I don’t think Harris is particularly strong in interviews. But Rogan is a very weak interviewer, in that he never pins people down on their answer. She could go on that show and pick up thousands of voters no question.
Skeptical of Rogan he is a bit more of a rightist a lot of the time and faux intellectual. Theo von would be an interesting interview bc he REALLY doesn’t pin people down. When he said something skeptical about Harris to Bernie, he responded with something along the lines of being a black women and getting to where she has gotten is no easy feat…theo’s response was a nod and “that’s true.”
Rogan's left / rightness is issue-by-issue. If Bernie said the same thing to Rogan do you think he'd push back? It's only marginally more likely and if he did he wouldn't argue with any halfway decent response he got.
I was going to say that a half-day event to pick up a few thousand votes would be a terrible ROI, but running the numbers shows doing events like that consistently for, say, 100 days could easily be the margin of victory in the popular vote. So maybe it's not such a bad ROI!
Do you think it is more politically beneficial to say “I used to support this thing you don’t like but now I repudiate that and support this thing you do like”, or to say “look at how much I support this thing you like”?
If you have been an extremely famous figure, famous for supporting the unpopular thing in the past, I can see that the former would be valuable. But I don’t think that describes Kamala Harris. Very few people actually paid attention to the early phases of the 2020 democratic primary, especially among people who are now swing voters.
Can you give some examples of when Kamala Harris has personally stated she changed her position? There's been lots of times some campaign spokesman--usually anonymously--has said so, but that's hardly the same thing.
She has personally stated positions that are in contrast to past positions she stated. Explicitly reminding people of the past position is not usually something you want to do while doing that, unless you are sure that nearly everyone remembers your past position.
I think part of the problem is that she doesn’t come across as the cool aunt — she comes across as the spacey aunt who’s, like, really into crystals. That’s a big turnoff for men.
Doesn’t mean she shouldn’t try - but I fear it could go very badly.
I...think that you are probably correct in reality, but it's funny to me, because I don't actually think's much gap between the personality of a crystal-gal vs. an ice-bath-bro, or an astrology chick vs. a tan-your-junk dude.
I think a lot of people have this impression of Rogan from 30 second clips of him being unusually credulous harvested from multiple 3 hour long podcasts a week he puts out but he's really not like a "tan your junk bro".
I always interpret this kind of comment to be "actually, I haven't seen her much in the media I pay attention to." I personally don't know what her daily schedule is and what kind of local media she is doing (maybe you do!) There are only seven states that matter and if she is doing the kind of media that will help move votes in those seven states but never doing anything national, whether it's 60 Minutes or Joe Rogan, then I'm fine with that.
maybe but I remember seeing tons of Walz hits in July (even on fox news) and they were all over social media, I have not seen any clips of either of them doing media since the 60 minutes thing. Maybe I'm following the wrong people on twitter tho.
It is the winning strategy. She isn't good off the cuff -- we've seen enough to know this, and trying to get better at it with 30 days left in the race is too risky. Run the ads, avoid any unscripted remarks and win.
All depends where you think things stand, right? I am at least hoping their risk-averse approach suggests their internal polls (or feedback "on the ground," or whatever) are giving them optimism. But if you have a 45% chance of winning, you can't afford to play prevent defense.
And heck, even with a 60% win probability, you don't play prevent defense.
"across as the spacey aunt who’s, like, really into crystals. That’s a big turnoff for men"
Is it? That sort of cliche just doesn't strike me as a big negative. The warm, nurturing, "safety first", school-principle-talking-about-equity-constantly type of female seems like it would be a big turnoff. On vibes I'd think someone like Elizabeth Warren would be a turnoff for men. Girl with crystals might actually be a girl who can get some shit done, although I'd personally be scared the same way I'd be scared of a RFK Jr.
I can't remember it ever coming up so I'm not sure. But that's more of a dating perspective.
I'm trying to imagine that I hear the PTA or School Board got a new head, who happens to be female, and I hear she's into astrology or spacey. And that seem not ideal for me, personally, but not a strong signal that she'd be unpopular or ineffective. I'm having a hard time imagining what the cool aunt counterexample would be.
TBH the kind of female that I imagine as really having their shit together and being able to perform would be like the moms I know who have 4 or 8 well-raised kids and still manage to have the time and energy to organize things, show up for volunteer stuff, manage a side-business etc... I can't think of any aunts who impress me nearly as much.
It’s a strong signal that she’s not a serious person.
Your last paragraph is spot on and IMO that’s part of Kamala’s male problem, she doesn’t give off that “competent mom” vibe. Of course Hillary did, and that didn’t resonate with men either (though I will note I very much liked it from her) - so maybe the lesson is women are going to be criticized no matter what they do.
If a man dislikes a warm/nurturing woman and a "schoolmarm" and an aunt type and a mom type and and and, maybe that's a sign that he just doesn't like women in general and/or only sees them as sex toys?
i mean to me she gives off ambitious lawyer vibes, do people have such little knowledge of women in a professional context they can only see a woman politician as an "aunt" or a "mom?"
I said this elsewhere but Hillary’s ‘intangibles’ problem was that she came off as a robot in a skin suit. Same sort of je ne sais quoi as pre-workout Zucc.
Sorry but this is just classic, sexist nonsense rhetoric. "Schoolmarm"? "Into astrology"? People who look for any excuse not to vote for a woman based on BS like this are not looking for "strength" in a candidate, they are whining for daddy's approval.
My kids call me "dada", so no. Was reaching for the common denominator word to capture the mentality of the kind of mini-male who whines and moans and tries to act tough by beating up on women rhetorically in order to fill the yawning gap in his masculinity created by his father's (probably well-deserved) lack of respect for him. "Father" seems too arch and "dad" too casual, while "daddy" better captures the juvenility of this sad creature, I think. Interesting stylistic question though...
"Little boys who can't handle powerful women" -- like Nurse Ratched (aka HIllary, aka "Her")?
OTOH, Kamala's use of the word "lethal" was a stroke of genius. Men could identify with that: they could envision the power being deployed on behalf of (rather than to constrain) them.
I don't think HRC was less martial or violence-coded than Harris could ever be. (See "Hilary Clintons Appalling Enthusiasm for War" from HuffPo circa 2016 among many such articles.). But I agree if you mean that Harris is just a better messenger overall because she has a calmer, more confident stage presence.
The reason Rogan hasn't had either candidate on is that Rogan does not want to have the candidates on. He doesn't need the publicity. He'd risk alienating a big chunk of his audience either way. There's no upside.
100%. She'd want to do interview prep to field some tougher questions, but just sounding reasonable and sounding sympathetic to the concerns of that audience would be useful.
I think as well, Walz should be doing this kind of interview. The pick of Walz was in part intended to show off a positive vision of masculinity -- rural guy who like to hunt and fish, knows car stuff, etc. And that's great. But you've gotta have that message reach its intended audience!
That would be awesome!!! Rogan’s not a tool. She’d all apart. All the bullshit couldn’t survive a 5 minute honest conversation much less 2 hours. Cool Aunt?!? It’d be cool to harvest all the material.
The “vibes” issue she is dealing with is going to hard to overcome. It’s the decade or more of “the future is female”, putting female leads in a bunch of Star Wars films, putting a bunch of social justice stuff in video games, the general female coding as good and male coding as toxic stuff.
A not insignificant number of young men feel like they’ve been taught to be ashamed of being men and they are pushing back on that. They perceive that the heroes have all been turned female because a female hero is inherently more valued by society (or at least the powerful people that control it).
All of this is a little absurd but, in talking to younger dudes, this is the consistent feedback I get. It’s not all just Pepe Frog mob types, it’s also otherwise sort of liberal types.
I'm obviously fairly liberal, but was also in a pretty fratty frat in college, and most of my friends today are from that frat. I do not remember one conversation about people being upset with more female leads or being ashamed to be a man, if anything the conversations closest to the culture war was the lack of good raunchy comedy movies anymore.
I do think Richard Reeves is doing great work on this issue, and the gender success gap is undoubtedly important. Just from my experience, I don't see many men my age focused on it.
You won’t find this attitude in a frat as much as you’d find it in a restaurant kitchen where a bunch of 23yo guys who never went to college, and not upwardly mobile, spend most of their time gaming and watching mma, etc. that’s the lost male cohort here.
I don't have any personal experience with frustrated Gen Z males, so I only hear what people tell me online or from polls. But based on that limited window of insight, it feels like the frustrations are concentrated on men at the bottom of the social and economic pecking order. Men doing well in terms of education and social functioning are doing as well as ever in terms of earnings and dating prospects. The complaints seem to be, for lack of a better word, especially from "losers", who can also vote.
As a slightly older male, the main area where I've heard other men complain is about situations in the workplace, where for example engineering groups are taken to task for not hiring enough females. I can also remember some male friends in the military complaining that females softened and worsened the boot camp experience. I guess I would associate both those as liberal-adjacent, politically speaking.
Dudes I know don’t give a shit about female leads in kid movies, but do care that it’s being forced. Clearly guys - especially honkeys - are what’s wrong with the world. That’s what we’re being told. My friend’s white 15 year old son is as lost and self-hating as they come. He’s a walking Prius bumper. Palestine good, Elon bad, muslins good, white people bad, rap good, rock bad, … (Weezer is punk which was invented in the late 80’s… God bless his ignorant self-loathing ass). Jesus kid, get a hobby besides listening to people who hate your existence. Maybe try spending your life defending your existence and destroy their world view. The point is, toxic leftism is real whether guys are bothered by it or not.
Oh you silly! You’re a goose. A real GOOSE!!! [HONK!] Fun with inadvertent text errors. Weeee! It would be fun for Hamas to de-colonize the make-up from your face.
If you’re told your existence is an innate problem for the world, it’s a problem, InCel or not. It’s just much less of a problem for a dude in his refractory period.
Deprogram yourself. Explain what “confirming what people say about you”. Explain who is demeaning women. Provide examples of fascism. Here are some.
I want you to have free speech so you can out yourself as a brainwashed moron. The Jew-hating science-denying women-hating censorious leftist are the fascist.
How ‘bout dudes playing female sports. How ‘bout dudes in prison for crimes against women allowed to be in prison with women?!? Literally an insane process, unless you hate women. Then it makes sense. And if female prisoners complain about bad acts from the men? Revoke their parole. Scare them into silence through fascism.
How ‘bout catering to sick greed of evil medical practitioners and administrators and the mentally ill who need their delusions validated by having unquestioned gender affirming care for kids, especially the differently-abled like autistics. Begin a lifetime of talk therapy, doctor visits, chemical and surgical procedures all because you’re finding your identity as a young confused person and some adults walked you through what amounts to a medical confession without a parent or someone representing your best long term interests. Fascism for greed and affirming the derangement of leaders.
How ‘bout those 51 intelligence officers stating the HB laptop was disinformation? That was a fascist lie to sway the election.
How ‘bout being censored and called racists for wondering if COVID was a lab leak (which it was but even if it wasn’t it’s a fair question). That was a fascist lie to … what? Appease China?
How ‘bout being censored and called racists for stating DIE and CRT is in schools, which are communist authoritarian work-around to justify hiring without merit, sowing hate between groups instead bringing people together, and changing the mission of critical institutions like FEMA from responding to emergencies for ppl in the wake of a hurricane to - and, watch how I do this, I’m using its own words, quoting its website, which is a foreign practice to legacy media which are now pure propagandists - “Goal 1: Instill equity [read: racist communism] as a foundation of emergency management”. So, before helping people in need, check their skin color, God, genitals, their body negative mental illnesses regarding their genitals, etc. and then limit your assistance based on your findings. Insanity and fascism.
As your kind is famous for, accuse the enemy of your own actions. Except we’re fellow citizens. Not the enemy. You’ve been programmed to see it this way. You’ve been programmed to reject reality, to parrot slogans, to your lying eyes. The best medicine is facts and light. You will buck. You will fight. Your brain and body will reject the truth. Some are too far gone. Some will feel like they got hit by a truck and through the pain, through the head-spinning illogic trying to twist words to fit the lies, they will decide to stop wasting time twisting truth and parroting the words of some liar who you don’t know and who probably hates you because they hate all citizens, you’ll decide to calmly look to see what’s true. Citizens shouldn’t be pitted against each by immutable characteristics, fostering an America Red Guard Cultural Revolution. We can differ, but we’re one entity. This is all by design. It’s designed by fascist/communists/whatever. Break free.
Free your mind.
Don’t obsess on Trump. Trump is a turd. They want him as the opposition because he’s such a turd. But he’s nothing compared to the fascist authoritarian managerial class intent on destroying the middle class and full control. It’s painful to here, but it’s obvious.
People feel how they feel, but "the lead character in the new Star Wars series was female" and "I'm being taught to be ashamed of being a man" are so different from each other that connecting them is a sign of seriously bad analysis.
They do not seem that different to me. They both directly contribute to the feeling many young men have that the elites dislike them, and seek to create a society that is more aligned with female values.
I'm not sure why you're not getting this. People illustrate general public moods or beliefs with specific examples all the time. His idea isn't that Star Wars leads, specifically, are leading men to feel their gender is less valued. He's giving an example of the *type* of thing that is leading to that feeling, and assuming the reader could fill in the blanks with many others.
Part of the issue there is the explicitness of it. Mainstream cultural institutions are promoting these choices explicitly, so it's not just "some movies have female leads" it's "we want our movies to have female leads because the time of the woman has come! And it's about time!" It's akin to the backlash I constantly see over Biden actually announcing publicly that he was going to select a female candidate for VP (and then making it pretty implicitly obvious that it would be a black woman). If he had just said he was going to pick the best person for the job and then chosen Harris I think some of the backlash to the selection goes away (some of it remains no matter what, obviously). It's the explicitness of these decisions that make them so impossible to ignore.
To be clear, I think these young men are wrong. As a white male, my race and gender are not disadvantaging me in American society, and I find the notion that they are to be pretty bonkers. But I at least see and understand why other people are feeling that way- a lot of this stuff is kind of culturally omnipresent and in your face.
I think this entirely correct, except that we are actually verging into your race and gender as a white man disadvantaging you in certain contexts. I’ve done a lot of recruiting at two prestigious organizations and there is very clearly a thumb on the scale for women and minorities at this point. I’ll grant that without it these organizations might end up being like 70% male, so it’s kind of needed, but it’s definitely the case that white men are getting passed over now in a way that wasn’t true 10 years ago.
"As a white male, my race and gender are not disadvantaging me in American society, and I find the notion that they are to be pretty bonkers"
I'm not sure that you're considering the gender part closely enough. Plenty of males do well, for sure, but when you look at the bottom rungs of society they are filled with men. Homeless camps and prisons are what...90% male? Drug overdoses are 70% male, homicides over 80%, etc..
That's at the left-tail of the distribution, but going a little up the ladder low-income blue collar males might be disadvantaged when compared to women at the same percentile of society. I think I'd rather be a coal-miner's wife than a coal miner, for example.
Women are way ahead in terms of college degrees and life expectancy and the latter will probably never change.
Personally I'm sure you have no complaints about being male and neither do I. I've never personally felt held back. But it's easy to overlook the fact that statistically speaking, a random male is much more likely to end up worse than their sister.
How many white men has Biden appointed to the federal bench? Are men of my generation to curb our ambitions to atone for the affairs of our grandfathers?
You can expand that to any piece of media with female/LGTQ+/minority led casts. I thought The Acolyte was a pretty horrendous piece of storytelling, but the creators and those involved with the show are pretty explicit that anyone who says that is racist/sexist. It's kind of bonkers, and I don't think it's helping us get better films/tv-shows when any legitimate critique of what's being pumped out now is hand waved away as being a by-product of monstrous attitudes.
I thought that one was better than the original, which of course had an all male cast apart from the love interest. Of course, much of the betterness is really just shifts in tastes over time - in the 1980s it was fine to have a random scene of oral sex with a ghost that had no connection to the rest of the plot, while nowadays it would have to indicate something more.
I'm not getting it because it doesn't make any sense. The only way the casting choices of Star Wars could illustrate men being less valued is if men's value was tied up in always being the main character of blockbuster movies. That would be a dumb thing to think, and would 100% validate the criticism that people with this objection actually object to any inclusion of women.
The original trilogy clearly included a woman in a key role, so it's not inclusion of women, it's women as main character in this specific franchise.
And what are these films generally about? The main character of a star wars film is usually a warrior who fights, with violence, against evil. This is traditionally and instinctively a male archetype.
You can write good stories with women filling that role, and they can be well-received, but it tends to work better when A) The women are fighting more with cunning and diplomacy more than direct physical violence - think Dragon lady in GOTs or Leia in the original trilogy B) It's a fresh story where the gender feels intrinsic to the character - think Katniss from Hunger Games, as opposed to Star Wars Universe where warriors and soldiers had already been established as male, so the female character warriors seemed to be replacing male roles (and in a clumsy gender swap style way).
and C) they don't seem like every other movie. A movie about Joan of Arc or those female warriors from Senegal might be cool once in a while, but if they are popping up too much it would be like if every movie about a single parent was about single dads and single moms seemed not to be getting their fair share of representation.
But when you replace an existing male-centric, violence-using role with a poorly done female lead, for no other reason than the role is female, don't be surprised that people wonder about what you're trying to say.
On one hand, I kind of agree with you, but to steelman it a bit, the issue is not any particular movie franchise's casting decisions but the perception of a general trend. Like nobody objected to the Alien franchise having a female lead - in fact, lots of very bro-ey guys think Ripley is super cool. But if the perception is that the action lead almost always (let's say >75% of the time) has to be a woman, then that's different. Now that perception may not be factually accurate, but if that is the perception, I think I can see why it would bother some low-info, non-progressive, but not-necessarily-extremely-sexist dudes.
Somewhat tangential, but I remember seeing the black actor Charles S. Dutton interviewed once and he said he was a huge fan of Amos & Andy because it was so funny. But he explained: the characters in Amos & Andy were idiots, but they weren't any bigger idiots than Ralph Kramden was. The problem was that during the 1950s there were no *positive* representations of black people on TV. So what made Amos & Andy racist wasn't Amos & Andy itself, but the context around it.
I guess I would phrase this as, “People’s sense of their own value is tied up in being valued by society."
Star Wars fandom is traditionally very male. A. If men are not valued, this gender imbalance will be viewed as negative, a problem to be fixed. B. The creators of Star Wars will attempt to reshape the media in ways to make it less appealing to men and more appealing to women.
We’ve seen B, some men take that as evidence that A is true.
And even if they’re tied up in blockbuster movies, they’re still being fairly represented? Top Gun got nominated for an Oscar. Deadpool and Wolverine stars two white men and made a billion dollars. Jason Statham is thriving. The kids loved the Mario movie. That’s why it looks like some men are just angry women and ethnic minorities are getting any roles at all - because there are PLENTY of heroic stories for white men.
As just one example, the American Psychological Association put out guidelines for men and boys a few years back that said that traditional masculinity is anti-feminine and prone to violence. I think the report itself is more nuanced and makes valid points, but I am not SHOCKED to hear that young men see stuff like this happening and walk away with the notion that elites and society dislike them.
I think you run into a problem here with the fact that, as Matt’s column pointed out, traditional masculinity IS prone to violence. That was what he meant about boys turning sticks into guns and swords at higher rates, preferring the death penalty, etc. It would be weird for the APA to pretend otherwise.
The anti-feminine point is tougher, but historically speaking, at least, wildly misogynistic cultures are considerably more common than not. You have a lot more Taliban-type societies than the alternative.
I’m not sure what you do about that reality, given that it hurts men’s feelings. Obviously one approach is to try and channel violence in positive ways, but the most “positive violence” professions in the US also consistently have…the highest rates of domestic partner abuse. So I am not actually super convinced about the total efficacy of that approach. I think it is a genuinely hard problem.
I think focusing on the violence part of it is key though. I've gotten the sense that "competitiveness" is sometimes thought of as toxic masculinity (now maybe that's not true and it's a vibe I've gotten anyway, but this is about vibes) and competitiveness can _lead_ to violence but doesn't have to.
Like I said, I think the guidelines were more nuanced, but I also totally get why people would hear that and become upset about the claim. But I think the fact that it was even stated goes to the heart of the sense that young men (and, more likely, men of all ages to a certain extent) have that culture/elites are devaluing them and view them skeptically. There are a number of similar things that could be said about all sorts of groups. For example, women are more prone to child rearing and likely to pursue family over career. Or you could drill down on the data more specifically and say traditional masculinity is more prone to violence, but black men and black cultural norms around masculinity are disproportionately prone to violence. You could cite to statistical arguments in support of those claims. But do you think the APA would ever put out guidelines for treating other groups particular ways because of widespread behaviors that those genders or races are "more prone" to engaging in? I find it almost impossible to imagine them ever doing so. Instead, they signaled out masculinity more broadly to highlight how destructive it could be in order to publish guidelines for correcting it. I'm not surprised in the least by the backlash, and the APA must have been blind to have not seen it coming and thought that publishing something saying men as a class are bad in certain ways was a good and productive thing to do.
Agree - it would be shocking (and professionally irresponsible) for the APA not to focus on the problems of violence and violence against women in their guidelines for treating men since these are almost exclusively male problems. To that extent at least, the observation that "traditional masculinity" is a source of problems for the safety of and progress of women seems utterly unsurprising, despite the fact that men commit most of their violence against other men. The guidelines are ultimately just that -- information that can be used by practitioners in the treatment of men and boys, not moral judgements about them. The trick for professionals who utilize the guidelines is that the failure to seek treatment in the first place is one of the hallmarks of "traditional masculinity"
It’s not that they’re different. It’s that one is a tenet (men are shameful and bad) of DIE Marxism and the other is just a thing that may or may not be a byproduct of the tenet (more female lead characters in physical action hero movies).
Do guys not really like movies with kick ass female leads? I thought their real problem was with the chick flicks their girlfriends would drag them to.
"Do guys not really like movies with kick ass female leads?"
Of course not. That's the strawman that's being invented here. The complaint, as I understand it, in a franchise like Star Wars is that roles that were traditionally male *within the fiction of the universe* (Jedi Warrior) are being gender-swapped in a clumsy way, where the goal seems to be the-future-is-female-politics and not advancing anything needed by the pre-existing fictional canon itself.
Unsurprisingly, it's not executed very well and fails to pick up a new generation of young female fans. Meanwhile some portion of the old fans complain and they get "you're a fearful sexist" in response.
But yeah, no one's complaining about the Hunger Games. If they updated and remade the series with a male lead I'd probably complain.
I don't think Jedi Knight is a "traditionally male" role. Sure, the Jedi we see in the Original Trilogy are male. But from a certain point of view (heh), female Jedi have been part of Star Wars canon for many years, long before Peak Woke/Metoo. Mara Jade (EU novels) and Ahsoka Tano (The Clone Wars) are female Jedi and some of my favorite characters in Star Wars.
Also, the Jedi use the Force for strength and to guide them in combat, and this could obviate the natural advantage that men have due to greater physical strength. No reason why a woman can't be as strong as a man when she taps into the Force.
And the world is better for it, so long these young reactionary, antisocial men don't reform. At least they may stop voting when Trump is no longer on the ticket, and let the rest of the world go on becoming better.
I realize I don't help the situation by seeing it and calling it for what is is, but alas.
The problem is that your average young man isn’t doing any sort of analysis. They are watching YouTube/twitch/tiktok videos, discord chatting and surfing vibes while trying to establish an identify.
Or they’re getting a lesson in “social studies” from a 3rd grade teacher. How are people not getting this? We’re asking a replacement level 3rd grade teacher to convey subtly nuanced concepts that many professional writers and academics struggle with, to a bunch of 8 year olds.
When Kathleen Kennedy admitted they didn't have a plan for sequel trilogy before they began filming, everything about those movies made so much more sense.
The sequels made me appreciate the prequels much more; the prequels had lots of problems, but Lucas clearly had a plan, and he implemented it with consistency across three films. The overall idea of the arc (how a democracy falls into a dictatorship) was even pretty good!
The prequels' main problems are Lucas' clunky dialogue and not fleshing-out Anakin's turn to the Dark Side even more. There is a great 'fall of man/descent of man' story line there, and I am not sure if Lucas didn't realize he had created it, or was like, too scared to finish it.
It's certainly the most baffling decision in Hollywood history on a dollars-spent basis. I get that Disney wanted to quickly get a return on its investment in buying Lucasfilms, but I absolutely do not understand how a bunch of high-powered studio executives in the mid-to-late 2010s didn't understand that audience expectations about serialized storytelling had dramatically increased over the previous 20 years. I mean, I can all but guarantee you that basically every single person involved in that decisionmaking process had watched "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men" and also analyzed the MCU's development. (As an aside, I'll add that certainly the fastest way to spin up a great, cohesive sequel trilogy would have been to adapt Timothy Zahn's incredibly well-regarded "Heir to the Empire" trilogy, which I have to think was discussed and can only conclude was discarded because they didn't want to pay Zahn for adapting it.)
Followed by re-canonizing Thrawn, followed by doing a fairly good job with Thrawn in Rebels (within the limits of an expressly kid-oriented show), followed by turning him into a clumsy cartoon villain in the live action Ahsoka show. Sigh.
Yes, I'm aware, but I actually don't begrudge them that at all -- the EU already had numerous contradictions with the prequel films (e.g., all the stuff about Luke and Leia's mother in "The Black Fleet Crisis" books) and with themselves (Boba Fett had like three or four different origin stories in EU materials even before AotC came out!), plus the storyline had diverged so far from anything the general public was aware of (like the whole 30+ book story arc for the NJO . . . ), that from a continuity perspective it made the most sense to decanonize it all and then pick and choose elements to use in the new continuity.
IMO, as often in politics, when it comes to the new Star Wars trilogy, basically everyone is wrong. They made two good to really good movies that had the potential to repair the damage done by the prequels. The problem is that they then totally wimped out on where those movies were going precisely because they were unwilling to make Rey a less traditional, Luke Skywalker-style hero. Her character arc was clearly towards rejecting the traditional Jedi order. She should have fallen to the dark side, or broken the dark/light dichotomy entirely for something more thoughtful and interesting. If they ever made a third movie it could absolutely tie together a coherent arc about the failures of blind dogmatism and carrying on the wars of one's fathers.
"They made two good to really good movies that had the potential to repair the damage done by the prequels."
Are you including The Last Jedi in the "two good to really good movies"? Because if so... no, just no. The Last Jedi sucked, and not just because they butchered Luke Skywalker's character (the Luke in the Original Trilogy would never have tried to kill his nephew in his sleep, WTF?). OK, maybe you like the degradation of Luke because it boldly "subverts expectations" or whatnot. But consider:
1. Admiral Holdo is super annoying, to the point that, when she sacrifices herself, instead of appreciating her noble sacrifice, I was relieved that she was gone. Also, she's a military leader, why the heck is she wearing a ball gown and has pink hair like she's a gender studies teacher at a cocktail party? You're in a war zone, woman, put on a uniform!
2. The stupidity of Holdo not explaining the plan to Poe, which backfired on her rather badly.
3. Rose Tico is also annoying, and illogical. "We win by saving what we love" - ok but you just stopped Finn from... saving what he loves (all his friends at the base) by stopping him from ramming the cannon! Yes, Luke is about to save everyone, but you had no way of knowing that.
4. The stupid Canto Bight sequence. What was the point of that, other than making a statement: "See, war profiteering bad! Slavery bad! Rich people bad!" I'm glad you're here to tell us these things, movie.
5. Rey goes from "I just found out I have Force powers" to "I can effortlessly lift about five tons of rocks" in DAYS. Even Luke struggled to lift the X-wing out of the swamp, and he had the benefit of actual training by Yoda, not "I'm sitting around on this island while the local Jedi Master is grumpily ignoring me."
6. The tense opening scene ruined by Poe cracking a stupid "Yo Mama" joke, with the side benefit of making General Hux go from a threatening villain to a laughingstock.
7. I bet you were excited to find out who Snoke is? Well, too bad! He's dead, enjoy having your expectations subverted!
On the plus side... the actors did the best they could with what they were given, especially Kylo Ren. The visuals were great. The music was good. That's about it.
