The 120 greatest moments on the path to the White House

Here's the list:

1 - 44

45 - 77

78 - 99

100 - 120

How Obama lost me, part 3

Click here for the premise of this list and #1-5.

Click here for #6-8.

At the risk of making this Obama supporter even more mad at me, here's the rest of my list of "How Obama lost me":


9. Rigidly opposing the surge

Obama's two main responses to being asked whether he was wrong on the surge (which you can see starting around 4:00 of this clip) are, to paraphrase:

• It didn't do what it was supposed to do.
  
• No one, not even Bush or McCain, expected it to achieve the positive results that it did.
  

So his position is: the surge wasn't successful enough ... and by the way, it was successful beyond our wildest dreams?!

If he wants to present himself as such a nuanced observer of the surge now, he should have taken a nuanced position back then. Instead, he seems to have opposed it without considering the possibility that it would work out.

I have very little understanding of the situation in Iraq, but I can understand this: if he got the surge right, he should explain why. He hasn't done so. If he got it wrong, he should be as blunt as John Edwards was in admitting he was wrong about whether to invade Iraq. 


10. "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." (#87 in my campaign moments list)

This line -- from a speech Obama gave to the pro-Israel AIPAC in June -- was a worse foreign-policy gaffe than anything I've heard Sarah Palin say.

Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus -- both of whom, like me, are still supporting Obama despite lots of reservations about him -- give a very thorough explanation of why it was so awful:




11. Rev. Jeremiah Wright

I don't agree with all the attention and criticism Obama's pastor got, but that's water under the bridge. It was reckless of Obama to run for president, knowing he had something as explosive as this with the potential to tilt the election to the Republicans, and apparently do nothing to prepare for it. 

He could have had a Sister Souljah moment by proactively distancing himself from Rev. Wright early on. He could have even done this out of the blue, before anything hit YouTube. And once the clips started circulating, he should have acted immediately and decisively. By dragging things out for weeks and weeks, he just delayed the inevitable reject-and-denounce, while making it look like a reluctant political calculation.   


And lastly, of course...

12. Inexperience

I hate to say it, but he shouldn't have decided to run for president with just 2 years of qualifying experience.

I think I understand his calculation: he had the growing excitement around the beginning of the primaries, whereas if he'd waited around for years being a boring ol' senator, that might have eroded his luster. But he just should taken that gamble and run in 4, 8, or 12 years -- when he would have been in his 50s or just turning 60. It would have been worth it to be able to run as someone who's more fluent in policy, has more specific accomplishments to point to, and doesn't compel people to doubt whether he's "ready."

--

So, that's my list. To be clear, none of this is reason enough for me not to vote for Obama. Every candidate has a slew of flaws, and I think McCain's are worse. There are the staggering self-reinvention and flip-flops, which dwarf anything I've seen from Obama. There's his refusal to admit that invading Iraq turned out to be a bad idea. There's his painfully shallow understanding of economics. There's his "How dare you question my integrity or righteousness -- I was a POW!" attitude, which makes Bush look humble by comparison. 

And yes, there's his age. Of course I think people in their 70s can handle serious jobs. I have no problem with, say, an 80- or 90-year-old judge, as long as they're able. But being president is a uniquely stressful and demanding job, so I do have a problem with an 80-year-old president (which is what McCain will be if he has a full, successful presidency). The idea that this is somehow offensive or taboo is ludicrous. The stakes are just too high to worry about offending people. 

--

I haven't gotten to read all the comments on this list yet, but I might have an update once I do. Thanks for all the civil discussion. 

And thanks to the many bloggers (and one Twitterer) who linked to this list and made it almost certainly my most-read content yet -- I've gotten about 20,000 visits since I started the list on Monday, compared with about 60,000 total visits to this blog. Thanks especially to Instapundit and my mom.

