The discourse celebrating the decline of the nuclear family (and bending over backwards to negatively associate marriage with right-wing conservatism) is more about race than gender. You guys are looking at this from an elite perspective, but low marriage rates among (white) women who attend Ivy League colleges and work for media companies in major cities aren’t the group whose choices are being implicitly defended by this discourse. That’s because the choices of this group aren’t readily associated with persistent social problems, like high rates of youth violence in black communities coupled with low educational attainment. Conservatives believe these problem are caused by the deterioration of the black family and are best solved by family formation and following the “success sequence” rather than by government intervention.
The white progressives are just getting out ahead of these arguments by acting like they were cool with the decline of the nuclear family all along. But they aren’t, if their behavior is any indication. Exhibit A: Jessica Grose’s article saying the decline of the nuclear family is a good thing. She’s married with kids.
Didn't I say this? I know I THOUGHT it! Because, yes, just about all those progressive Media Elites are married and have children in pretty traditional nuclear family structures. This is what I was getting at when I talked about my evangelical Christian friend having a peer group with much more chaotic situations than was typical in my social circles.
Lol well, it’s possible that you said that and I was just too preoccupied with writing my very long comment to hear it :-)
I think we’re dealing with the debate over the Moynihan report all over again. People do not want to sound like they are blaming single mothers for societal problems. It makes it incredibly difficult to be an advocate for the “success sequence” without sounding like a bigot. I feel cringey even writing about this stuff!
Once, a group of my students remarked that it was ironic & troubling that a feminist movement that sought to equalize domestic labor and childcare had been followed by this enormous rise in single mothers who are the sole breadwinner, caregiver, and domestic laborer in their household. They said this with no judgment, they were sincerely confused as to why no one had pointed out this paradox.
I’m convinced by the argument that stable relationships boost happiness and other positive outcomes for both adults and their children. Such a link is both supported by data and commonsensical. I’m just skeptical that tepid policy solutions like “teach the success sequence” will make much of a difference. Bush-era marriage promotion was pretty much a total failure as I understand. We shouldn’t conflate the positions “this isn’t bad” with “this is bad but there’s not much the government can do”. In other contexts conservatives are keen on that distinction, but they tend to forget it on “family breakdown” and the like.
That said, I do think it’s worth thinking about policies that would try and address the issue without rehashing the same debate over and over. Andrew Yang proposed free state-funded marriage counseling, which I thought was a cool idea.
I haven't heard Andrew Yang's comments but the biggest problem is the outcomes for children of parents who never marry, not the children of divorce. This unmarried parents problem is most acute among "people of color".
I hate the term "intersectionality" but one of its original tenets was that the feminism conceived by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Smeal did not contemplate the dire circumstances of poor women of color, the vast majority of whom were unmarried. What your students spoke of is a failure to reconcile the concerns of educated, married (mostly white) women with the concerns of poor women(mostly black) who did not have the financial and emotional support of a husband.
Exhibit B: What Does Marriage Ask us to Give up? Divorced Black woman writes about going to live with her mom & siblings, argues “But what is a threat to some can be to others a glimmer of a new world coming.” (Read the comments asking whether the absence of fathers from the household is the type of New World we should celebrate.)
Exhibit C: “In Brooklyn, a Tiny Apartment and a Neighborhood Filled With Families” White upper middle class family finds community surrounded by other young, married couples with kids.
Damn. You beat me to it. I hopped on the Googles hoping to find that Traister was in a polycule with a Afro-Latinx nonbinary, genderqueer autogynephile trans woman.
Alas, as you note, it was not to be. Traister lives with her hetero white male attorney husband and the two kids they have together.
And yes the real elephant in the room is young, poor black mothers, 70% of whom are unwed at time of childbirth. And I'd wager hard currency that the vast majority remain unwed for the subsequent 18 years.
Ha - you brought back memories of when I was a regular Salon reader. It was the Joan Walsh-Traister-Cary Tennis-King Kaufman era. Of course that was a time period we could call "B.T." - Before Trump.
Minor quibble - a public defender is still a college-educated professional, no less so than his law school classmate who makes millions representing Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. The difference is most prominent in their paychecks and their voting preferences, not necessarily their personal behavior/family structure. They are both likely to be married to a college-educated natal female, with whom they have 2.3 kids, all living under the same roof.
No quibble. I was just offering an additional detail about her husband's job. Obviously, they're "elites" even if they don't make as much as their high-rolling Brooklyn neighbors. Hell, I'm an elite and I make less than any of them.
