Ezra Klein

I mean, we talked a few minutes ago about falls in testosterone and sperm quality.

I mean, that's measurable and strange, and it's been going on for many decades now, and we should, I think, think about it and worry about it.

But you also have...

Men's wage is not doing great.

You have girls performing much better than boys in high school, much more likely to enroll in college.

Men today are five times likelier than in the 90s to say they don't have any close friends.

They are four times more likely to die by suicide.

Sometimes this can all get framed as a competitive race with girls, as if it would be fine if both genders were dying by suicide at the same rate.

But that's not the way I think about it, that there is—boys are not doing great on their own terms.

And the sense that, you know, perhaps society's evolved in a way, whether that is in terms of the chemical soup and the microplastics that we're all exposed to from childhood now all the way up to the structure of school, the structure of the workplace—

The idea that it is more recently evolved in a way that is not good for boys and men, it's not a crazy thought.

And I think it's something worth, you know, when you look at this data, taking seriously.

interesting dimension in a bunch of these books where it does feel to me you're watching both in these books actually and in culture broadly men import what has more traditionally been a huge problem for women and girls really quite rapidly which is this obsession with unrealizable body aesthetics

Bronze Age pervert, true to the name, is known for constantly posting pictures of, you know, tanned and muscled male bodies.

Raw egg nationalist Charles Cornish Dale, weightlifter, talks a lot about that in his book.

There's this whole idea of the pursuit of beauty.

as a way of aligning yourself to higher good.

This is from the Bronze Age Perfect Mindset in its sort of weird internet grammar.

In same way, see from all this that aesthetic physique has the most cosmic significance.

And it is because of what I've said so far that aesthetic bodies are a window to the other side because they're the pinnacle of nature."