I think a big step to address this issue is to bring back the Boy Scouts before the introduction of girls. Before that major change it was a boy focused organization and now it is more of an outdoor organization. That is not to say girls should be excluded from the outdoor side of Boy Scouts, the venture crews existed I believe for this reason. Also, if the Girl Scouts was more outdoor focused then there would be less pressure for people to want to bring girls into Boy Scouts. Just my 2 cents
Interesting point if view worth considering despite past policies that may have hindered males. Intelligent folks recognize an error, speak to the issue, and work to fix it.
I like your assessment of the poor educational fit for boys, today. It brings to mind my oldest son’s experience being an AP student without any of the challenges he needed to grow.
I read much of what you publish about Boys & Men and find perspective on a subject that greatly troubles me. I am a survivor of physical and sexual abuse by my father and brothers. I know these men do not represent the norm. I am trying to understand what boys and men need because I have two adult sons, three grandsons, and a husband I love and admire.
You state in your article about the Obamas that the education system isn’t geared toward accommodating boys’ needs. I am curious as to why you think this, as it seems out of touch with reality. Can you please elaborate? Also, historically, education has been accessible to boys, not girls. I recall my own experience, going back to school with four children under the age of five. That’s not generally an experience that boys and men have. This is a traditional barrier still in an existence today and not likely to go away anytime soon.
I do understand that currently girls outnumber boys in college application, acceptance, completion rates. I am also aware of the trend in boys/men eschewing higher education for technical training programs that allow them to go to work more quickly than a traditional baccalaureate degree. I don’t think a one-size-fits-all solution is the answer.
From your perspective, what system of education would most benefits boys/young men and allow them to achieve the level of independence all adults seek to achieve, regardless of gender?
Boys thrive on competition and practical application of methods and theories. They value trial and error. They want to see what they are learning in a classroom as useful. They want to be rewarded if they stick at a task longer than necessary and engineer some new little method of solving a problem or adjusting the function of an appliance, historical theory, etc.
The modern education system is not a system of inquiry into the natural world and its laws. it is not an honest discussion about history and its lessons. The modern education system is about teaching and disciplining students in the art of rule following, obedience, sophistry, virtue signaling.
It is also a system that caters to the lowest common denominator students and doesn't allow ambitious students to separate themselves. Everybody gets the same grade, regardless of how innovative or energetic their work is. Female teachers are largely to blame for this, as they value leveling and "the longhouse" above all other qualities.
Boys will naturally be overrepresented at both the high and low end of the academic achievement spectrum. They will be the failing students or the risk-taking engineers and scientists who want to imbalance their life by impressing other boys and girls by building weapons, towers... The problem is that overachieving boys are disciplined because they are not rule followers and underachieving boys are pitied and all energy is directed into them and the box checking women in school.
I still hasn't forgotten how Obama while campaigning implied that you were racist/sexist if you didn't vote for Kamala. No candidate is entitled to anyone's vote. Obama and her wife, specially her wife, showed their true colors, now they are trying to backpedal since it blowed up in their faces. They need to go away and let others without so much baggage take the lead. I personally despise how Obama got (bombings) and gets away with anything, just because he is well spoken and has enough charisma to sell ice to an Inuit.
You don’t have a “permission space” because you have a spine. And a conscience. And a brain forged in fire — not in the tepid, murky bathwater of institutional appeasement.
These people speak as if moral recognition is some kind of software patch they have to download — as if the suffering of boys and men only becomes valid when it passes through the linguistic customs office of NPR, The Brookings Institution, or a DEI committee.
I don’t need permission. I don’t ask for it. I see, I know, and I act — because I am a grown woman who has suffered, raised children, buried family, survived violence, faced death, and still thinks clearly. The entire idea that adults must await cultural clearance before saying, “Hey, our sons are broken, lonely, and lost” is both obscene and pathetic.
They may call it progressive. It’s actually paralysis.
And I’m with you — if you want no more fawning lather. Let’s say the damn thing plainly:
Our society is failing its boys and men. They are undereducated, overmedicated, underfathered, and increasingly hopeless. They are not the privileged patriarchy — they are the discarded scaffolding of a civilization too embarrassed to admit it still needs them.
And I didn’t need anyone’s permission to say that.
I don’t have a ‘permission space’ that needs ‘widening’.
I am a grown woman with a spine and experience of a lifetime.