I laughed at Sarah's speculation about Ibram Kendi's kitchen; I'd also be curious what's in his garage.
Regarding her musings on lengthy comments --and I will keep this short!--- the absolute worst are the commenters on Matt Yglesias "Slow Boring" and Astral Codex Ten.
The offenders seem to be mainly academics and lawyers, for whom a 1500 word comment is just the warm-up for the bloviating to come.
Worse yet, they type in huge blocks of texts with no spaces. I swear one guy cut and pasted his entire Ph.D dissertation... I can only imagine these guys at parties
As someone who has had to read large swaths of legal text, I can attest that lawyers are terrible writers and at least 60% of the problem is in the sheer number of words they use.
I hear you. I frequently have to soldier through legal articles aimed at creative people and--if I'm feeling charitable--tell myself it's probably difficult for lawyers to easily switch from writing for judges (or other lawyers) to writing for laypeople
But with Substack I'm much more cynical (my default mode) and assume they're just bombarding the readers with endless paragraphs of legal jargon (and double negatives) so they'll give up and thus kill off any rebuttal.
Academic here. Guilty as charged! Writing comments is like eating junk food compared to my professional writing, and reading comments on New York Times articles? That is my crack.
Guilty as charged (again). My comments here are definitely longer than the ones I write elsewhere, but I suppose that’s because the whole thing is just so on the nose for me. I was a broken down unemployed young guy who played video games and watched porn at the time I first learned of this Sarah Haider character, I looked at her as something of a role model when I got into political advocacy, now I’m a highly educated doctor, and Sarah has taken it upon herself to trash all of the above (education, medicine, men, etc.).
I do have a job, and you can tell how busy I am by how long it takes me to get to these things. But in defense of the verbose commenter, I think it’s important to actually do some sort of mental processing; if I were passively listening or scrolling through a written piece, I’d just forget it five minutes later.
I hope it’s of some value to them; online communication is shouting into a void, and if you’re on Twitter, what you get back is nonrepresentative and often garbage. I’ve avoided going into the content creation business as a job, but I imagine if I were them it would be fulfilling to be able to see who was listening or reading.
Oct 2, 2023Liked by Meghan Daum, Meghan Daum & Sarah Haider
Hi Sarah and Megan! I just finished listening to this most recent episode, and I just want to respond to your last few comments. I'm a listener, and a mom, and I work part time. I never have time to comment, let alone revise my comments and engage in discussions, but I love listening. You guys are my fave! I listen while I'm running around cleaning the house and doing errands. I just want you to know that you have listeners who don't have endless time to engage , but you probably don't hear from us. I'm quiet, but I'm here. 😬
Pre-kids, I loved a good internet argument, and I expect I will one day again. So you have to keep this going for at least another decade and a half, so I can eventually contribute some high quality comments. 😅
Oct 1, 2023·edited Oct 1, 2023Liked by Meghan Daum & Sarah Haider
Unrelated: Meghan was a subject of this weeks Bob Wright/Mickey Kaus NonZero podcast.
Bob claimed to be at a super secret high-level conference with Meghan. but Bob refused to disclose the name of the conference , other attendees or location.
Even after prodding from Mickey, all Bob offers is another reference to Meghan.
What's going on here? Is Meghan a member of some nefarious group dictating policy for the little people?
speaking of the videos: am i the only one who things sarah deploys her big hair privilege on these podcasts? she always throws her hair fwd as if to prominently display it
Well, shit, I admittedly stopped in the middle of walking my dog to write a very long comment in response to this episode! Of course, if I had listened through to the end before commenting I would know that this was going to get me called out for being a barren, unemployed bum! Hey man, it’s Saturday!
I mean, they’re so ramble-y I’m always afraid I’m going to forget whatever it is because they will have jumped to three other wildly unrelated things by the time my walk/drive is over.
A decade ago Charles Murray pointed out that among college educated, professional/managerial white liberals who have formed a family, the overwhelming majority:
-Married a person of the opposite sex.
-After marriage, had 2.3 kids, who
-Live in the same household with their biological parents.
The people who minimize the two parent nuclear family are often the ones who exist in one. Interesting, to say the least.
Man, I am in my mid thirties and and have been on a dating odyssey for the past few years (after abruptly realizing that I dearly wanted children following the birth of my nephew). Blessedly, about 6 months ago I met a man who is on the same page as me and we seem to be headed in a positive direction. However, my experiences dating men ages approximately 32 to 40 seem to bare out Sarah’s thesis about how men will choose the path of least responsibility indefinitely unless otherwise forced not to. I found myself internally screaming “yes!” During that part of the episode.
