Female Luxury Beliefs with Rob Henderson

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Welcome back to Psychobabble, where we expose bad therapy and the liberal narratives that contribute to our poor mental health. I'm Hannah Spear, and today I'm talking to Rob Henderson, who's an American political commentator with a very successful Substack newsletter. And he's the author of Troubled: A Memoir of Family, Foster Care, and Social Class. And he has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and he's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And in his book, he coined the term luxury beliefs, which is the idea that, that you confer status on members of the upper class at little cost to themselves while inflicting costs on persons in the lower class. Classes. So welcome to Psychobabble, Rob Henderson. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Yeah, thank you, Hannah. It's great to be here.

The first question is, please elaborate on my quite faulty retelling of your excellently coined term. And I would also like to sort of direct the question a little bit because the listeners can, you know, you've been on all the great podcasts and so there are plenty of podcast you can go to, to listen to your story and details and all that. But so, and, and I've listened to them, and, uh, and it tends to sort of gravitate to the elite signaling generosity and, and moral enlightenment at zero cost to themselves. And so what I'd like to focus on today would be the female side of luxury beliefs, because women, you know, they uniquely shape their emotional, relational, and very much the educational environment, and they control usually what goes on in the home and when, when you seek mental health care with the kids. So many of the beliefs, they sound compassionate and progressive. And as I see it, end up burdening men and eroding the families. And so I'd like to really get right into the thick of that and, and ask you if you think there are a distinct class of female luxury beliefs.

Huh. Well, I guess what does distinct mean here? I'm sure, I mean, any given luxury belief, you will most likely see members of both sexes who support it. There are probably some luxury beliefs where you will see maybe a skew more towards women, maybe some more towards men. I'm thinking about, you know, I just finished reading Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier's book. I, um, have read quite a bit of research from the social psychologist Corey Clark, and she has done some very interesting work looking at this split in terms of academic values. So this is in higher education where women seem to prioritize emotional well-being and the mental safety of the students, whereas male academics are more likely to say that the more important value is not emotional well-being, but whether the students are mastering the material. And so, you know, I think, yeah, a lot of the values around being nice, being kind, being at least short-term compassionate may have some long-term consequences. I'm thinking about, for example, what was happening at many schools and universities during the COVID lockdowns, where schools dramatically lowered their standards. And anecdotally, I've heard that a lot of that was driven by female educators who didn't want to put the burden of typical academic standards on students during a very difficult time. Whereas there were male professors who, uh, at least one of whom lost their job because they refused, uh, to grade more softly, to, to lower the standards for the students. So, you know, I think short term a lot of this does sound very nice. Um, it can, um, short term alleviate some suffering perhaps, but in the long run, um, you know The world will demand a lot of you, and school in some ways is a preparation for the real world. And the stakes are much lower. The worst thing that can happen in school is you get a bad grade. But in the real world, um, you know, the potential cost can be much higher. The burdens can be more stressful. And so for school, you know, you want to put a little bit of simulated stress on young people to give them a taste of what adult life will be like. But, you know, in the event of an unexpected catastrophe like COVID, suddenly the standards were lowered. And I think that actually sent the exact wrong message to young people. It's not, um, the message they received was when life suddenly becomes very difficult, uh, you know, the world is going to go softer on you. We're going to lower the standards so that no one fails, no one experiences any, um, additional stress. But in fact, uh, when you enter the real world, as we saw for a lot of people who were struggling during the lockdowns, especially economically, then, you know, it's not like employers and, and every other adult who has expectations on you are going to say, well, we're in the middle of this very difficult period, so we're just going to, you know, pay you, we're going to take care of you, nothing, you know, no more expectations than necessary from you, and in fact we're going to lower them. That's not how the world actually works. So I think there is a bit of that empathic desire that does no favors for young people.

And you see that as a luxury belief?

Is that a luxury belief? Interesting. Does it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. To some extent it is, depending on the context. So if you are, for example, a teacher, an educator at— these are their stories out of inner city for example, where teachers from more middle class or upper middle class backgrounds teach at a school with low-income students, and the students come in and they say, oh, you know, I can't do my schoolwork because of this, that, and the other, and, you know, maybe raised by a single mom, family instability, all these struggles at home. And then the teacher responds by saying, oh well, I'm going to soften the standards for you because of how tough your life is. But that kid is going to eventually enter the real world, and that's not how the world is going to treat a kid from that kind of environment of lowering standards and expectations and being extra empathic. The world is actually going to be harder for them than the typical person. But the message they're receiving from their students is, oh, you know, everything's going to be nice.

