00:07:54.560And now they call us stupid and they have to write books about how we're stupid.1.00
00:07:57.160There is actually, like, an anti-sexism case for why women are attending college and doing so much better at school is literally that the returns to education are better for women.1.00
00:08:05.880They had to go to college to get into the middle class, whereas men assumed, eh, I don't really have to go to college and I'll be okay.
00:09:35.300Adolescence is a period when we find it harder to restrain ourselves.
00:09:38.540But the gap is much wider for boys than for girls because they have both more acceleration and less breaking power.
00:09:44.920The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the CEO of the brain, are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about two years later in boys than in girls.
00:09:57.860The cerebellum, for example, reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys.
00:10:04.780So basically, like, all of the things that allow you to decide, like, should I stay up late playing video games or should I do my homework and go to bed early?
00:10:13.260All of those mechanisms are appearing much earlier for girls than for boys.
00:10:18.180I mean, to state the obvious, this clocks.
00:12:41.920See, this is as soon as something requires a massive social program, you know, it's a no go in America.
00:12:46.800So I think the thing of adding like, oh, footnote, asterisk, we're just going to add universal pre-K to this does to me point to like one of the flaws in the book that begins to show up here is that I think one of the things that is appealing to him about this is because it seems like, oh, we're just making the structural change.
00:19:24.140There's also the last thing I want to mention is that
00:19:25.520If you look at the studies, even the ones that Richard Reeves cites in his book, race and socioeconomic class have a way bigger effect than, like, your birth month.
00:19:40.340But, like, we're talking about tiny little things.
00:19:42.740And then if the main determinants of, like, outcomes and stuff is mostly, like, how rich are your parents and, like, how good is the school that you go to?
00:20:09.420I don't think from what I've heard that we know enough to be like, pass a law, boys have to start school later.
00:20:16.000Before we move on to the work stuff, I just want to talk really briefly about like the actual causes of the gender achievement gap, or at least the extent to which we know what they are.
00:20:23.440the researchers seem to have settled on this thing like kind of conscientiousness or they call them
00:20:29.560non-cognitive skills that boys and girls are roughly the same amount of intelligence like
00:20:34.020boys are not dumber than girls but girls are much higher in conscientiousness and other sort of like
00:20:39.600i can get things done like putting off gratification kinds of skills to me it's like this stuff is0.94
00:20:44.200really interesting but also it doesn't really solve the problem right it's like why are boys
00:20:48.520falling behind ah they're less conscientious well why are they less conscientious then we're just
00:20:51.960back to like is it biology or is it socialization again because we're punishing boys who lash out
00:20:57.180in class they get yelled at and then they don't do as well in school and i speak from personal
00:21:04.320experience uh i got yelled at all the time and look where you are now and now i'm a podcaster
00:21:10.140you should do scared straight presentations in middle school and now i'm a podcaster as a young
00:21:15.900as a young boy back when i was on my adhd meds i was a gifted student uh it was when i went off1.00
00:21:23.020the meds that they were like oh you're actually stupid you're actually dumb as hell it was the0.99
00:21:27.600adderall the whole time that was just chemicals so there is actually some evidence that boys are0.99
00:21:33.720discriminated against in school so boys tend to do better on things like standardized tests
00:21:40.360where there's no teacher discretion where it's just like you fill in the bubbles and everybody's
00:21:44.440graded on the same criteria. When they aren't there to judge us. Well, honestly, like as soon
00:21:49.080as there's teacher discretion, it's like an essay or whatever, like teachers know the kids. Teachers
00:21:52.580are overwhelmingly female, especially in earlier grades, especially in elementary school. And so
00:21:57.620it's fairly plausible that teachers might just be giving less grace to boys, especially considering
00:22:03.380that boys are much more likely to act out. They might then get into the cycle of punishment where
00:22:07.780they act out. And then teachers are like, oh, he's one of the boys that acts out. I'm not going to
00:22:10.540give him a good grade. That's at least plausible. Although there's been tons of work
00:22:14.400on this because it's a really big deal, right? If boys are facing discrimination in schools,
00:22:17.440like systematically, it's like that is something that we should be concerned about. And so as
00:22:22.600people have looked into this more, it appears that this effect only shows up or primarily shows up
00:22:27.660for poor boys. Because if you're a rich boy acting out and you get in trouble, then your
00:22:32.860obnoxious ass parents go yell at the teacher and they don't have time for that. There's this theory0.99
00:22:37.680that basically social deprivation seems to harm boys more than girls. Boys raised by single0.91
00:22:44.160mothers have worse outcomes in life, whereas girls raised by single mothers basically do the same
00:22:48.820as people not raised by single mothers. Well, then it sounds to me like that's also
00:22:53.380discrimination, but this time from the mothers. There's no one in this world more discriminated
00:23:00.240against than the little misbehaving boy. That's my personal belief. We are getting representation.