Guilty as charged. I’m 37, and while I did enjoy dogsitting for a friend every now and then I’m not sure I’m ready for the responsibility of having one of my own. Let alone anything more than that.
But why would anyone sign up for responsibility? Women don’t. The women’s rights conversation is largely over, but the women’s responsibility conversation still hasn’t really begun yet. And from my perspective, the women are the smart ones in this equation. Men, especially American men, work way too hard.
I agree with you that Americans (perhaps especially American men, but women too) work way too hard. But you seem to be biting the bullet that rejecting the American work culture is a “rejection of responsibility”, which I would dispute.
It's multifactorial, but I think there is a real tradeoff there.
My frame of reference involves living in Australia, where I found adults of both sexes to be relatively immature and lackadaisical, as well as being less angry and more joyful than typical American counterparts. Then I come back to America and see my physician colleagues working themselves to death. And some of those doctors absolutely look down on people who didn't work 100 hour weeks during peak COVID. I didn't do that, and I'm glad. But I see the tradeoff.
I don’t think the case of a physician during a pandemic is a representative example of the social value of marginal work hours, and even there I wouldn’t say “avoiding responsibility” is the right frame for thinking about it.
For example, I don’t see women working fewer hours than men on average as “shirking responsibility for their own benefit”. Women spend more time on unpaid care work. If, like me, you don’t think there’s a responsibility to put in extra hours at work, but there is a responsibility to care for one’s family, that implies it’s actually men who are shirking.
I mean we're responsible for human lives. If we're not working, we're avoiding responsibility.
Medicine is not the same as anything else, but at the high end of business and the legal profession, I think there is a culture of overwork that is somewhat unique to the U.S.
Your argument assumes that all work feeds in to “responsibility for human lives”. That’s very much not the case. The labor market produces a lot of work that doesn’t just fall short of the high standard of “life-saving”, but is actually socially useless. For example, a lot of effort in advertising or sales is wasted in zero-sum struggles for market share.
John Bingham, could you elaborate? You’re either saying something very insightful or very crazy, and I’d love to know which it is. What is the “women’s responsibility conversation”? Why are women there smart ones? What makes you say women don’t sign up for responsibility? Are you saying men work hard and women don’t?
When I’m talking about women’s responsibility, a big part of I’m talking about the end of the notion of a male “provider”, meaning that adult women, with or without children, are responsible for taking care of themselves. If they want help from an individual man, they need to convince him to do it voluntarily (so no more child support payments). If they want help from men in aggregate, they need to earn it through work (so no more free government benefits for women). If they can’t do those things, they go to a homeless shelter, and if they can’t take care of children, they lose the children. That’s gender equality under the law. We are not there yet, but I think we need to get there. Women’s roles have changed rapidly since the industrial revolution, so my overall perspective is that women can learn to live with this level of responsibility eventually.
Another layer of women’s responsibility is being held responsible for bad behavior. If women were as scared of having their careers ended or going to jail over some minor and possibly unintentional behaviors (as men are), then suddenly I think they would develop an appreciation for the importance of civil liberties and due process. I’ve had many women made remarks to me laden with sexual innuendo, or rub up against me in various ways, or occasionally actually try an overt move like the old “dick grab”. Those women are unafraid of any consequences. I want them to be afraid that I might come out of the woodwork twenty years later and ruin their life. Then I want them to vote for saner policies surrounding these issues.
Women are the smart ones (in a selfish way) because they know about the double standards that exist in these areas and have chosen not to accept responsibility for their actions. They’ll take a banner and march in the street for their right to vote or to get an abortion for free under any circumstance, but you’ll never see them march to stop child support payments or reform divorce law or punish their own sexually harassing behaviors. This is hypocritical, but it’s smart. Men on the other hand, are terrible at advocating for our own interests, and we have given women everything they wanted in these areas. That was not smart.
It is also true that men spend far more time at work than women (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf), which again I think is smart on the part of the women. Yes, women spend more time in childcare (the shrinking number that have children), but that is presumably a far more fulfilling activity. Americans work unusually hard compared to people in other developed countries, which I think is a mistake on our part. Women value work-life balance. They then complain about making less money for doing less or easier work (the “wage gap”), which is a cynical lie, but it is smart in a purely selfish way. To me, the extra money is not worth the extra work for most people. Men are working themselves to death in many cases. I think there’s more to life than work.
