like definitive quality of the teenage boy, it's a lack of impulse control. 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 and like in interviews and stuff. Do you know what his solution is to the gender achievement gap?

My guess would be that each person transitions to the other gender right before puberty. Damn it. You got there before me. My joke was going to be that like the only thing we can do about this gap is puberty blockers for all American girls. Yeah.

We're now doing it for around 5,000 kids. We need to get that up to 25 to 30 million. There's no reason to enter puberty before the brain is fully developed at the age of 25. You rent a car, then you get armpit hair. When I write an article for The Atlantic, that's like, they won't let you say it. This is what it's about. So his actual solution to this is basically red shirting. Hell yeah. So because boys are like a little bit delayed in development, it's like,

If you just hold every single boy back for a year, that will essentially equalize like the maturity levels of girls and boys. And then they'll start on an equal footing. This idea has actually been around since like 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 around.

comparing kids who are held back for a year versus kids who are not held back for a year. And like the data is very clear that like kids who are held back for a year do really well. 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. 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, you know, as I was reading through this chapter, I was like double checking statistics and like everything checks out. But then once I got to the later sections of the book, I was like, OK, I think I need to circle back to the data underneath this red shirting idea.

So the first problem with this idea is child care. Right. So he's like, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. We're also going to have universal pre-K. I do sort of, I understand. You just, you need a place for the boys to just mill about for another year. Yeah.

Yeah, see, as soon as something requires a massive social program, you know it's a no-go in America. 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. Right, but there—

The right is going to see this and be like, oh, you think boys are dumb and weak. Exactly. Every guy is just graduating high school at the age of 20. You think the right is going to be OK with that? 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. Presumably a lot of the social stigma goes away in his class.

This is his argument. Yeah. That if it's all boys, then it's not like, well, Jeff is dumb. It's like, well, every boy in the class is one year older. Girls are in first grade and they're just passing. They pass a room in the hallway and they're like, what's in there? That's the boys your age milling.

It just sort of feels like, oh man, this group of people is like 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 because like, oh, you can't handle it. Like your sister is more mature than you. Right. Or like you have to test up.

or something. 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 like a nationwide consensus that boys are biologically disabled

at this age and there is no way that you're going to get people to believe that that is true. It's also not true. I mean, I also looked into the biological evidence on this. It's like 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. I mean, we don't even fucking under, we barely understand what consciousness comes from. Yeah, exactly. So the idea that we understand exactly where impulse control comes from, right, is a little misguided. 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. Yeah.

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. Okay. So earlier when I said everyone sees the gap between boys and girls, you just let me ramble like an asshole. I let you do it because I was going to. Interesting. This is what I do on this show. I'm like, yes, yes, Peter. Wait six minutes. There are things that feel related to impulse control that you see like teenage girls get into that you just tend to.

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. I mean, one thing that really stuck out to me, and I really remember from this period of 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.

Why are we such worse drivers? 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. Yeah. So like are boys driving fast?

because of brains or because of social. We just don't know. 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. 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. He's 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 redshirting was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. This is why three weeks ago you texted me being like, did we talk about redshirting when we discussed Outliers? And I was like, Mike, that was two and a half years ago. 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 like 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 like natural experiments where because this has become such a craze, some states have changed their criteria for like birthdays and they'll move

the cutoff. So all of a sudden you have boys who like 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. Like if you're a year older than the other kindergartners, you're 20% older than the other kids. And then it decreases. Yeah. By the time you're like a freshman in high school, you're like 3% older than the other kids. Right. The last thing I want to mention is that if you look at the studies, even the ones that Richard Reeves cites in his book, really

race and socioeconomic class have a way bigger effect than like your birth month. Right. 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? Yeah, yeah. But like we're talking about tiny little things and then if the main determinants of birth

like outcomes and stuff is mostly like how rich are your parents and like how good is the school that you go to. Right. It just isn't the case that like we can one weird trick our way to like the gender achievement gap going away. You can't talk about nationwide massive societal change kind of solutions without

When we haven't even quite pinpointed the problem, right? Like we have ideas. Right. 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. 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 again?

Because we're punishing boys who lash out 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. And look where you are now. And now I'm a podcaster. You should do scared straight presentations in middle school.