00:23:06.080you are qualified to talk about this as a young troublemaker yeah when i was a kid as a young
00:23:11.680troublemaker with a wasted life with the outcome that you have ended up where you are new jersey
00:23:17.640podcaster if you would if you i should have never told you i moved to new jersey
00:23:23.340if i if you would ask nine-year-old me who's got it the hardest i would have been like probably
00:23:29.280little boys who make trouble uh probably little boys to who have who like to have a little bit
00:23:33.120of fun sometimes. So the other thing, the other thing I wanted to say about like the gender
00:23:36.440achievement gap is that like, it is wild how consistent it is, but it's also really interesting
00:23:41.180how much it varies. So if you look at race, Asian kids, girls are 3% more likely to graduate from
00:23:48.620high school than boys. If you look at black kids, boys are 19% less likely to graduate from high
00:23:53.720school. Wow. The gender gap is like everywhere, but it, it varies a ton across like income levels0.97
00:23:59.420across countries. Like in some countries it's really big and some countries it's really small.0.63
00:24:03.120Which also indicates to me anyway that it's like fairly malleable.
00:28:03.880Name one book that had a male protagonist that you read when you were in school.
00:28:08.720There's also my favorite biological crank theory was there's this weird theory that
00:28:13.420boys they hear different frequencies than girls and so they can't hear their female teachers1.00
00:28:18.780scientifically we're just tuning these bitches out it's so dumb i actually literally can't hear1.00
00:28:25.140women that's dude women women be talking the paper academic paper i know god damn dude that1.00
00:28:33.040rules i i the audacity the audacity to be like i can't even hear him i can't even hear him okay
00:28:39.480But to take vaguely seriously this, like, bad faith case, boys have been told that, like, masculinity is toxic and they're, you know, maybe they're afraid of raising their hands or maybe it's just, like, giving them really low self-esteem.
00:28:49.500The problem with it, of course, I mean, first of all is the international comparisons because they have completely different sort of feminist movements in other countries.
00:28:55.300But also among the states, we just saw, like, Arkansas has one of the largest gender gaps.0.97
00:31:39.920Just straight up illegal discrimination.
00:31:41.860And he says – he's like, before you say it's illegal, before you say it's illegal, that's what's been happening in STEM if you actually look at the numbers.
00:31:47.120Yeah, but not as an actual – not as an actual overt express policy.
00:31:52.060That doesn't make his thing – his idea legal.
00:31:54.180He also – he says there should be like male-targeted scholarships and fellowships to get men into these fields.
00:36:40.200the study was called lickety split the lesbian experience in Sweden but he says like the the
00:36:47.960lesbian partner who leaves the workforce to have a baby will have a huge hit to her earnings
00:36:51.700whereas the lesbian partner who stays in the workforce does not have a hit to her earnings
00:36:55.060which indicates that we're not talking about gender discrimination we're talking about like
00:36:58.440leaving work and coming back is very bad for your earnings right so not not gender discrimination
00:37:02.940at the workplace level we're talking about like ultimately social expectations of women0.65
00:37:09.920Exactly. And also he also notes that even within the same employer, you find wage, you know, the thing you always hear about like women making less money than men for the same job. This does show up in the data, but he finds a large scale study of like a transportation authority where they looked at all the wage data and it appears that men are working more hours in the same job. Like men are available for overtime more. Men are available for, you know, Sunday shifts, which end up producing more pay in a way that women are not. And you can also trace that back to childcare if you want to.
00:37:37.180Yeah. As far as I was able to tell, this stuff is all kind of like as a descriptive matter,
00:37:40.740roughly true. The gender wage gap appears to be driven mostly by women choosing different0.97
00:37:46.360occupations than men. The thing of like women earning less for the same job does happen.