How Obama lost me, part 2

As I explained in this post, I've become disillusioned with Barack Obama as a candidate (read the intro to that post for the details). Here are some more points in the continuing list of reasons why:


6. Does Obama have a problem with "policy specifics"? Yes and no...

This critique has always bothered me. The fact is, most voters are moved by speeches about broad themes and values, not policy wonkery. And I find it highly suspicious that everyone makes this complaint about Obama, while no one says it about McCain, even though McCain is even more vague than Obama on policy. But...

a) Hearing Bill Clinton's convention speech, where he mentioned actual statistics and explained how they matter to ordinary people's lives, made me think: it is possible to have the best of both worlds. Obama is just not operating at the Bill Clinton level when it comes to communicating policy. Of course, very few people are at Bill Clinton's level -- but Obama has been billed as the next Clinton. And given the Democrats' history with presidential elections over the past few decades, Bill Clinton would be a pretty good person to emulate.

b) While saying "His policies are on his website!" is appropriate as a response to anyone who suggests that he truly hasn't offered specific proposals ... it's not very satisfying. If he really cares about those policies, he should be devoting real effort and political capital to trying to convince people of their merit instead of just passively hosting them on the web.

Also, he obviously didn't sit down and write that stuff from scratch and hit the "post" button; he found some smart, knowledgeable person to do it for him. Nothing wrong with that! That's true of every candidate. But it would be more useful if we could see him actually explain and defend these policies in an extemporaneous setting (or as close as you can get, given the scripted nature of campaigns).

Many Democrats are (rightly) skeptical of whether Bush, McCain, or Palin genuinely understands and believes in their own official economic policies. Voters are entitled to be equally skeptical of Obama.

c) Campaigns aren't fair -- that's life. Even if you don't agree with the narrative that "Obama is inspiring but too vague," as long as that idea is out there, it's Obama's burden to proactively convince voters otherwise.

He actually tried to do that in February while campaigning in Wisconsin ... but the result just wasn't very interesting! I watched one of his "specific policy" speeches, and the only thing I remember from it is that he wants to give college students a few-thousand-dollar tuition credit in exchange for community service. If I'm understanding it correctly, he's basically saying he'll offer a bunch of low-level government jobs specific to college students. That may be a perfectly fine thing to do, but it's not the kind of idea that's likely to sway anyone's vote. Yet it was the climactic moment of his whole policy speech.

d) A couple of his most distinctive policies -- that is, ideas specific to him rather than simply reflecting the consensus of mainstream Washington Democrats -- are notably bad ideas:

• Requiring 50 hours a year of public service from middle and high school students as a condition of federal funding for schools. I think my mom had the right call on this:
  

[C]hildren are already forced to work when they are sent to school. School is work. Respect that work. Let them know that it is work, and it's their job. And when they are done, let them play. Let them have their free time. Don't appropriate any more of their time. How dare you!

• The faith-based initiative. Why put so much emphasis on a reheated leftover from Bush's 2000 campaign? Admittedly, this is an example of actually backing up his bipartisan rhetoric with policy specifics ... but if that's what Obama's bipartisan approach is really like, then I can do without Obama's bipartisan approach! (To be clear: I admire religious organizations for doing good works, but I don't want my tax dollars favoring the religious over the secular.) He claims the program will fund only "secular programs" and not "proselytizing" ... but money is fungible: give a church more money for their charitable works, and you're indirectly giving them more money for everything else they do.
  

7. As much as I hate to admit it, there's a lot of truth to the "He's all about speeches, not ideas" critique.

This is similar to #6, but broader. In other words, even beyond policy, what has he ever said about anything that's so exciting or original?

This is another point I've been resisting for months and months, but I couldn't deny the basic truth that Robert Wright -- another skeptical Obama supporter -- hit on here (transcript of key point followed by video clip):

If you are a great orator ... and you don't use your skills to surprise people or stake out a position that's a little risky and really do the work of convincing people that that's the right position -- if you take your great oratorical skills and just keep repeating "I'm a uniter, not a divider," plus several boilerplate predictions that are totally poll-driven -- you look like an empty suit!