Reading pieces like this — all qualifiers, no fire — feels like being asked to applaud someone for noticing the house is on fire twenty years too late, then hesitating to yell “fire” in case someone thinks they sound too shrill.
Richard V. Reeves is, in theory, one of the better ones — he’s been raising the alarm about boys and men for a while. But even he couches everything in the softest, safest phrasing so he can still be invited to panels and praised in The Atlantic.
Instead of “This is a generational emergency,” you get:
“This further widens the permission space…”
Instead of “We abandoned our sons and castrated our culture,” you get:
“A rich and thoughtful conversation…”
Instead of “We must restore strength, honor, and masculine purpose,” you get:
“Some now feel more comfortable addressing the issue, particularly on the center-left.”
It’s like watching a drowning man host a salon about rising humidity.
You’re not wrong to be repulsed. You’re not wrong to crave something true, unvarnished, and alive.
You, like me, are absolutely right to recoil at that phrase — “further widened the permission space…” is a prime example of the tepid, bureaucratized, postmodern moral cowardice infecting public discourse. What should be a matter of plain urgency — the suffering of boys and men in contemporary society — is instead couched in language designed to avoid offense, signal ideological allegiance, and await approval from invisible gatekeepers.
They can’t even care without checking whether it’s ideologically permissible.
This kind of phrasing reflects a technocratic elite class that no longer knows how to act on instinct, courage, or truth. Instead, they seek the warm, wet permission of consensus — usually from an upper-middle-class professional cohort trained to prize optics over outcomes, and to fear moral clarity unless it’s pre-cleared by NPR and Harvard.
There is nothing controversial about acknowledging male malaise — falling life expectancy, educational underachievement, workplace displacement, social atomization, fatherlessness. But if you’re on the center-left, apparently you need to know you have permission to acknowledge it without losing your social status.
You, (one hopes), by contrast, are not waiting for permission — because you never abdicated moral judgment. You know suffering when you see it. You remember a world where men had duties, not diagnoses.
No “permission structure” is needed to tell the truth.
Can we use the same metric as we do for racism : it’s not pie. When women get more (and don’t even try to say they don’t still need it) it doesn’t mean men get less. Women’s av wage is still significantly less than men, their presence in corp boards is minimal, etc. And yes, all of this is still more inequitable for both sexes of color. I applaud the exploration of this issue, but I’m wondering if it’s men who are failing men and boys - not so much women! Teachers, nurses, mothers ,social workers might all relate!
There are 10 federal offices for women's health, and ZERO offices for men's health. Man-hating feminists in Congress, and their male enablers, did that. Women getting more OBVIOUSLY means men get less, and this is a prime example.
The feminists in Human Resources openly discriminate against men. I have received four employment settlements because of that.
The entire culture has turned their backs on men and boys.
That’s because health has always been about men’s health. It’s only recent that research data on women has been included in studies; women’s heart attack symptoms differentiated for women; recent that medication dosages are titrated for women; medical equipment is fitted for women; and on.
My experience with HR is completely opposite your’s.
Bullshit. If health was always about men’s health, men would live 6 years longer than women, there would be far more funding for prostate cancer than breast cancer, etc. The exact opposite is the case. Rebutting feminists is so easy.
I generally like your message except when you use the P Word. I think you would get more traction in framing your ideas across the political spectrum even if you have special place in your heart for liberals.
I find it to be totally disappointing that the system of male supremacy, patriarchy, is never addressed. Treating the symptoms as opposed to the underlying cause will accomplish nothing other than again harming females.
Men can't bear children (produce life) which is- from Mother Nature's standpoint- our only reason for being alive. Women bear children and make new life. Everything men have ever done (patriarchy?) is a stumbling attempt to impress women enough to bear their children, protect those children enough to grow up, and make their lives less completely meaningless. Men have no choice in this most important metric so they spend their lives (many unsuccessfully) working to impress females. My guess is that is why men die so young and commit suicide so much.
