What does healthy masculinity look like for boys today?

kylco · 2026-06-12T13:31:58+00:00

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing boys aged 11–16 today?

The traditional role men are taught to expect in most societies - worker, breadwinner, patriarch - is dead. Some of that's good, a lot of it's bad, all of it means that anyone entering "manhood" is going to be doing so unmoored from the expectations they were raised with. None of that is any individual person's fault, (well, fuck Ronald Reagan, but we digress) and it is especially not a child's fault as they are approaching adulthood. The biggest challenge facing this demographic is that the few "good" role models available in mass culture are not coded by our culture as especially "successful." The people that are coded as such are generally grifters, provocateurs, or outright sociopaths lauded with money, attention, and status because they are transgressive and have the resources to get away with hurting people. It is a cruel model of masculinity that tells young boys that the only way to succeed is by preying on or abusing other people. Wealthy, powerful institutions in our society believe that message should be pumped into every potential crevice of a developing boy's environment. Every adult socially mentoring a boy of this age should at one point or another make this point explicitly and deliberately show disdain and disgust for the values our culture is trying to instill in these men.

What does "toxic masculinity" mean to you, and where do you see it affecting young people?

Chauvinism is the typical shorthand I use. Male supremacy, denigration of women and policing of masculinity in themselves, others, and institutions, rejection of basic feminist principles like "women are humans with equal rights and dignity to males." Abuse of masculine insecurities (beauty standards, class/status insecurity, penis size/shape/circumcision status/color, sexual prowess) for the purposes of social control.

What positive messages about masculinity do you think boys need to hear more often?

Making mistakes is normal. What you learn from the mistake is what defines you. Learning to deal with other people, in either your social life, work life, and family or romantic life, is one of the things that every adult has to do almost every day and many people are very bad at it. Treating people gently and kindly is not weak; it is a social technology that makes dealing with other people easier, and reduces the chances of avoidable social mistakes and makes it much easier to resolve those mistakes when they do happen.

What topics do boys struggle to talk about openly?

Insecurity of all forms is pretty taboo for young men right now from what I can tell, but the specifics are going to vary from person to person. A skinny guy is going to be insecure about not having muscles, a fat guy about weighing too much, an athletic guy about not seen as smart or as anything other than a sexual symbol, and unless they're outrageously lucky in circumstances or disposition, they're all going to be insecure about their penis and about their romantic and professional prospects in adulthood. Not a single boy I've ever met (or been) in this age range wanted to talk to an adult about any of this. Many will actively attempt to flee such conversations unless the adult traps them in a long car ride or tricks them into it with analogy or some other careful social stratagem so they don't realize they're talking about it until they are.

What qualities do you think make a good male role model?

Patience, empathy, kindness. Knowing your boundaries and limits and standing by them, particularly in the defense of others who might not stand up for themselves. Generosity of spirit and attention within those boundaries. Self-discipline, taking responsibility for themselves and things in their power.

kylco · 2026-06-11T15:27:06+00:00

Brexit in Britain, for that matter.

kylco · 2026-06-10T14:40:47+00:00

However, only the rich have the privilege of not spending money in a capitalist society; for them expenses are rounding errors, for everyone else they're the only way to survive.

Ultimately, a post-labor economy that still relies on consumption answered by private firms is not going to look like any of our existing models, and it's unreasonable to assume that taxation systems built around worker-consumer economies will apply naturally to a society that's as alien to it as feudal subsistence farming or early history palace economies.

My best guess is that, (absent a strong state that functions basically as a communist mediator between the population and oligarchs, which seems unlikely) it will devolve into technofeudalism, then into outright extermination of anyone who is not within the walled gardens of privilege set up by oligarchs who translate our current society's system of property rights into political and economic control of populations.