I’m one of those long-winded commenters although I only comment on a couple podcasts and listen to three or four. I think I’m trying to converse even if it’s not an actual conversation. I am showing my appreciation! I’m probably bored or craving more conversation. I will read the Atlantic article and maybe I’ll return to comment, ha kidding.
Intellectually stimulating conversation and working out your ideas in writing is never a waste of time. In contrast, plenty of people who learn to code spend their time either making web ads or building platforms for web ads.
This is true Gaudium. As far as coding goes, I don’t have the brain/desire/personality for it. I also work full-time. I am a registered nurse. But I get what Sarah is suggesting-- use time more wisely.
Straight men may appear to be happiness vampires at the expense of women, but the post-marriage psychological boost effect holds (in my experience) for us homos
Where was the Boston University administration while Henry Rodgers was wasting money? That's an easy question: collecting a percentage of each external grant for "overhead", that's where.
(To be fair, it's common practice for research universities to skim overhead money from external grant awards. Whether it's claptrap like an antiracism center or important work like a neurologist studying brain damage among football players and developing preventative safety measures. (coincidentally also at BU).
Here's some late-arriving MacAurthur info, straight from the horse's website:
The stipend is now $800,000.00, paid quarterly over 5 years--no strings attached, no requirement to report what you're doing with the funds. They figure that if you've got the stuff of which MacAurther fellows are made, it would be an insult to keep tabs on you like that. So, nothing left to do but hope for a nomination and make plans for that new kitchen.
I'm commenting late so maybe no one will see this. Anyway. Re: marriage and happiness, I have been married twice (I'm 36, yeah, I know). And I think my happiness was the same before and after marriage, and the marriages were only bad at the end, they were good for the most part. I agree with Sarah that I felt more fulfilled when married (I don't have kids by choice) but I wonder if that sense of fulfillment is strongly tied to or totally based upon achieving social norms/expectations. Hmmm.
Rebecca Traister did a very good interview with Benjamin Kunkel from N+1 about “men who lack purpose” all the way back in 2005, hitting many of the points people like Richard Reeves (and Meghan and Sarah) talk about now. It’s another debate that’s older than people think. Kunkel made a lot of good points, I like this in particular: “I think there's got to be a reason that the slacker -- the person who feels that nothing he could do could really be all that meaningful, so why really do anything -- is a more common male figure than a female figure. It must be because the person expected to act meaningfully in the public world, man or woman, has been a man forever. And men then are in a better position to sense some sort of decline in the ability to feel that you can do something meaningful in your life”. https://www.salon.com/2005/09/20/kunkel/
I'm so glad you pulled up that interview. I loved Ben's novel Indecision. He also wrote an essay about the lopsided NYC dating market (amazing women and mostly uremarkable men) some time in the early 2000s that I absolutely loved but am not finding now.
Reminds me of Adelle Waldman’s novel “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P”. There was a spate of novels like that in the 2000s/early 2010s, mostly by NYC-based writers, where the problem of non-committal men (not just in romance, but life generally) was an important subtext, if not the major theme. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/love-actually
Then at some point the discourse shifted from “people aren’t settling down” to “people aren’t dating at all”. You should get Kunkel on to talk about it! :)
The discourse celebrating the decline of the nuclear family (and bending over backwards to negatively associate marriage with right-wing conservatism) is more about race than gender. You guys are looking at this from an elite perspective, but low marriage rates among (white) women who attend Ivy League colleges and work for media companies in major cities aren’t the group whose choices are being implicitly defended by this discourse. That’s because the choices of this group aren’t readily associated with persistent social problems, like high rates of youth violence in black communities coupled with low educational attainment. Conservatives believe these problem are caused by the deterioration of the black family and are best solved by family formation and following the “success sequence” rather than by government intervention.
The white progressives are just getting out ahead of these arguments by acting like they were cool with the decline of the nuclear family all along. But they aren’t, if their behavior is any indication. Exhibit A: Jessica Grose’s article saying the decline of the nuclear family is a good thing. She’s married with kids.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/opinion/nuclear-family.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Didn't I say this? I know I THOUGHT it! Because, yes, just about all those progressive Media Elites are married and have children in pretty traditional nuclear family structures. This is what I was getting at when I talked about my evangelical Christian friend having a peer group with much more chaotic situations than was typical in my social circles.