And now I'm a podcaster. 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. It was the Adderall the whole time. That was just chemicals. 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. Yeah, when they aren't there to judge us. Well, honestly, as soon as there's teacher discretion, it's like an essay or whatever. 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. Because if you're a rich boy acting out and you get in trouble, then your obnoxious-ass parents go yell at the teacher and they don't have time for that. There's this thing.

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. 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. We are getting representation. You are qualified to talk about this. As a young troublemaker when I was 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 have... I should have never told you I moved to New Jersey. Yeah.

If you would ask nine-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. So the other thing I wanted to say about the gender achievement gap is that 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. Wow. The gender gap is like everywhere, but it varies a ton across like 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 like fairly malleable. Right. 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. This is a chart from Brookings, a state-by-state breakdown of whether girls are more likely to graduate high school on time. Yeah. Girls are more likely to graduate high school on time in every single state. Yes. However, the gap between girls and boys...

is about as or even less significant than the gap between certain states. Exactly. 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. Yeah. So you're seeing the same gap between boys and girls. However,

Also seems obvious that like state by state policy is playing a big role here. This is precisely what I wanted to get at is that like 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. 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, right?

Just because it's real doesn't always mean that it's the most important thing happening. Yeah, because you've got a 20% difference in graduation rates between Arizona and Virginia. Enormous gaps. 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 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. What's happening in the American Southwest? Arizona and New Mexico are the worst two states. It's the strip malls and the scorpions. This is my airport bestseller.

So I, 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. Right. The biggest problem with like my explanation that it's like something to do with deprivation is basically the Scandinavian countries. Yeah. Norway and Finland are,

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 is like one weird trick with like another weird trick of mine. Like let's make class sizes smaller or something. 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. Can I articulate what I believe is like a slightly good faithified version of the right wing theory of why this is happening? Do it. That there are sort of cultural elements within school administration that are biased against young boys. That teaching and school administration are...

full of anti-boy libs. 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 changed. One of them was like, we should make sure that boys are reading literature with male protagonists. Name one book that had a male protagonist that you read when you were in school. 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 scientifically we're just tuning these bitches out so dumb i actually literally can't hear women that's dude women women be talking the paper academic paper i know god damn dude that rules i i the audacity the audacity to be like i can't even hear him i can't even hear him okay but but to take

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. Right.

Also, among the states, we just saw like Arkansas has one of the largest gender gaps. Right. 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. Yeah, that does seem pretty devastating to the cultural argument, right? So that was gender achievement. We've solved nothing. We learned nothing. What are you talking about? This is a problem with no solutions. We just found out that boys can't hear girls. That's the only thing you're going to remember. Yeah.

There's going to 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. Okay, so now we are going to talk about how the boys are struggling in the workplace. 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? Yeah, yeah. The clear gaps at the education level. Yeah.

And I imagine we're about to hear about more in the workplace due to the feminization, the vaginality, increased vaginality of HR. Since the 1980s, women have earned around 33% more. Men have earned 10% less. In real terms? Yeah.

If you look at men with no high school diploma, they are earning 23% less than they did in 1979. Women are earning more, 4% more. 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. A lot of this seems...

Like it might be a little less gendered and more about like the post-union order shaking out. 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.

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. I was waiting for us to talk about emotional intelligence. 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 healed

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

coded stuff like nursing and teaching. Maybe we can do an affirmative action trade. He does say that we should have a two to one hiring preference for men in these heel positions. And he's like, hell yeah, just straight up illegal discrimination. And he says, he's like, before you

say it's illegal. Before you say it's illegal, that's what's been happening in STEM if you actually look at the numbers. Yeah, but not as an actual overt express policy. That doesn't make his thing, his idea legal. He also, he says there should be like male targeted scholarships and fellowships to get men into these fields. That's about to get going. Yeah. It's guys only for scholarships from here on out. 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. Hell yeah. So here is him talking about the advances that have been made and potentially the limits of those advances. 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, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also still 3 to 1 ratio between men and women in STEM. It's still a really big disparity. 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.

Okay, how is he separating out socialization from those preferences? Yeah, 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 they just have different preferences. And honestly, if tech was like 55% men...

I feel like honestly, I'd be like, yeah, whatever. Even if it gets to like 60, 40, I feel like a lot of the broader social concern starts to fall off. Yeah. But like you look at the influence of tech right now on broader society and

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, right? Yeah, the persistent testicality of existing fields can also be a problem. Yeah.