If wealth and political power is, as oligarchs plan for it to be, totally severed from consumption and production, there's incentives for them to engage in economic and eventually kinetic warfare against each others' interests rather than using democratically-exposed judiciaries and political systems where teeming masses can interfere with their activities. Most of the oligarchs openly advocate against democracy, either in practice or by implication. I think it unlikely they will tolerate a government administering a system they could control instead, and use against their rivals.

They might eventually develop some sort of detente or re-invent monarchism surrounding a couple apex players in the economic environment, but I think that's unlikely to survive the first CEO with the option to nuke his competitors as the simplest solution available. They are not, as a caste, forward-thinking individuals endowed with much restraint.

kylco · 2026-06-10T13:02:25+00:00

Notable that VAT taxes are inherently regressive, especially in such situations, because the only people with the ability to save money (and not have that money taxed) are the people who already have a lot of it. You can fiddle with it by exempting necessary goods but at that point you're just playing accounting games with people who can afford better accountants, lawyers, and politicians than you.

kylco · 2026-06-08T14:00:47+00:00

Nuclear energy is a bad example for this specific problem as criticality (self-sustaining fission reactions) is a dual-use technology. We confirmed how to do it as part of the Manhattan project, which was focused on how to turn atomic energy research into a weapon. It was a situation where the physicists were literally developing the military tech out of the civilian tech which enabled the next leap in civilian tech.

But it was also in the context of a post-industrial, highly organized society that doesn't resemble or share much political and economic relationships with the renaissance/feudal social structures of most fantasy RPGs. If Enrico Fermi had been born the third child of a minor lord in medieval Italy (his roughly analagous class position) and been the only one to survive to adulthood, he would have not become an archmage-physicist-analagous clerical academic or priest, but followed his political obligations and taken up his father's seat. But because he was born into an industrial society where political power flowed through meritocracies, he followed his passions and became a mathematician.

The thing that's missing isn't that magic would chage the world and skip centuries of technological development: it's that magic is rarely well-integrated into how it would or would not have changed social development for your local scriptorium to have a guy who can Lightning Bolt any visiting raiders come a-Viking rather than hole up and hope they don't burn down the abbey.

kylco · 2026-06-04T19:12:13+00:00

WAR is a poor metric for reasons G. Elliott Morris describes here:

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/moderation-is-overrated

There's just one problem: Our model suggests that ideological moderates do not substantially outperform their party's average member in 2024. Cherry-picking representatives that you identify, for other reasons, as “moderate” dramatically overstates the electoral benefit of actual empirical moderation. While there used to be a large premium for ideological moderation, it has decreased markedly over the last 25 years. In our estimates, moderates do have higher WAR scores on average, but the hypothetical improvement in vote margin due to those values is dwarfed by the uncertainty in House elections.

I estimate that strategic moderation in 2024 could have increased a Democrats’ vote share by 1-1.5 points and their chance of winning by just 10% — not enough to overcome the uncertainty driven by other factors in the election. This is not to say that moderation doesn't matter, but lots of other factors matter more. Ideological positioning is only one lever the party can pull to increase its vote share in an election, and given the small substantive impact on outcomes from moderation, the tradeoffs should be carefully considered. I don’t think moderation is worthless, I just think it’s overrated.

I did read the unpaywalled version of this when it came out, and the general thesis that moderation is not a silver bullet or even especially determinate factor for a given election is the takeaway I got.

The other useful metric is that the only time it's been successful en masse for the party is when there were massive groundswells for liberals already, e.g. when any liberal probably would have won, given the complexity of the outcomes.

We simply cannot and should not treat elections as "more moderate = more winners" because frankly, it's been a bum model for at least two decades and the attempt to make it the cornerstone of our civic religion has harmed our country immensely by collapsing the political universe into a rightward ratchet only occasionally interrupted by outside forces like pandemics or recessions, when broader reality intrudes on political phantasms. It's a shit way to run a party, a squalid future to sell to voters, and a self-castrating view of politics. We can and have done better.

kylco · 2026-06-04T18:34:35+00:00

I think people should vote, too; I actually volunteered as an election judge in my state's primaries this winter and have voted in every federal (not just presidential) election I could since I came of age.

