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I recently spoke to Kyle Borland, author of Third Cultured, for a queer perspective on the problems facing US native-born men.
We talked about how masculinity doesn’t comport well with formal education, the importance of community, and our current labor shortage, “Every time I hear it, I'm just like, gentlemen, I need you to get off Twitch and I need you to go build some stuff,” Kyle said.
Getting further into how the public education monopoly fails men, we talked about how at 16 years of age you're allowed to work at McDonald's. Then the vast majority of high schoolers who graduate do so at the same level of employability.
As I talked about with Shoshana, we need to streamline the licensure process for construction jobs and the skilled trades. But also, schools have these kids captive for hours a day. Why not graduate the kids who are not going to college with a certification? Why not ensure that they've had an apprenticeship before they graduate? Why not ensure that there's something that they're qualified to do when they get done so that they're not then having to go into debt?
I think my message to native-born US men, especially young men, is: ‘You are not extra. You are necessary. We need you. We need what you have to offer, especially if it falls outside of whatever you've been told masculinity is.’
Here’s my favorite part what Kyle had to say:
Kyle:
Feminism allowed women to be anything they want. We really need an ongoing conversation like you're doing and for everybody else to start contributing to it, but especially for men to be involved in it.
What are the different kinds of masculinity? We have soft bi boy masculinity. That's super popular right now. Everybody wants one. You’ve got positive masculinity. You got Mr. Rogers out here. You don't have to toss masculinity away in order to leave out certain parts of it, like the aggression, the dominance, the misogyny. You can throw all of that out and still be a man in every way, shape, and form. And honestly, that's what people want from you, especially straight women.
There's a lot of men who are under the impression that they have to be one thing. They talk about alphas all the time. Being the fantasy sci-fi nerd that I am, I just find that to be a complete misunderstanding. They're like, you gotta be a Chad, you gotta be out there and look a certain way.
They've internalized so many bad messages. Get on Twitter and read the threads where they're like, ‘I want a man with a gut. I want my soft bi boy who will watch trashy girly TV with me.’
There's 4 billion women and 4 billion men on this planet. You don't have to be one specific type of guy that gets cast on Fuckboy Island. You don't have to have this perfect body but then also be kind of dumb so that people think that's cute and humorous. Find whatever is you and find how you can be that person. And build other people up. Because I firmly believe that we [men] are meant to support. We are meant to go out and accomplish things and accomplish things for our family, our friends, our society. We're meant to protect ourselves and protect other people, but not so much that you're like overstepping.
An ideal man, to me, is someone who goes out and helps and supports and protects, but leaves enough space so that that person you're helping or those people that you're helping understand when you're gone that they are their own first line of help and support and protection. It’s imbuing people with that sense of security when you're there and when they think about you, so when they can pull that into their own lives.
At the moment, people are really focused on being the leader. But they always forget the part where the leader is supposed to feel everybody's pain. The leader is supposed to care about if one person drops, you failed as a leader. It's not about being Donald Trump or that type of person who's just chauvinistic and putting on displays of power and strength and status. Good Lord. It's really about how are you helping the women in your life? How are you helping the other men in your life? Are you telling people you love them? Are you telling people you missed them? Are you telling people you're there for them?
And at the end of the day, right now, we're not doing that. But I really think conversations like this one and, honestly the growing prevalence of those soft bi boys that I was talking about, gives me a little bit of hope for the future and just kind of giving men more options. Because right now they feel like if they're not an athlete and they're not the gay boys succeeding at school, that they might as well go try and get a job at that furniture store or waste away in their house.
Full, corrected transcript below:
Cathy: Hi, Kyle Borland. It's so good to see you again. We first met at the Bay City Beacon several years ago when we were both writing for them in San Francisco. You covered cannabis mostly. I covered housing mostly. Since then you've started the Third Cultured, blog, I believe, newsletter. Is that hosted on Substack?
Kyle: Yeah, still, still on Substack.
