SAM: Spending $20 Million to Talk to Men

(Jack Ohman/S.F. Chronicle)

The "gender gap" in the minds of some observers (not all) manifested itself in the 2024 elections, with men voting overwhelmingly for Republicans and women likewise for Democrats. This week the Democrats allotted $20 million to find out how to talk to men.

On Wednesday night, the San Francisco Democratic Party weighed in, endorsing the idea as well. The resolution noted that Donald Trump got 56% of the votes of men aged 18-29, and that “addressing the challenge experienced by boys and men is not only a moral imperative, but is essential to fostering a more inclusive and responsive political movement that truly speaks to the needs of all individuals, and countering the resultant rise polarization and disinformation.”

...The New York Times reported last week that the plan “is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.

“Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone,” it urges.

Yes, that's going to win over the men. "Inclusive and responsive political movement" and "gains attention and virality in these spaces" are precisely how guys talk to each other in the locker room and neighborhood bar.

How about leaving men alone and NOT talking politics 24/7? That's got a better chance of improving your poll numbers rather than working on your "messaging."

No Congratulations are in Order

For decades boys' performance in school has lagged that of girls. Recent studies show that boys are catching up, but there's no joy in why that's so:

Girls have lost ground in reading, math and science at a troubling rate, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of student test scores across the country.

Since 2019, girls’ test scores have dropped sharply, often to the lowest point in decades. Boys’ scores have also fallen during that time, but the decline among girls has been more severe. Boys now consistently outperform girls in math, after being roughly even or slightly ahead in the years before 2020. Girls still tend to perform better in reading, but their scores have dropped closer to boys.

The findings suggest that pandemic learning loss hit girls particularly hard in ways that haven’t been addressed by schools. The most recent test scores show that girls haven’t yet recovered. This comes following longstanding gains for girls and women in educational attainment.

Theories abound why girls seemed to suffer more during the COVID lockdown:

Shutting down schools might have hurt girls more because they tend to do better in school generally, said David Figlio, a professor of economics and education at the University of Rochester who has studied gender gaps in education. “Girls have a comparative advantage in school and you take schools away, they’ll suffer more,” he added.

Another hypothesis is that girls took on more household duties during the pandemic—including taking care of younger siblings—so were less able to focus on school.

Boys can catch up to girls by bettering themselves or because girls have gotten worse. When the reason is the latter, no congratulations are in order,

Cupertino Contretemps

(Illustration from them.us)

Just when I thought the Chronicle was a decent newspaper that kept its news and opinion sections separate, it produces this headline:

A Silicon Valley teacher used pronouns in a TK class. Parents demanded they go back ‘in the closet’

The slant from the headline? Pronouns are relatively harmless, "back in the closet" harks back to the historic suppression of homosexuality, and "parents demand" hints that they're intolerant uneducated rubes, probably religious. However, digging into the article reveals that non-binary pronouns are being taught to four-year-olds in Transitional Kindergarten.

The individual at the center of the battle teaches 4-year-olds in transitional kindergarten at Dilworth Elementary School and was placed on leave in August after parents complained that they were discussing content they did not believe was appropriate for young children. Supporters of the teacher, including many experts in early childhood development and instruction, said the criticism appears to be leveled against the teacher’s gender identity, not what they’re teaching.

The reporter's bias is evident. She accuses the parents of transphobia ("against the teacher’s gender identity, not what they’re teaching") by using the "many experts...said" ploy. She also adopts trans pronoun language ("what they're teaching" not "what she's teaching").

I agree with the parents that non-standard pronouns are wholly confusing for kids who are learning the alphabet and basic arithmetic. Teach four year olds the fundamentals, then branch out to nuances and exceptions when they're years older. Parents' protests, IMHO, have nothing to do with animus toward the teacher's personal characteristics, just the content of his or her instruction.

Get the woke ideology out of elementary schools, and the kids will have a much better chance of getting into a good college (if that's what they want).

Creation Story

Today it was my turn to do the Old Testament reading. It was the Creation story, i.e. the entire first chapter of Genesis plus three verses of the second. It's a lengthy passage, and familiar to most churchgoers.

Later, I took another look at 1:27:

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

I wonder how long that passage will remain intact.

