JF

This is an area where I do think discussion of “the marginalized” is merited as there is a differential impact on different sorts of people (including studious, introverted kids) of the free range approach; it’s about striking a certain balance

It just seems very hard in practice not to oscillate from one extreme to the other; letting obstreperous boys run free can mean routine brutality while regimes run by people determined to stamp that out can become — are becoming — repressive in their own way

Such that the gaps in achievement and discipline between boys and girls are getting enormous. On the Rogan show, you get a glimpse of what it would take to close the gap: some tough male authority figures who frame learning as “cool shit”

If you compare the guys on the Rogan show to the “politically incorrect” media of the 1980s and 1990s, you can measure how far the men of Rogan’s generation have evolved in terms of not being racist, sexist pricks while still being dudes...there’s just no comparison

But for many, just being dudes is problematic in itself

Like Asian kids who grew up with Tiger Parents a lot of shy, weak, bullied boys grow up to proclaim that the adversity they experienced made them tough and was the best thing to happen to them, while others have a lifelong fixation on the trauma they experienced

One of the most interesting things to listen to on Clubhouse is rooms of black men and women having intra-gender struggle sessions in which the women deploy therapeutic trauma language and the men are all like “I’m just taking it all in...tryna listen and learn...”

The comedy of the Sopranos was hearing white ethnic Italian Americans gentrifying in the suburbs and adopting bourgeois therapeutic concepts and vocabulary (even as they continue murdering mafia rivals)