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? Right. 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.

Yeah. 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 what feminists are saying because I literally can't hear them, but...

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. It's the West world doesn't look like anything to me. It's when they're looking at their fucking schematics. 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 overlap. So 40% of women earn more than men's median earnings. Okay. Well then who cares? Exactly. We're done here.

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. I was thinking, how long have you been holding that? I've been I want to see a chart that's like girls on the X axis, boys on the on the Y. And then it's want to have fun versus back in town. Yeah.

So the thing is, I'm going to go through this stuff relatively quickly because you're familiar with all this stuff. Yeah, yeah. He says the one word explanation for the pay gap is children. Okay. So if you look at the gender wage gap early in your career, there's almost no difference. Yeah. But then over time throughout their sort of 20s and 30s, women leave the workforce to have kids. Right. This is a...

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 child care, even if it is 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 have that qualifier because she...

She's an elitist lunatic. 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 both women, right? They're both experiencing gender discrimination at roughly the same level as we would assume. Careful what you say. This is most of our listeners. Yeah.

The study was called Lickety Split, the lesbian experience in Sweden. But he says like 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, 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. Right. So not gender discrimination, right?

at the workplace level, we're talking about like ultimately social expectations of women. 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. 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? 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. I don't know. It's very weird to me how like

In his mind, some biological differences in outcome need to be remedied. Exactly. 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. Yeah. I don't get it. This whole question of like women are choosing to be in lower paying occupations also feels like a weird, like it to me, it's not necessarily refutation of,

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

But the fact that women dominated fields pay less is partly the result of sexism. There's this really interesting article called The Cost of Caring from the 1990s where they look 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. Yeah. 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 years. Due to the slow decline of the butler. 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.

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. Yeah.

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. 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. Right, right. But like it...

It feels bad and wrong that only women have to make that choice. 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. 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 and he's talking about

men and women were in very different economic positions 50 years ago. And as soon as we get to absolute statistics, he's like, oh, yeah, well, you know, men do earn more money than women. Right. 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. Let's not get into politics, you know.

Because like if you – I mean even Reeves admits that like if you look at high-level lawyers, like high-level lawyers in 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 up until the 1960s. Anytime someone is like looking around a 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.

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

Is there sexism? Yeah. Yeah. When the actual question is like, how exactly is sexism manifesting? Right. 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. I also think a lot of men would like to stay home. I wouldn't know anything about it. Yeah.

So it's been five years since the last time I was in the office. Yeah. Five days a week. Dude, I could not do it anymore. If I got a real job, no. 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. So we've talked about how men are falling behind in education. How?

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 men.

Donald Trump. Joe Rogan, help us. 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 was like alcohol overdoses or fentanyl overdoses. Yeah. Sadness adjacent death. White males are about 70 percent 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. 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? Yes. I think the place to start, and I'll let you take the lead, is American women. Right.

What do you think they're doing? 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. 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. One way in which Reeves is totally correct is that I do think like these problems, like these specific

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 two-thirds less likely to die of overdoses. And we don't really know why. We need qualitative research. We need quantitative research. Yeah. I believe it was Drill. Mm-hmm.

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. 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 like 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. That's a lot. I really think Reeves is onto something. And I think he's correct that like this needs much more attention. But the act of...

of helping men with this.

would require doing a bunch of like woke bullshit about the nature of masculinity. 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. Right. We then have the normalization of using drugs and alcohol to cope with emotional problems, 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. Right.

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. Yeah. Breaking that cycle requires like updating norms of masculinity that like it's OK to reach out. It's OK to ask your friend for 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. He's gonna be like, what are you, a homo? I had a nice weekend with my best friend a couple weeks ago and I had to text him no homo afterwards. Yeah.

It's relentless, but you have to constantly guard the boundaries of your heterosexuality. 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

But in general, this is a responsible presentation of like a genuinely really interesting and important issue. 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 Blindness. The political left is in denial. Hell yeah. And we start with an anecdote from his son's school.

school, which I'm going to send to you. Litter boxes. If that's level 10, this is like level seven. 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.

All right, and then we... That's the story. Those are the set of facts. We then have...

His conclusion. He posts pictures of all the girls. That's the real crisis of boys. Boys have no idea what's hot anymore. This is the last third of the book.

