They want a national lecture hall.

That's odd. I am driving around doing errands. I catch the very tail-end of a conversation between an NPR person and Liz Plank who has a new book out, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity. A woman writing about what needs to be done to improve men. Well, that doesn't sound particularly auspicious. As Ann Althouse has noted, in virtually all media, the norm is to characterize all events and discussions in terms of whether the event or plan is beneficial to women and to characterize any deviance between men and women as reflecting a deficit in men for not being women. Perhaps an exaggerated claim but sometimes it seem to strike pretty close to the facts.

What struck me in the twenty or thirty word snippet on NPR was something which seemed both witty and insightful. The substance, between the NPR person and Plank, was something along the lines of "We keep inviting men to have a conversation about gender and when they show up, we tell them to be quiet and listen to complaining about why they aren't more like women."

We keep hearing calls for national conversations. A national conversation on race, on gender, on rape culture, on inequality, on intolerance, on AGW, or what not. The calls are from statist critical theory types and it is always immensely clear that they do not want a national conversation. They want a national lecture hall. They want to force people to hear their arguments and then force people to do what social justice postmodernists insists needs to be done.

They then cast the natural reluctance of most people to participate under those terms and conditions as evidence of racism, misogyny, denialism, etc. It is a neat and effective rhetorical slight of hand but it is also clear evidence of a lack of good faith, indeed, it is evidence of moral corruption on the part of those calling for such national conversations.

To hear an author and NPR person make that point, that men are being called to a national conversation about what is wrong with them and then being told to shut up and listen, was quite astonishing. Perhaps there is more meat and substance to the book than implied by the title?

Well, perhaps, but it seems unlikely. The blurb indicates:

A nonfiction investigation into masculinity, For The Love of Men provides actionable steps for how to be a man in the modern world, while also exploring how being a man in the world has evolved.

In 2019, traditional masculinity is both rewarded and sanctioned. Men grow up being told that boys don’t cry and dolls are for girls (a newer phenomenon than you might realize―gendered toys came back in vogue as recently as the 80s). They learn they must hide their feelings and anxieties, that their masculinity must constantly be proven. They must be the breadwinners, they must be the romantic pursuers. This hasn’t been good for the culture at large: 99% of school shooters are male; men in fraternities are 300% (!) more likely to commit rape; a woman serving in uniform has a higher likelihood of being assaulted by a fellow soldier than to be killed by enemy fire.

In For the Love of Men, Liz offers a smart, insightful, and deeply-researched guide for what we're all going to do about toxic masculinity. For both women looking to guide the men in their lives and men who want to do better and just don’t know how, For the Love of Men will lead the conversation on men's issues in a society where so much is changing, but gender roles have remained strangely stagnant.

What are we going to do about men? Liz Plank has the answer. And it has the possibility to change the world for men and women alike.

That final line is a chilling harbinger of a totalitarian mindset. Let this expert woman tell you what men need to do to meet her expectations and then we need to change men to make them more acceptable.

But authors don't, as far as I know, write their blurbs. So maybe it is some 23 year old literature major spinning what she thinks will sell without having read the book.

However, the author's forward also does not seem especially promising. Emphasis added.

Between most chapters is a short essay about a man with interwoven identities that captures and reveals the urgency of a conversation about mindful masculinity. Thomas Page McBee, a journalist and author, who understood the challenges of being a “real man” when he transitioned. Victor Pineda, an immigrant with a disability, who challenges the myth of the so-called self-sufficient man. Wade Davis, one of the few openly gay members of the NFL, who grew up believing that being queer and a man were mutually exclusive. Glen Canning, a father who became an outspoken advocate for men to stop violence against women after his daughter took her own life. Maurice Owens, an advocate for boys of color, who followed an unlikely path to the White House. D’Arcee Charington Neal, a gay black man with a disability, who has a unique understanding of how cookie-cutter masculinity prevents the full expression of men’s humanity. And Nicolas Juarez, a Mexican-American with Tzotzil ancestry, who has firsthand experience of how little indigenous men profit from a system built on outdated notions of masculinity that are aligned with white supremacy. This book cannot capture all of the complexities of the male experience, but these amuse-bouches are a start.