(end of quote -- back to me...) It's getting clearer and clearer that what has gotten him so much attention and adoration despite his inexperience is not his ideas or policies or even his life story. It's two things: he's black, and he can give a great speech. If you took those two things away, it'd be inconceivable that he'd be chosen over Biden, Richardson, or Dodd, let alone Hillary Clinton. I'm not complaining about the focus on his race -- I think it's really important to have the first black president. And I'm glad he gives a great speech. But look, fellow Obama supporters: that's not really enough, is it, considering the crisis America is in right now?

Many commenters on my previous post complained that if I'm going to make all these anti-Obama points, I shouldn't turn around and vote for him. Well, there's a difference between whether to vote for him, and whether the excitement surrounding him has been justified. None of the points I'm making in this list convince me to vote for McCain instead of Obama. But at the same time, I think it's worth pointing out that it's really hard to see the justification for the unprecedented level of excitement around the guy -- which I myself participated in.


8. His take on race has been disappointing.

I largely agreed with the praise showered on his race speech. But it was pointlessly overshadowed by the famous passage in which he criticized his own grandmother for fearing black men on the street -- the implication being: even basically decent people have some racism in their hearts.

The problem is: whether or not you think Jesse Jackson and others are racist to feel relieved if the person towards them down a dark street turns out to be white, the fact is that many Americans do feel this way and don't consider themselves racist, anymore than they'd consider it sexist to feel relieved upon seeing that the person walking towards them turns out to be a woman. It's fine with me if Obama privately thinks otherwise, but that doesn't make it a productive thing for him to say when he's running for president.

Of course, the fact that he later tried to clarify that part of the speech by explaining that his grandmother was being a "typical white person" only compounded the problem.

Another example: when he was asked at a debate whether he, as the son of a Kenyan immigrant, has had to deal with the problems facing most black Americans, he jocosely mentioned "trying to catch a cab," then pointedly cut himself off as if to say to the audience: Now, doesn't that just about say it all? Of course, this got enormous applause. First of all, if that's one of the worst problems facing blacks in America, given our racial history, then we should all be overjoyed. Second, this image conjures up an affluent man standing around in NYC, waiting for a driver who -- let's face it -- is quite likely a minority and/or an immigrant trying to make ends meet. That's not exactly a crystal-clear symbol of everyday black people being thwarted by The Man.

UPDATE: Concluded here.

How Obama lost me

In September 2004, my mom (Ann Althouse) posted "How Kerry lost me." She never particularly supported Kerry, and she ended up voting for Bush. She didn't mean "How Kerry lost me" as in "Why I stopped being a supporter" -- she just meant how she went from open-minded about him to turned off from him.

I'm not usually explicit about my political preferences on this blog, so I want to be clear: I've supported Obama since I watched his announcement in early 2007 with excitement, I voted and caucused for him in the Texas primacaucus, and I'm going to vote for him in November.

So in what sense did he "lose me"? As with my mom's "How Kerry lost me," I haven't gone from supporter to non-supporter. What I mean is that I used to hold these beliefs:

• I thought he was clearly, dramatically preferably to Hillary Clinton.
  
• I thought he was virtually the dream candidate for 2008, with the obvious but overlookable exception of his thin resume.

I now believe that I was wrong. Specifically:

• He's probably better than Hillary would have been, but it's at least really close, and I'm even open to the idea that she would have been better.
  
• I still support Obama, but not particularly more strongly than I'd be supporting any other mainstream Democratic candidate who was the nominee.
  
• He's just not a good enough candidate. Democrats are entitled to feel very disappointed about this.

It's taken me a long time to get to this point because there's no single issue or moment that decisively turned me off from him.

Rather, it's a long list of things that add up to the "He's not good enough" conclusion. Here are the ones that most stand out to me:

[UPDATE: The list is now finished, with part 2 here and part 3 here.

1. "It's not surprising that they get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations." (#28 in my list of campaign moments, by the way)

It's not the "bitter" part that bothers me. In hindsight, this was a tactless choice of words, but not worth devoting days of media coverage to.