Cathy: Fellow Substacker, love it. Love to see it. We are both queer kids from Alabama who left the south and in my case came back. I'm super excited to catch up with you and get your perspective on this question of US native-born men, and what's wrong with them and what's facing them.
And I think as an out gay man who grew up in an environment where that was… Another thing that we have in common is growing up in evangelical Christian environments. I’d just love to know kind of your perspective on the topics I've been writing about as far as polarization, atomization, men opting out of education, employment and training, declining marriage rates, declining fertility rates, like all that mess of problems.
In essence, what can the queer perspective, what light can the queer perspective shed on, on these phenomena?
Kyle: Yeah, absolutely. And, thank you for having me.
I'm super excited to be having this conversation with you. When you started kind of like the series of really like analyzing, like what the hell's going on with American men? My partner and I talk about it all the time. We're constantly, whenever, whether we're watching reality TV, talking to our friends, reading what straight women, women that have to engage with cishet men, just reading the things that they have to deal with, the conversations that they have to have. Really wondering like what the hell is going on? Like why, what, where did the split happen?
Because earlier this year a study come out that showed that if all the gay men by men in America were our own country, we'd be the most educated country in the world. I think it's like 52% of us have a bachelor's degree. We’re like 50% more likely to have a professional degree or PhD, a JD or an MD than a straight man.
And just like, why did that happen? I know for me personally, I think a lot of it has to do with most of my friends, if not 90%, all of my really close friends growing up were smart girls. Just girls who either, like they knew I was gay and didn't care or they were just like, ‘I don't know what that is. It's not on my radar. I'm focused on school.’ And those were just the people that I gravitated towards. Really, I was just playing catchup with them. I wasn't even like competing with any of my friends most of the time. I think my friend group, when I graduated from Prattville, and I had moved there sophomore year of high school.
So it was really like wherever I gravitated towards, let's like try and, make it work. One of them was the valedictorian. Four of them were the salutatorian cuz we had eight of them. I don't know. And so I was just like really trying to keep up with my friends. And, school was really, I remember ironically, like looking back on, it seemed so silly, but I just really needed to get an SAT score that had a three in the beginning of it. Because all my friends are getting 32s and higher, and I was like, ‘Fuck, I need to get to a 30.’
I ended up, I think I went like 24 the first time and I was like ‘Oh, God, I don't even want to tell them this.’ I don't even wanna, like, I'm gonna get kicked outta the group. Like I'm making the group look bad. And so I think a lot of it has to go back to just, what were the expectations, obviously as queer men, we have the, best little boy in the world syndrome.
I don't know if you've ever read The Velvet Rage. Generally, the idea is, because gay men, or just non-masc presenting men, it doesn't even have to be a gay or a queer just like, my dad is a straight man, but growing up just wasn't what the Northeast, he wasn’t what South Boston deemed masculine.
And so he dealt with, ironically, a lot of the same things that I did. And so it's really not just isolated to men who have sex with men, men who are into men. It's really just if you deviate at all in a masculine world, and especially when being a little boy, it’s just masculinity test after masculinity test, after masculinity test.
And if you fail those, more often than not, you kind of have to overcompensate somewhere else. And so queer men definitely overwhelmingly gravitate towards academics. We know we can excel there. We know we can own it at this point. And, and then just never really let go.
Whereas like, I guess at this point straight men are kind of trapped in that. They don't wanna be Nancy Drew, like that traditional femininity model. And now they don't wanna be seen as like, oh, if I'm trying too hard, are they gonna think I'm gay? Which is crazy.
Being a teenage boy, being a boy, being a man, is kind of crazy. They kind of lock themselves into sports and video games. And if they aren't good at sports that only leaves video games, which like now we have like e-sports, but it's kind of the same thing as sports.
If you don't have the skills, you're just wasting. And so I think it's just like an amalgamation of one not taking… I think the main thing is that men aren't taking responsibility for the choices that they made and what got them to a point where they have less choices as an adult, but also just the cultural forces that made them feel that way in general.
