Two books tackle how men are falling behind in college, labor, and mental health. Maybe it's time to stop telling men we don't need them? Plus: A fired NYU prof, and the celebrity-fertility delusion
My degree was in Physics, and the group of people most disliked by professors and grad students in the Physics department were the pre-med students. Pre-meds were required to take at least two semesters of calculus-based physics -- the same classes as engineers and scientists. Because pre-meds were all very bright and hard-working, and because competition to get into med school is so bonkers, these students expected and needed to get As in all of their classes.
For most pre-meds, the physics classes, especially the second semester on quantum mechanics, were the classes where they were most likely to get a B, because it's just not easy material and our professors did not fuck around -- most of the people in the class were going into fields where you at least theoretically might need to understand this stuff. So for a lot of these young strivers, the difference between getting to be a doctor and not boiled down to whether they got an A or B in a quantum mechanics class.
As you can imagine, this caused pretty annoying behavior. Pre-meds would come pleading to professors and TAs anytime they lost points on their homework or tests and they thought they might have deserved more. If, heaven forbid, they got less than an A, they would complain to high heaven and sometimes even file formal grievances with the university. So yeah, everyone hated them, and you can see why.
But on the other hand, it was really fucked up that whether you got to be a doctor or not depended in significant part on whether you got an A or B in your quantum mechanics class. Trust me, you do not need to understand quantum mechanics to be a good front-line doctor, in fact the mental traits for that are almost the opposite of what you'd want to cultivate in your doctors.
All this is to say, the o-chem professor story is pretty nuts, but I've been thoroughly red-pilled on a lot of med school prerequisite stuff. We should just create more med school capacity, make more doctors, and drop all these pointless weed-out classes that everyone hates.
Vinay Prasad wrote about this case in his Substack today and I thought covered it pretty well from all angles. He doesn't think the university handled it well and also doesn't think requiring organic chemistry makes any sense at all for medical students. I always heard organic chem was really hard; glad I could stay well away from it as a math/computer guy.
I heard Prasad and Z-Dog talk about this on their podcast. I agree with their takes. I've never taken org so I can't comment on it as a prerequisite for med school. A friend of mine does biochemical research - he's mentioned to me that org requires a really different approach to the subject than most students have encountered, meaning that a lot of students are caught off-guard by it.
I love all the episodes, but I put this one as one of your best. I especially enjoyed your back-and-forth on the "book that changed my life" part; my reading list just keeps getting longer. Love the episode title, too! And definitely up for live chat.
Thanks for this great conversation about boys and men. I love men! I have a son, who is sweet, smart, and responsible. He loves babies! He always goes over to people's babies and plays peek-a-boo with them (he's 12). I want him to stay that way - it will make him a good partner.
If you haven't listened to Cocaine and Rhinestones (deep dives into country music history), there's a fantastic episode about Loretta Lynn and her song "The Pill": https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/loretta-lynn-pill-ban. Lots of other songs are covered, including your outro (love that song). By the way, definitely check out the notes and links provided for that episode.
Finally, about that professor and his students. I've been a professor for 20 years now. I'm good at what I do (I've won many teaching awards, etc.) - not a humblebrag but it's relevant for context. I also teach difficult languages that require a lot of work in and outside class. There are a lot of sides to this story. First, because he's not tenured, he's vulnerable. His way of testing is old-school and falling out of favor, in my opinion, for good reasons. A test that has a high score of 30% isn't helpful to students or teachers, because it's not designed to assess student learning effectively. Remember that this class was huge - over 300 - so this isn't a matter of a small sample.
Second, a lot of professors did see student performance decline during the pandemic. Because so many students went from online high school to online college classes, they missed out on a lot of socialization regarding class behavior and college expectations. Here's an example from a student evaluation of the first term of this difficult language I teach: "Since we meet 5 times a week, I don't understand why there was so much emphasis on self-study." Well, it's COLLEGE - where you need to take charge of your learning - ideally students should be studying 2 hours outside class for every hour in class. That's in addition to many teachers being far more lenient than they would otherwise have been.
Third, online classes don't work for many people for a lot of reasons, definitely including distraction. While I benefitted from students having their Zoom cameras on (and I hope they did too), I didn't really want to see students doing things like painting their toenails during class, or students' roommates walking behind them with only a towel wrapped around them. And a lot of students, before, during, and after pandemic classes, never take advantage of many of the resources they have available. It's really easy to tell yourself that it's fine to skip class because you'll watch the class video later, and then never follow through.