So everything's— the teacher— I see that much more of a sort of a feminine— the consequences of feminine traits in general governing rather than that teacher having a particularly— because she is a part of a privileged class, she puts out a policy that will only— that will not have any consequences on her class. It's just sort of what female teachers will tend to do because they're more compassionate, as would a very feminine male teacher do, which there are many of now. I'm just trying to get that distinction clear.

Yeah, with, with the— yeah, so with these teachers, they get to look compassionate to their fellow educators, to other affluent credentialed adults, that, oh, you know, my students are struggling, so this is what I did for them. And so they get to look good, they get to acquire a certain kind of cachet among their peers. But the lesson that they're imparting to these struggling students is the reverse message of what they should be, which is Yes, life can be hard, but you're still going to be held to high standards. And only by being held to high standards can you actually uncover your academic potential and aptitude that will maybe allow you to escape from this, uh, you know, this dire, uh, environment where you're struggling and so on. So yeah, I think that that does qualify as a, as a luxury belief. Is it, is it specifically female? I mean, I, I suppose statistically because most teachers are women, most educators are women. That the short-term compassion can lead to, um, you know, long-term consequences. And we see that now with, um, learning loss among young people. Uh, I just attended this documentary, uh, about the— what happened during the school closures during the COVID lockdowns. And it was actually— so the, the highest performing students before the lockdown didn't really suffer any learning loss, which makes sense. In some ways, you could imagine a very bright student, regardless of, you know, the external circumstances, they're going to have resources, they're curious, they're going to be able to— and maybe they're self-driven. And so they're learning the material on their own, regardless of whether they're in school or not. The middling students suffered a bit of learning loss during the lockdowns. And then the— it was the lowest performing students pre-lockdown who suffered the most during the lockdown. Where they were already struggling beforehand, but going to school and having these expectations and so on, that allowed them to, to learn a little bit. But then after the lockdowns, they essentially— many of them stopped going to school altogether. They stopped attending classes. Many of them didn't have access to technology and computers and so on. And so, you know, you had this policy of let's just close the schools and let's just neglect the standards for the kids. And it was the students who were already struggling to begin with who suffered the most. Whereas the children of the affluent didn't really suffer much learning loss. And in many cases, the private schools opened much earlier than the public schools. So, and that was in part because rich parents had a lot of influence in pressuring these private schools to reopen, whereas the teachers unions and so on had more influence on the public schools and refused to open them for, in some cases, more than a year.

Gosh.

Yeah.

So when I actually thought about— when I read about luxury beliefs, it was so brilliant, by the way. I thought about something that I wanted to hear what you think that if this might be a female luxury belief. So in my work, I worked in the district in several countries. And so I sort of heard what, I would say, normal women's concerns were. And then I would be in my personal life with very affluent women, most of them carrying PhDs, right? And I had one conversation where we were talking about the daycare, and that's always a topic that us moms together, we talk about a lot. And I say, you know, these moms who are poorer, Who are you? They're florists, they work cash desks, these sort of things. They don't really want the daycare option. They want to be at home with their kids if they had the choice. They miss their kids. And then the answer was, well, you don't know, maybe they want to be, maybe they want to work as a cashier, like maybe they want to work in that grocery store. You don't know. And they don't want to. So that just really struck me as this sort of luxury belief that you want everyone to have these day— you're supporting this policy around daycare and everyone has higher taxes so that everyone can have daycare. And while these normal women, that's not really what they wanted at all. So what do you think?