I know that's why I liked what your series was about so much. Because we do need to pivot the conversation from ‘Why are they so horrible?’ to like, ‘What can they be now? What can we provide them?’ Because they are being left behind and they are struggling a lot.
And just trying to find that balance. How do we support men? How do we especially support straight men without coddling them?
Cathy: That's a great way to put it. One of the things that I've loved about engaging more with left-leaning analysis is that it focuses more on… To vastly oversimplify, the right is very much about good people versus bad people and agency and choices. And the left is much more about incentives and systems, assuming everybody is good, everybody wants similar things but systems and structures and incentives make it more difficult for some people to have the same outcomes as other people.
And so it's like, okay, how do we take this beautiful lens and apply it to some of the people that maybe the left isn't as interested in being sympathetic towards? Not because they're more deserving. That's never where I want it to come from, is that like white men are more deserving of help than other groups. But just because we all need help.
And this is an area where I think the consequences of ignoring their problems are gonna be really bad for everybody. That's kind of my perspective and I'm glad that we're on the same page about it. And I wanted to dig into, there are several things that I appreciate about right-wing analysis.
One is the focus on things like, family, social structures, communities that are geographically near each other. I think these things are important. But another is, I do hear people on the right who are concerned about what's happening with men. They talk about the “feminization” of school and work.
And I think what you're saying is that, there's something contradictory between masculinity as it's currently conceived… And I wanna take a second to acknowledge that. I do believe that masculinity is policed much more aggressively than femininity. I think it's much easier for a girl growing up wherever she's growing up to choose between sports and academics.
And, obviously women are disincentivized from pursuing certain academic paths. But it is, I think, more socially acceptable for a girl to get outside of femininity than it is for a boy to get outside of masculinity. And so I'd love to hear your perspective on whether and to what extent to the reason that boys see academic achievement as unmasculine is due to education, let's just focus on K-12, being hostile to masculinity. Do you think there's anything to that?
Kyle: I think to an extent, yes, because, ironically, so with gay men and straight versus straight men across the board across races, across, income, we succeed more. It's not like white gays versus everybody else. Like it's just queer men are succeeding more than straight men. And ironically, the whole thing flips when you go to women. Because lesbians traditionally had more like degrees, were succeeding more than women, just because the things that were holding women back in the sixties that gap has closed a lot. Like with younger women, it's basically on par with each other, between straight and gay women.
But ironically, or unfortunately is probably the better word, unfortunately, that across all demographics doesn't hold. White lesbians can keep up with their counterparts. But every other racial group, they start succeeding less by like a substantial, significant amount and a lot of…
Cathay: Sorry to interrupt. It's my understanding that bisexual women are also at disadvantages in a lot of areas. They’re more likely to be victims of violence, domestic violence, more likely to have lower incomes. So I'm guessing that bisexual women would also have less academic achievement on average than straight women, but I don't know.
Kyle: Yeah, I was, I don't, they've said queer women in the study I was reading. So I assume just like anyone read as queer, kind of like deviating from that like Nancy Drew, good girl, academic track. And definitely black and brown women and black and brown girls, they're just automatically seen as more masculine, whether it's true or not, whether they present that way or not, that's just how they're viewed.
And so they do get targeted a lot more because they get in trouble. Like they get sent to detention, they get suspended or expelled, even if they're doing nothing, there'll be.. I think there was just a study. The teachers were told that they were doing one thing, but it was really a fake eye tracking test and the teachers just observed and just basically watched the black kids. And they were like, oh, they're doing something wrong. Oh, they're doing something wrong. Oh, they're doing something wrong. And so it would, I'll have to send you that, it just came out this week.
Cathay: I mean, there's robust evidence that black kids are policed more stringently and given harsher punishments for the same infractions as white kids.
