Weekly Digest: Why Men Are Falling Behind
Weekly Digest: Why Men Are Falling Behind
Welcome to my weekly digest for May 5, 2023.
For new subscribers, this contains a roundup of my recent writings and podcasts, as well as links to the best articles from around the web this week. You can control what emails you get from me by visiting your account page.
Why Men Are Falling Behind
My friends at Kite and Key Media made this video about why men are falling behind in America.
This video heavily channels Richard Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men. You can read my review of that book at the Institute for Family Studies.
Best of the Web
CNN: Pornhub blocks access in Utah over age verification law - Great news - every state should pass an identical law ASAP.
NYT: After Student’s Suicide, an Elite School Says It Fell ‘Tragically Short’ - A student committed suicide after administrators at this school that costs $76,000/year to attend allowed him to be bullied over a rape accusation that the school itself found to be “bogus” and “utterly false.” I’m sure the evangelical justice and abuse crowd will be all over this one, right?
NY Post: Wall Street ‘egging’ on freezing egg pregnancy delays - “Everybody knows this [egg freezing] is what you need to do to show management you are committed to the company and that you will push off having a family many years down the road…There’s definitely a silent pressure coming from management”
The Guardian: Motherhood on ice: lack of suitable men drives women to freeze their eggs - Here’s a shocker: women blame men for why they need to freeze their eggs. The possibility that the type of high quality men these women say they want may have decided that these women don’t actually measure up to their standards seems never to have entered anyone’s mind. These articles always start with the implicit assumption that all of these women are highly desirable and marriageable themselves. Only men ever have defects that make them unattractive in the relationship market.
NYT: Needing Younger Workers, Federal Officials Relax Rules on Past Drug Use - The federal government is going to start hiring druggies.
Christianity Today: 18 Christian Colleges Closed Since the Start of COVID-19 - probably many more to come.
New Content and Media Mentions
In March I spoke at the Canada Strong and Free Network conference, which is a conservative networking event sorts like a more mainstream CPAC. My panel was on the future of cities, and how conservatives can be relevant to cities. I was joined by Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam. Among the matters I discuss is the need for conservatives to have what I call a “positive governing agenda” for cities. Here’s the video of that event.
New this week:
The Church of England Embraces Post-Familialism - A look at a new report by the CoE that calls on the church to “celebrate” singleness.
Americanism Is Their Religion (paid only) - I examine a recent Jonathan Leeman post against Christian nationalism that defines American liberalism as the only legitimate, non-authoritarian form of government. It illustrates how a lot of evangelicals have adopted Americanism as their default political theology.
At American Reformer, P. Jesse Rine writes on Christian higher education for a new era. Rine is joining American Reformer to launch a new Center for Academic Faithfulness and Flourishing (CAFF) that we are very excited about.
My podcast this week is on understanding how the American system is different from our simplistic views such Orwell vs. Huxley or capitalism vs. socialism.
Paid subscribers can read the transcript.
You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple, Google, or YouTube.
Post-Script
The manosphere figure Rollo Tomassi, famous for his “rational male” series of books, tweeted this as his vision for becoming a high value man.
He got heavily ratioed for this. I think it’s illustrative about the type of moral and life vision that underpins much of the thinking in the online men’s space. While this might be a fun lifestyle in one’s 20s or 30s, it would grow old quickly and is a path to a literal dead end. Unfortunately, people like Tomassi have given out a large quantity of highly accurate information on intersexual dynamics. We need to find a way to combine these social science type insights with a better moral and life vision.
The starting premise of the Kite and Key Media video is the pathetic progressive view that women have enjoyed enormous "progress" and "achievement" and this must be preserved. The video then staggers about looking for a solution for men falling behind. The best it can do is suggest that boys start school a year later and men become more involved in traditional female occupations to avoid job losses to AI.
It is "received wisdom" today that women have been held back and are now finally being allowed to achieve what they are capable of. This is completely false and until this pernicious lie is exposed as a falsehood, there is little hope for a cure to what ails men and women today. I know those are very strong words, but strong medicine is needed. It is as if placebos and nicely-flavored syrups must be administered to the patient to cure him of an ailment that has been misdiagnosed. Worse still, he's surrounded by witch doctors guided by ambition, while evil spirits hover about.
The rightful relationship between men and women that existed in the Garden of Eden places men at the head of households, and by logical extension, in leadership roles in society. We saw what happened in the Garden when that natural order was usurped. Not surprisingly, once outside the Garden, mankind has been even more vulnerable to lapses in the natural order - though that had to wait until technological progress created the perfect opening for feminism.
The rightful relationship between men and women has enormous implications for how society functions. Break it, and all sorts of ills will emerge. Getting back to my original statement, the so-called achievement of women outside the home sounds good to modern ears - to men because they themselves are accustomed to working outside the home and managing the affairs of society and to women because their only role models mimic the achievement of men. Both men and women are additionally encouraged to do whatever their imaginations suggest because this rhymes with our American ideal of freedom.
I would argue that the so-called achievement of women is failure in disguise. Holding positions in society that were once the exclusive domain of men doesn't mean anything when the system is structured to support and shield women in these positions. Consider the most radical and foolish members of Congress, the "Squad," and the band of female democrats that often side with them. Yes, we have Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, but how about Kamala Harris and Biden's picks for various offices? These are all feminists.
Men are not faring well because the system at every turn promotes women and denigrates them. The only solution that would bring sanity to the country is the return to patriarchy. But that will never happen because we are no longer a Christian nation. Even dedicated Christians seem unable to see our societal decay in clear terms. So, we will dance around the problem, never seeing it and never addressing it.
On the college closing list, it looks like around half them happened before Covid. Also in the case of Presentation College in South Dakota, it has always been known as a nursing school, they offered only a few other majors. There is certainly high demand for nurses, I suspect the programs the state schools have offered in nursing made it too difficult for them to compete. I would expect to see a lot more of that, if there isn't an advantage in quality of religious life and instruction at the school, families aren't going to pay the huge premium for private higher ed anymore.