Why boys hate liberalism

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I’m still sick, so, again, if this doesn’t make sense pretend it does.

I got a comment on Loneliness, boys, and Andrew Tate that I find so interesting I want to write a response long enough that it might as well be its own post.

Here’s the part of what Christopher Nuttall wrote that I most want to address:

We need to be forgiving of minor transgressions that – when not forgiven – provide cover to major transgressions.

Why this?

Men have a tendency to speak and/or act first, without thinking. This tends to lead to them putting their foot in their mouth and saying something that gets a response that they see as a massive overreaction (see thread below). This fuels a general suspicion and contempt for feminine reactions and/or judgement, which tends to obscure the fact that some ‘overreactions’ are nothing of the sort. Worse, because this mistake is never left in the past, it becomes a source of resentment and eventual hatred. Men think “I apologised so many times and made it up to her time and time again and she just won’t shut up about it and I’m sick of it and I’ve had enough!”

This never ends well.

Then Christopher pointed to this thread:

joanna schroeder @iproposethis

Do you have white teenage sons? Listen up. I've been watching my boys' online behavior & noticed that social media and vloggers are actively laying groundwork in white teens to turn them into alt-right/white supremacists. Here's how:

I’m glad to see people thinking deeply about what’s going on with boys and men.

The point about forgiving minor transgressions is interesting. I think there's something to that.

To vastly overgeneralize, I think the right is too fond of Nazis and the left is too fond of purity tests. I’m no leftist. But I’m also no both-sides-er. Purity tests are bad. Nazis are worse.

HOWEVER, here’s what I’ll say about the right: They get shit done. I mean look at our elected representatives. Republican electeds take positions farrr to the right of the average conservative. I’m talking fetal personhood laws, gay marriage abolition, etc. Democrat electeds want to fund the police and deport refugees. Or look at the culture wars. Far-right donors like Peter Thiel, Charles Koch, and Dennis Prager fund YouTube channels, news outlets, broadcast media, talk radio, social media, etc. dominated by far-right bullshit artists peddling slavery revisionism and blatant misogyny aimed at the lowest common denominator viewer. Far-left donors have… academic papers. I saw it when I lived in D.C. Right-leaning organizations had robust programs for recruiting young people to work in think tanks, volunteer for campaigns, write letters, get trained to run for office, get trained to become pundits, and donate. Left-leaning organizations hired a few interns every semester and called it good.

So how does this impact men? Well, I think Christopher is right that men are more impulsive than women on average. Is this the result of innate sex differences? Probably at least to some extent. Though I don’t think we should let socialization entirely off the hook.

Gender essentialism hobbyhorse time commence!

Studies show male and female infants are treated differently based on the gender they’re assigned at birth. From the moment someone assigns a kid a gender, they’re rewarded when they perform that gender according to expectations and punished for failing to perform it.

As they grow, girls are penalized more harshly than boys for failing to show adequate conscientiousness. Boys, on the other hand, are penalized more harshly than girls for failing to show adequate bravery, aggression, and bias toward action. Boys are also, in my reading and opinion, generally penalized more aggressively for performing femininity than girls are for performing masculinity. So, it would make sense that socialization would influence boys’ average greater tendency toward speaking their mind without thinking deeply about how what they’re saying might make another feel.

Gender essentialism hobbyhorse time concluded!

So — whether by nature, nurture, or both — boys probably do have a greater tendency than girls on average to put “their feet in their mouth,” as Christopher put it.

If all this is true, it would make sense that boys would feel alienated from left-wing social communities where they can expect harsh social sanctions for saying the wrong thing, or merely saying the right thing the wrong way.

For all the “facts don’t care about your feelings” on the right, the reality is that in many important, underappreciated ways, feelings are the only reality. If I’ve learned anything from spending the vast majority of my productive time over the last 15 years trying in one way or another to change people’s minds, behavior, or both, it’s this: People do not change their minds about things they care about through facts and logic. The average person becomes ready to consider thinking differently about a topic they care about only after being persuaded to first feel differently about it.

The right has the tremendous advantage of peddling orthodoxy. That is, if you just swallow messages from the broader culture without any critical thinking or additional information and then spit them out again you’ll be 99% in lockstep with the right. For example, surveys show most white people believe white people are the main victims of racism today. So one would expect a naive white boy to say something like “Racism against Black people is mostly over and the people who claim otherwise are making things up and/or making mountains out of molehills.” This kind of statement will get him friends on the right, and absolutely canceled on the left.

I truly feel the left’s frustration when encountering messaging seeming to suggest toning down anti-bigotry to not alienate boys and men. That’s not what I’m suggesting. A note: I’m not suggesting coddling boys and men for their own sake alone (though I do think that’s reason enough because boys and men are, in fact, people). I’m suggesting everyone is better off when there are fewer authoritarians, and the discourse and macroeconomics are unfortunately pushing men and boys especially in that direction.

My main suggestion is that liberals try harder to love everyone.

To illustrate the point, I’m going to tell a story.

My Buddhist monk friend was recently telling me about an in-person meetup of Twitter folks he attended last year. He mentioned that Curtis Yarvin was there. I shared with him and my two other friends my assessment of that group of people: “They’re not Nazis, but they’re way too tolerant of Nazis.” As you’d expect of someone who specializes in lovingkindness meditation, my monk friend told me, essentially, that it’s wise to try to find the good in everyone. I said, essentially, fuck that shit.

But upon further reflection, I decided I agreed with my monk friend. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, but I think it’s most useful to judge ideas as good or bad, rather than people. What I really think about that group of people is that they’re too tolerant of virulent racism. I think an essential part of liberalism is favoring discourse over tribalism. Rather than disinviting Yarvin, I wish I had confidence someone, multiple someones, had engaged critically with him on his slavery apologism.

What I’d like to see more of on the left is call-in culture. Its fundamental premise is that everyone is basically good, but often lacks some valuable information and perspective. My online friend Kitty Stryker recently posted on Facebook asking for one memory of her. I mentioned the time she gently, lovingly called me in about something I’d tweeted that came across as fatphobic.

Call-out and cancel culture are fundamentally tribalistic approaches. They seek to identify and ostracize the outgroup from the ingroup. Liberalism is fundamentally cosmopolitan. It seeks to help everyone live in harmony.

Obviously safety is a concern. In some instances ostracization is the right move. But for those of us who have the safety and privilege to call in, I think it will yield better results than other approaches.

Header images come from me putting the headline or some body copy when the headline violates the TOS into OpenAI’s DALL-E. Today’s prompt was “surrealist painting of a boy being chastised by a woman.”

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