Kylo murdering Snoke was the best choice a Star Wars movie made since Empire. It's baffling that anyone ever thought Palpatine from Wish was to be straightforwardly accepted as a serious villain.
Luke going into exile after reproducing the failures of the Yoda/Obi Wan Jedi order with his own nephew makes perfect sense.
Canto Bight was dumb and clumsily executed but Finn's arc finding a reason to commit to the rebels was necessary and somewhat compelling regardless of the ham-fisted casino planet.
The Poe and Holdo conspiring to fuck it all up because of their egos arc is exactly the sort of lesson that a decent sequel would call back to when a certain lead character needs to be convinced to let go of some of her shit too.
Generally everything involving Kylo/Rey/Luke and everything from when they all board Snoke's ship through to the end is great. (The weird Rose/Finn crash thing excepted)
Kylo murdering Snoke *could have been* the best choice a Star Wars movie made since Empire, but only if Kylo or Hux had actually been established as genuinely threatening villains. TLJ suffers tremendously from Rian Johnson wanting to make the First Order pathetic, but if the First Order is pathetic, what does it say about our heroes who keep losing to them???
I haven't actually gotten to anything past season 2 of the Mandalorian. Once CGI Luke showed up I got drastically less interested. I hear I actually should get around to Andor though.
If what you want is a more mature Star Wars that breaks away from endlessly repeating previous stories and explores different tones, then you should absolutely see Andor.
I strongly agree with this. I think that the original TLJ Rian Johnson wanted had Rey join with Kylo Ben in rejecting both the New Order and the Republic or whatever. Instead the climactic moment just falls flat and she scurries away and nothing really changes. No wonder Abrams just threw everything away for the (awful) TROS, the core of TLJ *did not happen in the film that was released*.
I did always kinda feel like it pulled it's punch at the end to not lock in Ep IX to a specific direction, which I assume came from Kennedy more than Johnson, but it's not like it couldn't have followed on from that core idea if they hadn't been chicken/hyper-sensitive to youtuber criticism about it.
I think one problem is that Disney leadership and a lot of media act like any criticism of star wars for being bad is based on the fact that the people complaining are really just angry about the female being the lead. I've seen a lot of people complaining about stuff that goes to the storytelling and writing of the movies where the response is "misogynists were always going to hate these movies because of Rey".
You should meet more elementary school teachers, they’re the ones we entrust to faithfully convey “the leads in Star Wars are female does not entail that we think men are inferior.”
I know a bunch of elementary school teachers, unsurprisingly since I have kids in elementary school. If you think they're conveying lessons about Star Wars, though, maybe you're the one who needs to meet more of them.
Is it a sign of that or a sign of yourself not wishing to accept that they originate from the same cultural package because you don’t want to throw out that cultural package in aggregate?
Saying “the future is female” was just incredibly stupid. Can you imagine saying “the future is black” or “the future is Muslim” or “the future is male.”. It was a thumb in the eye of 48% of the electorate. I’m willing to vote for qualified women, but I have zero interest in shifting the balance of power towards women. Women already have longer life expectancies, lower incarceration rates and higher graduation rates than men.
Women have those things because they study harder than men, take better care of their health and do less stupid, self-destructive shit. Women are doing what we hope all our children will do, while men are sitting back and trying to "work the refs" with nonsense arguments about the cultural "vibes" favoring women.
If I were to say "men are more represented in STEM, in software engineering jobs and higher management because they work harder than women and do less stupid, self-destructive shit", it would rightfully be seen as offensive and wrong. I submit your statement falls into the same category.
It’s funny how even within, say, a physics department, there’s an extremely notable gender gradient among subfields and it’s basically exactly what a YouTube manosphere moron would predict.
THIS is the actual counterpart to Joe’s argument, and they’re both pretty correct.
There is no question that the gradient exists and I think there is minimal evidence that it is primarily (but not wholly) due to anything other than differences in preferences that are gender-correlated. But this does not get at the behavioral differences that are driving the gross-level differences in outcome -- graduation rates, health outcomes, etc.
Your comment barely proffers an argument but I’d like to hear why it is that you think there is such a gender-correlated preference for “amount of math I have to learn” among people who are willingly going into a field that has them doing more math than 99.9% of the population.
You are suggesting that becoming a lawyer or doctor rather than becoming a software engineer is equivalent to committing crimes that land you in prison, or failing to graduate from high school or college, or a sign of self-destructive behavior? That's not so much "offensive" as just bizarre. I'm not inventing anything here, just summarizing Reeves' conclusions, as well as that of dozens of researchers.
So I guess Victorian women had shorter life expectancies than men because they were sluts and got pregnant too often. Your reasoning is analogous to that.
Woah - this reads like a tortured non-sequitur from a raging misogynist who has just been aching to use the word "sluts" in order to reveal his deepest feelings about women. The comment makes no sense whatsoever.
bullshit. if you are going to blame men for the impact modern social conditions have on make life expectancies, you should blame victorian women for the effect victorian social conditions had on their life expectancies. we all exist within social context and results are the best way of gauging who is doing better
Da Fuck? Who do think was controlling fertility and every other "social condition" in Victorian England and everywhere else until about 5 minutes ago? You are just completely off the beam. I can't even discern an argument here, let alone a sound one.
Gotta be honest, the only time I utter the word “slut” it’s pretty much only, uh, during something that one particular woman is seeming to enjoy. If I want to call a bunch of hoes hoes I call them hoes. Might be a generational thing.
Typical right wing argument. I don’t buy it when such logic blames the poor for being poor and I don’t buy it when it is used to justify gender gaps (of either kind). Sure at the individual level you can point to the importance of choices but it doesn’t explain changes in the aggregate. Systemic shifts are at play. In many places the system is still rigged against women. In some it is becoming rigged against men.
I am not arguing for not addressing the conditions that are creating the gender gaps (and I most definitely not "right wing"). I am observing that there are very clear differences in behaviors between the sexes that explain a lot of those gaps and have nothing to do with feminists imposing pro-girl / anti-boy cultural norms. You actually need to study to earn a high GPA. I agree with Reeves that a lot of the variance is caused by differences in the timing and pattern of brain development, as well as the steady retreat of men from the professions that help shape boys' models of maleness and help accommodate male behavioral patterns within relatively structured settings like schools. Those are structural / systemic issues we can address without blaming girls and women for succeeding under the longstanding rules we collectively established for our children (study hard, don't commit crimes or violence), and which we seemed to be fine with as long as boys and men were "winning".
Second, “gpa” ie grades can be determined in different ways. What do you reward ? Exam performance or attendance and homework? The shift towards more emphasis on the latter and on consistency of performance in low stakes settings advantaged girls but it’s not objectively a more correct way to grade.
The best counter example is Oxford university. All students there are chosen purely on academic merit and presumably both male and female there are on average equally smart hard working and intellectually mature. And yet men outperform women there in getting distinction in their degrees. It seems clear that the reason is oxfords very traditional grading system. The *entirety* of your “gpa” is determine in one incredibly stressful stretch of exams at the last couple of weeks of your whole 3-4 years. Moreover, these exams reward intellectual daring to pursue original arguments (in humanities subjects at least) not just mastery of others’ ideas. It seems that on average women are less prone to take these kinds of risks* and thus less often get distinctions (although to be clear many still do! Just fewer than you’d expect).
[*to be clear the argument here isn’t that they are less able to do so but rather on average less *willing* to do so. In other words it’s an example on how academic settings can reward behaviors that aren’t inherently about academic ability or knowledge. I argue that a similar inherently non academic behavioral bias advantaging girls is in America’s education system]
>> You actually need to study to earn a high GPA. I agree with Reeves that a lot of the variance is caused by differences in the timing and pattern of brain development
So much misunderstandings here.. where to start? I’m a historian so with history I guess… for literally millenia academic and intellectual pursuits were coded male across a wide arrange of human cultures. It is only in th past generation, and only in a select countries (a minority of humanity) that girls started outperforming boys. Yes, I believe that boys h historic and virtually ubiquitous advantage is likely due to patriarchal structures but the fact that a handful of exceptions with the reverse have now occurred is hardly sufficient to conclude inverse essentialism (“brain development”).
Thanks for the many comments - will try to address all in a single "mega response".
Re: "right wing ... personal responsibility". The point of my comment was to note that the differences in results can be traced to differences in behavior within frameworks we have long-established, and under which men were presumed to be thriving relative to women until relatively recently. The tone here throughout has been blaming women (or the women's movement, or the me too movement, or some external force "oppressing" men) as the source of the growing disparity, which is batshit crazy as well as being totally unproductive. That is not "right-wing" and it is not a lecture on "personal responsibility", it's just properly accounting for the facts in evidence.
Re: pedagogical methods. Sure - agree. But this does not change the biological facts about brain development, which no more makes boys "inferior" than menstruation makes girls "inferior". I don't see how noting the differences and proposing ways to address it in order to provide boys greater opportunities for success can be seen as being negative about boys' education.
Re: testing methods. Again, sure. Devise the best testing method that accords with the results you are trying to encourage, ideally ones that will lead to producing the best long-term results for society as well as for the individuals involved. Oxford's is kind of limited, IMO, but there are lots of systems out there, and a fair amount of choice among them within the US higher ed system at least.
Re: millenia of male-codeed academic success. A token acknowledgement of of the role of "patriarchal structures" is insufficient here. This is the only era in which women have had widespread and equal access to higher education along with the opportunity (and indeed the expectation) to use that education in fulfilling, self-directed careers. And it is precisely this era in which we find women excelling relative to men along the exact parameters that were established to evaluate the performance of their male peers. If this is an historical anomaly it's because it's the first time these conditions have existed. We have an N of 1, so "history" is not much of guide to explain things.
Moreover, we don't need to closely evaluate the performance of men and women over the span of history to see or understand differences in brain development timing and patterns between the sexes -- we can observe them and test for them directly, as been done countless times now. "Essentialism" is the false attribution of characteristics to a class of people or things based on pre-conceived but untested suppositions. When things are observed and replicated repeatedly, the process of attribution and explanation is called "science".
Dear Joe, could please apply your insightful analysis to explain racial income gaps? I think you’ll find the analysis still works if you change “women” to “white people” and “men” to “black people”.
If the result offends you, maybe you could strongly reconsider your original point.
It's not MadLibs, where you can replace words at random to create a "result". Explaining income differences is more complex than observing differences in academic performance and educational attainment. Educational attainment is obviously part of the income gap, as are relative unemployment rates, as are career selection and opportunities. But as to educational attainment and performance, there is nothing offensive or inoffensive about it, there is just the data and the link between data and behavior. These observations are robust across racial groups -- white women perform better than white men, black women perform better than black men, latino women better than latino men. So whatever factors are creating the gaps in performance between racial groups, there is no reason to believe that it's the same thing that's driving the difference between men and women within each group. As for behavior driving the differences between the sexes within racial groups, these are also robust. I really don't see why it's "offensive" (or even mildly surprising) to find that lower rates of disciplinary intervention and higher rates of homework completion are correlated with higher rates of academic performance and degree completion.
I didn’t say you’re right wing. Merely that the dismissive attitude in your comment (“personal responsibility”) echoed right wing talking points about social ills.
Finally there is the question of pedagogical methods school culture etc. the cutting or even elimination of recess time is probably hurting all kids but in average seems to hurt boys more.
All of this put together is quite sufficient to hypothesize a shift without assuming boys are lazy or cognitively inferior (“late development”)
My God you people have short memories. I beg you to go and read discussions from the past about why women were less successful than men. We didn’t accept those arguments about women and we shouldn’t accept them about men. End of story.
Every other group that does worse, it’s the fault of white people or men or both. But when men do badly, it’s their fault. Thank you for clearly illustrating why me and hundreds of millions of other men around the world are finding left wing politics completely untenable and bordering on offensive.
Man and father of boys and girls (now young adults). Don't understand what you mean by "operate". But having watched this in real time as a very interested party for a couple decades now, I reject the notion that what has happened to boys is that they have been beaten down by social messaging about their inherent low value, inferiority, or evil. I definitely would have noticed that, as would the rest of my family, especially my son.
I don’t know you. But I see many people completely oblivious to many things, especially those that don’t directly impact them. I won’t speak to your perceptive abilities but, if I’m inferring correctly, I’m sincerely glad your son hasn’t been negatively impacted (assuming he actually hasn’t) by the explicit and implicit divisive real world messaging against men - and even biological women - especially of the Honkey variety.
Fair enough, so I will amend my claim to say that I have not seen evidence of this, either personally or more broadly socially. What I have seen is an increasing intolerance for what is I think is objectively bad and antisocial behavior by men in relation to women, and yes, also some pretty nutty claims by extremes about a lot of things, including sex roles/gender, etc. I have not seen young men struggling to sort through this rhetoric, although I find that older men are having a harder time with it. This is not to deny that there is a very real crisis among young men, pretty well documented by Reeves and others, that deserves more attention and probably some policy changes.
The movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” is incredibly useful in understanding American masculinity. Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne are very different archetypes, but they are both equally masculine and equally American. A real man can be a lawyer or a gunslinger, but he cannot be a coward. Old movies, at least ones that avoided cheap escapism, are windows into the American soul.
My absolute favorite movie from the age of 6 to 12 years old. Agree it was a powerful tale and a formative lesson in how to act like a real man. Only later did I learn that the story was (of course?) written by a woman.
I think that’s generally the feeling a lot of men have and I don’t mean to be dismissive of it at all.
From my POV, I thought Rey was actually a pretty great character and I thought Daisy Ridley was a good actor (much better than any of the other male leads with the exception of James Earl Jones, Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Harrison Ford). I just thought the writing, direction and editing was pretty terrible throughout the new series.
That’s looking at that role and franchise in isolation though. What I don’t think is absurd is a dude taking that one data point and adding it to a constellation of other data points and feeling pretty shitty about things.
Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge what your saying either lacks observational skills or is willingly blind. It’s all right in front of our faces, everywhere. They’re insulting their own intelligence by not acknowledging the obvious.
That's not the problem -- there are innumerable strong male archetypes all across every dimension of the culture. The problem is that any attempt to explore the reality that there are also strong female archetypes appears to send weak-minded men into a spiral of self doubt and shame from which they are unable to extricate themselves. JFC, this conversation on this site today is the first one that may convince me that women really should run the entire world because men seem utterly ill-equipped to deal with even the slightest challenge to their historical hegemony, which is particularly ironic given that men set the rules of the game that women are now winning.
Sam is / was failing to understand the difference between an actual proposal and an intentionally hyperbolic claim used to illustrate my frustration with the whiny tone of the complaints above. Do you think I was actually proposing a legally-instituted gynocracy? Seriously?
This all seems true- young men were not crazy to think progressives didn’t like them or want them around circa 2014 onwards. But it also feels like the boy alienating vibes in elite progressive circles peaked around 2021.
There’s a recent NYT article by Jessica Grosse (former Jezebel writer) arguing that the misogyny of Gen Z men is overstated, pointing out young men are still committed to women’s legal equality. I agree with her! But it’s significant how different this is from what you’d expect from these corners a decade ago, when you could be declared a misogynist for sitting wrong in a bus, or talking too enthusiastically about something.
All of this is to say, I don’t know what more progressives can do to change the vibes. The “male tears” mugs are already in the trash.
2021 is not all that far in the past. But it might be worth circling back to the main thrust of MY's post today, which is that commitment to women's legal equality and is only one of very many topics that might have a gender skew, and if men are moving away from Democrats, Dems need to find issues to win them back.
Throwing away the male tears mugs is a good start, though, lol.
Don't be silly. It's generally considered settled whenever the definition "legal equality" is straightforward and easily agreed upon.
But often, legal equality can be taken to be statistical outputs, like the average income of men vs women. Or it could be parenting rights when a couple divorce. Or it could be related to some aspect of biology where it's just very difficult to determine what equal treatment means (abortion, or fertility treatments, or viage, for example).
Or it could be something even trickier, like sentencing and parole guidelines, which usually take men's greater propensity to violence into account. For any of these, It's just not clear what legal equality means or exactly how voting patterns will gender skew based on them.
Absolutely, and if you look at the Richard Reeves stuff there are plenty of valid reasons for young men to feel like they're being left behind. And since it's concentrated in poorer families and neighborhoods, it shouldn't be a progressive violation to talk about it.
And yet it seems to be because the Code of Hammurabi was paternalistic and there are still more male CEO's than female, or something.
I think Matt's code switching has some validity, but not signaling that young men falling behind is of concern is an own goal.
More men at the top argument is always flawed because the top is a tiny fraction of the populous. Ultimately, it would take longer to diversify the top than the bottom. Also, the top is running game and will shit on anyone of any characteristic to keep owning the game. And who defines success or failure? Who defines struggle? Self-determination and being fulfilled (or not miserable) should be the qualitative criteria for success. If there are more men/male CEO’s but men are offing themselves and life expectancy is dropping materially, men are doing very poorly in modernity. If the opposite is happening for women but the percentage of CEO’s isn’t making a 2nd wage feminist happy, who’s better off? The average man or woman? Moreover, the idea that we’re pitting the groups’ victim status against one another is another commie anti American wet dream. Message positively and rise all tides. But many don’t want that. It’s clear who they are.
Eh, I think it's vibes, but I think you've got the origins wrong. It's not really much that the actual creators of stuff are doing saying (except VERY recently, as what I'm about to talk about below has metastasized and escaped so creators studios start getting pressure to comment), but rather it's a feedback loop between right wing and left wing, well, I don't want to say grifters, but I'm going to. You can point to either starting it, but since I'm on the left, I'll be nice and give a model dialogue where the left starts it:
LW: This new game has a black female lead, that's going to drive the MAGA chuds crazy and they'll make threats and boycott the studio! What assholes!
RW: The studio has gone woke! Remember all the good games they used to make? What happened to them? Oh, well, go woke, go broke, we gotta show them we won't just buy whatever they're selling. See, here's this LWer [Quoteretweet/splice/whatever] saying that the studio's on their side, we gotta get them back on our side!
LW: See! They're trying to destroy the studio! And I've heard some RWers have sent death threats to the creators!
Studio: Please don't send death threats to our staff, or be racist to them.
RW: SEE! THEY'RE CALLING US ALL RACISTS WHO THREATEN PEOPLE!
LW: SEE! THEY'RE ALL RACISTS WHO THREATEN PEOPLE!
Scene.
Everyone involved gets views, gets attention and attention for their upcoming game. This was bad, but didn't usually effect players who didn't choose to get involved/follow these dingbats. What's changed, mostly is that (1) studios send out a lot more press releases, because (2) bits of the press started reporting on this like it was actual news, and not just after studios sent out press releases, but before. The press story that is 'five racists on twitter sent racist messages to someone and their employer has not commented to say 'we think that's bad'' needs to die in a fire.
So... I have Many Thoughts about this, as a woman who loves Star Wars and hero stories in general. (My husband also loves hero stories, we watch them together, it's great!)
Like I said in a comment above, I think that a zero-sum war of the sexes is harmful and stupid. Neither sex has a monopoly on virtue or vice; saying "men are toxic" is just insulting and wrong.
Now, putting my "Devil's Advocate" hat on, stories featuring male heroes doing great deeds and overcoming evil are a staple of Western culture. The original Star Wars trilogy! Harry Potter! The Lord of the Rings! A whole bunch of male Marvel and DC Comics superheroes, like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Captain America, etc. etc. etc.!
I watched these movies and read these books as a girl and woman, and I had no trouble identifying with the male protagonist. Why can't men do the same with a female protagonist? If I can recognize and admire the virtues of Luke Skywalker and Aragorn even though they're men and I'm a woman, why can't men do the same with the Black Widow or Katniss?
I think a feminist would see the current situation as a *rebalancing*: men, you've been so dominant for so long, it's our turn in the spotlight now. Again, I don't *agree* with it, because it's starting to sound too zero-sum. But, like, if you hate a movie with a female protagonist, go stream the LOTR movies, nobody is stopping you.
BTW, I strongly dislike the Disney+ Star Wars shows, not because they feature female and/or Black characters, but because they're badly written. The Obi-Wan Kenobi show sucked; The Acolyte sucked worse. Give me good stories with female protagonists, and I'll happily watch them. I loved Mara Jade in the Star Wars Thrawn novels, I wish she had been made part of the Disney canon.
Have you seen Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind? It's a beautiful anime movie from the 80s (so, many years before the "Masculinity Is Toxic" discourse). The protagonist is a young princess who is very brave and resourceful, as well as compassionate and kind. In the end, she [spoiler alert] solves the conflict without violence. I think it's a wonderful movie for girls *and* boys. There's more than one way to be a hero.
It’s not just a staple of western culture, it’s a staple of almost all cultures to some degree or another. There are also plenty of example of female heroes in western culture that I grew up thinking were pretty cool Annie Oakley! Joan of Arc! Ellen Ripley! Sarah Conner! Catwoman! Storm! Jean Grey! Etc.
I do agree that men need to get over some of this because the culture is big enough for a diverse array of heroes and their epic adventures. It’s really the annoying in your face “yaaaas” internet stuff that is driving dudes away and a lot of those people also identify as progressives.
As I said in another comment here I liked Rey, I just thought the new series was flawed from a story, directing and editing perspective. Not Daisy’s fault because she is a great actor and did what she could with the character as written.
I suspect that "women have an easier time identifying with men than the reverse" is baked into biology to some degree. It's not all culture. Speaking from my limited directed experience, I only have a daughter, and she's never been adverse in the least to male main characters. In fact, I think she prefers it. But I think that would have been a turnoff for me at that age.
This is all, to some degree, just a question of where the money is. It's not like female main characters are a new invention - I just rewatched the Wizard of Oz for example. If people ever stopped females from buying move tickets, it was a long time ago. With all the choice out there, I'd guess that the supply of female main characters approximately matches demand. Consequently the most griping comes from specific fanbases, where there's not unlimited choice. There are a lot of star wars movies, but not a new one to match every possible taste or interest.
I also think, that although happily there are exceptions, men are just on average attracted to direct, bash-it-on-the-head violence, while women are, again on average, a little more drawn into heroes who wield power in more subtle ways. And so that's the way a lot of media plays out.
There is still a societal sentiment that boys/men aren't allowed to like feminine things. From my own limited experiences, I was not adverse to female main/side characters, even preferred them. But in turn I got shamed and criticized, the same shaming doesn't really exist the other way around.
I will say, there was some data that came out about League of Legends where female players would disproportionately play female characters whereas male players played both male and female characters equally that directly contradicts the "women have an easier time identifying with men than the reverse" angle.
Are there a lot of men who refuse to engage with stories with female protagonists sight unseen? I do watch some of the "toxic" reviewers, like nerdrotic and critical drinker, and while I find them to be on a bit of a hair trigger, they do like and sometimes praise action movies with female leads. One example is Prey, a Predator movie from a couple of years ago. Their complaints are usually similar to your own - bad writing, plotting, and acting.
I mean, the answer to your question is most likely yes, given the metric ton of b*tching and griping about how "all the movies have female protagonists, The Feminists have ruined the movies!!!" one sees on social media.
Again, I am NOT NOT NOT trying to turn it into a war of the sexes, a "men = evil, women = good." And I'm certainly against performative wokery. But I have also learned that the performative wokery exists in reaction to *something,* and every time someone tells you reasonably, "The misogyny is not that bad," the reply is, yes, yes it is that bad. Go on the internet and see for yourself.
Now, I actually agree with you re: Critical Drinker. His politics are 180 degrees away from mine, but I have actually enjoyed some of his reviews! He doesn't hate things for the sake of hating things. He can be witty. He praised Blue Eye Samurai, a show with a female protagonist.
Of course they exist, but I think at least from what I can recall, it often turns out to be a very small number of people being very loud about it. One problem (for everyone) is that the relatively flat structure of social media can make things seem much bigger than they really are, i.e., the usual "twitter is not real life" refrain.
btw, glad to hear you like critical drinker! One of my female postdocs spontaneously mentioned his reviews to me recently (while she was mocking The Acolyte 😂), so I'm glad to see while he can be very...critical, he still attracts a more diverse audience than I might have guessed.
Imagine if Alien had been released 45 years ago and the movie studio was like "Check it out! The kickass lead in our kickass movie is FEMALE!" Or if the studio behind The Bodyguard 32 years ago had said "Check out our movie about the unlikely relationship between a pop star and her bodyguard that’s INTERRACIAL!" My point being: don’t bludgeon people over the head with it, just show it. They’re more open minded than you might think.
I don't really buy that there's some structural problem with running women candidates because so many other countries, from Germany to Pakistan, have elected women.
I would have thought that the international comparison makes me think it *is* a structural problem, because in most political structures, women have ascended to the top role, even with varying cultural associations, making it seem like the distinctive structures of the American political system might be more relevant. The fact that women leaders have been more common in parliamentary than presidential systems seems to confirm this.
Now one thing that points in the cultural direction is the fact that Canada and Australia have each only had one female prime minister, and both as brief placeholders, suggesting that something about the shared cultural features of Australia, Canada, and the USA is relevant, as well as the structural difference between the presidential and parliamentary systems, and whatever other structural features are present.
Translation: the core anti-democratic features of the American Constitution are also anti-woman because they exaggerate the influence of states with male-dominated voting patterns.
How can one exaggerate the electoral influence of every state simultaneously? Do you think starting baseball games at 10-10 instead of 0-0 would also generate some sort of unfairness, or did you mean something else?
I’m not quite sure I get this. Is the idea that by making federal politics dependent on state politics, it creates two separate filters, so that male dominance is imposed a second time at the second level?
They use party lists, so the party just puts women on the lists- no voter input is required. Also I think some of those countries now legally require X% of the candidates be female, so there's no option to opt out. I've even heard of developing countries that are traditionally seen as more misogynistic requiring that, so it's not just a European thing.
Anyways, that's quite different from individual candidates running in single member districts where only 1 candidate can win
I don’t think there is a “structural” problem, I think there is a specific issue with a specific candidate because of specific cultural headwinds we are dealing with on the American left. It’s unique to us and our time and place.
That is at best unprovable. Kamala Harris isn't any sort of uniquely threatening figure. She's just a woman who has been very successful in politics. Men have voted for her before and there's no reason to think that men who voted for Biden or Obama won't vote for her.
I think she would be farther ahead except for the misogyny. I feel like this also comes up for the MA senator. That isn’t a reason not to run and I think Harris can still win. All people have to do is vote for her.
In any case - the international data you're drawing from *would suggest* there may be a structural problem given that the majority of politicians and heads of state worldwide are still men.
I don't know what the reason is or if it's structural, but although the evidence very clearly shows it's possible for women to get elected, the lower % of female leaders suggests there could be additional headwinds.
I recall 538 doing a breakdown of this a number years back and that was essentially the conclusion they reached. Basically, female candidates don't run for office until they're more experienced/more qualified, so the quality of the female candidate is pretty high. But the voters don't seem to vote for them in any lower proportions, so the "penalty" that people are constantly saying females face just doesn't seem to exist at the actual ballot box.
If I had to guess (and this truly is a guess...I'm very far indeed from an expert on this topic) a big part of the challenge for American women to advance in politics is the same one they face in most other sectors: it's hard to balance having children AND a career. If Harris wins, I don't think the fact that our first woman president will not have been a mother* is completely unrelated.
*Yes, I'm aware Harris has stepchildren. And by all accounts they adore her. Which is great. But she didn't have to take off nine years in her 30s. For better or worse, America at the end of the day ain't Finland.
Because we choose not to adopt a few basic policies that would make the core economic and career choice less weighted against professional women. We don't do it because we still have a politics dominated by self-satisfied, under-achieving and (based on this thread) weirdly fearful men.
I think there's a real problem with the mass internet freakout about "toxic masculinity" not being consistently followed by, "But here's what a non-toxic masculinity looks like", with pointing to, well, guys like Tim Walz, or for that matter Nick Offerman. It's possible to be a man who enjoys manly stuff -- hunting and fishing, woodcrafting, football, whatever -- while also being kind, helpful, and even publicly emotional about the stuff you care about.
