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 piece from the Guardian wins “stupidest sentence of the day” for me. “All of the women who froze their eggs were cisgender”. Yes. A trans women would never have any eggs ever. It is literally impossible for a trans women to have eggs.
“Inhorn’s research found that women freezing their eggs tended to be in their late 30s, successful high-earning professionals...”
A Yale female professor writing a book about elite women’s dashed romantic hopes. We all know how the story unfolds in this scenario.
Prof. Inhorn could well turn her anthropological lens on why America now has 40% of children born out of wedlock and why marriage has disappeared among the working classes.
I think the fixation in educational attainment levels leaves out many other factors that make for a good match. In addition, why the intense focus on the mating patterns of the college-educated who are at most 30-35% of the US population?
Egg-freezing will only be accessible to a very small slice of women who dominate elite circles, and who sadly are most likely to have sky-high expectations and requirements for a mate.