Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…The good ones. Right, the good ones. But that should create an incentive for cultures and societies to form good ones and to figure out, How do you form good men in this landscape? And we haven’t. It’s pretty clear that we aren’t figuring out exactly how to do that. Instead, you have these selection effects, where you increasingly have male spaces and female spaces that aren’t single-sex spaces. They aren’t spaces where women go to be women, and men go to be men, and then they meet in the dating market. They are spaces that are heavily female but have a certain percentage of males, or heavily male but have a certain percentage of females, have their own sort of self-contained dating markets where, because of the imbalance, there ends up being hostility between the sexes. Thus, you have the far-right incels online, complaining about how women are terrible because in their world, there aren’t very many women. So all of the incentives are for women to behave like normal human beings and take advantage of their position. And then on the other side, in left-wing academic environments, you have fewer men, so the men don’t behave as well, and the women feel like the men are terrible. That seems like a hard cycle to break, and it does seem like you would need some sort of effectively cultural campaign around rebuilding male education and manhood. Right now, the models for that are polarized between conservative religious models that, as a conservative religious person, I’m in favor of, but they obviously have a limited purchase in the culture as a whole, and then more feminist models that are trying to remake men along the lines of female virtues that I don’t think actually work, that don’t effectively identify core ways of making men successful as men. But I do think — to be the social conservative for a minute — I do think pornography plays a really nasty role in all of this. A society that stigmatized and limited pornography would have at least slightly better men. I think readily available, constantly available pornography pushes men away from women, pushes men away from the cultivation of masculine virtues, makes them less marriageable, makes them literally more impotent in certain ways, and is a sort of underappreciated aspect in the decline of men. In the theology of original sin, what percentage of men are the good ones?…

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