Boy Troubles on the Big Stage

The boy crisis at the Aspen Ideas Festival, divorce never ends, the war on mothers and more in this week's digest.

The troubles facing boys in America today were the topic of a panel at this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, which is a major mainstream elite event. Panelists included Maryland Governor Wes Moore; Michael Strautmanis, who worked in the Obama White House and now is an executive at the Obama Foundation; and Richard Reeves of the American Institute of Boys and Men.

It was a great panel.

The Aspen Institute is a bi-partisan organization - I’ve done work with them - but definitely skews significantly to the establishment left. I’m sure many conservatives and online men’s influencers will criticize this panel for not having any conservatives, and for essentially promoting an anti-right point of view.

But I’d say not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s important that these issues are on the agenda in a real way in the mainstream. Events like this are what makes that happen. It’s also very important that men’s issues not be entirely coded as right wing, and this means letting serious people on the left talk about them in their own way.

I also want to point out that all of the panelists are male, which surely took some amount of courage for the Aspen Institute to schedule. I don’t know any conservative organization that has had an all male panel talking about men’s issues. When the Heritage Foundation hosted an event on the crisis of masculinity last year, for example, two of their three panelists were women. The center-left Reeves has an entire institute devoted to boys and men, while conservatism does not have a single male scholar focused on gender at any of its institutions so far as I know.

I’ll highlight one part of the talk I thought was especially interesting, because it was the only one where there was real disagreement. The moderator asked Gov. Moore if he thought men should become more comfortable being stay at home dads. He bristled a bit at this and didn’t engage on that, instead choosing to talk about men leading at home. Whereas Reeves, who himself was a stay at home dad for a period of time, was much more positive.

I don’t know for sure, but I’d hypothesize that black men like Moore will be much less amenable to things like telling them to take on traditionally female roles. They have a lifetime of experience of having black masculinity in particular being pathologized. Asking black men to be stay at home dads is just another way of trying to neuter black masculinity, whereas for white elites like Reeves, this is not that big a deal. I can definitely see how there could be a racial divide on topics like this.

Best of the Web

Anthony Bradley: Hoodie Nation: The Official Uniform of the Crisis of Boys and Men - A great piece from Bradley. You should be sure to sign up for his Substack.

Jeff Giesea: Gen X Man's conflicted call to greatness - A great take on my generation from a fellow member of it.

First Things: Making men in the Blue Ridge Mountains - about an all-male Anglican boarding school being created that will mix liberal arts education with manual arts education.

NYT: Your Boss Will Freeze Your Eggs Now

Compact: The War on Mothers

Take Norway, which has a generous welfare state and men willing to take up much of the slack in parenting. But it is also child-centered culture in a way that might sound dreamlike to the uninitiated but can be a positive nightmare to many parents. In one study of immigrant parents from Southern Europe, mothers spoke of needing to follow strict parenting norms lest they have child services called on them. Things that were regarded as normal and even beneficial in their places of origin, like drinking alcohol in front of children, to “show them that it’s something natural, something you have to be reasonable about,” as one parent put it, were construed by Norwegians as dangerous and risky. One parent described how she “naïvely” told her health visitor about attending a festival on a trip to her home country—naïve because she feared she’d have child services called on her for taking her child out past bedtime.

…

Parents are increasingly conceived of as their children’s “risk managers.” They are expected to be aware of any and all risks, but also of the risks of avoiding all risks and thus sheltering their children from reality. And of course, they are often seen as the biggest risk themselves. All of this is often accompanied by a culture of “parent-bashing”: Parents serve as the last acceptable scapegoats when things go wrong.

The Spectator: Divorce Never Ends - “It will affect your kids for the rest of their lives”

All of this is to say something you don’t hear that often: divorce will affect your kids for the rest of their lives, well into adulthood. They will have split holidays and summers. They will have stepparents. Their kids will have step-grandparents. Whatever inheritance they would have been entitled to is often being divvied up with other spouses and their kids. More important than the money, however, is the attention they’ll never get because their parents are dating or remarrying or whatever. They will only be with one parent half of the year — if they’re lucky: we only saw my dad twice a year. They will have to choose who gets Christmas, forever. Or they will be bouncing around at holiday time with their kids, just like the old days.

Parents who divorce might be able to largely move one, but the children never can.

Nate Fischer: The Antifragile Christian College

Oren Cass/NYT: This Is What Elite Failure Looks Like

NYT: The real problem with legal weed

New Content and Media Mentions

I was mentioned in the New York Times, the Blaze, CurrentPub, American Reformer. I was also a guest on the Dual Citizens podcast.

Here are the new pieces since my last digest.

• I had a podcast with Georgetown University professor Joshua Mitchell on the roots of identity politics.

• I had a podcast with Matthew Peterson, editor in chief of the Blaze, on the future of conservative media.

• I provided a toolkit about how to pick a place to live.

• I wrote a short piece on the emergence of the post-religious right

• And I wrote about affinity group migration and the quest for community (paid only).

Off Topic

I have two pieces that are somewhat off topic for my newsletter but may be of interest.

The first is an NYT op-ed from Stephen Smith, who goes by the name “Market Urbanism” on social media, about how America’s unique elevator regulations raise building costs and lead developers to install fewer of them. It’s another example of the modern twist on American exceptionalism: an example of where we are exceptionally bad.

And Substack writer Tracing Woodgrains has a piece on Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record. The piece is very long and overly detailed. Most people won’t be interested. But it is a fascinating look at internet culture and how it was evolved over the last 15 years, plus a glimpse at the kinds of people who run major online movements and sites like Wikipedia.