Lol well, it’s possible that you said that and I was just too preoccupied with writing my very long comment to hear it :-)
I think we’re dealing with the debate over the Moynihan report all over again. People do not want to sound like they are blaming single mothers for societal problems. It makes it incredibly difficult to be an advocate for the “success sequence” without sounding like a bigot. I feel cringey even writing about this stuff!
Once, a group of my students remarked that it was ironic & troubling that a feminist movement that sought to equalize domestic labor and childcare had been followed by this enormous rise in single mothers who are the sole breadwinner, caregiver, and domestic laborer in their household. They said this with no judgment, they were sincerely confused as to why no one had pointed out this paradox.
Yes, the family values types like to say “it’s something we don’t talk about”, but actually the debate has been going on since forever. Anyone remember this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/04/dan-quayle-was-right/307015/
I’m convinced by the argument that stable relationships boost happiness and other positive outcomes for both adults and their children. Such a link is both supported by data and commonsensical. I’m just skeptical that tepid policy solutions like “teach the success sequence” will make much of a difference. Bush-era marriage promotion was pretty much a total failure as I understand. We shouldn’t conflate the positions “this isn’t bad” with “this is bad but there’s not much the government can do”. In other contexts conservatives are keen on that distinction, but they tend to forget it on “family breakdown” and the like.
That said, I do think it’s worth thinking about policies that would try and address the issue without rehashing the same debate over and over. Andrew Yang proposed free state-funded marriage counseling, which I thought was a cool idea.
I haven't heard Andrew Yang's comments but the biggest problem is the outcomes for children of parents who never marry, not the children of divorce. This unmarried parents problem is most acute among "people of color".
I hate the term "intersectionality" but one of its original tenets was that the feminism conceived by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Smeal did not contemplate the dire circumstances of poor women of color, the vast majority of whom were unmarried. What your students spoke of is a failure to reconcile the concerns of educated, married (mostly white) women with the concerns of poor women(mostly black) who did not have the financial and emotional support of a husband.
Exhibit B: What Does Marriage Ask us to Give up? Divorced Black woman writes about going to live with her mom & siblings, argues “But what is a threat to some can be to others a glimmer of a new world coming.” (Read the comments asking whether the absence of fathers from the household is the type of New World we should celebrate.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/opinion/marriage-divorce.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Exhibit C: “In Brooklyn, a Tiny Apartment and a Neighborhood Filled With Families” White upper middle class family finds community surrounded by other young, married couples with kids.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/realestate/renters-carroll-gardens-brooklyn.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
White liberals: The nuclear family for me, but not for thee!
Lol exhibit D. Rebecca Traister is married with kids!
Damn. You beat me to it. I hopped on the Googles hoping to find that Traister was in a polycule with a Afro-Latinx nonbinary, genderqueer autogynephile trans woman.
Alas, as you note, it was not to be. Traister lives with her hetero white male attorney husband and the two kids they have together.
And yes the real elephant in the room is young, poor black mothers, 70% of whom are unwed at time of childbirth. And I'd wager hard currency that the vast majority remain unwed for the subsequent 18 years.
Rebecca's husband is a public defender and she actually has some pretty nuanced views about things like sexual assault allegations and the like.
Ha - you brought back memories of when I was a regular Salon reader. It was the Joan Walsh-Traister-Cary Tennis-King Kaufman era. Of course that was a time period we could call "B.T." - Before Trump.
Minor quibble - a public defender is still a college-educated professional, no less so than his law school classmate who makes millions representing Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. The difference is most prominent in their paychecks and their voting preferences, not necessarily their personal behavior/family structure. They are both likely to be married to a college-educated natal female, with whom they have 2.3 kids, all living under the same roof.
No quibble. I was just offering an additional detail about her husband's job. Obviously, they're "elites" even if they don't make as much as their high-rolling Brooklyn neighbors. Hell, I'm an elite and I make less than any of them.
Upwards of 80% in some communities. https://wirepoints.org/a-statistic-that-continues-to-be-ignored-the-high-rate-of-births-to-unmarried-mothers-across-illinois-20-largest-cities-wirepoints/
I laughed at Sarah's speculation about Ibram Kendi's kitchen; I'd also be curious what's in his garage.
Regarding her musings on lengthy comments --and I will keep this short!--- the absolute worst are the commenters on Matt Yglesias "Slow Boring" and Astral Codex Ten.
The offenders seem to be mainly academics and lawyers, for whom a 1500 word comment is just the warm-up for the bloviating to come.