I think the Walz pick and the way they talked about him at the convention _is_ aimed at addressing this shortcoming on the left, but Casey is 100% correct above that if they want this message to get through, they need to take it to where the intended audience is listening. Send Walz on dudebro podcasts, have him talk with fitness YouTubers, etc. Have Kamala do that stuff too and talk about whatever is the dudeliest thing Doug does and how she appreciates him for it. And about how he's a good dad, and they have a functional blended family where she gets along well with his ex.
If I were in your position, I would tell these younger dudes that real men work hard because hard work is good, and they do the right thing because it is right, and feel ashamed when they do not, and that is the end of it. I would tell them that real men do not care if they are the center of attention, they do not need to be celebrated, and they do not demand to be pandered to. They should stop blaming their dissatisfaction on video game promotional materials and more time knowing themselves.
"You should care about / feel differently then you actually feel" is often not effective. But apart from that, it shouldn't really change anything about who they are voting for, if they feel like liberals are responsible for the vibe. I'm all for focusing on what you can control and avoiding focusing on exterior factors that you can control, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay any attention to those exterior factors at all.
It seems like you disagree with the fundamental premise of the article, that the political divide between genders is not actually about gender issues specifically. That the reason more men are Republicans is not because they're mad the Democrats are making them ashamed of being men, but that they don't think Democrats are willing enough to kill bad guys.
Well I take the point of Matt's article being that it's much easier to address column B than column A (especially with only weeks to go), so if it's even a little of column B then Harris should go for that.
She can't do much to reverse decades of cultural shifts, but she could definitely talk more about how she's going to make sure the US has the deadliest military in the world.
Cringe is dead, you just dive in. Playing it safe is a losing hand with the stakes this high and the race so close. Do Theo Von, do lex, do some barstoolish stuff. Go to a gun range and stream it.
Off topic but my wife and I were talking about how the rules have shifted: whereas before you never looked at the comments because they were awful, now you read one paragraph and then look at the comments to see if anyone is cogently debunking the whole thing.
I think it has always mattered whether you are talking about something like a newspaper that has enabled comments because they thought it sounded like a good idea, or something like Reddit where the comments are basically the core functionality. It’s just that more and more of the internet is now the latter rather than the former.
also the forums many of the denizens here populate (including this one) are probably not representative of the internet at large. My city has a great hyper-local urban development forum (with a Jurassic interface ofc) that I kill a lot of time on, but that's a very very niche pursuit, and one that I'd guess is 95% male.
There was a great example of that just yesterday on the Your Local Epidemiologist substack. First comment was a really smart, thoughtful critique of the author's argument.
One thing that has happened that reinforces gender polarization is how in many elite institutions (that are predominantly controlled by Democrats or people with strong political affinity for that side of politics) treat men and boys as the problem.
The issue of workplace skills mismatch and deindustrialization? - that is a personal failure
The issue of real wages going down for decades for those not going to college (predominantly male) - a personal failure
Male sexuality - problematic (even though there are lots of horrible aspects and behaviors)
Boys falling behind in schools - it’s due to their behavioral issues
Boys and men are blamed for having bad behaviors and are told they are responsible for the bad structural things they happened to them. We are then socialized to bottle these things up.
According to extensive research I've conducted, Men make up 42% of college enrollees (see: the Pew article that was the first result when I googled the issue). Whenever we see those kinds of gender gaps in other arenas it is viewed as clear evidence of gender bias in the selection criteria, training programs that allow one to enter the arena, or some other harmful gender based element. But with college enrollment, its viewed as young men being lazier or not driven enough or not ambitious enough or generally not being up to snuff. Which may be true! But it's the only area I can think of with nearly a 20 point gender gap in an incredibly important field (college still has pretty outsized influence on long term success in our society) where we blame the people who aren't successful enough rather than looking to structural reasons for the gap and then trying to address those reasons.
I don’t see it as blame, to think of young men as being less likely to have the ambition or drive to go to college. It is somehow part of the structural explanation, but it’s unclear whether there is some structural thing upstream that causes that difference in motivations, or something structural issue that makes college too connected to this kind of personality trait.
When women are underrepresented in STEM fields I don't see anyone saying "those subjects are very difficult and women just lack the ambition or drive to do well in them". Anyone that did make that argument would be castigated.
And I'm not sure how it's not "blame"- it's literally saying something about the men themselves is the reason they're not pursuing college. I see very few people (some, but not many) looking to solve the structural problems that are causing the differences in motivation. More people are just saying men are not doing their part to work harder and be more successful. It's a common complaint from the women who are trying to find decent men to date- they're saying these young men are losers and unmotivated. They're not saying "these young men are being left behind and forgotten, and that's why they're not more successful."
I’m not sure where you’re looking if you don’t see anyone saying that there are differences in the kinds of interests women and men have that lead women to go into fields other than science. (There’s some of it in this comment section.) You’re right that there’s usually pushback, but there’s also usually pushback (again, including in this comment section) on the idea that men aren’t going to college because of lack of ambition.
Also, there’s a real difference between “this is something you are doing that is counterproductive for your success” and “you are blameworthy for this thing you are doing that is counterproductive for your success”. Mere attribution of causal responsibility is not the same as a moral judgment (though many people slip quickly between them).
A decade or two ago, lots of academic fields went through a period of soul-searching about whether a combative style of argument was pushing away women (ie, exactly the sort of explanation that depends on an intrinsic difference between men and women to explain) and there was some self-conscious change in style of interaction in the fields, that most people think has been good regardless of whether or not it is relevant for gendered differences. But this is all compatible with not *blaming* women for not liking combative interactions.
There’s a version of the story about young men in college where the issue is that men are less likely to have the kind of ambition that gets you to sit still in a chair for hours at a time, and that therefore we should change the structure of schooling to be more open to different styles of ambition, that might be similarly worthwhile regardless of whether or not it is an important explanation of the gender gap.
There may be a disconnect where you're talking about "desire to do STEM vs. some other useful thing" and you're right that lots of people say that makes women go into other fields than science.
But Testing123 is not saying "don't blame this on a lack of interest", Testing is saying "don't start saying this is a lack of ambition and drive"
I can see where you two might be reading this very differently from each other.
As A.D. pointed out, there's a big difference between "they want to do something else" and "they're incapable of doing X" or "they're too lazy to do X". People aren't looking at the male drop off in college enrollment numbers and saying "ehh, men just want to be successful doing other things."
"Also, there’s a real difference between “this is something you are doing that is counterproductive for your success” and “you are blameworthy for this thing you are doing that is counterproductive for your success”. Mere attribution of causal responsibility is not the same as a moral judgment (though many people slip quickly between them)."
Is there? I fail to see the difference in this instance. The "something that you are doing" in this instance that men are accused of is being lazy and lacking ambition to achieve, and that's why they're not working hard enough to be academically successful. The attribution of causal responsibility in this discussion is absolutely a moral judgment of inherent failing.
If I said "Kenny Easwaran posts bad comments on Slow Boring, and that's because he is too lazy to research what he's talking about" would you think I was just making a causal statement about my claim that your comments are bad (to be clear- you post good comments! Always enjoy reading your stuff :). Just using this as an example of how it comes across when we say people are too lazy to be doing better)? If the commentary was more "men are lacking the social supports necessary to do well academically" (which, I agree, SOME people do make) then it would be an attempt to ascribe causality to the issue and work towards solutions. But if the issue is laziness and lack of ambition then the solution is laid at the feet of the lazy unambitious person- get off your ass and work harder. It's absolutely a moral assignment of blame for failure.
I think the surprise is, what ISN'T said is "how are universities failing young men by not being more welcoming to them" the way it is said about women in STEM fields.
If people are really saying “young men are too lazy”, then yes, that is victim blaming. I didn’t think that’s the point that is coming up in serious discussion. (I’m thinking more of things like Richard Reeves in Of Boys and Men than of things like JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, where laziness may be the claim.)
I thought the serious discussion on this issue was about the different kinds of success teenage boys and girls are motivated by, and the fact that schooling is set up in ways that are more compatible with the things girls like (sitting still and paying attention rather than running around, or whatever). I also think this discourse has its own problems, but that’s what I took to be the focus, not the worst kind of discourse here.
Richard Reeves' book, Of Boys and Men, is about exactly this.
His research suggests that policies have an enormous effect, and that many well-intentioned incentives for boys/men fail and only reward girls/women. He is scrupulous in explaining that the success of women in such a short period of time is excellent and called for--and he argues that more attention should be spent on figuring out how to motivate and support boys/men without making it a zero-sum conflict.
I think that everything you've said here is true, and the reason this hasn't been addressed yet re: male enrollment in college is because the change happened SO swiftly, and was originally addressing the opposite situation.
Pushes to get women into college started and succeeded wildly over the course of a short 30 years, and men have just started lagging in the last 10. Everybody is still so caught up with empowering women and girls, and can't believe that it's been so successful maybe we need to pivot to boys and men so soon.
I agree with you, but I’d prefer we just came up with a set of standards that work and make sense and stopped trying to catch up to this empowerment see saw
All kidding aside, I think that's absolutely a component of it. My expectation is that more men enroll in trade schools than women do.
But that still gets us to the societal response to the dip in male enrollment, which doesn't say "men are ambitiously seeking out trade school opportunities that better align with their desires than 4 year colleges/unis do", and instead the explanation is frequently "men would rather play video games and live in basements than get educated and attain wealth and status".
ETA: Just realized I don't think I was addressing your question directly. The stats I'm citing are for 4 year colleges/universities, so the trade schools wouldn't be included.
I think the male coded position on those questions is that they’re all basically correct. People need to take responsibility for their own problems. I think a reasonable, male coded complaint is that this is applied *only* (but properly) to men.
The answer seems to obviously be in some cases people need to take more responsibility for their own lives but the government should help when there are clear significant patterns that are socially destructive. Whether real or imagined at a policy level, at a rhetorical level which half of that sentence each party uses seems almost entirely dependent on demographics
One thing I have come to think is that what it means to be a man is simply “taking responsibility for problems that aren’t necessarily your fault.” It’s duty. It’s obligation. These values seem devalued in modern popular culture.
This is why I find Trump, his deflection, and finger pointing so immature and so unbecoming of what it means to be a man.
Maybe this is a better description of what it means to be an adult, but I don’t want to project such expectations on women when they have so many unique burdens themselves.
I largely agree with you about what it means to be a man and I think it's a real shame that's not what most people in modern popular culture feel, but kind of to my point, Democrats are going to have a hard time making this case when they systematically suggest criminals ought not be held responsible for things that _are_ their fault or that abortion is a fine way to avoid becoming a father (a comment of Milan's on this thread that you threw a like at)
That Trump personally is an utter failure at taking responsibility for any of the many evils he does is obvious, and the Republican party seems to be limited in their conception of personal obligations to "I can't literally do crime or kill others," but even that to my eye puts them closer to my view of male duty/obligation to my eye than Democrats who seem to have anathematized the very idea of personal responsibility (except for a small group of rich folks on whom they, to a significant extent I'd say rightly, try to place the duty of paying to fix every social ill)
I've seen Milan say that he himself believes that, which I frankly see as pretty gross, and was the context in which I was seeing your like of it (which I didn't go hunting for but noticed when looking if you had a blog). My apologies for misreading that
The central insight of adults dealing with stuff that is "not their fault" is that "fault" is not a useful construct for a huge number of situations you confront, whether by virtue of the unassailable logic of determinism or the futility of fighting the iron clad arrow of time. "Dealing with it" is the core virtue and the essential skill -- minimizing the downside and maximizing the outcome.
Agree with the sentiment, but I think a lot of women would tell you that large parts of their lives are dominated by assuming responsibility for problems that are not necessarily their (or anybody's) fault. I think of this as the core realization of adulthood, rather than a specifically male thing.
Hence why I suggested at the end why it might just be what defines adulthood.
What irks me is how so many men want to shirk responsibility, duty, and their obligations. Trump is emblematic of this moral defect.
I guess I think men should take a greater share of responsibility for fixing problems they didn’t cause because they don’t have the biological burdens of childbirth.
Missed that - sorry. Agree about Trump as the extreme case, but also about a certain male character type that tends to coast on a cushion of "male privilege" (widespread social acceptance of cloddish behavior, no expectation to equally share burdens of child-rearing, housework, parental care, etc.), secure in the belief that women will always be there to pick up the slack.
The pattern is obvious and it's a pattern of behavior that is like tailor-made poison for progressive organizations who are naturally credulous about claims of identity-based rights.
To be a little more nuanced, I do think that original claims from second wave feminists about literal men's clubs being the locus of power and access to power were correct and true, and integrating those centers of power was the right move.
But there is an obvious situation happening now where men aren't allowed to have men-only spaces, and they snarkily, sometimes cruelly, but ultimately correctly point out that feminists and women complaining about trans women invading women's spaces is exactly the same.
"It's also become problematic for men to have spaces that are geared towards men."
I'm a woman, as noted elsewhere in the thread, and I practice karate. The dojo is predominantly male, and there have been multiple cases where I'm the only woman at a practice.
Is this space "geared towards men"? Certainly it is de facto, although not de jure. Nobody is stopping women from joining; women just tend to be less interested in an activity that involves the risk of being punched in the face. AFAIK our dojo leader hasn't made any specific efforts to recruit more women, but when a woman does show up and wants to practice, he treats her with respect, as he does me.
Is our dojo a "problematic" space? Not as far as I can tell. There's no Feminist Police descending on our dojo saying, "Your membership is only 16% female! Shame on you!!!"
One very, very important point: we are a very traditional style of Japanese karate, and part of our code of ethics is "stay away from social media." There are some exceptions, like training videos on YouTube, but you simply DO NOT take a selfie at practice and post it on social media with a "Watch me #slay at practice! #madskillz!!!" It just simply isn't done, and it keeps the internet outrage brigade from finding us and yelling at us.
Am I somehow spoiling this traditionally male space by existing in it while female? Are my male instructor and colleagues secretly rolling their eyes and thinking, "Man, I wish drosophilist wasn't here, then we'd all be free to hold belching contests and tell d*ck jokes"? I would like to think not.
I understand this is n = 1, a somewhat niche example, but we have lots of men at the dojo who are just really good people - honest, disciplined, strong without being macho bullies - and I don't think anyone is making them feel like "they are the problem."
*I* don't think that your dojo is a problematic space, but there's absolutely an informal "Feminist Police" mode of thought out there that does exactly that sort of thing. As the parent of two sons born in the early 2010s, I can tell you this is a very common theme in children's media produced in the last decade or so -- (1) there's a depiction of some group involving the main character(s) that is exclusively or overwhelmingly male, (2) the main character(s) are confronted with this fact and asked what are they going to do about it, (3) the main character(s) bewail the fact that they do not have more girls/women in their group and set out to make efforts to actively recruit girls/women, and (4) there is usually no dissension or pushback to #2 or, if a character does question it, the story communicates very clearly that character is BAD for having expressed doubt about why the group needs to make a special effort to recruit girls/women.
I think it's very important to disambiguate between two very different possibilities:
1. My group is overwhelmingly male because we're a bunch of sexist a-holes who make women feel bad and drive them away. This is bad! Solution: stop being a sexist a-hole.
2. My group is overwhelmingly male because we're centered around an interest that just happens to appeal to men much more so than women: martial arts, computer science, welding, the "ratsphere." This isn't necessarily bad, and there's nothing to be done. And if you think this is bad, then you should think book clubs and knitting and quilting circles and personal advice column readership should work hard to recruit more men, to be logically consistent!
Scott Alexander had an interesting column on this on Slate Star Codex.
No, but you haven't insisted on any changes. Good for you, in the most honest sense!
On the other hand, I watched a HEMA group fall into this exact pit, complete with a paragraph in the new CoC about 'no social media posts promoting fascism, sexism, transphobia, racism, or ableism. Our safe space extends outside the training room!'
Hell, *I* wouldn't want to hang out with people whose social media posts promote fascism or racism or sexism, so I can't really blame that HEMA group. Maybe it's just as well that I have never looked at the dojo members' social media posts. Ignorance is bliss?
Of course, if that HEMA group defines "transphobia" as "we don't have women fight biologically male participants, even those who identify as transwomen/nonbinary" and "ableism" as "you must be physically capable of wielding a sword/bow/spear to participate," then yeah, I see the problem.
Again, it's a variation on what I said in my comment above: is the code of conduct an expression of excessive wokeness that looks for microaggressions behind every tree, or is it an anodyne "let's all be nice to each other" statement against a-holery?
That's all well and good until supporting some local politician or having a fairly anodyne political belief (“I think we should support Israel” / “I think we need to address illegal immigration”) becomes “promoting x”.
The problem with the CoC was that there was never a need for it (there wasn't one at all) until certain people joined, and then they insisted on having one for ‘their protection’. Then it was obvious that they intended on deploying it against people with political views they didn't like. This is how the cycle goes, as I outlined it in my OP
On one hand good point, on the other, based on the terminology used you can probably guess which of the two it was as long as the reporting is accurate.
I’d add onto srynerson’s statement with my prediction: you’d only have a “war of the sexes” type issue at your dojo if there were to be an attempt to change the rules of communication-style.
The rules of communication at the dojo are simple. The teacher gives orders, we follow orders. When the teacher says "Any questions?" you're allowed to ask questions about a given technique and stuff. And you can always interrupt for urgent things like "I got a blister on my foot, I'm bleeding on the floor, please excuse me while I get a Band-Aid and wipe up" (true story, happened to me a few practices ago).
Yes, it's very authoritarian in its way, but it works because we all respect our teacher and we're there by choice. If you don't like it, the door is over there, bye.
I’m a woman and cannot understand in any way women’s opposition to nuclear power. 28% *strongly oppose*? Where is that level of antagonism coming from?
I’d guess it’s tied in with whatever is causing the general divergence on “risky” technology. Men are also relatively more supportive of pesticides, use of genetically modified foods, genetically modifying people, use of animals in lab testing, and human space exploration.
Even just within energy, men like nuclear, yes, but they also like fracking and offshore drilling.
Is that a like of "risky" technologies or "technology" in general? There's the classic "men like things, women like people" split, and technology is very much about "things".
But I agree it's probably tied to the general divergence on tech.
Hard to say, men are also more in favor of AI in general and driverless cars specifically, and men are more in favor of lab grown meat, but all of that could be construed as risky I think.
If you look at social media, which generally isn't viewed as risky, women got into it more quickly and I think are still the heavier users. And I'd be surprised if there was a gender gap in views of Apple, Amazon, etc.
Vibes: "it sounds / feels risky". Understanding details like the 1 in X thousand cancer risk caused by living near a coal plant is just well beyond the capabilities of most voters.
So I'm guessing a lot of the gender divergence in support is a vibe thing among uninformed voters. Among people with a firmer understanding of the pros and cons maybe the gender gap is closer.
I think the explanations above are all good, but I also think there is a bit of a "fruit of the poisonous tree" kind of thing going on. Nuclear power was invented by men for the purpose of committing violence, and so its fruits are tainted and inherently suspicious.
This is a funny comment but I guess I should note that I don't really see this as a specifically feminist perspective. That is, I think even completely apolitical women are likelier than men to feel distaste and dread about physical violence, war, etc. I don't think it's at all a self-consciously anti-male thing.
I disagree with the mechanisms others here are suggesting. I think women tend to be far more concerned with "safe environments" in the context of the literal environment while men tend to see safe environments in a more adversarial way. With all the caveats of averages and overlapping distributions that Matt started his piece with, if you go more insane you can see this more clearly. 5G tower conspiracy theories seem to be a primarily female phenomenon where the idea of some ambient force is knocking off the balance of the environment. Men get much more sucked in by QAnon sort of stuff where there are very particular people doing very particular evil. If you go more normal, guys are more likely imagine people breaking into their houses and think owning a gun is important for their safety, and women are more likely imagine their house being slowly but surely flooded with radiation that makes their kids sick.
1) Radiation poisoning affects fertility and birth in pronounced ways.
2) Ionizing Radiation is a novel and not widely understood threat vs more mundane threats like car exhaust. Are brains are wired to focus on novel threats.
3) Probably, this might be a stretch, the link to cancer and all the focus on breast cancer research and awareness has made women more sensitive than men (men I assume are less receptive to messaging on breast cancer.)
I think part of opposition to nuclear power has always been opposition to nuclear weapons. Some people just blur them together, but also they have been connected very closely (though they are much less so now, but lots of people haven't updated on that).
Women are more hostile to the military and weapons so that could be a contributing factor to them being hostile to nuclear power.
None of these explanations seem very convincing. The opposition to nuclear power appears to be stronger among women than the demand for stricter gun control. I’m in the minority in that I like both guns and nuclear power, but surely the “danger vibes” and the actual danger from guns are greater than from a power plant. I wish an anti-nuke woman would weigh in here.
My guess is that this is a “men like technology” thing, just as more men than women like fast cars, computer games, riding mowers, leaf blowers, airplanes, space ships, sci fi, etc.
Why is this? Idk, maybe it’s related to testosterone, hah!
First, I think MY is right in that there are plenty of dude-coded positions that are consistent with existing or not that far removed from existing D stances. There's no need to re-invent the wheel, and it's really only through the teens that I think this slipped.
Where a lot of this may be coming from I think is education, on two particular fronts. One is that the divergence may be downstream of education polarization. Don't tell anyone on Twitter, but women are quickly becoming the more educated sex and the gap is even bigger when you focus in on, say, black men versus black women.
The other place where I see an issue is public schools. Conservatives worry about wokeness run amok, partisan indoctrination, etc. But who is to say the reaction to left activist ideas won't be the opposite? What if people come to see it as part of the older generations' silly, neurotic obsessions, kind of like how us in the Millenial and GenX generations look back on DARE? I think there is a better chance something like that happens, especially with young men, and that the experience serves to create skepticism about left of center politics generally as they enter adulthood.
A little bit, yes. I'm not really into the idea of expressly male lobbying, not that what I've read of him leans too hard into that. But he has influenced some of my thinking on my most important social function, that being raising my two sons into something resembling successful adults.
I read Of Boys and Men twice, bought 11 copies to give to parent and educator friends, and have met him in person, and listened to probably 6 or 7 interviews with him about that book.
The last thing I’d describe him as is someone expressly lobbying for boys or men.
He goes out of his way in his book and in every interview I’ve heard to laud the gains of feminism, and repeatedly assert that this should not be viewed as a reason to *cut back* on women’s programs or progress—just a gentle prod to give attention to boys and men at the same time.
He details policy ideas as well, noting that some policies meant to be sex neutral end up working only for girls and women, but others have succeeded in encouraging boys and men—because the data show that boys and men respond differently.
To clarify I've never read him as being anti-women or anti feminism at all. I've also found little to disagree with on the occasions I've come across articles on his substack. I think there are a bunch of aspects to the way we approach education and socialization that don't work as well for boys and that we ought to be adaptable both because it's the right thing to do and for our own benefit.
That said, where I do have some discomfort is with a path that leads to the interest group-ification of men. I've never read him as calling for that either, but I worry that may be what people are hearing. Bigger picture I think we'll be better off with fewer people internalizing the idea that they've been failed by various structures or society or the system or what have you.
As Bo said I think a big part of it is that the culture of the Democratic Party is not nearly as open to “traditional masculinity” as the culture of the GOP.
Minor example: remember how much of a thing Brat was for Democrats online over the summer? Remember how basically no Democrats on line got invested in the Kendrick/Drake beef? Think about who listens to each artist.
Another minor test: what elected Democrat would young men be interested in doing a workout with?
Why do you think the weightlifting space is so conservative... well at least the male weightlifting side.
My theory is weightlifting is one of those endeavors where it takes sacrifice, hard work to succeed, and the results are directly proportional to the effort. (leaving out steroids). This is basically root conservatism at its core...
As an aside.... I would like to see a survey on peoples view on TRT (testosterone replacement therapy) by gender and political party. When I first went on TRT... after being medically diagnosed even... it was surprising how many people frowned upon it, questioned it... and they were universally on the left.
Extreme distance running is actually one of the few physical feats where women outperform men, interestingly enough.
Nevertheless, I’d argue that weight lifting and running engage different parts of both the brain and body, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see studies saying that the former boosts T more than the latter.
There's also a clear missing variable. Few women pursue weightlifting because in current aesthetic conventions, feminine beauty requires being lithe or at most "toned" rather than muscular. Weightlifting is thus an overwhelmingly male pursuit (versus e.g. distance running) that draws people attracted to highly masculine spaces.
“ the results are directly proportional to the effort”
My understanding is that’s laughably inaccurate. Results form a bell curve like distribution. On the left some people are exercise non-responders even in a clinical setting. They lift and gain no muscle mass (IIRC some actually lose muscle mass). On the right you have people who get great, almost steroid like, results with comparatively little effort.
You are incorrect. There is no such thing as a non-responder. It is true that there is variability in response... but given protein intake, and lifting to failure... there will be hypertrophy (muscle growth)... and in fact, new weightlifters will always show newbie gains. Its just people tend to not know how to lift or fail to adequately fuel their bodies.
I think you underweight how important protein consumption and proper practice are.
As a hairstylist, I had to remind myself constantly that many clients—as high as 40%—did not actually know how to use shampoo and conditioner properly. Blew my mind, but also explained their negative reviews of products.
But it isn’t really “proportional” to effort. Lifting more frequently or heavily than a certain (not very intense) amount, increases one’s gains far less than focusing on diet and sleep.
“ The studies showed that, on aggregate, endurance training increased people’s endurance. But when the researchers examined individual outcomes, the variations were staggering. Some people had improved their endurance by as much as 100 percent, while others had actually become less fit, even though they were following the same workout routine.
Age, sex and ethnicity had not mattered, the researchers noted. Young people and old had been outliers, as had women and men, black volunteers and white. Interestingly, nonresponse to endurance training ran in families, the researchers discovered, suggesting that genetics probably plays a significant role in how people’s bodies react to exercise.
Since then, other researchers have found that people can have extremely erratic reactions to weight training regimens, with some packing on power and mass and others losing both.
And a study published last year concentrating on brief bouts of intense interval training concluded that some people barely gained endurance with this type of workout, while others flourished, greatly augmenting their fitness.”
"On the right you have people who get great, almost steroid like, results with comparatively little effort."
I think the spoiler here is that those steroid-like results are because those people are, in fact, on steroids. It is way more wide spread in use than most people (i.e. most people who don't spend much time in gyms) think.
The other factor is that the "results" that most people think of (6-packs, well defined muscle lines, "being cut", etc) here don't come from the gym, they come from the kitchen. If you are on a bad diet, but lifting 3-4 times a week, you will get stronger, feel better, etc, but you won't really look much different.
The normal range for serum testosterone is 300-1000 nanograms per deciliter. Someone at the high end of normal or even naturally high is going to do dramatically better than someone at the low end of normal or just naturally somewhat lower than normal.
I think you’re misunderstanding what “directly proportional” means here. Maybe better phrased as “MY results are directly proportional to MY effort.”
That doesn’t mean that if I work harder than you I’ll see better results than you. But it does mean that if I work harder this year than I did last year, I’ll see better results.
“ But it does mean that if I work harder this year than I did last year, I’ll see better results.”
No.
“ Since then, other researchers have found that people can have extremely erratic reactions to weight training regimens, with some packing on power and mass and others losing both.”
I’d love to see the paper that says strength training with even passably competent programming can reliably cause detraining.
The paper you linked above about endurance training basically says that individuals have individual responses to standardized training regimes… something which most practitioners already know. Adaptation requires progressive overload, and overload is defined from your personal baseline.
I think the character traits list you have there is all present in endurance athletes and that seems like a much more liberal group.
I lift a decent amount too and something just feels very different about the kind of person who really gets deep into these events on average but it’s not that people running for 3 hours before dawn don’t believe in sacrifice.
That last question is… odd. Many/most elected officials are old(er) and not in great physical shape, and that’s ok. You elect them to govern, not to have a workout or a beer with.
Maybe AOC would be up to going for a run or a long bike ride?
If you want politicians to have serious experience in anything other than politics, then they're not going into politics much before 40 and they won't get to the top level much before 50, so most politicians are going to be old enough that physical fitness has dropped a lot since their youths.
