Masculinity. Why are boys falling. This panel is intended to promote inquiry and further examination of an important and often overlooked topic. What has been happening to our boys and young men in america and the world for quite some time. Each panelist will focus on disparate different aspects of this crisis. Dr. Piercey will discuss and other causes. Dr. Summers the education and education policies, and mr. Olson economic shifts and men, the workforce. It is our hope that this panel will mark the beginning not the end of a conversation. Panelists may disagree one another and even heritage policies, but we are going to forge ahead as this is a crisis in need of attention and solutions. We are fortunate today to have a stellar of panelists to help guide us. First is dr. Nancy pearcey. Nancy is bestselling author and speaker, a former agnostic. She was hailed in the economist as americas preeminent evangelical protestant female intellectual. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Washington Times first things, human events, american thinker, daily caller, the federalist, and fox news. And she has appeared on cspan and fox and friends. She is currently a professor and scholar in residence at houston christian universe city. Peirces books have translated into 19 languages and include total truth, the soul of science saving, leonardo finding truth, love thy body, and most recently, the toxic war on masculinity. We have available for purchase outside. Christine summers is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise institute, where she studies the polity of gender and feminism as well as Free Expression due process and the preservation of liberty in the academy. Before joining aei, dr. Summers was a philosophy professor at clark university. Is best known for her defense, Classical Liberal feminism and critique of gender feminism. Her books include freedom, feminism. Its surprising history and why it matters today. One nation under therapy coauthored with sally satel who stole feminism and the war against boys which was named a New York Times notable book of the year in 2001. And i will add that is an incredibly prescient, educational over 20 years later. Last we henry olsen henry is a senior fellow at the ethics and Public Policy center, where he studies and provides commentary on american politics. Mr. Olson is an opinion columnist for. The Washington Post and his daily pieces focus on politics, Foreign Affairs and american conservative thought mr. Olsons work has been featured in many probably prominent publications, including the New York Times, the washington journal, the wall journal, national review, the guardian and the Weekly Standard and. He is the author of the working class Ronald Reagan and the return of blue collar conservatism and the four faces of the Republic Party coauthored with dante scala. Please join me in welcoming todays speakers. To hear. Thank you, brenda, for that introduction and. Im going to use slides today because want to move through some facts quickly and that will help us to move faster faster. You go firstly. Okay, im going to start first fact is this. Where do you guys see it . Youll see it. Okay. I dont see the slides. Okay, great. Look at this recent image from Australian News tabloid. Oh, do you think this boy, six or seven. What ideology you calls a seven year old boy a potential monster and says we must stop the menace of toxic masculinity. No wonder theres a boy. And ive asked to address the problem of fatherlessness. And i want to start with the good news. Theres going to be plenty of bad news today. But the good news is an anthropologist conducted the first ever Cross Cultural study of concepts of masculinity. And what he found is that all cultures share the expectation. A common code manhood that the good men performs what he calls the three ps protect provide and procreate. That is become a father, raise a family. So universally innately inherently men do know what it means to a good man. Theres another sociologist. Another. This one by a sociologist found that there are actually two contrary victory scripts that young men pick up today. This sociologist speaks all the world. And so he came up with a very experiment. He asked young men two questions. First, what does it mean to be a good man if you at a funeral and in the eulogy, somebody says he was a good man. What does that mean . And the sociology said all around the globe, young men had no trouble. And so they answering that they would immediately start listing things like honor, duty integrity, sacrifice, do the right, be a provider, be a protector. And the sociologist would ask them, well, where did you learn that . Theyd say, its just in the air we breathe. Or if they in a western country, they were likely to say, its part of our judeochristian heritage. Then the sociologist would ask a follow up question. He would say, what does it mean . I tell you, man up, be a real man. And the young men would say, no, no, no, thats completely different. That means tough. Be strong, never weakness. Win at all costs, suck it up, be competitive, get rich, get. Im using their language language. And so the sociologist concluded that again, universally innately, inherently young, men do know what it means to be a good man. I would say were made in gods image and therefore we do have an intuitive knowledge of what it means to be a good man. But they also feel culture a pressure to live up to the, quote unquote, real man and, which includes very different traits not all of them about, of course, in a crisis. We want people, men and who can stand tough. But if it gets decoupled, disconnected from a moral vision, then these traits can slide into being things like entitlement, dominance, misogyny, what we might call the andrew tate phenomenon. Right. Fast cars, fast money, fast women. So in response to the boy crisis, we are increasingly now young men reach out to the man who sphere via the collection of