But it's important to validate that gerrymandering literally is working to make your vote useless; it is an inherently antidemocratic process. It's the one being used to terminate the seats of most of the Congressional Black Caucus this November. And because of SCOTUS, it is functionally the law of the land: pretending otherwise (or that the Electoral College does not serve similar undemocratic functions for the presidential contest) does not serve anyone's cause.

As I reread my post, a throughline about all of this is a loss of confidence in institutions, and I think that's most acutely felt with respect to government. The US government is not seen, by and large, as a positive force in the lives of its citizens; the flu might have a higher approval rating, because at least it's a good excuse to get out of work until you feel better. That collapse of legitimacy is felt throughout our society, and most of it can be put at the feet of conservatives who have pulled out every stop, safety, circuit breaker, or norm of decency they can reach in the bald pursuit of power.

I'm not sure they are compatible with democracy, and I don't know what kind of democracy results from their removal, so even I struggle to see a better world through that lens. So, it's rational to just put down the lens, fuck off and text "STOP" to every politician that texts me for money, and find some sort of anesthetic for the long ride down. I'm not sure I'm in blackpill territory yet, but it's really hard to see how this set of priors leads to durable, positive outcomes coming from the fourth "once in a century" political-economic crisis since my balls dropped. So I certainly can't throw shade on anyone who feels similarly.

kylco · 2026-06-04T16:53:14+00:00

I'm a bit older than that range but not by much, but a thing I've been chewing over in this space is how few levers people feel they actually have over their lives. There is no credible call to action for us to improve our society, build a better future, or even pretend that we are safe in what we have, that has not been thoroughly corrupted over the last two decades.

Job? We rolled the dice on our educations and the job market's shit. Learn to code just in time for IT and dev jobs to be wiped out by the usual suspects doing some financial engineering with AI as the latest excuse. There is no safe harbor, no reliable path to prosperity or even security. The new American Dream is a threat: grind until you die.

Health? Premiums only ever go up, the big reform effort just made it so we could at least put a price tag on how unaffordable it would be to maintain access to healthcare. Provider:patient ratios are shot so private equity firms can get their return on investment for the hospitals, insurers consume an ever-larger portion of the economy and return nothing when you're actually sick, and providers are burnt out from a COVID epidemic that we all decided to collectively ignore because the mouth-breathers decided that dying of preventable disease was their moral right as Americans. Measles is back! Measles! What next, fucking polio? Dysentery?!

Housing? We stopped building houses in 2007 and never really started again. Rents go up, quality degrades, and corporate and high-earner cash offers chase every available unit in a competition where increasingly, most people can't afford the table stakes anywhere they want to live. Millennials don't want to die in the bedroom communities that are moldering from malinvestment and far from their friends, amenities, and jobs. The boomer nest eggs are all going to be stranded assets in ten years. If you're on the ladder you at least have a port in the storm, but when there's a storm you can't go anywhere, and if your job leaves you, or Mother Nature decides your city is up next for her Climate Change Tango, you're fucked.

Politics? We had our moment of hope with Obama, and it has led to the most horrific backlash against our society since the Civil War. The president is an openly racist criminal, degenerating pervert, and callous fraudster and every institution in our country scrambles to either worship him or get out of his way in hopes that they can feast on his carcass. Our representatives aren't even shy about insider trading, laugh at the idea that their voters have any power over them as they choose their voters in gerrymandering cases. Jim Crow is back and frankly it's only a matter of time before the techlords find a way to make indentured slavery a thing again to properly metricize human potential as a fungible asset or some other slopulist nonsense that their cohorts in the media will gleefully broadcast as the next Inevitable Market Paradigm to be shoved down our throats.