Fourth, administration and tuition. Everybody knows college is too expensive, particularly at places like NYU. That makes students and parents act like customers. Administration wants to keep retention high, for a couple of reasons, one obviously to keep the money pipeline flowing, but also because they want students to finish their degrees (cynical take: alumni are far more likely to donate than people who drop out, but admin also genuinely wants students to complete their education). Contingent faculty who get complaints and low student evaluations? BYE! (BTW note that over half of college faculty nowadays are adjuncts or on contract - tenure has become far more rare over the past 30 years plus).
I wanted to add that my husband, a physics professor, told me that one reason for org professors making tests so difficult is due to rampant cheating - and cheating comes up in the NYT article. It takes no time for a pirated downloadable solution manual to appear whenever a new textbook edition is released.
Been busy so I didn’t get a chance to listen until this morning.
This is a nice break from all the serious stuff going on.
I found myself laughing out loud and mumbling “engineering” while the two of you struggled with STEM andI thoroughly enjoyed this episode.
RE: Loretta Lynn: I’m not a country music fan by any stretch of the imagination. It was always just noise playing in the background of many places I have worked until I became senior enough to control the music.
A couple years ago I watched Ken Burns Country Music series on PBS out of pure boredom. I wasn’t expecting much.
Boy was I wrong.
There were many interesting characters in the series but I have to say that Loretta Lynn was one of my favorites . She was very down to earth and plain spoken with her various anecdotes about her career and the music business in general.
This one gave me some thoughts. First of all, the school stuff is totally true, in my experience. I raised a classically stoic and masculine little boy who was very bright and loved to read, but always disliked school. I had an epiphany when I read The War Against Boys when Nick was in elementary school - school was ‘coded’ to work for girls and Nick was coded all boy. And it never got better. Our daughter, despite far more obvious deficits (she is physically disabled with cerebral palsy and also has some learning disabilities), did very well in school. She was top of her class in high school and went straight on to college and grad school and is a tenured PhD professor today. Nick did graduate from high school, as he knew it was nonnegotiable, but he did it a year early, by taking summer school classes after his junior year to get just enough credits to get his diploma and join the Navy. He became a Hospital Corpsman, and worked his whole 8 year active career as a field medic for the Marines (who don’t have their own medical corps, so they use the Navy). He did very well in the military which, at least in those days, was coded male. When he left active duty, he used his GI Bill to go to college, still hating it all the way. He graduated and went to work at a VA medical center, on the psych ward. He planned to continue working with veterans with PTSD. He died in 2019, at age 33, leaving the world short one great man.
My second Big Thought about this episode also relates somewhat to Nick, but also to my own experience as a housewife, which was my career for about 20 years. I used to read a lot in those days about the ‘crisis’ in jobs for women. These articles always cited the figures of women who were ‘unemployed’ without ever breaking out the numbers of women like myself who weren’t employed or looking for work because we were purposefully part of one income families. Which brings me to Nick’s friends, most of whom are manly men like he was - veterans, many of them, and most of them outdoorsy hunting and fishing types. And a surprisingly large number of them are stay at home dads. You would think (or at least I did, and was surprised to learn different) that Nick’s cohort of classically masculine and mostly conservative men would look down on this choice, but they don’t at all. They view it as a pragmatic choice. Their wives (most of whom, like my daughter, did well in school) are the primary wage earners in their family, and doing the math with the costs of day care, they find that having a parent at home to cover all the home front labor is a good thing. And these guys treat their work at home like a real job. During my housewife days, I knew a LOT of fellow housewives whom I considered to be slackers. Most of them were fellow Navy wives, whose husbands, like mine, spent 12-14 hours a day commuting and working, while their wives spent much of their days on TV, shopping and personal hobbies, then expected their husbands (and bitched constantly that they wouldn’t) to come home and do their “fair share” of the housework. Nick’s househusband friends don’t do this. Like I did in my day, they view their work in the home as their 9-5 work and they treat it as seriously as they did their paid jobs. And their families all benefit, like mine did, by having a wage earner who can fully concentrate on work, without worrying about/ being exhausted from a second workday shift of cooking and scrubbing toilets. They all plan to return to the workplace eventually, like I did myself, once it makes sense for their families, but they all currently meet the criteria of ‘unemployed and not looking for work.’ So my question, at long last, is this: did the authors of these books (which I’m planning to buy and read) consider stay at home dads when they were calculating their unemployed men stats?