online groups that we call the manosphere and that all sort of the andrew tate model or let me give you another my own has been called in the new york new post called him the new andrew tate who says i help transform themselves into pimps. All of all of marriage throughout history, he says, has been basically prostitution. So that all men are johns. All women are. So where is the boy crisis coming from a key cause . Is the number of young men are growing up without a father in the home. This is not a left right issue anymore. You know, people on all sides of the political all agree that fatherless boys are more likely to have trouble at school, to run away from home, be addicted to drugs or alcohol end up behind bars. Boys raised by traditionally fathers generally do not commit crimes. Fatherless boys, commit crimes. But the tragedy that today, 40 of American Children growing up, apart from their natural fathers, it is the highest rate of single parenthood in the world. Is that something to be at the top of the top the heap for single parenthood. So the question then is, is causing this flight from. Well, one obvious reason is the way fathers are marked ridiculed and in the media today portrayed as incompetent idiots. The Homer Simpson stereotype. Yep. So then the question is where did these negative stereotypes come from . It turns you have to go far further back than most people realize. You have to go all the way back to the Industrial Revolution before most men worked with wives and children all day on the family farm. The family industry, the family business. The cultural expectation for men focused on their caretaking role. In fact, heres a surprising fact most of the literature of the day on child rearing or parenting was addressed to fathers. If you go to a bookstore today, they mostly mothers, but fathers were just as engaged with children as mothers were. And of course, their sons teaching them the skills they needed for adult life. Masculine virtue was described duty to god and man. So how did we lose. This concept of masculinity . The Industrial Revolution took work out of the. And of course men had to follow work out of the home and into factories and offices. And for the first time, men were no longer working with people with family members, people they loved and had a moral bond with. Instead, they were working individuals in competition with other men. And thats where see the literature start to change. People began to protest that men were changing, that they were losing the caretaking ethos of the colonial era. They were becoming egocentric, selfinterested aggressive, acquisitive, looking for number one. This is some of the language that was used at the time. So was the first time that negative language began to be applied to the male character, and particularly to fathers. When fathers began working out of the home, they lost touch with the family. They were no longer as much in tune with their childrens thoughts and feelings. And so already in the 19th century, begin to be painted as irrelevant and incompetent. Today, were so used to fathers being of the home. We dont realize what a shock it was at the time and give you a few quotes. This is an article Parents Magazine from 1842 says paternal neglect has become one of the most abundant sources of domestic sorrow. Francis willard, who was one of the most influential women of the 19th century, said, god is the father, but how many families there are, whether prototype of the divine is practically absent from sunday to sunday. As a result, boys started losing touch with a close up model of what it meant to be a man. A sociologist writes for the first time in american history, young men experienced an identity, a history. Boys grew up from their fathers and from the world of adult males, which cut boyhood adrift. Robert bly. Some of you have read his stuff. Hes the founder of the contemporary mens movement, writes the love unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution was the father son bond. He calls it industrial fatherlessness. And the most striking feature of child rearing manuals is the disappearance of the references to fathers. Boys had a lot of unstructured since their fathers were no longer supervising them. And people began to complain that boys were becoming wild and unruly. Heres a the leading 19th century psychologist said never before has the american boy been quite so wild and so half orphaned. Dont you love that word . Their fathers out of the home. So theyre essentially half orphaned and left to female guidance in school, hall, home and church. Well, what happened when these half orphaned boys grew up . Well, they took their wild ways them so that historians tell us. There was a huge increase in drinking, gambling crime, gangs, prostitution and i tried to get a discreet of prostitution, of home. I was really happy to find this. Some sometimes a single quote, a single fact can crystallize things. So in 1830 and americans drank times as much as they do today. So theres a reason there was a great explosion of reform in the 19th century as well. The temperance movement, the abolition movement, the socalled social purity movement, which worked against prostitution and sex trafficking and. These movements did a lot of good. But they also created antagonism between men and women. Because these that they were addressing were traditionally male voices. But so one historian writes, almost all of the female associations were implicit condemned of males. There was little doubt as to the sex of the slave masters, cabin keepers and seducers. I know the historian writes, American Society gave men the freedom to be aggressive, greedy, ambitious, competitive and selfinterested. And then left women with a duty of curbing this behavior. And this is an image from the temperance look at the women kneeling, praying in the street, reinforcing that religion is for women. While the men in the saloon are standing with their arms