No, that, that's, uh, it, it, it's, it's so interesting because when you look at the professed opinions of women by education level and income, the higher you go, the more likely they are to support that kind of gender egalitarian model of, you know, yeah, women should work or, or if they want to work, or they shy away from the idea of the stay-at-home mother. Um, they're much more likely to support this idea that women should be working. Um, and then the lower you go in terms of socioeconomic status, uh, the more likely you are to find the opposite opinion among women, where they would prefer, uh, to stay at home, spend more time with their kids, um, not have to clock in to their day job. Um, and yet when you look at the actual behavior, uh, it's flipped, where high-income women are the most likely to be stay-at-home spouses. So when I say high income, I mean like household income. And so high-income women, highly educated women, tend to be married to high-earning men, and they are the most likely to be stay-at-home spouses, stay-at-home wives, stay-at-home mothers. Whereas more working-class women, they desire to stay home in many cases,, but they can't, uh, because, you know, it's economically infeasible for them. And so you have, you know, this group of elite affluent women who support work despite in many cases not working or working part-time or working very flexible kind of jobs while their husband, uh, uh, earns the major— the majority of the money. Um, in, in dual income, uh, households, um, you actually find the gender egalitarian model more so in, uh, in low-income homes, which is fascinating. Where you would expect actually highly educated couples to actually be the most gender egalitarian in terms of both people go to work and they split childcare and so on and so forth. But actually, you're more likely to find that pattern in lower-income homes. And it's the higher socioeconomic status families that look the most like that kind of 1950s, you know, dad goes to work, mom stays home, maybe has some part-time work, spends most of her time with her kids. And so in some cases, the way that I put this with what I call the luxury belief class is that they walk the '50s and talk the '60s, where they live by these very conventional values, these gender roles they uphold. That's how they live their life. But then in terms of their professed opinions and the ideas that they promote throughout society is, uh, is the opposite of what they practice, where, you know, they, they, they shy away from, you know, women staying at home, and they support women in the workplace, and so on. Um, and then another interesting one is from— this was a study out of the Brookings, uh, Institution where they found that when you ask, um, American parents, are you more worried about the future of boys in America, or are you more worried about the future of girls? Um, conservative American parents say that they are more worried about boys, and liberal American parents say they're more worried about girls. But then when you ask these parents about their own children, and you ask them, are you more worried about your sons, or are you more worried about your daughters? Conservatives, again, you know, they say they're more worried about boys in general, and then when you ask them about their kids, they say, I'm more worried about my sons than my daughters. Liberal parents, it's flipped where liberal parents say, I'm more worried about girls in general. But just like conservative parents, they say, I'm more worried about my son in particular. And so there's this, there's this mismatch here where conservative parents are consistent. You know, they're worried about boys. They're worried about their sons. Liberal parents, I'm worried about girls in the abstract. But then in my own home, I'm worried about my boys. And I did not see whether there was a gender split here where, you know, fathers say one thing, mothers say another. But my guess is simply because, like, generally left-leaning women tend to be more feminist, even more feminist than left-leaning men, that you would see that pattern where publicly they're very feminist, they're very— the future is female, let's invest more in girls' education, girls in STEM, and so on. But then privately in their own homes, they're more concerned with their boys and, and are trying to find ways to help their own sons and put them in a position of advantage.

Very interesting. Why do you, why do you think that is?

Um, why do I think? Well, so why is there the mismatch? Well, you know, because, you know, the luxury belief idea is if you are a left-leaning person and you publicly say, I'm worried about boys in America and we need to help the boys, you're going to be accused of betraying feminism or you're going to be accused of not being an ally. And so they have to say, you know, the quote correct opinion that will either garner status or prevent the loss of status in their social circle. So they say, oh, worried about the girls. But then, of course, in their own personal lives, you know, the closer something gets to your own life, affects your own reality, then you start to behave in a, in a more understandable and more—

the more conservative way.

Yeah, right, exactly.

And so they're conservative about what they really love the most, right?

And so with their boys, it's, you know, suddenly they're, you know, getting them extra tutoring and, you know, trying to get them more involved and figuring out ways to help their own sons. Uh, and so there's just less of that, that mismatch. And I think a lot of it is down to that sort of luxury belief idea about, okay, well, status in public, and then in private, I'm going to behave in this more, again, more conventional way where you're investing a lot in your, in your own kids.

Yeah. And maybe there's also that element of thinking that it'll never apply to you, that it'll never happen to me. Right. I see that when it comes to ADHD medication, that'll always be very supportive of that. And oh, maybe you should go and get the assessment. And then, but when it's about your own son, when he gets to school age, then it's like that. I don't know. He doesn't have that. He's just a normal boy.