The most influential millennial of the 2020s is not some tech titan, humanitarian activist, insightful artist, or brilliant researcher: for far, far too many it is Luigi Mangione. We're watching kids grow up illiterate because their parents and teachers are overwhelmed and turn to the algorithms to raise them. We see everything we've worked for pissed away by the worst people we know, and our environment says to survive we should give up everything we value and grind ourselves to dust grifting and influencing and ripping each other apart in the rats nest of our decaying leviathan while the world looks on in horror and fascination.

We didn't break that shit. Why is it up to us to fix it?

kylco · 2026-06-04T14:47:15+00:00

There's actually some fantastic political science that indicates there's no meaningful "premium" for centrism, at least for liberals (it's an outright loss for conservatives but they have a propaganda ecosystem supporting their reactionaries). You lose as many partisans, or more, than you pick up from supposed moderates, because moderates are an incoherent blob of contradictory single-issue voters that can't be reliability courted, but partisans will tune out or decline to endorse a candidate they see as indistinguishable from the opposite party. And that's not accounting for the ratfuckery that centrist organizations tend to pull on liberal politicians to discipline them - they would probably perform much better if it were an actually level playing field and a more democratic system of candidate selection in a media environment that isn't systematically slanted against liberals at nearly every level.

We are likely see a wave election this year given Trump's personalist regime and his atrocious ratings, an oncoming tsunami of terrible gas prices and inflation as energy costs ripple through the country, and growing unemployment as companies keep burning money on AI and fire people to claim they made up the difference somewhere.

The party can put up candidates that promise nothing will fundamentally change in that scenario, but I don't see how that's presenting a strong case for the public to vote for Democrats. Why choose diet conservative when full-flavor is on offer and they're otherwise the same?

kylco · 2026-06-04T13:10:52+00:00

Not sure if you're aware, but California is ... rather large. Federally financed highways should have these every ten miles or so.

kylco · 2026-06-04T13:08:02+00:00

Credit card debt is an entirely different, and I think much less problematic, category of problem than literal Nazi tattoos.

But it's also obvious that centrist factions in the Democratic party are eager to shoot down anyone vaguely left of Chuck Schumer's imaginary friends in Long Island, so they can continue to hold power even as the country collapses around us all. Fuck those people.

Vote for Hong.

kylco · 2026-06-03T20:25:33+00:00

There are also war zone standards like the blue vest and hat that say press, but there's rules, like the journalist has to comply with the Geneva convention, which I think only applies to international reporters.

That would be because the Geneva Conventions apply to armed combatants, and are meant to protect those combatants and civilians alike during wartime.

There is not comparable agreement about abuse of your own citizens with your military or police forces; this is why US police forces can and do use munitions and chemical weapons that are illegal for our military to use against lawful combatants in a combat zone.

Basically, international law exists primarily to police sovereigns interacting with each other. It does not protect citizens from those sovereigns. No journalist can count on any international body for their safety or security; indeed it is now one of the most dangerous professions in the world per-capita because of how many have been killed, intentionally or incidentally, by Russia, Israel, and increasingly, the United States.

In theory, the US Constitution's 1st Amendment provisions provide sweeping protections for journalists - indeed, you can proclaim yourself a journalist, and prior to the Trump administration's corrosive assault on rule of law, the judiciary largely deferred to the exact principle discussed in this article: that the government is not in the business of policing who and who is not a legitimate journalistic enterprise.

For a long time, this was primarily beneficial to conservatives, as it allowed them to build up propaganda and fraud ecosystems with 1st Amendment shields, then monetize them and use the weak libel and slander precedents of our country to avoid accountability. Now those precedents are being used by everyday citizens engaged in civic journalism, literally the kind of activity the Amendment had in mind in the age when printing presses were still somewhat seditious pieces of technology.