Worse yet, they type in huge blocks of texts with no spaces. I swear one guy cut and pasted his entire Ph.D dissertation... I can only imagine these guys at parties
As someone who has had to read large swaths of legal text, I can attest that lawyers are terrible writers and at least 60% of the problem is in the sheer number of words they use.
I hear you. I frequently have to soldier through legal articles aimed at creative people and--if I'm feeling charitable--tell myself it's probably difficult for lawyers to easily switch from writing for judges (or other lawyers) to writing for laypeople
But with Substack I'm much more cynical (my default mode) and assume they're just bombarding the readers with endless paragraphs of legal jargon (and double negatives) so they'll give up and thus kill off any rebuttal.
Academic here. Guilty as charged! Writing comments is like eating junk food compared to my professional writing, and reading comments on New York Times articles? That is my crack.
I also love reading NYT comments -- and book reviews by smart "regular" people.
Long comments rock, and I’m grateful for the stimulating discussion and debate you all provide here every week :)
Guilty as charged (again). My comments here are definitely longer than the ones I write elsewhere, but I suppose that’s because the whole thing is just so on the nose for me. I was a broken down unemployed young guy who played video games and watched porn at the time I first learned of this Sarah Haider character, I looked at her as something of a role model when I got into political advocacy, now I’m a highly educated doctor, and Sarah has taken it upon herself to trash all of the above (education, medicine, men, etc.).
I do have a job, and you can tell how busy I am by how long it takes me to get to these things. But in defense of the verbose commenter, I think it’s important to actually do some sort of mental processing; if I were passively listening or scrolling through a written piece, I’d just forget it five minutes later.
I hope it’s of some value to them; online communication is shouting into a void, and if you’re on Twitter, what you get back is nonrepresentative and often garbage. I’ve avoided going into the content creation business as a job, but I imagine if I were them it would be fulfilling to be able to see who was listening or reading.
Still just at the beginning but I think Meghan should go by Karen X.
Hi Sarah and Megan! I just finished listening to this most recent episode, and I just want to respond to your last few comments. I'm a listener, and a mom, and I work part time. I never have time to comment, let alone revise my comments and engage in discussions, but I love listening. You guys are my fave! I listen while I'm running around cleaning the house and doing errands. I just want you to know that you have listeners who don't have endless time to engage , but you probably don't hear from us. I'm quiet, but I'm here. 😬
Thanks for dropping by Michelle! We feel strengthened by your (silent, but strong) support.
Pre-kids, I loved a good internet argument, and I expect I will one day again. So you have to keep this going for at least another decade and a half, so I can eventually contribute some high quality comments. 😅
You have better things to do than comment? I salute you!
Unrelated: Meghan was a subject of this weeks Bob Wright/Mickey Kaus NonZero podcast.
Bob claimed to be at a super secret high-level conference with Meghan. but Bob refused to disclose the name of the conference , other attendees or location.
Even after prodding from Mickey, all Bob offers is another reference to Meghan.
What's going on here? Is Meghan a member of some nefarious group dictating policy for the little people?
I have no idea what he's talking about. None whatsoever.
Hey I'm just the messenger. Others are free to interpret: https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/66784
It's within the first five minutes.
Maybe Bob is dreaming of an illicit assignation and wants to taunt Mickey
First
there's a conspiracy to block me from first now
absolutely
DAMNIT!!!!
Maybe LAST can be your new thing. Hang in there sport.
😂
how the video is 360px? at least 1080px would be good. no need for 4k and pores
Our pores are deep (like our conversations), and you all would be lucky to see them.
speaking of the videos: am i the only one who things sarah deploys her big hair privilege on these podcasts? she always throws her hair fwd as if to prominently display it
very haram
What is this, a call to hijab?
It's almost impossible not to mess with one's hair if it's past the chin, I think. Especially if you have to look at yourself.
Well, shit, I admittedly stopped in the middle of walking my dog to write a very long comment in response to this episode! Of course, if I had listened through to the end before commenting I would know that this was going to get me called out for being a barren, unemployed bum! Hey man, it’s Saturday!
I mean, they’re so ramble-y I’m always afraid I’m going to forget whatever it is because they will have jumped to three other wildly unrelated things by the time my walk/drive is over.
Hey, a world where everyone spent less time working and more time discussing podcasts is a world I’d rather live in :)
Rhetoric vs. Reality
A decade ago Charles Murray pointed out that among college educated, professional/managerial white liberals who have formed a family, the overwhelming majority:
-Married a person of the opposite sex.