Yeah. No, there's, it's, it's so interesting when you ask these, um, members of the Luxury Belief class about their, their vision for society and for how schools should be run, how kids should be educated or treated, or what the expectations are. It's often, again, like, very seemingly compassionate. Oh, if a kid is struggling at home, maybe he shouldn't be held to high standards at school. If a kid is, you know, maybe he— if he doesn't seem like he's particularly focused, then maybe we shouldn't expect much out of him. But then for their own kids, you see, regardless of how motivated or unmotivated their own kids are, they will often pressure them and do everything they can to set them up for academic success. I tell this story in my book about how there was a student at Cambridge, one of my classmates, where I described one of my friends from high school. And my friend, who he was— he played football and he was on track to get a scholarship scholarship to go to university to play football, but he was falling behind. He wasn't doing well in school, so he had to attend this makeup class where if he attended this sort of special program for 2 weeks and got a good grade, then he could be returned to the track to get the scholarship. But he didn't attend the course. He just decided he'd rather, you know, hang out with me and my other, you know, go party and, and forget classes and just have a good time. And he had kind of neglectful parents. And so I told this story to one of my classmates at Cambridge, and her response was, well, you know, like, if he didn't like school and that's kind of who he was, and, you know, like, maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. You know, do you really need to coerce him if that's not what he wants? And then I asked, well, what if that was your son? You know, like, you have a son who's going to get a football scholarship. All he needs to do is go to class for 2 weeks for this special program. 'If he doesn't go, then he won't go to college. How would you handle that?' And she replied, 'Oh, I would force him to go to class every day, and if he didn't, I would threaten to kill him.' And so that was, you know, if it's her son, it's, you know, do everything you can— coercion, blackmail, I don't know, whatever, whatever you could do to get your son into class and make sure that he is successful. But then for kids in general, it's, 'Oh, leave them alone. You don't need to do anything with them. Like, just let them have a good time.' And so there's this strange mismatch there where they look compassionate when you talk about kids in general and society in general, but then in their own lives, again, like you said, more conservative, more authoritative, more exacting in their standards.

Yeah. So very hypocritical. I think it's difficult to know what is it that hypocritical and what are luxury beliefs. I was thinking about another one. So let me have your thoughts on this one. And that would be that all families are equal. That's often something that you'll hear from women, all families are equal. And this very comfortable position because it usually doesn't exclude the mother. It's usually then inferred that the fathers are optional if all family, all different family types are equal. And so what are, like you were asking, who pays the cost? Well, it's definitely not the women because they always have control. Over the birthing. I don't need a man.

