Richard Reeves

And if that sentence sounded boring to people, hallelujah, hallelujah, because I want the debate about gender to become much more boring.

The people who are saying non-boring things about gender are either wrong or grifters.

Yeah, I think what's happened is that in the culture and therefore to some extent in our politics, there has been a reaction.

I mean, this is exactly the right word in this case to the perceived and in some cases real excesses perhaps the other way.

And more broadly, this is the neglect of these issues.

One of the most difficult things for me to argue to someone from the more reactionary side of the aisle on these issues until very recently was when they would say, well, they don't care about boys and men, right, the people in power.

Right.

A boring example that makes the point is that the CDC has a disparities in suicide page and it lists the various disparities for LGBTQ, rural, urban, veterans, et cetera, race.

It doesn't mention the gender gap even though that's the biggest disparity.

And men's right see people, manosphere type people, reactionaries would very often point to that fact and say, look, it's not – they won't even admit the gender gap.

And I would be engaging with people at CDC and saying, what are you doing?

Just put it on your website.

Just acknowledge that there's a gender gap.

Why wouldn't you acknowledge that there's a fourfold gap in suicide rates?

That's much bigger than any of the other gaps.

And so it was frustrating to me that in some ways the mainstream institutions and the government were doing the work of the reactionaries because it allowed them to claim with some plausibility that we were just ignoring these issues of boys and men.

That created a vacuum.

That vacuum got filled.

And the answer is not to necessarily blame the boys and young men who are looking for answers to these questions, looking, frankly, for someone who seems to care about them or at least not dislike them.

That's our fault.