I don't have a problem with most senior politicians being 50-70, I do have a problem with having Pelosi *and* McConnell *and* Schumer *and* Biden *and* Trump all being at the top at once. Harris and Jeffries and Johnson are more of the age I expect senior politicians to be.
Don't get me wrong, an occasional very young of very old politician is a good thing. Having an AOC (actually she's not that young any more, so maybe a Max Frost) and a Biden around just to ensure that different perspectives are included is good. But the majority of electeds should be 40-70 and the most leaders in their 50s or 60s.
I agree with this completely. This is my concern that things have gotten too skewed to the upper end. Harris really isn't a senior politician. She is only just over the median age in the house and well below the median in the senate. I'd be fine with 50-70 as you've laid out, but our current distribution is more like 60-80.
It'd take a constitutional amendment at the federal level, but I'd like a rule saying that no-one can be elected to a term that will extend beyond their 80th birthday.
I would like to push back on that a bit. I think, “Village Elders” have been running the show (in villages) since before recoded history. I seems likely that this is a feature, not a bug and, in fact, mature wisdom beats the hot headed-ness of youth when it comes to governmental decisions.
>"America’s public elementary schools are probably the place most infused with progressive sensibilities..."
It's funny that Matt states this without any doubt or qualification, and yet progressives always say conservatives are lying when conservatives make the same statement. There is a lot to dislike about Chris Rufo, but on the above statement he and Matt are in agreement.
This is just a general phenomenon where conservatives lie so much that the default progressive response is "that's a lie" when in reality they mean "you're correct and i just disagree that X is bad"
see also the idea that elites disrespect the opinions of the masses on immigration and are deliberately trying to maintain higher immigration levels than normal people want. this is an extremely conservative coded statement, and most progs would say it's a lie.
of course, it's true AND it's also true that the 'masses' are morons and i don't really care what they think except insofar as they have to be placated for electoral reasons
Yes, completely certain. They lie incessantly, without hesitation. They do not care about truth, or reality, or facts. By happenstance, they occasionally care about a thing that is actually happening, but just as often they are content to make something up entirely.
This is not the sort of thing that anyone who doesn't already believe it can be convinced of, unfortunately. But consider something like e.g. the recent blowup over Haitians eating pets in Springfield. Never happened. JD Vance admitted he was lying about it to put media attention on immigrant communities.
Or, of course, the biggest lie of the recent pack: the fact that most GOP electeds will tell you the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
I used to feel this way, circa 2020. It seemed so obviously one-sided.
I no longer feel that way at all, but it took a lot of exploration of news and opinions outside the mainstream to see that democrats are not so saintly after all. And there’s no way to say that concisely without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.
Except, their point is exactly the reverse of one another. Matt's point is that despite teachers being progressive they can't get little boys to stop playing war. Rufo's point is that because teachers are progressive, they'll indoctrinate your children and turn them into little marxists.
If you say so. I've certainly seen concerns about separation of church and state, ensuring charter schools provide reasonable levels of education rather than simply being fraudulent (also a concern with public schools) and the slow death of public services being offered as public services rather than as contracting officers for private parties to provide services, but I don't remember seeing anything like that.
Is there any doubt that teachers aren’t frustrated by their inability to keep boys from warring and play fighting, though?
And there is plenty of research that modern k-12 schools emphasize behaviors and traits more commonly found in girls, which absolutely leads to penalizing boys.
To the extent that the gap between young men and women exists ideologically, I think a lot of it can be ascribed to the fact that a lot of young men are in a cohort where they are being outperformed educationally and professionally by women. There's a sense for some people that the world has turned against them while they are also being lectured about how men suck and have it easier. Since Dems are increasingly seen as a party for (neurotic?) professional women, it's not surprising some young men would feel alienated from the party even if Dems take savvier policy positions to try to combat the drift.
There's also a lot of discussion about how right wing "manosphere" content online is radicalizing young men. I'm not sure how true this is (I am somewhat skeptical) but the discussion inevitably becomes very scoldy which probably further compounds the problem.
Every time I read about gender differences, I feel like a mutant weirdo freak, because I'm a woman, but my positions tend to code as masculine. I strongly support nuclear energy. I think the death penalty should be used very sparingly and only in cases where the evidence is overwhelming, but I believe there are cases where it's justified, like some depraved serial rapist-torturer-killer or the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. I was a bit startled when Kamala said that line about the "most lethal military in the world," but I agreed with her: *someone* is going to have the most powerful military, and I'd much rather it were us than Russia or China or North Korea.
Of course, I am one of the 14% of Slow Boring commentariat that is female, so I am in no way representative of women. Also, I love Star Wars - the original trilogy, the Thrawn novels, The Clone Wars, some episodes of Rebels were really good - and I don't like the Disney+ Star Wars content other than Andor. The Acolyte straight up sucked.
I'm the opposite, I'm a man whose positions tend to code as feminine. Reading through this article it was strange finding myself on the "women" side of so many issues, though it was mostly the "violence"-related issues, since I tended to side more with my gender in the "science and technology" section. I think I am just averse to violence to general. It would explain a lot of my opinions from my dislike of American gun culture to my general apathy towards contact sports.
drosophilist, I hear you, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you happily engage as part of the 14% female SBers. Why? I don’t think we know yet, but I do think these traits are correlated.
When I was 5 and being baptized (I know a little late in the game for that), I used one of the candles as a gun and started shooting it at the priest. I distinctly remember the priest saying "boys will be boys."
Reminds me of social dancing in 7th grade during PE. There we were, "slow" dancing to Elvis, as close as we ever got to our shorter male classmates. The boys were having finger gun battles using us as shields. (What a way to lead!)
I remember when i was a kid i watched the VHS of Commando and wanted to gear myself up like Arnie, only to find the toy guns were too unrealistic to really match it without a lot of spray paint or electrical tape.
Nowadays i've gone through the toy sections of stores and man, it'd have been so much easier to get tac'd up as a kid today.
Repainting toys is a very easy project and it's a shame more kids don't get a chance to do it.
I know it's not really relevant to your situation since you are no longer a child. Just saying that a cheap can of Rustoleum 2x, and two craft paints (black and a silver metallic) for a grand total of like $15 could have given you a sweet gun.
My wife grew up with her sister and her mom mostly, and her dad worked long hours. We had a girl first. She was thoroughly surprised when our son, as soon as he could walk, started grabbing sticks and hitting everything with them.
A friend of my mom’s raised her only son with her husband on a sailboat from 2-5. She assiduously avoided any “violent” toys or media. One day the son met some other kids on some island, the boys used sticks as swords, and from that moment on the son was obsessed with wielding imaginary weapons.
First off, it's a great column, but I have to reply because Yglesias baited me with his mischaracterization of vibesology, of which I am a proponent.
OF COURSE, Democrats have issues they feel strongly about. So do Republicans! The argument is that this doesn't really apply to the persuadable voters who decide elections, who often not only lack strong opinions about the issues, but frequently *DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT THE ISSUES ARE*! On my Facebook feed, a woman I used to work with posted a picture of cheese she took at her local grocery store, and she wrote that while she despises Donald Trump, she is voting for him because the price of cheese is now too high. And that is your typical undecided voter's thought process when settling on a decision. I asked her what impact she thought that Trump's tariffs were going to have on prices: I am confident from her response that she doesn't know what a tariff is.
Look, any position can be taken too far. In truth, I support a popularism-infused vibesology. I DO think that policies influence voting behavior at the margins. But that works by influencing the views of people who are TRUSTED by these election-deciding, idiot (excuse me, "low information") voters. If a politician proposes something radical, that is something that gets picked up on by these dimwits when they hear conversations with their pastors / co-workers / friends / siblings / etc. And the importance of candidate policy positions are SWAMPED by factors often outside the control of those candidates. Like the price of gasoline or whatever.
My main concern with popularism is that I sometimes I see it used as an excuse to either betray progressive values, or else do nothing. I believe that the reason to win elections is to go do stuff -- to actually spend the political capital that you accrue. And you win those elections through a sensible blend of position-taking and aggressive vibesology.
Anyway, I really enjoyed reading today's column. Feel free to tear me a new one in the replies, but I won't be able to respond. Busy moving at the moment and just don't have the time.
1,000% agree with your first paragraph. Every time I read an interview with a swing voter is an enraging experience, they seem to lack any understanding of cause & effect.
In general American politics is bizarre because the arena in which it takes place is shaped by a very large number of people who are actually pretty well informed, all things considered, and have very strong political opinions. In most countries, politically engaged people are at least somewhat elastic -- e.g. shifts from Tories to Labour/LibDem in the UK, or from Liberals to Conservatives in Canada, but in the United States this basically does not occur. So all elections are decided by people who, as you rightly point out, are incredibly stupid, which creates this weird perception that *American voters writ large* are stupid.
That's interesting. My assumption would be that it would work the same everywhere. I'm in Germany at the moment, and my sense (without looking at the data) is that the least informed voters are the ones who are most likely to jump-ship, although it's probably true that you get more movement inside of a coalition (e.g., a former SPD voter casting a vote for the Greens).
My read is that Europeans have no grasp of how US politics works and do not understand that the views of right-wing rural communities are enormously overrepresented in the US political system. (By giving rural states like Wyoming, with 600,000 people, the same amount of power in the Senate as the state of California, with its 39 million; through the Electoral College; etc.) This gives Europeans the false impression that Americans are more right-wing than they actually are.
I'd be interested in giving this issue a closer look. Could be that you're totally right. If you have some articles, send them my way!
I mean, in general the Republican Party wins 46-49% of the national vote depending on the election. The difference between 47 and 51 is huge for majoritarians purposes but for purposes of "what do Americans think?" it's negligible.
About half of Americans support the Republican Party, and about half don't.
It's a fair point, but it has a huge impact on public policy for several reasons: 1) a lot of the kinds of policies that European (pseudo)intellectuals point to as evidence of their superiority simply cannot be passed in the American context precisely because of these anti-democratic features of the US political system, and in many cases would not have passed in Europe, if Europe had those same features; and 2) even when the Dems have a trifecta, our public policy must pander to the Dems from the most conservative states in the country, rather than what the majority of Dems actually want.
This kind of circles back around to what I was saying above. I just don't think the fact that 46-49% of voters support Republicans means that 46-49% of the public supports the GOP agenda. I question what percentage of voters even know where the GOP stands on the issues. (NOTE: I am absolutely NOT suggesting, as progressives often do online, that the typical voter is some latent / closeted hardcore leftist who will vote for the Dems if they do Marxism. Instead, my argument is that huge percentages of voters are ignorant and relatively uninterested in politics, and that this observation applies to Europeans, too.)
I love Europe and Europeans. As I've said in response to other Slow Boring articles, I view Europe the same way I do America: there are problems, but also a lot to admire. But one thing I can't stand about Europeans is the smug sense of superiority that I encounter, which is utterly unjustified by the facts. Trust me: these people are idiots. (I say that with tongue partially in cheek. But their best-selling newspapers are tabloids. I recently got into a conversation with a college-educated professional who didn't understand how his nation's health system worked. Etc.)
There is a well known gender gap on the question of "is space cool" and "should we spend money to do cool stuff in space". I think Democrats in general would benefit from moving away from Obama's influence on this question, he convinced so many of them that space exploration is dumb and a waste of money.
Ancillary observation. I am a huge weightlifter... its my main hobby.
Over the last few years, I've seen a huge increase in teenagers and Gen Z getting interested in the gym... weightlifting and bodybuilding. And for whatever reason... the gym space tends to be conservative. Even the women who are into fitness are more likely to lean conservative.
I don't think its causal effect (gym driving people conservative), but its definitely a trend I've noticed.
I weight lift, but also have gotten into running marathons a fair bit post college. My sense is that the running space is also seeing a huge increase in numbers, but it's a comparatively left coded activity. Good that young people are exercising more though!
Weightlifting is "help yourself" which fits into conservative philosophy. As opposed to something like therapy, which is "get help from others" which is clearly more in the direction of feminine and liberal philosophy.
i think it is probably causal. lifting weights is very fair -- you get out what you put in for a long time before individual genetics starts to matter. if a big part of your life takes place in a very fair arena, a conservative philosophy makes a lot more sense.
“Fitness” is gender-segregated, not gender-disproportionate. The girlies love yoga, Zumba, step classes, water aerobics, free dance, and all the other “softer” modes of exercise.
this is actually too bad. Women suffer from age related muscle loss (sarcopenia) even more than men do. Age related muscle loss is a major contributor to quality of life and mobility issues... to falls, balance, etc...
Weightlifting is the only intervention that can halt it. Women... especially older women should skip the softer modes of exercise and pump some iron.
I agree. My side gig is as a fitness teacher (mostly dance/spin/kickboxing) and I always try to encourage clients to do weight-training exercises either in our classes or outside them. Functional strength and comfortable movement are the highest goals of fitness in my opinion and it’s terrible that women are dissuaded from some of the most effective formats because of the fear of looking “bulky.” Back when I got my first group fit certification, the course actually instructed us not to use the word “muscles” around women because it would “scare them off”, which remains a top ten dipshit thing I’ve heard.
Violence is cool and all— especially when I experience it through a screen and can’t get hurt— but sex is much better. Liberals have become increasingly censorious about sex. This is an electoral liability. A sex-positive female politician could turn her gender into an advantage. If young men thought Harris would bring us closer to the sexual mores of the Netherlands or Norway, they would vote for her at far higher rates.
To an extent, feminism, especially first wave feminism, has liberated men. Men can now choose between empowered career women and more traditional types. This is really quite awesome. I don’t have to work my fingers to the bone to “be a man,” I can work less, earn half the money and still hold my head high. Empowered women can seek erotic and personal fulfillment in relationships rather than viewing marriage as more of an economic arrangement. Empowered women don’t need alimony and don’t have to view every breakup as a disaster. They can have flings and lovers and enjoy their bodies. Unfortunately, many feminists are censorious and seem uncomfortable with the fact that men prefer fit, attractive, pleasant women. Harris is a fit, attractive woman who can be a cool girl when she wants to be. She should let her hair down and be sex positive.
But what would it actually look like to be more sex positive? I don't know if "let your hair down" is the answer. The classic dilemma for female leaders is that if your personality is too warm you're called a slut, and if it's too cold you're called a bitch, and there's a very narrow zone of acceptable behavior in between.
I think another problem is the pool of voters Harris needs to win across the swing states. Are they the ones who want more sex positive behavior from the potential first female president?
I think the answer is expressing approval of young unmarried couples and romantic relationships short of marriage. Make Republicans the churched up scolds who think you have to wait til marriage.
What does approval mean in this context? There's no shortage of those relationships in the US, but also the evidence is very strong that people are usually less satisfied in them than if they marry.
If not for Dobbs this would be beyond a lost cause. Hawk Tuah projects a Republican aura — the antithesis of a dour self-appointed censor with a bedazzled cane.
Not exactly a pillar of feminine elegance and beauty, but the sort of girl that gets with immature college guys.
One way would be to talk frankly about her relationship with her mentor, the much older Willie Brown. She could open up about how it was unconventional, and there was a large age gap, but she doesn't regret it. That would be her real, first-hand experience of being sex-positive. But somehow I don't think she's going to talk about any of that.
If Trump/Vance or Republican electeds a start calling Harris a slut, that would only help her. “You raped a women in a department store and call me slut because I had boyfriends. Pathetic!”
I think when you look at pop music since the pandemic it's very evident that we haven't culturally figured out what to do with male sexuality since Me-Too. Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX etc sing a lot about sex, I think I also read Beyonce's 2022 album was her "horniest yet."
But on the male side we have like Benson Boone and Noah Kahan, basically sad sacks with no apparent agency in life. Even MJ Lenderman who I really like is singing sad songs. Contrast that to the early '10s when you had Drake, Kanye, the Weeknd, etc. Those guys were all clearly horny in a way that probably crossed the line of what's appropriate in some respects but at least they were interesting and somewhat authentic. Even the indie rockers of the 2000s were kind of dirtbags--go listen to the lyrics on the early career albums by The National, also people like the Strokes and Interpol were clearly writing "party" music (drugs and sex).
I'm not sure it's a coincidence that all your "sad boys" were White and all your "horny guys" were Black - the cultural expectations for what each type of artist will sing about is very different.
There's definitely been a measurable (although not gigantic) decline in the popularity of rappers.
I think The Weeknd is just between album cycles and it's not clear if he's going to be dropping off the face of the earth like Katy Perry or will be back with a vengeance soon.
Also, Million Dollar Baby by Tommy Richman has been really big this year and that's a horny song
yeah I have no idea why some music ends up being more popular than other music but Troye Sivan is definitely a big step below Sabrina Carpenter or whatever. Seems like all the momentum for popular men is in country now, Morgan Wallen, Kane Brown, Shaboozey, etc. etc. etc.
Millennial third wave feminism was generally very sex positive, as contrasted with 1970s second wave feminism. (First wave feminism is usually thought of as 1920s suffragism.)
Gen Z in general seems much more skeptical about sex - they’re having less of it, and even the straight men among them seem more likely to think it’s inappropriate in movies and TV. Among queer people there’s been an observation that older generations want to have sex and younger generations want to have gender. (This helps give gay bars new reason to exist, when the apps were killing them a decade ago, but they’re becoming different types of places.)
Look, I disagree with David Abbott, must be a day that ends in "-y"!
(I kid, David, I kid)
I don't think that's it at all. Sure, on the margins you may find some barstool bros or whatever they're called who would vote for Harris if she were more sex-positive. But the mainstream conservative critique of the Democrats is just the opposite: that they preach sexual liberation and alternative lifestyles like same-sex marriage and polyamory, but in their private lives they are fuddy-duddy traditionalists who get married, have their children after they're married, and don't get divorced.
Rather than sex positivity, such conservatives want Democrats to preach more traditional morality: marriage is good, having children out of wedlock is bad, you should stay together for the sake of your children. (Of course, conservatives also support a twice-divorced serial adulterer, but I digress.) "Luxury beliefs" and all that.
That’s the mainstream _intellectual conservative_ critique. Ever meet an undecided voter in Pennsyltucky who even knows that bourgeois Manhattanites get heterosexually married and have 2.1 kids in their mid-30s after reaching serious financial stability?
I mean, Hilary to Kamala within a couple election cycles feels like a lot of progress on this gradient. It's hard to imagine a successful female Democratic politician in this era being censorious and anti-sex given the male-dominated arenas in which they have necessarily participated throughout their careers. I suppose this could change over time, but it's not my read on the up and coming generations.
Among all the factors listed here, I think censorship of speech and cancel culture are probably the biggest reasons. Men like to talk trash (both liberals and conservatives), either for fun or to let off steam and then forget all about it the next day. The penalty for doing that has become unacceptably high, specially if they are about race or gender or some protected group. DEI and AA is another area where most men (moderates and conservatives) favor meritocracy over diversity and representation.
I'll say for the hundredth time she should just go on Rogan and be affable. Lean into the cool aunt vibes. Gotta hunt where there's ducks.
Maybe she’s worried Rogan would ask her point blank if she explicitly disavows some of her most leftist 2019 positions.
I don’t think Harris is particularly strong in interviews. But Rogan is a very weak interviewer, in that he never pins people down on their answer. She could go on that show and pick up thousands of voters no question.
Skeptical of Rogan he is a bit more of a rightist a lot of the time and faux intellectual. Theo von would be an interesting interview bc he REALLY doesn’t pin people down. When he said something skeptical about Harris to Bernie, he responded with something along the lines of being a black women and getting to where she has gotten is no easy feat…theo’s response was a nod and “that’s true.”
She should do both. Prep hard for the interviews etc but it’s a great opportunity to reach out to marginal voters.
Rogan's left / rightness is issue-by-issue. If Bernie said the same thing to Rogan do you think he'd push back? It's only marginally more likely and if he did he wouldn't argue with any halfway decent response he got.
I was going to say that a half-day event to pick up a few thousand votes would be a terrible ROI, but running the numbers shows doing events like that consistently for, say, 100 days could easily be the margin of victory in the popular vote. So maybe it's not such a bad ROI!
Great opportunity to say she does
Does she?
Many of them, yes.
She needs to make it explicit then. At least if she’s dead set on winning PA.
Do you think it is more politically beneficial to say “I used to support this thing you don’t like but now I repudiate that and support this thing you do like”, or to say “look at how much I support this thing you like”?
If you have been an extremely famous figure, famous for supporting the unpopular thing in the past, I can see that the former would be valuable. But I don’t think that describes Kamala Harris. Very few people actually paid attention to the early phases of the 2020 democratic primary, especially among people who are now swing voters.
Can you give some examples of when Kamala Harris has personally stated she changed her position? There's been lots of times some campaign spokesman--usually anonymously--has said so, but that's hardly the same thing.
She has personally stated positions that are in contrast to past positions she stated. Explicitly reminding people of the past position is not usually something you want to do while doing that, unless you are sure that nearly everyone remembers your past position.
Rogan's comments after the debate showed some respect simply for the fact that she looked stronger and smarter than Donnie boy up there.
I don't know how she feels about spicy food, but she could go on Hot Ones. As long as she finished I think that would earn her some guy points.
Hot Ones would be great!
I think part of the problem is that she doesn’t come across as the cool aunt — she comes across as the spacey aunt who’s, like, really into crystals. That’s a big turnoff for men.
Doesn’t mean she shouldn’t try - but I fear it could go very badly.
I...think that you are probably correct in reality, but it's funny to me, because I don't actually think's much gap between the personality of a crystal-gal vs. an ice-bath-bro, or an astrology chick vs. a tan-your-junk dude.
I think a lot of people have this impression of Rogan from 30 second clips of him being unusually credulous harvested from multiple 3 hour long podcasts a week he puts out but he's really not like a "tan your junk bro".
He is not, but he doesn't push back on them enough for my tastes.
I don’t want sunburn on my privates….
some of the problem is just she doesn't do any media at all so she isn't really shaping her image so people can say whatever they want.
I always interpret this kind of comment to be "actually, I haven't seen her much in the media I pay attention to." I personally don't know what her daily schedule is and what kind of local media she is doing (maybe you do!) There are only seven states that matter and if she is doing the kind of media that will help move votes in those seven states but never doing anything national, whether it's 60 Minutes or Joe Rogan, then I'm fine with that.
maybe but I remember seeing tons of Walz hits in July (even on fox news) and they were all over social media, I have not seen any clips of either of them doing media since the 60 minutes thing. Maybe I'm following the wrong people on twitter tho.
Funny you mention Walz, because I opened YouTube the other day and the first video was him on WeRateDogs taking about his rescue dog: https://youtu.be/Spiwlde4kys?si=YSaUMCe8s50G2eA4
It’s cute, and it’s about 5% politics and 95% dogs.
Echelon Insights recent polling found most voters had seen Trump/Vance in interviews, Harris/Walz in ads.
It is the winning strategy. She isn't good off the cuff -- we've seen enough to know this, and trying to get better at it with 30 days left in the race is too risky. Run the ads, avoid any unscripted remarks and win.
All depends where you think things stand, right? I am at least hoping their risk-averse approach suggests their internal polls (or feedback "on the ground," or whatever) are giving them optimism. But if you have a 45% chance of winning, you can't afford to play prevent defense.
And heck, even with a 60% win probability, you don't play prevent defense.
"across as the spacey aunt who’s, like, really into crystals. That’s a big turnoff for men"
Is it? That sort of cliche just doesn't strike me as a big negative. The warm, nurturing, "safety first", school-principle-talking-about-equity-constantly type of female seems like it would be a big turnoff. On vibes I'd think someone like Elizabeth Warren would be a turnoff for men. Girl with crystals might actually be a girl who can get some shit done, although I'd personally be scared the same way I'd be scared of a RFK Jr.
How many guys do you know who like it when a woman is really into astrology? It’s the same vibe.
Though I agree with you that the schoolmarm is also a turnoff.
I can't remember it ever coming up so I'm not sure. But that's more of a dating perspective.
I'm trying to imagine that I hear the PTA or School Board got a new head, who happens to be female, and I hear she's into astrology or spacey. And that seem not ideal for me, personally, but not a strong signal that she'd be unpopular or ineffective. I'm having a hard time imagining what the cool aunt counterexample would be.
TBH the kind of female that I imagine as really having their shit together and being able to perform would be like the moms I know who have 4 or 8 well-raised kids and still manage to have the time and energy to organize things, show up for volunteer stuff, manage a side-business etc... I can't think of any aunts who impress me nearly as much.
It’s a strong signal that she’s not a serious person.
Your last paragraph is spot on and IMO that’s part of Kamala’s male problem, she doesn’t give off that “competent mom” vibe. Of course Hillary did, and that didn’t resonate with men either (though I will note I very much liked it from her) - so maybe the lesson is women are going to be criticized no matter what they do.
If a man dislikes a warm/nurturing woman and a "schoolmarm" and an aunt type and a mom type and and and, maybe that's a sign that he just doesn't like women in general and/or only sees them as sex toys?
i mean to me she gives off ambitious lawyer vibes, do people have such little knowledge of women in a professional context they can only see a woman politician as an "aunt" or a "mom?"
I said this elsewhere but Hillary’s ‘intangibles’ problem was that she came off as a robot in a skin suit. Same sort of je ne sais quoi as pre-workout Zucc.
Sorry but this is just classic, sexist nonsense rhetoric. "Schoolmarm"? "Into astrology"? People who look for any excuse not to vote for a woman based on BS like this are not looking for "strength" in a candidate, they are whining for daddy's approval.
Do you say “daddy” a lot in your day-to-day life? Strange way to put this.
My kids call me "dada", so no. Was reaching for the common denominator word to capture the mentality of the kind of mini-male who whines and moans and tries to act tough by beating up on women rhetorically in order to fill the yawning gap in his masculinity created by his father's (probably well-deserved) lack of respect for him. "Father" seems too arch and "dad" too casual, while "daddy" better captures the juvenility of this sad creature, I think. Interesting stylistic question though...
"Little boys who can't handle powerful women" -- like Nurse Ratched (aka HIllary, aka "Her")?
OTOH, Kamala's use of the word "lethal" was a stroke of genius. Men could identify with that: they could envision the power being deployed on behalf of (rather than to constrain) them.
I don't think HRC was less martial or violence-coded than Harris could ever be. (See "Hilary Clintons Appalling Enthusiasm for War" from HuffPo circa 2016 among many such articles.). But I agree if you mean that Harris is just a better messenger overall because she has a calmer, more confident stage presence.
The reason Rogan hasn't had either candidate on is that Rogan does not want to have the candidates on. He doesn't need the publicity. He'd risk alienating a big chunk of his audience either way. There's no upside.
She went on All the Smoke recently, which feels like a good move in this type of direction.
100%. She'd want to do interview prep to field some tougher questions, but just sounding reasonable and sounding sympathetic to the concerns of that audience would be useful.
I think as well, Walz should be doing this kind of interview. The pick of Walz was in part intended to show off a positive vision of masculinity -- rural guy who like to hunt and fish, knows car stuff, etc. And that's great. But you've gotta have that message reach its intended audience!
I continue to maintain she should go on Hot Ones.
(ETA: I don't particularly watch Hot Ones, I just think it's a good vibe for her.)
Trump has been on literally every tech bro, man-coded podcast. The fact that Harris hasn't even been on any is a huge miss by her team.
And Walz! He'd be great on those shows.
That would be awesome!!! Rogan’s not a tool. She’d all apart. All the bullshit couldn’t survive a 5 minute honest conversation much less 2 hours. Cool Aunt?!? It’d be cool to harvest all the material.
The “vibes” issue she is dealing with is going to hard to overcome. It’s the decade or more of “the future is female”, putting female leads in a bunch of Star Wars films, putting a bunch of social justice stuff in video games, the general female coding as good and male coding as toxic stuff.
A not insignificant number of young men feel like they’ve been taught to be ashamed of being men and they are pushing back on that. They perceive that the heroes have all been turned female because a female hero is inherently more valued by society (or at least the powerful people that control it).
All of this is a little absurd but, in talking to younger dudes, this is the consistent feedback I get. It’s not all just Pepe Frog mob types, it’s also otherwise sort of liberal types.