Yeah, that is, uh, the family, um, opinions around family, I think, are, at least for me, those were the original luxury beliefs. Those were the first ones I thought of because I heard that opinion expressed so often that, you know, every family, um, type, every kid is equally likely to succeed regardless of their, uh, family structure. Which is just statistically not at all the case. But again, the more intact people from intact families are the most likely to express that opinion, interestingly. So if you come from married parents and that's how you were raised, but then I ask you, you know, what's your opinion on family? They're the most likely to say family doesn't matter. You know, whether you're raised by a single mom or stepparents or, you know, an aunt because your parents are unavailable or whatever. They're the most likely to have, again, that kind of egalitarian, you know, let's not judge, let's not place any standards on anyone. And the lower you go in terms of socioeconomic status and the more likely the person is to have come from an unstable family, the more likely they are to value that two-parent family structure, probably in part because that's what they lacked. Um, and so the people who set family policy though, uh, are who themselves tend to come from intact families are the most likely to support and promote this idea of all families are the same, we shouldn't judge, kids are equally likely to flourish regardless of where you place them. Um, and this has long-term consequences. So one statistic I point out in Troubled is if you go back to 1960, uh, you find that children, regardless of social class in the U.S., um, 95% of children, um, poor and working-class families and children in affluent families, 95%, uh, were raised by both of their birth parents. Again, rich families and poor families. Then you fast forward to 2005, um, for affluent families, the number dropped from 95% in 1960 to 85% by 2005. So a slight drop, but the vast majority of kids in upper-middle-class families, affluent families, are raised by both of their birth parents. For poor and working-class families, it was 95% in 1960, identical to the rich kids. You fast forward to 2005 and it plummeted to 30%. Um, and so now if you visit a poor working-class community in the U.S., uh, it's an anomaly to see married intact families. And when I read that statistic, it very much reflected my own experience where, you know, I grew up in this kind of dusty blue-collar town in California. I was in foster homes before that. None of my friends growing up were raised by both of their birth parents. I had 5 close friends growing up. None of us were raised— you know, I— there was me raised in foster homes and sort of various fragmented family structures, um, 2 friends raised by single moms, 1 friend raised by a single dad, another friend raised by his grandmother because his mom was an addict and his dad was in prison. And that is a very common picture of of what families look like in these communities. And then I get to Yale, you know, years later, after a stint in the military, and I learn about the students at this elite college and discover that almost all of them are raised by both of their married parents. And it never seemed to occur to any of them that maybe that was one important factor in why they were able to study at a place like Yale, like why there are more people like them than people like me. Where having two parents who are committed to one another and to the children and to the family, um, you know, that can go a long way in terms of setting up a kid for academic success and for their future. Um, but those are the very people who are the least likely to support this. Tell a couple of stories in the book about how I would talk to, um, students and, and graduates of these universities and they would— many of them would say, you know, marriage is this outdated patriarchal structure. It's oppressive to women. It's, uh, you know, rooted in this, um, you know, these, these, uh, outdated notions of, of what a family is. And then I would ask them, well, how were you raised? And they would say, well, I was raised by my mom and my dad, and they stayed married, but, you know, yeah, I, I don't think that that's how everyone should do it. And then I would ask them, well, what do you plan to do in your own life you know, later in your career, you know, you're probably gonna get married, right? Like, what do you— what's your plan in the future? And then every single one of them would say, well, I was raised this way, I'll probably do the same thing for myself, but that doesn't mean everyone should do it. And I think, like, as a society, we should get past this old, outdated notion of marriage. And so what I was hearing from them was, I benefited from this age-old institution that led me to study at a place like Yale, and I plan to, uh, continue this, uh, practice for my own children, uh, to set them up for success. But my official public position is no one should do this, you know, make sure you don't do this thing that will— that, you know, that led me and my friends to go to a place like this. And, you know, everyone I know who grew up was like this. And there's so many pieces there with the family thing. I, I sometimes talk about this other example where having, um, good role models, an intact family, responsible adults around you can counterbalance a lot of the misbehavior and what I think can be very toxic messaging you see from mass media and pop culture and social media. So, you could imagine a kid in an upper middle-class family, nice suburb, all of the adults in this neighborhood are married, they have kids, it's that kind of environment. And so the kid is around adults who are married, educated, and, you know, value hard work and success privately. I mean, publicly many of them will say something else, but privately that's what they value, and that's what they model for their kids. And so then this upper middle class kid, uh, you know, opens his phone or watches TV or looks at a magazine and listens to music, watches Netflix, and getting all of these different messages about experimenting with drugs and maybe experimenting with novel relationship arrangements, polyamory, and, you know, just having a good time indulging in this hedonistic pleasure. That's the messaging he's getting from mass media, pop culture, and so on. But privately, he's getting a different set of messages because he's watching the adults around him who are disciplined and hardworking. But now you can imagine a kid who grew up the way that I did who really had no role models, you know, neglectful parents and, you know, a lot of fragmentation and instability, not much in the way of guidance. And then the kid looks again at Netflix and movies and pop culture and music and everything else and getting all of this messaging about, you know, how to have a good time and, you know, experiment with drugs and have fleeting relationships and just indulge your short-term hedonistic desires. Those messages are going to be— they're going to have even more of an influence on that kind of kid than the upper middle class kid. And this is something I think people don't understand, is like having a good family can counterbalance a lot of those toxic messages from the broader society. And so, you know, that's like one factor among many for why I think you see, you know, a lot of what, shortsightedness, uh, among kids from those kinds of backgrounds is, well, where are they supposed to be getting their, their role models from and good messaging from and so on? Um, and this isn't that due to economic factors alone. Uh, so going back to that statistic I shared earlier, um, 1960 versus 2005, there were poor people in 1960 as well. Um, you know, our grandparents, great-grandparents, there's a lot of poverty back then too. And yet their marriage rates were identical to people who had money. And so the reason is because obviously there's a cultural factor there. There were strong norms and expectations for, you know, if you're going to have kids, you should be married and that kind of thing. And by, you know, by the time you reach the 2000s, those expectations have all but dissipated. And so, you know, poor people were the most likely to be affected by this.

Right.