Tammy, thank you for this considered and granular response, and I am of course very sad to learn of the loss of your son Nick. I'm not Jewish but I love the phrase, may his memory be a blessing. As for breaking out whether some of these NILFs were stay-at-home dads, in fact Eberstadt did do this, and these men cared for children or others on average *less* than any other demographic. They were, alas, truly receding in every way. It's heartbreaking.
I'm a Navy veteran, and I'm very sorry to hear of your son's death. I help with reading groups for vets through Vet Centers - we try to build community for vets to work through their experiences and talk to one another.
I appreciate your comments about husbands and wives. I'm also planning to read the books mentioned in this episode.
ETA: I wanted to add that I really admire corpsman for the responsibilities they have as well as the training they go through. They often don't get the credit they deserve.
Sarah - in all my long life, the only time I’ve ever said, “I will do banana if you you will do zucchini,’ is when I really kinda wanted an excuse to do banana. I’m just saying.
True true. Clearly I wanted to do banana. It's just that banana now strikes me as very bold, involved, and scary! Alas, a deal's a deal. Banana, here I come. -- SH
I grew up in rural East Texas and we called teachers Miss or Ma’am and close adults who weren’t family but you saw them very often (like Sunday school teachers and friend’s moms) were also called Miss regardless of marital status. So, my best friend’s mom was Miss Patsy and her dad was Mr. Mack. My husband grew up in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Charlotte and he said they only did it when visiting family in Texas. I think Nancy is correct from my lived experience ;)
Matt Welch's interview with Nichola Eberstadt on The Fifth Column is well worth a listen and a good complement to Sarah and Nancy's discussion. The number and trends discussed here are alarming. Maybe I don't know enough young folks, but nobody I know is in this NILF category (and they really need a better acronym than that.)
I loved Kat Rosenfield's "No One Will Miss Her". I remember listening to the audiobook a year ago with a friend on a long cross country drive, in particular when we got to the Big Reveal -- woah, did NOT see that coming. I've already pre-ordered "You Must Remember This".
And, the E in STEM is Engineering
Thank you again for the show notes. My local library is about to reserve a few books for me..
The description of backing out of the room is really apt. I have become less social and engaged in communities that I used to be active in because I get tired of hearing my demographic run down and the sense that if I protest I will just be exhibiting toxic masculinity.
I’m not a NILF (a term that amuses me because I unpack it to “nobody I’d like to..”) but I do plan on leaving the labor force as soon as I feel that I can afford it and regularly fantasize about retiring somewhere rural where I can just be alone to pursue my interests without bothering anyone or dealing with anyone being bothered.
I don’t plan on living my life in obsessing on others disdain, but I do feel tribeless and resented, and do organize my life around minimizing how much that affects me.
And I am genx, and can remember better times. When we had subcultures that mattered more than sex or race. I think if I had come of age starting in 2012 I might have internalized the messaging in an even less healthy way.
When I saw Loretta Lynn’s death announced, I had a similar reaction as to the death of Queen Elizabeth - you knew it was inevitable given her age, but still felt like a huge loss. Growing up, I remember being aware of Loretta Lynn and Coal Miner’s Daughter and knowing some of her other music, but it wasn’t until her 2004 album Van Lear Rose (with Jack White) that I dove head first into fandom. Coal Miner’s Daughter was also an autobiography with a follow up Still Woman Enough- both great following her life from poor girl from a Kentucky holler to Queen in her own right of country. Also love reading about the family she came from and the huge family she and Doo created.
Every year on Doo’s birthday, and maybe their anniversary, she would post on FB about how much she missed him. Her spirit must overjoyed to be reunited with his after 25+ years.
Oh I forgot - in 2004, I put seeing Loretta live on my bucket list. Several years later, I was able to check it off my list when I saw her at the iconic 930 club in DC. She was in her early 80s. Amazing. One of my most cherished concert experiences.