We have previously observed how Progressive ideology is entering the Episcopal Church through language revisions that no one has bothered to explain to the great unwashed.

Substituting genderless language (e.g. "humankind" for "mankind") is probably acceptable to most, but the Church will lose many followers if the new theology embraces the idea that there are more genders than male and female and if it doesn't explain why the change is right and necessary.

The Men's Shed

Dale Nugent and Jim Tuten at the Ruston, LA Shed

Three decades ago John Gray wrote Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. It described the different methods by which men and women communicate, their different perspectives of the world, and, importantly, how men and women could communicate more effectively with each other. It sold 15 million copies.

The book has been criticized as making over-broad generalizations, but it still resonates with the millions of Americans who subscribe to traditional views of the sexes.

The Men's Shed movement, while open to women, has filled a need for men who like to work in groups to construct something tangible.

The Hopkins [Minnesota] shed is one of 27 Men’s Sheds in the U.S., where men, and sometimes women, gather to build park benches, desks, and bird feeders, or learn to cook and sew. At David’s Memorial Men’s Shed in Girard, Pa., a 5,000-square-foot pole barn, members work on cars or learn to weld. Shedders, as they are called in Ruston, La., construct bunk beds for shelters in a former warehouse. Elsewhere, shedders repair bikes for police youth leagues and clean parks....

The Men’s Shed movement started in Australia in the 1990s, to combat loneliness among retired men, and has grown to more than 2,500 sheds in a dozen countries, each with projects based on local interests. Estonia has two sheds, whose members help each other with chores, such as stacking logs and transporting stones.

A mere half-century ago every community had non-sectarian organizations where men could gather together outside of work and home, for example, the Freemasons and Elks and Rotary Clubs. (All now are open to women, or have affiliated groups for women, but they're still predominantly male.) These groups have a general philanthropic bent, but they have not been able to arrest the decline in membership.

Men's Sheds seem to have struck the right chord with guys who want to work with their hands, strive toward a concrete, limited goal, and be around other guys doing the same. More like this, please.

Speaking of Holes

Don't call it a manhole, you sexist pig.

This headline puzzled your humble blogger:

Body found in ‘sewage hole’ near Jack London Square in Oakland

My initial reaction was that a "sewage hole" must be a new element of the wastewater system. Is falling into a sewage hole another danger we must avoid? The entire story (below) did not provide clarity.

A body was found “lodged inside of a sewage hole” near Jack London Square, according to the Oakland Police Department.

The person was found unresponsive inside the hole at about 7:40 a.m. Saturday in the 300 block of Broadway, the police department reported. Oakland firefighters helped remove the person, and though paramedics tried to render aid, the person was pronounced dead at the scene.

The circumstances surrounding how the person ended up in the hole, and how long that person had been in there, remain unclear. The person’s name has not been released, pending notification of next of kin.

Anyone with information about the death can contact Oakland police at 510-238-3821 or 510-238-7950.

Understanding came with the realization that the new stylebook tries to eradicate all traces of gender from ordinary language. "Manholes" should be called maintenance, utility, or sewage holes.

IMHO, the replacement of "sewage hole" for "manhole" obfuscates meaning, substitutes a multi-syllabic phrase for a perfectly fine two-syllable one, and makes unnecessary work for a reporter who has to look up which system the hole leads to. And that's why I never understood or did well in the language arts.

The Beam in Their Own Eye

Having studied Latin in middle school and rather unsuccessfully trying to learn conversational French and Spanish during the '80's and '90's, your humble blogger was struck by the foundational importance of gender in the Romance languages.

(Gif from NBC News)

At the beginning of the 21st century, in the drive to eliminate gender from American English, a strange word, Latinx, seeped out of the academy into the mainstream.

How would American Hispanics react?

Latinx was initiated by a Progressive movement that purports to have their interest at heart, but labeling a group with a genderless brand-new word seemed a bit like the cultural imperialism that Progressives decry. (For the record, I believe that we should strive to call people by the names that they wish to be called, but when addressing members of a group who themselves disagree, we should try to use the terms that the majority find least offensive.)

There were Hispanic voices speaking out against Latinx when we posted on the subject in 2019, but they were still early days.