Yeah.

How did you counterbalance your, your childhood and, and make it to where you are now?

Yeah, it's, um, probably a mix of different factors. Uh, I was always a curious kid. Um, you know, I, I had the raw ingredients I think necessary to be successful. Um, but I was just so weighed down by everything that I had experienced with foster homes and then the adoption and the divorce and kind of moving around a lot as a kid. Um, you know, family tragedies and financial catastrophes and all this stuff. Um, and I think what really helped— part of it was luck. Uh, you know, in high school I was, um, you know, drinking and driving and experimenting with drugs and arson and fist fighting and all kinds of things that boys can do when They're having a lot of, what, like emotional difficulties and no adult oversight. But when I graduated, when I was 17 from high school, I joined the military right away. And I think that was probably what redirected my trajectory was being in an environment where, you know, again, this was the opposite of what you would expect from that kind of compassionate, maybe more feminine style. The military was the opposite of that, which is like, we don't care where you came from or what your excuses are. Like, these are the standards and you're going to meet them regardless. Equal playing field, right? Like, whether you're a kid from a rich family, middle-class family, poor family, like, you— we're all going to be treated equally horribly. Um, yeah.

And so would you see a sort of a policy of conscription being, uh, you know, a possible solution to all this fatherless— we're seeing fatherlessness?

Um, well, maybe. Um, so, so you asked me, um, what made the difference for me. I was enlisted for 8 years, Hannah, and I needed all 8 of those years to, um, figure out what my talents and skills were and, um, to recover from everything I had gone through and to, um, uh, what, like, overcome these self-doubts about my own potential. Uh, so it took 8 years. So I was 17 when I enlisted, I was 25 by the time I got out. Um, and so, you know, a lot of countries when they do conscription, it's 1 year, it's 2 years. Um, in North Korea it's 10 years, but I don't think anyone wants to use the North Korean model of 10 years conscription. Um, and so, you know, I, I just have my doubts that 1 or 2 years, like for me, for example, 1 or 2 years probably did nothing. Like, if I had left the military after 1 or 2 years, there's a very strong chance I would have just gone back to what I was doing before. Um, I needed longer than that for, you know, however you want to— it could be frontal lobe development, maturity, outlook, wisdom, learning more about myself, um, exerting, you know, the, the skills required for self-discipline. Um, and, and I was by far the most academically inclined of all my friends from high school. Um, I was the only one who read for pleasure and who would kind of find the school material interesting. Um, and even then, I still needed 8 years in this extremely rigid structure to learn all of the skills that I never received as a kid growing up. And so, you know, I, I'm just skeptical, I guess, that, um, whether or not conscription would even work and then the amount of time that would be required to help these kids, you know, and even, even with conscription, I don't know if you're— if you or your listeners have seen this with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, talking about obesity in the military. Well, one reason— so, so one of the most shocking statistics from the Pentagon in the US is that 80% of young adults would not qualify for enlistment. Um, 80%. So 8 out of 10 young people couldn't join the military even if they wanted to. Uh, and the main reason for that is obesity, but there are other, um, important contributing factors here, like history of drug use, um, uh, physical or mental, uh, health issues. Um, uh, there are other— criminal background, this kind of thing. And it's kind of sad because the reason why a lot of those factors are becoming more prevalent among young people in the first place, I think, is because of family fragmentation, the decline of standards, um, just kind of the coarsening of the culture in general. Where if you have this culture of non-judgmentalism, of, you know, let young people do whatever they want, then yeah, some of them are gonna like— you know, have, have a lot of mental health issues. They're going to overeat and, you know, do drugs and do all of these things to cope with those early life experiences that will later rule out their future opportunities. So even if they don't go to college, um, uh, so that pathway is closed off to them. And then maybe they could join the military, but for 80% of them, that pathway is also closed off to them. Because of those early life experiences. So, you know, it's, it's a very tricky problem. I think that, you know, a lot of the solutions, if there are any, it would have to happen way before the age of 18. Once the kids hit 18, you know, we can maybe help them do some damage control. Something on the margins that can benefit them. But ideally this, you know, whatever policy or cultural change would have to happen much earlier.

