 In terms of the thesis of the decline of men, the female dominated society for forever, men had all the power and all the money. And for a short period of time, some women have had a little bit more. There is no parallel there. For example, in the US, we talk a lot about female breadwinners, families where women earn 55% of the income and men earn 45% of the income. Well, that's not female domination in the same sense that we had male domination, which was 90% of men earned 100% of the income. There are some places where women and girls are doing better than men and boys. And we should expect that in a gender egalitarian society, which we don't even have. I don't wanna make an argument that girls and women are naturally better than boys and men at some things, that whether they are or not, the differences would be very small compared to the level of male domination in patriarchal society we had for centuries. In the biggest ways, that's not even the case. Politics and economics, in terms of the commanding heights of the economy and the political system, male domination is completely secure. Some cultural elites view traditional masculinity as sort of primitive and even pathetic, underdeveloped. And there have been segments of working class, communities where the economic changes have hurt men quite a bit and more than women, where occupational shifts have been away from blue collar jobs, factory jobs, mining jobs, and more new opportunities have occurred in things like education and healthcare and services, which are more female dominated. So in those places, it's not crazy at all for men to experience over the course of a lifetime what is a diminished status, diminished dominance. And in the same way that whites in America feel their power being threatened or their dominance being threatened by the rise of racial and ethnic diversity, by the movement towards racial and ethnic equality, if such as it is, that loss of status is very real. It is not in reality anything similar to the kind of domination that men had for so long, but when the loss of status can be felt over the course of a lifetime, it can feel very damaging and it can have real damaging consequences. So I would not want to minimize at all the negative experiences or emotions that men feel in cases like that. And you can see that, for example, in suicide in certain economic areas where we definitely do see indications of this being felt. For example, the so-called deaths of despair in the United States, the opioid epidemic and so on. There are indications that this kind of loss of status transfers into real effects. Truthfully, the in cell movement is related to that loss of male dominance. It's not the same as female dominance, but it is a perceived loss of dominance and it can have real social psychological consequences. There is not one gender narrative that we can lay over all situations and say, we live in a patriarchy, all men benefit equally at all times in all ways from this patriarchy and nothing is wrong in men's lives. And we can't say if men are complaining it's automatically illegitimate. The truth is most of the hardships that men and boys experience in this country in this period are not really gender specific. They may feel gender specific, but those working class communities where people are disenfranchised or economically marginalized, those are places where we have problems that we need to address as social problems, not necessarily as gender problems. Those aren't problems of female dominance, even if certain problems are being experienced just proportionally by men and boys compared to women and girls. It's not a question of gender oppression, but it may be that the changing times have produced effects that are not uniformly experienced, but there is no contemporary world in which this is a problem of female domination. We may have problems of not adequately teaching to students where they are, not adequately dealing with the real life circumstances and problems that some of our students have, but the narrative that is unproductive is the idea of a flipped hierarchy where we now live in a female dominated society. That's what I think we need to avoid. If you think about problems and solutions in the context of that overall gender disparity, which still favors men in the deep and fundamental sense of patriarchy, localized disparities that go in favor of women are not the same kind of systemic problem. Now that may be called comfort to the individual man who feels disenfranchised or excluded. In the case of the fictional two equally qualified candidates, I have no problem with the policy that gives the job to the member of the disenfranchised group because we're still in the project of trying to reduce historical disparities and uplift marginalized groups. I can't lose sight of that overall context, which is the patriarchal society and male domination. Take the example of young single adults in the labor market. There are cases where women are more than men in that circumstance, however, most people get married, most people have children. That's not a problem of gender inequality against men. That's an illustration of gender inequality against women that in order to achieve the benefits of their education and job skills, they need to not get married and not have children. The anti-feminist backlash is connected to what has been called white nationalism or Christian nationalism, the racist right and the idea of a traditional family, traditional home, traditional country, which is both male dominated and white and Christian. The gender backlash is connected to that larger movement. So you look for example, at the anti-abortion movement, the legal crusade in the United States, which has had a lot of success, judges appointed under the Trump administration with anti-abortion laws being passed in many states around the country. There is a sense in which this is part of movement to reclaim a traditional past. I'm not worried that that's going to dominate society or culture in terms of becoming a majority movement, but we are so polarized and geographically divided that what happens is we have parts of the country dominated by these regressive movements in ways that really impinge on democracy and human rights. So I think in the worst case scenario, the anti-feminist backlash, regardless of its connection to empirical reality, whether like I said, it's marginally attached to reality or not attached to reality at all, it can be part of a very damaging political and cultural movement. What I would press for would be a recognition that we could reduce a lot of our problems by raising the floor in society. If the worst thing that can happen to you is you are not in a dominant position you expect to be in, that's not so bad if it doesn't also come with poverty, homelessness, lack of access to healthcare and so on, schooling, education. If we make the consequences of failure, the consequences of marginalization much less, then I think the volume of the backlash goes way down. It becomes not a life or death struggle, but a reasonable struggle in the realm of politics. I think we can handle that a lot better if we could make the consequences of failure less.