Okay, so here's his interpretation. 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 good faith sort of read on this is like you want to use language that does not ostracize and potentially radicalize young boys. That's his case. Yeah. 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...

Yeah.

The kind of school where when something like this happens, which probably happens at almost every high school in the country to some degree, it gets widespread press coverage. And maybe the girls at the school, this is an opportunity maybe to organize. Yeah. So they do a protest and then all of a sudden the Daily Mail is like,

I don't know about this. That's absolutely what happened. This is also in the wake of me too. That's right. 2018. It was 40 girls of 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 like 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 going to 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 they had like a round table 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 of the punishment for the boy's...

Listening to the girls. Okay. It's like you had to sit there. And then according to this Washington Post article, the boy gave like a very heartfelt apology. He's like, 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 Post did not name the boy. Yeah. 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.

Everyone talked about it. What else do you want here? Yeah. If what you're saying is a 16 year old boy doing this shit shouldn't get widespread press coverage. I agree. I don't understand the complaint that like you can't call this toxic masculinity. This is what like jokerfied me. Is it 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. Boys behind the girls back.

being like, oh, she's more like a four and not telling the fucking girls for months. And the fucking right, dude, how many people say that like the left...

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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. Got it. So this is what he says about that.

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 out of an excess of masculinity. I just want to point out the dynamic here. This is an entire chapter dedicated to the problems of progressives, right? 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. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. That said, I don't think it's crazy to think that like the left...

in like online social spaces can use language that like 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,

Right. It's important to be specific so that people know that you're not talking about everyone. I think also like 80 percent of fucking discourse now is like leftists should talk different online. Yeah. We need to acknowledge the fact that there is 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 conference.

to like bring attention to like the plight of women in high schools. That's, that's the other side of what I was just saying. So like it, 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 is,

will elevate that language no matter how often you use it. Exactly, yeah. And so it's sort of unclear how much we can do to address the problem, right, internally on the left. Yeah, 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 right. That's not a real strategy. Dude, your median Republicans are like retweeting gas chamber memes right now. Yeah, no shit, yeah. Where's the fucking Atlantic article? 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. 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.

And then he gives us some examples.

For those on the political left, then, victim blaming is permitted when it comes to men. So we're back to toxic masculinity again. I think you can flip this and also say that the right suddenly sees structural problems when it comes to their in-groups. 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.

Yeah. 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. 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. Like that's taking away the blame from the individual.

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 they wouldn't with other groups. I think that's true. 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. So his third reason why progressives are fucking up this issue is an unwillingness to acknowledge any biological basis for sex differences. I was so excited for this to get transphobic. 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. Nice. He's like, the political right is saying that trans people threaten 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. My apologies to Richard Reeves. You've done nothing wrong. Yes. Other than the attempted shoe bombing. So here is his case.

that the left denies biology. 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? This is the thing. I was waiting this whole section for him to give an example. Right. The whole thing is kind of bizarre. Like, I was very careful when we were talking 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, right?

That, I think, is much more difficult to prove. But that's the thing. It's 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. Yeah. I'm really not sure that I've seen intelligent people on the left just say everything socialization. I don't think that's a common belief. 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. So here is his more concrete example.

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 U.S. 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. 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. Right. It's a government report about women and girls. It's going to focus on women and girls.

Like a black empowerment council is not going to mention the problems faced by white people. That's just not in the mandate of the group. When I was in college, I dated like a classic women's studies feminist type of girl. And the way that she like brought me into that was to be like, here's how this stuff affects men. That was like very formative for me. Just like having someone articulate that to me and having it click in my brain. The idea that like we should be reading this much into women.

one policy council from the Biden administration, just completely isolated from any broader context.

I don't know about that. 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. There was light 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. We then get to chapter nine, seeing red, the political right wants to turn back the clock. So now we're going to talk about what conservatives are fucking up. Okay. He says...

Yeah.

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. 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. So here is his case for this. 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.

Right.

Throw a little dig on the left. Yeah, right. You can't say anything bad about the right without an equivalent jab. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. The thing that really stuck out to me was in the U.S., a third of men of all political persuasions believe that they are discriminated against, and among Republicans, that number is rising. Yeah.