We always come back to the solution of, yeah, we need to strengthen marriage. That's what we need to do in terms of prevention. But then again, I do see that a lot of these beliefs, they have a very unique downstream effect on male mental health, not just boys. Now we talked about boys and adolescent mental health, but really also men. So, you know, you have happy wife, happy life. You have, you know, a lot of these beliefs that are, that we don't even think about. Even this, um, believe all women only benefited women. And they have direct effects on marriage, on relationships, on men seeing that, you know, marriage isn't something that I want to get into, doesn't seem to benefit me at all. And I completely understand them. I completely understand this. I don't think it's a good solution. I don't think there's a good alternative to marriage for kids. But I think that there are, you know, for my own sons, I'm afraid because we always instinctively think about what's best for women. How will it affect their mental health? Women's feelings dictate norms completely, and male suffering is invisible. And, you know, more than that, women's unhappiness is used as a— is treated as evidence of injustice. Right. We've come that far. And so I, I don't think— yeah, you do think that there are any such, um, sort of downstream effects?

Yeah, I do. Have— are you familiar with, uh, Dani Sulekowski, Hannah?

Yes, yes, I was going to ask you about her, right, with the sexual competition.

Yeah, I think, you know, that her, her idea, um, if, if it's true, I think it would maybe qualify, to some extent as a, as a sort of a female-coded luxury belief, which is— so her idea is, you know, essentially that because elite women generally set the, um, uh, standards for what a successful family looks like, you know, men, regardless of their social standing, are not really contributing much to the discourse around parenting and family and, you know, how you should raise your kids. Women generally are much more interested in that conversation. About family and child rearing and so on. Um, but it's really elite women who have the most influence in those discussions about, you know, here's how you should raise your kid, and here's the kind of home you should have, here's the lifestyle you should aspire to, the kinds of schools your kids need to go to, the activities they should partake in, the kind of family vacations you should go on. So that is primarily influenced by the standards of elite women, both in kind of legacy media, corporate media, and pop culture, social media, and so on. And those standards, if that's what a successful family looks like, that makes it very difficult for ordinary women to have children. They feel like they are being essentially priced out of childrearing because, you know, Dani gives this example. If you go back to 1970, What was a successful middle-class family? You had a modest house. Maybe kids would share a bedroom. You had one family car, one television. The kids go to public school. Maybe some of them go to college. Maybe some of them don't. It was a much more affordable arrangement. And now today, what does a successful aspirational family look like? It's, you know, you have a big house. Every kid has their own bedroom, multiple cars. Maybe the kids have their own car when they are teenagers. All of them have to go to college. You know, you need music lessons, ballet lessons, sports, tutoring, expensive international trips. You know, you want your kids to be cultured, you want them to learn everything. And if that's what the model of a successful family looks like, and if you fall short of that, you're going to be judged or looked upon as low status, then it's not worth having children in the first place. So that's the way the logic goes. And it doesn't seem— you know, some people have suggested, well, you know, it's motherhood is low status now, that's why women aren't having kids. It's, uh, you know, careerism is high status, motherhood's low status, um, having kids is low status.

I don't think that's— having several kids is low status, having more than 2 kids.

I think that's right in general, yeah. But, but I think it's not so much having kids is low status, it's having kids and not giving them that aspirational life. So if you have 3 or 4 kids but, but all of them are in private school Uh, they're all taking, you know, music lessons, ballet, you know, tutoring. They have all of the advantages. They're all bound for an elite college. Um, I, I don't think people would consider you low status. I think if you have 4 kids and you can barely afford it, and, you know, you look disheveled, you don't look like you're put together, you're struggling, maybe you and your spouse aren't getting along, uh, maybe there's a separation, all those kinds of things code as low status. But if you're, you know, this, this, um, happy, you know, family and you have lots of kids and you're financially successful, that actually, I think, probably boosts your status somewhat because you're indirectly signaling that you're so rich you can afford—

you can afford all these. But now we're again focusing on the elite and elite women. But I see these luxury beliefs in all kinds of women. Like, for example, I would say such a thing as men should be more emotionally available. I would say that's a luxury belief in this female category, because it benefits women. And because men should open up more, you know, be more emotionally attuned and more available, and it signals from them compassion and modernity. When it— what do men get? They get a woman, like a wife, who loses attraction to them. They get rejected faster. They're mocked by others, dismissed as too needy. And breakups happen at usually the cost of the man.

