Conservatives Sure Enjoy Whining

I have a rather startling confession to make --- I'm a liberal (try to contain your surprise).  But someone somewhere made the wise point that we should expose ourselves to opposing points of view, so as to test our assumptions and biases, and not become detached from reality in a bubble of like-minded thinkers.

So in this spirit, I follow S.E. Cupp and David French on Twitter.  I have learned that Cupp occasionally takes a break from her fact-free attacks on the left and exercises in false equivalence to level the occasional well-placed attack on Trump.  I haven't followed French for very long, but if most of his views are like his recent essay on masculinity, I have very low expectations.

French is unhappy because the APA (American Psychiatric Association) just released it's first-ever guidelines for working with men and boys.  And French disagrees strongly with it:

The APA sees the challenges facing young men and rightly seeks to overcome those challenges, but then diagnoses the wrong cause. As Stephanie Pappas notes on the APA website, the new guidelines conclude that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.”

French presents his case citing essentially no facts other than two charts which show that women have seen greater wage gains than men over the past 40 years --- which is kind of to be expected, considering the stark gender-based wage discrimination 40 years ago (not to mention the fact that women were still largely shut out of lucrative fields like law and medicine).  And he certainly makes no effort to refute any of the APA's 13 years of research.  The rest of his piece is the kind of primal scream one typically hears from the right any time someone suggests that it's possible for men to improve their behavior.  A typical passage:

Yet as we survey a culture that is rapidly attempting to enforce norms hostile to traditional masculinity, are men flourishing? And if men are struggling more the farther we move from those traditional norms, is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy’s essential nature? Male children are falling behind in school not because schools indulge their risk-taking and adventurousness but often because they relentlessly suppress boys and sometimes punish boys’ essential nature, from the opening bell to the close of the day.

Are men flourishing?  Well, we're currently suffering under the misrule of history's most corrupt and incompetent president, in part due to the fact that his opponent was a woman.  Women's earnings are still only 80% of men's.  And to the extent that men aren't flourishing (suicide rates are rising generally, but it is much higher among men than women), French makes no effort to relate it to 'norms hostile to traditional masculinity'.

Is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy's essential nature?  I wonder whether French is familiar with the concept of a straw man.

Male children are falling behind in school . . . Without even the pretense of a factual basis to back it up.

The whole essay is like this, and I wouldn't bother writing about it, except that his closing argument is: a) Anecdotal, and b) A tremendous self-own:

Then, one day after I returned from overseas, I was on a Cub Scout hike with my son. We were at the bottom of a ravine, when one of the boys threw a rock that hit my son square in the head. The gash was deep, blood was everywhere, and he started to lose consciousness. Our cell phones worked to call 911, but there was no way the ambulance could come down to us. We had to run up to it.

So, with the pack leader applying direct pressure to his head, I picked him up and started to run — straight up a steep incline. I ran, carrying him, until I was about to pass out. Then my wife (who is very strong but couldn’t carry him as far) would spell me for a bit. Then I’d grab him and run some more. We got to the top of the hill just as the ambulance arrived, and they were able to stop the bleeding before the blood loss got too serious.

Exciting!  And in French's mind, the perfect example of why we shouldn't listen to the APA when they say that "stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful."

French doesn't explain which of these traditionally male traits --- stoicism, competitiveness, dominance or aggression --- was the key ingredient in getting his son to the top of the hill.  Nor does he explain how his wife came by those same traditionally male traits when she took her turn.

But the 800-lb. gorilla that French ignores is that there would have been no need to carry his son up a ravine in the first place if another boy hadn't thrown a rock and hit his son in the head, in exactly the kind of dominance and aggression the APA wants to address.

What's more amazing than French's lack of self-awareness is that of his right-wing buddies, who jumped on Twitter to praise him for writing such a marvelous rebuttal to the APA.

In sum, we have:

1. The nation's most respected body in the study of psychology releases a document which is the result of 13 years of clinical study and analysis.
2. A right-wing commentator with no background in psychology (who probably didn't even read the full APA document) throws together a response full of right-wing grievance and unsupported whining, concluding with a self-refuting anecdote.
3. The rest of the right-wing applauds him on his accomplishment.

I don't think I'll be adding other conservatives to my list of Twitter follows any time soon.