The "cling" part is what bothers me. There's no context that justifies this; it's simply unacceptable for an American presidential candidate to put on the record any kind of negative comment about people clinging to guns and especially religion. How could he have possibly thought it was a good idea to list "religion" along with "antipathy towards people who aren't like them," as if both of these things were part of some larger problem with middle America? (And if he didn't realize all this was going on the record, in the age of blogs and YouTube, he should have.)

This comment alone has given people grounds to doubt the sincerity of his politically convenient conversion to Christianity as an adult. I don't personally care what his religious views are, but a lot of voters obviously do care and doubt whether he's really a Christian.


2. His answer about "evil" in Rick Warren's Saddleback Forum

I'm sure this kind of analysis -- focusing on moral equivalence and the need for American "humility" -- goes over well at elite liberal cocktail parties, but he's supposed to know to avoid that image. He should have realized that McCain would turn the question into a question about defeating terrorism. There's no benefit to ceding moral clarity to McCain on that issue.


3. Saying he would personally meet with dictators in his first year without preconditions

Everyone knows that Hillary got this right and Obama got it wrong. When he was asked about it after the debate, he should have been humble enough to admit that he wasn't paying enough attention to the details in the question when he gave an unqualified "yes" answer. Instead, he's subjected us to tortured explanations for why he really did have the right answer. He seems to have based a whole foreign-policy plank on standing up to Hillary and McCain's taunts about this gaffe!


4. I think he got a bad rap for supposedly flip-flopping and moving to the center immediately after he clinched the nomination, but his timing and PR could hardly have been worse.

And what did he get out of it? Very little, as far as I can see.

How many voters still remember the nuances of his positions on various Supreme Court decisions? How many voters are truly upset about his utterly innocuous comment about being willing to "refine" his Iraq policy based on talking to military commanders about the changing circumstances? Probably not many anymore, since ... circumstances in Iraq have changed, which would force any rational president to ... refine their Iraq policy!

It's not Obama's fault that the media -- and, let's face it, the voters -- have an unrealistic expectation that a candidate should be able to sum up a clear foreign policy in the form of simple soundbites that don't change for years. Obama is smart enough to know that foreign policy doesn't work like that, and his only gaffe was letting it slip that he understands that things are more complex than the media or the people would like them to be. So I'm basically sympathetic to Obama on this. But he let McCain and the media run away with the narrative instead of taking charge of his own narrative.


5. The Palin pick seemed to catch them utterly by surprise.

My mom was gearing up for the Palin pick well in advance (blog post, Bloggingheads video clip). Lots of other pundits and bloggers were gearing up for the Palin pick. So why wasn't the Obama campaign gearing up for the Palin pick?


Continued here.

My reading list, part 3

(You can see the whole list at this link, and see the beginning of this post for the premise.)

11. What Went Wrong? - Bernard Lewis

How Islam got left behind. Fortuitously written right before September 11.


12. The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

13. God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens

I've read Sam Harris's The End of Faith and didn't find it very satisfying. I'm looking forward to these two books as a replacement. I expect them to go well together, almost like a two-volume set: the former is more about God, the latter is more about religion.


14. The Construction of Social Reality - John Searle

It's surprising how little focus there's been within analytic philosophy on explaining society -- not making prescriptions for society, but simply describing its fundamental nature. Searle gives it a shot, and makes you feel in awe of screwdrivers, restaurants, and five-dollar bills.


15. What's It All About? - Julian Baggini

The meaning of life in one short, simple book.

The 40 greatest grunge songs

[intro] —> 40 - 36

35 - 31

30 - 26

25 - 21

20 - 16

15 - 11

10 - 6

5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1.

[outro]

My reading list, part 2

See this post for the beginning of the list, and the premise.

6. Upheavals of Thought - Martha Nussbaum

A thoughtful and emotional book arguing that emotions contain more thought than they're given credit for. 


7. Descartes's Error - Antonio Damosio

Sort of the flipside of #6: rational thought requires emotions -- contrary to the traditional belief that reason and feelings are distinct mental faculties that "d[on't] mix any more than oil and water."