Kyle: And I think that connection between automatically seeing more masculinity and definitely more of what we've now started labeling “toxic masculinity,” aggression just automatically from black and brown women. I definitely think it's pretty obvious, especially by high school, all boys, especially if they're just like those stereotypical, I don't wanna say stereotypical, but, traditional, representations of masculinity, people are just kind of programmed and be like, oh, he, he cares about these two or three things.
He's gonna be a troublemaker. And if he has friends, then they're all gonna be rowdy. And I mean, I know that growing up I knew to… I didn't really have anything to vibe with. The only straight boys that I was really friends with were the good little church boys that were also good at school, which, as much as I'm not a fan of religion, the community that church provides is so important.
If you have a non-religious family and you just don't have that stability, even if it's just like connected to other churches and just kind of that familiarity to talk to people, which might be very much like an Alabama Bible Belt thing, maybe it's not the same everywhere, but definitely that lack of community, whether you're getting it from sports, you're getting it from your church, you're getting it from literally wherever you can possibly get it. I do think that that starts to manifest, like even the teachers can see who the loners are. That energy radiates cuz one thing I personally believe about masculinity is controlling your energy, because we just project it.
Whether we know whether we have control over it or not. We just project ourselves into a room. And if you don't have the experience of interacting with other people, knowing how to make that energy supportive, knowing how to make it, like even if the people just can't sense that like, this is going to be a good conversation, or this is, this is an interaction that I really wanna have today, by high school and like middle school, I tended to believe that all middle schoolers are just rowdy and like, you can help anybody by middle school. But by high school, you're pretty ingrained and short of like a really good teacher, making an intervention, you've already decided if you're gonna be jaded or not, or if you're gonna interact and try and grow and like kind of that constant self-improvement is something that like.. I mean, it goes all the way back, to use a very stereotypical reference like Marcus Aralius, the whole Book of Meditations is just about, you have to keep improving.
You can never believe that whatever you are is enough. You need to learn more, you need to do more, you need to help more. You need to contribute more. And so I think there's a lot of, and then a lot of the anxiety and a lot of the chip on the shoulder is like, society's not giving me anything. Society's not doing anything for me. Like it's doing it for other people, but they don't take into account how much those people are participating, how much people are contributing, whether it's at school, like I was saying, or church or on a team or, wherever you find your interest to take place.
I know like I was on Goodreads and I had a little writing group on Goodreads, the first year or two I was in Alabama. Being a new, obviously gay boy in Pratville, Alabama, which is quoted in Axios as like one of the most conservative places in America, I had to find friends somewhere else. Luckily Goodreads and Tumblr existed. But even then, we had people coming from 4Chan and Reddit to shut down the site. So it was literally like the queers and the girls online, we couldn't even escape the harassment and the… Which on some level, I think that they thought they were playing around and they just don't, they just don't know lines.
They don't know boundaries and we all suffer for it, unfortunately.
Cathy: Yeah. I'm wondering about, I think that to a certain extent, something like school is going to be somewhat incompatible with certain aspects of masculinity. Your point about energy, I feel like it's often a more masculine manifestation of energy to be loud, to move your body, to want to affect physical change, to be possibly talking over people, things like that. And I think that to be competitive, some of those things I think can be very, compatible with education and learning. But some of them I think are just really not compatible with at least the way that we do education now, where it's a lecture model, where it's hours and hours of sitting still, where it's a lot of deference to authority, where it's not primarily a competitive situation.
And so I'm wondering whether you think that there are some common-sense, easy-to-implement changes in the way we do K-12 that could correct, perhaps, this disadvantage that let's say the average boy is at in an academic environment.
Kyle: I definitely think we have to stop just like talking, especially I think in cuz down south, you definitely know that we don't track, but we track for the gods.
Like you got your AP kids, you got your honors kids, you got your general kids. And if you're not an AP, they have given up on you already. Like honors. If you get to college, that's great. If you succeeded, something snaps for you. But they don't really care. The money and the success is all put into that AP model, those AP kids that they know are gonna just kind of go for it on their own.
Like they kind of already have built in that competition.