crossed. The tension is palpable. And one more expression of that tension the early feminists. So Elizabeth Cady stanton said the male element, a destructive force, stirring, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike, discord disorder, disease and death. What america needs, stanton concluded, is a new evangel of womanhood to exalt purity, virtue, morality and true religion. So do you see the tension between men and women . Its already in the 19th century and in the late 19th century, men began to revolt. They took the condemnations that women were lobbying against them and turned them into badges of pride. They basically said, if men are naturally rude and crude, well, then these are not negative trace and normative trace, just the natural male character. And this evaluation took place, especially after darwin, published his theory of evolution. This is surprising because most of us of evolution as scientific, but it had a huge, huge impact on secular definitions of masculinity. Social darwinism said that the men who came on top in the struggle for survival had to be men who were ruthless, brutal, savage, barbarian and sexually predatory to recover their authentic masculinity, they need to get in touch with the beast within. That was a favorite word. So in the past, christians had christianity had urged men to live up to the image of god in them. Social darwinist urged men to live down to their presumed animal nature. And by the way, social darwinism has come back in our own under the label evolutionary psychology. This was a bestselling book, and the author, human males are by nature a, possessive, possessive, flesh obsessed, pigs, giving them advice. Advice on marriage is like offering vikings a free booklet on how to pillage. And this older book was just reissued. Some of you may know George Gilder men are nature violent, sexually predatory and irresponsible. The greatest yearning is to escape to a primal mode of predatory and immediate gratification. Are you seeing the origins of andrew tate . Are you seeing the ideas that now fuel the manosphere. Quickly . A few a few points on solutions to just to make sure im not leaving you hanging. Obviously the long Term Solution to any toxic behavior in men is reconnecting to their sons. A says were not going to raise a better class of until we have the requests of fathers. There was a 35 year, 35 year longitudinal that looked at how parents are successful, passing on their religious, moral and spiritual values to their children. And it came up with two surprising results. One is fathers more than mothers. My female students dont like this. They say thats not fair. But is a fact. Fathers matter more than mothers. And the second thing they found is what is the close loving, warm bond . If the father, a moral exemplar, a leader in the a pillar of his church, but hes perceived cold and distant, his children wont follow him. They will they will not adopt his moral, spiritual values. Another study focused more on how to raise masculine sons. This was this reported in this book here. And surprisingly, a fathers own masculinity was irrelevant. Again, what mattered more a close relationship with his son and a quick suggestion on policy recommendations. Since we are in d. C. A Harvard HarvardUniversity Just published a study finding that during the pandemic, 78 of fathers said that by working from they got closer to their children and they dont want to lose that. What i thought was cool is, you see, underneath that it was reported the New York Times. So Family Friendly policies. I dont say Family Friendly because. Most people think that means women father friendly policies is government should encourage corporations to take on. Thank you very much. Good morning. Afternoon. And im so happy to be here and that the heritage is taking this cause. Ive been talking about it for many years. Many of us had, and at least think tanks to take it seriously. If no one else does. Thomas mortenson is a senior scholar at the pell institute. The study of opportunity in higher and thats a Philanthropic Group that, as its name implies it looks for ways to improve opportunity cities for disadvantaged groups. Well in the 1980s early eighties mortenson looked with great satisfaction at the data because it had been the case especially before title nine. There were more men in college. The rate of College Attendance was much higher for men than women. And he noticed that by 1982, women had caught up. And as a father of two daughters. He was very proud and pleased to see this. But kept watching the numbers and with each passing year the female advantage in college grew. By the early nineties. He was alarmed. And on one occasion he looked at the of womens advancement according to of education projections. And he told colleagues only half in jest. The last male will graduate from college in 2068. Now he was exaggerating, but the fact is not by much in the sense that our colleges are increasingly female dominated and. I just looked at the latest data from the department of education and rates College Attendance are now higher for africanamerican girls. Hispanic girls certainly white girls than for white and africanamerican boys are slightly white boys. Hispanic boys in between the girls across all ethnic lines and race what you find is that in classrooms, because you have to say if more girls are going to go to college, thats because of something thats happened earlier on, which is high school, junior high school, elementary school. And we find at every level the girls come to kindergarten more prepared at. They are far readers. They get most of the honors. We look at the lists of valedictorians, even aspirations. There was a time when psychologists would measure vocational experts would measure the aspirations of young men and women. And young men had higher aspirations. Theres been a reverse. And the girls are more ambitious now. When . When mortenson, the pell institute, when he announc