Richard Reeves

They haven't somehow shifted into this other fixed position.

And maybe they liked his energy and they liked his specificity.

And here's the thing.

Maybe they liked his courage.

Maybe they just liked the fact that he seemed like his own man.

And actually didn't lean very hard into lots of the kind of culture tropes we've talked about before.

And even if they didn't agree with him on policy in some cases, as they definitely didn't agree with Donald Trump on policy on many things, he seemed like a guy who was...

someone they could aspire to be.

And so I think it's more important that we show what mature, positive masculinity looks like rather than telling people what it looks like.

I think some of these cultural questions about masculinity, my role, relational skills, those are not restricted to certain groups.

I do think that at all levels of society, a lot of young men are struggling with those questions.

It's just if you've got the resources, you're much more likely to be able to answer them or at least keep going while you're wrestling with them.

But you're quite right that actually if you intersect this with class and race, that's very, very different.

The simple version of this is that

If you take any level of economic or social disadvantage, that will impact boys more than girls.

It's not that it won't impact girls, right?

But the education gaps, for example, this is a great example of this.

And Sean Reardon out of Stanford has very good work on this.

You see that there is a gender gap on most educational outcomes across the class distribution, but it's much smaller at the top than it is at the bottom.

So the poorer the neighborhood, the weaker the school, the less stable the family structure is, the worse the boys will do relative to the girls.