Helen Lewis

You're probably going to end up as essentially a 12-year-old girl who got raped by her master every night.

You know, there is just this kind of, but then I think this comes back to this idea that they are special people and therefore they don't live in a society where they're able to exercise that specialness anymore.

Sure.

No, I think that's reasonable.

And there is a kind of light side version of that, right?

Which is that here in the developed world, we live in aging societies.

And that has profoundly shaped how decisions are made in just ways that we're only really beginning to reckon with now.

I'm not sure if that's so much about gender as it is about an aging society.

If you live in a much younger society, then the young people are the kind of dominant force and they set the rules.

Well, at the moment, we live by the baby boomers social, like their social conditions that they find most amenable to them.

But the other bit that I think is worth taking away from this, and I don't want to dismiss all this stuff out of hand, is that I do think that there is a place in society for male spaces.

I made a program from the BBC about gurus, new gurus it was called.

And one of the things I did was I went to a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym.

And I talked to older guys who had lived a life and they were teaching younger men about controlling their aggression and how to channel that into positive ways.

I've written Difficult Women about the problems of boys in school, which again, I think are real.

I think there are lots of boys who find it really difficult to sit still for eight hours a day.

And they, you know, they are not encouraged to kind of burn off their energy.

And the whole school model has been framed around this idea of the kind of good girl who sits there passively and kind of just digests information in a way that doesn't suit lots of boys.

The New York Times had a really interesting report a couple of months ago about ADHD diagnosis in teenagers.

And one of the things I took away from that is that lots of them don't end up on medication that they start as teenagers in adulthood.