This episode was really great, and actually something I really needed. I'm a man who has slways struggled with self esteem and am a Highly Sensitive Person (which means my brain is wired to take everything personally. I wish every day that wasn't the case). It really did a number on me emotionally when a lot of my female fiends IRL, people who have been in my home and/or I have done favors for, would post about how sick of white men they were and how there should be a moritorium on hiring men for jobs and show photos of their "male tears" coffee mugs. When I was looking for a job (never been a NILF!), going online would feel like walking in a minefield and the despair I was feeling was actually funny to prople I thought were my friends.
I have so much more to say about this but I'll just say this: I appreciate "Smoke 'Em if You Got 'Em" (and "Feminine Chaos" and "A Special Place in Hell") for not making me feel terrible about myself.
I also agree with everything Nancy said about Mary Gaitskill. I feel so raw emotionally when I finish reading her. I can't think of another writer that does that (JCO, like Sarah said, probably comes closest).
RE: Feminism doesn't have to be a zero sum game. I disagree. If women are tired of housework, day care, teaching kindergarten, secretarial work, and being a nurse instead of a doctor, then what makes you think men will want these roles? Let's face it: For every female CEO, college president, military officer, etc.; that's one less prestigious job that's going to go to a man. Feminism is a necessary and enevitable movement in a free society, but let's not pretend it comes without costs to men.
I haven't listened to the entire episode yet, but just broke in to say that I have a copy of The Body on my nightstand right now. I bought it for my son a few months ago because Stand By Me is one of his favourite movies and I thought the novella it's based on would be a guaranteed hit with the kid - alas, no. He brought it to me the other night, said he gave it a whirl, and it's just not his cup of tea. (He's partial to graphic novels and Japanese manga). So, his loss, my gain, I'm thinking. I was going to wait to finish a different book before I started, but after hearing Sarah talk about the opening paragraph, I'm just gonna dive in now.
And on the subject of being a mother to a son, I can't wait to listen to the rest of this episode, The Richard Reeves title is now on my wish list.
My degree was in Physics, and the group of people most disliked by professors and grad students in the Physics department were the pre-med students. Pre-meds were required to take at least two semesters of calculus-based physics -- the same classes as engineers and scientists. Because pre-meds were all very bright and hard-working, and because competition to get into med school is so bonkers, these students expected and needed to get As in all of their classes.
For most pre-meds, the physics classes, especially the second semester on quantum mechanics, were the classes where they were most likely to get a B, because it's just not easy material and our professors did not fuck around -- most of the people in the class were going into fields where you at least theoretically might need to understand this stuff. So for a lot of these young strivers, the difference between getting to be a doctor and not boiled down to whether they got an A or B in a quantum mechanics class.
As you can imagine, this caused pretty annoying behavior. Pre-meds would come pleading to professors and TAs anytime they lost points on their homework or tests and they thought they might have deserved more. If, heaven forbid, they got less than an A, they would complain to high heaven and sometimes even file formal grievances with the university. So yeah, everyone hated them, and you can see why.
But on the other hand, it was really fucked up that whether you got to be a doctor or not depended in significant part on whether you got an A or B in your quantum mechanics class. Trust me, you do not need to understand quantum mechanics to be a good front-line doctor, in fact the mental traits for that are almost the opposite of what you'd want to cultivate in your doctors.
All this is to say, the o-chem professor story is pretty nuts, but I've been thoroughly red-pilled on a lot of med school prerequisite stuff. We should just create more med school capacity, make more doctors, and drop all these pointless weed-out classes that everyone hates.
Thank you for this!
Vinay Prasad wrote about this case in his Substack today and I thought covered it pretty well from all angles. He doesn't think the university handled it well and also doesn't think requiring organic chemistry makes any sense at all for medical students. I always heard organic chem was really hard; glad I could stay well away from it as a math/computer guy.
I heard Prasad and Z-Dog talk about this on their podcast. I agree with their takes. I've never taken org so I can't comment on it as a prerequisite for med school. A friend of mine does biochemical research - he's mentioned to me that org requires a really different approach to the subject than most students have encountered, meaning that a lot of students are caught off-guard by it.
So true about pre-meds. I took the physics courses in college that weren't curved, and that's what all of the pre-meds took as well.
I love all the episodes, but I put this one as one of your best. I especially enjoyed your back-and-forth on the "book that changed my life" part; my reading list just keeps getting longer. Love the episode title, too! And definitely up for live chat.