Yeah, I don't know how neatly the model applies for— so, so yeah, we, we gave the, the definition, um, luxury beliefs, they confer status on, you know, the affluent and credentialed while inflicting costs on the lower classes. Um, and so it really is this, uh, it's more of a sort of class-based, uh, idea. Um, you know, we could— if we categorize the genders as a class, um, You know, maybe, I guess.

Uh, I mean, feminism does— isn't— didn't they take the whole class thing and, and just apply it to gender?

Yes. And I think, well, I mean, honestly, I think a lot of feminism hurt women more than men. Um, feminism was a movement driven primarily by elite women, and the people who suffered the most were, um, poor and working-class women. Where— so, you know, if you go back, you know, 60-plus years ago um, a lot of these elite women wanted to enter the workforce. They wanted these cushy white-collar jobs, uh, and so they triggered this movement of all women need to enter the workplace. And a lot of the working-class women who were stay-at-home mothers and wives, they were all too also forced to go into the workforce, but their jobs are much less glamorous and exciting. And, and again, we talked about this statistic earlier that many of those women would actually prefer to stay at home But now with the changing of the economy and the culture, driven in part by elite feminists, they're required to go into work. And, you know, educated women also— I mean, there's some data suggesting they're not as happy as women were a generation or two ago, but they are definitely happier than the women who have kind of wage jobs getting paid you know, menial amounts.

Yeah, I just, I disagree with that. I think we're so used to saying that feminism hurt women more, and that that is yet another one of these luxury beliefs. So we're so used to saying that now, it hurt women more, and it's a way of keeping the being injured and being a victim while furthering more feminism. The feminism of it being, you know, let's fix things for women while the men's suffering remains invisible.

Yeah, I don't really— hmm, yeah, I guess I'm not really focused on, on which, like, whether women— you know, the whole, the whole idea for me is, um, at least in this context, more so about the kids who are suffering. Um, so kids in, you know, these poor and working-class environments with, you know, increasingly fragmented families, they're the ones who are, I think, truly suffering, and they have no You know, I think it's especially egregious because regardless of whether you're a man or a woman or the social class you belong to, you still have some agency and some political power. You can vote. Kids can't vote. They have no ability to organize in their own interests. So, you know, men can collectively come together and say, these are men's interests. This is what we need to be concerned with. These are some policies and some ideas and so forth that we can promote to benefit men. Women can do the same thing. Women can unite as they have and, you know, try to rally in favor of their own interests. Whereas kids can't do that. Kids can't have that kind of, you know, like, I'm imagining—

advocate for themselves. They can't advocate for themselves. But this whole booting women out and through the workplace has hurt boys because we took away the maternal presence, which has had a direct effect on attachment disorders. And I think a lot of what we talked about before, that's a consequence of attachment disorders and the disappearing mother. And so, you know, that's why I just— I'm opposed to hearing this. It's hurt women the most because we're all worried about our sons.

Yeah. And if you look at the, um, uh, boy— boys seem to be more affected by family instability than girls. And this is— I mean, regardless of the metric you look at, graduation rates or likelihood of entering higher education, incarceration rates and so on, where boys— if you look at the difference between boys versus girls in wealthier families, the difference is pretty minimal. But for boys and girls in low-income families, boys are much more at risk of failing to graduate or being incarcerated or having substance abuse problems and so on. In some ways, it's interesting because I think people have this belief that boys are resilient. You know, it's almost like, you know, the people who believe this, they sort of have this kind of stereotype in their mind that, oh, boys can— they're tough, they're strong, they can get over it.

But in fact, in many ways, they're more fragile in the sense that if they have higher cortisol levels as kids, right, they're much more in need of that stability.

Yeah, if they don't have those family structures and inputs in place, that they actually seem to be more susceptible to negative outcomes than, than girls in the same kinds of environments. So Yeah, and, and then so I think this is one important reason why you're seeing people are very concerned with boys, with what's going on with young men. Well, we've had kind of two generations now of, um, you know, family fragmentation, decline in standards, and, um, you know, people who are unwilling to say that, uh, you know, young children need guidance, especially young boys.

I hope you enjoyed this this free episode of Psychobabble and that you'll come over on Substack, upgrade and become a Psychobabble Insider so that you can catch the extended, um, the extended episode where we'll talk about if there are male luxury beliefs and what we have to say about that.