00:37:51.200But as far as like the broad societal phenomenon, it's mostly women clustered in jobs that pay less.0.98
00:37:56.460This is why the gender wage gap debate gets so hot, because the real question ideologically
00:38:03.100is do you think that needs to be remedied or not exactly right and to me it does but to him he
00:38:09.120doesn't really say it but to him he thinks we should shift the focus to men i don't know it's
00:38:13.360very weird to me how like in his mind some biological differences in outcome need to be
00:38:20.140remedied like exactly if you imagine that at the elementary school level that boys are they got a
00:38:26.420case of the bad brain your solution to that if you're him is all join hands across america and
00:38:32.100hold them back a year so they can do better. But then you see women choosing child care over work0.66
00:38:40.060and that results in lower income. He's like, so we can ignore it. I don't get it.0.92
00:38:45.640This whole question of like women are choosing to be in lower paying occupations also feels like a
00:38:50.660weird, like to me, it's not necessarily refutation of discrimination.
00:38:55.720Well, the fact that someone is in a job does not mean that they chose the job per se.
00:38:59.320Yes. And a lot of his argument rests on this idea that men and women kind of inherently have these different preferences, right? As he said earlier, men like things and women like people. And so it turns out the thing oriented, the men oriented industries just happen to pay more. But the fact that women dominated fields pay less is partly the result of sexism.
00:39:18.320There's this really interesting article called The Cost of Caring from the 1990s where they look throughout the economy and like every job associated with caring for another human being pays way less than a comparable job with the same level of education.
00:39:31.660There's also some interesting work about sectors as they become more female dominated, the wages go down.
00:39:37.680So the wages for housekeepers have gone down by 21% in the last 50 years.
00:39:41.660Due to the slow decline of the butler.
00:39:43.240You've got like computer programming, which used to be seen as like a fairly menial task that was mostly done by women.
00:39:48.560That has then, of course, become this like massive powerhouse and pays really well as it has become more male dominated.
00:39:54.100I think there probably are many women and men for that matter, but maybe more women who see two paths, one lower paying, but more fulfilling to them for whatever reason.
00:40:04.180But that's different than people whose choices are narrowed to lower paying paths and have to go down one of them or feel some kind of social or cultural pressure to go down one of those paths.
00:40:16.720And it's not super easy to tease out the causes there.
00:40:20.520If 50% of the population is having to choose between having kids and having a stable career, that's also a problem.
00:40:26.940You can chalk it up to whatever you want to.
00:40:29.100But like it feels bad and wrong that only women have to make that choice.1.00
00:40:33.160That's the obvious problem. Again, just because women are foregoing income to take care of their child does not mean that that is a choice that they want to have to make.0.86
00:40:45.620I also think it's a little telling that most of his statistical case for, like, why we should shift the focus from women to men relies on relative statistics, right?
00:40:55.620He's talking about, like, since 1980, men are doing worse, women are doing better.
00:40:59.260But men and women were in very different economic positions 50 years ago.
00:41:03.920And as soon as we get to absolute statistics, he's like, oh, yeah, well, you know, men do earn more money than women.
00:41:10.780Women are more likely to live in poverty than men.
00:41:12.980And if you look at most industries, the overwhelming majority of like top managers and CEOs are still men.
00:41:23.820Let's not get into politics, you know?
00:41:27.900Because like if you – I mean even Reeves admits that like if you look at high-level lawyers, like high-level lawyers in firms, it's still only roughly 20%.
00:41:38.940If you look at Fortune 500 CEOs, it's around 10%.
00:41:42.820venture capital going to women is about 3%. College professors, it's now 48% of college
00:41:48.440professors are women. But among tenured faculty, it's only 35% of women. We also know that women0.99
00:41:54.640were historically marginalized for most of American history. Like women could not vote1.00
00:41:58.620until 1920. Women could not attend college up until the 1960s. Anytime someone is like looking0.99
00:42:04.720around a society and saying like, yeah, this historically marginalized group, the reason1.00
00:42:09.920they make less money is because of their choices i always think like we actually need really good
00:42:16.760evidence of that it's so annoying to have these conversations because for some reason the
00:42:22.280conversation often revolves around like is there sexism yeah yeah when the actual question is like
00:42:28.040how exactly is sexism manifesting right but instead of having like a normal conversation
00:42:35.840about how they manifest, where they manifest, what might be done to address it, if anything,
00:42:43.180everything just gets turned into an argument about like whether this is real and whether
00:43:37.240Part of this manifests in men being three times more likely to have deaths of despair.