-After marriage, had 2.3 kids, who
-Live in the same household with their biological parents.
The people who minimize the two parent nuclear family are often the ones who exist in one. Interesting, to say the least.
Murray thinks liberal elites should be more vocally judgmental and “preach what they practice.”
Does he really think that Obama commenting on the importance of two parent families will get a fair hearing in rural Missouri, where I work?
We have a literal Trump Store!
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8rx2jFi2w3vvWc9N7?g_st=ic
BTW Obama DID comment on the importance of two parent families.
https://www.politico.com/story/2008/06/text-of-obamas-fatherhood-speech-011094
DING DING DING!!!
Man, I am in my mid thirties and and have been on a dating odyssey for the past few years (after abruptly realizing that I dearly wanted children following the birth of my nephew). Blessedly, about 6 months ago I met a man who is on the same page as me and we seem to be headed in a positive direction. However, my experiences dating men ages approximately 32 to 40 seem to bare out Sarah’s thesis about how men will choose the path of least responsibility indefinitely unless otherwise forced not to. I found myself internally screaming “yes!” During that part of the episode.
Guilty as charged. I’m 37, and while I did enjoy dogsitting for a friend every now and then I’m not sure I’m ready for the responsibility of having one of my own. Let alone anything more than that.
But why would anyone sign up for responsibility? Women don’t. The women’s rights conversation is largely over, but the women’s responsibility conversation still hasn’t really begun yet. And from my perspective, the women are the smart ones in this equation. Men, especially American men, work way too hard.
I agree with you that Americans (perhaps especially American men, but women too) work way too hard. But you seem to be biting the bullet that rejecting the American work culture is a “rejection of responsibility”, which I would dispute.
It's multifactorial, but I think there is a real tradeoff there.
My frame of reference involves living in Australia, where I found adults of both sexes to be relatively immature and lackadaisical, as well as being less angry and more joyful than typical American counterparts. Then I come back to America and see my physician colleagues working themselves to death. And some of those doctors absolutely look down on people who didn't work 100 hour weeks during peak COVID. I didn't do that, and I'm glad. But I see the tradeoff.
I don’t think the case of a physician during a pandemic is a representative example of the social value of marginal work hours, and even there I wouldn’t say “avoiding responsibility” is the right frame for thinking about it.
For example, I don’t see women working fewer hours than men on average as “shirking responsibility for their own benefit”. Women spend more time on unpaid care work. If, like me, you don’t think there’s a responsibility to put in extra hours at work, but there is a responsibility to care for one’s family, that implies it’s actually men who are shirking.
I mean we're responsible for human lives. If we're not working, we're avoiding responsibility.
Medicine is not the same as anything else, but at the high end of business and the legal profession, I think there is a culture of overwork that is somewhat unique to the U.S.
Your argument assumes that all work feeds in to “responsibility for human lives”. That’s very much not the case. The labor market produces a lot of work that doesn’t just fall short of the high standard of “life-saving”, but is actually socially useless. For example, a lot of effort in advertising or sales is wasted in zero-sum struggles for market share.
John Bingham, could you elaborate? You’re either saying something very insightful or very crazy, and I’d love to know which it is. What is the “women’s responsibility conversation”? Why are women there smart ones? What makes you say women don’t sign up for responsibility? Are you saying men work hard and women don’t?
Sure, there’s a lot buried in there.
When I’m talking about women’s responsibility, a big part of I’m talking about the end of the notion of a male “provider”, meaning that adult women, with or without children, are responsible for taking care of themselves. If they want help from an individual man, they need to convince him to do it voluntarily (so no more child support payments). If they want help from men in aggregate, they need to earn it through work (so no more free government benefits for women). If they can’t do those things, they go to a homeless shelter, and if they can’t take care of children, they lose the children. That’s gender equality under the law. We are not there yet, but I think we need to get there. Women’s roles have changed rapidly since the industrial revolution, so my overall perspective is that women can learn to live with this level of responsibility eventually.
Another layer of women’s responsibility is being held responsible for bad behavior. If women were as scared of having their careers ended or going to jail over some minor and possibly unintentional behaviors (as men are), then suddenly I think they would develop an appreciation for the importance of civil liberties and due process. I’ve had many women made remarks to me laden with sexual innuendo, or rub up against me in various ways, or occasionally actually try an overt move like the old “dick grab”. Those women are unafraid of any consequences. I want them to be afraid that I might come out of the woodwork twenty years later and ruin their life. Then I want them to vote for saner policies surrounding these issues.