Thanks for this great conversation about boys and men. I love men! I have a son, who is sweet, smart, and responsible. He loves babies! He always goes over to people's babies and plays peek-a-boo with them (he's 12). I want him to stay that way - it will make him a good partner.
If you haven't listened to Cocaine and Rhinestones (deep dives into country music history), there's a fantastic episode about Loretta Lynn and her song "The Pill": https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/loretta-lynn-pill-ban. Lots of other songs are covered, including your outro (love that song). By the way, definitely check out the notes and links provided for that episode.
Finally, about that professor and his students. I've been a professor for 20 years now. I'm good at what I do (I've won many teaching awards, etc.) - not a humblebrag but it's relevant for context. I also teach difficult languages that require a lot of work in and outside class. There are a lot of sides to this story. First, because he's not tenured, he's vulnerable. His way of testing is old-school and falling out of favor, in my opinion, for good reasons. A test that has a high score of 30% isn't helpful to students or teachers, because it's not designed to assess student learning effectively. Remember that this class was huge - over 300 - so this isn't a matter of a small sample.
Second, a lot of professors did see student performance decline during the pandemic. Because so many students went from online high school to online college classes, they missed out on a lot of socialization regarding class behavior and college expectations. Here's an example from a student evaluation of the first term of this difficult language I teach: "Since we meet 5 times a week, I don't understand why there was so much emphasis on self-study." Well, it's COLLEGE - where you need to take charge of your learning - ideally students should be studying 2 hours outside class for every hour in class. That's in addition to many teachers being far more lenient than they would otherwise have been.
Third, online classes don't work for many people for a lot of reasons, definitely including distraction. While I benefitted from students having their Zoom cameras on (and I hope they did too), I didn't really want to see students doing things like painting their toenails during class, or students' roommates walking behind them with only a towel wrapped around them. And a lot of students, before, during, and after pandemic classes, never take advantage of many of the resources they have available. It's really easy to tell yourself that it's fine to skip class because you'll watch the class video later, and then never follow through.
Fourth, administration and tuition. Everybody knows college is too expensive, particularly at places like NYU. That makes students and parents act like customers. Administration wants to keep retention high, for a couple of reasons, one obviously to keep the money pipeline flowing, but also because they want students to finish their degrees (cynical take: alumni are far more likely to donate than people who drop out, but admin also genuinely wants students to complete their education). Contingent faculty who get complaints and low student evaluations? BYE! (BTW note that over half of college faculty nowadays are adjuncts or on contract - tenure has become far more rare over the past 30 years plus).
Thank you for this!
I wanted to add that my husband, a physics professor, told me that one reason for org professors making tests so difficult is due to rampant cheating - and cheating comes up in the NYT article. It takes no time for a pirated downloadable solution manual to appear whenever a new textbook edition is released.
You ladies are the sirens in the shoals of heterodoxy; that is where you lie.
Been busy so I didn’t get a chance to listen until this morning.
This is a nice break from all the serious stuff going on.
I found myself laughing out loud and mumbling “engineering” while the two of you struggled with STEM andI thoroughly enjoyed this episode.
RE: Loretta Lynn: I’m not a country music fan by any stretch of the imagination. It was always just noise playing in the background of many places I have worked until I became senior enough to control the music.
A couple years ago I watched Ken Burns Country Music series on PBS out of pure boredom. I wasn’t expecting much.
Boy was I wrong.
There were many interesting characters in the series but I have to say that Loretta Lynn was one of my favorites . She was very down to earth and plain spoken with her various anecdotes about her career and the music business in general.
Check it out...
This one gave me some thoughts. First of all, the school stuff is totally true, in my experience. I raised a classically stoic and masculine little boy who was very bright and loved to read, but always disliked school. I had an epiphany when I read The War Against Boys when Nick was in elementary school - school was ‘coded’ to work for girls and Nick was coded all boy. And it never got better. Our daughter, despite far more obvious deficits (she is physically disabled with cerebral palsy and also has some learning disabilities), did very well in school. She was top of her class in high school and went straight on to college and grad school and is a tenured PhD professor today. Nick did graduate from high school, as he knew it was nonnegotiable, but he did it a year early, by taking summer school classes after his junior year to get just enough credits to get his diploma and join the Navy. He became a Hospital Corpsman, and worked his whole 8 year active career as a field medic for the Marines (who don’t have their own medical corps, so they use the Navy). He did very well in the military which, at least in those days, was coded male. When he left active duty, he used his GI Bill to go to college, still hating it all the way. He graduated and went to work at a VA medical center, on the psych ward. He planned to continue working with veterans with PTSD. He died in 2019, at age 33, leaving the world short one great man.