00:43:42.760This is the idea that men, especially kind of working class white men, mostly in rural areas, are dying of things like poisonings, which was like alcohol overdoses or fentanyl overdoses.
00:43:56.160White males are about 70 percent of the suicides.0.66
00:43:58.960This is actually like a uniquely American thing that in basically every developed country, the ratio of male to female suicides is around one in two men are twice as likely to kill themselves as women.
00:44:13.700If men in America are basically a lot more prone to suicide, for example, than men in other countries, then we need to look at variables that exist in America, right?
00:44:26.700I think the place to start, and I'll let you take the lead, is American women.0.78
00:44:33.400This is kind of one of the problems always of talking about suicide rates is that partly you can chalk it up to like sort of male malaise fine.
00:44:39.900But there's also like logistical issues of just like access to guns.
00:44:42.980That's what I was actually thinking might explain that.
00:44:44.880It's just the fact that if you have a brief suicidal thought, the suicide machines are all around us in America.
00:44:51.160One way in which Reeves is totally correct is that I do think like these problems, like these specifically male aspects of things like opioid overdoses and suicides are genuinely under research.
00:45:03.460So the one study I found was basically like, we think we're the first people to do this.
00:45:08.120Women are just as likely to get opioid prescriptions as men, but they're like two thirds less likely to die of overdoses.
00:45:18.500Yeah, I believe it was Drill who on Twitter said that everyone wants to talk about mansplaining, but no one wants to talk about man's pain.
00:51:17.180It was 40 girls at this high school showed up outside of one of the administrator's offices
00:51:20.860when they found out that A, the boy had made the list, B, it had been sent around a bunch of their
00:51:25.300friends. Like what really hurt the girls was that a lot of their male friends had like weighed in
00:51:29.680on this list. And they're like, what the fuck? I thought we were friends. And you're like, oh,1.00
00:51:32.840she's a seven or whatever. And then the administrators, when they found out that
00:51:36.960the boy had done this, they gave him like one day of detention and like weren't going to put it on
00:51:41.220his record. And the girls were pissed off about this. And so 40 of them showed up at the
00:51:45.000administrator's office and was like, we want to talk about the culture at this school. And they
00:51:49.040had like a round table thing which was supposed to be 45 minutes but ended up going on for four0.99
00:51:53.180hours where like girls told stories of like the fucked up shit that had happened to them at the0.99
00:51:57.700school and the boy was there part of it was like the punishment for the boy was like he had to0.99
00:52:01.680listen to the way that part of the punishment for the boys listening to the girls was like okay so
00:52:06.920you had to sit there and then according to this washington post article the boy gave like a very0.98
00:52:10.500heartfelt apology he's like okay you're right this was a really fucked up and stupid thing to do i0.87
00:52:14.520shouldn't have done it i also like the fact that the post did not name the boy yeah this was a0.96
00:52:19.260dumb thing that a 16 year old boy did but like it doesn't need to ruin his life it's like yeah this0.78
00:52:23.260boy did this dumb thing the girls were mad everyone talked about it what else do you want1.00
00:52:27.560here yeah if what you're saying is a 16 year old boy doing this shit shouldn't get widespread press0.99
00:52:33.360coverage i agree i don't understand the complaint that like you can't call this toxic masculinity0.96
00:52:40.100this is what like jokerfied me is that like he's like oh you can't just put that label on anything
00:52:45.240but like this feels like an a very clear-cut example of toxic masculinity to me yeah like0.97
00:52:49.700boys behind the girl's back being like oh she's more like a four and not telling the fucking0.97
00:52:54.220girls for months and that fucking right dude how many how many people say that like the left0.99
00:53:00.160does language policing right and then like we have been introduced to like a relatively useful term0.97
00:53:08.620Maybe it's not always used correctly, but can be used to describe incidents like this, toxic masculinity.
00:53:14.580You use the term and they're like, oh.
00:53:16.340It's like they'll call anything toxic masculinity these days.
00:53:18.920Even a boy writing down the looks of his female classmates and sharing it with all the other boys.
00:53:25.360So from this anecdote, the whole point of this anecdote, of course, is that it's emblematic of, he says, four major failings of the political left on issues related to boys and men.
00:53:34.620The first issue is a tendency to pathologize naturally occurring aspects of masculine identity, usually under the banner of toxic masculinity.
00:53:47.640Lacking any coherent or consistent definition, the phrase now refers to any male behavior that the user disapproves of from the tragic to the trivial.