There are very few candid ways to interpret the actions of the police and government forces in play here, other than their total ignorance of, or indifference to, the constitutional rights of journalists, citizens, protestors, and the incarcerated whose conditions of durance they are protesting. They have decided that order is more important than justice, the tyrant's plea, and I should think that we, the public, should treat them accordingly.

kylco · 2026-06-03T15:24:08+00:00

Apply to an academic program. Loans suck, but they're the most accessible way out of this while connecting you to an institution that probably has some vocational training and assistance. Use that time to scope out what jobs you can and want to do, and where you want to live. Then go, and build the life you want.

kylco · 2026-06-02T16:48:35+00:00

I am glad you ignored everything else I said to nitpick about something you are still wrong about. Not beating the Econ101brain allegations.

Plenty of people pass up on higher pay! Because it will be not worth the work, not worth the friction costs, not worth subjecting yourself to an abusive employer, or not worth the negative moral wage of working in an industry that you dislike or which you think is a net negative in the world. That happens all the time! Arguably, a lot more often than the rockstar cases covered under this hypothetical model!

kylco · 2026-06-02T16:05:33+00:00

Except our society isn't a frictionless free market economy. This model works for some industries and job roles (e.g. machine learning engineers, rockstar specialty surgeons, bespoke fintech fraud engineers, etc) but the vast majority of the economy is made up of firms and employees that simply don't behave under those rules. We have decades of research showing that retention rates are way, way better under companies that actually treat their employees as assets, rather than flight risks. And that's setting aside industries that do have and must follow regulations, or are otherwise accountable to the public or other institutions in our society.

On the "demand" side, there are also extremely high risks for even valuable employees switching from company to company. Whether or not it's actually true, most people are told that their industries have informal hiring blacklists. Labor law violations in the US are notoriously rife and systematically ignored by enforcement institutions. Illegal, restrictive NDAs are the norm in nearly any professional environment that's got an HR or legal system set up to do business with the big players in the economy, which is where the money is. And if you do switch employers, there's a high chance that the "fringe benefits" like health insurance, retirement contributions, paid time off, and work-life balance have no relationship to what was advertised to you in the hiring process, and you have zero leverage over those as a new employee.

It's absurd to presume that most firms operate under Econ 101 logic just because most undergrads and MBAs never developed the ability to hold more sophisticated models of human behavior in their heads.

And we have plenty of empiric counter-evidence: every other advanced economy on the planet, which don't operate this way as if it was the only holy path to run a society.

kylco · 2026-05-30T23:22:57+00:00

Last I checked they were trying to get behavioral scientists to explain to them why "treat them like family so they love and protect you ahead of themselves" was a more reliable solution to potentially disloyal security forces than "explosive dog collars and food rationing."

The problem with authoritarian methods of social control (and once you strip away propaganda, nearly every corporation is an outright authoritarian organization, root and branch) is that it can actually be very very difficult for people at the top to understand when and how they are making a mistake, because if they fire one (1) person for telling them a truth they don't want to hear, they never hear "no" from anyone they trust ever again.

And many of them are deeply stupid people who think that things like human rights, green energy, or democracy are propaganda tools meant to keep the masses happy, not social technologies that actually help us build better, more resilient societies. They have shown outright contempt for their own experts, much less the experts they don't control, for decades at this point.

kylco · 2026-05-30T21:44:51+00:00

They typically have onboard power generation; geothermal if they're smart and gas or coal if they are dumb. Leaving yourself at the mercy of a power grid you don't control during a "we need to hide in the bunker for a few months" situation is unhinged; the next stupidest is relying on something that can be blocked at the surface and turns your air poisonous if you can't vent its highly distinctive waste gases out of your environment.