My second Big Thought about this episode also relates somewhat to Nick, but also to my own experience as a housewife, which was my career for about 20 years. I used to read a lot in those days about the ‘crisis’ in jobs for women. These articles always cited the figures of women who were ‘unemployed’ without ever breaking out the numbers of women like myself who weren’t employed or looking for work because we were purposefully part of one income families. Which brings me to Nick’s friends, most of whom are manly men like he was - veterans, many of them, and most of them outdoorsy hunting and fishing types. And a surprisingly large number of them are stay at home dads. You would think (or at least I did, and was surprised to learn different) that Nick’s cohort of classically masculine and mostly conservative men would look down on this choice, but they don’t at all. They view it as a pragmatic choice. Their wives (most of whom, like my daughter, did well in school) are the primary wage earners in their family, and doing the math with the costs of day care, they find that having a parent at home to cover all the home front labor is a good thing. And these guys treat their work at home like a real job. During my housewife days, I knew a LOT of fellow housewives whom I considered to be slackers. Most of them were fellow Navy wives, whose husbands, like mine, spent 12-14 hours a day commuting and working, while their wives spent much of their days on TV, shopping and personal hobbies, then expected their husbands (and bitched constantly that they wouldn’t) to come home and do their “fair share” of the housework. Nick’s househusband friends don’t do this. Like I did in my day, they view their work in the home as their 9-5 work and they treat it as seriously as they did their paid jobs. And their families all benefit, like mine did, by having a wage earner who can fully concentrate on work, without worrying about/ being exhausted from a second workday shift of cooking and scrubbing toilets. They all plan to return to the workplace eventually, like I did myself, once it makes sense for their families, but they all currently meet the criteria of ‘unemployed and not looking for work.’ So my question, at long last, is this: did the authors of these books (which I’m planning to buy and read) consider stay at home dads when they were calculating their unemployed men stats?
Tammy, thank you for this considered and granular response, and I am of course very sad to learn of the loss of your son Nick. I'm not Jewish but I love the phrase, may his memory be a blessing. As for breaking out whether some of these NILFs were stay-at-home dads, in fact Eberstadt did do this, and these men cared for children or others on average *less* than any other demographic. They were, alas, truly receding in every way. It's heartbreaking.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
I'm a Navy veteran, and I'm very sorry to hear of your son's death. I help with reading groups for vets through Vet Centers - we try to build community for vets to work through their experiences and talk to one another.
I appreciate your comments about husbands and wives. I'm also planning to read the books mentioned in this episode.
ETA: I wanted to add that I really admire corpsman for the responsibilities they have as well as the training they go through. They often don't get the credit they deserve.
I'm so sorry for your loss, Tammy.
Yes live chat!
I constantly close my eyes on camera 🤣
Sarah - in all my long life, the only time I’ve ever said, “I will do banana if you you will do zucchini,’ is when I really kinda wanted an excuse to do banana. I’m just saying.
True true. Clearly I wanted to do banana. It's just that banana now strikes me as very bold, involved, and scary! Alas, a deal's a deal. Banana, here I come. -- SH
Oh, and Five Decembers was phenomenal. Excellent read, thanx.
I'm so glad you liked it! It was a pretty rip-roaring read for me. -- SH
Partway through and really enjoying it.
I grew up in rural East Texas and we called teachers Miss or Ma’am and close adults who weren’t family but you saw them very often (like Sunday school teachers and friend’s moms) were also called Miss regardless of marital status. So, my best friend’s mom was Miss Patsy and her dad was Mr. Mack. My husband grew up in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Charlotte and he said they only did it when visiting family in Texas. I think Nancy is correct from my lived experience ;)
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Matt Welch's interview with Nichola Eberstadt on The Fifth Column is well worth a listen and a good complement to Sarah and Nancy's discussion. The number and trends discussed here are alarming. Maybe I don't know enough young folks, but nobody I know is in this NILF category (and they really need a better acronym than that.)