Cathy: I just wanna reiterate what you're saying. I was in a lot of regular classes in public school in Alabama, because I was lazy and didn't see the point of working harder. I'm like, I'm gonna go to college either way.
Literally boys, mostly, would get up in the middle of class while the teacher is trying to instruct and dance around in the room. And we had coaches who would be our instructors, who would literally just read from the textbook. We had textbooks that didn't have the first 50 pages, they'd been ripped off and they were just using them year after year.
I mean, the level of neglect for average students in public schools in much of America, I think it would really boggle a lot of people's minds. So just wanna, just wanna reiterate your point there.
Kyle: Yeah. No, it just reinforces to those kids what they already feel. And then you have the kids who are just like, I mean, this is great. Like the teacher doesn't care.
I like ran out of electives to take at one point. So I started taking psychology, sociology, which were general electives. And I was just like, it was just culture. I've moved all over, being a military kid, moved continents, moved to different states all the time.
And that was probably one of the biggest culture shocks, just going from one hallway to another hallway. And it's that segregated other than like, when you take health class in 10th grade and they have to funnel everyone in there and then you go back to your perspective zones. And so like that, that communicates to kids that we already know where you're at. It's that the energy that's being radiated and rather than the kids that dance or the kids that would just start like rapping in the middle of class or people who would just start breaking out into song in the middle of a class.
One of my best learning experiences through K-12 through college was in grad school when the teacher came in and all of us were talking about something that was going on in the world and how it applied and she just kind of sat there and listened to us for two minutes.
And she was like, okay. Okay. Hold on. And then she completely threw the lesson out and took what we were already talking about, took what was going on in the world and actually applied it and made it this fun discussion. Rather than being like, I did this lesson plan, we're gonna do these things, which obviously I'm not trying to tell teachers how to do their job. They have ridiculous constraints and expectations and no resources to do it. But there are definitely folks who they get put in classes that they see as low effort. And they put in even less effort than is expected of them. We have to get kids excited about learning, cuz then we can't be surprised, especially with boys who become men who are problematic or they're just not contributing to society.
Like our current labor shortage. Every time I hear it, I'm just like, gentlemen, I need you to get off Twitch and I need you to go build some stuff.
Cathay: Yeah. Well, but I think this goes back to K-12 where it essentially spits out two kinds of kids: The kids who are going to college and the kids who are not. And the kids who are not do not graduate with any qualifications to do any labor that they didn't have before they started high school.
At 16 you're allowed to work at McDonald's and when you’ve graduated at 18, you're the same level of employability. And it's like, okay, we have all these occupational licenses for construction jobs and the skilled trades.. (which I definitely think we need to streamline those licensure requirements) but it's like, you have these kids captive for hours a day. Why not graduate the kids who are not going to college with a certification? Why not ensure that they've had an apprenticeship before they graduate? Why not ensure that there's something that they're qualified to do when they get done so that they're not then having to go into debt?
They're not then having to figure out because a lot of it is just bureaucracy. How do I get the certification? What's the test that I take? And it's like, rather than teaching them the pythagorean theorum or whatever? They don't know it when they're done anyway. Let's get them in a shop and under a car and making a structure. There's a lot of opportunity. And if we wanna brand it as like masculinizing K-12 to make the base happy, like that's fine with me. But I do think that there is something to be said about, and I love what you brought up about looking at who succeeds in school.
And the fact that gay men are having an easier time, but lesbian women aren't does I think, speak to this idea that there is something at odds between masculinity, at least as currently seen and educational attainment. There's a disconnect there, so I appreciate that.
I want to wrap up. I wanted to give you a chance to give me any last thoughts that you wanted to get across and then tell people more about where to find more of your brilliant thoughts.
Kyle: Yeah. Thank you again. Thank you so much. I think that my final thoughts would just be that, again, this all.. not to be like super queer about it, but we love binary in America.. I think there's a lot of people who like you are either doing toxic masculinity or you're doing like good masculinity.