Uh-oh. This laundry list of marginalized identities seems to explicitly condemn straight mainstream non-critical theory men of any color. I.e. it seems to baseline its views on the 15% of individuals who are a standard deviation outside the statistical norm while simultaneously indicting the 85% who constitute that statistical norm.

OK. Let's invest just a little bit more time to reconcile the airwaves statement with what seems to be in the book. How about the first few paragraphs from the first chapter?

Although the news often focuses on the threats of terrorism, natural disasters and nuclear war, there is no greater threat to humankind than our current definitions of masculinity.

It’s a bold statement. If you’ve never thought about it, it may even seem overblown. But before you put this book down, take a moment to put a gender lens on men. In ten years of both academic and media reporting on gender theory, I’ve long focused on the numerous consequences of the patriarchy for women, because there’s no shortage of them. But when I started talking to men about their own gender, I was dumbfounded. It changed my entire outlook on feminism. I started to wonder why the lies that we tell about masculinity aren’t on the first page of every newspaper every single day of the year.

That sounds more like it. We have been lying to men about their toxicity, about our expectations of them, about how they should be treated, etc. for decades now. All these old tropes about men being forced not to cry, not show emotions, not to take advice - they reek of a decades out-of-date fusty mind trying to support a bankrupt theory. We know there are dramatic behavioral differences between men and women. We know they are heritable differences. We know we have two or more generations of softer, more emotional, more equal education and socializing norms. The old tropes are marginalized and broadly unrepresentative. That battle has been won. We don't need to lie about it.

But, as it turns out, I am misreading Plank's words. She apparently does believe these stodgy stereotypes from the 1950s are indeed still alive, and well, and mainstream today. She appears to believe that men are being raised to be social morons and emotional pygmies.

Psychologists have sounded the alarm. For the first time in its history, the American Psychological Association (APA) has created a set of explicit guidelines for practitioners treating men and boys. Their report warns therapists about the dangers of what they call “traditional masculinity ideology” negatively impacting men’s mental health as well as physical health and well-being. Although the APA has often produced guidelines for therapists dealing with vulnerable populations like women, minorities or LGBTQ people, they’ve identified that the falsehoods we’ve all absorbed about men are putting their own health at risk.

And this is not just an American problem. It’s an international crisis. In China, recently a new term has emerged, 直男癌, which translated from Mandarin means “straight man cancer.”

In Iceland it’s eitruð karlmennska, which means “toxic” or “poisonous masculinity.” Hindi people in India refer to it as Mardaangi. In Québec, where I’m from, we call the guy who defines himself through domination of men and women “un macho.” His polar opposite, the man who is in touch with his feelings, is referred to pejoratively as l’homme rose, which translates to “the pink man.”

No matter what continent I visited and conducted interviews with men on, from Scandinavia to North America to Sub-Saharan Africa, I heard the same things over and over again. Toxic masculinity is an epidemic that knows no borders. No society has yet found the cure for it.

Oh, dear. What tosh. When you lead your argument with "psychologists have sounded the alarm", you know you are on weak ground. Psychology being the field in which there is the most adamant and progressive convictions but also the field where virtually all research ends up having to be withdrawn sooner or later owing to slipshod research or analysis and non-replication.

If your argument rests on the expertise of experts whose work is most notorious for error, you know there is a red flag waving.

If your primary purpose is to slay fictional stereotypes and tropes from the fifties, and which were unrepresentative at the time and certainly rare today, perhaps it is time to reconsider one's career choices.

This sounds like exactly the sort of ignorant moralizing and falsehood pedaling which has brought diversity training, sensitivity training, and all the other Mao-like re-education programs into such universal mockery and revulsion. Programs which, when rigorously assessed and analyzed, appear to make the stated problems they are intending to fix, worse.

Does the Plank from the radio daring to speak truths that fanatics want to lecture and not converse show up anywhere in the book?

I don't know. Art is long and life is short. The leading indicators are sufficiently off-putting in terms of their foreshadowing of low-quality argumentation and high volume ideology, that it seems unrewarding to invest further time with Plank.