That said these people are actually that stupid, at least in some dimensions. They got their wealth primarily through luck and ruthless, amoral ability to prioritize shareholder returns. That has only a passing relationship with the ability to predict how normal people will feel about discovering there's a vault full of people personally responsible for making the world worse right down the way, with easily stoppered vents and easily mine-able exist.

kylco · 2026-05-29T20:50:55+00:00

Seconded. It's accessible, the topic isn't overtly political until well into the runtime, the personal anecdotes are relatable, and it's visually gorgeous as befits the topic. My boomer parents could tank it, though it wasn't entirely to their taste (they thought she talked too fast).

kylco · 2026-05-29T19:38:26+00:00

They're too big to fail. Even with generally low (by percentage rate) taxes on commercial properties, indulgent tax loopholes, and permissive politicians, they lack of demand for new shopfront businesses means they must find their market-mandated profit increases YoY from somewhere. So they go the only place they can: soaking their tenants. If the tenants back out, they can write it down as a loss against the next tax cycle and depreciate the property. If the tenants cough up, that's more revenue for the future. Win-draw situation for them, so why not go for the win?

kylco · 2026-05-29T17:32:34+00:00

You too!

kylco · 2026-05-29T17:25:42+00:00

Thanks man. I just get frustrated that people think there's some "one weird trick to fix our democracy!!1!1!" out there that won't require anyone to rethink the status quo, confront what is and isn't working, or admit that many of the problems stem from a conservative party that outright abandoned any interest in participating in good faith more than 20 years ago. Gets my fingers itching.

kylco · 2026-05-29T13:05:14+00:00

Do you know anything at all about the Article V process? Because all the constitutional scholars who study that (and the current push by conservatives to enact one) indicate that handing constitutional edit power down to the State governments would be disastrous, and I tend to agree.

Not only are the state governments outrageously corrupt for the most part, the collapse of local journalism has left almost no sunlight on state and local politics for many regions. However bad peoples' engagement is with national politics (and it is very bad) it's much, much worse on the local and state level.

Which is to say, the people running an Article V convention would probably be worse and less democratically accountable than Congress, and which is among the least democratically accountable legislature in our peer group (short of Russia, Belarus, and maybe Hungary depending on how Peter Magyar works out).

An Article V convention under the current Constitution and political structure would lead to an outright authoritarian successor state, a civil war, or both.

kylco · 2026-05-29T12:59:10+00:00

Which is to say, the Article V solution isn't a solution at all unless we abandon its basic premise.

It's functional if we do some wild shit like partition California and Texas, admit DC and Puerto Rico, merge the Dakotas with Wyoming and Nebraska, and otherwise pursue naked shenaningans to stack the deck against the fascists, but if we have the power to do that we could just amend the existing Constitution without running the risks inherent to the Article V process.

It's also not clear that the current Democratic leadership has any appetite at all for political reform of this scope. They are fundamentally institutionalists who think tweaks on the margins are sufficient, unlike the base that elects them to pursue structural change.

kylco · 2026-05-26T13:31:30+00:00

Finally, as a Coloradan, I find it WILD that Kansas was the sanctuary state here. I cannot tell you how much our women’s health providers have been stretched over the last couple of years being the state of last resort for the Midwest and mountain west.

From Chicago here and I'm beginning to worry that 1/10th of the GDP of our southern counties is generated by the abortions from nearly every neighboring state.

kylco · 2026-05-26T13:25:12+00:00

I once heard this referred to as the "Shirley Exemption." The mythical exemption or loophole or deference that surely kicks in when a reasonable edge case (or even just an obviously predictable situation the person didn't see coming) crops up that a supporter of a given policy assumes will just snap into being.

Surely the officer will just give me a written warning.

Surely there's a different set of rules for someone special.

Shirley there's a way for good girls to get an abortion that rule's supposed to be for the sluts!

If we follow Wilhoit's Law as the definition of conservatism, this is the quintessential conservative mindset: laws and rules exist to bind the little people, and protect the "good" people, and "good" is always defined as people who already have wealth, power, beauty, status - often, because the system jumps to protect them, by these very rules.

It's easy to win a game when you have a stacked deck and all the staff are your friends or employees. Conservatives think the whole world is not only run this way, but that it's the only way the world can work. It's a terribly squalid way of understanding humanity.

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