I'm obviously fairly liberal, but was also in a pretty fratty frat in college, and most of my friends today are from that frat. I do not remember one conversation about people being upset with more female leads or being ashamed to be a man, if anything the conversations closest to the culture war was the lack of good raunchy comedy movies anymore.
I do think Richard Reeves is doing great work on this issue, and the gender success gap is undoubtedly important. Just from my experience, I don't see many men my age focused on it.
You won’t find this attitude in a frat as much as you’d find it in a restaurant kitchen where a bunch of 23yo guys who never went to college, and not upwardly mobile, spend most of their time gaming and watching mma, etc. that’s the lost male cohort here.
This is bad. Whether it will have any effect on voting (will any of these dudes vote?) is another question entirely.
Given how large this cohort is, I'm guessing it has to have some impact. There's a lot more young dudes in kitchens than in frat houses.
This is spot on. Data point: guy I do jiu jitsu with was like “Why did they have to make Godzilla about climate change?”
I don't have any personal experience with frustrated Gen Z males, so I only hear what people tell me online or from polls. But based on that limited window of insight, it feels like the frustrations are concentrated on men at the bottom of the social and economic pecking order. Men doing well in terms of education and social functioning are doing as well as ever in terms of earnings and dating prospects. The complaints seem to be, for lack of a better word, especially from "losers", who can also vote.
As a slightly older male, the main area where I've heard other men complain is about situations in the workplace, where for example engineering groups are taken to task for not hiring enough females. I can also remember some male friends in the military complaining that females softened and worsened the boot camp experience. I guess I would associate both those as liberal-adjacent, politically speaking.
Yep, your comment and Tom H's below are spot on. The problem is from the men Reeves identifies as falling dramatically below women in society.
Dudes I know don’t give a shit about female leads in kid movies, but do care that it’s being forced. Clearly guys - especially honkeys - are what’s wrong with the world. That’s what we’re being told. My friend’s white 15 year old son is as lost and self-hating as they come. He’s a walking Prius bumper. Palestine good, Elon bad, muslins good, white people bad, rap good, rock bad, … (Weezer is punk which was invented in the late 80’s… God bless his ignorant self-loathing ass). Jesus kid, get a hobby besides listening to people who hate your existence. Maybe try spending your life defending your existence and destroy their world view. The point is, toxic leftism is real whether guys are bothered by it or not.
I personally love muslins.
I assume you love their social politics.
I mostly use them for removing makeup, which they're very industrious at.
Oh you silly! You’re a goose. A real GOOSE!!! [HONK!] Fun with inadvertent text errors. Weeee! It would be fun for Hamas to de-colonize the make-up from your face.
I personally love Christmas with the Campbells.
I’m cool with you fetishizing them.
Didn’t take long for the thread to turn to “kids these days and their music.”
15 year olds of all genders are pretty much the worst. Although, there’s nothing wrong with muslims, Palestine, or Weezer.
i don’t think it’s the guys in frats who are having the issues, it’s the incels and incel-lite
If you’re told your existence is an innate problem for the world, it’s a problem, InCel or not. It’s just much less of a problem for a dude in his refractory period.
Or you stop confirming what people say about you by stop voting for fascists and demeaning women and anyone not like you.
Deprogram yourself. Explain what “confirming what people say about you”. Explain who is demeaning women. Provide examples of fascism. Here are some.
I want you to have free speech so you can out yourself as a brainwashed moron. The Jew-hating science-denying women-hating censorious leftist are the fascist.
How ‘bout dudes playing female sports. How ‘bout dudes in prison for crimes against women allowed to be in prison with women?!? Literally an insane process, unless you hate women. Then it makes sense. And if female prisoners complain about bad acts from the men? Revoke their parole. Scare them into silence through fascism.
How ‘bout catering to sick greed of evil medical practitioners and administrators and the mentally ill who need their delusions validated by having unquestioned gender affirming care for kids, especially the differently-abled like autistics. Begin a lifetime of talk therapy, doctor visits, chemical and surgical procedures all because you’re finding your identity as a young confused person and some adults walked you through what amounts to a medical confession without a parent or someone representing your best long term interests. Fascism for greed and affirming the derangement of leaders.
How ‘bout those 51 intelligence officers stating the HB laptop was disinformation? That was a fascist lie to sway the election.
How ‘bout being censored and called racists for wondering if COVID was a lab leak (which it was but even if it wasn’t it’s a fair question). That was a fascist lie to … what? Appease China?
How ‘bout being censored and called racists for stating DIE and CRT is in schools, which are communist authoritarian work-around to justify hiring without merit, sowing hate between groups instead bringing people together, and changing the mission of critical institutions like FEMA from responding to emergencies for ppl in the wake of a hurricane to - and, watch how I do this, I’m using its own words, quoting its website, which is a foreign practice to legacy media which are now pure propagandists - “Goal 1: Instill equity [read: racist communism] as a foundation of emergency management”. So, before helping people in need, check their skin color, God, genitals, their body negative mental illnesses regarding their genitals, etc. and then limit your assistance based on your findings. Insanity and fascism.
As your kind is famous for, accuse the enemy of your own actions. Except we’re fellow citizens. Not the enemy. You’ve been programmed to see it this way. You’ve been programmed to reject reality, to parrot slogans, to your lying eyes. The best medicine is facts and light. You will buck. You will fight. Your brain and body will reject the truth. Some are too far gone. Some will feel like they got hit by a truck and through the pain, through the head-spinning illogic trying to twist words to fit the lies, they will decide to stop wasting time twisting truth and parroting the words of some liar who you don’t know and who probably hates you because they hate all citizens, you’ll decide to calmly look to see what’s true. Citizens shouldn’t be pitted against each by immutable characteristics, fostering an America Red Guard Cultural Revolution. We can differ, but we’re one entity. This is all by design. It’s designed by fascist/communists/whatever. Break free.
Free your mind.
Don’t obsess on Trump. Trump is a turd. They want him as the opposition because he’s such a turd. But he’s nothing compared to the fascist authoritarian managerial class intent on destroying the middle class and full control. It’s painful to here, but it’s obvious.
People feel how they feel, but "the lead character in the new Star Wars series was female" and "I'm being taught to be ashamed of being a man" are so different from each other that connecting them is a sign of seriously bad analysis.
They do not seem that different to me. They both directly contribute to the feeling many young men have that the elites dislike them, and seek to create a society that is more aligned with female values.
AYFKM?
I'm not sure why you're not getting this. People illustrate general public moods or beliefs with specific examples all the time. His idea isn't that Star Wars leads, specifically, are leading men to feel their gender is less valued. He's giving an example of the *type* of thing that is leading to that feeling, and assuming the reader could fill in the blanks with many others.
Part of the issue there is the explicitness of it. Mainstream cultural institutions are promoting these choices explicitly, so it's not just "some movies have female leads" it's "we want our movies to have female leads because the time of the woman has come! And it's about time!" It's akin to the backlash I constantly see over Biden actually announcing publicly that he was going to select a female candidate for VP (and then making it pretty implicitly obvious that it would be a black woman). If he had just said he was going to pick the best person for the job and then chosen Harris I think some of the backlash to the selection goes away (some of it remains no matter what, obviously). It's the explicitness of these decisions that make them so impossible to ignore.
To be clear, I think these young men are wrong. As a white male, my race and gender are not disadvantaging me in American society, and I find the notion that they are to be pretty bonkers. But I at least see and understand why other people are feeling that way- a lot of this stuff is kind of culturally omnipresent and in your face.
I think this entirely correct, except that we are actually verging into your race and gender as a white man disadvantaging you in certain contexts. I’ve done a lot of recruiting at two prestigious organizations and there is very clearly a thumb on the scale for women and minorities at this point. I’ll grant that without it these organizations might end up being like 70% male, so it’s kind of needed, but it’s definitely the case that white men are getting passed over now in a way that wasn’t true 10 years ago.
"As a white male, my race and gender are not disadvantaging me in American society, and I find the notion that they are to be pretty bonkers"
I'm not sure that you're considering the gender part closely enough. Plenty of males do well, for sure, but when you look at the bottom rungs of society they are filled with men. Homeless camps and prisons are what...90% male? Drug overdoses are 70% male, homicides over 80%, etc..
That's at the left-tail of the distribution, but going a little up the ladder low-income blue collar males might be disadvantaged when compared to women at the same percentile of society. I think I'd rather be a coal-miner's wife than a coal miner, for example.
Women are way ahead in terms of college degrees and life expectancy and the latter will probably never change.
Personally I'm sure you have no complaints about being male and neither do I. I've never personally felt held back. But it's easy to overlook the fact that statistically speaking, a random male is much more likely to end up worse than their sister.
How many white men has Biden appointed to the federal bench? Are men of my generation to curb our ambitions to atone for the affairs of our grandfathers?
See also: The all-female cast of the Ghostbusters remake, complete with labeling any criticism of that movie as "misogynistic".
You can expand that to any piece of media with female/LGTQ+/minority led casts. I thought The Acolyte was a pretty horrendous piece of storytelling, but the creators and those involved with the show are pretty explicit that anyone who says that is racist/sexist. It's kind of bonkers, and I don't think it's helping us get better films/tv-shows when any legitimate critique of what's being pumped out now is hand waved away as being a by-product of monstrous attitudes.
Let's not forget Wheel of Time!
I thought that one was better than the original, which of course had an all male cast apart from the love interest. Of course, much of the betterness is really just shifts in tastes over time - in the 1980s it was fine to have a random scene of oral sex with a ghost that had no connection to the rest of the plot, while nowadays it would have to indicate something more.
It’s forgettable.
I'm not getting it because it doesn't make any sense. The only way the casting choices of Star Wars could illustrate men being less valued is if men's value was tied up in always being the main character of blockbuster movies. That would be a dumb thing to think, and would 100% validate the criticism that people with this objection actually object to any inclusion of women.
The original trilogy clearly included a woman in a key role, so it's not inclusion of women, it's women as main character in this specific franchise.
And what are these films generally about? The main character of a star wars film is usually a warrior who fights, with violence, against evil. This is traditionally and instinctively a male archetype.
You can write good stories with women filling that role, and they can be well-received, but it tends to work better when A) The women are fighting more with cunning and diplomacy more than direct physical violence - think Dragon lady in GOTs or Leia in the original trilogy B) It's a fresh story where the gender feels intrinsic to the character - think Katniss from Hunger Games, as opposed to Star Wars Universe where warriors and soldiers had already been established as male, so the female character warriors seemed to be replacing male roles (and in a clumsy gender swap style way).
and C) they don't seem like every other movie. A movie about Joan of Arc or those female warriors from Senegal might be cool once in a while, but if they are popping up too much it would be like if every movie about a single parent was about single dads and single moms seemed not to be getting their fair share of representation.
But when you replace an existing male-centric, violence-using role with a poorly done female lead, for no other reason than the role is female, don't be surprised that people wonder about what you're trying to say.
On one hand, I kind of agree with you, but to steelman it a bit, the issue is not any particular movie franchise's casting decisions but the perception of a general trend. Like nobody objected to the Alien franchise having a female lead - in fact, lots of very bro-ey guys think Ripley is super cool. But if the perception is that the action lead almost always (let's say >75% of the time) has to be a woman, then that's different. Now that perception may not be factually accurate, but if that is the perception, I think I can see why it would bother some low-info, non-progressive, but not-necessarily-extremely-sexist dudes.
Somewhat tangential, but I remember seeing the black actor Charles S. Dutton interviewed once and he said he was a huge fan of Amos & Andy because it was so funny. But he explained: the characters in Amos & Andy were idiots, but they weren't any bigger idiots than Ralph Kramden was. The problem was that during the 1950s there were no *positive* representations of black people on TV. So what made Amos & Andy racist wasn't Amos & Andy itself, but the context around it.
I guess I would phrase this as, “People’s sense of their own value is tied up in being valued by society."
Star Wars fandom is traditionally very male. A. If men are not valued, this gender imbalance will be viewed as negative, a problem to be fixed. B. The creators of Star Wars will attempt to reshape the media in ways to make it less appealing to men and more appealing to women.
We’ve seen B, some men take that as evidence that A is true.
And even if they’re tied up in blockbuster movies, they’re still being fairly represented? Top Gun got nominated for an Oscar. Deadpool and Wolverine stars two white men and made a billion dollars. Jason Statham is thriving. The kids loved the Mario movie. That’s why it looks like some men are just angry women and ethnic minorities are getting any roles at all - because there are PLENTY of heroic stories for white men.
As just one example, the American Psychological Association put out guidelines for men and boys a few years back that said that traditional masculinity is anti-feminine and prone to violence. I think the report itself is more nuanced and makes valid points, but I am not SHOCKED to hear that young men see stuff like this happening and walk away with the notion that elites and society dislike them.
I think you run into a problem here with the fact that, as Matt’s column pointed out, traditional masculinity IS prone to violence. That was what he meant about boys turning sticks into guns and swords at higher rates, preferring the death penalty, etc. It would be weird for the APA to pretend otherwise.
The anti-feminine point is tougher, but historically speaking, at least, wildly misogynistic cultures are considerably more common than not. You have a lot more Taliban-type societies than the alternative.
I’m not sure what you do about that reality, given that it hurts men’s feelings. Obviously one approach is to try and channel violence in positive ways, but the most “positive violence” professions in the US also consistently have…the highest rates of domestic partner abuse. So I am not actually super convinced about the total efficacy of that approach. I think it is a genuinely hard problem.
I think focusing on the violence part of it is key though. I've gotten the sense that "competitiveness" is sometimes thought of as toxic masculinity (now maybe that's not true and it's a vibe I've gotten anyway, but this is about vibes) and competitiveness can _lead_ to violence but doesn't have to.
Like I said, I think the guidelines were more nuanced, but I also totally get why people would hear that and become upset about the claim. But I think the fact that it was even stated goes to the heart of the sense that young men (and, more likely, men of all ages to a certain extent) have that culture/elites are devaluing them and view them skeptically. There are a number of similar things that could be said about all sorts of groups. For example, women are more prone to child rearing and likely to pursue family over career. Or you could drill down on the data more specifically and say traditional masculinity is more prone to violence, but black men and black cultural norms around masculinity are disproportionately prone to violence. You could cite to statistical arguments in support of those claims. But do you think the APA would ever put out guidelines for treating other groups particular ways because of widespread behaviors that those genders or races are "more prone" to engaging in? I find it almost impossible to imagine them ever doing so. Instead, they signaled out masculinity more broadly to highlight how destructive it could be in order to publish guidelines for correcting it. I'm not surprised in the least by the backlash, and the APA must have been blind to have not seen it coming and thought that publishing something saying men as a class are bad in certain ways was a good and productive thing to do.
Agree - it would be shocking (and professionally irresponsible) for the APA not to focus on the problems of violence and violence against women in their guidelines for treating men since these are almost exclusively male problems. To that extent at least, the observation that "traditional masculinity" is a source of problems for the safety of and progress of women seems utterly unsurprising, despite the fact that men commit most of their violence against other men. The guidelines are ultimately just that -- information that can be used by practitioners in the treatment of men and boys, not moral judgements about them. The trick for professionals who utilize the guidelines is that the failure to seek treatment in the first place is one of the hallmarks of "traditional masculinity"
Is that an acronym people are supposed to know?
Are You Flippin' Kidding Me?
It’s not that they’re different. It’s that one is a tenet (men are shameful and bad) of DIE Marxism and the other is just a thing that may or may not be a byproduct of the tenet (more female lead characters in physical action hero movies).
Do guys not really like movies with kick ass female leads? I thought their real problem was with the chick flicks their girlfriends would drag them to.
"Do guys not really like movies with kick ass female leads?"
Of course not. That's the strawman that's being invented here. The complaint, as I understand it, in a franchise like Star Wars is that roles that were traditionally male *within the fiction of the universe* (Jedi Warrior) are being gender-swapped in a clumsy way, where the goal seems to be the-future-is-female-politics and not advancing anything needed by the pre-existing fictional canon itself.
Unsurprisingly, it's not executed very well and fails to pick up a new generation of young female fans. Meanwhile some portion of the old fans complain and they get "you're a fearful sexist" in response.
But yeah, no one's complaining about the Hunger Games. If they updated and remade the series with a male lead I'd probably complain.
I don't think Jedi Knight is a "traditionally male" role. Sure, the Jedi we see in the Original Trilogy are male. But from a certain point of view (heh), female Jedi have been part of Star Wars canon for many years, long before Peak Woke/Metoo. Mara Jade (EU novels) and Ahsoka Tano (The Clone Wars) are female Jedi and some of my favorite characters in Star Wars.
Also, the Jedi use the Force for strength and to guide them in combat, and this could obviate the natural advantage that men have due to greater physical strength. No reason why a woman can't be as strong as a man when she taps into the Force.
I don't remember any guy friends complaining about The Hunger Games
And the world is better for it, so long these young reactionary, antisocial men don't reform. At least they may stop voting when Trump is no longer on the ticket, and let the rest of the world go on becoming better.
I realize I don't help the situation by seeing it and calling it for what is is, but alas.
Yes, as I said, it is all a bit absurd.
The problem is that your average young man isn’t doing any sort of analysis. They are watching YouTube/twitch/tiktok videos, discord chatting and surfing vibes while trying to establish an identify.
Or they’re getting a lesson in “social studies” from a 3rd grade teacher. How are people not getting this? We’re asking a replacement level 3rd grade teacher to convey subtly nuanced concepts that many professional writers and academics struggle with, to a bunch of 8 year olds.
The main problem with the Disney Star Wars is that they have been mostly bad. JJ and company are bad.
Complaining about the lead is silly when those movies and so much content produced is blegh.
When Kathleen Kennedy admitted they didn't have a plan for sequel trilogy before they began filming, everything about those movies made so much more sense.
The sequels made me appreciate the prequels much more; the prequels had lots of problems, but Lucas clearly had a plan, and he implemented it with consistency across three films. The overall idea of the arc (how a democracy falls into a dictatorship) was even pretty good!
The prequels' main problems are Lucas' clunky dialogue and not fleshing-out Anakin's turn to the Dark Side even more. There is a great 'fall of man/descent of man' story line there, and I am not sure if Lucas didn't realize he had created it, or was like, too scared to finish it.
It's certainly the most baffling decision in Hollywood history on a dollars-spent basis. I get that Disney wanted to quickly get a return on its investment in buying Lucasfilms, but I absolutely do not understand how a bunch of high-powered studio executives in the mid-to-late 2010s didn't understand that audience expectations about serialized storytelling had dramatically increased over the previous 20 years. I mean, I can all but guarantee you that basically every single person involved in that decisionmaking process had watched "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men" and also analyzed the MCU's development. (As an aside, I'll add that certainly the fastest way to spin up a great, cohesive sequel trilogy would have been to adapt Timothy Zahn's incredibly well-regarded "Heir to the Empire" trilogy, which I have to think was discussed and can only conclude was discarded because they didn't want to pay Zahn for adapting it.)
OMG I would have LOVED to see the Thrawn trilogy of movies!
I know this is heresy, but I think they should have acknowledged the passage of time and recast Luke, Han, and Leia with new actors.
> I get that Disney wanted to quickly get a return on its investment in buying Lucasfilm
So far Disney is still nearly $3b in the hole! https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/14/disneys-star-wars-box-office-profits-fail-to-cover-cost-of-lucasfilm/
Ouch! I hadn't heard about that.
There very first thing Disney did when they bought Lucasfilm was de-canonize all the Zahn and other pre-2012 Star Wars novels.
Followed by re-canonizing Thrawn, followed by doing a fairly good job with Thrawn in Rebels (within the limits of an expressly kid-oriented show), followed by turning him into a clumsy cartoon villain in the live action Ahsoka show. Sigh.
Yes, I'm aware, but I actually don't begrudge them that at all -- the EU already had numerous contradictions with the prequel films (e.g., all the stuff about Luke and Leia's mother in "The Black Fleet Crisis" books) and with themselves (Boba Fett had like three or four different origin stories in EU materials even before AotC came out!), plus the storyline had diverged so far from anything the general public was aware of (like the whole 30+ book story arc for the NJO . . . ), that from a continuity perspective it made the most sense to decanonize it all and then pick and choose elements to use in the new continuity.
IMO, as often in politics, when it comes to the new Star Wars trilogy, basically everyone is wrong. They made two good to really good movies that had the potential to repair the damage done by the prequels. The problem is that they then totally wimped out on where those movies were going precisely because they were unwilling to make Rey a less traditional, Luke Skywalker-style hero. Her character arc was clearly towards rejecting the traditional Jedi order. She should have fallen to the dark side, or broken the dark/light dichotomy entirely for something more thoughtful and interesting. If they ever made a third movie it could absolutely tie together a coherent arc about the failures of blind dogmatism and carrying on the wars of one's fathers.
"They made two good to really good movies that had the potential to repair the damage done by the prequels."
Are you including The Last Jedi in the "two good to really good movies"? Because if so... no, just no. The Last Jedi sucked, and not just because they butchered Luke Skywalker's character (the Luke in the Original Trilogy would never have tried to kill his nephew in his sleep, WTF?). OK, maybe you like the degradation of Luke because it boldly "subverts expectations" or whatnot. But consider:
1. Admiral Holdo is super annoying, to the point that, when she sacrifices herself, instead of appreciating her noble sacrifice, I was relieved that she was gone. Also, she's a military leader, why the heck is she wearing a ball gown and has pink hair like she's a gender studies teacher at a cocktail party? You're in a war zone, woman, put on a uniform!
2. The stupidity of Holdo not explaining the plan to Poe, which backfired on her rather badly.
3. Rose Tico is also annoying, and illogical. "We win by saving what we love" - ok but you just stopped Finn from... saving what he loves (all his friends at the base) by stopping him from ramming the cannon! Yes, Luke is about to save everyone, but you had no way of knowing that.
4. The stupid Canto Bight sequence. What was the point of that, other than making a statement: "See, war profiteering bad! Slavery bad! Rich people bad!" I'm glad you're here to tell us these things, movie.
5. Rey goes from "I just found out I have Force powers" to "I can effortlessly lift about five tons of rocks" in DAYS. Even Luke struggled to lift the X-wing out of the swamp, and he had the benefit of actual training by Yoda, not "I'm sitting around on this island while the local Jedi Master is grumpily ignoring me."
6. The tense opening scene ruined by Poe cracking a stupid "Yo Mama" joke, with the side benefit of making General Hux go from a threatening villain to a laughingstock.
7. I bet you were excited to find out who Snoke is? Well, too bad! He's dead, enjoy having your expectations subverted!
On the plus side... the actors did the best they could with what they were given, especially Kylo Ren. The visuals were great. The music was good. That's about it.
Kylo murdering Snoke was the best choice a Star Wars movie made since Empire. It's baffling that anyone ever thought Palpatine from Wish was to be straightforwardly accepted as a serious villain.
Luke going into exile after reproducing the failures of the Yoda/Obi Wan Jedi order with his own nephew makes perfect sense.
Canto Bight was dumb and clumsily executed but Finn's arc finding a reason to commit to the rebels was necessary and somewhat compelling regardless of the ham-fisted casino planet.
The Poe and Holdo conspiring to fuck it all up because of their egos arc is exactly the sort of lesson that a decent sequel would call back to when a certain lead character needs to be convinced to let go of some of her shit too.
Generally everything involving Kylo/Rey/Luke and everything from when they all board Snoke's ship through to the end is great. (The weird Rose/Finn crash thing excepted)
Kylo murdering Snoke *could have been* the best choice a Star Wars movie made since Empire, but only if Kylo or Hux had actually been established as genuinely threatening villains. TLJ suffers tremendously from Rian Johnson wanting to make the First Order pathetic, but if the First Order is pathetic, what does it say about our heroes who keep losing to them???
Book of Boba Fett should have been a parody of Cheers where Boba gets wrapped up in the hijinks of the week.
I haven't actually gotten to anything past season 2 of the Mandalorian. Once CGI Luke showed up I got drastically less interested. I hear I actually should get around to Andor though.
If what you want is a more mature Star Wars that breaks away from endlessly repeating previous stories and explores different tones, then you should absolutely see Andor.
You absolutely should.
"Andor" is amazing.
I strongly agree with this. I think that the original TLJ Rian Johnson wanted had Rey join with Kylo Ben in rejecting both the New Order and the Republic or whatever. Instead the climactic moment just falls flat and she scurries away and nothing really changes. No wonder Abrams just threw everything away for the (awful) TROS, the core of TLJ *did not happen in the film that was released*.
I did always kinda feel like it pulled it's punch at the end to not lock in Ep IX to a specific direction, which I assume came from Kennedy more than Johnson, but it's not like it couldn't have followed on from that core idea if they hadn't been chicken/hyper-sensitive to youtuber criticism about it.
I think one problem is that Disney leadership and a lot of media act like any criticism of star wars for being bad is based on the fact that the people complaining are really just angry about the female being the lead. I've seen a lot of people complaining about stuff that goes to the storytelling and writing of the movies where the response is "misogynists were always going to hate these movies because of Rey".
It does not help that a lot of the complainers (though not all) are in fact misogynists. See the treatment of Tran.
Yes, I strongly disliked Rose Tico (the character), but Kelly Marie Tran does *not* deserve all the sexist, racist abuse she received. What the heck.
I liked Rose Tico. It's nice to have a character who isn't descended from four people strong in the Force.
“I hate the movie because I hate JJ Abrams’ work. All he does is hide the ball.”
My main criticism of Disney is everything feels designed by committee to check off a box.
*A checklist written by a Zoomer intern watching a 12 hour video by some YouTuber about how The Last Jedi ruined their childhood
The original 6 Star Wars movies are dog shit as well. If you disagree you are a man-child, I didn’t make the rules.
You should meet more elementary school teachers, they’re the ones we entrust to faithfully convey “the leads in Star Wars are female does not entail that we think men are inferior.”
I know a bunch of elementary school teachers, unsurprisingly since I have kids in elementary school. If you think they're conveying lessons about Star Wars, though, maybe you're the one who needs to meet more of them.
Is it a sign of that or a sign of yourself not wishing to accept that they originate from the same cultural package because you don’t want to throw out that cultural package in aggregate?
Saying “the future is female” was just incredibly stupid. Can you imagine saying “the future is black” or “the future is Muslim” or “the future is male.”. It was a thumb in the eye of 48% of the electorate. I’m willing to vote for qualified women, but I have zero interest in shifting the balance of power towards women. Women already have longer life expectancies, lower incarceration rates and higher graduation rates than men.
Women have those things because they study harder than men, take better care of their health and do less stupid, self-destructive shit. Women are doing what we hope all our children will do, while men are sitting back and trying to "work the refs" with nonsense arguments about the cultural "vibes" favoring women.
If I were to say "men are more represented in STEM, in software engineering jobs and higher management because they work harder than women and do less stupid, self-destructive shit", it would rightfully be seen as offensive and wrong. I submit your statement falls into the same category.
It’s funny how even within, say, a physics department, there’s an extremely notable gender gradient among subfields and it’s basically exactly what a YouTube manosphere moron would predict.
THIS is the actual counterpart to Joe’s argument, and they’re both pretty correct.
There is no question that the gradient exists and I think there is minimal evidence that it is primarily (but not wholly) due to anything other than differences in preferences that are gender-correlated. But this does not get at the behavioral differences that are driving the gross-level differences in outcome -- graduation rates, health outcomes, etc.
Your comment barely proffers an argument but I’d like to hear why it is that you think there is such a gender-correlated preference for “amount of math I have to learn” among people who are willingly going into a field that has them doing more math than 99.9% of the population.
You are suggesting that becoming a lawyer or doctor rather than becoming a software engineer is equivalent to committing crimes that land you in prison, or failing to graduate from high school or college, or a sign of self-destructive behavior? That's not so much "offensive" as just bizarre. I'm not inventing anything here, just summarizing Reeves' conclusions, as well as that of dozens of researchers.
I'm suggesting no such thing. Just showing how your rhetorical style can be seen to be offensive.
Did not mean to offend your delicate male sensibilities. It's just that I'm attracted to violence...
I find shoes rhetorical style more naively moralistic than offensive.