00:53:54.500It has been blamed, among other things, for mass shootings, gang violence, rape, online trolling, climate change, the financial crisis, Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and an unwillingness to wear a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:54:07.360Lumping together terrorists and delinquents, it ultimately poisons the very idea of masculinity itself.
00:54:13.100I mean, look, at the end of the day, Brexit was toxic masculinity.
00:54:16.660Now, that's the one I disagree with the most, the idea that the British are doing anything out of an excess of masculinity.
00:54:22.840I just want to point out the dynamic here. This is an entire chapter dedicated to the problems of progressives, right? The ways that progressives are not helping boys. The first category is a complaint about people using a term. Yeah. This is the life cycle of every trendy term. People also overuse like sweet summer child.
00:54:42.320Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. That said, I don't think it's crazy to think that like the left in like online social spaces can use language that like ostracizes certain groups. Right. That's why I don't joke about white people. I specifically carve out ethnic groups within white people. Italians, Irish. Right. It's important to be specific so that people know that you're not talking about everyone.
00:55:10.820I think also like 80 percent of fucking discourse now is like leftists should talk different online.0.88
00:55:17.140Yeah. We need to acknowledge the fact that there's a vast right wing apparatus explicitly designed to find the dumbest leftists saying the dumbest shit and bring it to the nation's attention.1.00
00:55:27.120The Daily Mail did not cover this thing at the Washington, D.C. high school to like bring attention to like the plight of women in high schools.0.99
00:55:35.260That's that's the other side of what I was just saying. So, like, I think it's true that certain language that is employed by the left can be ostracizing. The problem with trying to address that internally is that there is this right wing media apparatus that will elevate that language no matter how often you use it.
00:55:56.920Exactly. Yeah. And so it's sort of unclear how much we can do to address the problem. Right. Internally on the left.
00:56:03.720Your political strategy cannot be that like tens of millions of people need to show perfect
00:56:08.440discipline in the vocabulary that they use.
00:57:57.340I would excise the term toxic masculinity from this discussion because I think that toxic masculinity in and of itself does imply something structural.
00:58:07.020This is to me what is so interesting is that even in his own examples, he's citing what I think are structural factors.
00:58:13.440So if men are depressed, it's because they won't express their feelings.
01:02:09.180No gender inequalities related to boys or men are addressed.
01:02:12.100The fact that women now outnumber men in college is noted,
01:02:15.340but only in order to highlight the fact that women hold more student debt than men.
01:02:18.560And then he lists a bunch of other examples of, they mentioned like women need access to health insurance, but men are more likely to be uninsured than women.
01:02:26.000But he throws in there that the mandate of this agency is to guide and coordinate government policy that impacts women and girls.
01:05:19.840There's something that I'm going to try to articulate here.
01:05:21.660But when the rhetoric of the right does not align with reality, these folks, by which I mean like centrist types, will say, you know, this isn't true, but this fuels the right, right?
01:05:36.680When they're talking about right-wing misinformation, they almost talk about it like it's a political
01:12:45.340This guy is just constantly lying and lying to men in order to sell them on a right-wing
01:12:51.740ideology that's making them worse, that is making them believe a bunch of things that
01:12:55.600are not true and are not helping them.0.60
01:12:57.960Here, Reeves is like, oh, isn't he really just a bard?0.97
01:13:01.500An older, deeper form of masculinity where you cry all the time on camera and dress like the fucking Riddler.0.94
01:13:11.480So the third problem with conservatives is he says conservatives see the solution to men's problems as lying in the past rather than the future.0.98
01:13:22.340In a fascinating study conducted before the 2016 election, Dan Casino, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, added an unusual question to a survey of voting intentions.
01:13:31.500Do you earn more, less, or about the same as your spouse?
01:13:35.580Half the respondents got the question early in the survey, before being asked about voting,
01:13:40.100and the other half got it after declaring their voting intention.
01:14:05.520A lot of these have totally failed to replicate.
01:14:07.600So I went back to this study that Reeves is citing.
01:14:09.900Like most of the statistics he cites in this book, like this is correct.
01:14:12.940It's actually – it's a 24-point shift in voting preference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump depending on whether you prime people with this like does your spouse make more than you.
01:14:22.360And what's wild is he also tested it with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump because maybe it just pushes people more toward Republicans, right?
01:15:23.360To the point one need not actually be disabled to claim government support.