Feminism allowed women to be anything they want. There's so many different kinds of women. We really need an ongoing conversation like you're doing and for everybody else to start contributing to it, but especially for men to be involved in it. What are the different kinds of masculinity? We have soft bi boy masculinity. That's super popular right now. Everybody wants one. You’ve got positive masculinity. You got Mr. Rogers out here. You don't have to toss masculinity away in order to leave out certain parts of it, like the aggression, the dominance, the misogyny. You can throw all of that out and still be a man in every way, shape, and form. And honestly, that's what people want from you, especially straight women.
There's a lot of men who are under the impression that they have to be one thing. They talk about alphas all the time. Being the fantasy sci-fi nerd that I am, I just find that to be a complete misunderstanding. They're like, you gotta be a Chad, you gotta be out there and look a certain way.
They've internalized so many bad messages. Get on Twitter and read the threads where they're like, I want a man with a gut. I want my soft bi boy who will watch trashy girly TV with me. There’s like there's 4 billion women and 4 billion men on this planet.
You don't have to be one specific type of guy that gets cast on Fuckboy Island. You don't have to have this perfect body but then also be kind of dumb so that people think that's cute and humorous. Find whatever is you and find how you can be that person. And build other people up, because I firmly believe, although I know people are like men have been at the center of society.
Look at the military. We are sandbags. We are expendable sandbags. And we are meant to support. We are meant to go out and accomplish things and accomplish things for our family, our friends, our society. We're meant to protect ourselves and protect other people, but not so much that you're like overstepping. An ideal man to me is someone who goes out and helps and supports and protects, but leaves enough space so that that person you're helping or those people that you're helping understand when you're gone that they are their own first line of help and support and protection. It’s imbuing people with that sense of security when you're there in their presence and when they think about you, so when they can pull that into their own lives. At the moment, people are really focused on being that leader. But they always forget the part where the leader is supposed to feel everybody's pain. The leader is supposed to care about if one person drops, you failed as a leader. It's not about being Donald Trump or that type of person who's just chauvinistic and putting on displays of power and strength and status. Good Lord. It's really about how are you helping the women in your life? How are you helping the other men in your life? Are you telling people you love them? Are you telling people you missed them? Are you telling people you're there for them?
And at the end of the day, right now, we're not doing that. But I really think conversations like this one and, honestly the growing prevalence of those soft bi boys that I was talking about, gives me a little bit of hope for the future and just kind of giving men more options because right now they feel like if they're not an athlete and they're not the gay boys succeeding at school that they might as well go try and get a job at that furniture store or waste away in their house.
You're a man. You need to be outside. Your testosterone goes up when you're in the sun, go outside.
CathyL I love it. I love it. I think masculinity should be a positive force. It should be a guide. It shouldn't be a prison. It shouldn't be limiting. And yeah, I would say this has really helped me clarify.
I think my message to native-born US men, especially young men, is: ‘You are not extra. You are necessary. We need you. We need what you have to offer, especially if it falls outside of whatever you've been told masculinity is.’
Okay. Where can people find you?
Kyle: So you can find me at ThirdCultured.substack.com. It's a newsletter about how queer people fit into diplomacy, politics, and war. I really try to bring attention to what's going on with queer people all around the world, because it's not just Obergefell happened and everything's fine. We have a lot of backlash going. We have a lot of progress going at the same time, you know?
Being a queer person, it's always an ongoing conversation, ongoing dynamic all around the world. And then on basically any other social media. If you look up kgBorland, you're gonna find me. kgborland.com has all my published writings listed there. I probably need to update a little bit.
Cathy: Fantastic. I can't recommend Kyle's writing enough, especially if you're interested in the topics he's covering. He's an excellent writer, excellent social media presence, and a wonderful friend. So thank you so much for your time. It was so great to catch up. I'd love to have you on again. Let me know if you have any more thoughts about things you wanna cover.
A queer perspective on men's woes