So I guess Victorian women had shorter life expectancies than men because they were sluts and got pregnant too often. Your reasoning is analogous to that.
Woah - this reads like a tortured non-sequitur from a raging misogynist who has just been aching to use the word "sluts" in order to reveal his deepest feelings about women. The comment makes no sense whatsoever.
bullshit. if you are going to blame men for the impact modern social conditions have on make life expectancies, you should blame victorian women for the effect victorian social conditions had on their life expectancies. we all exist within social context and results are the best way of gauging who is doing better
Da Fuck? Who do think was controlling fertility and every other "social condition" in Victorian England and everywhere else until about 5 minutes ago? You are just completely off the beam. I can't even discern an argument here, let alone a sound one.
Gotta be honest, the only time I utter the word “slut” it’s pretty much only, uh, during something that one particular woman is seeming to enjoy. If I want to call a bunch of hoes hoes I call them hoes. Might be a generational thing.
Yes - generational. And extremely relevant to a discussion about Victorian social norms. Keep on truckin' daddy-o.
Typical right wing argument. I don’t buy it when such logic blames the poor for being poor and I don’t buy it when it is used to justify gender gaps (of either kind). Sure at the individual level you can point to the importance of choices but it doesn’t explain changes in the aggregate. Systemic shifts are at play. In many places the system is still rigged against women. In some it is becoming rigged against men.
I am not arguing for not addressing the conditions that are creating the gender gaps (and I most definitely not "right wing"). I am observing that there are very clear differences in behaviors between the sexes that explain a lot of those gaps and have nothing to do with feminists imposing pro-girl / anti-boy cultural norms. You actually need to study to earn a high GPA. I agree with Reeves that a lot of the variance is caused by differences in the timing and pattern of brain development, as well as the steady retreat of men from the professions that help shape boys' models of maleness and help accommodate male behavioral patterns within relatively structured settings like schools. Those are structural / systemic issues we can address without blaming girls and women for succeeding under the longstanding rules we collectively established for our children (study hard, don't commit crimes or violence), and which we seemed to be fine with as long as boys and men were "winning".
Second, “gpa” ie grades can be determined in different ways. What do you reward ? Exam performance or attendance and homework? The shift towards more emphasis on the latter and on consistency of performance in low stakes settings advantaged girls but it’s not objectively a more correct way to grade.
The best counter example is Oxford university. All students there are chosen purely on academic merit and presumably both male and female there are on average equally smart hard working and intellectually mature. And yet men outperform women there in getting distinction in their degrees. It seems clear that the reason is oxfords very traditional grading system. The *entirety* of your “gpa” is determine in one incredibly stressful stretch of exams at the last couple of weeks of your whole 3-4 years. Moreover, these exams reward intellectual daring to pursue original arguments (in humanities subjects at least) not just mastery of others’ ideas. It seems that on average women are less prone to take these kinds of risks* and thus less often get distinctions (although to be clear many still do! Just fewer than you’d expect).
[*to be clear the argument here isn’t that they are less able to do so but rather on average less *willing* to do so. In other words it’s an example on how academic settings can reward behaviors that aren’t inherently about academic ability or knowledge. I argue that a similar inherently non academic behavioral bias advantaging girls is in America’s education system]
>> You actually need to study to earn a high GPA. I agree with Reeves that a lot of the variance is caused by differences in the timing and pattern of brain development
So much misunderstandings here.. where to start? I’m a historian so with history I guess… for literally millenia academic and intellectual pursuits were coded male across a wide arrange of human cultures. It is only in th past generation, and only in a select countries (a minority of humanity) that girls started outperforming boys. Yes, I believe that boys h historic and virtually ubiquitous advantage is likely due to patriarchal structures but the fact that a handful of exceptions with the reverse have now occurred is hardly sufficient to conclude inverse essentialism (“brain development”).
Thanks for the many comments - will try to address all in a single "mega response".
Re: "right wing ... personal responsibility". The point of my comment was to note that the differences in results can be traced to differences in behavior within frameworks we have long-established, and under which men were presumed to be thriving relative to women until relatively recently. The tone here throughout has been blaming women (or the women's movement, or the me too movement, or some external force "oppressing" men) as the source of the growing disparity, which is batshit crazy as well as being totally unproductive. That is not "right-wing" and it is not a lecture on "personal responsibility", it's just properly accounting for the facts in evidence.
Re: pedagogical methods. Sure - agree. But this does not change the biological facts about brain development, which no more makes boys "inferior" than menstruation makes girls "inferior". I don't see how noting the differences and proposing ways to address it in order to provide boys greater opportunities for success can be seen as being negative about boys' education.
Re: testing methods. Again, sure. Devise the best testing method that accords with the results you are trying to encourage, ideally ones that will lead to producing the best long-term results for society as well as for the individuals involved. Oxford's is kind of limited, IMO, but there are lots of systems out there, and a fair amount of choice among them within the US higher ed system at least.
Re: millenia of male-codeed academic success. A token acknowledgement of of the role of "patriarchal structures" is insufficient here. This is the only era in which women have had widespread and equal access to higher education along with the opportunity (and indeed the expectation) to use that education in fulfilling, self-directed careers. And it is precisely this era in which we find women excelling relative to men along the exact parameters that were established to evaluate the performance of their male peers. If this is an historical anomaly it's because it's the first time these conditions have existed. We have an N of 1, so "history" is not much of guide to explain things.
Moreover, we don't need to closely evaluate the performance of men and women over the span of history to see or understand differences in brain development timing and patterns between the sexes -- we can observe them and test for them directly, as been done countless times now. "Essentialism" is the false attribution of characteristics to a class of people or things based on pre-conceived but untested suppositions. When things are observed and replicated repeatedly, the process of attribution and explanation is called "science".
Dear Joe, could please apply your insightful analysis to explain racial income gaps? I think you’ll find the analysis still works if you change “women” to “white people” and “men” to “black people”.
If the result offends you, maybe you could strongly reconsider your original point.
It's not MadLibs, where you can replace words at random to create a "result". Explaining income differences is more complex than observing differences in academic performance and educational attainment. Educational attainment is obviously part of the income gap, as are relative unemployment rates, as are career selection and opportunities. But as to educational attainment and performance, there is nothing offensive or inoffensive about it, there is just the data and the link between data and behavior. These observations are robust across racial groups -- white women perform better than white men, black women perform better than black men, latino women better than latino men. So whatever factors are creating the gaps in performance between racial groups, there is no reason to believe that it's the same thing that's driving the difference between men and women within each group. As for behavior driving the differences between the sexes within racial groups, these are also robust. I really don't see why it's "offensive" (or even mildly surprising) to find that lower rates of disciplinary intervention and higher rates of homework completion are correlated with higher rates of academic performance and degree completion.
P.S.
I didn’t say you’re right wing. Merely that the dismissive attitude in your comment (“personal responsibility”) echoed right wing talking points about social ills.
Finally there is the question of pedagogical methods school culture etc. the cutting or even elimination of recess time is probably hurting all kids but in average seems to hurt boys more.
All of this put together is quite sufficient to hypothesize a shift without assuming boys are lazy or cognitively inferior (“late development”)
My God you people have short memories. I beg you to go and read discussions from the past about why women were less successful than men. We didn’t accept those arguments about women and we shouldn’t accept them about men. End of story.
Every other group that does worse, it’s the fault of white people or men or both. But when men do badly, it’s their fault. Thank you for clearly illustrating why me and hundreds of millions of other men around the world are finding left wing politics completely untenable and bordering on offensive.
I’m a man. You aren’t describing me or my experience.
Are you a man? What do you do? Is that how you and your man friends operate?
Man and father of boys and girls (now young adults). Don't understand what you mean by "operate". But having watched this in real time as a very interested party for a couple decades now, I reject the notion that what has happened to boys is that they have been beaten down by social messaging about their inherent low value, inferiority, or evil. I definitely would have noticed that, as would the rest of my family, especially my son.
I don’t know you. But I see many people completely oblivious to many things, especially those that don’t directly impact them. I won’t speak to your perceptive abilities but, if I’m inferring correctly, I’m sincerely glad your son hasn’t been negatively impacted (assuming he actually hasn’t) by the explicit and implicit divisive real world messaging against men - and even biological women - especially of the Honkey variety.
Fair enough, so I will amend my claim to say that I have not seen evidence of this, either personally or more broadly socially. What I have seen is an increasing intolerance for what is I think is objectively bad and antisocial behavior by men in relation to women, and yes, also some pretty nutty claims by extremes about a lot of things, including sex roles/gender, etc. I have not seen young men struggling to sort through this rhetoric, although I find that older men are having a harder time with it. This is not to deny that there is a very real crisis among young men, pretty well documented by Reeves and others, that deserves more attention and probably some policy changes.
Wanting my culture to celebrate strong male archetypes is hardly absurd.
The movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” is incredibly useful in understanding American masculinity. Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne are very different archetypes, but they are both equally masculine and equally American. A real man can be a lawyer or a gunslinger, but he cannot be a coward. Old movies, at least ones that avoided cheap escapism, are windows into the American soul.
Now you've got the song stuck in my head
Ha, yes! I literally started whistling the theme song the second I saw the title!
My absolute favorite movie from the age of 6 to 12 years old. Agree it was a powerful tale and a formative lesson in how to act like a real man. Only later did I learn that the story was (of course?) written by a woman.
I think that’s generally the feeling a lot of men have and I don’t mean to be dismissive of it at all.
From my POV, I thought Rey was actually a pretty great character and I thought Daisy Ridley was a good actor (much better than any of the other male leads with the exception of James Earl Jones, Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Harrison Ford). I just thought the writing, direction and editing was pretty terrible throughout the new series.
That’s looking at that role and franchise in isolation though. What I don’t think is absurd is a dude taking that one data point and adding it to a constellation of other data points and feeling pretty shitty about things.
I'd add Adam Driver to that list. And Ian McDiarmid! Nobody chews scenery like Darth Sidious! UNLIMITED POWAHHH! [shoots lightning from fingertips]
Ian is just a chill dude as well, class act. Both great!
Preach, Bo.
Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge what your saying either lacks observational skills or is willingly blind. It’s all right in front of our faces, everywhere. They’re insulting their own intelligence by not acknowledging the obvious.
That's not the problem -- there are innumerable strong male archetypes all across every dimension of the culture. The problem is that any attempt to explore the reality that there are also strong female archetypes appears to send weak-minded men into a spiral of self doubt and shame from which they are unable to extricate themselves. JFC, this conversation on this site today is the first one that may convince me that women really should run the entire world because men seem utterly ill-equipped to deal with even the slightest challenge to their historical hegemony, which is particularly ironic given that men set the rules of the game that women are now winning.
Since you yourself are a man, I guess we should just dismiss everything you wrote since you're probably just a dumb, angry, violent person, right?
I mean, not as dumb as the person who writes a comment like yours, but sure.
Sounds like that male fragility of yours is acting up. Might explain most of your comments here.
I feel like you are missing the plot of the conversation completely. Do you need some CliffsNotes or something?
Sam is simply taking your words and logically extrapolating. Do you understand that?
Sam is / was failing to understand the difference between an actual proposal and an intentionally hyperbolic claim used to illustrate my frustration with the whiny tone of the complaints above. Do you think I was actually proposing a legally-instituted gynocracy? Seriously?
This all seems true- young men were not crazy to think progressives didn’t like them or want them around circa 2014 onwards. But it also feels like the boy alienating vibes in elite progressive circles peaked around 2021.
There’s a recent NYT article by Jessica Grosse (former Jezebel writer) arguing that the misogyny of Gen Z men is overstated, pointing out young men are still committed to women’s legal equality. I agree with her! But it’s significant how different this is from what you’d expect from these corners a decade ago, when you could be declared a misogynist for sitting wrong in a bus, or talking too enthusiastically about something.
All of this is to say, I don’t know what more progressives can do to change the vibes. The “male tears” mugs are already in the trash.
2021 is not all that far in the past. But it might be worth circling back to the main thrust of MY's post today, which is that commitment to women's legal equality and is only one of very many topics that might have a gender skew, and if men are moving away from Democrats, Dems need to find issues to win them back.
Throwing away the male tears mugs is a good start, though, lol.
I mean, the very notion that there could any kind of debate about whether women should be entitled to "legal equality" is just fucking absurd.
Don't be silly. It's generally considered settled whenever the definition "legal equality" is straightforward and easily agreed upon.
But often, legal equality can be taken to be statistical outputs, like the average income of men vs women. Or it could be parenting rights when a couple divorce. Or it could be related to some aspect of biology where it's just very difficult to determine what equal treatment means (abortion, or fertility treatments, or viage, for example).
Or it could be something even trickier, like sentencing and parole guidelines, which usually take men's greater propensity to violence into account. For any of these, It's just not clear what legal equality means or exactly how voting patterns will gender skew based on them.
Maybe it’s less “I don’t know what to do” and more “people complaining about the vibes need to recognize how much the vibes have already shifted”
Did you read the comments for the article? Unfortunately the most liked ones seemed to be pretty hostile towards men
Absolutely, and if you look at the Richard Reeves stuff there are plenty of valid reasons for young men to feel like they're being left behind. And since it's concentrated in poorer families and neighborhoods, it shouldn't be a progressive violation to talk about it.
And yet it seems to be because the Code of Hammurabi was paternalistic and there are still more male CEO's than female, or something.
I think Matt's code switching has some validity, but not signaling that young men falling behind is of concern is an own goal.
More men at the top argument is always flawed because the top is a tiny fraction of the populous. Ultimately, it would take longer to diversify the top than the bottom. Also, the top is running game and will shit on anyone of any characteristic to keep owning the game. And who defines success or failure? Who defines struggle? Self-determination and being fulfilled (or not miserable) should be the qualitative criteria for success. If there are more men/male CEO’s but men are offing themselves and life expectancy is dropping materially, men are doing very poorly in modernity. If the opposite is happening for women but the percentage of CEO’s isn’t making a 2nd wage feminist happy, who’s better off? The average man or woman? Moreover, the idea that we’re pitting the groups’ victim status against one another is another commie anti American wet dream. Message positively and rise all tides. But many don’t want that. It’s clear who they are.
Matt’s article is more strategic to benefit the Democratic party, not to benefit humanity or remedy hurting men.
Eh, I think it's vibes, but I think you've got the origins wrong. It's not really much that the actual creators of stuff are doing saying (except VERY recently, as what I'm about to talk about below has metastasized and escaped so creators studios start getting pressure to comment), but rather it's a feedback loop between right wing and left wing, well, I don't want to say grifters, but I'm going to. You can point to either starting it, but since I'm on the left, I'll be nice and give a model dialogue where the left starts it:
LW: This new game has a black female lead, that's going to drive the MAGA chuds crazy and they'll make threats and boycott the studio! What assholes!
RW: The studio has gone woke! Remember all the good games they used to make? What happened to them? Oh, well, go woke, go broke, we gotta show them we won't just buy whatever they're selling. See, here's this LWer [Quoteretweet/splice/whatever] saying that the studio's on their side, we gotta get them back on our side!
LW: See! They're trying to destroy the studio! And I've heard some RWers have sent death threats to the creators!
Studio: Please don't send death threats to our staff, or be racist to them.
RW: SEE! THEY'RE CALLING US ALL RACISTS WHO THREATEN PEOPLE!
LW: SEE! THEY'RE ALL RACISTS WHO THREATEN PEOPLE!
Scene.
Everyone involved gets views, gets attention and attention for their upcoming game. This was bad, but didn't usually effect players who didn't choose to get involved/follow these dingbats. What's changed, mostly is that (1) studios send out a lot more press releases, because (2) bits of the press started reporting on this like it was actual news, and not just after studios sent out press releases, but before. The press story that is 'five racists on twitter sent racist messages to someone and their employer has not commented to say 'we think that's bad'' needs to die in a fire.
So... I have Many Thoughts about this, as a woman who loves Star Wars and hero stories in general. (My husband also loves hero stories, we watch them together, it's great!)
Like I said in a comment above, I think that a zero-sum war of the sexes is harmful and stupid. Neither sex has a monopoly on virtue or vice; saying "men are toxic" is just insulting and wrong.
Now, putting my "Devil's Advocate" hat on, stories featuring male heroes doing great deeds and overcoming evil are a staple of Western culture. The original Star Wars trilogy! Harry Potter! The Lord of the Rings! A whole bunch of male Marvel and DC Comics superheroes, like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Captain America, etc. etc. etc.!
I watched these movies and read these books as a girl and woman, and I had no trouble identifying with the male protagonist. Why can't men do the same with a female protagonist? If I can recognize and admire the virtues of Luke Skywalker and Aragorn even though they're men and I'm a woman, why can't men do the same with the Black Widow or Katniss?
I think a feminist would see the current situation as a *rebalancing*: men, you've been so dominant for so long, it's our turn in the spotlight now. Again, I don't *agree* with it, because it's starting to sound too zero-sum. But, like, if you hate a movie with a female protagonist, go stream the LOTR movies, nobody is stopping you.
BTW, I strongly dislike the Disney+ Star Wars shows, not because they feature female and/or Black characters, but because they're badly written. The Obi-Wan Kenobi show sucked; The Acolyte sucked worse. Give me good stories with female protagonists, and I'll happily watch them. I loved Mara Jade in the Star Wars Thrawn novels, I wish she had been made part of the Disney canon.
Have you seen Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind? It's a beautiful anime movie from the 80s (so, many years before the "Masculinity Is Toxic" discourse). The protagonist is a young princess who is very brave and resourceful, as well as compassionate and kind. In the end, she [spoiler alert] solves the conflict without violence. I think it's a wonderful movie for girls *and* boys. There's more than one way to be a hero.
It’s not just a staple of western culture, it’s a staple of almost all cultures to some degree or another. There are also plenty of example of female heroes in western culture that I grew up thinking were pretty cool Annie Oakley! Joan of Arc! Ellen Ripley! Sarah Conner! Catwoman! Storm! Jean Grey! Etc.
I do agree that men need to get over some of this because the culture is big enough for a diverse array of heroes and their epic adventures. It’s really the annoying in your face “yaaaas” internet stuff that is driving dudes away and a lot of those people also identify as progressives.
As I said in another comment here I liked Rey, I just thought the new series was flawed from a story, directing and editing perspective. Not Daisy’s fault because she is a great actor and did what she could with the character as written.
I suspect that "women have an easier time identifying with men than the reverse" is baked into biology to some degree. It's not all culture. Speaking from my limited directed experience, I only have a daughter, and she's never been adverse in the least to male main characters. In fact, I think she prefers it. But I think that would have been a turnoff for me at that age.
This is all, to some degree, just a question of where the money is. It's not like female main characters are a new invention - I just rewatched the Wizard of Oz for example. If people ever stopped females from buying move tickets, it was a long time ago. With all the choice out there, I'd guess that the supply of female main characters approximately matches demand. Consequently the most griping comes from specific fanbases, where there's not unlimited choice. There are a lot of star wars movies, but not a new one to match every possible taste or interest.
I also think, that although happily there are exceptions, men are just on average attracted to direct, bash-it-on-the-head violence, while women are, again on average, a little more drawn into heroes who wield power in more subtle ways. And so that's the way a lot of media plays out.
There is still a societal sentiment that boys/men aren't allowed to like feminine things. From my own limited experiences, I was not adverse to female main/side characters, even preferred them. But in turn I got shamed and criticized, the same shaming doesn't really exist the other way around.
I will say, there was some data that came out about League of Legends where female players would disproportionately play female characters whereas male players played both male and female characters equally that directly contradicts the "women have an easier time identifying with men than the reverse" angle.
It’s because you look at a League of Legends character from a rear view
Sure, I didn't mean to dispute that there are societal aspects. I just mean to point out that some of it may also be ingrained tendencies.
Are there a lot of men who refuse to engage with stories with female protagonists sight unseen? I do watch some of the "toxic" reviewers, like nerdrotic and critical drinker, and while I find them to be on a bit of a hair trigger, they do like and sometimes praise action movies with female leads. One example is Prey, a Predator movie from a couple of years ago. Their complaints are usually similar to your own - bad writing, plotting, and acting.
I mean, the answer to your question is most likely yes, given the metric ton of b*tching and griping about how "all the movies have female protagonists, The Feminists have ruined the movies!!!" one sees on social media.
Again, I am NOT NOT NOT trying to turn it into a war of the sexes, a "men = evil, women = good." And I'm certainly against performative wokery. But I have also learned that the performative wokery exists in reaction to *something,* and every time someone tells you reasonably, "The misogyny is not that bad," the reply is, yes, yes it is that bad. Go on the internet and see for yourself.
Now, I actually agree with you re: Critical Drinker. His politics are 180 degrees away from mine, but I have actually enjoyed some of his reviews! He doesn't hate things for the sake of hating things. He can be witty. He praised Blue Eye Samurai, a show with a female protagonist.
That's all I've got for today, go away now 😊
Of course they exist, but I think at least from what I can recall, it often turns out to be a very small number of people being very loud about it. One problem (for everyone) is that the relatively flat structure of social media can make things seem much bigger than they really are, i.e., the usual "twitter is not real life" refrain.
btw, glad to hear you like critical drinker! One of my female postdocs spontaneously mentioned his reviews to me recently (while she was mocking The Acolyte 😂), so I'm glad to see while he can be very...critical, he still attracts a more diverse audience than I might have guessed.
Imagine if Alien had been released 45 years ago and the movie studio was like "Check it out! The kickass lead in our kickass movie is FEMALE!" Or if the studio behind The Bodyguard 32 years ago had said "Check out our movie about the unlikely relationship between a pop star and her bodyguard that’s INTERRACIAL!" My point being: don’t bludgeon people over the head with it, just show it. They’re more open minded than you might think.
I don't really buy that there's some structural problem with running women candidates because so many other countries, from Germany to Pakistan, have elected women.
I would have thought that the international comparison makes me think it *is* a structural problem, because in most political structures, women have ascended to the top role, even with varying cultural associations, making it seem like the distinctive structures of the American political system might be more relevant. The fact that women leaders have been more common in parliamentary than presidential systems seems to confirm this.
Now one thing that points in the cultural direction is the fact that Canada and Australia have each only had one female prime minister, and both as brief placeholders, suggesting that something about the shared cultural features of Australia, Canada, and the USA is relevant, as well as the structural difference between the presidential and parliamentary systems, and whatever other structural features are present.
Translation: the core anti-democratic features of the American Constitution are also anti-woman because they exaggerate the influence of states with male-dominated voting patterns.
What is a state with a male-dominated voting pattern?
Every state with a legislature, which are still roughly 33% female and 66% male on average.
How can one exaggerate the electoral influence of every state simultaneously? Do you think starting baseball games at 10-10 instead of 0-0 would also generate some sort of unfairness, or did you mean something else?
I’m not quite sure I get this. Is the idea that by making federal politics dependent on state politics, it creates two separate filters, so that male dominance is imposed a second time at the second level?
They use party lists, so the party just puts women on the lists- no voter input is required. Also I think some of those countries now legally require X% of the candidates be female, so there's no option to opt out. I've even heard of developing countries that are traditionally seen as more misogynistic requiring that, so it's not just a European thing.
Anyways, that's quite different from individual candidates running in single member districts where only 1 candidate can win
I don’t think there is a “structural” problem, I think there is a specific issue with a specific candidate because of specific cultural headwinds we are dealing with on the American left. It’s unique to us and our time and place.
That is at best unprovable. Kamala Harris isn't any sort of uniquely threatening figure. She's just a woman who has been very successful in politics. Men have voted for her before and there's no reason to think that men who voted for Biden or Obama won't vote for her.
Polls would suggest they’re planning to vote for her at lower rates in swing states. I hope those polls are wrong.
Lower rates than Biden? I don't think so.
I want counting Biden in this cycle as he was a fatally flawed candidate in historically unique ways.
lower than biden in 2020
I think she would be farther ahead except for the misogyny. I feel like this also comes up for the MA senator. That isn’t a reason not to run and I think Harris can still win. All people have to do is vote for her.
Was that argument made?
In any case - the international data you're drawing from *would suggest* there may be a structural problem given that the majority of politicians and heads of state worldwide are still men.
I don't know what the reason is or if it's structural, but although the evidence very clearly shows it's possible for women to get elected, the lower % of female leaders suggests there could be additional headwinds.
It's hard to recruit women into politics. They need sponsors and donors and people who will advance their careers.
But when you actually get them into politics, voters vote for them.
I recall 538 doing a breakdown of this a number years back and that was essentially the conclusion they reached. Basically, female candidates don't run for office until they're more experienced/more qualified, so the quality of the female candidate is pretty high. But the voters don't seem to vote for them in any lower proportions, so the "penalty" that people are constantly saying females face just doesn't seem to exist at the actual ballot box.
Men are generally more open to risk taking and in many states running for major/statewide office is pretty risky.
"They need sponsors and donors and people who will advance their careers."
How is this particular to women?
I was thinking the same thing.
If I had to guess (and this truly is a guess...I'm very far indeed from an expert on this topic) a big part of the challenge for American women to advance in politics is the same one they face in most other sectors: it's hard to balance having children AND a career. If Harris wins, I don't think the fact that our first woman president will not have been a mother* is completely unrelated.
*Yes, I'm aware Harris has stepchildren. And by all accounts they adore her. Which is great. But she didn't have to take off nine years in her 30s. For better or worse, America at the end of the day ain't Finland.
"America at the end of the day ain't Finland"
Because we choose not to adopt a few basic policies that would make the core economic and career choice less weighted against professional women. We don't do it because we still have a politics dominated by self-satisfied, under-achieving and (based on this thread) weirdly fearful men.
I think there's a real problem with the mass internet freakout about "toxic masculinity" not being consistently followed by, "But here's what a non-toxic masculinity looks like", with pointing to, well, guys like Tim Walz, or for that matter Nick Offerman. It's possible to be a man who enjoys manly stuff -- hunting and fishing, woodcrafting, football, whatever -- while also being kind, helpful, and even publicly emotional about the stuff you care about.
I think the Walz pick and the way they talked about him at the convention _is_ aimed at addressing this shortcoming on the left, but Casey is 100% correct above that if they want this message to get through, they need to take it to where the intended audience is listening. Send Walz on dudebro podcasts, have him talk with fitness YouTubers, etc. Have Kamala do that stuff too and talk about whatever is the dudeliest thing Doug does and how she appreciates him for it. And about how he's a good dad, and they have a functional blended family where she gets along well with his ex.
The reason I like Antman is because he is Dadman.
If I were in your position, I would tell these younger dudes that real men work hard because hard work is good, and they do the right thing because it is right, and feel ashamed when they do not, and that is the end of it. I would tell them that real men do not care if they are the center of attention, they do not need to be celebrated, and they do not demand to be pandered to. They should stop blaming their dissatisfaction on video game promotional materials and more time knowing themselves.
Sure, I give them good advice. However I’m a PMC with a house in the suburbs and an attractive wife.
“Easy for you to say bro” is the general vibe I get.
I’ll do my part but some of it is just going to take time and better liberal leadership than we had in the recent past.
"You should care about / feel differently then you actually feel" is often not effective. But apart from that, it shouldn't really change anything about who they are voting for, if they feel like liberals are responsible for the vibe. I'm all for focusing on what you can control and avoiding focusing on exterior factors that you can control, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay any attention to those exterior factors at all.
Granted, but this need not be, should never have been, partisan.
It seems like you disagree with the fundamental premise of the article, that the political divide between genders is not actually about gender issues specifically. That the reason more men are Republicans is not because they're mad the Democrats are making them ashamed of being men, but that they don't think Democrats are willing enough to kill bad guys.
Little bit of column A, little bit of column B
Well I take the point of Matt's article being that it's much easier to address column B than column A (especially with only weeks to go), so if it's even a little of column B then Harris should go for that.
She can't do much to reverse decades of cultural shifts, but she could definitely talk more about how she's going to make sure the US has the deadliest military in the world.
You’re not wrong but how does a female politician address this directly without being cringe af?
Cringe is dead, you just dive in. Playing it safe is a losing hand with the stakes this high and the race so close. Do Theo Von, do lex, do some barstoolish stuff. Go to a gun range and stream it.