Why wouldn't you say what the number is? 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. When it was being wrapped up for 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 the legal system. It all starts with Barry Weiss's article about the rapping librarian. 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 percent of Republicans and around 20 percent 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. Right. These are not equivalent problems, right? Unlike the progressives and conservatives. Right.

It's like, oh, yeah, by the way, they're fucking lying to men and it's working. 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. Yeah, exactly. 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. And they're like banning abortion. Right.

Right. Like this is actually affecting women. It manifests in policy much more directly. Yeah. I don't like seeing certain phrases on the internet and also like 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. 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 rights. 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

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. 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. Dude. Richard. No. No.

He's writing this in like 2022, man. What the fuck? Jordan Peterson is just like a blithering weirdo who tweets like 300 times a day about like people are too fat in magazines now.

The dude is a right-wing psychopath, bro. 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. Yeah, but he does mock or patronize women. 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. I don't want to start talking – go down an evolutionary psychology rabbit hole here. But I like – 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. But also like 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. Yeah. 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's

he still, even now, gets this bizarre laundering where we're like, oh, 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, oh, 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. 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 now. He also has this weird tick 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 this thing, 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. 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. 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? An older, deeper form of masculinity where you cry all the time. Yeah.

on camera and dress like the fucking Riddler. 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. And so here's this. In a fascinating study conducted before the 2016 election, Dan Cassino, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, added an unusual question to a survey of voting intentions. Do you earn more, less, or about the same as your spouse?

So I'm 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 no effect when you did it with Bernie Sanders. It was only when you did it with Hillary Clinton. Wow. 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. Right. 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.

Scare quotes. Died new liberal Andrew Yang. Everyone's favorite.

Leftist. 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 wants to 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. It's wild, dude. You are your job, dude. And also he's 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. Right. Why? This is completely made up. These these guys are like sort of mentally trying to harken back to like hunter gatherer societies. Like we were out hunting and providing. Right.

But like those societies were super communal, right? You obviously relied on like the broader group to provide you and your family with shit. All of this like modern masculinity stuff is basically like invented tradition. It's just like hard not to see that it just happens to align with like Republican policy in the post Nixon era. Yeah.

They're just like, food stamps are gay. For this, I also read Stift, which was Susan Faludi's follow-up book after Backlash, both of which I really recommend. She frames all of this as like a betrayal. By women. Ha ha ha.

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 Musks of the world who completely fucked you over 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. Elon Musk talking to you about masculinity. Think about that.

You ever seen him do the X jump? My God. I think this is the thing to keep in mind is that like they want us to be fighting. They want this dumb like war of the genders to be going on. Like are women better? Are men better? So that they can take your job and fucking send it to China. Like that's been the dynamic for the last 40 years. We should be focusing our anger at the Chinese. Yeah.

I just think it's so frustrating that it's like we get such clear eyed diagnoses of the problems in like 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. 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? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So credit where it's due. Yeah. 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. I don't want to blame individuals. I want to look for structural solutions. The thing is, I don't really blame Richard Rees for this. I think there is a sickness among quote-unquote serious punditry where you cannot be taken seriously as an intellectual unless you do this pantomime of both sides have problems. If Richard Rees 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. Yeah. 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 is going to restore your factory job? They're not doing anything. The reason why work is so much more precarious is mostly because of fucking Republicans. Yeah.

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. But both sides have problems. This is the problem with the social media era where everything gets analyzed through what the like bulk of rhetoric online looks like. What happens when one side is in power versus another? Yeah. What do they do? Who's funding mental health that men can access, right? 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 OK, 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. Yeah.

Now you lose Republicans, right? Or you lose, you know, moderate fence sitters who like to believe that they are like above politics. We're just going to end with the final two paragraphs of the book. Will the boys ever be back in town?

Will women ever speak at a frequency that men can hear? 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. Our political leaders have political views that are different. 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. We can do political things away from politics. 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 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. One side is trying to increase their wages, and the other side is saying that it's gay to get unemployment insurance. 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,

Like there are real discrepancies between boys and girls in elementary schools. And the outputs of that might be really bad and dangerous. And we should be thinking about addressing them. Well, they might be

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 become more

and more delusional. And so my tolerance for the, like, partisanship is the issue crowd is waning. Yeah, yeah. Imagine how much Barry Weiss would be pissing me off now if I could hear her when she spoke. Yeah.