01:15:27.980More recently, they have championed universal basic income.
01:15:31.340This latter idea would have the federal government guarantee every adult in America an income stream generous enough to live on, whether he works or not.
01:15:39.020One liberal candidate for president recently ran an entire campaign on it.
01:15:42.660Died to a liberal, Andrew Yang. Everyone's favorite leftist.
01:15:45.540The message is that work is optional, replaceable, and that a check is just as good as a job.
01:15:50.260and what that means in practice is a check is just as good as a man because if government can
01:15:55.800supply everything a father or husband once did by working what's the point of manhood this is0.99
01:16:01.400what my college girlfriend was talking about when she said that this shit constricts men too0.99
01:16:05.400it's wild dude you are your job dude and also he's he's literally saying that like other people0.99
01:16:10.900getting disability insurance or like you getting unemployment benefits when you're fired makes you
01:16:15.320less of a man right why this is completely made up these these guys are like sort of mentally
01:16:21.180trying to harken back to like hunter-gatherer societies like we were out hunting and providing
01:16:25.780right but like those societies were super communal right you obviously relied on like the broader0.95
01:16:31.720group to provide you and your family with shit all of this uh like modern masculinity stuff is
01:16:38.140basically like invented tradition it's just like yeah hard not to see that it just happens to align0.99
01:16:43.960with uh like republican policy in the post-nixon era they're just like food stamps are gay for this
01:16:52.300i also read stift which was susan faluti's follow-up book after backlash both of which
01:16:57.000i really recommend she frames all of this as like a betrayal by women what she says is that it's
01:17:04.300basically like it's oligarchs who did this to you it's like rich people it's like the elon musks of0.98
01:17:09.060the world who completely fucked you over and told you whispered in your ear the whole time that the0.98
01:17:14.940person you should be mad at is like the immigrant that stole your job or the woman who's your boss0.99
01:17:20.780elon musk talking to you about masculinity think about that you ever seen him do the x jump my god
01:17:26.060i think this is the thing to keep in mind is that like they want us to be fighting they want this0.64
01:17:30.920dumb like war of the genders to be going on like are women better men better so that they can take0.98
01:17:37.000your job and fucking send it to china like that's that's been the dynamic for the last 40 years we1.00
01:17:41.640should be focusing our anger at the chinese i just think it's so frustrating that it's like0.99
01:17:48.220we get such clear-eyed diagnoses of the problems in like our sort of intellectual life as americans1.00
01:17:54.840but the minute it comes to solving them everyone pretends to be half as smart as they actually are
01:18:00.160like well there's problems on both sides what's interesting is that he's getting very bogged down
01:18:05.560by the aesthetics. And he seems to understand that the right wing is pitching to men,
01:18:10.500but offering them nothing, right? So credit where it's due. But he's unwilling to sort of say the0.73
01:18:16.400opposite, which is, okay, the left is not pitching to men, or at least not doing it very effectively.
01:18:23.220But that is where the better solutions to these problems lie.
01:18:27.500I don't want to blame individuals. I want to look for structural solutions. The thing is,
01:18:32.220I don't really blame Richard Reeves for this. I think there is a sickness among quote-unquote
01:18:36.700serious punditry where you cannot be taken seriously as an intellectual unless you do
01:18:41.700this pantomime of both sides have problems. If Richard Reeves wrote a book where he was like,
01:18:47.220the right offers no solutions for men and it's actively making all of the problems worse,
01:18:51.860and the left could be doing more, has some problems, but fundamentally is on the side
01:18:55.720of downtrodden men, everyone would write off the book as like, oh, it's too partisan.
01:18:58.880Yeah. And it's so bizarre, especially on this issue in particular, where conservative everyone just admits openly they're like, oh, yeah, conservatives are like actively trying to bring back this like fake 1950s family. They're not doing anything for boys. Like you think fucking Josh Hawley is going to restore your factory job? They're not doing anything. The reason why work is so much more precarious is mostly because of fucking Republicans. This is like the basic political dynamics are so clear on this. Everyone just admits to it. Like throughout this book, he's like, oh, well, yes, yes. Conservatives are trying to bring back like the fake traditional family.
01:19:52.300I understand that he wants to do this sort of like no one's talking about this maneuver because that allows everyone who's reading it to feel OK, as opposed to a book that's like, by the way, generic Democrats are just like 10 times as good on this shit as Republicans.0.98