I would love to see Kamala making holes on targets, good point.
Harris should come out strongly in favor of internet forum commenting, particularly Substack. She would kill it.
Just don't endorse the WaPo comment section. How that ended up a cesspool I'll never know, but it did.
Or NYT 😵💫
I would pedantically defend forum culture as being very different from [blog -> comment] culture, which is what Substack is.
She has explicitly said ``first rule: don't look at the comments'' in one of the interviews. How is that for an anti-endorsement?
Off topic but my wife and I were talking about how the rules have shifted: whereas before you never looked at the comments because they were awful, now you read one paragraph and then look at the comments to see if anyone is cogently debunking the whole thing.
I think it has always mattered whether you are talking about something like a newspaper that has enabled comments because they thought it sounded like a good idea, or something like Reddit where the comments are basically the core functionality. It’s just that more and more of the internet is now the latter rather than the former.
also the forums many of the denizens here populate (including this one) are probably not representative of the internet at large. My city has a great hyper-local urban development forum (with a Jurassic interface ofc) that I kill a lot of time on, but that's a very very niche pursuit, and one that I'd guess is 95% male.
There was a great example of that just yesterday on the Your Local Epidemiologist substack. First comment was a really smart, thoughtful critique of the author's argument.
One thing that has happened that reinforces gender polarization is how in many elite institutions (that are predominantly controlled by Democrats or people with strong political affinity for that side of politics) treat men and boys as the problem.
The issue of workplace skills mismatch and deindustrialization? - that is a personal failure
The issue of real wages going down for decades for those not going to college (predominantly male) - a personal failure
Male sexuality - problematic (even though there are lots of horrible aspects and behaviors)
Boys falling behind in schools - it’s due to their behavioral issues
Boys and men are blamed for having bad behaviors and are told they are responsible for the bad structural things they happened to them. We are then socialized to bottle these things up.
According to extensive research I've conducted, Men make up 42% of college enrollees (see: the Pew article that was the first result when I googled the issue). Whenever we see those kinds of gender gaps in other arenas it is viewed as clear evidence of gender bias in the selection criteria, training programs that allow one to enter the arena, or some other harmful gender based element. But with college enrollment, its viewed as young men being lazier or not driven enough or not ambitious enough or generally not being up to snuff. Which may be true! But it's the only area I can think of with nearly a 20 point gender gap in an incredibly important field (college still has pretty outsized influence on long term success in our society) where we blame the people who aren't successful enough rather than looking to structural reasons for the gap and then trying to address those reasons.
I don’t see it as blame, to think of young men as being less likely to have the ambition or drive to go to college. It is somehow part of the structural explanation, but it’s unclear whether there is some structural thing upstream that causes that difference in motivations, or something structural issue that makes college too connected to this kind of personality trait.
Maybe blame is or isn't the right word, but certainly the contrast with how women-in-STEM is talked about is pretty stark.
When women are underrepresented in STEM fields I don't see anyone saying "those subjects are very difficult and women just lack the ambition or drive to do well in them". Anyone that did make that argument would be castigated.
And I'm not sure how it's not "blame"- it's literally saying something about the men themselves is the reason they're not pursuing college. I see very few people (some, but not many) looking to solve the structural problems that are causing the differences in motivation. More people are just saying men are not doing their part to work harder and be more successful. It's a common complaint from the women who are trying to find decent men to date- they're saying these young men are losers and unmotivated. They're not saying "these young men are being left behind and forgotten, and that's why they're not more successful."
I’m not sure where you’re looking if you don’t see anyone saying that there are differences in the kinds of interests women and men have that lead women to go into fields other than science. (There’s some of it in this comment section.) You’re right that there’s usually pushback, but there’s also usually pushback (again, including in this comment section) on the idea that men aren’t going to college because of lack of ambition.
Also, there’s a real difference between “this is something you are doing that is counterproductive for your success” and “you are blameworthy for this thing you are doing that is counterproductive for your success”. Mere attribution of causal responsibility is not the same as a moral judgment (though many people slip quickly between them).
A decade or two ago, lots of academic fields went through a period of soul-searching about whether a combative style of argument was pushing away women (ie, exactly the sort of explanation that depends on an intrinsic difference between men and women to explain) and there was some self-conscious change in style of interaction in the fields, that most people think has been good regardless of whether or not it is relevant for gendered differences. But this is all compatible with not *blaming* women for not liking combative interactions.
There’s a version of the story about young men in college where the issue is that men are less likely to have the kind of ambition that gets you to sit still in a chair for hours at a time, and that therefore we should change the structure of schooling to be more open to different styles of ambition, that might be similarly worthwhile regardless of whether or not it is an important explanation of the gender gap.
There may be a disconnect where you're talking about "desire to do STEM vs. some other useful thing" and you're right that lots of people say that makes women go into other fields than science.
But Testing123 is not saying "don't blame this on a lack of interest", Testing is saying "don't start saying this is a lack of ambition and drive"
I can see where you two might be reading this very differently from each other.
As A.D. pointed out, there's a big difference between "they want to do something else" and "they're incapable of doing X" or "they're too lazy to do X". People aren't looking at the male drop off in college enrollment numbers and saying "ehh, men just want to be successful doing other things."
"Also, there’s a real difference between “this is something you are doing that is counterproductive for your success” and “you are blameworthy for this thing you are doing that is counterproductive for your success”. Mere attribution of causal responsibility is not the same as a moral judgment (though many people slip quickly between them)."
Is there? I fail to see the difference in this instance. The "something that you are doing" in this instance that men are accused of is being lazy and lacking ambition to achieve, and that's why they're not working hard enough to be academically successful. The attribution of causal responsibility in this discussion is absolutely a moral judgment of inherent failing.
If I said "Kenny Easwaran posts bad comments on Slow Boring, and that's because he is too lazy to research what he's talking about" would you think I was just making a causal statement about my claim that your comments are bad (to be clear- you post good comments! Always enjoy reading your stuff :). Just using this as an example of how it comes across when we say people are too lazy to be doing better)? If the commentary was more "men are lacking the social supports necessary to do well academically" (which, I agree, SOME people do make) then it would be an attempt to ascribe causality to the issue and work towards solutions. But if the issue is laziness and lack of ambition then the solution is laid at the feet of the lazy unambitious person- get off your ass and work harder. It's absolutely a moral assignment of blame for failure.
I think the surprise is, what ISN'T said is "how are universities failing young men by not being more welcoming to them" the way it is said about women in STEM fields.
If people are really saying “young men are too lazy”, then yes, that is victim blaming. I didn’t think that’s the point that is coming up in serious discussion. (I’m thinking more of things like Richard Reeves in Of Boys and Men than of things like JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, where laziness may be the claim.)
I thought the serious discussion on this issue was about the different kinds of success teenage boys and girls are motivated by, and the fact that schooling is set up in ways that are more compatible with the things girls like (sitting still and paying attention rather than running around, or whatever). I also think this discourse has its own problems, but that’s what I took to be the focus, not the worst kind of discourse here.
Richard Reeves' book, Of Boys and Men, is about exactly this.
His research suggests that policies have an enormous effect, and that many well-intentioned incentives for boys/men fail and only reward girls/women. He is scrupulous in explaining that the success of women in such a short period of time is excellent and called for--and he argues that more attention should be spent on figuring out how to motivate and support boys/men without making it a zero-sum conflict.
I think that everything you've said here is true, and the reason this hasn't been addressed yet re: male enrollment in college is because the change happened SO swiftly, and was originally addressing the opposite situation.
Pushes to get women into college started and succeeded wildly over the course of a short 30 years, and men have just started lagging in the last 10. Everybody is still so caught up with empowering women and girls, and can't believe that it's been so successful maybe we need to pivot to boys and men so soon.
I agree with you, but I’d prefer we just came up with a set of standards that work and make sense and stopped trying to catch up to this empowerment see saw
An excellent point- thanks for highlighting!
You want me to do even MORE extensive research?! I'm still worn out from this morning's google search.
All kidding aside, I think that's absolutely a component of it. My expectation is that more men enroll in trade schools than women do.
But that still gets us to the societal response to the dip in male enrollment, which doesn't say "men are ambitiously seeking out trade school opportunities that better align with their desires than 4 year colleges/unis do", and instead the explanation is frequently "men would rather play video games and live in basements than get educated and attain wealth and status".
ETA: Just realized I don't think I was addressing your question directly. The stats I'm citing are for 4 year colleges/universities, so the trade schools wouldn't be included.
I think the male coded position on those questions is that they’re all basically correct. People need to take responsibility for their own problems. I think a reasonable, male coded complaint is that this is applied *only* (but properly) to men.
The answer seems to obviously be in some cases people need to take more responsibility for their own lives but the government should help when there are clear significant patterns that are socially destructive. Whether real or imagined at a policy level, at a rhetorical level which half of that sentence each party uses seems almost entirely dependent on demographics
One thing I have come to think is that what it means to be a man is simply “taking responsibility for problems that aren’t necessarily your fault.” It’s duty. It’s obligation. These values seem devalued in modern popular culture.
This is why I find Trump, his deflection, and finger pointing so immature and so unbecoming of what it means to be a man.
Maybe this is a better description of what it means to be an adult, but I don’t want to project such expectations on women when they have so many unique burdens themselves.
I largely agree with you about what it means to be a man and I think it's a real shame that's not what most people in modern popular culture feel, but kind of to my point, Democrats are going to have a hard time making this case when they systematically suggest criminals ought not be held responsible for things that _are_ their fault or that abortion is a fine way to avoid becoming a father (a comment of Milan's on this thread that you threw a like at)
That Trump personally is an utter failure at taking responsibility for any of the many evils he does is obvious, and the Republican party seems to be limited in their conception of personal obligations to "I can't literally do crime or kill others," but even that to my eye puts them closer to my view of male duty/obligation to my eye than Democrats who seem to have anathematized the very idea of personal responsibility (except for a small group of rich folks on whom they, to a significant extent I'd say rightly, try to place the duty of paying to fix every social ill)
I liked Milan’s point because it is an apt description of many young men’s perspectives.
𝖸̶𝖾̶𝖺̶𝗁̶ ̶𝗌̶𝗈̶𝗋̶𝗋̶𝗒̶.̶ ̶ ̶𝖩̶𝗎̶𝗌̶𝗍̶ ̶𝗇̶𝗈̶𝗍̶𝗂̶𝖼̶𝖾̶𝖽̶ ̶𝗂̶𝗇̶ ̶𝗉̶𝖺̶𝗌̶𝗌̶𝗂̶𝗇̶𝗀̶ ̶𝗒̶𝗈̶𝗎̶ ̶𝗁̶𝖺̶𝖽̶ ̶𝗅̶𝗂̶𝗄̶𝖾̶𝖽̶ ̶𝗂̶𝗍̶ ̶𝖻̶𝖾̶𝖼̶𝖺̶𝗎̶𝗌̶𝖾̶ ̶𝗂̶𝗍̶ ̶𝗅̶𝗈̶𝗈̶𝗄̶𝖾̶𝖽̶ ̶𝗅̶𝗂̶𝗄̶𝖾̶ ̶𝗒̶𝗈̶𝗎̶ ̶𝗆̶𝗂̶𝗀̶𝗁̶𝗍̶ ̶𝗁̶𝖺̶𝗏̶𝖾̶ ̶𝗒̶𝗈̶𝗎̶𝗋̶ ̶𝗈̶𝗐̶𝗇̶ ̶𝖻̶𝗅̶𝗈̶𝗀̶ ̶𝖨̶ ̶𝗐̶𝖺̶𝗌̶ ̶𝖼̶𝗎̶𝗋̶𝗂̶𝗈̶𝗎̶𝗌̶ ̶𝗍̶𝗈̶ ̶𝗅̶𝗈̶𝗈̶𝗄̶ ̶𝖺̶𝗍̶.̶ ̶ ̶𝖨̶ ̶𝖺̶𝗀̶𝗋̶𝖾̶𝖾̶ ̶𝗍̶𝗁̶𝖺̶𝗍̶'̶𝗌̶ ̶𝗁̶𝗈̶𝗐̶ ̶𝖺̶ ̶𝗅̶𝗈̶𝗍̶ ̶𝗈̶𝖿̶ ̶𝗒̶𝗈̶𝗎̶𝗇̶𝗀̶ ̶𝗆̶𝖾̶𝗇̶ ̶𝗌̶𝖾̶𝖾̶ ̶𝗂̶𝗍̶ ̶𝖺̶𝗇̶𝖽̶ ̶𝖨̶ ̶𝖿̶𝗂̶𝗇̶𝖽̶ ̶𝗍̶𝗁̶𝖺̶𝗍̶ ̶𝗋̶𝖾̶𝖺̶𝗅̶𝗅̶𝗒̶ ̶𝗌̶𝖺̶𝖽̶/̶𝗎̶𝗇̶𝖿̶𝗈̶𝗋̶𝗍̶𝗎̶𝗇̶𝖺̶𝗍̶𝖾̶.̶ ̶
Edit to be clearer:
I've seen Milan say that he himself believes that, which I frankly see as pretty gross, and was the context in which I was seeing your like of it (which I didn't go hunting for but noticed when looking if you had a blog). My apologies for misreading that
The central insight of adults dealing with stuff that is "not their fault" is that "fault" is not a useful construct for a huge number of situations you confront, whether by virtue of the unassailable logic of determinism or the futility of fighting the iron clad arrow of time. "Dealing with it" is the core virtue and the essential skill -- minimizing the downside and maximizing the outcome.
So you want to give a man total control over a woman’s body because he finds both condoms and personal responsibility for his choices inconvenient?
Yikes.
Agree with the sentiment, but I think a lot of women would tell you that large parts of their lives are dominated by assuming responsibility for problems that are not necessarily their (or anybody's) fault. I think of this as the core realization of adulthood, rather than a specifically male thing.
Hence why I suggested at the end why it might just be what defines adulthood.
What irks me is how so many men want to shirk responsibility, duty, and their obligations. Trump is emblematic of this moral defect.
I guess I think men should take a greater share of responsibility for fixing problems they didn’t cause because they don’t have the biological burdens of childbirth.
Missed that - sorry. Agree about Trump as the extreme case, but also about a certain male character type that tends to coast on a cushion of "male privilege" (widespread social acceptance of cloddish behavior, no expectation to equally share burdens of child-rearing, housework, parental care, etc.), secure in the belief that women will always be there to pick up the slack.
It's also become problematic for men to have spaces that are geared towards men.
The cycle is thus:
Men have a space
You must let women in.
You must change the rules to accommodate what the women want.
You must ban anyone who doesn't follow the new rules.
"If you don't like the rules, go make your own space!"
Repeat.
This creates an endless cycle where men are informed that they are the problem.
Identical to trans women’s inclusion in women’s spaces. Many men have pointed it out, and many a woman is now contemplating it.
The pattern is obvious and it's a pattern of behavior that is like tailor-made poison for progressive organizations who are naturally credulous about claims of identity-based rights.
To be a little more nuanced, I do think that original claims from second wave feminists about literal men's clubs being the locus of power and access to power were correct and true, and integrating those centers of power was the right move.
But there is an obvious situation happening now where men aren't allowed to have men-only spaces, and they snarkily, sometimes cruelly, but ultimately correctly point out that feminists and women complaining about trans women invading women's spaces is exactly the same.
"It's also become problematic for men to have spaces that are geared towards men."
I'm a woman, as noted elsewhere in the thread, and I practice karate. The dojo is predominantly male, and there have been multiple cases where I'm the only woman at a practice.
Is this space "geared towards men"? Certainly it is de facto, although not de jure. Nobody is stopping women from joining; women just tend to be less interested in an activity that involves the risk of being punched in the face. AFAIK our dojo leader hasn't made any specific efforts to recruit more women, but when a woman does show up and wants to practice, he treats her with respect, as he does me.
Is our dojo a "problematic" space? Not as far as I can tell. There's no Feminist Police descending on our dojo saying, "Your membership is only 16% female! Shame on you!!!"
One very, very important point: we are a very traditional style of Japanese karate, and part of our code of ethics is "stay away from social media." There are some exceptions, like training videos on YouTube, but you simply DO NOT take a selfie at practice and post it on social media with a "Watch me #slay at practice! #madskillz!!!" It just simply isn't done, and it keeps the internet outrage brigade from finding us and yelling at us.
Am I somehow spoiling this traditionally male space by existing in it while female? Are my male instructor and colleagues secretly rolling their eyes and thinking, "Man, I wish drosophilist wasn't here, then we'd all be free to hold belching contests and tell d*ck jokes"? I would like to think not.
I understand this is n = 1, a somewhat niche example, but we have lots of men at the dojo who are just really good people - honest, disciplined, strong without being macho bullies - and I don't think anyone is making them feel like "they are the problem."
*I* don't think that your dojo is a problematic space, but there's absolutely an informal "Feminist Police" mode of thought out there that does exactly that sort of thing. As the parent of two sons born in the early 2010s, I can tell you this is a very common theme in children's media produced in the last decade or so -- (1) there's a depiction of some group involving the main character(s) that is exclusively or overwhelmingly male, (2) the main character(s) are confronted with this fact and asked what are they going to do about it, (3) the main character(s) bewail the fact that they do not have more girls/women in their group and set out to make efforts to actively recruit girls/women, and (4) there is usually no dissension or pushback to #2 or, if a character does question it, the story communicates very clearly that character is BAD for having expressed doubt about why the group needs to make a special effort to recruit girls/women.
I think it's very important to disambiguate between two very different possibilities:
1. My group is overwhelmingly male because we're a bunch of sexist a-holes who make women feel bad and drive them away. This is bad! Solution: stop being a sexist a-hole.
2. My group is overwhelmingly male because we're centered around an interest that just happens to appeal to men much more so than women: martial arts, computer science, welding, the "ratsphere." This isn't necessarily bad, and there's nothing to be done. And if you think this is bad, then you should think book clubs and knitting and quilting circles and personal advice column readership should work hard to recruit more men, to be logically consistent!
Scott Alexander had an interesting column on this on Slate Star Codex.
No, but you haven't insisted on any changes. Good for you, in the most honest sense!
On the other hand, I watched a HEMA group fall into this exact pit, complete with a paragraph in the new CoC about 'no social media posts promoting fascism, sexism, transphobia, racism, or ableism. Our safe space extends outside the training room!'
Hell, *I* wouldn't want to hang out with people whose social media posts promote fascism or racism or sexism, so I can't really blame that HEMA group. Maybe it's just as well that I have never looked at the dojo members' social media posts. Ignorance is bliss?
Of course, if that HEMA group defines "transphobia" as "we don't have women fight biologically male participants, even those who identify as transwomen/nonbinary" and "ableism" as "you must be physically capable of wielding a sword/bow/spear to participate," then yeah, I see the problem.
Again, it's a variation on what I said in my comment above: is the code of conduct an expression of excessive wokeness that looks for microaggressions behind every tree, or is it an anodyne "let's all be nice to each other" statement against a-holery?
That's all well and good until supporting some local politician or having a fairly anodyne political belief (“I think we should support Israel” / “I think we need to address illegal immigration”) becomes “promoting x”.
The problem with the CoC was that there was never a need for it (there wasn't one at all) until certain people joined, and then they insisted on having one for ‘their protection’. Then it was obvious that they intended on deploying it against people with political views they didn't like. This is how the cycle goes, as I outlined it in my OP
Good point.
On one hand good point, on the other, based on the terminology used you can probably guess which of the two it was as long as the reporting is accurate.
I’d add onto srynerson’s statement with my prediction: you’d only have a “war of the sexes” type issue at your dojo if there were to be an attempt to change the rules of communication-style.
The rules of communication at the dojo are simple. The teacher gives orders, we follow orders. When the teacher says "Any questions?" you're allowed to ask questions about a given technique and stuff. And you can always interrupt for urgent things like "I got a blister on my foot, I'm bleeding on the floor, please excuse me while I get a Band-Aid and wipe up" (true story, happened to me a few practices ago).
Yes, it's very authoritarian in its way, but it works because we all respect our teacher and we're there by choice. If you don't like it, the door is over there, bye.
Wait, is this a round about way of mocking gamerz ™?
(I get your point though.)
I used to be a gamers, so the joke would be on me. And it's exactly what happened to Reddit, modulo ‘women’ → ‘marginalized people or what have you’.
I’m a woman and cannot understand in any way women’s opposition to nuclear power. 28% *strongly oppose*? Where is that level of antagonism coming from?
I'm also a woman who supports nuclear power. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I’d guess it’s tied in with whatever is causing the general divergence on “risky” technology. Men are also relatively more supportive of pesticides, use of genetically modified foods, genetically modifying people, use of animals in lab testing, and human space exploration.
Even just within energy, men like nuclear, yes, but they also like fracking and offshore drilling.
Is that a like of "risky" technologies or "technology" in general? There's the classic "men like things, women like people" split, and technology is very much about "things".
But I agree it's probably tied to the general divergence on tech.
Hard to say, men are also more in favor of AI in general and driverless cars specifically, and men are more in favor of lab grown meat, but all of that could be construed as risky I think.
If you look at social media, which generally isn't viewed as risky, women got into it more quickly and I think are still the heavier users. And I'd be surprised if there was a gender gap in views of Apple, Amazon, etc.
Social media is the most "people" of all those technologies as well.
Vibes: "it sounds / feels risky". Understanding details like the 1 in X thousand cancer risk caused by living near a coal plant is just well beyond the capabilities of most voters.
So I'm guessing a lot of the gender divergence in support is a vibe thing among uninformed voters. Among people with a firmer understanding of the pros and cons maybe the gender gap is closer.
I think the explanations above are all good, but I also think there is a bit of a "fruit of the poisonous tree" kind of thing going on. Nuclear power was invented by men for the purpose of committing violence, and so its fruits are tainted and inherently suspicious.
Many people are saying that nuclear power is made by and for the patriarchy. It is known. :)
You might think you were kidding, but . . . https://inkstickmedia.com/breaking-the-mold-of-nuclear-patriarchy/
This is a funny comment but I guess I should note that I don't really see this as a specifically feminist perspective. That is, I think even completely apolitical women are likelier than men to feel distaste and dread about physical violence, war, etc. I don't think it's at all a self-consciously anti-male thing.
I disagree with the mechanisms others here are suggesting. I think women tend to be far more concerned with "safe environments" in the context of the literal environment while men tend to see safe environments in a more adversarial way. With all the caveats of averages and overlapping distributions that Matt started his piece with, if you go more insane you can see this more clearly. 5G tower conspiracy theories seem to be a primarily female phenomenon where the idea of some ambient force is knocking off the balance of the environment. Men get much more sucked in by QAnon sort of stuff where there are very particular people doing very particular evil. If you go more normal, guys are more likely imagine people breaking into their houses and think owning a gun is important for their safety, and women are more likely imagine their house being slowly but surely flooded with radiation that makes their kids sick.
But ofc I have no idea and am just guessing
1) Radiation poisoning affects fertility and birth in pronounced ways.
2) Ionizing Radiation is a novel and not widely understood threat vs more mundane threats like car exhaust. Are brains are wired to focus on novel threats.
3) Probably, this might be a stretch, the link to cancer and all the focus on breast cancer research and awareness has made women more sensitive than men (men I assume are less receptive to messaging on breast cancer.)
I think part of opposition to nuclear power has always been opposition to nuclear weapons. Some people just blur them together, but also they have been connected very closely (though they are much less so now, but lots of people haven't updated on that).
Women are more hostile to the military and weapons so that could be a contributing factor to them being hostile to nuclear power.
"The '70s" is my default answer.
None of these explanations seem very convincing. The opposition to nuclear power appears to be stronger among women than the demand for stricter gun control. I’m in the minority in that I like both guns and nuclear power, but surely the “danger vibes” and the actual danger from guns are greater than from a power plant. I wish an anti-nuke woman would weigh in here.
My guess is that this is a “men like technology” thing, just as more men than women like fast cars, computer games, riding mowers, leaf blowers, airplanes, space ships, sci fi, etc.
Why is this? Idk, maybe it’s related to testosterone, hah!
Not sure. There are some good arguments against more / too much nuclear energy, but "risk" is not one of them.
First, I think MY is right in that there are plenty of dude-coded positions that are consistent with existing or not that far removed from existing D stances. There's no need to re-invent the wheel, and it's really only through the teens that I think this slipped.
Where a lot of this may be coming from I think is education, on two particular fronts. One is that the divergence may be downstream of education polarization. Don't tell anyone on Twitter, but women are quickly becoming the more educated sex and the gap is even bigger when you focus in on, say, black men versus black women.
The other place where I see an issue is public schools. Conservatives worry about wokeness run amok, partisan indoctrination, etc. But who is to say the reaction to left activist ideas won't be the opposite? What if people come to see it as part of the older generations' silly, neurotic obsessions, kind of like how us in the Millenial and GenX generations look back on DARE? I think there is a better chance something like that happens, especially with young men, and that the experience serves to create skepticism about left of center politics generally as they enter adulthood.
You read any of Richard Reeves’ stuff?
A little bit, yes. I'm not really into the idea of expressly male lobbying, not that what I've read of him leans too hard into that. But he has influenced some of my thinking on my most important social function, that being raising my two sons into something resembling successful adults.
I read Of Boys and Men twice, bought 11 copies to give to parent and educator friends, and have met him in person, and listened to probably 6 or 7 interviews with him about that book.
The last thing I’d describe him as is someone expressly lobbying for boys or men.
He goes out of his way in his book and in every interview I’ve heard to laud the gains of feminism, and repeatedly assert that this should not be viewed as a reason to *cut back* on women’s programs or progress—just a gentle prod to give attention to boys and men at the same time.
He details policy ideas as well, noting that some policies meant to be sex neutral end up working only for girls and women, but others have succeeded in encouraging boys and men—because the data show that boys and men respond differently.
To clarify I've never read him as being anti-women or anti feminism at all. I've also found little to disagree with on the occasions I've come across articles on his substack. I think there are a bunch of aspects to the way we approach education and socialization that don't work as well for boys and that we ought to be adaptable both because it's the right thing to do and for our own benefit.
That said, where I do have some discomfort is with a path that leads to the interest group-ification of men. I've never read him as calling for that either, but I worry that may be what people are hearing. Bigger picture I think we'll be better off with fewer people internalizing the idea that they've been failed by various structures or society or the system or what have you.
As Bo said I think a big part of it is that the culture of the Democratic Party is not nearly as open to “traditional masculinity” as the culture of the GOP.
Minor example: remember how much of a thing Brat was for Democrats online over the summer? Remember how basically no Democrats on line got invested in the Kendrick/Drake beef? Think about who listens to each artist.
Another minor test: what elected Democrat would young men be interested in doing a workout with?
Why do you think the weightlifting space is so conservative... well at least the male weightlifting side.
My theory is weightlifting is one of those endeavors where it takes sacrifice, hard work to succeed, and the results are directly proportional to the effort. (leaving out steroids). This is basically root conservatism at its core...
As an aside.... I would like to see a survey on peoples view on TRT (testosterone replacement therapy) by gender and political party. When I first went on TRT... after being medically diagnosed even... it was surprising how many people frowned upon it, questioned it... and they were universally on the left.
Totally agree with your theory on weightlifting. It’s the key example of hard work leading to results.
Seems totally wrong. Distance running shares literally all of these traits except it's harder to cheat via steroids
Extreme distance running is actually one of the few physical feats where women outperform men, interestingly enough.
Nevertheless, I’d argue that weight lifting and running engage different parts of both the brain and body, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see studies saying that the former boosts T more than the latter.
There's also a clear missing variable. Few women pursue weightlifting because in current aesthetic conventions, feminine beauty requires being lithe or at most "toned" rather than muscular. Weightlifting is thus an overwhelmingly male pursuit (versus e.g. distance running) that draws people attracted to highly masculine spaces.
It’s a transparent euphemism for ‘guys who lift weights tend to do so because they want to be physically strong and get tons of pussy’
My weekly running group struggles to get women to join us, we used to have some consistent ones, but it’s pretty much all dudes
I’d be willing to take it a step further and query whether weight lifting nudges individuals of both sexes toward the center/conservatism.