8. Ruling Passions - Simon Blackburn

Similarly, this would go very well with #6 and #7. The basic position is: ethics depends on emotions, yet this doesn't mean that ethical principles are "relative" or "subjective." There's also an intriguing tangent on the connection between aesthetics and ethics. 


9. Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? - Christopher Heath Wellman & Alan John Simmons

Well? Is there?


10. Lifting the Fog of Legalese - Joseph Kimble

Trying to send "null and void" into the void.

My reading list, part 1

As I've been transitioning to a new town and job, I've also been rearranging my book collection -- rediscovering books from back home in Madison and bringing them to my new home in Albany. Below are some of the ones I want to get to relatively soon. Some of them are books I'm in the middle of reading, some are ones I've read before but want to refresh my memory about, and some are just books I haven't read yet. All of them are books I might do blog posts about in the future, but for now I just want to have this list on the blog so that I'll be more motivated to read these:

1. The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria

What in the world is going on?

(Video interview with the author.)

2. The Future of Freedom - Fareed Zakaria

If you want "liberal democracy," you need to have the "liberal" part before the "democracy."

3. Modern Times - Paul Johnson

A history of most of the 20th century. He's overly biased toward the right, and he's supposedly prone to outright factual errors. But when I want to read about history, I just can't not read Paul Johnson, with his passionate writing style and his knack for highlighting the human, quirky side of history.

4. The Mysterious Flame - Colin McGinn

An argument that the mind-body problem can't be solved by human beings.

5. Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The scientifically tested secret to enjoying life. Why is happiness so elusive even though it's quite attainable, even for people of modest means?

More to come...

What are the disadvantages of being male?

A few weeks ago, I made this point, which I want to get back to (isn't it great when you've been blogging long enough to quote yourself?):

Both genders face huge and distinct disadvantages. I'd be hard-pressed to say whether it's more unfortunate to be a man or a woman.

As a thought-experiment, you could imagine -- apologies to John Rawls and his veil of ignorance -- that you haven't been born yet and you get to choose which gender you want to live your life as. You get to be fully informed about what the world is like, but all you know about your future life is that you'll be a human being growing up in the United States. (Significantly, you don't know your race or sexual orientation.) Which gender would you choose to be? I think some people would choose to be a man, and others would choose to be a woman, and it's far from obvious what the wiser choice would be.

I want to focus on the male-disadvantages side of this question, which I find more interesting because it's not talked about as much.

I'm well aware that the person who suggests, at least in certain kinds of elite circles, that maybe there are some not-so-great things about being a man is likely not be heard. Civil discussion will end. You aren't allowed to talk about, or think about, the idea that while gender roles, norms, traditions, stereotypes, etc. have certainly been bad for women ... they might also be bad for men too.

It's odd: I would have thought that if that's true, then it would actually strengthen the case for feminism. If everyone is burdened by antiquated gender rules, isn't that twice as bad as if half the population were burdened?

But even if you honestly believed there were no disadvantages to being a man, what would be your motivation to silence those who suggest otherwise? Why wouldn't you want a completely free debate in which anyone is allowed to marshall whatever evidence they want and get a fair hearing? In a free debate, anyone who doesn't have the facts on their side will be revealed as wrong. You shouldn't need to decide in advance which are the correct views and which are the incorrect views and shout down anything that falls under the latter category.

It's hard for me to imagine a much clearer example of this phenomenon than a recent set of discussion threads on Metafilter. It's rare that you have such a clear-cut instance of taboo enforcement preserved for all to see, so I want to take a look at this. (I have first-hand experience with the same thing in the real world, but can't really blog about it.)

The other day, someone posted a question to AskMetafilter, essentially asking: What are the advantages of being a man? (For those who aren't familiar with it, Metafilter is a "community" website written by thousands of users; one section is called AskMetafilter, where people post questions on any topic for other users to answer. Anyone can read it, but you pay a nominal one-time fee to add content.)

So I decided to post the reverse: What are the disadvantages of being a man? Both questions immediately began drawing a variety of thoughtful answers.