In the intervening two years more evidence has come in that 'Latinx’ Isn’t Popular With Latinos:

Actual Latinos shun the word “Latinx.” According to a November 2021 poll by Bendixen & Amandi International, only 2% of Americans of Latin descent refer to themselves that way. Some 68% prefer “Hispanic” to “Latino” and “Latina.” And 40% are offended by “Latinx,” which means it’s a mistake for a politician to use the word, at least around Latino constituents.

Will the white Progressives who use Latinx respect the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Hispanics? I doubt it, they see white supremacy everywhere but in themselves.

A Dead Language: In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti

Gaia is an icon of modern environmentalism and
has influenced the feminization of God

The Episcopal Church has gone through many changes in the past half-century, e.g., the ordination of women and gay priests and an overwhelming tilt toward Progressive politics, and it appears that another dramatic change is in the offing--the re-gendering and non-gendering of the Christian God:

In some seminaries and university religion departments, “Godself,” [in place of "Himself"], though somewhat awkward, has become second nature; professors are even known to dock points from papers that use “he” for God...

The 2021 language guide of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) recommends titles such as “Mother,” “I Am,” “Hen” and “Woman.” In 2018, the Episcopal Church’s 79th General Convention, while stopping short of authorizing a full revision of its 1979 Book of Common Prayer, encouraged liturgical experimentation, including with “inclusive and expansive language and imagery.” And more casually across mainline Protestantism, it’s not uncommon to hear God, and especially the Holy Spirit, referred to as “she.”

To baby boomers these developments aren't new. In the late 60's and 70's, priests in college towns rattled theological comfort zones by introducing new religious forms and concepts to young mainline Christians. At Catholic and Protestant services, for example, I heard God referred to as "She" and prayers to pagan deities such as Gaia. In college I first experienced the folk mass while then-exotic varieties of bread were served at Holy Communion.

That's what college was--a place where one could experiment with new things, question the assumptions under which one operated, and try out different religions. But we always knew we could go back to our home churches, if we wanted to lead a mainstream though possibly boring American life.

Over the past 20 years, I've noticed--infrequently, to be sure--that some Episcopal priests sneakily insert words and phrases, including feminine pronouns, for God. This phenomenon occurred long before the 2018 General Convention "encouraged liturgical experimentation." I use "sneakily" because those words and phrases are certainly not consistent with Anglican theology.

If revolutionaries are going to change the venerable and venerated words that constitute one of the bases of faith for the overwhelming majority of congregants, they ought to explain why such change is necessary. Why is "God the Mother" or "God the Sexless" truer to Christianity than "God the Father?" Why is the Holy Spirit feminine, especially when He impregnated the Virgin Mary, or is the Immaculate Conception nonsense, like the rest of the Nicene Creed?

I hope the Episcopal Church doesn't plop the rumored new Book of Common Prayer in our laps and say "Use this, sheeple." It could be enough to make some of us Catholics.

The Under-40 Men and the Sea

(Chronicle photo)

Their one-month journey to Hawaii puts to shame complaints about my own trip:

On Wednesday [June 30] afternoon, a four-man crew of rowers pulled their 30-foot boat into Waikiki, setting foot on land for the first time in a month and setting a new world speed record for crossing the Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Hawaii.

By completing the journey in 30 days, [Jason] Caldwell’s team smashed the previous race record by nine days and clutched a world record for the fastest all-male crew of four to row the mid-Pacific route east to west in an open class rowboat...

Caldwell, the only American, has crossed the Atlantic twice. His three teammates, all Brits, are a mixed bag of experience levels.

Angus Collins is one of a handful of people to have rowed the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans. Duncan Roy had taken down the Atlantic as well. But the fourth crew member, a tattooed mountain of a man named Jordan Shuttleworth who owns a CrossFit gym in the United Kingdom, had no ocean-crossing experience and was added to the team earlier this year.

Despite the record speed, the men endured punishing challenges at sea. To make time, they paired up and rowed in two-hour shifts.

The first two weeks, the men battled headwinds through cold and rain, and nearly capsized pushing through massive swells. Shuttleworth suffered debilitating seasickness that kept him all but out of commission for the first week.

