I'm so tired of not being able to talk about things

Aren't you?

When you see a cousin or childhood friend after a gap of some years, there’s always that little bit of surprise at how they changed. It’s not rational. Of course they’ve changed. But you weren’t there to see it, so there’s that immediate discrepancy between them as they are now and your last image of them, which you’re never even aware you’re carrying.

Without being aware of it, I had an implicit expectation that boyhood was more or less as I left it. But it’s not. If you know the stats—until recently, I didn’t—you know young men are in something of a free fall. I had a sense they were slipping, but I didn’t realize just how bad it really is.

To take one example, the gap between women and men earning college degrees is larger now than it was in the early 1970s when Title IX was introduced—and it’s getting worse. In other words, girls are now further ahead of boys than boys were ahead of girls. It seems like the reappearance of a gap that inspired landmark anti-discrimination legislation, regardless of which way it tilts, ought to spark a conversation given how important education is to young people’s future.

But this isn’t about boys. This is about what happens when a topic—any topic—is artificially suppressed.

There are always bad apples, but I suspect many people in media genuinely don’t understand why our trust in them is at an all-time low. In a recent public debate of that exact question, author Malcolm Gladwell and journalist Michelle Goldberg argued that their publications were more factual than any of the alternatives—and that may be true. (I’m not sure what Book of Truth they’re comparing themselves to, but just like Joseph Smith and the golden plates, you have to wonder why we have to go through them and can’t consult it directly.)

The criticism is not that the media is full of outright falsehoods, although I’m sure there are plenty. Rather, it’s that the media omit facts inconvenient to the narrative, whatever narrative it is, and they make mistakes, even honest mistakes, without ever correcting or even admitting them.

That kind of sideways discourse was expertly lampooned in the character Walter Sobchak from “The Big Lebowski”. Walter makes incredibly bombastic statements ending with the question “Am I wrong?”, which he repeats over the stammering objections of his friends such that there’s no way to move the conversation forward except in answer.

In case you don’t get the trick, there’s a big difference between not being wrong and being right. I can recite the mean surface temperature of the earth for the last five years and not be wrong, but that doesn’t mean anything I might say about it is right.

After learning just how bad the situation with young men really is, my first reaction was a gradual, creeping sense that we’re being lied to in this way—deliberately. The facts alone are newsworthy regardless of the diagnosis or treatment. If the murder rate were twice what it was in 1970, you’d expect some kind of discussion even before getting into why or what to do about it. The mere fact that it’s higher doesn’t necessitate a particular stance on policing or capital punishment, but it’s for damn sure news. Why not cover it?

The second problem with suppressing a topic is that it absolutely breeds extremism. The conceit is that, if they don’t give us a space to discuss it, we simply won’t be able to—because prohibiting alcohol didn’t at all create a black market ten times worse.

As with everything, technology amplifies the effect. If, for example, you were intrigued about this issue—perhaps you think I’m exaggerating—and wanted to learn more, there’s not a lot of reputable “content” to serve in a search because no one is getting paid to write think pieces or make videos critiquing those think pieces. (There is some, but not much, especially compared to literally any other gender-related issue.)

For algorithms, however, serving nothing isn’t an option since that doesn’t keep you on-site in front of advertisers. And algorithms are dumb. Where there’s a gap, they don’t say “Sorry, there’s not a lot of good scholarship here.” They simply jump it and serve you the next best outrageous thing they can find.

I spent the last several days—including to 1 AM last night—watching the absolute worst of humanity. I don’t want to mention names or YouTube channels because I don’t want to give them any views. It isn’t even the raging misogynists or the parade of genuine man-baiting misandrists on TikTok that the misogynists carefully curate to artificially prove their point. There’s quite a bit of otherwise moderate content that innocently comments on or “reacts” to these videos, giving them a kind of credence and making it seem as if the views presented are far more common than they actually are, even as they rightly pick them apart.

There was a time in my youth, before YouTube and TikTok, when I was a nerdy, inexperienced, and extremely shy boy. Had it existed then, such a highly curated stream of videos cherry-picked to represent the very worst of womankind as if it were the secret heart of femininity would’ve absolutely CONVINCED me there was no point in risking rejection on such creatures. I mean, let’s face it, going up to a similarly immature stranger and betting all of your self-esteem on their off-the-cuff reaction is one of the hardest things for a social animal to do. I can’t speak for women, but most men would find it easier to save a drowning stranger than ask them on a date. If a woman shoots you down, especially in front of others, you’re immediately a low-value male. It’s really, really hard for an immature person to come back from that.

In the old days, I would’ve told guys they have to do it anyway in the same way that a hatchling, who’s only ever known life in the nest, has to stare down the equivalent of a skyscraper and believe that if they jump, their wings will magically work despite having never done so before. (Anyone who’s spent any time in nature knows there are those hatchlings that get it on the first go and those that take a lot of coaxing from mom and dad.)

This week, I came to realize it’s not as simple as when I was young. The vast majority of women will simply offer the same kinds of rejections they always have. But I am now aware of a small but amazingly vocal minority who will, for example, record a guy’s “harassment” in a bar or coffee shop and upload it to social media and invite the mob to shame them—or worse, if he was foolish enough to approach her at either of their places of employment.

To repeat for those who missed it: That won’t be the reaction of the vast majority of women, even young women. I think most of them get how difficult it is—although I’ve said for years that it would be extraordinarily helpful to the species if we instantiated a custom that a teenage girl must also approach a boy a few times if only so she realizes what a gargantuan effort it is.

We now have to add to that a very small but decidedly non-zero chance of mass humiliation, career damage, or even legal action. No, that doesn’t mean we should go back to the days of rampant sexual assault. When I was young, I had an old boss who worked for KFC when he was young, and he used to tell stories of Colonel Sanders using his cane to lift women’s dresses in the elevator. That’s an awful if unfortunately mild example of the shit that used to happen regularly. Women (and men) need ways of safely reporting that behavior, which should be addressed.

Human relationships, especially romantic ones, are messy. They’re awkward. They’re complex. It’s pure fantasy to think the error rate on that reporting mechanism will approach zero. The best of intentions cannot alter the fact that, for example, the calculus of approaching a woman has shifted. I can easily see where an inexperienced man’s fumbling attempt at a pickup might go horribly awry or else be honestly misinterpreted. In a world where any miscommunication has real potential consequences, any guy is going to be all the more reluctant to do the thing he doesn’t even want to do in the first place.

But the biological imperative won’t diminish. And resentment will build. And that’s what I saw online: lots and lots of young men frustrated by forces—some noble, some malign—that they don’t have the context or experience to understand.

There is certainly a female side to this—or many of them. But what difference does it make when we’re not allowed to discuss it? How do we work through these changes and settle on a set of norms that defines exactly what words and behaviors are recourse-free and which are not?

In several of the videos I saw, young women were lamenting the loss of romance. They told stories about elder male family members who wooed and courted their eventual spouses, who had initially said no. What is the difference between a man so smitten he “won’t take no for an answer” and harassment? How does a young man hedge against that, or against putting his foot in his mouth, or against a woman simply changing her mind?

Where those questions are actually forbidden, where there are punishments for even noting the mixed signals, the worst people will be the only ones brave enough to go there. Is it any surprise that those dark voices are the loudest when no one else even dares speak?

For all our sakes, we need to break this taboo and have honest painful discussions, without insults or use of the word “grift,” about how to reintroduce young people to each other.