One was Ross Douthat interviewing Scott Galloway. It’s a gift link, though I’m not sure how long it lasts.
Douthat, you may remember, is a conservative Catholic, particularly conservative on sex issues. He believes rapists such as Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski are the product not of patriarchy but when the 1960s embraced free love: “If your culture’s code is libertine, don’t be surprised that worse things than libertinism flourish.” As noted at that second link, that doesn’t explain why very un-free love, un-libertine groups such as the Southern Baptist Conference are also rife with rape. His final column as he departs the Times for CBS news bemoans that as a moral conservative, living under “peak woke” is like the McCarthyite 1950s, with bonus civic and educational collapse happening all around him.
Scott Galloway? He’s the current male whisperer offering dubious critiques and dubious solutions to the problems of men falling behind women.
Sure enough, Galloway repeats the claims from his book that schools are biased against boys: “Think about the way we approach what we ask of students in school. Sit still, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You just described the activities that come more easily to a girl. Even push a pencil around, ask questions. Our prefrontal cortex is 18 months behind a girl’s.”
This is a standard complaint from We’re Failing Men types, that school is inherently female. Guys just can’t stomach the calls to Sit Still And Do As You’re Told. But hasn’t that been the way of school forever? All the way back to the medieval European days when student bodies were entirely male? Schools were if anything stricter in the past, when it was “reading and writing and ‘rithmetic/Done to the tune of a hickory stick,” So why would it suddenly become an issue now? For that matter, if following orders was unmanly, the military would be predominantly female.
(As this Bluesky thread says, why are people assuming boys simply can’t do better? Or as someone else put it online, shouldn’t we tell them to step up, look to the girls for inspiration and work to match them rather than conveying that falling behind girls is not their fault and we’re going to fix it).
Galloway is also worrying that liberals aren’t concerned enough about men’s plight — sure, much of the problem is that when you’ve been on top, equality feels like oppression. Though to his credit, he’s also emphatic that “one of the greatest victories in America and society, generally, is that women are thriving” and that he has no sympathy with the right-wing impulse ” to take women and nonwhites back to the ’50s.” However the idea that we’re simply ignoring male struggles is baloney. It’s just that for all the supposed tragedy of their lives, they still aren’t the ones worried about being raped when they’re alone at night.
Not a bad dude, in short, but I’m not sure he has great answers. For example, there’s this comment: “It’s a tragedy to me that women don’t feel safe on the New York City subway. Women shouldn’t cross the street when they see a group of young men. They should cross the street to be around young men.” Well yes, they shouldn’t have to worry — but how do we make that happen in our rape culture? Giving men a purpose in life, making them feel they can contribute — none of these prevent them being rapists.
I do, however, like this observation: “I think the whole point of America is to give unremarkable kids a shot at being remarkable or doing something important. I feel like I had that infrastructure, and I worry that in today’s world, a lot of that infrastructure has been crammed into the kids who had already demonstrated they’re remarkable at the age of 18.” However as Rabbi Danya Rutenberg points out, the left is the one with ideas how to help: free childcare, free college, free medical care. Those would help all of us, including the unremarkable.
Next from the New York Times Magazine, an article on the Heritage Foundation tearing itself apart. Unfortunately the gift link already expired (you can look it up under the title, “What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right”). The gist of it is that the old guard conservatives in the Foundation have found themselves swept aside as Heritage struggles to suck up to the Toddler of the United States — suddenly tariffs are good policy! A bigger problem is the influx of even further right voices to the point the history of WW II is up for debate: “a lot of “rehashing and going through who was the bad guy and who were the good guys,” Richard Stern, who was then director of Heritage’s budget center and is now at Pence’s organization, told me. A sizable number of newer staff members were fans of Pat Buchanan, who wrote a book about how Churchill, not Hitler, was the instigator of World War II. A number of them, several former staff members told me, seemed to share this view.” One of the new people argued that the Holocaust was a lie, and that Jews controlled textbook publishing in the United States to hide the truth.
And Scott Yenor is far from the only misogynist there. No surprise: for conservative authoritarians, dominating women is always high on the agenda. As Heritage became increasingly staffed with far-right Catholics, “single women without children were deemed failures with ‘no skin in the game,'”
Overall it’s a good portrayal of how creepy the Heritage Foundation is. Which makes it surprising the article still deploys euphemisms in several places. The Claremont Institute is a right-wing creepy mess where several of its people supported the Jan. 6 coup. In the article it’s “a right-wing think tank that wants to restore America’s founding principles.” The Toddler’s OMB director, Russell Voight, is “a proponent of the maximalist view of executive power.” I think that’s “wants a right-wing dictatorship” Overall though, it’s a reminder that the Times, much as I criticize it for sanewashing the president’s gibberish, can still do great work when it wants.