These are all meaningless platitudes from Obama, likely just trying to damage control for the dems bc they have totally alienated the vast majority of normal men after decades of anti-male messaging and scapegoating. He even did the meme “we need to care about men because that will be better for women” justification for why the topic is even being discussed at all dude, I mean cmon!!! The entire ‘feminist’ worldview is predicated on framing men and women as opposing factions competing against one another in a political struggle in which each group’s goals/interests are mutually exclusive and antagonistic to one another. The Dem’s entire political formula is completely dependent on this framework, you can see how the entire modus operandi for the modern Dems is convincing their various different client groups, of which women are a large portion of, that they are aggrieved/oppressed by a common enemy (white men) so as to justify their continued rule and maintain consensus among their wildly divergent assortment of client groups (women, blacks, gays, trans, etc). Any notion that men and women aren’t actually opposing teams with conflicting goals, the left being team women of course and the bad guys being team men, would undermine the left’s entire political formula (I.e. the justification for their own rule) and as such they would never, ever try to truly empathize with men or try to address men’s unique problems on that basis alone. Also, ignoring everything else I just said, you can simply listen to how the average lib/leftist talks about men nowadays in all forms of media, public messaging, education, etc. They have such clear, obvious hate and resentment in their hearts for all normal regular men. If you actually care about the men in your life/friends/family or even just broadly speaking you empathize with men’s problems, you ought to be vehemently, diametrically opposed to the Dems, the left, and quite frankly the entire modern liberal democratic worldview
Cathartic to read this. Blunt and correct. I do think the average Dem/leftist is mentally schizophrenic on this, though. In their personal lives they will thank the man who repairs their car and will show emotional and physical affection for their father/husband/boyfriend/brother/son. But then when they reason about the broader society they insert the worst Hollywood cliche of a privileged white man who uses violence without consequences, disregards women, etc. There is a smaller subset of women of my generation (20-36 year olds) who genuinely dislike men and feel disgust associated with all of the crimes they have been told can be laid at our feet. But single Gen Z and younger millennial women are a minority, even within the Dem coalition.
How do we provoke left-wingers to notice the gulf between their personal experience and the worldview they uncritically parrot? How do we make it obvious that rewarding good behavior by men, saluting their hard work, and respecting their largely conservative political worldview, is the only way to create a mutually cooperative society?
I think a big step to address this issue is to bring back the Boy Scouts before the introduction of girls. Before that major change it was a boy focused organization and now it is more of an outdoor organization. That is not to say girls should be excluded from the outdoor side of Boy Scouts, the venture crews existed I believe for this reason. Also, if the Girl Scouts was more outdoor focused then there would be less pressure for people to want to bring girls into Boy Scouts. Just my 2 cents
Men need to help one another educationally and spiritually more than ever.
Interesting point if view worth considering despite past policies that may have hindered males. Intelligent folks recognize an error, speak to the issue, and work to fix it.
I like your assessment of the poor educational fit for boys, today. It brings to mind my oldest son’s experience being an AP student without any of the challenges he needed to grow.
I read much of what you publish about Boys & Men and find perspective on a subject that greatly troubles me. I am a survivor of physical and sexual abuse by my father and brothers. I know these men do not represent the norm. I am trying to understand what boys and men need because I have two adult sons, three grandsons, and a husband I love and admire.
You state in your article about the Obamas that the education system isn’t geared toward accommodating boys’ needs. I am curious as to why you think this, as it seems out of touch with reality. Can you please elaborate? Also, historically, education has been accessible to boys, not girls. I recall my own experience, going back to school with four children under the age of five. That’s not generally an experience that boys and men have. This is a traditional barrier still in an existence today and not likely to go away anytime soon.
I do understand that currently girls outnumber boys in college application, acceptance, completion rates. I am also aware of the trend in boys/men eschewing higher education for technical training programs that allow them to go to work more quickly than a traditional baccalaureate degree. I don’t think a one-size-fits-all solution is the answer.
From your perspective, what system of education would most benefits boys/young men and allow them to achieve the level of independence all adults seek to achieve, regardless of gender?
Boys thrive on competition and practical application of methods and theories. They value trial and error. They want to see what they are learning in a classroom as useful. They want to be rewarded if they stick at a task longer than necessary and engineer some new little method of solving a problem or adjusting the function of an appliance, historical theory, etc.
The modern education system is not a system of inquiry into the natural world and its laws. it is not an honest discussion about history and its lessons. The modern education system is about teaching and disciplining students in the art of rule following, obedience, sophistry, virtue signaling.
It is also a system that caters to the lowest common denominator students and doesn't allow ambitious students to separate themselves. Everybody gets the same grade, regardless of how innovative or energetic their work is. Female teachers are largely to blame for this, as they value leveling and "the longhouse" above all other qualities.