Well, guess what happened. The website's moderators deleted my question, but allowed the first question to stay.

I asked them about this discrepancy and got conflicting answers from the three Metafilter moderators. One of them said the distinction was that the other person's question was inspired by a book and mine wasn't. Funny -- I wasn't aware that Metafilter had a rule that your question has to be inspired by a book. (There was only one passing reference to the book, and it didn't seem to have any effect on the question.) Another moderator said the difference was that I started out my question with a few suggested answers of my own. Well, even if you accept that that's a reason to delete a question, the other question did the same thing, so that can't explain it. The last moderator said there actually wasn't any difference between the two questions except that mine was asked after the first one; they would have deleted the other one if it had been reversed. Maybe an interesting theory (albeit inconsistent with what the other moderators said) ... but the site often allows two back-to-back related questions -- they never seemed to have a policy of rejecting these until I asked my question.

Bottom line: they couldn't offer any principled reason for allowing one question (What are some advantages of being a man?) while deleting mine (What are some disadvantages of being a man?).

Draw your own conclusion.

Of course, I wasn't happy with this. But there's nothing I can do, right? Well, all I can do is preserve some especially thoughtful answers my question received.

Just to be totally clear: none of this is an attempt to make some kind of "argument against feminism." It's just that no one, no matter what theories they subscribe to, has a legitimate reason to want to ignore a huge chunk of reality. If you're going to contemplate gender at all, you might as well take in all of it -- the good and bad of being a man or woman.

I'm not trying to cancel out feminism. I'm trying to add to it.

Anyway, I started my question by noting:

Men are more likely to be victims of violent crime, go to prison, be forced to fight for their country if there's a draft, be socially expected to hold down a steady job, lose their parental rights in the event of divorce, and die younger.

(Those all seem to be pretty clearly bad things about being a man, though some people contested this point.)

Here are some of the responses I got (each paragraph represents a different comment):

You will be seen as an aggressive person or a threat even when you aren't one.

You tend to be more and more frequently distracted by sexual cues and later at developing social poise. Females are generally better socialized than males - males tend to have a harder time in social situations.

It isn't safe for a man to be alone with unrelated children -- he could be accused of being a child molester. This is not a perception that exists for women.

You have external, sensitive genitalia and we have pointy shoes! ;P

You are likely to be socialized never to admit weakness, confusion or doubt, and struggle with loneliness because of it.

As a young man in the US, you get to pay more for car insurance.

It's hard to talk to girls without people automatically assuming that I want to sleep with them.

Sex drive, often higher in men, can be a double edged sword (see, look, phallic symbolism already...) leading to distraction and frustration that otherwise may not be an issue.

Physical aggression, ranging from military service to playground tussels, is a much greater part of male life.

Many psychiatric organizations seem to think men, on the whole, cope with anger and sadness poorly compared to women. Women seem more likely to seek the support of others, men seem to end up loners more often.

I've heard it's often difficult for single men to adopt, compared to single women.

Acting outside gender roles can result in social fallout. A man becoming an interior decorator, poet, or actor would, in many social circles in the West, be considered a sissy, or have their sexuality questioned (by both sexes). Women transgressing similar norms may (as things improve) be thought empowered (female construction worker). This ties in to the emotional lives of men as well -- showing "weakness" in a healthy way is likely to cause a great deal of ridicule.

Being a gay man seems to carry more trouble than being a gay woman.

Many disorders seem to afflict men more often -- Autism and ADD come to mind. [As a New York Times article put it: "from the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood — and underappreciated — vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup."]

Widespread expectations of a greater male role in sexual activity -- a responsibility for its success or failure.

Men (at least in most places in the US) often pay much much more than women to get into clubs and bars. It is very usual to go to bars where women often enter for free while guys have to pay, I have never seen the opposite. There are clubs where men need to, regardless of their willingness to pay, have at least one (usually good looking) woman with them to get in.

In traditional cultures, there can be a great deal of pressure on male children to succeed -- whether it be carrying on the family business, producing heirs, or avenging the family name.