During the back half of the trip, the water flattened out, but subtropical heat kept the men from gaining much-needed rest.

Comments:

1) A pace of 80 miles a day two rowers at a time: their conditioning and BMI are in a different universe from mine.

2) Journalistic quibble: " a world record for the fastest all-male crew of four to row the mid-Pacific route east to west in an open class rowboat." Why the qualifier "all-male"? This is not a gender issue--are there faster times by mixed crews, all female crews, etc.? If it's the fastest time regardless, leave off the "all male." If it's not, how about a sentence explaining who has the record?

3) Hawaii requires all Mainland visitors to have in hand a negative COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours of departure. Wonder if that requirement was imposed on these gentlemen. Side note: Governor Ige will lift the testing requirements, effective July 8th, if visitors have a vaccination card. Assuming the crew was vaccinated, they should have slowed down to avoid the quarantine (kidding).

The Second Gentleman

(WSJ photo)

Mr. Douglas Emhoff, the husband of the Vice President, has an official designation: the Second Gentleman.

Mr. Emhoff’s honorific uses “gentleman” as the male counterpart to “lady” in the traditional titles of “First Lady” and “Second Lady” for the wives of the president and vice president, respectively. But while his formal designation may be new, it’s built on centuries of linguistic etiquette.

“Gentleman” itself dates back to around 1200 in English, originally modeled on the French equivalent, “gentilhomme.”

“Gentle” originally meant “belonging to a good, upstanding family,” from Latin “gentilis,” meaning “of the same family or clan.” The title was used for a man in the lower tier of respectability—one whose family was not ranked with the nobility yet was still entitled to a coat of arms.

Words, specifically references to men and women, have been one of the flashpoints of the culture wars. Lady and gentleman are terms that still carry with them the "whiff of their aristocratic background despite the country’s ostensibly egalitarian spirit" and are not tainted with historical baggage like, for example, master and mistress.

It's nice to know that at least one subject--the proper way to address Mr. Emhoff--won't be a source of contention.

The Ugly American 2.0

The cover I remember (Amazon)

One of the most influential political books in the 50's and 60's was the Ugly American: [bold added]

The authors were disillusioned with the style and substance of U.S. diplomatic efforts in Southeast Asia. They sought to demonstrate through their writings their belief that American officials and civilians could make a substantial difference in Southeast Asian politics if they were willing to learn local languages, follow local customs and employ regional military tactics.

In the book the "Ugly American" was actually a praiseworthy character who "got his hands dirty" working with the natives---it's cited as one of the influences on JFK to start the Peace Corps.

Subsequently the term came to mean the reverse of a good guy:

"Ugly American" is a term used to refer to perceptions of loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior of American citizens mainly abroad, but also at home.

One of the standing jokes through the 1970's was about how American tourists expected everyone to speak English, and, if the natives didn't understand, the solution was to speak louder. Later, American arrogance became chastened by Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab oil embargo, and political turmoil. The Ugly American stereotype receded, or so everyone thought.

Today Ugly Americans have not only come back, the arrogance on display--and it's all over the Internet--is even greater. Getting others to learn English is no longer the goal, they want non-English speakers to change their own language. We noted this phenomenon last year:

One source of amusement is the translation of gender-neutral English into Romance languages, where gender is all-pervasive.

(Gif from NBC News)

An example of this trend is the use of the term Latinx to replace "Latino" and "Latina".

If you follow politics closely, chances are that you have encountered the word “Latinx” in recent years. From freshman congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to the DNC to left-wing outlet We Are Mitu, it has become a popular term among progressives who say it’s a more inclusive way to refer to people (like me) [writer Giancarlo Sopo] of Latin-American ancestry.

Another Spanish-speaking person responds:

Spanish is not a gender neutral language. There are feminine and masculine words because that is how it has been spoken and read for centuries.

Hispanics will not accept completely changing their language just to avoid possibly offending some Social Justice Warriors. In fact, what is truly offensive is non-Spanish speaking SJWs demanding to change and completely upend the language of Cervantes.

Spanish speakers are perfectly capable of defending their language against these latter-day imperialists.

I just hope that they understand that we're not all Ugly Americans v 2.0.