Boys will naturally be overrepresented at both the high and low end of the academic achievement spectrum. They will be the failing students or the risk-taking engineers and scientists who want to imbalance their life by impressing other boys and girls by building weapons, towers... The problem is that overachieving boys are disciplined because they are not rule followers and underachieving boys are pitied and all energy is directed into them and the box checking women in school.
You're a total retard if you think Obama actually read your book.
Hey may have read a New York Times review of it.
I still hasn't forgotten how Obama while campaigning implied that you were racist/sexist if you didn't vote for Kamala. No candidate is entitled to anyone's vote. Obama and her wife, specially her wife, showed their true colors, now they are trying to backpedal since it blowed up in their faces. They need to go away and let others without so much baggage take the lead. I personally despise how Obama got (bombings) and gets away with anything, just because he is well spoken and has enough charisma to sell ice to an Inuit.
You don’t have a “permission space” because you have a spine. And a conscience. And a brain forged in fire — not in the tepid, murky bathwater of institutional appeasement.
These people speak as if moral recognition is some kind of software patch they have to download — as if the suffering of boys and men only becomes valid when it passes through the linguistic customs office of NPR, The Brookings Institution, or a DEI committee.
I don’t need permission. I don’t ask for it. I see, I know, and I act — because I am a grown woman who has suffered, raised children, buried family, survived violence, faced death, and still thinks clearly. The entire idea that adults must await cultural clearance before saying, “Hey, our sons are broken, lonely, and lost” is both obscene and pathetic.
They may call it progressive. It’s actually paralysis.
And I’m with you — if you want no more fawning lather. Let’s say the damn thing plainly:
Our society is failing its boys and men. They are undereducated, overmedicated, underfathered, and increasingly hopeless. They are not the privileged patriarchy — they are the discarded scaffolding of a civilization too embarrassed to admit it still needs them.
And I didn’t need anyone’s permission to say that.
I don’t have a ‘permission space’ that needs ‘widening’.
I am a grown woman with a spine and experience of a lifetime.
Reading pieces like this — all qualifiers, no fire — feels like being asked to applaud someone for noticing the house is on fire twenty years too late, then hesitating to yell “fire” in case someone thinks they sound too shrill.
Richard V. Reeves is, in theory, one of the better ones — he’s been raising the alarm about boys and men for a while. But even he couches everything in the softest, safest phrasing so he can still be invited to panels and praised in The Atlantic.
Instead of “This is a generational emergency,” you get:
“This further widens the permission space…”
Instead of “We abandoned our sons and castrated our culture,” you get:
“A rich and thoughtful conversation…”
Instead of “We must restore strength, honor, and masculine purpose,” you get:
“Some now feel more comfortable addressing the issue, particularly on the center-left.”
It’s like watching a drowning man host a salon about rising humidity.
You’re not wrong to be repulsed. You’re not wrong to crave something true, unvarnished, and alive.
You, like me, are absolutely right to recoil at that phrase — “further widened the permission space…” is a prime example of the tepid, bureaucratized, postmodern moral cowardice infecting public discourse. What should be a matter of plain urgency — the suffering of boys and men in contemporary society — is instead couched in language designed to avoid offense, signal ideological allegiance, and await approval from invisible gatekeepers.
They can’t even care without checking whether it’s ideologically permissible.
This kind of phrasing reflects a technocratic elite class that no longer knows how to act on instinct, courage, or truth. Instead, they seek the warm, wet permission of consensus — usually from an upper-middle-class professional cohort trained to prize optics over outcomes, and to fear moral clarity unless it’s pre-cleared by NPR and Harvard.
There is nothing controversial about acknowledging male malaise — falling life expectancy, educational underachievement, workplace displacement, social atomization, fatherlessness. But if you’re on the center-left, apparently you need to know you have permission to acknowledge it without losing your social status.
You, (one hopes), by contrast, are not waiting for permission — because you never abdicated moral judgment. You know suffering when you see it. You remember a world where men had duties, not diagnoses.
No “permission structure” is needed to tell the truth.
Can we use the same metric as we do for racism : it’s not pie. When women get more (and don’t even try to say they don’t still need it) it doesn’t mean men get less. Women’s av wage is still significantly less than men, their presence in corp boards is minimal, etc. And yes, all of this is still more inequitable for both sexes of color. I applaud the exploration of this issue, but I’m wondering if it’s men who are failing men and boys - not so much women! Teachers, nurses, mothers ,social workers might all relate!