“ the results are directly proportional to the effort”
My understanding is that’s laughably inaccurate. Results form a bell curve like distribution. On the left some people are exercise non-responders even in a clinical setting. They lift and gain no muscle mass (IIRC some actually lose muscle mass). On the right you have people who get great, almost steroid like, results with comparatively little effort.
You are incorrect. There is no such thing as a non-responder. It is true that there is variability in response... but given protein intake, and lifting to failure... there will be hypertrophy (muscle growth)... and in fact, new weightlifters will always show newbie gains. Its just people tend to not know how to lift or fail to adequately fuel their bodies.
I think you underweight how important protein consumption and proper practice are.
As a hairstylist, I had to remind myself constantly that many clients—as high as 40%—did not actually know how to use shampoo and conditioner properly. Blew my mind, but also explained their negative reviews of products.
Great example! "There's no way you could be getting that basic thing wrong" is usually false
But it isn’t really “proportional” to effort. Lifting more frequently or heavily than a certain (not very intense) amount, increases one’s gains far less than focusing on diet and sleep.
“ There is no such thing as a non-responder.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/well/move/is-your-workout-not-working-maybe-youre-a-non-responder.html
What are the citations on that article, for those who can't access it?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11427769/
“ The studies showed that, on aggregate, endurance training increased people’s endurance. But when the researchers examined individual outcomes, the variations were staggering. Some people had improved their endurance by as much as 100 percent, while others had actually become less fit, even though they were following the same workout routine.
Age, sex and ethnicity had not mattered, the researchers noted. Young people and old had been outliers, as had women and men, black volunteers and white. Interestingly, nonresponse to endurance training ran in families, the researchers discovered, suggesting that genetics probably plays a significant role in how people’s bodies react to exercise.
Since then, other researchers have found that people can have extremely erratic reactions to weight training regimens, with some packing on power and mass and others losing both.
And a study published last year concentrating on brief bouts of intense interval training concluded that some people barely gained endurance with this type of workout, while others flourished, greatly augmenting their fitness.”
"On the right you have people who get great, almost steroid like, results with comparatively little effort."
I think the spoiler here is that those steroid-like results are because those people are, in fact, on steroids. It is way more wide spread in use than most people (i.e. most people who don't spend much time in gyms) think.
The other factor is that the "results" that most people think of (6-packs, well defined muscle lines, "being cut", etc) here don't come from the gym, they come from the kitchen. If you are on a bad diet, but lifting 3-4 times a week, you will get stronger, feel better, etc, but you won't really look much different.
The normal range for serum testosterone is 300-1000 nanograms per deciliter. Someone at the high end of normal or even naturally high is going to do dramatically better than someone at the low end of normal or just naturally somewhat lower than normal.
I think you’re misunderstanding what “directly proportional” means here. Maybe better phrased as “MY results are directly proportional to MY effort.”
That doesn’t mean that if I work harder than you I’ll see better results than you. But it does mean that if I work harder this year than I did last year, I’ll see better results.
“ But it does mean that if I work harder this year than I did last year, I’ll see better results.”
No.
“ Since then, other researchers have found that people can have extremely erratic reactions to weight training regimens, with some packing on power and mass and others losing both.”
I’d love to see the paper that says strength training with even passably competent programming can reliably cause detraining.
The paper you linked above about endurance training basically says that individuals have individual responses to standardized training regimes… something which most practitioners already know. Adaptation requires progressive overload, and overload is defined from your personal baseline.
Reliably cause detaining in 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 individuals keep in mind. And at the other extreme people age making near miraculous progress.
It’s not really a fat-tailed distribution though.
I think the character traits list you have there is all present in endurance athletes and that seems like a much more liberal group.
I lift a decent amount too and something just feels very different about the kind of person who really gets deep into these events on average but it’s not that people running for 3 hours before dawn don’t believe in sacrifice.
That last question is… odd. Many/most elected officials are old(er) and not in great physical shape, and that’s ok. You elect them to govern, not to have a workout or a beer with.
Maybe AOC would be up to going for a run or a long bike ride?
I would like to push back on this a bit. It is not in fact ok that most elected officials are old. Gerontocracy is not a good thing.
If you want politicians to have serious experience in anything other than politics, then they're not going into politics much before 40 and they won't get to the top level much before 50, so most politicians are going to be old enough that physical fitness has dropped a lot since their youths.
I don't have a problem with most senior politicians being 50-70, I do have a problem with having Pelosi *and* McConnell *and* Schumer *and* Biden *and* Trump all being at the top at once. Harris and Jeffries and Johnson are more of the age I expect senior politicians to be.
Don't get me wrong, an occasional very young of very old politician is a good thing. Having an AOC (actually she's not that young any more, so maybe a Max Frost) and a Biden around just to ensure that different perspectives are included is good. But the majority of electeds should be 40-70 and the most leaders in their 50s or 60s.
I agree with this completely. This is my concern that things have gotten too skewed to the upper end. Harris really isn't a senior politician. She is only just over the median age in the house and well below the median in the senate. I'd be fine with 50-70 as you've laid out, but our current distribution is more like 60-80.
It'd take a constitutional amendment at the federal level, but I'd like a rule saying that no-one can be elected to a term that will extend beyond their 80th birthday.
I would like to push back on that a bit. I think, “Village Elders” have been running the show (in villages) since before recoded history. I seems likely that this is a feature, not a bug and, in fact, mature wisdom beats the hot headed-ness of youth when it comes to governmental decisions.
>Another minor test: what elected Democrat would young men be interested in doing a workout with?<
Is Martin O'Malley still in politics?
I remember those biceps running for president.
Maryland governor's are apparently roped up (let's conveniently ignore Larry).
Kamala should call up Halle Barry and John Wick and go cut an ad:
https://youtu.be/Xii9_oWQ7HY?si=udnjrkQ6vSuOYda2
AOC.
Didn’t Kamala say: “they not like us”?
Yeah, I saw the video with Taraji P. Henson. Not one of Kamala’s best moments, came off really staged.
More interested in Wes Moore’s, he’s huge
https://www.washingtonian.com/2024/08/02/maryland-governor-wes-moore-suits-up-with-maryland-football-wait-what/
Saw a video of Jamaal Bowman benching 405 for multiple reps
That was from the SocDem's now discontinued "Progressive Overload for Gaza" training program...
>"America’s public elementary schools are probably the place most infused with progressive sensibilities..."
It's funny that Matt states this without any doubt or qualification, and yet progressives always say conservatives are lying when conservatives make the same statement. There is a lot to dislike about Chris Rufo, but on the above statement he and Matt are in agreement.
This is just a general phenomenon where conservatives lie so much that the default progressive response is "that's a lie" when in reality they mean "you're correct and i just disagree that X is bad"
see also the idea that elites disrespect the opinions of the masses on immigration and are deliberately trying to maintain higher immigration levels than normal people want. this is an extremely conservative coded statement, and most progs would say it's a lie.
of course, it's true AND it's also true that the 'masses' are morons and i don't really care what they think except insofar as they have to be placated for electoral reasons
Are you sure that conservatives lie more than progressives? Could it be that they're correct, and you just disagree that X is bad?
Yes, completely certain. They lie incessantly, without hesitation. They do not care about truth, or reality, or facts. By happenstance, they occasionally care about a thing that is actually happening, but just as often they are content to make something up entirely.
This is not the sort of thing that anyone who doesn't already believe it can be convinced of, unfortunately. But consider something like e.g. the recent blowup over Haitians eating pets in Springfield. Never happened. JD Vance admitted he was lying about it to put media attention on immigrant communities.
Or, of course, the biggest lie of the recent pack: the fact that most GOP electeds will tell you the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
I used to feel this way, circa 2020. It seemed so obviously one-sided.
I no longer feel that way at all, but it took a lot of exploration of news and opinions outside the mainstream to see that democrats are not so saintly after all. And there’s no way to say that concisely without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.
You think you’re not one of the masses ?
"Progressives say something different than they mean." You've almost got this!
Except, their point is exactly the reverse of one another. Matt's point is that despite teachers being progressive they can't get little boys to stop playing war. Rufo's point is that because teachers are progressive, they'll indoctrinate your children and turn them into little marxists.
The difference in the points is understood but progressives frequently dispute the factual claim which seems to not be in doubt
Eh, so we want to distinguish between :
"America’s public elementary schools are probably the place most infused with progressive sensibilities..."
And:
"Your public elementary school is infused with progressive sensibilities..."
Or, more specifically:
"Your child's kindergarten teacher is infused with progressive sensibilities..."
Those very much aren't the same thing, let alone their frequent co-traveller:
"And it's trying to turn your kid into a gay trans furry marxist who craps in the litter box they secretly keep in the bathroom."
But as soon as any sort of charter school bill comes out it’s wall to wall panic about taxpayers shelling out for Evangelical madrasas.
If you say so. I've certainly seen concerns about separation of church and state, ensuring charter schools provide reasonable levels of education rather than simply being fraudulent (also a concern with public schools) and the slow death of public services being offered as public services rather than as contracting officers for private parties to provide services, but I don't remember seeing anything like that.
Do you ever find it a little strange how irrationality only ever exists on the side you aren’t on?
Is there any doubt that teachers aren’t frustrated by their inability to keep boys from warring and play fighting, though?
And there is plenty of research that modern k-12 schools emphasize behaviors and traits more commonly found in girls, which absolutely leads to penalizing boys.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias
Found Paul Krugman's burner account
To the extent that the gap between young men and women exists ideologically, I think a lot of it can be ascribed to the fact that a lot of young men are in a cohort where they are being outperformed educationally and professionally by women. There's a sense for some people that the world has turned against them while they are also being lectured about how men suck and have it easier. Since Dems are increasingly seen as a party for (neurotic?) professional women, it's not surprising some young men would feel alienated from the party even if Dems take savvier policy positions to try to combat the drift.
There's also a lot of discussion about how right wing "manosphere" content online is radicalizing young men. I'm not sure how true this is (I am somewhat skeptical) but the discussion inevitably becomes very scoldy which probably further compounds the problem.
Thank you for a fascinating piece, Matt Y!
Every time I read about gender differences, I feel like a mutant weirdo freak, because I'm a woman, but my positions tend to code as masculine. I strongly support nuclear energy. I think the death penalty should be used very sparingly and only in cases where the evidence is overwhelming, but I believe there are cases where it's justified, like some depraved serial rapist-torturer-killer or the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. I was a bit startled when Kamala said that line about the "most lethal military in the world," but I agreed with her: *someone* is going to have the most powerful military, and I'd much rather it were us than Russia or China or North Korea.
Of course, I am one of the 14% of Slow Boring commentariat that is female, so I am in no way representative of women. Also, I love Star Wars - the original trilogy, the Thrawn novels, The Clone Wars, some episodes of Rebels were really good - and I don't like the Disney+ Star Wars content other than Andor. The Acolyte straight up sucked.
I'm the opposite, I'm a man whose positions tend to code as feminine. Reading through this article it was strange finding myself on the "women" side of so many issues, though it was mostly the "violence"-related issues, since I tended to side more with my gender in the "science and technology" section. I think I am just averse to violence to general. It would explain a lot of my opinions from my dislike of American gun culture to my general apathy towards contact sports.
How much ya bench?
drosophilist, I hear you, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you happily engage as part of the 14% female SBers. Why? I don’t think we know yet, but I do think these traits are correlated.
Agree with all except “turn every stick into a toy gun or sword, depending on the stick”
Depends on the mood! Most sticks can be imagined into a gun or a sword.
When I was 5 and being baptized (I know a little late in the game for that), I used one of the candles as a gun and started shooting it at the priest. I distinctly remember the priest saying "boys will be boys."
Saying "pew pew" in a church would have been an exceptional pun for a 5 year old.
That's hilarious.
Sounds very Jesuit of him.
Curious to learn why (I'm not catholic but am curious)
Jesuits and Franciscan Priests tend to be chiller than other sects.
Reminds me of social dancing in 7th grade during PE. There we were, "slow" dancing to Elvis, as close as we ever got to our shorter male classmates. The boys were having finger gun battles using us as shields. (What a way to lead!)
Sadly, that is also the most common defense to charges of sexual misconduct in the ecclesiastical courts...
I remember when i was a kid i watched the VHS of Commando and wanted to gear myself up like Arnie, only to find the toy guns were too unrealistic to really match it without a lot of spray paint or electrical tape.
Nowadays i've gone through the toy sections of stores and man, it'd have been so much easier to get tac'd up as a kid today.
Repainting toys is a very easy project and it's a shame more kids don't get a chance to do it.
I know it's not really relevant to your situation since you are no longer a child. Just saying that a cheap can of Rustoleum 2x, and two craft paints (black and a silver metallic) for a grand total of like $15 could have given you a sweet gun.
My wife grew up with her sister and her mom mostly, and her dad worked long hours. We had a girl first. She was thoroughly surprised when our son, as soon as he could walk, started grabbing sticks and hitting everything with them.
A friend of my mom’s raised her only son with her husband on a sailboat from 2-5. She assiduously avoided any “violent” toys or media. One day the son met some other kids on some island, the boys used sticks as swords, and from that moment on the son was obsessed with wielding imaginary weapons.
First off, it's a great column, but I have to reply because Yglesias baited me with his mischaracterization of vibesology, of which I am a proponent.
OF COURSE, Democrats have issues they feel strongly about. So do Republicans! The argument is that this doesn't really apply to the persuadable voters who decide elections, who often not only lack strong opinions about the issues, but frequently *DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT THE ISSUES ARE*! On my Facebook feed, a woman I used to work with posted a picture of cheese she took at her local grocery store, and she wrote that while she despises Donald Trump, she is voting for him because the price of cheese is now too high. And that is your typical undecided voter's thought process when settling on a decision. I asked her what impact she thought that Trump's tariffs were going to have on prices: I am confident from her response that she doesn't know what a tariff is.
Look, any position can be taken too far. In truth, I support a popularism-infused vibesology. I DO think that policies influence voting behavior at the margins. But that works by influencing the views of people who are TRUSTED by these election-deciding, idiot (excuse me, "low information") voters. If a politician proposes something radical, that is something that gets picked up on by these dimwits when they hear conversations with their pastors / co-workers / friends / siblings / etc. And the importance of candidate policy positions are SWAMPED by factors often outside the control of those candidates. Like the price of gasoline or whatever.
My main concern with popularism is that I sometimes I see it used as an excuse to either betray progressive values, or else do nothing. I believe that the reason to win elections is to go do stuff -- to actually spend the political capital that you accrue. And you win those elections through a sensible blend of position-taking and aggressive vibesology.
Anyway, I really enjoyed reading today's column. Feel free to tear me a new one in the replies, but I won't be able to respond. Busy moving at the moment and just don't have the time.
1,000% agree with your first paragraph. Every time I read an interview with a swing voter is an enraging experience, they seem to lack any understanding of cause & effect.
In general American politics is bizarre because the arena in which it takes place is shaped by a very large number of people who are actually pretty well informed, all things considered, and have very strong political opinions. In most countries, politically engaged people are at least somewhat elastic -- e.g. shifts from Tories to Labour/LibDem in the UK, or from Liberals to Conservatives in Canada, but in the United States this basically does not occur. So all elections are decided by people who, as you rightly point out, are incredibly stupid, which creates this weird perception that *American voters writ large* are stupid.
That's interesting. My assumption would be that it would work the same everywhere. I'm in Germany at the moment, and my sense (without looking at the data) is that the least informed voters are the ones who are most likely to jump-ship, although it's probably true that you get more movement inside of a coalition (e.g., a former SPD voter casting a vote for the Greens).
My read is that Europeans have no grasp of how US politics works and do not understand that the views of right-wing rural communities are enormously overrepresented in the US political system. (By giving rural states like Wyoming, with 600,000 people, the same amount of power in the Senate as the state of California, with its 39 million; through the Electoral College; etc.) This gives Europeans the false impression that Americans are more right-wing than they actually are.
I'd be interested in giving this issue a closer look. Could be that you're totally right. If you have some articles, send them my way!
I mean, in general the Republican Party wins 46-49% of the national vote depending on the election. The difference between 47 and 51 is huge for majoritarians purposes but for purposes of "what do Americans think?" it's negligible.
About half of Americans support the Republican Party, and about half don't.
It's a fair point, but it has a huge impact on public policy for several reasons: 1) a lot of the kinds of policies that European (pseudo)intellectuals point to as evidence of their superiority simply cannot be passed in the American context precisely because of these anti-democratic features of the US political system, and in many cases would not have passed in Europe, if Europe had those same features; and 2) even when the Dems have a trifecta, our public policy must pander to the Dems from the most conservative states in the country, rather than what the majority of Dems actually want.
This kind of circles back around to what I was saying above. I just don't think the fact that 46-49% of voters support Republicans means that 46-49% of the public supports the GOP agenda. I question what percentage of voters even know where the GOP stands on the issues. (NOTE: I am absolutely NOT suggesting, as progressives often do online, that the typical voter is some latent / closeted hardcore leftist who will vote for the Dems if they do Marxism. Instead, my argument is that huge percentages of voters are ignorant and relatively uninterested in politics, and that this observation applies to Europeans, too.)
I love Europe and Europeans. As I've said in response to other Slow Boring articles, I view Europe the same way I do America: there are problems, but also a lot to admire. But one thing I can't stand about Europeans is the smug sense of superiority that I encounter, which is utterly unjustified by the facts. Trust me: these people are idiots. (I say that with tongue partially in cheek. But their best-selling newspapers are tabloids. I recently got into a conversation with a college-educated professional who didn't understand how his nation's health system worked. Etc.)
Next book idea for MY: "The Cheese is Too Damn High"
Do all "Joe"s have a similar low opinion / distain for idiotic low-information voters? I feel very seen right now...
hahaha! Let's unite!
Thinking of the pro-science funding position, I wonder if Mark Kelly does better than the average Democrat with men. Astronauts are cool.
There is a well known gender gap on the question of "is space cool" and "should we spend money to do cool stuff in space". I think Democrats in general would benefit from moving away from Obama's influence on this question, he convinced so many of them that space exploration is dumb and a waste of money.
Ancillary observation. I am a huge weightlifter... its my main hobby.
Over the last few years, I've seen a huge increase in teenagers and Gen Z getting interested in the gym... weightlifting and bodybuilding. And for whatever reason... the gym space tends to be conservative. Even the women who are into fitness are more likely to lean conservative.
I don't think its causal effect (gym driving people conservative), but its definitely a trend I've noticed.
I weight lift, but also have gotten into running marathons a fair bit post college. My sense is that the running space is also seeing a huge increase in numbers, but it's a comparatively left coded activity. Good that young people are exercising more though!
You are a bipartisan exerciser!
100% agree with this. Though I think Running is probably more 50/50 split.... whereas weightlifting is 80/20
We don't even have to mention MTG and CrossFit.
Of course we dont have to mention crossfit... the crossfitters will tell us all about it.
So fucking true.
I think all those groups in spandex on bikes every weekend (or the retired guys any day) is also left coded.
Nah. That’s a lot of finance bros. Probably exactly the kind of person this article is about - not fans of Trump but don’t like Democrats.
Ten years of clubs and it never did anything for me other than make me super skinner.
Now I do like 6 miles of running a week. Ain’t got the time for it.
This is funny. I did clubs for awhile. I got called out by a coach once for wearing headphones on a run. It was so weird.
I liked having a schedule to be accountable and people to push me but I wasn’t out here trying to chat with people.
That was it for me in groups.
As am I, to someone who thinks she dies after a mile.
haha... definitely a thing on TikTok
Weightlifting is "help yourself" which fits into conservative philosophy. As opposed to something like therapy, which is "get help from others" which is clearly more in the direction of feminine and liberal philosophy.
spot on
i think it is probably causal. lifting weights is very fair -- you get out what you put in for a long time before individual genetics starts to matter. if a big part of your life takes place in a very fair arena, a conservative philosophy makes a lot more sense.
Very curious of the effects on testosterone levels for lifting vs running.
I think there's already research out there about testosterone levels and political affliliation.
Weightlifting increases testosterone.
Sprinting increases testosterone.
Long distance running decreases testosterone.
Not surprised to hear this!
“Fitness” is gender-segregated, not gender-disproportionate. The girlies love yoga, Zumba, step classes, water aerobics, free dance, and all the other “softer” modes of exercise.
this is actually too bad. Women suffer from age related muscle loss (sarcopenia) even more than men do. Age related muscle loss is a major contributor to quality of life and mobility issues... to falls, balance, etc...
Weightlifting is the only intervention that can halt it. Women... especially older women should skip the softer modes of exercise and pump some iron.
I agree. My side gig is as a fitness teacher (mostly dance/spin/kickboxing) and I always try to encourage clients to do weight-training exercises either in our classes or outside them. Functional strength and comfortable movement are the highest goals of fitness in my opinion and it’s terrible that women are dissuaded from some of the most effective formats because of the fear of looking “bulky.” Back when I got my first group fit certification, the course actually instructed us not to use the word “muscles” around women because it would “scare them off”, which remains a top ten dipshit thing I’ve heard.
Violence is cool and all— especially when I experience it through a screen and can’t get hurt— but sex is much better. Liberals have become increasingly censorious about sex. This is an electoral liability. A sex-positive female politician could turn her gender into an advantage. If young men thought Harris would bring us closer to the sexual mores of the Netherlands or Norway, they would vote for her at far higher rates.
To an extent, feminism, especially first wave feminism, has liberated men. Men can now choose between empowered career women and more traditional types. This is really quite awesome. I don’t have to work my fingers to the bone to “be a man,” I can work less, earn half the money and still hold my head high. Empowered women can seek erotic and personal fulfillment in relationships rather than viewing marriage as more of an economic arrangement. Empowered women don’t need alimony and don’t have to view every breakup as a disaster. They can have flings and lovers and enjoy their bodies. Unfortunately, many feminists are censorious and seem uncomfortable with the fact that men prefer fit, attractive, pleasant women. Harris is a fit, attractive woman who can be a cool girl when she wants to be. She should let her hair down and be sex positive.
But what would it actually look like to be more sex positive? I don't know if "let your hair down" is the answer. The classic dilemma for female leaders is that if your personality is too warm you're called a slut, and if it's too cold you're called a bitch, and there's a very narrow zone of acceptable behavior in between.
I think another problem is the pool of voters Harris needs to win across the swing states. Are they the ones who want more sex positive behavior from the potential first female president?
If you bore young men as swing voters, the answer is “YES!!!”
I think the answer is expressing approval of young unmarried couples and romantic relationships short of marriage. Make Republicans the churched up scolds who think you have to wait til marriage.
What does approval mean in this context? There's no shortage of those relationships in the US, but also the evidence is very strong that people are usually less satisfied in them than if they marry.
Approval means praising and showing concern for those people. It means making Fred feel like Kamala wants him to get laid.
There are few things that I would like less than for the President or a candidate thereof to be concerned about my sex life. Talk about creepy.
The evidence is very strong for a correlation but not for a causal relationship.
If not for Dobbs this would be beyond a lost cause. Hawk Tuah projects a Republican aura — the antithesis of a dour self-appointed censor with a bedazzled cane.
Not exactly a pillar of feminine elegance and beauty, but the sort of girl that gets with immature college guys.
One way would be to talk frankly about her relationship with her mentor, the much older Willie Brown. She could open up about how it was unconventional, and there was a large age gap, but she doesn't regret it. That would be her real, first-hand experience of being sex-positive. But somehow I don't think she's going to talk about any of that.
Omg I would love it if she did, and the women who it would off hate Trump and love abortions so much they would vote for her anyway
If Trump/Vance or Republican electeds a start calling Harris a slut, that would only help her. “You raped a women in a department store and call me slut because I had boyfriends. Pathetic!”
I think when you look at pop music since the pandemic it's very evident that we haven't culturally figured out what to do with male sexuality since Me-Too. Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX etc sing a lot about sex, I think I also read Beyonce's 2022 album was her "horniest yet."
But on the male side we have like Benson Boone and Noah Kahan, basically sad sacks with no apparent agency in life. Even MJ Lenderman who I really like is singing sad songs. Contrast that to the early '10s when you had Drake, Kanye, the Weeknd, etc. Those guys were all clearly horny in a way that probably crossed the line of what's appropriate in some respects but at least they were interesting and somewhat authentic. Even the indie rockers of the 2000s were kind of dirtbags--go listen to the lyrics on the early career albums by The National, also people like the Strokes and Interpol were clearly writing "party" music (drugs and sex).
we need more party music and less handwringing over what is “appropriate.”
haha. true. I love Yeezus but "I'm in it" definitely makes me squirm.
I'm not sure it's a coincidence that all your "sad boys" were White and all your "horny guys" were Black - the cultural expectations for what each type of artist will sing about is very different.
could be. for some reason though white guys seem to be having a moment (at least on XM pop radio lol).
There's definitely been a measurable (although not gigantic) decline in the popularity of rappers.
I think The Weeknd is just between album cycles and it's not clear if he's going to be dropping off the face of the earth like Katy Perry or will be back with a vengeance soon.
Also, Million Dollar Baby by Tommy Richman has been really big this year and that's a horny song
There’s been a re-bifurcation in music taste between young nonblack and black males.
Yes I think this is probably true with the rise in country and country-adjacent music and corresponding relative decline in rap
Troye Sivan is pretty much exactly what you’re describing for and runs right into a no don’t be sexy like that from mainstream audiences.
yeah I have no idea why some music ends up being more popular than other music but Troye Sivan is definitely a big step below Sabrina Carpenter or whatever. Seems like all the momentum for popular men is in country now, Morgan Wallen, Kane Brown, Shaboozey, etc. etc. etc.
This is movies, not music, but I think Timothy Chalamet is the male counterpart to Sabrina Carpenter.
I heard he’s coming out with a new brand of tea, I think it’s called Kahan Chai.
Millennial third wave feminism was generally very sex positive, as contrasted with 1970s second wave feminism. (First wave feminism is usually thought of as 1920s suffragism.)
Gen Z in general seems much more skeptical about sex - they’re having less of it, and even the straight men among them seem more likely to think it’s inappropriate in movies and TV. Among queer people there’s been an observation that older generations want to have sex and younger generations want to have gender. (This helps give gay bars new reason to exist, when the apps were killing them a decade ago, but they’re becoming different types of places.)
Look, I disagree with David Abbott, must be a day that ends in "-y"!
(I kid, David, I kid)
I don't think that's it at all. Sure, on the margins you may find some barstool bros or whatever they're called who would vote for Harris if she were more sex-positive. But the mainstream conservative critique of the Democrats is just the opposite: that they preach sexual liberation and alternative lifestyles like same-sex marriage and polyamory, but in their private lives they are fuddy-duddy traditionalists who get married, have their children after they're married, and don't get divorced.
Rather than sex positivity, such conservatives want Democrats to preach more traditional morality: marriage is good, having children out of wedlock is bad, you should stay together for the sake of your children. (Of course, conservatives also support a twice-divorced serial adulterer, but I digress.) "Luxury beliefs" and all that.
Appealing to conservatives will not work. Appealing to politically unattached young men might
That’s the mainstream _intellectual conservative_ critique. Ever meet an undecided voter in Pennsyltucky who even knows that bourgeois Manhattanites get heterosexually married and have 2.1 kids in their mid-30s after reaching serious financial stability?
"A man is a not a plan. A man is a companion."
Fani Willis
And if he’s a really good companion, you can pay him with public funds your office controls and blow the biggest case you’ve ever handled!!
I mean, Hilary to Kamala within a couple election cycles feels like a lot of progress on this gradient. It's hard to imagine a successful female Democratic politician in this era being censorious and anti-sex given the male-dominated arenas in which they have necessarily participated throughout their careers. I suppose this could change over time, but it's not my read on the up and coming generations.
Among all the factors listed here, I think censorship of speech and cancel culture are probably the biggest reasons. Men like to talk trash (both liberals and conservatives), either for fun or to let off steam and then forget all about it the next day. The penalty for doing that has become unacceptably high, specially if they are about race or gender or some protected group. DEI and AA is another area where most men (moderates and conservatives) favor meritocracy over diversity and representation.