Women are the smart ones (in a selfish way) because they know about the double standards that exist in these areas and have chosen not to accept responsibility for their actions. They’ll take a banner and march in the street for their right to vote or to get an abortion for free under any circumstance, but you’ll never see them march to stop child support payments or reform divorce law or punish their own sexually harassing behaviors. This is hypocritical, but it’s smart. Men on the other hand, are terrible at advocating for our own interests, and we have given women everything they wanted in these areas. That was not smart.
It is also true that men spend far more time at work than women (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf), which again I think is smart on the part of the women. Yes, women spend more time in childcare (the shrinking number that have children), but that is presumably a far more fulfilling activity. Americans work unusually hard compared to people in other developed countries, which I think is a mistake on our part. Women value work-life balance. They then complain about making less money for doing less or easier work (the “wage gap”), which is a cynical lie, but it is smart in a purely selfish way. To me, the extra money is not worth the extra work for most people. Men are working themselves to death in many cases. I think there’s more to life than work.
I’m one of those long-winded commenters although I only comment on a couple podcasts and listen to three or four. I think I’m trying to converse even if it’s not an actual conversation. I am showing my appreciation! I’m probably bored or craving more conversation. I will read the Atlantic article and maybe I’ll return to comment, ha kidding.
Intellectually stimulating conversation and working out your ideas in writing is never a waste of time. In contrast, plenty of people who learn to code spend their time either making web ads or building platforms for web ads.
This is true Gaudium. As far as coding goes, I don’t have the brain/desire/personality for it. I also work full-time. I am a registered nurse. But I get what Sarah is suggesting-- use time more wisely.
Straight men may appear to be happiness vampires at the expense of women, but the post-marriage psychological boost effect holds (in my experience) for us homos
Where was the Boston University administration while Henry Rodgers was wasting money? That's an easy question: collecting a percentage of each external grant for "overhead", that's where.
(To be fair, it's common practice for research universities to skim overhead money from external grant awards. Whether it's claptrap like an antiracism center or important work like a neurologist studying brain damage among football players and developing preventative safety measures. (coincidentally also at BU).
Here's some late-arriving MacAurthur info, straight from the horse's website:
The stipend is now $800,000.00, paid quarterly over 5 years--no strings attached, no requirement to report what you're doing with the funds. They figure that if you've got the stuff of which MacAurther fellows are made, it would be an insult to keep tabs on you like that. So, nothing left to do but hope for a nomination and make plans for that new kitchen.
I'm commenting late so maybe no one will see this. Anyway. Re: marriage and happiness, I have been married twice (I'm 36, yeah, I know). And I think my happiness was the same before and after marriage, and the marriages were only bad at the end, they were good for the most part. I agree with Sarah that I felt more fulfilled when married (I don't have kids by choice) but I wonder if that sense of fulfillment is strongly tied to or totally based upon achieving social norms/expectations. Hmmm.
Rebecca Traister did a very good interview with Benjamin Kunkel from N+1 about “men who lack purpose” all the way back in 2005, hitting many of the points people like Richard Reeves (and Meghan and Sarah) talk about now. It’s another debate that’s older than people think. Kunkel made a lot of good points, I like this in particular: “I think there's got to be a reason that the slacker -- the person who feels that nothing he could do could really be all that meaningful, so why really do anything -- is a more common male figure than a female figure. It must be because the person expected to act meaningfully in the public world, man or woman, has been a man forever. And men then are in a better position to sense some sort of decline in the ability to feel that you can do something meaningful in your life”. https://www.salon.com/2005/09/20/kunkel/
I'm so glad you pulled up that interview. I loved Ben's novel Indecision. He also wrote an essay about the lopsided NYC dating market (amazing women and mostly uremarkable men) some time in the early 2000s that I absolutely loved but am not finding now.
Reminds me of Adelle Waldman’s novel “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P”. There was a spate of novels like that in the 2000s/early 2010s, mostly by NYC-based writers, where the problem of non-committal men (not just in romance, but life generally) was an important subtext, if not the major theme. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/love-actually
LOVE that novel. I see she has a new one coming out.
Oooh, nice - I wonder if she’ll explore how things have changed/stayed the same in the online dating era
Then at some point the discourse shifted from “people aren’t settling down” to “people aren’t dating at all”. You should get Kunkel on to talk about it! :)