There is a stigma attached to a male expressing emotions.

The thread was only around for about an hour, but all these answers were deleted from the site (preserved only if you saved the URL, but not generally accessible from the website). I'm sure there would have been more items added to the list if the thread had stayed up. (Feel free to post some in the comments.)

Someone else made a valiant attempt to keep the conversation going by starting a new thread:

I enjoy being a guy, but one thing I have philosophized about is the stunted intimacy. I don't mean sexual intimacy, which is just one subset intimacy, but rather the unguarded closeness and surrender and trust and sharing that any two people can experience, such as a mother and child. Men have much less of this, at least in western culture.

It is culturally acceptable and natural for them to display and indulge in a level of intimacy and affection with each other that is simply not in the realm of possibilities between men. Can you imagine two straight men, who are friends, sitting on a couch together with their arms around each other, looking into each other's eyes, maybe one comforting the other, hand softly on his neck, or crying or something? Unless you're 6 and the other guy is your dad, that isn't going to happen, the obvious exception excluded. I know that regional cultures can make this more or less of a possibility for women too, but I think you know what I'm saying. To think of two men doing that kicks up a visceral gender-role police enforcement squad in one's lizard brain. What? WHAT?! It's so deeply ingrained that it's alarming when the sediment is disturbed. Or think about walking arm in arm down the street. No way. Guys have made a lot of strides in shedding machismo, but not to that degree. ...

And the thing is, I think I can speak for men when I say we don't want those things. It's not like we secretly want them but cruel society won't let us have them -- it's that we simply weren't trained that way, or maybe it's a combination of biology and culture. Because of my socialization and the way gender roles are mapped out in our culture, I was essentially programmed that this was not an option any more than flying is, or that there could be some primary color other than the ones we know of. It isn't something you think about or regret, it simply doesn't exist. ...

So then isn't it a deficit for me as a man that I don't have the same level of opportunity for intimacy as a woman? Shouldn't that be recognized as a pretty awful missing piece in the human journey?

Unlike my question, the moderators did leave this thread on the site ... but they immediately closed it to further discussion.

None of this is meant to minimize the oppression of women. It's not about pushing women away and saying, "Please don't bother us with your petty complaints." It's about drawing men in by saying, "Look, gender disparities hurt everyone -- it's not just a woman thing."

I understand that the response might be: it all comes down to rape and domestic violence. There's nothing men have to deal with that's on that level.

Well, it's not quite that simple. Not all rape victims are women. They can be men or women. It's well-known that this often happens to men in prison. Of course, this is usually just laughed at (as is female-against-male domestic violence) because -- to add one more item to the list -- society is more concerned about "protecting" women than men (which follows logically from the belief that women are weak).

By definition, we can't know about all the unreported rapes. But which gender do you think would be more hesitant to report it out of shame or a need to always appear tough?

That said, of course I take rape very seriously and recognize that it disproportionately harms women. I'm not even contending that anything from the above list is as serious as rape. Even if you're absolutely convinced that rape and domestic violence trump anything on the list of disadvantages of being a man, that's no reason to ignore those disadvantages. So it shouldn't be taboo to say, "Hey, there are some disadvantages to being a man, such as X, Y, and Z." This should always just be part of the equation, part of the conversation.

My message to liberal women: if you really want feminism to be a powerful force for changing people's minds, you need a message that will resonate with both sexes. The idea that men simply have it easy, and that women bear all the great burdens, won't -- more to the point, shouldn't -- convince men. Oh, there will be men who'll go along with this for the sake of political correctness. But any man who has thought seriously about gender and being a man in modern society will not buy into this.

Looking over the above list, I still feel like there's one big disadvantage for men that all of this is missing, maybe the biggest burden of all. But that will have to wait for another blog post, as this one is already ridiculously long.

The world is complicated. This may not be fashionable to point out, but it's reality.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Mom! And Glenn! And Reddit user ejp1082. And Dean. And Conservative Grapevine. And Villainous Company. And Church of Rationality.

UPDATE: Metapost.