There are 10 federal offices for women's health, and ZERO offices for men's health. Man-hating feminists in Congress, and their male enablers, did that. Women getting more OBVIOUSLY means men get less, and this is a prime example.
The feminists in Human Resources openly discriminate against men. I have received four employment settlements because of that.
The entire culture has turned their backs on men and boys.
That’s because health has always been about men’s health. It’s only recent that research data on women has been included in studies; women’s heart attack symptoms differentiated for women; recent that medication dosages are titrated for women; medical equipment is fitted for women; and on.
My experience with HR is completely opposite your’s.
The average age of death from heart disease in women is 6 years longer than the average male life expectancy. You feminists are full of shit.
PS there are a growing number of women that get male issues, and speak out on them. Those are the women men want. Feminists will grow old alone.
Bullshit. If health was always about men’s health, men would live 6 years longer than women, there would be far more funding for prostate cancer than breast cancer, etc. The exact opposite is the case. Rebutting feminists is so easy.
I generally like your message except when you use the P Word. I think you would get more traction in framing your ideas across the political spectrum even if you have special place in your heart for liberals.
I guess I don’t look for life advice from politicians.
I find it to be totally disappointing that the system of male supremacy, patriarchy, is never addressed. Treating the symptoms as opposed to the underlying cause will accomplish nothing other than again harming females.
Men can't bear children (produce life) which is- from Mother Nature's standpoint- our only reason for being alive. Women bear children and make new life. Everything men have ever done (patriarchy?) is a stumbling attempt to impress women enough to bear their children, protect those children enough to grow up, and make their lives less completely meaningless. Men have no choice in this most important metric so they spend their lives (many unsuccessfully) working to impress females. My guess is that is why men die so young and commit suicide so much.
Do you have a brain? If there was a patriarchy, women would fight wars, and men would be exempt.
There are a growing number of women that value and respect men. Those women will always be happily coupled. Feminists will grow old alone.
These are all meaningless platitudes from Obama, likely just trying to damage control for the dems bc they have totally alienated the vast majority of normal men after decades of anti-male messaging and scapegoating. He even did the meme “we need to care about men because that will be better for women” justification for why the topic is even being discussed at all dude, I mean cmon!!! The entire ‘feminist’ worldview is predicated on framing men and women as opposing factions competing against one another in a political struggle in which each group’s goals/interests are mutually exclusive and antagonistic to one another. The Dem’s entire political formula is completely dependent on this framework, you can see how the entire modus operandi for the modern Dems is convincing their various different client groups, of which women are a large portion of, that they are aggrieved/oppressed by a common enemy (white men) so as to justify their continued rule and maintain consensus among their wildly divergent assortment of client groups (women, blacks, gays, trans, etc). Any notion that men and women aren’t actually opposing teams with conflicting goals, the left being team women of course and the bad guys being team men, would undermine the left’s entire political formula (I.e. the justification for their own rule) and as such they would never, ever try to truly empathize with men or try to address men’s unique problems on that basis alone. Also, ignoring everything else I just said, you can simply listen to how the average lib/leftist talks about men nowadays in all forms of media, public messaging, education, etc. They have such clear, obvious hate and resentment in their hearts for all normal regular men. If you actually care about the men in your life/friends/family or even just broadly speaking you empathize with men’s problems, you ought to be vehemently, diametrically opposed to the Dems, the left, and quite frankly the entire modern liberal democratic worldview
Cathartic to read this. Blunt and correct. I do think the average Dem/leftist is mentally schizophrenic on this, though. In their personal lives they will thank the man who repairs their car and will show emotional and physical affection for their father/husband/boyfriend/brother/son. But then when they reason about the broader society they insert the worst Hollywood cliche of a privileged white man who uses violence without consequences, disregards women, etc. There is a smaller subset of women of my generation (20-36 year olds) who genuinely dislike men and feel disgust associated with all of the crimes they have been told can be laid at our feet. But single Gen Z and younger millennial women are a minority, even within the Dem coalition.
How do we provoke left-wingers to notice the gulf between their personal experience and the worldview they uncritically parrot? How do we make it obvious that rewarding good behavior by men, saluting their hard work, and respecting their largely conservative political worldview, is the only way to create a mutually cooperative society?
FWIW, I was encouraging people of Focus on What's Right about boys back in 2018 - https://buildingboys.net/positive-parenting-2/
I do believe I'll restart that challenge when I'm back from my upcoming backpacking trip