I loved Kat Rosenfield's "No One Will Miss Her". I remember listening to the audiobook a year ago with a friend on a long cross country drive, in particular when we got to the Big Reveal -- woah, did NOT see that coming. I've already pre-ordered "You Must Remember This".
And, the E in STEM is Engineering
Thank you again for the show notes. My local library is about to reserve a few books for me..
The description of backing out of the room is really apt. I have become less social and engaged in communities that I used to be active in because I get tired of hearing my demographic run down and the sense that if I protest I will just be exhibiting toxic masculinity.
I’m not a NILF (a term that amuses me because I unpack it to “nobody I’d like to..”) but I do plan on leaving the labor force as soon as I feel that I can afford it and regularly fantasize about retiring somewhere rural where I can just be alone to pursue my interests without bothering anyone or dealing with anyone being bothered.
I don’t plan on living my life in obsessing on others disdain, but I do feel tribeless and resented, and do organize my life around minimizing how much that affects me.
And I am genx, and can remember better times. When we had subcultures that mattered more than sex or race. I think if I had come of age starting in 2012 I might have internalized the messaging in an even less healthy way.
When I saw Loretta Lynn’s death announced, I had a similar reaction as to the death of Queen Elizabeth - you knew it was inevitable given her age, but still felt like a huge loss. Growing up, I remember being aware of Loretta Lynn and Coal Miner’s Daughter and knowing some of her other music, but it wasn’t until her 2004 album Van Lear Rose (with Jack White) that I dove head first into fandom. Coal Miner’s Daughter was also an autobiography with a follow up Still Woman Enough- both great following her life from poor girl from a Kentucky holler to Queen in her own right of country. Also love reading about the family she came from and the huge family she and Doo created.
Every year on Doo’s birthday, and maybe their anniversary, she would post on FB about how much she missed him. Her spirit must overjoyed to be reunited with his after 25+ years.
RIP together Loretta and Doo
Oh I forgot - in 2004, I put seeing Loretta live on my bucket list. Several years later, I was able to check it off my list when I saw her at the iconic 930 club in DC. She was in her early 80s. Amazing. One of my most cherished concert experiences.
This episode was really great, and actually something I really needed. I'm a man who has slways struggled with self esteem and am a Highly Sensitive Person (which means my brain is wired to take everything personally. I wish every day that wasn't the case). It really did a number on me emotionally when a lot of my female fiends IRL, people who have been in my home and/or I have done favors for, would post about how sick of white men they were and how there should be a moritorium on hiring men for jobs and show photos of their "male tears" coffee mugs. When I was looking for a job (never been a NILF!), going online would feel like walking in a minefield and the despair I was feeling was actually funny to prople I thought were my friends.
I have so much more to say about this but I'll just say this: I appreciate "Smoke 'Em if You Got 'Em" (and "Feminine Chaos" and "A Special Place in Hell") for not making me feel terrible about myself.
I also agree with everything Nancy said about Mary Gaitskill. I feel so raw emotionally when I finish reading her. I can't think of another writer that does that (JCO, like Sarah said, probably comes closest).
RE: Feminism doesn't have to be a zero sum game. I disagree. If women are tired of housework, day care, teaching kindergarten, secretarial work, and being a nurse instead of a doctor, then what makes you think men will want these roles? Let's face it: For every female CEO, college president, military officer, etc.; that's one less prestigious job that's going to go to a man. Feminism is a necessary and enevitable movement in a free society, but let's not pretend it comes without costs to men.
I haven't listened to the entire episode yet, but just broke in to say that I have a copy of The Body on my nightstand right now. I bought it for my son a few months ago because Stand By Me is one of his favourite movies and I thought the novella it's based on would be a guaranteed hit with the kid - alas, no. He brought it to me the other night, said he gave it a whirl, and it's just not his cup of tea. (He's partial to graphic novels and Japanese manga). So, his loss, my gain, I'm thinking. I was going to wait to finish a different book before I started, but after hearing Sarah talk about the opening paragraph, I'm just gonna dive in now.
And on the subject of being a mother to a son, I can't wait to listen to the rest of this episode, The Richard Reeves title is now on my wish list.